PJA: Bow & Arrow

This morning I received an e-mail from the editors over at SlideShare with some good news: the presentation I created with my colleagues Emmanuel Ording, Multimedia Designer and Doug Parrish, Senior Art Director, and uploaded to the PJA SlideShare page just yesterday has been featured on the SlideShare homepage, acquiring over 1,000 views in less than 24 hours.

I hope I have this kind of luck with the next installments of Social Media Points of Practice, a series I’ll be working on with my PJA colleagues that will provide marketers and social media enthusiasts with advice and how-to guides.

For now, check out this first SlideShare on optimizing a LinkedIn profile to improve SEO for your company.

On yesterday’s episode of This Week in Social Media, Mike O’Toole was joined by Frank Cutitta, CEO, The Center for Global Branding to discuss narcissistic media – both international and domestic – and how marketers need to build narcissism into their social media strategies. It was a great discussion that we hope to revisit in the future. But for now, here’s some of Mike’s advice for marketers:

When planning a content strategy, think like a narcissist. In other words, think of your audience’s self-interest.

Narcissists love a personal connection. If you’re already engaged with them on social networks such as LinkedIn and Twitter, and you’re already commenting on their blogs, they’re much more likely to respond to a marketing message from you. Think about including some emotional content – something that’s funny or surprising instead of purely rational. People are much more likely to react to that kind of content.

For a narcissist, it’s all about “me.” Build your programs based on their information needs, not what you want to sell them. Let’s take a look at B2B technology buyers, for example. They have huge needs around category education and making the business case for technology, but they don’t particularly want to hear about your product in the early stages of their decision process. Build content that responds to them and their needs and you’re more likely to get through to them.

Not all narcissists are created equally. Take a minute to understand the media behaviors in your target markets. Think about the fact that Japanese consumers are some of the world’s most avid bloggers. Hispanic consumers are twice as likely to be creators or critics, which makes them a great crowdsourcing market; give them something to do and they’ll get involved.

Don’t isolate social media from a traditional content strategy. When looking at optimization from a cross-cultural point of view, don’t just consider the tweet or status update, but the supplemental material that goes along with it.

How would you define narcissistic media? What tactics would you use to engage this type of audience?

Recently, the musician Prince, announced something pretty shocking. He announced that, “The internet is over.”

I know, right? I didn’t know either.

Prince went on to claim that “computers and digital gadgets are no good either and they just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.”

As much as I’d like to believe the man who penned such insightful lyrics as:

“I ain’t wit that, cuz she too fat, so I give her to my buddy cuz it’s like that!”

I think the web is going to stick around for a while – especially the social web.

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On yesterday’s episode of This Week in Social Media, Mike O’Toole was joined by Adam Medros, VP, Product at TripAdvisor to discuss how social media is becoming an essential communication tool for the travel industry and changing the way we travel. Here are some highlights from the show:

Social media allows you to experience your family’s and friends’ trips in real time. The slideshow presentation after you came back from a trip is iconic, but now you can experience your friends’ trips and vacations along the way thanks to all the tools that are available to share these stories in real time. Everyone loves the feeling of experiencing a trip with someone else, and with blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and digital forums, that’s entirely possible in whole new ways.

Travel has evolved over the past decade. Ten years ago you would walk into a travel agency and they would give you a brochure based on your budget and you had to wonder if that travel agent had ever been to that place and why they were recommending a certain hotel or restaurant. But now with companies such as TripAdvisor and social networks, you have the wisdom of crowds. People you don’t know share their experiences, and that body of information paints a truer picture of what the travel experience really is.

Wisdom of crowds vs. wisdom of friends. TripAdvisor recently introduced a new feature called Trip Friends that enables users to solicit travel advice from Facebook friends along with the site’s reader reviews.

The role of travel agents in the social media era. There is certainly room for travel experts who can work through the logistics and details of a trip. But where the wisdom of crowds or the wisdom of friends really shines is in aggregating these opinions and giving you a real time evaluation of the quality of hotels, restaurants, and attractions as well as insider tips.

The travel industry can benefit from social media. All it takes is a Twitter search or a glance at a TripAdvisor page for hotel General Managers, for example, to identify and respond to problems that they wouldn’t have known existed otherwise.

The powerful impact of social media on the traveler’s purchase decision. A recent study showed that 33% of people consult social networks before making travel plans and that people who find travel information through Facebook are much more likely to book a flight or hotel than if they find it through Google. This user-generated content is one of the most influential aspects of consumers’ travel decisions.

How has social media changed the way you travel?

If I were to imagine a group of people that work in customer service within the travel industry were to get together and talk about the “glory days”, my guess would be that they were referring to a time before social media factored into their jobs.

Not too long ago, travelers that wanted to complain about an airline or hotel would be sitting on hold for a long, long time, usually listening to very bad hold music with a recorded voice every now and again reminding them that their call is important…even if it’s really not.

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