Disqus - Latest Comments for Barry Hurd

Re: PR Agency Pros — How Social Media Savvy Are They?

Barry Hurd — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 12:58:41 -0000

Good situational review.

I often fall on the line of PR / Social Media pro, which is really developing into a very strong niche in the PR / Comm industry.

In the northwest (especially in Seattle), most of the PR groups and many advertising agencies have exactly one person who "gets it" and they often only know the strategic side, and have little tactical support from the team understanding.

Your statement about billable hours is entirely correct, as my core team spends roughly 2/3 of our time educating ourselves. With conferences like TechCrunch 50 and Demo08, having a 25+ new companies that may influence the social media sphere becomes a significant task. In fact, just reading a site in detail (like Mashable.com) and wrapping your head around the new information is a full-time job.

Keep up the good writing.

~Barry

Re: 123 Guide to Linkedin

Barry Hurd — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 13:16:50 -0000

I always appreciate the extra exposure. One of the reasons I wrote this article was simply because I knew there were so many professionals out there looking for a simple "idea" description of how to use Linkedin.

Re: Social Media Measurement and Brand Control

Barry Hurd — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:07:03 -0000

Eric- Funny you should mention the 2.0 to 3.0 conversion already happening. I'm amazed how often most adopters get "hung up" on a catch-phrase that has little tangible difference. It will be interesting to see how many marketers hold on to ideas as they go through change.

Steve- You can definitely use profiles on social sites and rating networks to foster some brand protection. I wrote an article about "profile marketing" on that very subject. The strange part about bview is that the company profiles are SEO friendly, but the personal profiles are not? You can find hundreds of profile sites out there that rank on specific industry phrases and terms to help your brand effort out.

Re: 123 Learning - Social Media vs. Social Networking

Barry Hurd — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:08:29 -0000

Thanks Aurelius, always giving it a shot. ;)

Charles, I'll take a look at Virtudex. Hadn't seen that one before.

Re: Professional Social Media Profiles

Barry Hurd — Thu, 29 May 2008 13:32:35 -0000

Kathie- it was good chatting with you too. Please feel free to link to any of my articles here.

Sachendra- I think everyone needs a profile "makeover", including me. One of the reasons I wrote this is to help keep my own "multiple personality" disorder under control on the 500+ sites I have a profile on. Hopefully no one else has that many to deal with, but everyone should have a few gems out there that has the "best of who they are" on it.

Re: Enterprise Social Media Platforms Choices

Barry Hurd — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 02:44:02 -0000

Dave, this isn't a comprehensive list of social platforms. There are over 200 last I wrote up a list. I don't think simply putting that much information in one place doesn't add credibility to the list, it just adds confusion and clutter.

I also don't usually cover services that have fairly insane pricing models such as Clearspace @ $59/user/year. At that rate a hundred person community is simply a self-funding company by itself.

Re: Enterprise Social Media Platforms Choices

Barry Hurd — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:56:01 -0000

No Jack, not that it is too cheap- but that it is actually expensive on a larger scale. 100 x $59 = $5900.

The price point is only expensive in the idea that the value statement as provided in the available info online really isn't there for Clearspace and doesn't tie in the tool and social set that smaller companies need. For smaller companies to see the value add I really think more ground level applications that tie into the business needs of the smaller sized company.

Re: Corporate Social Media Reputation - How to be Dugg to Death

Barry Hurd — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:11:50 -0000

I didn't paint RipOffReport negatively: just stated what it does.

I'm not even sure RipOffReport has countrywide on it (I didn't mention, nor check) - I just know that RipOffReport is another site "dedicated to promoting company mistakes" and in their specific case "profiting from promoting company mistakes"

RipOffReport is merely an aggregation point of information that ranks well for search results. Dozens (hundreds or thousands) of sites also rank for such like-minded complaints, but very few have a profit model developed around it.

As for Countrywide... they have thousands of complaints all over the web. I do think it is ironic that someone who likes RipOffReport questions another site's ability to debate and analyze whether or not the site is itself - a Ripoff (according to the SEOmoz article, there are a lot of companies who have valid enough complaints to drag them into court.)

Re: Connectory- a Blogger Relations Campaign with Whitepages.com

Barry Hurd — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:33:52 -0000

Edelman seems to have a knack for being “transparent” only in certain regards. It changes the way a social group works when it is contaminated by paid elements.

Imagine that ten people were wearing “I was paid $2k to be here” on a t-shirt at the event. When compensation comes into the mix from a PR company, it means a free / friendly / social event is attempting to be manipulated by a PR firm.

Not having been there- I am sure that the conversation was good on other points, Mike and the items being talked about are good discussion items. I’m sure his presence drew in a bigger crowd.

