Conversational Media Marketing

Today, I'm starting a contest called "You Judge the Pitch," where CMM blog readers get to rate the quality of PR pitches sent to me.

The first entry, Mike's Hard Lemonade viral video campaign.

So, go ahead and play along. Follow the link and You Judge the Pitch!

When it comes to the use of social media tools like blogs, social networks and even Twitter for marketing purposes, Realtors get it. Well, at least some do. Let's put it this way -- those who get it really get it!

I'm starting a series of posts containing interviews done with some of real estate's cream of the crop. The first is with my dear friend and protege, Ines Hegedus-Garcia.

Ines and I have a special relationship. I was her coach for Project Blogger, a contest sponsored by Active Rain where veteran bloggers were paired with newbies.

While we didn't win, the contest provided us ample opportunity to learn from each other about how to use blogs for marketing purposes. I have to say I learned as much from Ines as she did from me.

Here's the interview...

Last Friday, I had the opportunity to participate in an interview with Natalie Myers, a reporter with MarketingSherpa, one of the leading marketing resource information sites on the planet, to discuss the topic of real estate blogging.

Fielding Natalie's questions reignited a desire to once again get involved with the real estate industry, even if it's nothing more than blogging about RE.net here at CMM. This week I plan to share some insights from several Realtors on how the use of blogs and other forms of social media has worked to serve the purposes of SEO and lead generation.

I also want to share some pertinent insights of my own, not only to Realtors, but anyone who's thinking about using a blog for marketing. Anyway, look for a series of posts later this week.

I had the privilege of sitting in on a two-hour webinar led by , the CEO of WordFrame, where he demoed the enterprise level social networking/online community platform. And, two hours wasn't long enough!

I was amazed, not only by the extensive number of components that make up the platform (with more to come), but its ease-of-use. I've had experience with a number of both open-source and .NET social networking platforms and found none of them as simple to use as this. The logic, the workflow...everything made sense.

I'm not the only one who thinks highly of the product either. Just announced, one of the WordFrame sites, IT Counts, won the "Best New Web 2.0 Initiative" at the Web 2.0 Strategies 2008 conference held in the UK. How's that for industry credibility!

Not only is WordFrame a platform for the future, George is a genuinely nice guy who thoroughly believes in his product. You can tell he's proud to show it off.  And I was proud to be in attendance.

I've asked that question a couple of times on Twitter and received only , that from Amanda Chapel who said, "Conversational Media ran out of things to talk about." Funny.

Seriously, the site, which was a staple on my blog reading list, was there, then it was gone, replaced by a splog or some such. (That's if you use the "www." Without it, the browser returns a dead link altogether.)

Not only was the site a daily digest of the best posts by some of the best social media bloggers - the Crème de la Crème - on occasion they used my stuff!   

I assumed the domain got hijacked, but did a whois query and it look as if the domain was created in September of 2007 and wasn't up for renewal until 2012.

If you happen to know, please leave a comment. Thanks.

You may notice some changes to this blog. (You do notice them, don't you?)

First, I'm playing around with Typepad's CSS functionality and the ability it gives you to change the theme header to use a custom one. I'm no designer, but do like to mess around a bit with Photoshop. (So, please no comments on the header design. It's only one of many I'll try until I get something halfway decent.)

I also changed Typepad themes going from the 'Curves Blue' theme to 'April Showers'. The only problem with the new theme is that the right-hand columns aren't quite as wide as the previous one, so the My Blog Log widget sits right on the border. Being the OCD person that I am, that bugs me, so much in fact that I'm not scrolling down the page that far. (Out of sight, out of mind.) I'm sure I'll continue to play with themes until I find one that works.

Finally, I took Google Adsense ads off. I've always had a love/hate relationship with them anyway. Somehow, in the furtherest recesses of my mind I thought they gave the blog more credibility. Instead, they just got in the way. A Darren Rowse I'm not!

As you can probably tell, I like blue. It's calming they say.

You know the little camera known as the Flip? It's really not the best product of its kind on the market; the RCA Small Wonder is due to a number of features the Flip doesn't have (pivoting screen, removable memory, less expensive among other things).

Yet, the Flip is the one getting all the buzz among bloggers, so much so it's become the de facto camera to use and I don't see it losing ground in spite of the amenities the Small Wonder has to offer. (Gizmodo says the Flip has 13 percent marketshare among camcorders.)

Same with Twitter. Pownce has a much more elegant interface and doesn't suffer nearly the same maladies in terms of uptime as Twitter. However, barring a colossal failure, I don't see Pownce, Jaiku or the latest pretender to the throne, Plurk, taking marketshare.

I think that suggests a principle: The one that wins really wins...and big! And there's little to be done about it.

Just a quick, spur of the moment thought off the top of my head. What do you think?

The more I understand marketing, the more I see the need for an integrated approach which spans a wide range of tactics. I've commented on the use of , but that's only one way. The kind of integration I'm referring to is something like that provided by companies like Eloqua. Truly sophisticated stuff.

Today, B2B magazine posted two articles with almost the same title, which is what got me to thinking about this:

• Businesses embrace blogging
• Businesses embrace integrated marketing

If I had my druthers I'd focus only on the blogging/new media side of marketing, for that's the new fangled stuff. But, more traditional, tried-and-true approaches like email, Webinars, whitepapers and microsites, while less sexy, are necessary to get the job done.

In my case, getting the job done means generating leads for our salesforce. And it's best done when the right hand knows what the left is doing (i.e. Information from all sources is integrated via a single database.).

So, while blogs, social networking, podcasting and video are all tactics we're putting to use at Bizzuka, I'm disciplining myself to make use of the other stuff too...then blog about how successful I am at doing so. :-)

This post is not about blogging so much as it is about the craft of writing and, even more, about three people who express themselves better than just about anyone I've ever read using their blogs as the method of delivery.

They are, in no particular order, Jane Genova, Ann Handley and Michael Hyatt.

• iMedia Connection: What Conversational Marketing is NOT
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