Do you remember the first time you ’surfed’ the Internet? Do you remember what you stumbled across?

I was in my high school library doing research for a grade 11 modern history assignment on the Vietnam War. It was 1996. I wanted to know if any Vietnam vets had published photos of the conflict to the world wide web. I had to get special permission from the librarian and my history teacher to access the Internet because it was expensive. I can remember searching Yahoo! and finding a pic of some soldiers in a jungle. It took about five minutes to load about a third of the graphic and then I gave up and went back to the usual history books on the shelves.

Can you remember the last time you went to the library? Do you remember feeling instantly out of date, at least until you got near a computer?

It’s amazing how much the world has changed in 12 years since I first surfed the web. Back in 1996 my first impression of the Internet was that it was going to change the world because suddenly the people had the power and I figured it wouldn’t be long before media corporations were sidelined. At university two years later I can remember one of my left-leaning media lecturers getting so exctied about the prospect of ‘citizen journalism’ he managed to spill a full glass of water all over the nearest Noam Chomsky book.

I’ve been doing a lot of social media marketing presentations lately and one of the quotes we used to explain how the Internet has changed the way people communicate comes from my old boss, Rupert Murdoch:

“Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite. Now it’s the people who are taking control…”

A good friend of mine has a fairly powerful job at a News Corp publication and she had dinner with Rupey the other day when he was in town. The topic of discussion centred around the theory that it won’t be long before people stop wanting to read the news on dead trees. Credit to Mr Murdoch for seeing the light and buying MySpace (I don’t like MySpace, but at least he’s getting his head around the situation and making some dough), but I get the feeling no-one in traditional media circles has any clue as to just exactly what is about to hit them.

My job is to tout social media as the saviour of the world and I obviously carry some vocational bias, but when masked terrorists started shooting innocent hostages in Mumbai last week, it wasn’t Fox News, The New York Post or News.com.au that people turned to for information, it was a little site called Twitter, a photo sharing tool called Flickr and a blog run by a community of concerned individuals from around the world.

Citizen journalism came of age last week. So did social media.

I made a deal with Kirrihill Wines a week or so ago.

We didn’t sign any contracts or even shake hands. I haven’t met anyone from the company, I’ve never been to see their grapes growing, in fact I haven’t even been to the region.

The deal we’ve made isn’t written down on paper, in fact it hasn’t even been spoken about. What we have is a social media marketing pact. They’ve engaged me in an online dialogue and we’ve made an exchange.

The exchange was as follows:

• As an ‘influencer’ I get: a dozen bottles of wine
• As a wine manufacturer they get: a conversation

Zakazukha Zoo isn’t a blog about wine. I’m not an influential wine critic. While I’m under no obligation to blog about their product, if I like it, statistics show that the chance of me recommending it to my friends is greater than 50%. They are presuming I will at least like the wine and they are hoping I will love it. They have confidence in their product and as someone with some social media reach, they think my dialogue is worth investing in.

Here’s why…

The reason they chose to send me 12 bottles, as opposed to one bottle, or a gift voucher, or a nice comment on my blog, is because the following information is public knowledge about my reach as an influencer:

• I have a blog which is regularly read by at least 30 people (they don’t know the actual stats, but that’s the number of regular commenters)
• I blog mostly about social media, Google and Facebook, but I also mention wine from time to time and I have blogged specifically about Kirrihill Wine.
• I have 177 friends on Facebook
• I have 34 Twitter followers
• I have 30 connections on LinkedIn

I’m going to presume they have this information stored in a database somewhere and while I’m clearly not James Halliday, I’m also not a hermit. I’m not a hugely powerful wine influencer, but I’m someone they think would be handy to have on their side. In their database I will probably look something like this:

• Name: Matt Granfield
• Property: http://www.e-cbd.com/zakazukhazoo/
• Industry Authority Score: 1/10 (I have very little influence in the wine industry)
• Social Authority: 6/10 (My Facebook and LinkedIn connections are bang on the median, but I have a larger blog following than your average Australian)
• Industry Reach: 0 (I have no obvious wine industry connections)
• Social Reach: 271 (the total number of social media connections I have)

If I like the wine, their stats will tell them that following is likely to happen:

• I will buy 3 bottles each year for the next five years
• Based on my social authority, I will influence 5% of my social reach into buying one bottle each
• Based on my industry authority, I will influence 5% of my industry reach into buying one bottle each

So, presuming the average price of a bottle of wine is $15, and they’ve already sent me 12 of them, you can use the following equation to figure out the value (ROI) of the social media pact I’ve made with Kirrihill:

ROI = 3 x 5 x $15 + 271 x 5 ÷ 100 x $15  + 0 x 5 ÷ 100 x $15 - $15 x 12

ROI = $248.25

So, Kirrihill Wines will make about $248.25 from me this year. That’s not too bad really. Obviously the figures I’ve used are examples, but they’re probably not far off the mark. I’ll report back in 12 months time and let you know if I’m right!