I am very interested why Edelman decided to spend money flying out celebrity bloggers, when they could have promoted the event here and drawn a much bigger crowd (including many local celebrity bloggers) who live in the Puget Sound area. Even if you just had an intern call around and invite the top 100 industry relevant bloggers here… it would have been attended by a bunch who didn’t know it was happening.

Re: Enterprise Social Networking Platforms

Barry Hurd — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 12:33:48 -0000

I agree Alister... I have been using Buddypress tied to WP for about a year and a half now and would love to see that side project come to fruition.

However Wordpress as a singular blog platform can actually utilize many plugins to create a full social network, check out http://www.stuff.yellowswordfish.com/simplepres... for a wonderful plugin. From my perspective: the Wordpress platform's main strength is in the added functionality of thousands of plugins not included in the main platform.

Re: Designer Jeans, without Design Jeans prices

Barry Hurd — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:13:49 -0000

Yep.

Re: 2008/06/05/social-media-strategy/

Barry Hurd — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:38:19 -0000

I spent about eight years working at the GTE/Verizon/Idearc beast... and think that all the people who truly get the online space left the company for better things a long time ago.

The Idearc portion of the company (the interactive/online side) has been having severe problems since 2005-06. Stock has gone from $38 to $4. As of June 2nd, they even appointed a new CEO - Scott W. Klein.

There are already multiple "Verizon Sucks" types of sites on the net. Facebook having one or more is just another sign of dwindling times.

As a phone and directory company, Verizon/Idearc is not prepared to handle the high-speed change and evolution of media. Unfortunately- they have done the only thing they can do, jump on Facebook and hope the lifeboat keeps them afloat.

Re: 2008/12/02/digg-bans-company-that-blatantly-sells-diggs/

Barry Hurd — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 01:17:38 -0000

I have to say that this Digg lawyer needs to study his law books again. Tortious interference is just a big word that has little to do here. If you read the description in the RCW (or even Wikipedia unfortunately) then you can see that rather than have 1 point to prove, there are five points that must be proven.

In this case, Digg has questionable complaint on all five points. Ouch. That means the other side has a 5 to 1 defense ration. Ouch, ouch, ouch.

Re: Has North Korea Started the First Cyber War?

Barry Hurd — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:05:09 -0000

This is not the first cyber war in any way or shape. My father was in the national security agency his entire career working against orchestrated "cyber" attacks from different countries. Going all the way to the USSR (pre break-up), there were routine electronic attacks.

Just because there are "invisible wars" going on that don't make the news doesn't make it the first attack. If we look at simple strategic placements of the first U.S. incursion into Iraq, we had frigates performing electronic warfare on a tactical level along with entire departments of government personnel using cyber warfare after 9-11.

It is a very simple realization to many U.S. citizens how fragile the economic platforms really are. If you know what domino to tip, you can cause a pretty massive cascading failure.

Re: “Engagement” Is A Means To An End

Barry Hurd — Sat, 02 May 2009 13:46:24 -0000

I think the question / statement needs to be modified, or else the wording becomes all wrong with this portion:

"don’t write them to increase Engagement. They care about sales, brand perception, coupon redemption, survey response rates, and maybe genuine product insights."

What is engagement if it is not sales, brand perception, coupon redemption, survey response rates, and maybe genuine product insights?

I'm probably on the "strange end" of social media measurement since my team works from the audit and competitive end of different departments in larger companies. I am not a fan of "fluffy" and most of the business driving metrics that can be affected by social media occur within internal communication and competitive information collection channels (IMHO)

Re: Ultimate Social Media Resource List

Barry Hurd — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 20:57:19 -0000

Nifty list, found you by surfing around MyBlogLog for a while. Thanks for putting it all in one place. It is nice to find like-minded bloggers.

Re: Is it a blog or a web site?

Barry Hurd — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 00:12:41 -0000

I wouldn't just limit the Wordpress platform to small and mid sized businesses. It can actually handle thousands of indexed pages and be stitched together with a variety of other forum platforms, social media tools, and complex delivery systems.

When leveraging multi-user wordpress and having the ability to control and OWN the platform you are using for business projects, it only makes sense to control your own destiny.

Re: Do You Have a Social Media Non-Compete?

Barry Hurd — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 21:51:55 -0000

(thanks for the pointer to my policy collection)

Perhaps a chicken or the egg?

This is really a tricky legal issue, ranging from a whole range of terms of service, non-competes, non-disclosures, confidentiality, and everything in-between.

To draw some larger comparisons- when Robert Scoble left Microsoft he took a huge following with him. As we see more and more "social media celebrities" or simply spokespeople, we see a strange mix of technology, marketing, customer service, administrative, etc personnel who are now "speaking" on behalf of the company.

Having come from a f50 company and organizing a massive home office salesforce, this question also came into play when accounts (home phone numbers) became high value assets that were accidentally tied to the employees (some who left, taking numbers and calls with them.)

