In response to How to make an awesome Social Media News Release, Jonathan Rick asked me, “Isn’t this essentially the same thing that Pitch Engine offers?” Jason Kintzler then added, “Yes Jonathan, exactly! Did I mention you can do it all for free?!” (See Socialmedia.biz‘s earlier writeup on PitchEngine: A social PR platform for the new era.)

Well, my response is the topic of this post today: “The article is only about the what and why of the Social Media News Release and not the how. Pitch Engine is a how!” I then added, “Pitch Engine doesn’t take away the work: writing/collecting compelling copy and assets. You do that work” and then “Our SMNR is just a platform and structure. 90% of one’s time should be spent writing amazing content” and then, finally, “Installing WordPress, an amazing platform, does not an amazing blog make; Pitch Engine is amazing but content is king”

So, let me explain. Pitch Engine and WordPress are best-of-breed application platforms that make creating a Social Media Release and Blog seamless, removing the technology hurdle from the process. Those are good things, to be sure. However, after re-reading my SMNR post, I was reminded that it wasn’t about technology at all, it was about the collecting and presenting of relevant assets, copy, images, and videos; it was about organizing and branding an ease-of-use “steal all this content, blogger, and please post on your blog” microsite.

In fact, I made a point of showing how one doesn’t even need to spend all your time installing WordPress or some other database-backed website or web app — one can hack together a very valuable SMNR with just the most basic HTML, an inexpensive hosting plan, and a $12/year domain from a domain name registrar.

Why humanity trumps technology

It’s not about the technology, people! Hire and train people based on their ability to write and their ability to connect and engage people — who like people and care about personal, human, relationships. Signing up for Pitch Engine won’t write your SMNR for you, creating a profile on Twitter doesn’t make you an influencer, and installing WordPress doesn’t put you in the AdAge Power 150 or Technorati’s Top 100. These are all essential steps, but they’re no panacea.

If you’re spending more money on tech than talent, don’t. If you’re intimidated by technology, don’t be. If you think that Social Networking and Social Media is about apps and sites and smart phones and Twitter and Facebook and Google+, then you need to get past that and remember that it’s about people. Real fleash-and-blood folks who hunger to connect and relate. Yes, with each other, but also with you and your brand, products, and services.

Pitch Engine’s job is to make Social Media Release-making as easy-as-possible, tech-free, as possible. And they do an amazing job of it. The same goes for WordPress and Facebook and Twitter. If an app doesn’t make it easier for you to connect with other people, the app doesn’t work. At the end of the day, all these web applications are top-drawer, but they just make it easier — effortless — to do your job. They do not do your job for you and they often make folks lazier, more careless, and less concise. They tend to be enablers, enabling bad grammar, poor spelling, and just good enough editing. People should always write as though going to press and being printed on paper instead of just assuming you can always edit it later.

If you’re intimidated by technology, that’s OK. Social Media News Releases and Blogger Pitch Emails are more about the quality, simplicity, efficiency, and targeting of the writing, structure, and presentation of the page. Some of the most popular blogs online are Blogger and MySpace blogs, even though there are more sophisticated platforms. Why? Because what it is to be a blogger is to be a writer and not a technologist or programer. The same thing with digital PR and social media marketing. The most effective marketing campaigns combine the ability to write clear, compelling copy; understanding the target audience and their associated wants, needs, desires, and hunger; and knowing where the sweet spot in the market is — it is not about the technology. The tech is a necessary evil that must be transcended in order to ensure that the messaging is able to seamlessly reach the market without barrier.

Reporters don’t need to know how to run a printing press, news anchors don’t need to understand how a picture makes its way, as if my magic, to my LCD HDTV, and radio hosts surely don’t need to go out to get their Ham Radio License. And you don’t need to become an iOS developer, a web application developer, or a CSS guru, either.

Too many people in this space get stuck behind the technology barrier. They spend all their budgets on building the perfect web application, the best Facebook App, and on graphic design and architecture, leaving very little if anything on the best writers and the best marketers. Don’t get stuck in that trap.

Your social media presence, digital PR strategy, and social media marketing campaigns are only as good as your writers, marketers, PR professionals, community managers, designers, and creatives — the artisans — and not on the technologies — the tools. When I teach young college marketing and PR students in their communication schools, I remind them every day that all the things they’re learning in class, though possibly dated and old school, are still relevant because human nature is human nature and people are people and technological platforms are ephemeral and fleeting.

Learn the tools, surely, but don’t become obsessed with them. Shine the spotlight where it matters: people. Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology.

