I have been following the social media blog Mashable for quite some time. I receive their updates via RSS feed on my igoogle and am constantly re-tweeting their tweets. I depend on them for the most up-to-date social media news and in-depth posts on best practices. And I am certainly not the only one. The blog has 265,000 subscribers and 950,000 twitter followers.

One day, while reading a particularly interesting article, I couldn’t help but think how cool it would be to write for them.  I mean, this blog is IT for social media and since BG is using social media for our clients on a daily basis, it seemed like a legitimate proposition. So I did a little digging.

As it turns out, if you want to write for Mashable, all you need to do is apply. (I love that, by the way. So very social of them). The application asks you:

• To tell them a little about yourself
• Your areas of expertise
• What sites you consider yourself a power user on
• Links to at least three relevant posts that demonstrate your writing ability
• Topics you would like to write about

So I filled it out. (Why not?) Once it was submitted, I received an email saying that they get a lot of submissions and aren’t able to respond to all, but that they appreciated my application. Nice touch.

Later that evening I received an email from the managing editor, Sharon,  informing me that I was under consideration to be a guest writer. I won’t lie, I was very excited.  The first step was for me to send over five proposed topics that I wanted to write about. So after careful consideration, I sent her the following:

• How to use niche video sites
• Trend watch: Facebook’s exponential growth for the 40+ age group
• Top 10 Twitter apps and sites
• The best Facebook fan pages and why
• Best applications for Facebook fan pages

Sharon asked for some more information on a few, and after much suspense on my part, she chose The Best Facebook Fan Pages to be my first guest post on Mashable. (Thanks Sharon!)

At this point, I figured the hard part was over. Not so much. I wanted to write about the Best Facebook Fan pages – not based on number of fans, but on how they were being used. Was there two-way conversations? Were their updates smart? Did they incorporate video and images? Any cool apps? Did the tone match Facebook’s? It was time to research. I looked at hundreds of pages (and was surprised by how many were so so bad) and at long last selected 5, each of which I though excelled in a different aspect.

I spent a good week writing and re-writing the post, working with the very capable features editor, Josh Catone, to refine it. It was a process, and by the end, I had new respect for the reporters we work with daily. But it was all worth it when Killer Facebook Fan Pages was published on June 16th.

The post received 250 tweets, 40 comments and 30 inbound links. When you type “Facebook Fan Pages” into Google, it is the 4th link to pop up. Since I linked to Bailey Gardiner and our Don’t Drink the Koolaid Blog in my bio, within the first 24 hours, there were 250 visitors that clicked through, and the BG Blog received 7 new inbound links. I also got a LOT of new followers on Twitter, more than 300. And my followers, as a whole, are much more interactive now. Which I love. After all, that’s what Twitter’s all about.

So what were my key takeaways from my Mashable experience?
1. Mashable is cool. They have some very dedicated readers and awesome SEO.
2. If you want something, go for it. You may just get it.

And most importantly…
3. I better get started on my next post. I’ll be making a list of smaller brands using Facebook well. Know any?

Two weeks ago I attended Interactive Day San Diego put on by the San Diego Ad Club.  One presentation I found particularly useful was given by Heather Blank from Responsys about email marketing best practices.  Although I’ve been involved in several email programs and fellow digital team member Becca has written several posts about the latest and greatest, I still found myself jotting down notes as quickly as I could write.  Take a look at this list of tips- there’s something new for everyone:

1. Get in front of the customer at the right time.  This is the #1 seducable moment.  Ex: for Petco, it’s sending an email coupon to a customer on their pet’s birthday.

2. Track list growth.  One year loses 30% if you don’t replenish.  Unsubscribes cause 1-3% loss per month, complaint rates cause 1% loss per month.

