I’ve posted a new episode of PodcastJunky. In this episode I review The Thomas Jefferson Hour, a radio show re-purposed to podcasting. In the show you hear the thoughts of President Thomas Jefferson in person. No, they haven’t put him in a TARDIS and brought him to present day. Thomas Jefferson is played by Clay Jenkins, a Humanities Scholar who really knows his Jefferson. Listen or read more here. http://www.podcastjunky.com/
Recently I was researching a topic in social media. As a result I had several twitter followers put me in touch with their favorite sources on twitter. Naturally I followed the people they recommended and the people doing the recommendations. From one of them I got the dreaded auto DM. I supose I should be glad that I only got one considering I probably followed 10-15 people that night.
My reaction: I find it disturbing that someone helping me with Social Media Best Practices Q earlier today has sent me an auto DM.
Auto DM’er (Sent via DM so name withheld): Touche! But, the auto DM saves me a ton of time. We single moms have to save time as much as we can:-)
Saves you time? Seriously? Auto DM’ers are filling up my DM inbox and email inbox with messages that say “thanks for the follow. Please buy my crap” or “Thanks for the follow. here is where you can find more crap I’m involved with” If you actually think I might be interested in something you are involved with then tell me, personally.
Picture this scenario; you attend a function in your city and meet many people. A few days later you recieve a hand written note from Jane Smith. It says that it was a pleasure meeting you and invits you to drop by her office any time. Jane thinks they might have some things at her office you might be interested in or business she can help you with.
Jane was nice enough to take time and send a hand written note and she might have something of interest to you. So, you decide to stop in for a bit, but you enter the wrong door. Jane is not there. Instead there a scanner auto scanning a stack of business cards that Jane has collected at community events. A machine is printing out what looks like personal hand written notes just like the one you received.
Now how do you feel about Jane. For me, I don’t care what she has in her store or how much she can help me in business. She is pretending to be personal but she is fake and she has waisted my time.
A DM has some similarities to a personal note. I open it before I open the rest of the mail. A DM hits my email box and when I get a DM I assume it’s because someone would like a private response and it is probably something more important than an @reply. It used to work that way before auto dm’s started filling up my email.
For a while 9/10 messages in my DM box were auto DM’s. That’s when I started unfollowing or blocking auto DM’ers. I simply couldn’t find the real messages in all the “thanks for the follow, please buy my crap” auto DM’s. How does wasting my time = saves you time? It’s an unnecessary and unwanted message in my inbox. If you are fake and want to waist my time in favor of “saving” your time, then you are a spammer and you are not worth my attention.
A few days ago I received a phone call from someone arranging for a conference on Social Media. A journalist friend had recommended me for a panel on PR. I responded that technically I am considered marketing but that the two are so married it really doesn’t matter. She was floored. Apparently this was a new concept for her.
I had to put on the breaks and remind myself that the PR people live in a PR bubble, The Marketing people live in a marketing bubble and both bubbles are completely ignoring the customer service department. PR, Marketing, and Customer Service need to be three branches of the same tree. They may focus on different aspects but if they are not connected at some point they are not going to grow well.
I’m not the only one saying this. CC Chapman has mentions similar statements on Managing the Gray and Ron Ploof talks about it in Read This First – The Executives guide to New media from Blogs to Social Networks. I’ve heard many others say it too. But it’s those of us who do not come from either marketing or PR that find separating the three just baffling.
Wikipedia has several descriptions for Public Relations but the simplest one is “the practice of managing communication between an organization and its publics”
It describes Marketing as “the process by which companies determine what products or services may be of interest to customers, and the strategy to use in sales… create value for customers and build strong customer relationships in order to capture value from customers in return.“
So if PR is “managing communication” and Marketing is “build(ing) strong customer relationships” shouldn’t they be talking to each other? And if it’s all about relationships with the customer shouldn’t both departments be talking to the only people in the company who are talking to the customers directly, the Customer Service Department?