Related articles

• Social media success demands talent above technology (socialmedia.biz)
• Social media success demands talent above technology (biznology.com)
• How to make awesome Social Media News Releases (chrisabraham.com)
• Detailed analysis of the perfect blogger pitch (socialmedia.biz)
• The Social Media News Release explained in detail (socialmedia.biz)
• Inside a Social Media News Release (biznology.com)
• WordPress 2.5 – So exciting I can hardly contain myself… (theresabloginmysoup.com)
• How to write an irresistible blogger pitch email (chrisabraham.com)
• 5 Types of Sites You Can Build With WordPress (thetechscoop.net)
• How To: Add Customer Reviews To WordPress (wpjedi.com)

Ellen Ewart has some fantastic advice to the business that is social media-curious but has yet to take the first step towards engagement: listen — If You’re Not Ready to Participate, Listen.

If you’re not already online, check out some blogs before you dive right in. If you’re not using your voice or moderating comments about your brand, chances are that hasn’t stopped other people from doing it. A good way to start is to simply listen and gage what your brand looks like in the online space. Perform a simple Google search to see where you are mentioned.

This is very important to do. It all comes down to measuring thrice, cutting once.  It is also important if you think of yourself as being a brand new gold fish entering a new tank: spend some time acclimatizing.   Here are some questions that Ellen Ewart offers you to ask before you take the first cut:

1. How have others perceived your brand? Is it in line with your corporate identity?
2. Is your logo familiar or trusted?
3. Has anything you’ve done in the recent past been controversial? If so, how have people reacted amongst themselves and has your company responded in any way?
4. Is there consistency in how people interpret your brand?
5. Are there any consistent keywords associated with your brand? Check keywords between sites that mention your brand.
6. Do people believe that you fulfill your brand promise? If not, how far do you fall short?
7. Are there any media outlets that don’t cover your news? If so, identify how to reach that audience.
8. Are your press mentions positioned accurately?
9. Do your employees participate in any conversation about your brand? Do they properly understand your brand’s promise?
10. Perform this type of research on your closes competitors to get a sense of how each fares.

These questions are a gift and you should read the rest of the article and the Bizzia Brandcurve blog as well.

You are not too late to enjoy the benefits of social media — you will never be too late — because the spoils in social media marketing go to the company that can maintain its social media participation over the long haul over the long term. Start now, start later, and I guarantee that if you’re a lion-hearted social media marathoner, you’ll probably best your competition.  Anyway, Joseph Ratliff did a brilliant job getting you motivated in How The Social Media Promotes Your Business:

The great thing about social media marketing is it offers a place to talk about your business in a new setting that is a lot less threatening than many other types of advertising. Social media is not about the hard sell. Instead, it focuses on creating relationships with people. Social media allows business people to share some of their personal lives with others. This helps to overcome any fear or reservations connected to buying from people online.

If you’ve started a blog for your business, you already have your foot in the water. The next logical step is to begin commenting on other blogs related to your business. Spend some time searching for a few blogs that you enjoy and subscribe to them via an RSS feeder to manage your time. This will allow you to follow several blogs without having to go to each one every day. When you find a post you can contribute a useful comment to, go to the site and offer your thoughts. Leave a link, if you can, so the audience can link to your own blog. Make this a part of routine at least three times a week.

Next, choose one or two social media communities to join. There are dozens and dozens out there, so do not try to become visible everywhere. Two of the most popular social media communities for business networking are Twitter and Facebook. Both of these are effective sites to increase your relationship building skills with prospects. Combine some personal tidbits with some business information until you discover the perfect mix of both. Do not just focus on building big numbers of friends or followers. It isn’t all about the numbers. Instead, build a little slower and spend your time interacting with the people you meet.

Tom Smith wrote a smashing article that really gets why big brands are having such a big problem with social media.  The article is over at Mashable and deserves a read because I am only excerpting the list here,  Why Big Brands Struggle With Social Media.  Number one, “social Media is often viewed as just another marketing channel,” deserves number one because the biggest mistake that brands and their agencies of record constantly make is they forge that these social media “marketing channels” are real people with real lives and real friendships and a real voice.

1. Social Media is often viewed as just another marketing channel: It is of course so much more; it is a completely different approach to interacting with consumers and customers. Of course, you can advertise in a social media environment, but the true return on investment comes from developing communities, creating content to be shared, and talking and listening directly with consumers.

2. It does not fit into current structures: True social media falls somewhere between marketing, PR, communications, content production and web development. No one is quite sure whose responsibility it is and who should ultimately deliver their organisation’s social media strategy.