3. Your email list growth goal should be ~14% annually.  About 3.5% of your unique monthly site visitors should be signing up.  A few ways to help achieve this:

• Place a ‘Quick Sign Up’ button on EVERY page of your website.  It should only require the customer to click once.  And, tell them why to sign up.  What’s the benefit?
• Be sure to have a link to the Privacy Policy.  Studies show that people don’t read it, but are more apt to sign up if one exists.
• Deploy a qualified sweepstakes.  Run a sweepstakes that awards a prize that is in line with your brand.  Ex: for Jer’s Chocolates, sign up to win a free box of chocolate every month for a year.  This is cheap to fulfill and drives sign-ups!
• View social media as an acquisition resource.  Customers are already expressing interest by interacting with your brand, so make it easy for them to sign up for correspondence.  It’s as simple as placing a newsletter sign-up link on your facebook fan page.

4. When working on your creative, design for grandma.  Simple.  Text.  In this order, your priorities are for them to: read it, open it, click on it. Then, put the creative stuff on your website.

5. You have 5-8 seconds to get someone to act.  They need to know: who’s it from? What’s in it for me? How do I take action?  ALL IN TEXT.

6. Links at the bottom of the email (rescue links) should be links to what’s clicked on most on your website.

7. Instead of opt-out, give a customer the option to opt-down.  Wouldn’t you rather they receive fewer emails from you than none at all?

8. If you have images in your email, point them toward the call to action.  It increases the uptake.

9. Strengthen your welcome message.  This is the triggered email that goes out immediately upon someone signing up.  Make sure it accurately represents you and gets them excited to receive more.  Consider adding an offer.  Ex: Philosophy, a body products brand, takes 3 weeks to condition their new customer with a series of welcome emails before placing them in the general email pool.  The added benefit here is that Philosophy can learn about their new customer- what did they click on, what did they delete?

10. Don’t ignore the text version of your email.  More and more, people are viewing from mobile devices so make sure you get to the point and label all your links.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Today was a very strange day. Learning that two of my childhood icons had died in the same day was oddly disturbing. Guess it truly marks the passage of time. But what made it even odder, was that in both instances I learned about the deaths on Twitter.

Sad as it is, we knew that Farrah Fawcett was sick and so I think the surprise was less. Michael Jackson however, was a shocker. And shockers spread through Twitter like wildfire.

The first tweet posts about Michael Jackson being rushed to the hospital appeared about 2 pm on the West Coast. TMZ.com broke the news. Like any educated person, I started looking at my “trusted sources” for verification – NY Times, CNN, LA Times, anyone? Nothing. Then TMZ and Perez Hilton posted that MJ was dead as well. Peter Shankman aka @skydiver posted:

Stopwatch is on – if TMZ/Perez are right, then All three cable nets missed by over 30 mins and counting…

Michael Jackson via last.fm

And that’s exactly what happened. The cable nets, the wires, and the city newspapers were all scooped by TMZ, Perez Hilton and the Twitter community. The news spread quickly, and despite warnings by a conservative few to wait for confirmation, most on Twitter believed that Jackson was dead before those who waited for more traditional media to catch up. By early evening all things MJ were top trending on Twitter having knocked Fawcett, Iran and all other news pretty much off the page. Twitter search scripts were showing 15% of all posts mentioned Jackson, while swine flu and the Iran election at their peak never quite reached 5%.

Of course, one takeaway from those stats is that the folks on Twitter care a lot more about celebrity news than hard news. Perhaps. Or maybe shocking news makes us all try to find a way to connect with others, to help make sense of something that is hard to understand or accept.

The other part of this is that for many of us, Twitter has become a primary news source. Without the freedom of access to and on Twitter, we might never have known the truth of the Iranian elections. Citizen journalism can work. And it can be an awesome thing.

A Twitter friend posted that she thinks TMZ broke the news first because they’re willing to pay more for news. Had a ring of truth about it to me. The access to and spread of news feels more and more like the Wild West.

I don’t have answers, but I can tell you that today raised more questions for me about where journalism and “news” are headed. It feels a bit like Pandora’s Box doesn’t it? That lid is never going back on.

Observe the Bailey Gardiner office at 9:00 AM sharp on any given day, and you might see some of the employees scream in defeat, cheer with victory, or scurry to their neighbor’s computer screen to see the latest deeply discounted goods being offered on Gilt.com.

