Online and citizen journalism have been around for ages - you know, at least four years, which is at least a century in internet years, but it appears that a school superintendent in Minneapolis didn’t get that memo.

Students from the Fairbault, Minnesota High have taken their newspaper online in response to the demand they shut their paper down from the superindetendent when he wanted to review an article about a teacher in advance.

While there are many touting the fact that this is a win for citizen journalists and lamenting the fact that there are still need for online journalists to prove themselves, the truth is, just because the school went and did something that the rest of us have been doing for ages - going online to reach audiences we wouldn’t have otherwise - isn’t particularly earth shattering news.

Yes, I know that I’m perpetuating this "news" by writing about it, but this is kind of a thorn in my side. There are only so many qualities that make something newsworthy.  Yes, it’s news in Minnesota. That’s a localization thing - it’s more important to the people in Fairbault than it is to, clearly, me in Vancouver.

When I first started reading the article on MediaPost, I was intrigued enough to try and find the story, but then when I realized that the extent of the story was the newspaper went online because of possible censorship, well…. I just got annoyed. And then I gave it more webspace. (sigh)

So, what do you think - is it news that students are embracing citizen journalism and moving online, or should they - the so called Net Natives - already be there?

Tags: net natives, cicitzen journalism, newsworthy, censorship

I spent the weekend working on a Christmas gift for our families. Photos were edited, accounts created and by Sunday afternoon, I was ready to start doing the layout for my Blurb book.

It didn’t really take me too long before I got frustrated, mainly with myself and the software and our interaction. I tweeted my annoyance and then promptly went out to run a few errands. An hour or so later, around 430 or 5 pm, my phone trilled with a message

“@colleencoplick what are you trying to do? i’m blurb’s marketing director - maybe i can help.”

On a Sunday afternoon. Of the US Thanksgiving long weekend.

I was floored.

I got home, and replied to  Mike, who pretty much immediately hopped onto GTalk with me and helped me through my software troubles, got me set on the right path, AND offered me $50 off my order with a personalized discount code. I was amazed and delighted that he was so responsive.

Turns out that Mike has a daily Twitter search that he runs to see what’s being said out in the world, and he saw my frustrated tweet. Talk about utilizing social media tools the right way! He’s tweeting as himself, but is there to help the community in any way he can.

It’s amazing when you run into a company using social media the right way, but combines that with outstanding customer service! Blurb should definitely hang onto Mike, he’s pretty fantastic!

Many of the established and well respected blogs within the online marketing community have recently started to make their audiences available to a variety of new voices. I’ve done it here and both Michael Gray and Jeremy Shoemaker have both recently put the call out for guest bloggers.

I’m totally interested and willing to have guest bloggers on Buzznetworker, (see below) but I also take it very seriously. I have high standards – I want to make sure that it fits the tone and topic of my site, and that the content is exclusive – it can only be published here. I’m thrilled if my guest bloggers post and on their own site and link back to their post, but I’m uncomfortable when they start repurposing that content.

Darren Rowse, from ProBlogger has defined some great key criteria that any guest blogger should take into account before you submit a post.

1. Research the Blog
2. On Being Yourself
3. Look for Gaps in the blog
4. Sell Yourself
5. Be Reliable
6. Add Value

The sixth point here comes from Marketing Pilgrim and I think it’s a very good and relevant point. If you’re not adding value almost every time you post, whether that post is on your site or someone else’s, you’re just adding to the noise.

Guest blogging really is bringing a new voice and a new perspective to an established site, and it’s important to keep that in mind when you’re offering up a post for someone else’s site.

All this said, I am now officially throwing the doors open. I’m looking for guest posts. The only criteria I have is that the post is on topic of the site (Something social media related – case studies, advanced social media thoughts, opinion pieces…) and that you don’t republish the content anywhere else. Please make sure you link up your posts and provide any images you want to go along with the post, complete with appropriate attribution.

Comment and let me know if I should be looking out for a post from you, and I’ll make sure I watch my inbox. I’m really looking forward to seeing what my readers come up with!!

Online news outlets, like this one, and pretty much any other influential blog out there, are hot commodities for many PR and marketing people. If you’ve got any kind of consistent readership, companies like Matchstick Marketing will want to get you to try out and review products.

Rebecca Bollwitt, hyper-local Vancouver area blogger, Miss604, has been involved with Matchstick Marketing in the past, and even successfully reviewed a Samsung T10 for the company. In addition, she and her husband John had successfully participated in a campaign for a Nokia 6682.

