Jim Durbin: Social Media Consultant In St Louis

I left a comfortable corporate job to strike out on my own and found a new media company dedicated to improving corporate relationships to online communities.

Today I tap my social network to hire social media experts, train internal resources, execute campaigns, and serve as a sounding board to entrepreneurs seeking to understand how the online world can improve their business.

My company, Durbin Media, is a pioneer in the social media space. We've been at this since January 2006, working with small and microbusinesses, start-ups, and a few carefully chosen national companies. We primarily work on retainer for consulting and recruiting, though project work is possible if you're clear on what you're trying to achieve. In addition, Jim uses socialmediaheadhunter.com and jobsinsocialmedia.com to identify staff for internal work.

Durbin Media Projects

Just some things we're working on.

Sendouts has launched their blog on applicant tracking systems. I'm actually using their software to power my client data base for SocialMediaHeadhunter.com

TalentDrive is continuing to work on their strategy of one screen, all job boards technology. For recruiters, this is a easy way to manage your resume databases.

Renaissance Plastic Surgery is writing a blog about St Louis and their cosmetic surgery practice. If you're looking for a plastic surgeon , or considering getting some cosmetic surgery done, this is a good site to read up on their work.

Franki is still going strong at LifeinAVenti cup, a style and fashion blog, and I'm still writing on StlRecruiting. New writers have stepped in at Kansas City and Charlotte Recruiting, but Seattle is about to be used for hiring recruiters in Seattle.

And of course, our regular St Louis social media branding and marketing blog can now be found at brandstorming.com

Vote For The Social Media Mom As A Ninja

Kristen Munson, the Social Media Mom, has been nominated as a Social Media Ninja over at Collective Thoughts. If you're a fan of her work using Stumble Upon, Twitter, Digg, or blogging, head on over and cast your vote in the comments.

You can also check out Kristen's posts on how she uses social media to build traffic, make friends, and foster community.

While you're at it, check out Chris Brogan's, Social Media for your Career.

Changes In Google Algorithm Suggest The Need For Corporate Blogging

Google has gone and done it again. Two very important changes in the way that Google ranks webpages have rocked the SEO world, and bloggers, especially corporate bloggers, stand to benefit.

First, SEO Roundtable says Google is no longer counting unlimited subdomains as separate sites. Subdomains in the future will now be treated as folders, a major blow to websites that create extra sites like news.company.com and careers.company.com.

From the WebmasterWorld thread:News flash from Las Vegas PubCon. Matt Cutts informed us that Google will very soon begin treating subdomains and subdirectories the same in this fashion: there will be only 2 total urls from a domain in any set of search results, so no more getting 3, 4 or however many spots via subdomains. We didn't get any more information than just that basic heads-up.

In the future, the company will only have its main domain, and one subdomain ranking high in the Google SERP's.

That's a pretty big deal if you built your search engine optimization strategy on a single brand. In the future, the need to create several different brands will become a major part of a companies SEO strategy, and the easiest way to create multiple domains is powering them with blog software. For small companies, the opportunity to create an outsized presence on line is a big win. For large companies, the need to build high quality blogs with their list of domain names just became a necessity. Expect to see a rise in auction prices as well.

The second piece of news is that Google is moving away from high-ranking sites, and increasing the value of recent material.

Google Operating System points out something interesting in Google’s algorithm recently: a preference in favoring recent content. The example provided would seem to favor the conclusion; TCP/IP’s anniversary today has resulted in Google preferencing recent posts, including from Digg, over informative articles related to the search term such as Wikipedia who would have normally had the top or near to the top position.

No more living off your SEOwork from three years ago. If you're not writing regularly, you're not going to rank on the first page of Google. This is a positive event for the consumer, which means less four year old webpages, but it's great news for bloggers, whose steady stream of information is going to rank even higher in the search engines.

SEO for 2008 just changed, and blogs are going to be the answer for many companies. The old saw that SEO is a marathon, not a sprint, just got proven true. If you're one of those corporate marketing, technology, or communication executives that wonder you're going to adjust, the time to speak to a social media company is now. I guess now is the time to remind you that we've corporate blog consultants?

If you're in St Louis, and you're looking for a social media consultant, you can't afford not to call.

Selling Social Media To Corporations

I attended the GIMA holiday party last night, and was once again surprised at the bigger companies in St Louis that are interactive marketing experts. The funniest moment was when a young lady registered surprise to find out Durbin Media is a social media marketing company, and headquartered in St Louis. I think a lot of people still think you have to be on the coast to be relevant, and that still bothers me. To be fair, most of our social media clients in the first year, 2006, were from the coasts, but that has changed in 2007.