P.S. It’s good to see Kirrihill Wines have taken my advice and put a tear-off tag on the back of their bottles so you can remember what wine you drank. I’m claiming full credit for that one, even if I find out the labels were printed before I mentioned it.

P.P.S I love the packaging, and it’s nice to see they are launching a range of wines called ‘companions’ with a social media marketing campaign. Bloody marvellous work and full credit to Network PR.

As a marketing professional and a former newspaper reporter, I’m well aware of how important it is for journalists (and the media organisations that employ them) to fully disclose their commercial interests. Any journalist worth their salt knows that it’s completely unethical to accept undisclosed payments in return for favourable coverage of a sponsor. Serious western media (perhaps with the exception of John Laws and Alan Jones) abhors the practice but in Russia it’s become so common for journalists to accept bribes in return for coverage, they’ve actually invented a word for it: ‘Zakazukha’.

While mainstream media outlets have shareholders and reputations to protect, out here in the blogosphere there’s no code of ethics to abide by and nothing to stop me, or anyone else ranting and raving about whatever we like. If I want to start accepting payments for favourable coverage I don’t have to give a toss about my reputation. The danger is that the Internet becomes a Zakazukha zoo.

This notion became all too apparent last night when Julie from Network PR emailed to confirm that, as an influencer with a blog, Facebook page and Twitter account that all mentioned vino every so often, I would be receiving, via post, a dozen bottles from her client, Kirrihill Wines: no obligation, I just had to enjoy the wine and if I felt like blogging about it or posting pictures of me and my friends drinking it to their Flickr Photostream, then that would be fine. I jokingly changed my Facebook status to “Matt is looking forward to sampling some marvelllous Kirrihill Wine from Australia’s Clare Valley”, with the intention of disclosing my zakazukhing in this blog this morning, but within minutes friends had started commenting on my status and asking about the wine. I have blogged often and loudly about the power of social media marketing, but this was the first time I’d seen it in action like this from a different side of the fence. Kirrihill will be wrapped I’m sure.

One of my friends is a lawyer (and her mother happens to be writing her PhD thesis on ethics in ‘new journalism’) and we started a debate about what, if any, duty of disclosure I had to tell my Facebook friends that I was in fact on the payroll of Kirrihill Wine. The answer seemed to be that I had no legal obligation whatsoever. As this sort of social media marketing becomes more common and more and more ‘influencers’, like me, are brought into campaigns, I think we’re also all going to find it harder to recognise and abide by the moral obligation.

Gyms are notorious for their hard-sell, ‘refer a friend’ tactics and the idea of rewarding people in exchange for a recommendation is nothing new, but now that everyone is an influencer in the eyes of a marketing department somewhere, and everyone has the tools to broadcast their opinion to the world, are we going to have to start asking our friends if their opinion has been paid for? Furthermore, if everyone’s on the payroll, will the power of social media marketing eventually be eroded?

Let people stand on a soapbox for long enough and they’ll run out of useful things to say and start whinging instead. It’s human nature, and while it goes without saying that companies should be monitoring what is said about them on the Internet, in reality, the ‘loudest’ customers aren’t neccessarily the ones you should heed.

Peter Moore is a well-respected travel writer (and, I should disclose, a client of ours). He has published more than half a dozen great books, he has a column in the Guardian and keen travellers love reading what he has to say. If an airline company came to me and asked for a list of influentual bloggers they should be trying to reach, he would be near the top of the list. If Peter recommends a destination, an airline, a hotel, or an experience, people listen. By the same token, if he has something negative to say, the implications are far-reaching. Peter rarely whinges about anything, which is why his blog is so good. If he does, it’s well thought out, nicely presented and without the faintest whiff of ‘I’m important so you’d better listen to me’.

The moral to the story?

Companies: Listen to the Peter Moore’s of this world, don’t worry too much about the rest
Bloggers: Be more like Peter Moore

Here’s a list of 25 top marketing and social media blogs. It comes from a guy called Mack who makes lists of blogs every now and then based on how many people subscribe to them. It’s by no means definitive, but there are some gems in here. Have a browse if you’re bored or looking for inspiration.