Recently marketing genius, New York Times best selling author, FDO and all around scary psychotic person Scott Sigler blew through my town. Well, technically it was a bit north of me but you get the idea.
Scott is now known for INFECTED and CONTAGIOUS, major hardcover thrillers from Crown Publishing. But he didn’t get there through traditional methods. After enjoying some success with a couple of gaming books Scott started seriously pursuing a fiction career in 1991. He tried the normal , traditional rout and shopped around his books looking for a publisher/agent. In 2005 he decided to podcast EARTHCORE.
Tee Morris.com gets credit for being the very first to podcast a novel with Morevi: The Chronicles of Rafe & Askana. Quickly followed by The Max Quick Series by Mark Jeffry. But Scott made a splash by being the first to do a “Podcast Only” novel. Listeners couldn’t peek at the end. We had to wait until Scott brought us our weekly episode. Forcing us listeners, known as “Junkies”, to hit refresh over and over each Sunday afternoon waiting for our Sigler fix.
On a side note, that is when my husband gave the the title “PodcastJunky” because my all around podcast listening habits seemed to be so similar to the Sigler “Junkies”. Always updating looking for my next podcast “fix”. Remember that was in the days where the number of podcasts was in the low hundreds, not the thousands of options we have today.
Scott built a large subscribed audience of 10,000 by giving away the podcast EARTHCORE. Next was ANCESTOR with 30,000 listeners. After giving it away as a podcast it was published in book form by a small independent press. Scott was again the first to “Make a run on the Amazon.com charts”. His fan-base was so strong that even though we already had the free audio version ANCESTOR still reached #1 in Horror, #1 in SciFi, #2 in fiction, (Harry Potter held the #1 spot) and was #7 overall.
Scott has been a relentless self promoter. But very little of it has been through traditional marketing. Scott has used New Media, twitter, FaceBook, his own site, etc to build a community of rabid fans who will step up and do all we can to promote his work. He talks with his fans via these social networks. He doesn’t just spew his message, he builds relationships and trust, and we reward him for it. We forward links, we retweet, we spread posters and postcards, here I am writing yet another post on him. It’s about trust. We trust him to bring us good fiction that will scare our socks off and make our skin crawl. He trusts us to be there for him and spread the word about his work.
It’s working! He caught the attention of Crown publishing who published INFECTED in 2008 quickly followed by it’s sequel CONTAGOUS which rocketed right into the New York Times Best seller list. INFECTED has now been optioned by Rogue Pictures and Random House Films, the movie version is currently in the planning stages.
Scott Sigler at Book Soup CONAGOUS Reading
He recently brought his “Sigler Stank” tour to So. Cal.
There was the traditional reading, Q & A and signing of a traditional marketing plan. But after the traditional part was over, Scott did his signature “pub crawl” Hanging out with fans, talking, enjoying some food and drink in a local establishment. You won’t see that in a traditional authors marketing tool box. He is building the trust and relationships that make his fans hard core “Junkies”
Scott hanging out with fans at LA Pub Crawl during Sigler Stank II
Mark Jeffry, Megan Enloe, Mathew Wayn Selznick
According to Libsyn, the company that holds my audio files so you can download them, I have been podcasting since 1969. That’s longer than Scott Sigler’s claim of podcasting for 18 years, and what proof does he have? 
Well I finally dusted the cob webs off my microphone and put out another PodcastJunky episode. You can find it at PodcastJunky.com.
I highlighted CC Chapman’s Managing the Gray podcast. CC helped me though a tuff time recently when Hubby was laid off from his job. We’ve never actually met and he has no idea he helped me, but he did.
CC’s contagious energy and pure love of life just runs through my ear buds and fills my gas tank with the stuff I need to keep going in difficult times.
I was in Costco the other day and witnessed a rather different form of marketing.
These big box stores have their own people giving out samples but they also bring in outside vendors for limited periods of time to promote their own products. The clothing and jewelry vendors don’t really capture my attention. But being a foodie, I always enjoy the chance to try a new and tasty product. After all, who hasn’t eaten lunch at Costco by way of grazing on the samples.