That's not the point of the post, though, it's the idea of selling the enterprise on social media strategies.

Step 1: Scale Your Prices.
Just because a blog can be made cheap, doesn't mean that the writing, and the commenting, and the "blogging" can be done cheaply. Money has to be spent on marketing and manpower, and if it's a big company looking for big results, the price tag starts at the $10,000 mark. Many blog consultants, who are used to working with small companies, vastly underprice themselves, and deliver little value ultimately they are just being paid to write (and copywriters are better at it then bloggers).

Companies don't respond to a budget of a few thousand, because it costs more to listen to you, give you approval, and pay your invoices, then it does to actually pay your fee.

Step 2: Understand Your Value
Companies aren't stupid. If you charge a small company $1000 and you charge a large company $10,000 without changing your services, you're walking a dangerous line, and probably won't sell the larger firm.

Figure out what a 10,, 20, 30, and $50,000 project looks like, and really dig deep to understand what value you can bring. A company will pay attention to a $50,000 price tag, but they aren't going to accept intangible benefits as metrics. With $50,000, can you deliver more traffic, more eyeballs, increase sales, cut costs, or provide public relations that are of greater worth than your competitors? Will your social media project yield results, or are you simply looking to get paid to "try." Public Relations firms are struggling with this, as they charge $10,000 a month to get you in the papers, but get paid whether or not you're successful. SEO Firms can charge $10,000 a month to get you on the first page of Google, but if they don't convert traffic to sales, they won't stick around.

The biggest mistake I see from competitors is selling services rival to PR firms and SEO firms, without showing a measurable return on the money spent. If you charge only $5,000 a month, but can't show results, the company won't hire you.


Step 3: Train your manpower well, and do it before you start a project:

Most companies want internal experience, but often will turn to you to do what they don't have the experience to do. It's one thing to offer consulting, and another entirely to actually execute the program. You cannot overestimate your ability to perform. From using Digg and StumbleUpon, to comment and link campaigns, to searching data and getting involved in communities, social media takes time.

And there's that pesky reality that you can't fake it. If you're not actively involved in the campaign, leaving a few comments isn't going to work. And that means you need help. It means you'll have train people ahead of time. And their back-ups.

Step 4: Sell to People Who want to be Sold to:
The final step in selling to corporation is finding decision makers who want social media, and don't have to be convinced. A lot of time is wasted explaining what you're doing, but what executives want is results, not understanding. They're paying you to get the job done, not to fill their mind with ideas of using Jajah to improve customer service (I have a great program built around that if you're curious).

Sell the benefits, and be prepared to execute the idea. In corporate America, the goal is to be a fast second, which is why selling your ideas to people who know nothing about blogs or Facebook is a lost cause.

Step 5: Make Sure You Have Examples of What You Do:
Lots of marketing companies say they offer blog services, or a social media program. Very few of them even have their own blogs, or Facebook or MySpace pages. They're responding to a demand from clients, but they can't do it for themselves.

Your biggest advantage as a blogger is that you are one. Work that advantage. Show your success, and compare it to your rivals. Everyone knows great salespeople, but few people know great bloggers. If you are one, it should be obvious, and it will help you close.

And on that note - I found this blogger on Digg - great information on improving your blog's reach and influence.

Blogs Or Forums? Which For Your Company?

Prospective clients who come to Durbin Media Group for Blog Consulting often ask if there's a difference between a blog and a forum. In the most extreme cases, I have to spend half an hour explaining the difference, and convincing the client that spending $10,-20,000 developing a forum isn't a good online strategy (and by the way, why not just add a free wiki instead of spending money developing something proprietary?). When you ask questions to get to their desire to have a forum, it usually boils down to the hope that readers will talk to each other, allowing the client to make money without having to put in any effort themselves.

This is why most forums don't work well online. You get what you pay for, and in this case, you paid for the technology, not the content. Most times, you end up with a nicely designed forum with nothing of interest to read.

Part of the problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the internet community works. Allow me to make a broad and inaccurate statement.

There are two kinds of people who don't get social media. Those who think social media is worthless, and those who think social media is magic.

Those who think the internet is worthless tend to focus on the amount of wasted time spent online. They can't see ways to make money from people "blogging," or spending time on Second Life, or recording podcasts. For them, if it's not improving productivity, it's worthless. I try to spend as little time as possible talking to clients like these. If they don't see the value, or want to see value, it's not worth it to try to convince them.