If you are not familiar, Gilt is an invite-only online shopping site that offers luxury brands at up to 70% off.  Gilt has changed the game for online shopping sites. Every day at 9 AM PST sharp, a new sale starts. Once the sale starts, shoppers have 36 hours to shop, however usually everything sells out within mere minutes.  Gilt has become a phenomenon, gaining one million members within 18 months of launching.  What makes Gilt so successful is that it feeds some of our most simple human desires:

• We love a good deal.  We may be in a recession, but most of us still want nice stuff.  We just don’t want to pay full price for it.  There is something deeply satisfying about getting a Chloe dress for 50% off, satisfying enough for me to often overlook the fact that I still spent hundreds of dollars I wasn’t planning on spending.

• We want to win.  Shopping on Gilt is like gambling.  Usually you have seconds to decide whether you like something enough to buy it, add it to your shopping cart, and check out before everything on the site is sold out. When I do succeed, and get that confirmation that my purchase has been processed, I get that winner’s euphoria like I won the jackpot.
•  We don’t want to miss an opportunity.  There is a sense of urgency with Gilt.  If you don’t buy right now, you will miss your opportunity.  This fear of missing out has caused me to make far too many impulse purchases than I would like to admit.
• We want to feel special and included.  Since Gilt is invite only, members feel like they are part of an exclusive club.  Gilt also often puts brands I could normally not afford within grasp.

For many, shopping is already a euphoria-inducing activity, and Gilt has figured out how to heighten that experience by satisfying our basic desires as consumers.  Sadly, I admit I am hooked.  Are you a Gilt member yet? What do you love (or hate) about the site?

Yesterday, in our weekly staff meeting, Bailey Gardiner’s COO, Indra Gardiner, introduced us to something Firefox, and only Firefox, is currently doing. They have added an add-ons feature (which can be found in the Tools section). There are over 5,000 of them that allow you to customize Firefox to meet your needs. And the best part is, it’s free!

Image via Wikipedia

I am sure by now you are wondering, ok so what exactly can I do with these Firefox add-ons?
Well, the possibilities are endless.

One of the add-ons that was introduced to us by Indra is called Ad Blocker. We all are quite familiar with all the ads we are served on website after website. Now, we have the control on what sites, if any, that we want to see banner ads on. Pretty cool, but also pretty scary for advertisers, like our marketing agency in San Diego, because now it makes it just that much more difficult to reach people online.

Another cool add-on is Zemanta.

Image via CrunchBase

Zemanta allows you to “add enrichment to your blog posts and emails through tags, links, photos and related articles, all in real time.” This really helps you save time while blogging. As I am writing this post, Zemanta is automatically searching for images that are relevant to what I am writing about. Then I can just drag them right into my post. This saves me the hassle of having to search for images or think about what image I should put in my post.

I did a little test with this add-on to see how well it really worked with providing you actual images that were specific to what you were writing about, and for the most part, it works really well. Even when I typed in “Oregon Ducks” to this post, Zemanta brought up the Oregon “O” (see bottom row in the middle on the image above). My only complaints with this add-on are:

1. It can be a little touchy when trying to place the image into the post

2. All the images have to say where they are provided from

It has only been a day since I’ve been introduced to this feature, so I still have lots of exploring to do on all the other add-ons they offer. I am curious to see if there is an add-on where I can select all my favorite sports teams and then only see their scores, highlights, news releases, etc… Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t, I’ll just have to search for it.

I’m just returning home from speaking at the Pacific Coast Builders Conference (PCBC) in San Francisco, where I led a presentation on social media marketing for the homebuilding community.  And although I was there to teach along with Jason Baer and Lora Heramb, I was also there to learn.  And I learned a great deal about where homebuilder marketing is headed.

Happily, I can report that the homebuilding community is wholeheartedly embracing the new world order.  Everyone I talked with understands that as the economy sparks back to life (and it is) and homes start selling again (and they are) that it will not be business as usual in homebuilder marketing.  I keep saying this economic downturn has been a game changer, and it every sense of the phrase, it has.

