I spoke on the American Marketing Association’s Social Media panel on July 15th. The video is above. Below is the original marketing information for the panel:
Innovation & Technology — How it affects the Marketing Mix
Date: Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Time: 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Location: John Hopkins University
Krieger School of Arts and Sciences
Washington, DC Center
1717 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Room BOB
Washington, DC 20036
Cost:
$40 Members & Students
$60 Non-members
Hors d’oeuvres included. All onsite registrants are subject to an additional $10 surcharge.
Pre-registration closes at 5:00 PM on Monday, July 13th.
Speakers:
Aaron Brazell, CEO, Emmense Technologies, Founder, Technosailor.com
Gray Brooks, New Media Ombudsman, Obama for America
Shana Glickfield, Communications Consultant, Founder, DC Concierge
Daniel Ruben Odio-Paez, COO, PointAbout, Co-Founder, DC Moblile Mondays
Patricia Mejia, VP Marketing, Siteworx
Moderator:
Maurisa Turner Potts, Expert Marketing Consultant
Every day a new social marketing outreach tool is introduced to the marketplace. Rapid innovation in technology has added new weapons to a marketer’s toolbox. Both clients and companies are looking for the next new hot thing to differentiate their product or service. Facebook, Smartphones, Iphone Apps, Twitter, and U Stream are every day household names. New companies and industries have been formed to spread messages about products and services. Yet, a key question remains:
How does innovation and technology affect the marketing mix?
Come join five expert panelists on July 15, 2009 to discuss key innovations in technology that directly impact marketers.
Aaron Brazell is a social media strategist and implementer. As a long time entrepreneur and technologist, he is most known for his blog, Technosailor.com – the most widely read business and technology blog in the Baltimore/Washington region.
Gray Brooks helped pioneer the political New Media space. In early 2003 Brooks drove to Vermont, helping the Internet team power Gov. Howard Dean’s presidential bid. In January 2007, Brooks joined Barack Obama’s campaign. As New Media Ombudsman, he was the special projects manager for the New Media Director and helped integrate the department into the campaign at large. Over the two years of the campaign and presidential transition, Brooks managed efforts integrating web design, online video, email, text messaging, online advertising, social networks, and fundraising.
Patricia Mejia is the Vice President of Marketing for Siteworx, Inc. Patricia offers a diverse background in public, private and non-profit organizations, having served most recently as VP of Marketing & Communications at IXI T Corporation. Prior to IXI, Patricia held leadership positions at Freddie Mac, the Mortgage Bankers Association and the Southeastern Universities Research Association.
Daniel Odio is a co-founder of PointAbout, a company that is focused on unlocking innovation in the mobile space. Previously, Daniel was the founder of Cardea Commercial Real Estate Advsors and DROdio Real Estate, Inc, a resdental real estate brockerage. Daniel has been featured on CNN, CNBC, TLC, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications for his innovative use of technology in the real estate market.
Shana Glickfield, an independent communications consultant, was previously the Director of Strategic Communications at Amplify Public Affairs. Shana is currently leading a workshop series to improve how Hill staffers use social media tools in the course of their jobs. She is the founder and author of renowned local blog, The DC Concierge and is one of the top 100 Twitters in DC.
Maurisa is an accomplished marketing professional with more than 14 years of professional marketing experience. Her background includes developing innovative and customized marketing strategies, communication roll-outs, event planning, public relations, and partnership development. She has experience in a variety of areas such as economic development, hospitality, technology, telecommunications, accounting, retail and legal services. After spending a majority of her career working in corporate America, she launched her own marketing/public relations consulting business offering freshly tailored marketing solutions exclusively to small businesses, boutiques, entrepreneurs and other private entities. She serves on the Board for the Greater Washington Fashion Chamber of Commerce. She is also a member of Success in the City Professional Women Organization, Washington Women in Public Relations, and a Social Committee Member for the Virginia Tech Alumni Association (National Capital Region).
Here’s a transcription of the event:
Subject: American Marketing Association’s Social Media Panel
Date: July 15, 2009
Location; Johns Hopkins University
Speakers:
Aaron Brazell, CEO, Emmense Technologies, Founder, Techosailor.com
Gray Brooks, New Media Ombudsman, Obama for America
Shana Glickfield, Communications Consultant, Founder, DC Concierge
Patricia Mejia, VP Marketing, Siteworx
Daniel Ruben Odio-Paez, COO, PointAbout, Co-Founder, DC Mobile Mondays
Moderator:
Maurisa Turner Potts, Expert Marketing Consultant
Legend – Panel Members and Moderator
AB – Aaron Brazell
GB – Gray Brooks
SG – Shana Glickfield
PM – Patricia Mejia
DO – Daniel Ruben Odio-Paez
MT – Maurisa Turner
Karen: So, I wanted to just make a couple of announcements, and then I’m going to turn the mike over to our Chapter President, Brendan Hurley. We’ve a few upcoming events, and I hope you like this space, because we’re going to be meeting here a lot for the speaker series. So coming up on July 28th, we have a networking series that’s gonna be with José Andrés, who is from THINKfoodGROUP. How many people have been to the Zaytinya, the Jaleo? Great restaurants. So that’s going to be on Tuesday, July 28th, that’s a lunchtime event. Am I correct? [Yeah.] Good. So on August the 12th, we’ll be back here at Johns Hopkins, and the table speaker series on the 12th is on Sports Marketing. So if you are interested in sports and marketing, I hope to see you and see your smiling face on August the 12th. I put the time as 6[:00] to 8[:00] because I know D.C.; I know traffic. We’re going to start at 6:30 every month, the speaker series, but I wanted us to have enough time to network, exchange business cards, and get to know each other.
But anyway, I’m going to turn it over to our new Chapter President, Mr. Brendan Hurley, who’s going to talk a little bit about the chapter, and we’ll be starting in 5 minutes. Thanks. […] You’re welcome.
Brendan Hurley: Thank you, Karen, and welcome everyone. Again, my name is Brendan Hurley. I’m the new Chapter President for the American Marketing Association here in DC, so I’m very honored to hold that title and to be here tonight, and to welcome you. I’d like to thank and welcome all of our speakers. Thank you very much for your time, and your insights, and your expert knowledge. I’m sure that our guests are going to learn quite a bit from you, so we appreciate that. For those of you who are not aware–we just began our new fiscal year.
The Chapter begins the fiscal year on July 1st, so I just want to take this opportunity to tell you a little bit about what our goals and expectations are for the new year. All we wanted to, really as a chapter, we want to focus on our core competency this week–move forward to try to provide maximum member value, so we are really focusing on increased and better programming, and increased in better networking opportunities for you, as we know that is very important to our members. We’re also going to be doing some internal and external research. We want to find out what, as members, you think of the organization.
For those people who are not members–we want to know what you think of the organization, as well, so that we can continue to improve and grow as a Chapter. We believe in building organizational infrastructure and improving efficiency so we’re very dedicated. Our volunteer force is very dedicated on focusing on those areas, so you have any input or suggestions for us, we welcome it. If you’re interested in volunteering for the chapter, we really welcome that. As part of our desire to improve the infrastructure, we really need volunteers to fill our committees. Melissa Okimoto, our Director of Volunteers, raise your hand, Melissa, is here. If you’re interested in talking to her, she’d more than happy to chat with you about some of the many opportunities available as volunteers at AMADC. So thank you again for allowing me to speak to you.
Now it’s my pleasure to introduce to you the moderator for this evening’s discussion, Maurisa Turner. Maurisa also happens to be the Chapter’s Vice President of Marketing and Communications. Maurisa is an accomplished marketing professional with more than 14 years of professional marketing experience. Her background includes developing innovative and customized marketing strategies, communication roll-outs, event planning, public relations and partnership development. She has experience in a variety of areas, such as economic development, hospitality, technology, telecommunications, accounting, retail, and legal services. Maurisa, is there anything that you really haven’t touched on in your career? [Laughter] She launched her own marketing/public relations consulting business recently offering professionally tailored marketing exclusions, exclusively to small businesses, boutiques, entrepreneurs and other private entities. She serves on the Board of the Greater Washington Fashion Chamber of Commerce, which she was just featured recently, I might add. She’s also a member of Success in the City Professional Women’s Organization, Washington Women in Public Relations, and a Social Committee member for the Virginia Tech Alumni Association. So, welcome. Thank you. [Applause]
Maurisa Turner: [I have to move this lower [microphone] for a 4’ 11” person.] Good evening, everyone. Thank you for coming and thank you, panelists, for being here. Before we start off, I’d like to get a little poll in the audience about how much everyone knows about social media. And I’m going to start with the basic question. Raise your hand if you know what the definition of social media is. Who is currently using social media? [Laughs] We have applications here. How many people are using Facebook? YouTube? Twitter? How many people blog daily? [Laughter] OK, weekly? Alright. And how many people do it for business? Personal? For both? OK, alright. How many people work for organizations that make it a requirement in their business to have a social media plan? Do any have a work or an entity where they’re adverse to using social media applications? [OK.] May I ask? [OK.] Is anyone Twittering right now? [Laughter] Alright. I just wanted to get a good pulse on just how the background of how many people are in the social media phase; how they’re using it–business versus personal.
And, of course, we are here trying to ask the burning question, how does this innovation and technology really affect the marketing mix? And, showing case studies, and proof-positives, and results from our amazing panelists that have used it very effectively and dynamically, and learn some of their points and tips, and how they carry it on into your background, into your career, as well.