3. Communities and content are global: Users of social media connect, consume, and share content globally with little care for international borders. Marketing and PR departments and objectives are set up nationally or regionally. Very few organisations have a truly international structure and perspective.

4. Social media needs a long term approach: To build community, distribute content, or get people actively involved in an application takes time. Marketing and PR work on short time frames and are wedded to sets of individual campaigns or short term objectives. Social media is not a campaign, it’s a permanent approach.

5. No guaranteed results: You book advertising and it’s guaranteed to work. For, example you book a web campaign on page views and you keep going until you reach your goal. This is what advertisers call a push medium, i.e. you choose when people see it. Social media is a pull medium; usage and interaction is totally dependent on the user choosing to do so. If it’s not relevant or lacks creative brilliance it will not work. This makes it hard.

6. The metrics are new: Companies are used to the big numbers of advertising, but these numbers are different. Advertising is measured in booked exposures, i.e. page views, while social media is measured in direct interactions, i.e. number of friends, number of views or number of users. These numbers will always be smaller, but not necessarily any less measure of success.

BL and I adore eachother so I was very excited to receive an email from her last night with a link to her latest article on Business Week, Using social media to market your business is a good idea. Just don’t plan on getting your whiz-kid nephew to do it for free — check it out and check BL out over on her blog, What’s Next Blog. Oh, and when BL asks “how many of them have actually created a successful campaign for clients using social media tools? I bet you’d be hard-pressed to find half a dozen with real track records,” I can proudly state that Abraham Harrison LLC has the expertise, the experience, and the track record to boot!  Anyway, here’s the article:

Debunking Six Social Media Myths

For companies, resistance to social media is futile. Millions of people are creating content for the social Web. Your competitors are already there. Your customers have been there for a long time. If your business isn’t putting itself out there, it ought to be.

But before you take the plunge, bear in mind the many myths that surround social media.

1. Social media is cheap, if not free. Yes, many of the tools that can be employed in social media marketing are free to use. These include Google’s (GOOG) video-sharing site YouTube, Yahoo’s (YHOO) photo-sharing site Flickr, the social-network building tool Ning, and content aggregators such as Digg and eBay’s (EBAY) StumbleUpon. Free blogging tools abound too; among them are WordPress, Twitter, and FriendFeed.

However, integrating these tools into a corporate marketing program requires skill, time, and money. The budget for an effective social media marketing campaign begins at $50,000 for two to three months. I’m sure companies have spent less, and I know they’ve spent more.

Building a site that incorporates interactivity, allows user-generated content, and perhaps also includes e-commerce doesn’t come cheap from anyone who knows what they are doing. Even taking free software like WordPress and making it function as an effective interactive site, incorporating e-commerce, creating style sheets that integrate with the company’s branding, takes more than time. That takes skill, experience, and money.

As a rule, a $50,000 to $100,000 budget can cover the creation of a simple multimedia microsite that becomes the center of an online community. Add in some widgets to help distribute the content and form a credible group on Flickr, Twitter, or Facebook and other networking groups to enhance the community aspect of the campaign. Complex functions add to programming and design costs.

A high-yield, highly targeted blog advertising campaign to kick off and support the program will cost an additional $25,000 to $100,000 a month. Advertising through Google’s AdWords, e-mail support, co-registration, and other tools that drive traffic would be additional costs.

2. Anyone can do it. A surfeit of whiz kids and more experienced marketers are claiming to be social media experts and even social media gurus. Search the bios of Robert Scoble’s 56,838 Twitter followers using Tweepsearch (www.tweepsearch.com), an index of the bios of Twitter users, and you’ll find:

• 4,273 Internet marketers
• 1,652 social media marketers
• 513 social media consultants
• 272 social media strategists
• 180 social media experts
• 98 social media gurus
• 58 Internet marketing gurus

How many of them have actually created a successful campaign for clients using social media tools? I bet you’d be hard-pressed to find half a dozen with real track records.

A successful social media campaign integrates social media into the many elements of marketing, including advertising, digital, and PR. Opinion and theory are no match for experience, and the best social media marketers now have more than 10 years of experience incorporating interactivity, blogs, forums, user-generated content, and contests into online marketing.

Video contests by companies hoping for viral buzz and Google juice are as plentiful as mosquitoes on a humid summer night. But, like their insect counterparts, most video contests suck.

It’s the rare video contest that gets as many as 2,000 entries. Many, like Denny’s (DENM) recent disastrous effort, get fewer than 10 entries. Apparently, 48 Denny’s breakfasts over four years wasn’t a big motivator.