“Three for the price of one” and “Today & today only” the carnival barker yelled. OK, this guy was a bit more annoying than most of the outside vendors Costco brings in but, whatever. I’m willing to give the product a taste.
This time the product was cheese. A well known national brand of cheese. The first sample was a cheese dip, not bad, Warm and yummy. As I reached for the second item to be sampled, cheese on a cracker, the man handing out samples said:
“Don’t just grab and run, listen to the man” Then he proceeded to point to the annoying carnival barker. Both of them were looking right at me.
Are you serious? Do you actually think you can humiliate me into purchasing your product?
I flirted with the idea of telling them off then and there but decided I didn’t want to bring any attention to them or their cheesy product. I just walked away, carrying with me a negative feeling about their brand.
A few months ago I started an online tutoring business. I have to use the term business lightly since it really never took off.
My idea was that students often don’t need an entire hour with a tutor, they just need help with that one problem to get them over the hump. So instead of purchasing a sit down with a face to face tutor, they would purchase 30 or 60 minute blocks and the unused minutes would role over until they needed me next.
So let’s start with what went right. I purchased a domain name and got a site up. MeganTheMathTutor.com. OK, not the most exciting domain name but hey, it’s self explanatory. Besides, if you are desperately trying to get through your math homework do you want a fancy name or do you simply want someone who can get you through the homework and help you pass the test?
I’m no web-page designer but I liked the page. It looked nice but here is the first thing I did wrong, it’s stagnant. I didn’t blog on it. I didn’t give people a reason to come back to it and search engines only saw an informational page that was old.
Now on to Social Media.I’ve been playing in the social media space for a long time. I have accounts with the usual’s, MySpace, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc. but I am most active on twitter.
Twitter is a microblogging platform that asked the question “What are you doing?” and users answer in 140 characters or less. But they also do a lot of celebrating fun things that are happening or venting about their frustrations.
I have an active twitter account @PodcastJunky. I didn’t want to muck it up with a bunch of math tutoring stuff so I started a new account @MeganTheTutor. And that’s where I really started to go wrong, way wrong.
Nothing wrong with having two accounts. For example, Paul J. Barrie, Jr.has @pauljbarriejr for his personal day to day tweets and WTTM for his wildly popular Disney fan podcast Window to the Magic. People follow one or both of his accounts depending on their interest.
The problem was the way I treated these two accounts. My PodcastJunky account was started just for fun and I followed podcasters to start with and then started following the interesting people they were having conversations with. I took a different approach with my second account.
On @MeganTheTutor I set up a twitter search looking for students struggling with math, It worked like a charm. During afternoon and early evening I was seeing a new tweet at least every few minutes.
All those students, all frustrated with math and here I am, a math tutor with no students. So I started offering to help. Each time I saw a tweet of frustration over math homework I would offer free help, a free sample of my services.
All that was good but my approach was bad. All I did was to offer help so my twitter stream looked like this:
Even worse, I started getting lazy and cutting and pasting the same message offering to help. This was the ultimate in STUPID and I knew better. Fortunately I only did that for about 10 tweets before snapping out of my cranial-rectal inversion.
I had taken the Social out of Social Media.
When I started talking with people, commenting on their non math tweets, I finally got discussions going. But it was a slow road. It takes time to build a community, and it should take time. Just because we live in an instant world doesn’t mean that relationships can be built instantly.
The tutoring account has been put on hold for a while. My husband being laid off meant that a trickle of tutoring money wasn’t going to cut it. Time needed to go towards finding regular income. But when I return, here are some things I promise to do differently:
I have all these ideas. Stuff floating around in my brain. I keep thinking I should blog about this or that but it doesn’t fit into any of my many projects.
So here it is. A place for all the random stuff passing through my mind and to serve as grand central for all my other projects. Thanks for stopping by.