So, let me kick off one question I’m going to talk this to Gray [Brooks] [Laughs], as a very interesting and exciting track recently. This question is for you, and of course, everyone else still on the panel, please pitch in. Last year, we saw a political candidate and Marketer of the Year, beating out companies, such as Apple and Nike. Many would argue that the technology behind the Obama campaign helped drive the brand, and spark the excitement of President Obama. Please give us your thoughts on power of the ‘Obama’ brand and how technology affected the marketing of his candidacy.
Gray Brooks: Sure, first of all, can you all hear me OK? [Yeah] Thanks for having us here tonight. You touched on a couple of the words in there that I think that are very crucial, but that sometimes they’re too easily considered. And one is “technology”, and the other is “brands”. The people at the top of the campaign did varied work, and I think hired a lot of very good people. But this is my third campaign, and I […] other campaign. [Laughter] It would be a mistake not to realize that even when we’re screwing up, we got by ok because the package we were selling, the candidate himself, was really good. So, technology enabled some revolutionary things, but also it was still a matter of selling something that was already a good product.
The other part of it is that, it would be a mistake not to realize how much effort went into the branding. I think the advertising industry was very conscious of, and very, I guess, more knowledgeable about the work that went into the branding of the campaign. Before the general election, we were hiring several graphic designers to focus that exclusively on adding artistic depth to the campaign at every level. On the Web site, we managed to subsume all the print design, all the [...] ads, everything that people saw down to the literature being handed out in mailboxes. We eventually were able to go through these two or three people, so there was consistence. It was based around a design that people thought conveyed a message even without words. And then the rest was kind of adding technology on top of that. But those two fundamentals of having really good product, and then actually truly focusing on brand, in trying to say something that you thought out. I was a huge part of that.
Aaron Brazell: I would say also that there was a huge emotional need in the constituency in the American people to have the technology come along to accent the product. I agree everything that Gray said. There was a great product there. The technology really enhanced it, but what really drove the point home was that there was a need for something, and that product and that technology enhanced that, and brought it out. I think any, no matter what it is, you’re not going to get anywhere without the technology, and you’re not necessarily gonna get anywhere with just the communications side of it in the product. But if you have three of those things all combined, I think you have a dynamic trifecta.
Shana Glickfield: In my experience with social media consulting professionally where I advise corporations and nonprofits, and even individuals, I think a lot of people now want the Obama-like results. And I think it’s important for marketers to understand that it was a big campaign, as the trifecta was taking place, and that you can have a very successful social media campaign without having the Obama-like results.
GB: We definitely want to be over our two lessons we learned here is that it was merely a case study. It was a huge case study in one that has a lot of material to learn from, it takes years. It’s just made up of best used strategies. The fact is, it’s a mistake to see that something as ultimate, when really, it was just one example.
Patricia Mejia: I would add that I think you had conversed a lot of things and also you’re first?, you’re innovative, so I think from a marketing standpoint, it’s important to think about what the next thing is. Timing is everything when it comes to marketing, so I think it’s a combination of things sort of lining up. It’s like a perfect world in the negative, but things came together because of the timing, as well.
AB: You have to drive that point home. If you look at it, it’s just not a political panel here, but as an example, since we’re in that space already with the Obama campaign, you look back at 2004 with the Dean campaign, they also did many of the things that the Obama campaign did do. They had arguably a great product. I didn’t like the idea, but that’s a different story altogether. [Laughter] They supposedly had a great product. There was a lot of great messaging there, but the emotional aspect of where the American people were with his outburst, and all these other things that happened just didn’t coalesce the whole product, the trifecta – I love that word [Laughter], actually come together and do something where we saw completely the opposite side of the Obama side.
MT: Great. Thank you. Of course, we know that each of you blog either on personal or business-related. There’s been some questions out there that some think that blogging has jumped the shark’, so to speak. What are your thoughts on that?
GB: I don’t mean to monopolize the time, but people say it’s great.
DO: So, first I’ll say that it’s a pleasure to be here. I see a lot of you out there that could be up here, so I wish this could be a roundtable where we all could be talking together because I’m sure that you’re doing things that we don’t know about, so I’d like to just open that piece of it up if you have thoughts, let’s just share them. If I can step back for a second, I would say that it’s really important to understand what social media is and isn’t. I think a lot of people consider social media to be a medium, but I consider it to be a tool, like a telephone. You don’t place an ad in a telephone; you place an ad in the yellow pages, and for me what social media is, is it’s a vehicle. It’s a tool that allows me to take the expertise that’s inside the head of, let’s say, whoever we’re looking to profile, and share that with the people that need it in the moment that they’re making a purchasing decision. So for example, if it’s real estate – I started a real estate company six years ago, and we had really competent realtors, but nobody necessarily knows that unless you can use tools like social media to allow that expertise that’s in their heads to get to the people that need to know it when they need to know it. So, what I would say about blogging, which to me is the component of social media, is that blogging allows you to do some things that you can’t do otherwise.
I like to say that Henry Ford would love blogs, because when you get questioned, you’ve answered twenty times already by e-mail instead of spending 15 minutes composing that answer again by email. Spend three hours writing a blog about it, a really researched in-depth answer; and then when somebody emails you that question, just send them back and answer the blog. You’re making an assembly line of expertise, right? So, very importantly at the beginning […], I would say social media is a tool, not a medium, and blogging is a very powerful tool. You also get great Google lists out of it when you blog with original content, which means that when people search for keywords, you’re the one that comes up as a subject matter expert, so to me, blogging is so very pertinent.
PM: I would add to that is that blogging is important, but authentic blogging is so much more important. So I think the authenticity people see through the salesy part of trying to sell you something to position yourself. The authenticity is what people are really looking for. They’re really yearning for it, because they’re kind of like over the marketing. I just had to add that.
AB: To go the extra mile there, I agree with Daniel here. Blogging is one of those places where you create content that’s going to be there forever, arguably, unless the internet blows up, which is always possible. They’re also going to be there, and the search engine’s Google, most importantly, is going to find it, it’s going to be there all the time. You can certainly refer people to them over email, or whatever. I think one of the big questions about is blogging. Is blogging jumping to the shark? At least this is the side of the conversation I’m hearing from the technology side, it’s the question that’s posed, it’s blogging versus social networks. So your Facebooks, your Twitters, your YouTubes and what have you, Tumblr. Why spend more time writing on a blog when all your costs are going into Twitter? That’s the side of the conversation I’m hearing quite a lot.
In fact, I don’t know how many of you, do any of you know Dave Troy? [No.] Ok. So David Troy is an entrepreneur. Actually, more towards Baltimore, but he’s involved with marketing, as well, so I thought some of you might have heard of him. Dave Troy asked a question on Twitter, maybe three weeks ago, “How many of you are blogging? Since Twitter came around, are you blogging more or less?” He was making the assumption that everybody blogged less. I find I blog more, because of Twitter and still sell all that much, but the reason why is you can have all these thoughts out there in social media, and social networks, etc., but, unless you have a place to put that to like really park it, and grow it, and create an audience around. And you just can’t do that on social networks. You can certainly share your thoughts. You can share your links, and share your list, this and that and other thing, but it’s hard to build community around that. And, if you’re working with a product or company, you’re trying to drive the product. You’re trying to drive some software, you’re trying to drive something that creates more sales, and you want to build community around it, because that community is going to turn into your biggest fan [trusts?] So, is it valuable to be out there on Twitter, absolutely. You’re out there, you put your thoughts out there, you pick every opportunity, you can’t conversate with the people who may be buying your product, may be buying your company, may be engaging with you in business somehow. But, if you really are going to build a community, you’re going to need the blog. So no, blogging has not jumped the shark. That was a long-winded answer.
SG: Blogging, in my experience, also, a lot of the great […] that mention SEO[?], I like community building, a couple of other things, but I think the solid leadership comes from putting content out there, and I think a lot of people get stuck with blogging because they think they have to sit down and write this 3-hour think piece every time. And that’s not the case. People don’t even like to tune into a blog and see all the same text over and over. You think about how to take the pressure off and make yourself a better blogger. It actually takes less time to judge. If you’re going to send something to a couple of your colleagues, from a newspaper or video on YouTube, instead of circulating it via email, I would just post it to a blog. It’ll take just as much time, but you’re really building your blog out.
MT: You have a question?
Unidentified Female Speaker A: Yes, I have a question. You’re all talking about building communities, and so like sending it email around to people you know, or doing it on Facebook or Twitter, will it follow you? I find it hard to understand how is building communities around blogs easier, than building?
GB: Just jump in. Part of my answer to you definitely revolves around my students’ overall question, and there is a really, really useful plagiarism of Benjamin Franklin, don’t live to geek.” And it’s cute and easy to remember, but it really does get back to the whole point of all this, and that is that no technology is good, or bad, or going to work, or not going to work. It’s just another tool, and we’re at a point today where we have more tools and more capabilities than we ever had before. But that gets us back to the original philosophical question of, “What are you trying to get done?”, and then, “How are you going to do it?” And the technology, like blogging or anything else can help you, right, and if it’s not helpful, then don’t use it. The only thing that I think matters here is just asking yourself, “What was I doing already?” and, “Can I be even more efficient?” Or, as efficient, maybe, as with some side benefits by using this other thing.
And, so, there are many times where you get other side benefits by blogging, as opposed other means without other extra costs and effort. Like you said, instead of emailing everyone in the company, if you post it on the blog, its adding content to your blog without any extra effort.
U/i Female Speaker B: But how do you drive readers to the blog?