Great question.

I suggest it is something any employer looks at and identifies well before it becomes a crisis.

~Barry

Re: Target Marketing

Barry Hurd — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 14:29:20 -0000

I agree with you Chris... there are far deeper things needing to be developed with relationships and understanding.

However it is shocking to see the number of relationship based accounts in my peer-network that have been subjected to broadside after broadside because of the relationship.

Relationships really need to make sure they are being supported with an in-depth communication, as many stakeholders are having to support decisions based on numbers. That means that there are contaminated decision makers looking at budgets and results across departments and unfortunately you may bot have a relationship with the right person.

Re: BuzzGain Launches to Help You Understand Influence

Barry Hurd — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 12:09:54 -0000

I like the flat pricing system and being straight-forward about not being a free service from the get go.

I have been studying all these tools with a lot of attention the past twelve months. While I think the space of Visible Tech and Radian needs a lot more competitors and developed niche players (which I'm sure this will find one of those niches), the user interface is pretty rough right now. I hope that between beta and final that they spend a bit of effort on the navigation.

It will be interesting to let some of the trends collect and fall away. I can set aside the need for a pretty GUI if the results are good. My preliminary results look decent enough (but the twitter category seems to pull duplicates of the same tweets)

Kudos to Mukund, Brian, and the rest of the team for putting things together.

Re: Opinions Are Every Bit as Important

Barry Hurd — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:17:12 -0000

I agree with you (and many others) on sharing opinion vs factual: but in one case from the Superbowl last night I highlighted on a blog article: "Cash4Gold Superbowl $2.7 million online reputation nightmare."

In today's digital age too many marketing types are zipping right into the field of insanity and failing to realize how different media elements connect. In some cases (like Cash4Gold), a commercial that could be rated by viewer opinion is instead being rated by consumer opinion and reviews off Google.

As more "sudden death" media channels begin to cross over, it will be really interesting to see how communication pros evolve or die.

Re: A Higher Education in Social Media

Barry Hurd — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 17:58:20 -0000

As a very fluent online communicator: how do you teach an master course in social media? If I were to log all the hours I spend every day absorbing, interpreting, and applying social media, I would have to challenge the course on a 10x level and simply pay hundreds of dollars on the credit.

This is of course also ironic in the fact that you simply cannot create coursework for something that changes every day. "could be self-taught." ???? as far as I know, 99.9% of social media is self-taught, working in the trenches and applying it to specific business models.

This is somewhat also ironic, because Andy has an advertisement running here for Full Sail university and an online marketing degree (which has a social media portion as well.)

Barry Hurd's last blog post..Social Media Audits - executives need to ask “Why?”

Re: How Twitter, Facebook and others are challenging traditional groups

Barry Hurd — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 06:13:00 -0000

The model of most chambers is not broken: it is just ignoring a new component.

Having researched many (over 100) real world business communities and networking groups (such as Chambers, Letip, Alumni, Rotary, etc) - the model they have is simply lacking a now "required" component in the form of online/social media.

As Brandon pointed out, there are many great values brought by real world groups (I would argue the strongest value is actually longterm and nurtured relationships) - the general business community is unaware of the benefits.

It wouldn't take much to rally any traditional business community, but it isn't free and it does have effort required.

Unfortunately folk like Brandon believe that social media is about making relationships online, which is really isn't. It is about maximizing relationships online and visualizing assets that are already there.

Case in point: of the 1000+ Seattle Chamber members, how many of them can actually name 25 people that can help them with business? More importantly: how many of them can schedule a lunch with the same 25 people that week?

Social Media / Online communication allows busy professionals to both sort and leverage far more connections than they could in real life, which means they can maximize the real world meetings with the right people.

Barry Hurd
@123socialmedia
@buzzprofile

Re: How Twitter, Facebook and others are challenging traditional groups

Barry Hurd — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 06:13:00 -0000

Re: Direct Marketing vs Social Media Marketing

Barry Hurd — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:09:33 -0000

Having spent a lot of time in the direct marketing field, I really don't think that this is a VS. situation - rather an opportunity to educate marketers how to connect campaigns between both worlds. I think this is actually more true in the European marketplace, but they seem to be more accepting of the social media learning curve.

Re: Agency + Client = Superhero Link Building Team

Barry Hurd — Fri, 09 May 2008 23:20:34 -0000

I believe one of the biggest assets of using an external SEO consultant is that they probably DO NOT know the client's industry.

While it at first sounds odd, I have a background doing executive online recruiting. SEO experts from outside of your business are going to apply a whole set of insights and talents that do not adhere to a client's industry standards. In most marketing situations this helps the client break out of the age-old train of industry thought, and look at the problem from an out of the box mindset.