3. You can make a big splash in a short time. Sure, sometimes a social media campaign can produce substantial and measurable results quickly.

Social media is great if you’re already a star, but that doesn’t happen overnight. Amid the recent launch of my T-shirt design business, Pawfun.com, I have relied heavily on my 4,000-plus Twitter followers and 120,000 readers of my What’s Next Blog, which I’ve updated as often as five times a day since 2003. Because that network already exists, with not one dollar spent on advertising, we were able to generate more traffic in our first three days than some major companies get after years online.

ZapposChief Executive Tony Hsieh, whose company has millions of customers who are evangelists for the great service that built the brand, quickly became a Twitter star, with more than 32,000 followers. When Dell (DELL), JetBlue Airways (JBLU), the Chicago Bulls, and other love-’em-or-hate-’em brands joined Twitter, they immediately developed huge followings.

Tweets can be used to drive traffic to articles, Web sites, contests, videos, and so on—if people already care about your brand, or if you have a truly original idea that people will want to share with their followers.

One recent example of a Twitter-generated success is Savvy Auntie, a community for aunts, godmothers, and “other women who love kids” that was launched six months ago by Melanie Notkin. She has counted on Twitter to drive traffic, help her find suppliers, products, and even investors. She developed a Twitter following before launching her business, then tapped into it for help when she launched.

4. You can do it all in-house. Wrong! You need strategy, contacts, tools, and experience—a combination not generally found in in-house teams, who often reinvent the wheel or use the wrong tools.

It is rare indeed to find an in-house team that can not only conceive and execute a social media campaign but also drive traffic to it with effective e-mail segmentation, search optimization, blogger outreach, blog advertising, Google ads, and more.

5. If you do something great, people will find it. Quite simply, that never was true. Until you can drive traffic to your social media effort, you’ve got a tree falling in the forest, heard only by those standing nearby. A great number of tools can drive traffic, including StumbleUpon, Digg, and Twitter, but nothing works better than word of mouse—one friend telling another, “Hey look at this!”

6. You can’t measure social media marketing results. You can use a variety of methods, including mentions on blogs and in media; comments on the content; real-time blog advertising results, and click-throughs to your company Web site. You can get very precise statistics from a variety of sites, including Google Trends, Twitter search, Google Analytics, BackType, and Compete.

The tools are there. The gurus who know how to use and interpret them—not so much.

Ochman, president of Whatsnextonline.com, has been creating new media marketing and online brand strategy since 1995 for companies including IBM, Ford, McGraw-Hill, Budget Car Rental, Stacksandstacks.com, and American Greetings. She tracks online marketing trends and campaigns in What’s Next Blog.

I have collected a number of thoughts I have had on social media, blogging, social networking, blogger outreach & engagement, blogger activation, astroturfing, and other fun stuff I call Insights — 38 in all — that I just stumbled upon and I thought it would be lovely to share:

1. Activating Bloggers
2. Advice on Starting and Growing an SNS
3. Always Bring Something to the Party
4. Blog Community Outreach
5. Blog Messaging and Counter-Messaging
6. Blogger Outreach
7. Blogger Relations
8. Brand Ambassadorship Requires Authenticity
9. Campaigns Must Evolve with the Internet
10. Corporate Blogging and the Corporate Blog
11. Domain Name Registration Strategy
12. Don’t Be Seduced by the Lure of Astroturfing
13. Gift and Asset Distribution
14. Influence the Influencers
15. Influencer Identification
16. Initial Online Audit
17. Markets are Conversation
18. Message Creation
19. Online Advocacy
20. Online Communities are Not Virtual
21. Online Community Outreach
22. Online Outreach and Online Engagement
23. Online Universe Creation
24. Ping Servers and Pinging
25. Publicity and Corporate Blogs
26. Reciprocal Linking
27. Search Engine Brand Protection
28. Social Bookmarking Strategy
29. Social Network Profiles are Not Fancy Personal Home Pages
30. Social Network Services Encourage Competition
31. Social Network Services Should be Facilitated not Controlled
32. Talk Like the Locals
33. The Blogroll
34. The College as Model for Social Networks
35. The Internet is Vastly Hugely Mind-Boggingly Big
36. Tracking Online Conversation
37. When in Rome Do As the Romans Do
38. Wikipedia and Wiki Promotional Strategy

I tell anyone who will listen to me that the current crop of advertisement methods is too short-lived. The moment you spend the money and your ad runs, that is the moment it is either gone to the grave or becomes a patient existing on life support. Either you’re smart and willing to keep it alive, in conversation, online on YouTube for the spots, or on a blog somewhere for the print work — or you feel compelled to keep on throwing money at it ad infinitum, because contextual ads, banner ads, etc, only last as long as you write checks.