GB: There are two ways to that. One is, if you compared to what you were doing before like sending an email with the content in there, and it […] around the link, that’s just as good. And, so you’re not losing anything on the process. The other thing is, the more you write, the more content you create, and the more you do actually adds authenticity, and try to add something that’s worth reading. People find that, and that’s a great thing about Google, and a great thing about the internet is that quality material rises to the surface literally on its own.
PM: One thing I would add is, I think as marketers we really need to stop thinking about us, and start thinking about the people that we are trying to reach. So, if I were you, I would think about what’s my target audience care about. What influences them, what do they care about? And so, are blogs relevant? It really depends on who you’re trying you trying to reach. If you that the people that you’re trying to reach like to find out what you think, and like to, sort of, get into you head before they’ll start to trust you, then I think the blog is a very useful tool. The other thing I would say about building an audience around the blog, it can be damn expensive. So, I understand what you’re saying about how do you build that community on the blog if you’re creating all this content on, why wouldn’t you just jump on Facebook and put your original content out there, or put it on Twitter, because it goes to various people?
AB: Can I ask a question? Why would it be expensive to build an audience on a blog?
PM: It depends on your topic, right? If you’re blogging about something like Obama, then surely, everyone is always searching for Obama.
AB: You’re talking about buying keywords, is that what you’re talking about?
PM: If you’re buying keywords, buying impressions through advertising – that’s my opinion. I’ve seen it, it’s expensive to build a community around [Cut off.]
AB: [Cut in] I’ve never done that in my life. I’ve got the largest business and technology blog in DC, and I’ve been going at it for five years, and I haven’t spent a dollar.
GB: I think her point is very valid, and definitely reflects on everyone’s company and that is, new media has infinite possibilities for being a black hole that you just pour money down. And it gets back to the question of, if you just think, I don’t understand this, but, hell with it, we’ll just spend $15000 and get some results, that’s a foolish way to go about it, and you’re pouring your money down the toilet. Whereas, it’s important to realize that the baseline is free, and, starting off with just using these tools in a forthright and pragmatic way doesn’t cost you anything. And you can add money to get more results from there, but it’s a mistake to just add money and to get more results from there, but it’s a mistake to just add money and expect results.
DO: And to add to that, it’s a very personalized, individualized thing for everybody, it’s very easy to blow your budget on Google adware. I mean Google will just charge that credit card, and before you even know it, you’ve spent 20000 bucks. But, on the other hand, it can also be expensive in time, and not expensive in money. It takes time to put that original content out there. I’m a very pragmatic guy. I have a voice recorder on the table here, and a camera up there, I’m capturing this content. Why am I capturing this content? Because, this was really valuable content. If you think about this, what’s all of our time worth? I don’t know, $100 an hour, $200 an hour, more? And, how many of us are in this room? This is a very expensive session that we’re having together, and the irony is that everyone’s going to walk out of here, and all this content would have been lost. It’s amazing, I have to think that in 20 years people are going to look back and say, for the first x-thousand years of human civilization, you’re telling me that content was just lost out there, with […]. [Laughter] It doesn’t make sense to me.
So, I capture the content whenever I can, I have a woman who lives in Washington state who transcribes it for 15 cents a minute, and I put it on my blog. And, I’ve been able to get a page rank 5 on Google for a domain name, PointAbout, that’s been around for less than a year, which is amazing. Google is thirsty for original content. So, you’re asking me about driving traffic, that was your original question. And, my answer would be, only one of your goals is driving traffic. Another one of your goals is saving time. If you can write something on a blog, instead of writing it a thousand times by e-mail, poorly, write it once on a blog, well, and send that blog out – a] you’ve gotten a time savings out of that for all the future people that ask that question, but, b] by putting that original content out there, or even better by capturing content – capture your CEO, or CMO.
When I was doing real estate, I would wear a lapel mic, and I would tell my clients, “Do you mind if I just record me showing you homes?” Because there are people out there that have never bought a home that would love to know what the experience is like. [Laughter] And, then I would have a woman transcribe it for 15 cents a minute and put it on my blog, right? Right, and that’s a lot of rich original content, and Google will reward you for that.
SG: I think we have time, two things that I want to talk about, that I’m not an expert on Google search engine optimization, but I do think we should just say for the audience here, in case people don’t know, like Google Juice, the way Google ranks you is based on how frequently your website is updated, in addition to how many times you use those keywords. So, I encourage all of you to get with your web team, if you’re not already, or whoever has your analytics, and find out what words people are using to find your site, and really optimize around those. And, a lot of people start their web experience with search.
[Aside to panel] I don’t know the statistics, do you guys, it’s like 90%? [AB confirms it’s about 90%.]
So, when we’re talking about like a pragmatic strategy, I would definitely say start with your search terms and [to DO], do you want to talk about Google?
DO: I just going to say that Google is very smart about it. They even know of the domain name address, where the domain name was registered is the same, it matches up to the address on your website, they will give you credit for that, because that shows that you are actually the owner of that domain name; it gets down to that level of detail. So, Google SEO – search engine optimization should be for any business, I think, a key part of your initiative, because that’s like buying real estate in New York in 1900. You can rent that space through ad words, but if you put the time and effort now into buying that space, you get Google to like what you’re doing now; it’s going to pay off for the next 100 years.
GA: The one thing I was going to just put on top to what the gentleman said a couple of times before was, he is incredibly right, because one third of new media as a whole is content, content, content. And, you’re crazy if you have a company blog that is updated once a week. And you’re crazy if you have a Twitter feed, but, don’t actually don’t create anything new, you just link to what you’re already, [changes thought], fresh content is crucial. And the fact is, he’s ahead of the curve on all this, but every person in here should blog and say, “Today I went to this forum, and here’s a link to the video.” It’s connecting to what someone else has done, it’s good content is right behind having you done[?] the content yourself.
MT: Let’s bring us into organizations, and it’s interesting that there are still companies that still convincing of having a social media plan. Us, as marketers, we have some executives you can to talk to until you’re blue in the face and try to convince them to change or consider a new idea. But those companies are for those individuals that work for companies that are adverse to this social media craze, how can you convince them that this is good for their business?
AB: I think all you got to do, and I’m going to avoid doing the normal, somebody’s going to bring up Zappos, someone is going to bring up Dell, somebody’s going to bring up Southwest Airlines, but, I think [Some bantering and laughter]. I think if you look at the [changes thought], once you get away the head of the tail of the big companies that everybody knows that using social media, I think there a whole lot of really great examples of companies that are doing it really well.
And I wrote a blogpost on my blog the other day, just like the greatest experience I ever had with customer service, via Twitter; and that was with my bank, 1st Mariner Bank, in Baltimore. I was having a really bad day as a result of them, and went ballistic! [Laughter]. Their customer service guys on Twitter reached out to me and through a couple days of exchanging direct messages, and him going above and beyond wearing more than the minimum pieces of flair [Laughter]. I’m telling you, it was great example. You take a look at that, and now this guy is getting all kind of attention outside of my blog, outside of 1st Mariner Bank, there’s a number of other posts that have been written about my experience, and all of a sudden you start seeing a pattern that there’s a direct line that goes from the engagement in social media to the ROI that the company wants to have, every company wants to have. And I think that, when you’re talking to the executives, when you’re talking to the people that make the decisions at the top, they want to know where is the value for the company. It’s nice that there is this experience; it’s nice that you can talk to customers, but how does it actually help us run a business and make money, because everybody wants to make money, and that’s the end of the day.
PM: And more and more marketing is going online, I just looked at some Forrester[?] today that was looking at the growth in interactive, where it’s coming from, it’s coming from traditional channels. The emphasis is there, the audience is there, so I think it becomes a lot easier when you start to see your competitors being there. As a business-to-business marketer who has always been inside companies having to sell ideas before they actually get approved, a lot of times people will respond best to what they’re seeing their competitors do, or where see an opportunity where their competitors are not. A lot of the time that I spend in my job is looking at what our competitors are doing, or not or doing, so that we can do it first.
SG: I’d say Pew Internet and American Life, they do all the demographic research of who’s using social media, and I think that’s really important information for executives who haven’t been convinced yet, to really dissolve the myth that the blogger is a teenager in the basement. And, I think the fastest growing demographic right now on Facebook is women 50 and older, and it’s growing by hundreds of percentages a month, and we just had the officication of Twitter [Laughter]. We’re also absorbed at who’s using it – it’s our world. But, I think people, who it’s not their world don’t really realize that is where the majority of people are, and you have to go to where your consumers are, and that is Facebook and Twitter.
DO: I’ll just use a couple of real examples. I’m a very pragmatic guy, right? So, as an entrepreneur you have to be really pragmatic. PointAbout is a company that makes Ifonets, we actually made an Ifonet for 1st Mariner, but, I’ll use real estate, because it’s such a backwards industry, nobody even knows how to check e-mail in real estate. So, it’s really easy to get progressive in real estate. And, I’m a big fan of YouTube, I use Vimeo now, but, it’s just like YouTube. I am a big fan of, for example, I made a lowball offer video, which is just ‘drodio.com/lowball.’ It’s our real estate company name .com/lowball. And, I walked potential clients through what the steps were to make a good lowball offer. And, there are some things that we do that are different from norm, or whatever. I can’t tell you how many clients came to us and said, “I watched your video and I want to work with you.” It was a warm referral lead, the thing that realtors will kill for. This is very significant, we had cold marketing leads coming to us as if they were warm referrals, because they felt like they knew what we were capable of.