But, it seems that successful campaigns from Matchstick Marketing are few and far between, and they manage to piss off more bloggers than they make happy:

Matchstick Marketing Crosses the Line into Spamming [Darren Barefoot]
The one where we all start pimping for the man [Vancouver Metblogs]
Matchstick.ca is buzz marketing gone wrong [Borris Mann]
I won’t be Nokia’s bitch [Unvarnished]
Match-Stuck [Worldwide Watercooler]
Matchstick, please stop the spam [Vancouver Metblogs]

See, the thing about blogger relations is that if you screw up, you’ll be outed, almost immediately. Citizen journalists are an immediate bunch. We usually don’t sit on things that either piss us off or make us happy very long.

The things Matchstick did wrong include:

• Contacting bloggers several different times, by several different Matchstick employees about the same campaign
• Not responding when the blogger is qualified and agrees to sign up for the campaign
• Making the bloggers go through a detailed screening process only to disqualify the blogger on an unrelated, unmentioned point
• Alienating popular bloggers by telling them that they are unqualified for the campaign they’ve been pitched hard for because they participated successfully in campaigns in recent months, but then still contacting them over and over again to participate in upcoming campaigns

Matchstick Marketing needs to get some things straightened out in the own house first, start their own blog and apologize to the bloggers they’ve pissed off, and they might get some of these people, and their loyal readers, back.

Stay tuned for an entry about how to conduct blogger relations the RIGHT way.

(image source: Newscom.com)

I owe my b5 gig entirely to the connections I’ve made through social media.

I met Tris Hussey on Twitter. We chatted, I found out that he was across the water in Victoria.  We met, briefly, face to face at Bloghaus at SxSW. I knew he was with b5. We got to be better friends after SxSW, primarily over GTalk and Skype.

I saw ProBlogger’s post about b5 looking for a new blogger through a tweet from Jesse Stay, but not through Twitter. I noticed it on my Facebook homepage, under the status updates. Jesse has connected his Twitter account to update his Facebook status. I followed the link out of curiosity. I sent it through to Tris via GTalk.

 Tris sent Kelly, the business channel editor an email introduction, directing her to a blog post he had written about a recent presentation I had given and put on SlideShare.

I immediately sent an email to Kelly, introducing myself and offering her some writing samples, two of which were from my writing on Techvibes about Technology in Vancouver.

Kelly took a look at the slides and my writing, and less than 12 hours later, we were discussing the terms of my contract and I had the gig.

Social media is changing not only the way things work, but the speed at which things happen.

I have been doing social networking consulting for awhile now, a few months back I had to do a bid for Joey Lawrence. The former child star had just finished doing his stint on “Dancing with the Stars” and was in the studio recording an album of covers of classic crooners like Sinatra and Martin.

Being friends with one of his managers I needed to prepare a marketing plan for them. In doing the plan I had to do a keyword check of Joey Lawrence and prepared a listing of some of his search terms on a few individual social networking sites.

While I can’t reveal the entire quote for privacy reasons, I thought this specific section would be fun to share. I only looked for less than a handful of terms, however I encourage you to plan a marketing strategy with around ten keyword searches on these sites.

Joey Lawrence social networking information

MySpace.com- MySpace would be the key focus of the campaign, 36% of the users on MySpace are over the age of 35 years old fitting into your desired demographic.

Members of Groups Mentioning Dancing with the Stars: 5,312
Profiles Mentioning Dancing with the Stars: 43,830
Members of Groups Mentioning Joey Lawrence: 786
Profiles Mentioning Joey Lawrence: 3,930
Friends of Existing Fake Joey Lawrence Profiles: 758
Members of Groups Mentioning Sinatra: 3,926
Profiles Mentioning Sinatra: 47,790

Friendster.com- The forerunner to MySpace still has a large audience of over 30 million users, I would use this site to in addition to MySpace. The demographics skew higher in the same range as MySpace

Total Members with Three Targeted Keywords: 22,395

Hi-5.com- Hi5.com is made up of a strong Hispanic, worldwide base, and it is considered to be one of the top five social networking sites, I would continue to data mine this site as we went along.

Total Members with Three Targeted Keywords: 7,559

Bebo.com- One of the fastest growing social networking site, skews very young, and very European.

Total Members with Three Targeted Keywords: 10, 375

Additional Sites

Youtube.com- The largest video filing sharing service, we would need to have material before we started to add people on this site. Friend addition and migration from this site usually yields low results unless the content is spectacular. Without large video content this site would not be worth using.

Total Members with Three Targeted Keywords: 29,455

These results were positive, although I wouldn’t say they were sky high like some of the other campaigns I have run. I just wanted to show you this because a lot of people will say that their niche isn’t represented on social networking sites. If you take the time and do a cursory keyword search you will find that you have more of an audience on there than you think.