Those who think social media is magic assume that social media is this easily set-up and easily manipulated traffic engine that allows you to put in small amounts of time and money, and 'POOF',

...you make a lot of profit and retire.

Some of you are chuckling, because you know what I'm talking about. There is no shortage of people who think the can start a blog, have other people write on it, and then charge money to advertisers once you get thousands of people reading. It's a different problem than the forum issue started above, but from corporate marketers to entrepreneurs, the lure of easy money has parted many internet speculators from their capital. Blogs are just a new way to do that.

When the blog fails to produce, some go back to saying the internet is worthless. Others start looking for that next easy score, convinced it is just around the corner.

Here's the truth. Everything in life is hard work. The world of social media and blogs is not a fairy kingdom of pixels and profit, but a complicated mix of communities, columnists, spam and technologists. The blogosphere is a mirror of the real world, which means that it functions in much the same manner as the real world. There are winners and losers. Some people hit it big with little effort, and some slave away for years for no reward. From the outside, that looks accurate, but from inside, it's easy to see why some blogs are successful and some are not.

In general, bloggers who blog find a level of success equal to the time and effort they put into it, or they stop. Those who sample, or who try to extract value without putting in effort, ultimately fail (and then blame the medium).

So what should you do, as a company? Should you start a blog or a forum? What is the difference, and what should you look for from each? Luckily, Douglas Karr has answered that for us.

Please Slow Down With The Quality Content

My feed reader (I use NetNewsWire, the Newsgator product for the Mac) has been blowing up with great posts on the nature of social networking, and my usual strategy of marking a story unread until I can post about it won't work.

So here's a round-up of stories I'd like to write, but have already been written, by authors who blog better than I do.

1) Jeremiah says there is no Field of Dreams for entrepreneurs who want to build a social networking community.

“I want to build a community”
Many an entrepreneur are seeking to create vertical communities, monetize on ad sense, or some other hook. Also, folks from large corporations are hoping to launch these communities, let customers self-support, and attempt to centralize the community in a decentralized world. For 95%, it’s not going to work.

The reason it won't work is most of those entrepreneurs aren't willing to do the work needed to make a community successful. Communities, and blogs, are not websites you can pay someone else to build while you reap the benefits. No matter what you read in Ad Age.

2) Rohit points out what people hate about social networking sites.

Unfortunately, everything he lists are the things sites use to make money and lock in users. Good comments on this post as well.

3) Techdirt says that your social networking site is scaring away advertisers.

The problem is advertisers don't want their ads showing up next to embarrassing user-generated content, but it is the content which creates the large audiences the advertisers want to get to.

This is a serious concern for many businesses, which don't want to be seen as supporting or associated with certain groups or types of content. But it's a potentially bigger problem for Facebook and other social-networking and user-generated content sites. These sites' major challenge is figuring out how to monetize the massive amounts of traffic they get, and their poor click-through rates are already one factor that holds down the rates they can charge. Couple those low rates with a dearth of quality advertisers scared off by the sites' content, and it sounds like a vicious cycle for social-networking and UGC sites.

4) Buzz Bin says astroturfing isn't always astroturfing, and explains how astroturfing came about. This is a great link if you know what astroturfing is, but as Buzz Bin points out, most people don't know, and don't care.

Yet, while we discuss these ethical issues in serious fashion (because how our profession conducts itself professionally in the blogosphere matters to us) no one on the outside world really seems to care. On a recent trip to Canada, I asked twenty people about their opinion on these matters… No one — not one — had heard a thing about any of these three blogodramas.

Personally, I think that our definitions of astroturfing have gone too far. It's like campaign finance laws. Don't regulate it - just make sure know one is hiding anything. That's the point of transparency, to own your words. My major problem with fake blogs and fake comments is that they're insulting, and the lazy marketer's way of billing large amounts for very little work.

It's hard to join a community, but effective. It's easy to leave lame comments and create fake blogs, but they are so easily sniffed out, what's the point?

But....most major companies I've spoken to in the last year have had some agency give them astroturf pitches. The problem, is these agencies don't understand social media, and are casting around for something to keep the client happy.

5) And Scoble, who has been on a Facebook promotional rant last week (or so it seemed), says that we don't need need new killer social networking apps, and that Facebook has already won. I don't think that's true, but will let time do my arguing for me.

List of Social Media Interview Questions

Over on the StlRecruiting.com blog, I've been carrying on a short e-mail conversation with Betsy Beard, the inhouse recruiter for Fleishman Hillard, a major PR firm looking for a new media/social networks account executive in St Louis.