Again, it’s getting the expertise out of your head, and into the hands of the people that you don’t want making that decision, so I think the really way to start is with something like YouTube, and to take a video of the product manager, don’t take a video of the PR person, take your video of the product manager at your company who has lived and breathed that product and knows it in and out. A very real video, into what you’re saying, does not marketing speak, don’t edit it, don’t make it look all glossy, make it gritty and real, and put that up on YouTube, and then send people to it, or use Google search engines and officications[?] who can find it, and you will find that’s a very easy way to have a small test, and all about making the food before you build the restaurant, don’t spend all this money on building the restaurant and nobody wants to eat the food. So, small tests, and you can then show your boss, “Hey, I did this video and we got 20 sales out of it.” And it’s a very trackable thing.
MT: For those that work for organizations, if you don’t mind me asking, that are still on the fence, or adverse to it, what’s the reason?
[Some disjointed comments from the audience.]
U/i Female Speaker C: [Extremely poor audio.]The reason is the RY[?], there has been a lot of research with Twitter and other social media[?] that talk about the RY to try to shield my company’s […] officers. […] field marketing has a 45 […] RY […] the numbers go up […]. Social media is not there, and, so, even though we have a lot with Twitter, and […] everybody will comment, but the weak […], and everything, I personally maintain it’s great, but my CEO […] and he […] numbers wise . So, I would say that probably is a lot of […], we want to get the highest return on what little resources we have, […] social media [...].
DO: See, I take a big exception to that, and it’s not with you, it’s with your CEO. I will call your CEO personally and talk to him or her [Laughter.] Because, the cost is zero, it’s an intern’s time. And, you know what, the intern can do it the best that of everybody at the company. So, take the unpaid intern and have him do a small test – a very small pragmatic test.
PM: I disagree with that. I tell you. I think it depends on the business, right? And so, in some businesses and certain niches, it’s fine. Your intern’s going to do a great job of representing your brand. I think with other businesses where you have a complex product that you’re trying to sell, or complex solution that you’re trying to sell, it’s something that needs to be bought in at the top level, because it requires the involvement of high-priced people. And that’s just been my experience. So, looking at it from different perspectives, small business – large business, business – consumer versus business-to-business, it really does matter.
AB: I can see where you’re coming from, and I’ve already fought with you about it today [Laughter.] What I would say is that I find it really interesting that your CEO would put more stock in ad words that he would in social media engagement. Cause, at the end of the day, I hear the argument that he is making. At the end of the day, you’re putting your money into ad words and, you might get the results, what are the results? So many impressions that actually turn into an actual sale. And, these are rhetorical questions, right, so I’m asking not asking you directly.
What I ‘m saying is you can put $5000 into a campaign and never get a sale out of it – that’s trackable, Google delivered those impressions, but is that actually a valuable investment when there’s no sale, on the other hand, like an intern, or somebody, anybody in the company getting out there and talking to people like they want to be talked to in the effort and hope that you might get a sale out of that, probably has a much higher chance of actually converting than, instead of following ad words up there and spending thousands of dollars.
GB: So, I think that part the confluence of where I believe both Aaron and Patricia are right, has to do with, I’ve been advocating for a very realistic and down-to-earth investment of money in the media. I do believe that it’s worth investing in, and I believe it can be done well. He’s right, that when it comes to the financial investments, well, part of it’s very minimal manpower, and very minimal financial investments, it started.
The important question though is whether or not the upper echelon and the leadership, as a whole, are willing to invest in the media, personally. And if you have an organization where you tell the unpaid intern, ‘Hey, go do this, ok, how many […] just go do it”, and no one talks to that intern, and they attempt it on their own, you’re going to have terrible results. And the question is, if that intern is allowed to, once a month, take a video camera and have 30 minutes of the CEO’s time to do a direct-to-camera video for the YouTube Channel – that’s going to work, and that didn’t cost any money other that the CEO’s time.
But that’s the problem is while these organizations where the CEO says, “Yeah, but I don’t have time for it, my managers don’t have time for it. We want someone to go do something.”
MT: Let’s take a couple questions.
U/i Female Speaker D: I work for a large government contractor and we are just now, we just hired a social media manager, and started a YouTube channel, but it’s taken a long time and it’s a fairly sizeable company. And I think the resistance is security, as she mentioned. But also, our clients are government decision makers, and they tend to be[?] older, and the belief is that social media is for a younger generation. So, what have you found in your research and your findings that I can take back to my CEO and say, “No, there is research that shows this attracts older government decision makers.”
PM: So, Forrester just put out a report, a social technographics report. So they look at different demographics, and they map their social behavior. So, they start at the most engaged all the way down to people who are just spectators or uninvolved. And that’s the kind of data that you could put in front of a C-level person, or director-level person. They want to know what’s the survey data telling you about the kinds of people that you’re trying to reach. I would definitely recommend looking at something like that. [Clarifies for questioner that the organization is Forrester Research.]
DO: Also, Pew Internet just recently did a talk at the Web Editors Roundtable which is a great event. I captured the content, so you’re welcome to come see it. It’s on the site, pointabout.com – just search for Pew, and you’ll find that. It’s called, “The Nine Tribes of the Internet”, and it talks about very specific slicing of all the different types of users, and what the growth trends are, or, they’re not all growing, but, many of them are. A lot of them do skew, just actually like […] was saying.
And Patricia, just for the record, I’m not going disagree with you at all. I completely agree with you. In the best of both worlds, this is a top-level down strategic thing that’s being done, but I feel like we’re all kind of sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night. It’s like you have to go show some small successes in order to be able to get that big budget, and I guess that was my point.
MT: Let’s take two more questions on the topic.
SG: I think one thing that we haven’t gotten to that could reach your audience is that journalists are watching social media, because that’s where the buzz is coming, and even if it’s not reaching your consumers, it’s reaching the people who write to your consumers, who are still reading the paper on paper, probably. So I think you can relationship build with journalists directly, you can keep story ideas, and position yourself as a thought leader, via Blogink, so that when it comes time for they need an expert for their story, and they either Google, or they’ve seen you Tweet about it, then they’re going to reach out to you. So, that’s our long term.
U/I Female Speaker E: And that’s what exactly we’ve done. We’ve used it on a PRN, but not so much in the market.
MT: Carrie, in the back, do you have a question?
Carrie: [Very poor audio] I’ve noticed with some companies that the push for ROI comes […] in that it vies with traditional things like advertising and public relations. It’s actually not, [changes thought], you can’t always make that tie from placing that ad to placing that sale, and […] metric. So, they still do it, because they’ve always done it. And, the social media is damned[?]. And, I’m wondering, take the part that says that’s part of it, and also, maybe some tools to overcoming that problem[?].
GB: One thing which I think is to your question, and to the question right before it, it’s worth trying to double[?] show them surveys and results that have been done by their people, but it’s incredibly important to be tracking the work you’re doing in the meantime, it’s sourcing everything you can. And between Google Analytic and YouTube accounts, they now have analytics built into it that you can actually see the sex breakup, the age breakup of people watching your videos. On all these things you can be tracking what’s going on in the meantime. And, you can be saying, “I know that someone came to this part of our website and bought this from one of our ads, because we can track that.” And, it’s of incredible importance to be trying to convince these people by saying, “I’ve doing this for the last few months and here, I can show you quantitative results.” And try to get that from your TV advertisement, department, or you old media, because you just can’t. Not like this.
U/i Male Speaker A: I have a comment on that, too. You can do targeted access campaigns. So, I’m a big believer of doing a lot of testing, as well. That’s what I was going to tell you. Google allows you to target by domain, target by geography, and target by time of day. So, if you’re trying to reach government influencers, 8[:00]–to-5[:00] from D.C., from Punjab, Thai domain names, and whatnot. […] if you do a lot of really small parts to see what kind of traffic is running to your site, outgoing […].
GB: Just the one thing that already enforces that, and I forget about this, but, ad from Facebook? You can target it to say, I really want these people to see this if they work at the department of whatever, and such, or, I want people to see this if they are literally on a computer in the Capitol Building. You can target like nobody’s business.
DO: You can also get on the content side. Google offers a great set of tools. How many people in this room are doing AB Multivariate testing, for example? I not surprised the answer’s zero, so AB Multivariate testing is for every piece of content you have, every web page you have, you have the a] control, and, the b] contender. And Google offers this for free, where you can say, “Google, I want you serve up about a 50-50 ratio of what I think is the best page, and then what the intern thinks is the best page, or whatever. And let those two pages ‘duke it out’.” And Google will tell you which one is performing better, and you just keep repeating that cycle. You can increase your conversion rates from 1% to 7% on a page by doing that. Which is very significant, you just increased by 700% the number of people that are contacting you off of a page. So, there are tools you can use like that.
Also, just very quickly to your point, there are some very non-threatening things that you can do with social media. You’re saying that you’re already, for example, interviewing the CEO, or your doing a blog list. Start, transcribe it, and turn it into text. All that great video and audio, Google can’t see that, it’s opaque to Google. So, you’ve just spent all this time creating all this great audio and video, but you’re not getting any Google credit for it. Spend $.15, $.25, $.50 a minute for that on Craigslist; you’ll get tons of responses from people willing to transcribe your content into text. Put that below the page, but, the video and the audio, the transcription is not for the humans – it’s for Google.
MT: Let’s talk about ‘Buzz’, and what is Buzz tracking, and can we honestly measure that. How can you honestly measure that?
