Mark Sigal's Blog - The Network Garden

Featured in PR Week Product & Tools Newsletter

As part of the Expert Q&A section of PR Week's Product & Tools Newsletter, I was interviewed recently to talk about the role of social media in PR, marketing and media, and how the media landscape is evolving.

If interested in the newsletter in general, you can sign up to receive it in your email in-box, by clicking HERE. If you want to read the full version, here is a PDF of same: Download PR-Week-Products-Tools-newsletter.pdf

Here is an excerpt:

How can communications professionals most effectively use video in their PR campaigns?

MS: There are three primary areas [where] we work closely with PR professionals, agencies, and major brands. One is to leverage rich, social media as part of a larger conversational marketing strategy to create brand awareness through uploading, rating, reviewing, commenting, sharing and an underlying contest for most popular/interesting/ viral content. For example, this is a link to a blog I wrote about a campaign called "laidback legends" that we did with Fosters Lager and their interactive agency, Chunk, which allows consumers to upload videos of the different characters that you encounter at a bar. Weekly winners get their bar tab covered for the week. The grand prize winner gets a dream trip with their bar buddies.

The second is the use of these technologies to supplant the type of community engagement that previously was dependent on a face-to-face event or was relegated to an email list.

The last is to test new social media services very rapidly without the high cost, high execution risk and long time to market. In this case, we enabled Disney, by working with their interactive agency, avenue a/razorfish, to create a new virtual theater concept that has the potential to reinvent the way companies market new DVD releases. Here is a blog post on that service which went from storyboard to first pilot in a few weeks.

UPS Campaign Launches and it's powered by vSocial

The campaign, called UPS Delivery Intercept Challenge, is a really good one because it mixes effective messaging with relevant engagement to showcase a new UPS offering called Delivery Intercept.

Basically, the campaign encourages junior high, high school and youth football leagues to upload clips of the best interceptions from their games. The idea is to recognize student athletes and the programs that they play for.  Top rated interceptions garner cash awards and prizes for the players and their programs.  Plus, UPS account holders can win prizes just by watching and rating. 

As the UPS service enables account holders to "intercept" packages before delivery (e.g., you sent the wrong shipment), the tie in to football interceptions is a nice hook.

Equally so, the campaign spotlights how my company, vSocial, works with interactive agencies.  In this case, we partnered with Creative Digital Group, UPS' agency, who was able to leverage vSocial's Campaign Solution to go from concept to launch in five weeks, including hooking into proprietary applications that CDG had created for UPS.

Here is an article on the campaign.

Reason AND Faith

Reason and faith find a welcome home when you pursue your life's passion. 

I have always known just how much luck is involved in success.  Perhaps the path is more straightforward for others, but for me it takes daily work, intense focus and a sometimes lonely leap of faith that my truth is destined to be realized. 

The space that I am within, social media, is a vibrant one.  It is all about faith.  Faith that people systematically connecting with like minds in a rich fashion is a good thing. 

Faith that the combination of favorites, related and recommended content will lead to better media and information flows. 

Faith that companies, their customers and their constituencies will take the plunge and embrace as strategic the cultivation and capturing of conversations; that they will take whole the development of never-ending narratives with and between their core base. 

I really believe in the goodness of all this but new markets don't follow familiar paths.  You just can't know what you don't already know.  There is no substitute for actually doing.

Here is where pragmatism enters the equation.  There is a saying that you can not improve what you don't measure. This is a medium that can be measured on so many levels. Brand awareness.  Attention.  Well-defined actions. Completion. Signing up for an email list.  Requesting info.  Buying something.  And on it goes. 

But the workflow-friendly means to make sense of the data in a meaningful fashion are still pretty young. 

And what constitutes the metrics of your success and that of your customers in this medium? It really depends on what your ambition is.  How earnestly you approach something that is not yet fully formed.  Early adopters gain huge market "land grab" advantages.  That said, fast followers are all too often the last man standing. 

Ultimately, you've got to pay the bills.  In the lexicon of "Built to Last," it is not the reason for being but it is certainly the oxygen.

What got me thinking about this is that I am reading Al Gore's book, "The Assault on Reason" and one of the central tenets of the book is how disconnected our society has gotten from owning our own critical reasoning facilities. 

Putting the political and cultural aspects of the book aside, I realized that I do reason very well.  It is the oxygen that I breathe naturally.  What I do less well is faith.  It sounds strange to say that, as I am very spiritual and like I said, I have taken many leaps throughout my life and career to date. 

Somewhere along the line, however, I started to carry a dispassionate self.  Wanting to believe that there is a light a the end of the tunnel. But too much of a chicken shit to take the emotional plunge and put it all out there.  Too much of a chicken and not enough of a pig.  No more.  I am all in.

The seeds of faith have been re-planted.  I must chant it daily.  Shouldn't we all own reason and embrace faith (whatever that means for you) and faith-filled pursuits ?

Lazy Wisdom: On life's pursuits

I once had a friend who prided himself on being lazy.  He did not consider it to be a negative in the least. 

The way he saw it, his laziness forced him to come up with solutions that enabled him to be successful without perennially running around like a chicken without a head.  That wasn't his vision of himself.

His laziness was his wisdom.  What is yours? Is it:

• To work hard or to work smart?
• To run full sprint at all times or to pace yourself for a marathon? 
• To pursue execution speed or to develop strategic decision-making skills? 
• To live it, breathe it 24/7 or to put it in a box and stick it in the drawer when the opportunity presents? 
• To pursue individual greatness or to become a part of the body team?

Share your thoughts, I will share mine and maybe over time this can grow into a wall of wisdom. :-)

MyRaganTV Launches

I have written previously about MyRagan.com, a business-to-business focused social network and online community powered by Me.com’s SNAPP platform.  In essence, this so-called “MySpace for the PR Industry” has enabled Chicago-based Ragan Communications, a specialized information publisher serving over 80,000 customers, to create an online, global space where “like minds” can network with one another, stay on top of their game by accessing industry-specific content libraries, and build out their brand/online presence by connecting with a dedicated audience of communications and PR professionals.  In just a few months, the community has grown to over 8,000 members.

Continuing its rollout, Ragan has just launched MyRaganTV, an enterprise-class video service that augments and extends MyRagan’s content, community and communications functions to the online video universe.  The solution, which is powered by vSocial’s Enterprise Community platform, is also noteworthy in that it showcases the first integration between the vSocial and Me.com platforms, enabling users to have one login, one rich user profile and unified search across users, conversations and content types.

MyRagan/MyRaganTV are suggestive of the ways that enterprises can embrace social media in a business-to-business and business-to-consumer context.