I routinely mix ideas into my recipe of success by studying models that are successful in other regions, countries, and industries.

Re: A Brand is Worth Protecting

Barry Hurd — Fri, 23 May 2008 17:43:21 -0000

I agree completely on this Lee, even as professionals in the SEO and PR space this stuff sometimes slides by us. There is a very congested area of reputation being developed online and it is very hard to control all the permutations of how brand may be infected/corrupted/abused.

Yesterday I wrote an article in preparation for a presentation I was doing in Seattle regarding the "Top 100 Companies to Work For" in Washington. Many of them on the list had online brand problems with a very quick check on Google.
“Online Reputation Control, Branding, Insurance, or blind-luck?“

One trend I am also seeing more and more of is singular professionals having brand control issues in search results thanks to companies like Namyz, Linkedin, Intelius, and many other profiling sites populating organic search with census data or purchasing names in massive PPC campaigns.

I'm also in the strange boat of having dozens of "social media" keyphrase domains for having some like-minded trademark issues... but then again I chose the keywords in the domain for specific SEO reasons and hope everyone uses the trademarked word combinations. I also own all the trademarks, and love the fact that it puts me on the front lines of the trademark/branding/seo battle front.

Re: 5 Reasons Why Business Blogs Fail

Barry Hurd — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 17:13:52 -0000

I really have to agree on the comment mechanism section. Comments and conversation make a blog an evolving entity. Comments also feed the great SEO Monster looking for fresh and up-to-date content.

"For the same reasons people hire guides on jungle, mountain or desert excursions, businesses can realize the benefits of blogging more efficiently and cost effectively when working with a capable consultant."

Having been a mountain guide myself when I was younger, I have actually said this same line many times over. There are simply some things that you cannot do for yourself. You cannot blow your own horn... and while you can learn from your own mistakes, it is usually a lot less painful to learn from someone else's.

I also agree on the resource allocation. I would have to say every single client I have dealt with (or at least 99%) greatly underestimated the amount of effort, time, skill, and talent it took to launch and cultivate a business blog. Most of my professional contacts look at me in disbelief when I tell them how many words per day I actually type for my own blog and other client sites.

If I had to add a "6th Reason" to this list, it would be that "Support for the idea from the top didn't exist"

Re: BIGLIST SEO Blogs Update 060608

Barry Hurd — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 17:17:15 -0000

Thanks for starting my Friday morning coffee with a good opening today. Always happy to connect with new readers. :)

Love reading your insights, especially in the niches you interact with that I don't have a chance to be involved with (only so much time in the day!)

~Barry

Re: Optimizing the Right Content for the Right Audience

Barry Hurd — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:14:18 -0000

I agree with you Lee.

I am constantly amazed at SEO companies and how narrow-focus they are in terms of what you just described. Sales and marketing often want tactical control over specific conversions to dollars... while PR and executive teams have the strategic thought to realize 2 to 3 levels of detachment.

About half of my own articles result in direct communication with a journalist or key decision maker that I didn't have access to before.

I think your second diagram needs to be combined with the first slightly. In diagram #2, "trusted source" and "media relationship" need to have the "searcher" pointing to them and then they need to point towards "customer". The media relationship and trusted sources are were a good portion of searchers turn to before purchasing.

Re: 5 Ways to Re-Purpose Content for Blog SEO

Barry Hurd — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:17:55 -0000

I am amazed by the number of businesses that do not re-purpose content. They go through all the work to create some amazing material, then just let it sit on the back-burner or some invisible marketing site.

One item I always tell clients to look at for re-purposing content is your e-mail inbox. Once a day (or once a week), select one of those "hefty" e-mails you wrote to a client or internal partner and strip it of the proprietary or confidential information. In an instant you have a 2-5 paragraph article with some highly useful information that you can share on you blog or newsletter.

~Barry Hurd

Re: SEO Basics: Are Directory Submissions Still Worthwhile?

Barry Hurd — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 12:14:50 -0000

While the SEO Basics are nothing new, I think there is value in them for both experienced online marketers and new entrants to the industry.

As SEO experts, we all have a different flavor of pitching information. My readers are looking for X, your readers are looking for Y. Understanding that there may be overlap and that we both use different basic communications techniques for our different audiences is a good opportunity to learn from. Perhaps one of us has found the "missing link" that allows a critical element to be understood by the people needing it.

On the flip side, I am pretty sure there are a lot of readers here who have the urge to pull out search engine and social media dictionaries to figure out some of the more complex articles. There are A LOT of very smart people out there who are just getting into this industry, and helping them understand the basics is critical for our businesses and industry.

~Barry Hurd

Re: The Marketing Hot Seat

Barry Hurd — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:05:49 -0000

It will be interesting to see what the justifications and assumptions are regarding the problem. I predict that there will be a lot of A/B statements in regards to decision process.