AB: I think everybody’s going to say Twitter. Hash Hacks[?], but, I think that’s also kind of a game system, and I don’t think it’s a very good system. But, certainly, although I don’t know if there’s an answer to that, I don’t know if anyone here has an answer to that, you can probably patent it. But, there are all kinds of different [changes thought]. NY Times has BlogRunner, which is sort of their top news in a variety of different verticals. It’s not just NY Times content, they track blogs, and they track other things, as well.
In political space, there’s the media randoms, and the technemes, and the Technoratis, and all these different sites that will sort of give you a picture of what people are talking about at the moment, with Twitter you have the hashtag and the trending topics. I don’t know if there’s really an answer to that.
SG: How many people in here are familiar with the concept of the long tail? The idea is that the top 10% of, like, say, blogs are getting 90% of the readership, and then there’s long tail of like 90% of the blogs are only getting 10% of the readership. And, they are these very niche communities. But there is a lot of value, and there are books written about this, and it’s a big popular theory in social media. There is a lot of value in the long tail, and that’s where people even see the internet going with trends with hyper logo[?], and things like this, the way we are able to do all this targeting.
So, you can generate Buzz with a very small community, but it can be a very important community to your brand, or your mission. So, it goes back to the Obama-like results, that are graded on a national level, but it really depends on who your audience is, and who you’re trying to reach. And it could be very easy to get the attention now, it’s like, you can’t really get the mommy fear, but maybe just the mommy fear who knit, too, or has a child who’s dealing with an illness, and they’re doing a lot of doctor’s visits, but that may be a very key audience for you. So, the idea is maybe don’t worry about getting the biggest Buzz, but really getting a buzz with your niche audience.
DO: So, two quick thoughts – one about long tail, and the other about Twitter.
First, Twitter. How many people have an RSS feed of Twitter searches set up right now? So, three people. Alright, you can do this when you get home tonight, and this is awesome. I’ll tell you, this is going to change your life, maybe. [Laughter.] So go to search.twitter.com, and just search for anything, search for your name, your company’s name, maybe a product that you’re interested in, you know, ’F22 Raptor’, whatever it is for you defense folks [Laughter.] And then, on the top right there’s a little RSS icon which most of you, do you understand RSS? Right, so you can click on that and you can come into your e-mail, or into an RS reader – you will be amazed at what you find.
The interactive manager for Coca-Cola was doing this, Coke has this Coke Rewards thing, and I asked her, her name is Carol. I said “Carol, are you tracking what people are saying about My Coke Rewards?” She said, “No, we’re not.” I said, “You should be, let’s do it!” [Laughter.] And, people were like sharing codes on Twitter, and bashing it, it was very enlightening. So, that’s super simple, it’s free, it takes a second to do, it’ll make you look like the smartest person in your office. You also get the news first when it’s something that is pertinent to you, so that’s very user [cut off.].
AB: You can also embed it. You embed those searches in Twitter. You use Twitter.com, you do your search on the sidebar, and then you can actually save that search and keep going back to it, as well.
DO: So, it doesn’t really answer the Buzz question, but it, at least, let’s you personally see about things that you care about quickly.
PM: Well, there are also tools, like Metrics, and I think, Nielsen, either they bought Metrics, or they have their own competing products that actually look at brand perceptions, and so, will look at beyond just what’s happening on the web, overall perceptions with the brand, with the social media being a component of it. So, that is a tool that’s out there, or a capability that’s out there, that if you’re in an organization that’s very brand sensitive, very focused on what people are saying about you, you may want to invest in something like that.
GB: Just one quick thing. I agree with using all of these tools. My umbrage connect comes back to the original question, and I’m not a big fan of Buzz, intrinsically, because in my mind, Buzz is ephemeral, and it’s too ghostlike to just chase it for its own good. And, I think it’s a mistake to not be focusing consistently on the question of whatever we’re doing right now, already; can we use these tools to get an extra 5%? Can we use it to become more efficient with what we’re already doing, and see it as a more down-to-earth disimprovement[?] of your results, as it is?
MT: What were you going to say about long tail?
DO: Do you want to hear about long tail? [Laughter] Are there any realtors in this room? Can you raise your right hand and say, “I will not share this with any realtor?”
Seriously, just raise your right hand, “I won’t share this with any realtor!” That was your let hand, by the way. [Laughter]
So, when you Google search for any home that’s for sale in the D.C. area, D.C. Virginia, and Maryland, my own real estate company typically comes up number one in they Google search results. How do we do that? We use the long tail. There are probably only one-to-ten people searching for any specific property, but because we were able to expose a database of content and get Google to spider that content, there are apparently 1000 people a month that submit leads off of those terms. This realty company gets 1000 leads a month from exposing a database. And, so the point is, to the long tail point, if you have a database of data that you can expose to the internet, and you can make it so that there might only be very few searches for each of those terms, but there are so many of them. And also, part of the theory of long tail is when people are searching, for example, for a specific property address, they’ve done their research, they’ve probable driven past the house or they know the street. People tend, on the long tail, to be much more serious searchers. If I’m just searching for Alexandria homes, I might not be nearly as far along in my home searches if I’m searching for 1234 Main Street. So, if you have a database of content, you can use the long tail to really drive a lot of searches to your site.
MT: Let’s talk, this is kind of a two-part question, a personal question, but, social media as this tool is fairly new. How has it helped you in your business? If you could highlight maybe one major success, and you draw it back to the applications that you have, that you utilize today; and the second question is, out of all these social media applications, what is you favorite, and why? Gray? [Laughter] This may be easy for you.
GB: With the campaign, everything was, media was an equal player at the table to every other department. And, its success story was enhancing the finance field, political operations, every element that was pretty [..] in the campaign. I got more done because of media, and that’s it. And, it was not worth it, intrinsically, it was worth just a management part that was already there.
SG: I would have never expected that this would be my career. I was a lobbyist, and I went to law school, and I am a non-participating lawyer, social media consultant, who blogs about D.C. [Laughs] So, it was really unexpected, but I think that I just really loved tinkering with the tools world, experimenting and really engaging in community, [Changes thought], I knew all these people from the social media community, the tech community, even if we only Twittered at each other, it’s just grown my network exponentially. And, my favorite tool would probably be Twitter.
PM: Siteworx is different from others here, we do website development. I’m a B2B marketer. I think for us, what has helped us be is relevant. So, we have a lot of very technical people in our organization that talk tech all the time. From a marketing standpoint, I don’t want to talk tech, I want to talk business problems. So, I want to understand what people who are in our space care about, it’s helped us, in my mind to be more relevant. And I will say Twitter, but Twitter Search.
Oh man, it’s just awesome being exposed to what people are thinking, and from a marketing standpoint, I spent my whole career of trying to get into peoples heads, right? This is like right in their head, like all day long, so I think that to me is the best tool.
DO: So, a great story about Twitter, because I think a lot of people are trying to figure Twitter out. I know that I’m still trying to figure out. But, I think the greatest thing about Twitter is an elementary teacher would Tweet what was going on in the classrooms to all the parents, so that when their child came home, they could, instead of saying, “How was your day?”, and not getting a response, they could say, “Hey, how was that project in Christopher Columbus?”
So that’s a great example of the power of Twitter. Twitter Search, I completely agree, to me is the most powerful part of Twitter, it’s not sending Tweets out, but it’s seeing what other people are saying. I think I’ve given a lot of examples. I got to say that this idea, like Gray is saying, that social media is a tool, it’s magnifying the others things that you’re already doing. It’s taking that content and distributing it out to the people that need to see it. I feel very strongly that’s how you have to think about social media – as a magnifying glass, maybe that’s a great way to say it.
AB: Well, if it wasn’t for social media, I’d still be working for one of the companies you work for. [Laughter] So, I’m self-employed, I have my own company, I built my company around social media, around WordPress, specifically, and added to my […] as well, in there.
And, if it wasn’t for my engagement, and, honestly, social media has leveled the playing field for many people. It just allowed us all to compete on levels that we weren’t able to compete on before. If it wasn’t for that, then, I wouldn’t’ be where I am today. So, certainly it’s been very important in my career and my life. I will also say Twitter, it’s the best tool out there. Is that the trend? [Laughter]
MT: Well, speaking about Twitter, maybe, do all you think that it can survive without having to sell any ads? Is it going to stay?
AB: Oh, this is really a good question. Actually, we run a Twitter business model, that’s cool. That would be a great conversation, actually. I think what they’re probably going to end up doing is not selling ads, because the ad market is, kind of ‘eh.’ And, too many people were getting their Tweets not through, ‘Tweetered up’, huh? Through TweetDeck and Seizement[?] Desktop, and, whatever your household variety Twitter climate[?], Twitterberry, whatever, they’re not going to be able to thread ads in there. So, don’t think that that is really the way it is going to probably go, but, partnership of carriers. How many of us use Twitter on a mobile device? Ok, yeah. So, if AT&T, or Verizon, wants to start taking a little bit of a Twitter tax out, I see that as a way for them to make money, and possibly, Twitter’d make money that way, as well, in priority. But, that’s net neutrality, and that’s not really what I want to hear. [Laughter]
DO: A great example of what one of the founders of Twitter mentioned, they’ve been very tightlipped about they’re going to make money. But, after a lot of prodding, and I think, and all things, D Conference, the guy said, “All right, give us an example.” “Imagine the flower shop has flowers that are going to be dead the next day, they can send a Tweet out saying, half-priced flowers if you come by before we close today.” So, the stuff like that I think would very, very powerful.