Homebuilders will not return en masse to the newspapers where they dropped thousands — if not millions — of dollars in advertising over the past many years.  Print advertising will not go away, but it will become much more targeted, more selective.  Broadcast media will experience the same new order – when the dollars do come back from builders, those now-savvy marketing directors will be asking about TV and radio station’s websites, email databases and other forms of online marketing tools.  Behavioral online advertising, pay-per-click, search engine optimization, and e-marketing are the stuff of strategic marketing discussion now.

This is no surprise.  All marketing executives now know the web is the place to be.  But what’s interesting is watching the homebuilding community eagerly gathering information for the upswing that is to come.  When the tide changes and the marketing dollars start to flow again, those “mature” dogs are learning some great new tricks.  They will be armed and ready.

SOOOOO cool.  Let the games begin.

It has been quite awhile since I’ve really gotten into any new television shows. Sure I have my shows that I’ve watched for years, we all do.

Most recently though, I have started to notice that the shows I once really enjoyed are starting to lose my interest quickly. Shows need to learn that when they are on top, they should bow out while all their fans still actually like it. Take Sex and the City for example. They ended their series at the perfect time and still have fans, like myself, who watch the reruns all the time and stand in line for three hours to go to opening night of the movie.

When shows start to see a decrease in ratings, that should be the first sign their run might be coming to an end. Every show has to come to an end some point. When this happens, I don’t get why shows start to do things completely random and so fake in hopes that it will draw more viewers, when in fact, it actually turns more viewers away.

One show in particular that I have seen do this is Jon & Kate Plus 8 (yes, I’ll admit that I watch that show, but I won’t be watching it for much longer). It used to be a show about a family with twin and sextuplets and all the fun family things they did together. This season, after Jon & Kate’s marriage started to crumble and they’ve become a massive target for the paparazzi, producers have done everything to keep the show interesting, even if it’s completely scripted and unrealistic. In three of the more recent episodes they have had guest appearances by the baker at Charm Cakes, Emeril “Bam” Lagasse and American Chopper. Really, three biker guys from American Chopper and a celebrity chef coming all the way out to a small town in Pennsylvania? Come on! It just seems like the producers are trying to get viewers by having celebrities doing things for the parents (not the kids) instead of sticking with what originally worked for them–a show about a mom and dad and their eight kids.

I think it’s funny that these three episodes in particular have been complete plugs for not only Jon & Kate Plus 8 but for other shows (one on TLC as well) that have seen declining numbers in their viewers as well.

I’ll be willing to bet this will be their last and final season (since ratings have dropped by millions every week).

Desperation and doing anything to get more viewers is not the answer, strategic planning and discussions on how to approach the dwindling numbers first is the only way to determine what the best way to move forward is.

Bailey Gardiner is looking for a summer public relations intern to support the Del Mar Racetrack account – one of San Diego’s longest running entertainment establishments (not to mention one of the most fun!).

We’re looking for:

• A college junior or senior working on a communications, journalism or English major. Recent college grads are good too.
• Ability to work at least 30-40 hours/week
• Outstanding communications skills (verbal and written)
• Thrive in a fast-paced, energetic, highly creative setting
• Previous PR/media experience is highly preferred
• An enthusiasm for social media – beyond your facebook account – we’re looking for someone who gets it from a marketing perspective and really, really loves it.
• Someone who can blow our creative minds with enthusiasm, ambition and previous PR skills.
• Start ASAP

Here’s what you’ll get hands-on experience doing:

• Direct media pitching with a focus on local and regional outlets
• Writing media releases and alerts
• Blog and social media correspondence
• Brainstorming
• Research
• Creating and updating media lists
• General account support

And working for us isn’t so bad either. While we can’t compensate you with pay, the experience is invaluable. We’ll take the time to teach, support, provide you with responsibility and have some fun.

If you fit the bill, please send your resume, cover letter and references to lizzie@baileygardiner.com or call (619) 295-8232.

As part of a recent exercise on social media for a homebuilder client, I searched for examples of other homebuilders using Twitter as a marketing tool.  Yep, you guessed it — not so much.  There are a few examples of builders doing it really well (check out @lennar for example), and yet there is so much more that can be done.