Technorati Tags: Myspace, Marketing, Proposal, Joey Lawrence

Have you heard of Ray Hopewood? A Software Mogul from Silicon Valley that has more money than God and is now running to become the next President of the United States, Hopewood has been all over the place, including most of the major social networking and bookmarking websites.

You haven’t heard of him? Well Hopewood is fake, and I don’t mean in the traditional way a lot of politicians are. He is a creation of Rassak Experience, a online marketing company, for their client BigFix. Hopewood can be found on MySpace, Youtube, Flickr, and on various other social networking websites, all helping to direct traffic to BigFix.com a software company.

The campaign has been a success as detailed by the SFGate, here. By creating a character with an interesting story, they have designed a campaign that uses entertainment with an angle to get attention for BigFix. Deploying profiles on multiple sites, the campaign has led to the company seeing increased traffic to their website. In fact 47% of their total traffic is now coming from StumbleUpon, the social bookmarking website, speaking to the popularity of the content they have created.

Their campaign hasn’t just been about driving traffic, they have garnered over 40 solid sales leads for their software, which is for enterprise users. The campaign has converted traffic into sales and has become a how to lesson on viral marketing.

I think the important lesson to take from this is the fact that they didn’t put all their eggs into one basket, they used multiple platforms to drive their traffic. Also they produced video content and used that successfully, I think video content is becoming vital to any online campaign. It isn’t just about driving sheer numbers through social networking sites, you need hooks in order to get the potential customers to come back or refer the site.

Technorati Tags: Social Networking, Viral Marketing, Ray Hopewood, BigFix, Rassak Experience

This is part four of my case study on how I used MySpace.com to drive traffic to a clients website. You can read the first three parts here:

Part I-How to Establish a Foothold on MySpace
Part II-Establishing the marketing plan and doing the design
Part III-How one profile used MySpace Groups

In my previous posting I talked about how we used the “professional” profile on MySpace, now I want to talk about how we used the “personal” profile. Let me recap a bit about the “personal” profile. The personal profile was where we used the identity of someone that worked for the company, we used pictures that were taken at events with a female employee.

To give it a more authentic personal feel we made sure not to go overboard with the design of the page, so it looked like an average person created it. Also we used the about me section and interest sections to make sure that it seemed authentic, all while putting in numerous links to their company website.

Using the profile we joined mass groups like we did with the professional version of the profile. With the personal profile though we made sure to use the groups a little more. Whenever there was an event that this company was going to we made sure to go into the group and post a message on the groups message board announcing that we would be attending the event, we would have a booth, that people should add both profiles, and to visit their website for extensive coverage of the event.

On the personal profile we also used the blog feature. Because of the amount of news that was released on their company website we decided to take one story from their daily releases, post a introduction to the story and a link to the website after a short snippet, usually with a picture from the story. Within the post we added two important features to create and maintain traffic to their blog and site.

1) We tagged the posts for technorati and placed them on social bookmarking websites- For those of you unfamiliar with blogging, Technorati is a site can act as a blog search engine. We made sure to tag the posts by writing them in scribefire, a blogging program which works with the firefox browser. By tagging the posts we were able to grab some attention from other bloggers and writers.

Along with tagging the posts for technorati we made sure to place them on digg.com and other social bookmarking sites. These two tools were valuable in creating traffic to the blog and website, each just take a couple of seconds to do but easily resulted in hundreds to thousands of hits depending on the subject covered.

2) We made sure to add a subscribe to blog button on each blog posting- By reminding MySpace visitors to subscribe to the authors blog in each posting we quickly grew an audience. When people visited the page either from groups, friends requests, or from bulletin posts to check out the blogs they were reminded to subscribe to the blog.

A blog subscription on MySpace means that people are notified each and every time you post. This creates a constant flow of traffic to the blog and hopefully once to the blog, all the way to the website. Within a week of posting a blog we had a couple of hundred subscriptions.

Each time we posted a blog we made sure to post a bulletin in the morning and one in the evening to let people know that we had posted something. A bulletin on MySpace informs all the people on your friends list whatever message you have to pass on, it is a good way to reach out to your non-subscribers. Taking a couple of seconds out to do this has a large impact on the traffic to the blog and the site, usually within ten minutes of posting a bulletin there would be a spiked of a couple of hundred hits to the blog.

Using the blogs, the bulletins, and interacting in groups we were able to build a large profile in a short time, we were able to add 10K friends within a month and a half with at least 90% being people that were in the target market that we outlined when we started. The personal profile had a much more positive reception than the professional one, however because of this we had a lot of messages to reply to on a daily basis. The amount of interaction we received was a testament to the popularity of the profile and a sign that we were taking the right steps.

Next time: Things I wish I would have done differently.

Technorati Tags: myspace, case study, social networking, marketing