GB: I’d like to pursue a bit of the Craigslist model. I like the fact that I don’t have to pay the post from Craigslist. And the way they do it, funny, if someone wants to have a business model based around posting on Craigslist, then they charge a very nominal fee. And, so you can make it so it’s free for everyone who’s at home, everyone is just an individual. I think we want to actually organize this small, and there are a lot of possibilities therein. If you charge something that’s incredibly nominal, and then the other part that’s really overlooked here is the amount of data they accumulate is enormous. And, for the first time in history, we’re able to take enormous amounts of data, and really start crunching it in very interesting ways.
If you can start actually drawing graphs and very rich details about how Coca-Cola sought you out, the potency there is enormous.
DO: Speaking of kind of keeping that data, and capturing data in Twitter. Does anyone here use Yammer? One person. So Yammer has completely changed the way our company does business.
[Request for clarification]
Sure, yeah, we can explain it. So, Yammer is like a private Twitter. It’ an enterprise Twitter. And, you know where everyone sends an e-mail, like I’m going to lunch, who wants Subway, send me back an e-mail, and all that stuff, right?
You completely get rid of all those e-mails that goes to Yammer, so, it’s like Twittering, but without the 140 character limit, you can include attachments, and that sort of thing. But the nice thing about it is that it’s captured on Yammer forever, so like there is a dev team piece to Yammer, there’s an everyone piece to Yammer, and so the dev team can Tweet what they’re working on, for example, all the developers say what they’re working on every day, I can go check in on them. If I’m not sure, but, I don’t have to ask that way.
So, Yammer is a really great, free business tool – business Twitter. Well, it’s free, so far. So, maybe they’re going to start charging extra.
[Some light bantering back and forth, with humor]
MT: Fast forward. […], you have thoughts on this, but what do you project to be the next social media tech wave, and how can marketers benefit from it?
SG: I have a theory. I think we’d even seen it here in the panel, is that we’re all content, content, content. And, I do think that the internet is getting very cluttered, and even polluted with spammers, and other things and I think that the trend’s going to be more things that narrows things down, and kind of cut out the clutter for you.
PM: Well, the one thing I think about is mobile, and I know a lot of people, you have your mobile apps, you have your iPhone apps, and think about the device that everybody has on them all the time, and how you can actually really reach people and be highly relevant, if you’re smart on a mobile device. So, I’m not seeing it as the next ‘Big Bang’, but it’s something that we should be thinking about. A lot of people don’t want to be tethered to a laptop, they really use their phone as their primary device. I see trends moving in that direction.
AB: We won’t try to disappear here. [Laughter] It is the next best thing, so I do agree with the best thing. I think mobile is the next big thing, and the reality is right now as you were saying, they’re all, so let’s have phones, they are pretty smart, and all, but, by and large, we operate in businesses that we are tied behind a 19[“], 21[“] 24”, if you’re lucky 30” monitor with a keyboard and mouse. Or, you have a laptop, but you gotta have that laptop if you’re going to do your work.
I think the ambient nature of the internet is something that only mobile can do right now for us. And, it’s not there yet, but I think that’s probably the next best thing. I don’t want to start getting, [changes thought] and this is where the danger is, is if you start relying in a mobile space that everything, at some point, gets saturated with a spam content. And all of a sudden, we already have to worry about they’re not power industries, but what ends up happening when the people that will market in a less than upright way start taking and pushing their products in ways from mobile devices and mobile phones is not welcome. And, that’s something I have concern about with mobile, but I would say mobile is probably the next big thing.
DO: So I’ve placed my bet on mobile. PointAbout makes mobile apps, right now it costs $50[000]-300.000 to make a mobile app, with charges that mocratize[?] that, so it costs [$]2000 or $200 to make a mobile app. I‘ll say that I’ll be the first person to say that the infrastructure I don’t think is there yet, and I’ll give you two examples.
The first example is we used to use parking meters we put quarters in, now we’re using those ‘pay to park’ green boxes where we put our credit card in. Well, those aren’t networked yet, but when they are networked, and they will be, and it’ll probably be a year or two from now, that parking meter is going to be able tell you where there is an open parking spot. And you can, though your phone find the parking spot that’s on 16th Street, so you don’t have to park on 20th Street to get here tonight. But there’s infrastructure that has to grow up around the promise of mobile.
Another example is imagine holding your phone up, and through the camera of the phone it tells you there’s a bar right there, that’s having half-price drinks, and you actually see like a virtual world through your phone of the real world. Guess what, that exists in Europe right now – there’s a company that’s doing that. It’s almost like seeing with an x-ray. Right, so there’s a lot of promise in mobile, it’s early, I can talk to you all day about mobile, and I won’t, but I do believe that that’s in the next 48 months, it’s going to be a really big deal.
MT: One more question, and I’m going to open to up to the audience, if that’s ok. Let’s talk locally – the area, in your opinion, is D.C. a great city for innovation and technology? This town has been so government, boring, and thanks to the new administration, it’s changing things. [Chuckling]
DB: I think the administration is going to be one of the poster children for a lot of corporations, and a lot of the companies which have been slow to catch on, because the federal bureaucracy is struggling to try to oil its machinery, a bit, and become a faster running machine. And, you’re seeing that in government contracting, and as we’re trying to catch up, and so that’s going to be, the federal government and big bulky corporations are going to be kind of vying for last place to become more efficient.
AB: I agree, and I would say that there are two different types of innovation. I had this conversation with a friend of mine the other day, who is very hungry to see a lot of entrepreneurship here in D.C., and a lot of innovation. He’s sort of like me, has sort of a more Silicon Valley mentality to entrepreneurship and innovation, technology, and he doesn’t see that there’s anything happening here. And I see quite differently, I see where he’s coming from, but I also see that, right now as Gray said, there’s this opportunity inside the government to really, really swoop in.
If you’re a technologist, if you’re in communications, even, but if you’re an entrepreneur in technology right now, you have an opportunity to, maybe not on day one, change the game, but you have an opportunity to meet the needs that are coming done the pike. You take the time to take a step back, look at the problem that needs to be solved, understand the implications – the constituencies, the taxpayers, the goals of the agency, or the contractor that’s working with the agency, or whatever, and develop solutions that are tailor-made for that particular thing. I think there is a lot of opportunity for innovation. Where I don’t see a lot of opportunity for innovation in D.C., I just don’t think the mindset is here for it. It’s for that sort of consumer-oriented innovation that brings the next big Twitter to the scene. It’s a Silicon Valley thing, even though they’re fading as everybody’s kind of moving to Denver [Laughter]. I don’t see D.C. being Boulder, I don’t see D.C. being that place – it could be, I could be wrong, but I do see a tremendous amount of opportunity in open government-type stuff.
DO: I think it’s like, ‘use what your mama gave ya’ kind of thing. It’s a very underground entrepreneurial community here in D.C., we have government, let’s leverage it, it’s a great kind of fallback, and great opportunity to innovate on somebody else’s dime. I do wish that we had a Y combinator-type of atmosphere here. Y combinator’s a D.C. company[?] that invests in a lot of small start-ups, they invest $10,000, 20 times a year. I wish we had something like that here, so that we could really help those entrepreneurs that have ideas, that don’t have quite the network that there is out in Silicon Valley. We just started a geek fun Capitol Hill Facebook group, so if you ever work on Capitol Hill, look us up [Laughter]. We’re going to be doing poker night once a month. There are things like that out there; you just have to look a little bit harder.
PM: I think the opportunity is here, is limited, and it’s now. So, I think with the new administration you’ve got a tremendous focus on the D.C. area, and people really yearning for information and access. And, so, if there is going to be innovation around social media in the D.C. area, it’s going to be now, because you’ve got these people’s attention – that’s really what’s so valuable, we should really take advantage of it.
SG: I agree, I think D.C. is booming right now, we shall see the new New York, there’s an amazing energy in the city, and I think a unique thing that we are going across is because it’s such a political community, we all serve each other with political capital, and social capital, things like that. I just think people in D.C., more than other cities are much more willing to help, because it’s a ‘return-the-favor’ kind of town.
U/I Male Speaker B: Here, here! [Laughter]
MT: Thank you, panelists. I’d like to open the floor for questions. I first want to thank those who have been Twittering, I’ve been eying the board up there [Laughs] about the program. So, thank you.
Are there any questions out?
U/i Female Speaker F: Yes, I would just like to say that I’ve been working in the field of marketing for a non-governmental organizations, and non-profits. And we haven’t really talked a lot about that.
My name is […] Kessler, from […] Studio, and we do a lot of social media work for non-profits. And that’s really a big and exciting area in Washington, that’s not really been mentioned here tonight. I think that in that area there is a lot sort of private, social media community building. I heard when you talked about the long tail. I thought that maybe you’d talk about that little bit.
PM: Well, one of our clients is the American Diabetes Association. And one of the things that they’re doing in the redesign of their site is really integrating social media, but having a strategy around it. They have a very focused message, and they have a very focused audience that they’re trying to engage. So, building the capabilities on their site with tools and widgets, and all that stuff, it’s going to be really valuable for them. And, I think that for organizations that use support, it’s like a perfect fit. I come from an association where all my first ten years has been in the association space. So, our whole goal was building community and engaging people – giving them what they need. So, I think the social media, the ability to reach out, engage, serve, through these tools, it’s a perfect fit for a non-profit, in my mind.
SG: I think budget-wise, as well. I’m seeing a lot of innovation coming from the non-profit community who has less resources. They’re doing amazing things with the crowd sourcing. [Aside to GB for comments.]