Twitter is a tool that builders can embrace because of it’s immediacy, intimacy and personality.  Relationships can be built with potential homebuyers through twitter, or at the very least those relationships can be strengthened through continued communication via builder tweets.  For example, a residential community could tweet about price changes, incentives and — yes, they are actually happening — new phase releases.  Sales associates could direct message buyers with updates on the construction of their new home, send links to photos of the development, and let them know about upcoming milestones and special events.  A builder could be tweeting about his or her blog (ahem, Steve Doyle) and letting all its existing and future homeowners about news and trends.  Twitter really is a very powerful tool for homebuilders, just waiting to be tapped.

Builder Magazine recently published a list of builders using twitter.  Let’s hope that since it was released in March, this list has grown substantially along with the growth of twitter.

And another recent article in Brand Republic News ranked that top 100 brands most mentioned on twitter.  And no surprise – not a single homebuilder brand made the list.  But give us a little time — I’ll bet by next year builders and real estate developers are all over twitter like bees on honey.  It’s just a natural combination

Follow me @jonjonbailey for more…

Earlier this week, Lucretia Pruitt, aka GeekMommy, posted a rather strong piece about the frustration Mommy Bloggers are having with the PR/marketing community. It was an enlightening read for me. And one that gives our PR team great concern.

We have been working with the blogging community (and our local Mommy bloggers) for a while now. We’ve learned a lot from them and have enjoyed the experience. One of the Moms we work with got in touch to give us the heads up about the GeekMommy post. She told her contact here, Lizzie, that she believes there is quite a bit of misunderstanding among Mommy Bloggers about the difference between PR and advertising. After reading the post, and the subsequent nearly 100 comments, I would agree.

One of the unexpected outcomes of the embrace of blogs is that it has contributed to the fracturing of the established US newspaper industry. While it probably was not the intention of bloggers, they have grabbed a piece of people’s valuable time, time that might have gone to reading the local newspaper.

It is our job in public relations to find those writers, editors and outlets that make sense for our client’s news. And while the media may grumble when you say it out loud, the fact is that they couldn’t really do their jobs without us. There are too few of them to get all the info, all the time. It’s a strange symbiotic relationship that probably deserves its own post. We don’t buy or pay for story placement; we provide the media with information and access.

Now, we have bloggers who are speaking to our audiences and sometimes our client’s news, product or service mesh well with their blog. With due diligence and an understanding of a blogger’s non-paid role we try to find fits that work. And it has worked so well for us, and for them, that we have many bloggers who regularly come to our team looking for news. Why? Because when a PR person gets it right, and passes along a great tip and bloggers write a great post, it gets read, shared and linked to, increasing the blog’s SEO and maybe even subscribers.

The primary complaint of the GeekMommy’s Weblife post and reader’s comments is that writing about products and services or running a contest or promo takes time and they should be paid for that. This presents an interesting conundrum. Did that blog start out with the intention of becoming a news outlet? Maybe, maybe not.  If they did, did they look at the model of how media outlets work? Ads pay for the production, staff and profit. PR simply provides content. The comments on GeekMommy make me think that the two are being confused.

Of course, as with traditional media relations and PR agencies, there are agencies that suck at what they do. They give the rest of us a black eye on a daily basis. They don’t get to know the outlet they are pitching, they don’t respect the writer/editor’s time, and they are pushy. Obnoxiously so. Meanwhile, the rest of us plug on, trying to be professional and helpful.

I think it would be interesting to have a broader conversation about public relations and what we really do, and bloggers and what they really want. Seems like some bloggers are ready to take on the challenge of figuring out what they need to do to move to a model where they have advertising revenue and interact with PR pros.

We would like to engage in a broader conversation about this – perhaps at Blogher?  Would you sit around a table with us and find a solution?  Would you engage with marketers to learn more about creating a business model for your blog? I also think that some education might be helpful. If bloggers want to get paid, they need to set up advertising models to get what they need. If they just want to run their blog and don’t want to be pitched perhaps they should state so on their blog. Otherwise, PR people are going to see them as another outlet that might be interested in their client’s news, product or service.