So I saw the job description, but decided to create my own list of interview questions for social media consultants. This is a bit more involved than just blogging, but if want a job like this, or are hiring for a job like this, you could do a lot worse then to add these to your job description:

List of New Media Interview Questions

The Basic Job Description:

1. In Plain English, tell me what I’m actually going to be doing for Fleishman, or if I get to create the position. How much flexibility is there on what needs to be done?
2. What is my manager like. Do they understand social media, or am I going to be managing my manager for the first few months?
3. Has anyone else done this position for Fleishman Hillard before?
4. I’m going to rattle off a few names here – do they sound familiar? Twitter, Flikr, Typepad, Wink, Photobucket, Techcrunch, ValleyWag, Technorati. Does anyone at Fleishman know what these are and use them?
5. What is the salary range? Do I get bonuses for bringing new projects or billing extra hours?
6. How much travel is involved?
7. Do my duties as a social media expert consist of doing the job, or training clients to do so?

The Tough Questions:

1. What kind of internet access does Fleishman have? Are there any blocked feeds or websites?
2. What is the work from home policy?
3. Will I be asked to create or post on fake blogs or leave fake comments?
4. Do you have a corporate blogging policy in place?
5. What about my personal activities? What happens to current blogs and current properties I have a stake in?
6. Will I be signing a non-compete or a document that says Fleishman will own anything I create while I work there?
7. Do you have other social media and Web 2.0 types there that I can learn from?

The important details:

1. Do I get a cool laptop? Mac or PC?
2. What is the dress code?
3. Which IM client do we use?
4. How far away is the nearest Starbuck’s? Is there a local coffee shop I will be able to visit?
5. What about parking?
6. Any cool perks? Awards – trips to other cities?

Update: Jeremiah Owyang has some additional questions and comments on community managers. Cameron Olthius has more.

I've sent this list to Betsy asking her for her responses. I hope she will be able to answer them all, and if she does, well, one of you better come through. At the very least, link this post if you like the questions.

Fleishman isn't the only one looking - IBM is looking for a social media guru who wants to travel 100%. If either of these positions suits you, shoot me an e-mail and I'll pass your name along, if you have the chops. No resumes - Let your url's do the talking.

Online Monitoring Cyborg Style

The magical formula for online monitoring is determining who has "influence." If you want to advertise on a blog, do you go for traffic, or do you look for someone who will "influence" the way other bloggers and the audience to take action? Traffic is easy to measure - you decide on uniques, pageviews, length of visit, and demographics, and buy an ad.

Influence is harder to measure. You have to really do the homework, trust your instincts, and filter the link-baiters from the loyal, trusting audience builders.

So far, no one has done it. The problem is one of complexity. Considering the size of the web, and the structure of websites, and the lack of proper data, it's near impossible to write an algorithm that can shuffle through the internet and define the variables that equal influence.

Many companies sell this a pitch, but an overload of data and a lack of comprehension of what that data means leads the smart companies to mix the human ability of pattern recognition with the hard number crunching of computers.

Nathan Gilliatt, who is composing a guide to the online monitoring softwares around the world, writes about the different levels of human-computer interaction in the field, and, he even provides a nifty illustration. A commenter on his post asks the following instructive question.

What is the real signal-to-noise ratio out there in these consumer exchanges, and how is that being addressed? Where does the automation start and stop with regard to this source identification process? And then of course, the larger question, what is the current state of the balance between Automation and Accuracy in digitally-directed research?

The answer, is its being addressed poorly. There are three stages to gathering information effectively, and I'll label them as initial data, detailing, and analysis.

The human factor in each of these stages is necessary to prevent bad data from corrupting the entire process, and so far, it's my belief that a human brain is better at determining what is influential and what is garbage.

• Influential: Good writing, positive conversation flows, high-interaction communities
• Garbage: Splogs, blatantly commercial sites, untargeted sites, dangerous sites (NSFW, language, or charged political sites).

Computer Assisted Human Filtering is still the best bet for accuracy, but it's difficult to price correctly. Online Monitoring can be as expensive as a $20,000 setup fee and $10,000 a month for reports. If the technology exist to knock this report down to a few hours of work, do you charge just for the computer time, or do you separate the costs like the larger vendors do, charging extra for analysis of the data?

The real question is a simple one. Who do I need to engage to promote, defend and enhance my brand? And what are you going to charge me to do the work for me?

Do you base the fee on the hours it would take a human to compile the information, o