You have like have a built-in network of supporters, instead of hiring someone to do probably a real video for you, or whatever, you say everyone send us a photo of you, how you commemorate this cause, and then you put that to music, and that’s a more powerful video than you could have ever commissioned for a fee. So, I think you have a built-in community to support, and because the tools are free, then people have energy to donate, rather than money. I think I see a lot of the potential in this, right?
GB: I agree with everything that’s been said so far, and, I would argue that most of the things that we talk about tonight overlap just as equal in the non-commercial realm as the commercial realm, and it gets back to the whole question of just whether you’re being honest about what you’re doing, and how you’re going about it. And one of the things that NGOs have a benefit of that many corporations do not is, you have constituency, and that constituency, at some level, believes in something, is willing to give of themselves, and there’s a pool of energy there.
And, one of the two big revolutionary changes with technology going on right now are you being able to finally enable other people to do what they want to do for you. And that happened at an enormous level on the campaign, and it was all about meals, and it was a mistake for us to get in the way. All we wanted to was to puncture that, and connect them to how they could give of themselves to this end. And then the other question is to what degree, once you find those people, you then try to drive them further, and inspire them to greater and greater heights of involvement.
SG: Only because I even learned this one from the Obama campaign that the barrier to entry is almost so low that non-profits have to be careful what they ask for, because you’ll just get anyone with a phone, can send you photos or videos, but then how cluttered YouTube was getting. But, it’s like the Obama campaign can only do so much with that much content. So, they had to put requirements, like a page[?] has to be this long, and you have to use this grade of quality, and things like that, and kind of cut out [Doesn’t finish thought.]
GB: There’s definitely ways in which you can actually, [Changes thought] there was guy once who really believed in conserving the outdoors, and he always regretted how the most accessible national parks had just so many people coming from New York, and L.A., and it would get torn up by sheer volume of visitors. And, so he proposed was drop a few boulders right around the entrance to all the trails, and basically, put in a creek, and a couple of obstacles. People are willing to like climb over the boulder [Laughter], and like ford the creek. They have some investment in that, and they are kind of willing to be there.
And if someone just pulled of the interstate, and like throws their wrapper on the ground, they’re not going to take the time go into the great outdoors. Did that metaphor work? [Laughter]
[MT takes another question from the floor.]
U/i Female Speaker G: Can you press on a little bit about blogger and social media ethics? I have both, I […] happening, I come from a big firm, and now I’m working in a small non-profit, and they’re afraid to engage with bloggers because they’re an environmental non-profit, and they feel so much that the bloggers are talking incorrectly about what’s going on, and they don’t want to validate this discussion. But, then on the flip side, they have own blog, and they feel like it’s ok, just take blog rolls from people, and kind of do things that I don’t personally think are the best thing to do, but I want you guys to speak a little about what your thoughts were on doing some of those activities.
AB: It’s interesting. And, that’s something you’re going to see in corporations, you’re going to see it in non-profits, you’re going to see it some areas of government, I imagine. You’re going to see it everywhere, is where you have the entity that says, “The bloggers are not correct, they’re doing it the wrong way, they’re not engaging in the proper way. On the journalism side they don’t ever report facts”, bla, bla, bla, bla, bla. You always hear that on one side or the other. So, I would say is that the hindrance is that every blogger is independent, but, that’s the benefit, as well, because every blogger is independent.
So, the non-profit wants to get the benefit of the blog without wading into the murky waters of blogger ethics. Then there are probably some pretty good bloggers out there that could take the time to look around and scope out the territory, and find out who’s who in that particular space. You’re probably going to find some people you can rely on, and even if you don’t use them a lot, in terms of getting the message out immediately, start building some sort of relationship with them. At the end of the day, once you do need them, and you’re your board of directors, or whoever it is, decides they want to, “Oh, you know, everybody’s doing it, so we should probably, too.” It would be good to have a community of people, bloggers, that you take the time to build some kind of relationship with it, then you can go in, lean on them when you need them.
SG: I think it is so important to engage, and I think, one way I talk to corporations about it, or even, I guess, non-profits, is to try and bring it into your venue, because sometimes they’re a little bit more comfortable with that, than going and responding on someone else’s home turf, or something like that. But, I think what Aaron said is really important, and important, in general, even if you’re not blogging, I think a takeaway would to be really start building relationships with the influencers in your communities. And, you guys all have access to information that they don’t have access to. So, even if you’re not blogging, you should definitely feel that you should share information, offer them an interview with your CEO, “Can I e-mail you a couple of questions?”, and bloggers are trying to constantly produce content, so don’t feel you’re like, ”Oh, can I contact them?”, you’re giving them something of value, because they need new and interesting content on that thing, they do appreciate exclusives, and, nothing’s off the record. [Laughter] Yes [Fielding a question.]
[Banter about on and off the record.]
U/I Male Speaker C: And, I think picking up on that. I work for full service market research firm, and we work with a lot of government contractors. And, in the research we do, we find that certainly in the personal lives of people that we talk to, that can fit into the client, are slowly beginning to engage in these social media, but there’s still a great resistance to using these tools on a professional side. I was wondering if you could give us some examples from your experience of types of pitfalls or risks – the other side of the coin, because we can’t keep just harping on about the strengths of these tools. We’ve got a pragmatic look at what some concerns that we should, at least, make them aware of.
DO: One quick example is that things you put on Twitter are there forever, and, actually, there are pages that are dedicated to misspeaks, that people have fun[?], the mis-Tweets, maybe. That’s one thing to know, is that you can’t delete something that you read on Twitter, I think that’s a big one.
GB: The metaphor that I found really helpful a couple of years ago, in fact, when it first started coming into vogue, it was a report about this person getting fired for pictures they had on Facebook, and stuff like that. They were saying that what’s going on is not bad; it’s a return back to the small village. And, we live a very large town, when you live in New York. [Laughter] You can’t hide, you can go and drink too much, and make a fool of yourself, and if no one there that you knew was there, you can walk away from that.
But, if you live in a village with 200 people, everything you do, you’re held to account for it. You can’t get drunk one night without everyone in the village knowing it. And, so, the fact that nothing, even when you delete things, it’s important to realize that data is permanent, for all intents and purposes now. And then also, there’s a raised level of accountability, and, so, my interduct to the question of what’s the code of ethics, is […] kind of visualized everyone as living in a very small village, and what would you actually be ashamed of, you’re going to be held to account for it.
PM: If you think about risk in my mind, I would think it’s risk is that you’re wasting time and money. So, I think the most important thing is to have a big picture here of what you’re trying to accomplish. Be very focused on the target audience that you’re trying to reach, so that you can develop a campaign that’s really focused on those results. You can’t measure everything, but I think one of the reasons why the money is moving, the attention is moving from traditional to the immediate is because it is so measurable. So, if you think from your own personal career standpoint, the biggest risk is that you’re going to waste a lot of money.
The other risks are around brands. So, in making sure that what you’re putting out into the market place is consistent what your brand represents. I come from non-profit, larger companies, smaller companies, all companies that care about what people are saying about them, and how people perceive them. So, my caution is to tread lightly and have a strategy in place, so that your decisions are not ad hoc, and they’re really focused on an overarching goal, the hardest thing from a marketing standpoint is to do everything ok, and nothing really well.
DO: I would just say that two things that are kind of tangential, but I think are very pertinent – one is that there is a cost to fear, as well, so just recognize that. And, it’s ok if the CEO is fearful, or doesn’t see the benefits, just recognize it there’s a cost to that, as well.
That’s one thing, and I just also wanted to say, for example, who here has put something up on YouTube? Raise your hand if you put, so what, maybe half of you have? So, for those of you that haven’t, just go home tonight and take a picture of your cat, or dog, or child, or spouse walking across the screen. Just put it up on YouTube, just go through the motions, try it once, don’t be afraid, understand how easy it is, so that when you want to use it for something else, you get past that very real initial hump of doing it. It’s not hard to do, just try it. Don’t worry about the content, it doesn’t have to look perfect, you don’t have to do it 20 times, 20 takes, just make it a cup that you put it on YouTube, so you can just practice that.
AB: I would just say, be real. And, at the end of the day, the people that are involved in social media have a very, very acute sense of when they feel the wool is being pulled over their eyes. And, so, one of the pitfalls you’re going to find out is if you want to play by the rules, and you can hide behind a press release, you can widget more PR, I realize, or you can hide behind this, or hide behind that, you can’t hide behind social media. You are out there, and it’s going to be one of the most productive things you can do, it can also hurt you a whole lot.
MT: You have a question in the back?
U/i Male Speaker D: Yeah, I work for a professional association, it’s a non-profit, and to a degree, I have almost the opposite problem of what you were describing, with the Obama content that people are providing. I see a big challenge for us is kind of fragmentation, so our whole job is building community. We’re building community for a fairly finite audience. You’re talking less that 100,000 people across the […] school, and, our members are doing a small fragment of that. But, we’ve done a very effective job, historically. We’ve got really active listers[?], we’ve got events that people come to, the same conference, they come every year. We’ve got a series of other events. People are very engaged.
When we start going into all these other spaces, though, I see that there are two or three people engaged heavily on Twitter, that’s it. The rest of the people are just there, and they’re not active. Linkedin group, the same thing – two or three people […] now, we have our own Linkedin group, and we had another Linkedin group that grew up organically from our organization on a separate subtopic. So, it’s two or three people who compose them all the time, no one else is composing. And, then we’ve got people who want to build more than that, we have people going out wanting to build around our convention […] proprietary, almost like a Twitter, kind of PA[?] proprietary system just at a convention, on our convention website.