What my specialty is is online conversation marketing, online public relations, and online earned media. When you earn peoples’ attention and when they choose to speak about you, your clients, and your services, then you have a gift that keeps on giving — this is content that lasts well past the campaign and into the future. This is both the sort of thing that Google loves — it is SEO catnip — and it is just the sort of content that flows, both upstream to A-list bloggers and to mainstream media and down to your readers, aggregators, and to other bloggers and other blogs.

If you want to see some examples of powerfully successful blogger outreaches, check out International Medical Corps (IMC) 2008, Survivor Corps Operation Survivor 2008, and Fresh Air Fund Summer 2008, Jerry White’s I Will Not Be Broken book promotion. In many cases, these campaigns are close to a year old, yet they still still live in hundreds and hundreds of blogs and feed Google’s index until all of these blogs are taken down. It is really amazing how effective this sort of “advertising” promotion works. What’s better, when the campaign is over and the client “turns off” our tap, the content continues living and isn’t just shut off like it is with banners, buttons, and contextual advertising. Very interesting, very cool, and powerfully effective.

Remember how much fun Communication Arts is to page through? — CA is intoxicating! Well, every ad you make can be as interesting, as long as you’re willing to come out of your art department and share your process, share your experience, share your steps. Keeping those ephemera alive through narrative, sharing, conversation, and story, is what social media is, it is what customer service is, it is surely what branding should be.

Anyway, There is a lot of opportunity in this time of chaos, of this time of transition. The same sort of transition (and opportunity) happened when PCs came online, replacing the IBM Selectric II; when the Internet changed E-Commerce, threatening to eviscerate bricks and mortar stores, and it is happening now, more than ever, with advertising, marketing, and PR.

I call it white knuckle syndrome: holding on to the handholds you have, frozen on the face of the cliff, because you don’t know where the handholds of the future are. This chaos is pretty amazing to watch as the economy pitches and GM bails on Super Bowl.

Advertising knows it needs to jump off the locomotive before it pitches into the gorge (the bridge is out!) but reaching out to the proffered hand of the guy in the helicopter seems pretty risky too. But, as the current handholds become chalky and you start to feel them crumble under your weight, you’ll need to find somewhere else to go, and quick!

To me, Chris Brogan said it best the other day on Twitter, “customer service is the new PR.*” Looking at what @comcastcares has been able to do, customer service is the new PR, the new marketing, and the new advertising.

So, as those handholds start to get chalk and begin to crumble, it is important to at least set your eyes on a new handhold — or maybe a helping hand — before your original handhold turns to powder.

And for you who have yet to do the reading, please check out Cluetrain Manifesto and Naked Conversation.

Last week Thursday morning, I participated as a social media PR expert and panelist in a very cool Bulldog Reporter PR University audio conference entitled Beyond Twitter PR. Here’s some information on the call-in audio conference:

8/28/08 – Beyond Twitter PR: The New Rules of Crafting a Powerful, Cost-Effective Social Media Strategy

New media communications, social media optimization, Web 2.0 marketing, Facebook publicity, even Twitter PR. No matter how you tag the movement—it’s clear today’s engagement media and online channels from blogs to online video to social networks and even virtual worlds are bonafide communication tools. Practitioners who can master these mediums and create PR-driven social media strategies that generate real results for clients and companies alike—are sure to rule the integrated and digital marketing mix (and budget). Join Bulldog Reporter’s exclusive panel of the nation’s foremost experts successfully practicing in the nexus between PR and exciting new technologies to learn how you can beat the competition and successfully incorporate Web 2.0 tools into traditional PR programs. If you’re new to the social media revolution and its impact on communications, this is one call that will bring your work (and career trajectory!) up to speed. If you’re already incorporating social media and Web 2.0 techniques into your PR programs, this 90-minute, intensive call is a sure way to take your online efforts to the next level and position your team, client or company well ahead of the competition, while engaging consumers, customers and public in exciting, productive and profitable new ways.

It was a very amazing speaker panel:

Kate Laufer, Senior Public Relations Manager, North America, Beam Global
Spirits & Wine
Paula Berg, Manager, Emerging Media, Southwest Airlines
Doug Hay, CEO, Co-Founder, Expansion Plus
Susan Getgood, Principal, GetGood Strategic Marketing
Chris Abraham, President/COO, Abraham Harrison

If you like what you read, you are welcome to listen to the event by either ordering the conference CD or by requesting it on demand.