Strategic Reputation Management Talks to Dave Sumner Smith

Benjamin Lindley, Director of Strategic Reputation Management was lucky enough to spend some time talking to Dave Sumner Smith last week. Dave is CEO of Next Dimension Media - the world's biggest operator of LinkedIn groups. Next Dimension can connect with over one million people through its LinkedIn groups. If you consider that The Times of India, the world's most widely read English language newspaper, has a total readership of just over three million, Next Dimension's figure starts looking incredibly impressive. Benjamin asked Dave for his thoughts regarding advertising in social media. Here is Dave's response:

"Soft-selling through influential people in the world of social media has become an incredibly powerful modern marketing tool. Its capability to instantly reach many thousands of people is unparalleled and outstrips by far the efficiency of traditional advertising in print media.”

Now that is a serious statement, and businesses who are still not investing in social media marketing should pay heed. Consider the Next Dimension-operated group Linked:HR on LinkedIn. It has more than 815,000 members. Any post sent out to Linked:HR is instantly available to all its members to read, digest, and respond to AS SOON as it is posted. This is an incredibly quick and efficient way to reach a targeted audience. Traditional print media cannot hope to be as efficient an advertising medium as social media. Dave Sumner Smith agrees:

“It was not so long ago that companies and organisations sought to distribute their PR and marketing messages to media outlets and publishers. But the world has changed. Now everyone has the ability to become a publisher or media outlet using blogs and social media channels.”

And what is the benefit of using real individuals to soft-sell your products? For the consumer, it makes sure that the reviewer is unbiased and the product is of good quality. And for the manufacturer of the product, it provides a trusted advertising avenue straight to the consumer. How so? Traditional advertising comes with an inherent negative bias. Readers of magazines resent the page space taken up with adverts written in a font that hurts their eyes, advertising a product they may not even be interested in. However, followers of a self-publicist on Twitter have an inherent positive bias to the things that individual says or recommends. This is the essence of a soft-sell.

Get in touch with Strategic Reputation Management today to discuss your online marketing and to request a free audit of your business' online presence: www.srm-uk.co.uk info@srm-uk.co.uk

Read below for more from Dave Sumner Smith....

Will bloggers win the battle with traditional media?

Social media lets anyone become a publisher. Some well-connected individuals are already more influential than traditional newspapers and magazines. Businesses are starting to wake up to their media value – and the pace of change is getting faster all the time.

Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1450 marked the birth of media as we used to know it. Authors published books, while ‘pamphleteers’ were able to print leaflets and distribute messages. Over time these evolved into ‘news sheets’ that went on to become newspapers and magazines. These became very powerful, with newspaper publishers holding considerable power over politics and society.

Magazines had influence too. Consumer titles informed and entertained. Business magazines were a valuable way to take editorial and advertising messages to specific groups of business decision makers. The Readers’ Letters page even let them write back.

‘Columnists’ held power too. The wise editorial column in the newspaper or the witty comment page in the magazine influenced the views and decisions of readers. The best informed and most entertaining writers became media stars.

Then came social media. It was like the Readers Letters page taking over the magazine. The editorial and advertising messages were secondary. The audience was now the media itself.

Historic ‘pampleteers’ started on a small scale. So too did the people who owned groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. The vast majority had very limited success. Their horizons were as limited as village newsletters. But some have gone on to achieve considerable success. Check www.pagedatapro.com and you will see the biggest Facebook group has more than 274 million likes. There are hundreds with more than a million followers.

Scales are smaller on the B2B network LinkedIn, but there are hundreds of groups with more than 100,000 members and the largest professional discussion network boasts more than 800,000.

Businesses have not been blind to the power of these new media channels. Oracle, for example, runs Facebook communities such as Oracle Social. It has Twitter handles too, including Oracle and BizTekForum and LinkedIn groups such as The Business Technology Forum and Mission Critical Systems Forum.

But groups are not the only way channel for businesses to influence their supply chain and customers. Because media is becoming personalised. Companies and media companies are not the only ones with influence. Individuals are becoming powerful too.

It is no surprise to see global celebrities such as Rihanna, Eminem, Shakira, Lady Gaga and Cristiano Ronaldo with more than 50 million ‘likes’ each on Facebook. But the name Michelle Phan is perhaps less familiar. Writing and recording about skincare and cosmetics, she has nearly 1.4 million likes on Facebook and around a third of her 3.5 million YouTube subscribers watch her weekly videos. Magazine writer turned blogger Joanna Goddard attracts more than 5 million page views (plus some valuable sponsors) to ‘A Cup of Jo’ while designer, food enthusiast and blogger Joy Cho does even better with 14.5 million followers on Pinterest.

While these big numbers are impressive and put many traditional media outlets in the shade, the power of the best connected individuals are even more impressive when you dig below the surface. Special tools make it possible to identify the most influential people in any specific topic area – no matter how precisely defined.

Doug Ngo, the CNET technology editor, currently ranks as the most powerful writer about server hardware, for example, while Barb Darrow of GigaOM is the biggest influencer for cloud computing. But the rankings change by the day – and there are thousands of others whose views have an impact on people investigating a topic.

Bloggers. Writers. Influencers. The descriptive term does not matter. The important thing to recognise is their power. When potential customers are researching a topic, they can ‘drill down’ into a precisely-defined area of interest. The more precise they get, the smaller the pool of influencers, and the greater the power that each of these influencers holds.

Analytics and other technologies make it relatively easy to identify powerful influencers in any niche. Meantime, the syndication tools that previously allowed stories, case studies, press releases and videos to be distributed to newspapers and magazines are being redeveloped to target these social media influencers.

Put the two together and what have you got? A precisely targeted marketing process in which stories are supplied to and ‘published’ by key influencers in any subject area. It could represent as much of a threat to traditional publishers as online magazines and electronic publishing have done. But history suggests those that embrace change and adopt new technologies will survive and prosper.