So, what I see is, I see this […] as fragmentation, we’ve got too many different platforms, and not enough people engaged. Eh, I’m just wondering if anyone with experience, anyone on the panel, or even in the room, has experienced that sort of challenge. I think in a lot of it, the opposite is showing, some people are describing here. If anyone sees a solution to try to […]
AB: Well, I think it’s important that whatever that industry is, you spend your time being where the most people are going to be in trying to funnel the constituency there. So, maybe it doesn’t help to have two or three different Linkedin groups when everybody is over on Facebook, and there’s a fan page, it’s probably a bad example. But, what I do, when I recommend, when I talk to my clients and I’m developing strategy for them, we look at what their business is, where their constituents are. If it’s not Twitter, don’t be on Twitter, just to be on Twitter.
If most of the people that you’re going to be dealing with are in a sports network, and I’m talking very rhetorically here. But, there are sports athletes, college athletes, or something, maybe there’s a network that is designed specifically for that kind of thing that would be a better suited thing for social network than something like a Linkedin, or whatever, do you know what I mean? [Yes.]
PM: What I always say is that if you want to know people think, ask them. So do things like surveying, like focus groups. If you know that you’ve got two or three people that are on Twitter all the time, I know most of them aren’t, are the people that are on Twitter your key influencers? Are they people that other people listen to? So, really try to focus on, you’ve got influencers, you’ve got business decision, you have so many different people involved in all the decisions from a business standpoint. Figure out where you’re going to get the most bang for your buck. It may be in group[? audiences, but it may also be where these key people that influence a lot of other people are, and I think [Cut off.]
U/i Male Speaker D: [Cut in.] They were influencers, but there were only two or three on Twitter, they’re not doing a very good job of influencing.
PM: Well, it depends.
U/i Male D: I’m not trying to be rude[?].
PM: No, they can be influencing reporters, they could be influencing legislators, it may not be people that are in your [cut off.]
And that’s exactly right. We have influential reporters who [Audio too poor]
GB: The one thing that comes to mind, in my opinion, in some of these platforms when they’re kind of locked in, and proprietary makes it harder, I think the answer is aggregate. And, with some of these things you can use RSS, to have it so that every time someone posting in that Twitter group, it’s automatically added to the side […].
Or, if nothing else, you can at least be a member of these, also, and scrape their content, and say, “Hey, George from Wisconsin was saying this today.”, and if you make your blog, or your site, kind of the focus for that, you can, either through automated, or jerry rigged means, draw in good content from all these other places, it will work both ways, too. That will drive people back to those other places.
GB: If I can ask you a question, one thing I don’t understand is this hurting you to have all these people over these district services generating content that is about you?
U/i Male Speaker D: It hurts in terms of time resources.
DO: But, you’re not spending any of your resources to generate this content, right? To me, that’s what social media is. Like the old thing is controlling the message and it’s all going through one channel. The new thing is that there are people that you don’t control and you don’t know, and they’re Twittering, and you wouldn’t have had that otherwise, so embrace it. Take it, like Gray’s saying, and use it if it’s to your benefit, ignore it if it’s not. Encourage that, have 20 Linkedin groups if that’s people want to do. It just seems to me like it’s benefiting, not hurting, that’s all.
U/i Male Speaker D: I guess it’s an opportunity […], instead, if you had everyone on one Linkedin[?] […].
DO: That’s making the assumption that you could get the logs, more like people want to be wherever they want to be, right?
GB: I think his point is very valid, and it’s a good time to reassess for you, wherever your team is spending their time. And, I would proposition maybe having them either, not, [changes thought]. You don’t need to maintain 12 accounts if you don’t waltz through them. You can say, “We’re actually phase out, update any of these other places, and try to like make the website really the focus of all the activity.
SG: You said you had a really active eliser[?], and a lot of groups would kill for that. So, if you’re dragging an eliser, it’s like what you were saying in the beginning, you’ve already got it. If someone was just starting out, it would be like building in community, and your own white label, like social network, and those can be really successful, too. But, if you’ve already got everyone an eliser, and you can your own question, that’s where your group is at, that’s where the dialog’s taking place. And, yet you can take some of that like you guys were saying, and push it out on some of the other social networks.
DO: And, I would say, if you’re going to anything, you might actually encourage that, I mean, giving away a free iPod touch for the person who Tweets the most in a 24-hour period. But, then try to become a subject matter expert that they look to, so that, all of a sudden, they become, almost, I don’t want to use the word ‘soldiers’ of yours, but they can, like Aaron was saying, they can propagate your message. Maybe you are the official message when you do have all these disparate people saying other things, but if you can get them to look to you for content, or expertise, or whatever it is, and let them do their own thing as often as they want. But, if you have a weekly conference call, or monthly conference call, whatever it is, then when you have message that you want to be the official channel to propagate, you can leverage them as well.
MT: Any other question, one final question?
U/i Male Speaker E: Since you talk so much about content, do you ever have any tips for what makes for effective content on social media channels?
DO: I’ll just try to give you a quick answer to that, I can talk about content all day. To me, content is more about everyone going places, start there. Anything and everything is going to be relevant to somebody, so, I get people all the time saying, “I just don’t know if somebody would want to hear about what I have to say.” Maybe, that’s true, but it’s probably not true. You probably have at least person out there who cares about H-scale toy trains, or whatever, it is that you care about, right? So, I think it just naturally self segments.
AB: I’d say as somebody who loves to write, I would say, be really, really good at long-form and short-form writing. So, in other words, be able to really, really effectively produce subject, titles, like article titles, or excerpt piece or summary-type things, or, for the article itself, be really, really, really effective at being able to communicate your writing. Of course, content could be video or podcast, or anything else. But, I’m assuming it’s text.
And then, if you’re going to be engaging on Twitter, be really, really effective at that 140 characters, or less, effective communications. You can say a lot at 140 characters. I laugh when I see some people just trying to write whole paragraphs, like shortening ‘you’ into just the letter ‘u’, and all this stuff. I’m like, “No, think about what you want to write, and find a concise way to write it that is grabbing at a powerful [changes thought], people are seeing Tweets go by like ‘zap’, and they have no time to stop at what your Tweet says – is it something very, very compelling to them. So, if you’re writing, be very, very good at long-form and short-form effective writing.
SG: I think there’s an article by ProBlogger that lists like 15 different types of blog postings and they’re great, like top ten lists, short story, interview, and you can make a whole editorial calendar for your organization, and source that out. Like when I was blogging for a firm I was with, there were five of us, and we each had a day of the week that we were assigned to a posting, and it really worked for us. It was […] for our organization, but I think, so that you need to even look at a blog on your own is really effective. It would be, “What do I like about this blog?” And, you’ll answer your own question. A lot of times for me it’s like, I like the bullet points, and I like the colors, and I like the big multi-media. So, I think you can look at what you’ll enjoy, and repeat that.
PM: And building on that point, write about what you care about, because then you’re going to be relevant. So, find a topic that you’re passionate about. I write for a living, some things I hate to write about, I don’t write very well. [Chuckle] Some things, if I really enjoy it, I’m at least going to be relevant for people. So, that would be my recommendation.
GB: Echoing all these things, one of the nice recommendations that I try to give people to adopt that I think addresses all these points, and, almost accidentally leads to better and more content, is the guest blogging. And I think guest blogging goes across everything. One person’s got to be the person who’s adding content on a regular basis, But, you should definitely go into area of a person or organization saying “Hey, you, I want you to guest blog for us, and, I want you to guest blog for us, and, we should do a video with you, and, you should have to Twitter one day.” People like that, and, it accidentally, also gives more content, and gets more interesting […].
SG: And every time you link, linking is very important. You do say who your influencers are, and who you want relationships with, and every time you link to them, or take a quote and build on it, you’re doing original handshake, and rebuilding that relationship for when you need it next. And you’re doing that way when you’re forming your blog roll, and you’re doing that when you link, and you’re doing that when you comment on their sites. So, being a part of the dialog, I advise my clients on a 50-50 rule, spend 50% of your time writing, and 50% engaging in your community.
MT: I would like to thank the panelists very much for this evening, thank you so much for your time. [Applause]
[To the panelists] What would be your personal tip, your top social media tip?
GB: No matter what, this stuff isn’t going away, and it’s a mistake to get caught up in any one tool and think Twitter to be the all of the all in blogging, etc. But, all this stuff that we’re talking about […] is not going away.
SG: I would encourage people to experiment and not be shy about experimenting, and then find what fits, stick with it. You don’t have to be everywhere.
PM: I would encourage people to stick with your creative side, and, don’t let all the different tools, and technology, and analytical measurement, all that stuff take all the fun out of what you’re doing. That would be my recommendation.
DO: Social media is a tool, not a medium – just remember that. You are exposing an organization’s content to the world.
AB: I was going to say the exact same thing. Don’t get caught up in the hype[?] of the platform, it’s not about Twitter, it’s not about […], it’s not about the blog, it’s about the message, and effectively communicating that message. These tools just enable you to be able to that just a little bit better than you could 10 years ago.
MT: Thank you, Aaron, Daniel, […] [Applause], thank you so much for coming here tonight. And, there is an evaluation form on your chair, and even though a couple of them were duking it out up here, I would appreciate it if you would fill out the evaluation about how you felt the evening went. And, we welcome you to stick around a little bit, and network, and chat, and meet some of the panelists.
I encourage you to join our AMA Facebook and Twitter site page, as well, and you can get all the information on amadc.org. Thank you.
End of transcript.
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