1. Duct Tape Marketing
2. Church of the Customer
3. CopyBlogger
4. Search Engine Guide
5. Chris Brogan
6. Influential Marketing
7. Logic + Emotion
8. Converstations
9. Drew’s Marketing Minute
10. The Viral Garden
11. Experience Curve
12. Conversation Agent
13. Techipedia
14. The Social Media Marketing Blog
15. Emergence Marketing
16. The Social Customer Manifesto
17. Techno Marketer
18. Social Media Explorer
19. Movie Marketing Madness
20. Daily Fix
21. Customers Rock!
22. Shotgun Marketing
23. Biz Solutions Plus
24. Resonance Partnership Blog
25. MediaPhyter

If you’re interested in marketing or economics (or blogging) and you haven’t read Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, do it as soon as you can. It’s a brilliant book which explains that although a few market leaders account for the majority of sales in pretty much any industry, in any sales graph there is a ‘long tail’ of less popular items which don’t sell anywhere near as many as the most popular, but when you add them all up together, it still makes up for a lot of sales. For example, in the music business the number one album of the week might sell 100,000 copies, whilst ‘Pipe Organ Classics’ and 100,000 other obscure albums might only sell 1 copy each. If you have a store in a shopping mall (or even a warehouse near an airport) you don’t have enough space to stock 100,000 albums, but if your retail space is a website, you can afford to do that because there are no restrictions on what you can put on the shelves.

A typical ‘long tail’ sales graph might look something like this:

I could have grabbed that graphic from any number of websites which discuss long-tail theory, but I didn’t need to, because it’s actually the graph of popularity of articles in this blog. The most-popular one is about how mobile phone networks powered by Australian telecommunications provider Optus went down for a day. It racked-up a huge amound of hits on that particular day and has been largely ignored since (much like a cheesy hit song: think Crazy Frog Ringtone, if you even remember what that is). The least-popular article is a little thought-piece I wrote last week about imagining if every product you bought came with a photo of the factory worker who made it. I really like that piece, but nobody else seemed to (think art-school poetry, if you’ve ever read any).

But the major hits and the massive misses aren’t the key to success or failure in any business (or any blog). Scoring one big hit is down to a lot of luck and even in pop music, there’s no longer any tried and true recipe to make it happen. The most popular articles (and products) over time are ones your core audience connects with, blogs about and tells their friends about. Here at Zakazukha Zoo, the most popular articles over time are a post about how to promote your company in Wikipedia, and a couple of different case-studies with practical examples of real-life applications of online marketing strategy.

Whilst it’s fun to write little thought pieces, and it’s tempting to jump on the band wagon and yap about the most popular topic of the day, neither of those is the best strategy for building long-term relationships with readers. If you’re trying to decide what to blog about, follow these rules:

1. Have a list somewhere of things you want to blog about, don’t rely on just coming up with something insightful every day. Unless you’re The Buddha, you won’t.
2. Ask your audience what they want to read about.
3. Keep an eye on your most popular articles and follow suit.
4. Don’t just follow the bandwagon, if you want respect (and readers), be a leader.
5. Whinging can be fun and it’s good to get things off your chest, but before you hit the publish button, ask yourself whether your motivation is really to make the blog world a better place.
6. If you treat your blog like a soapbox, your readers will expect suds.
7. Before you write anything, ask yourself ‘would I still write this even if I knew no-one was listening?’
8. If you wouldn’t be proud of it in ten years time, don’t write it.
9. If you don’t want your grandchildren to read it, don’t write it.
10. If you don’t want your mother to read it, don’t write it.
11. Check you’re speling and grammar if you want people to take you seriously.
12. Don’t blog when you’re angry.
13. Every blog post is a job interview.
14. Think about what people who disagree with your point of view will say, because they will.
15. Anything you say will end up somewhere on that long tail graph, but aim for the left.
16. You don’t have to blog.

Two digital music stations and the viral power of blogs.

David Gillespie told me how stupid and crap Stripe is. It is. It’s crap and it won’t work and it’s stupid. I’m telling you now.

Iain Tait told me how f**king good Blip.fm is. It is. It’s brilliant and I’m listening to it now and I’m going to keep listening to it. And now I’m telling you. Go and listen. It’s f**king brilliant.

This is how blogs work. This is what they do. People whispering across the world.

I wrote yesterday about how smart corporations should be engaging bloggers in dialogue. Not just idly watching with Google alerts, but actively reaching out and befriending those who are talking about their products and services. They know that bloggers are as powerful, if not more so, than the radio shock jocks of yesteryear. Adding mildy relevant comments only when it suits just isn’t good enough, if you want people to blog about your product you need to have started cultivating relationships well before your latest campaign rolls out. It’s public relations 101 (well, public relations 2.0 perhaps).

No matter how small, or seemingly unpopular you think a blog is, I can guarantee you that more than one person is reading it. If that blogger mentions your product favourably to one person who is actively listening it’s worth more than 100 random poster impressions from people waiting for the bus. In fact, if you’re a disgruntled customer, one little blog post could be enough to make you switch banks.

Case in point: yesterday one of the other partners here at e-CBD read my blog post about NAB’s new electronic statement facility. She was helping her father-in-law with his tax and his bank didn’t provide more than three months worth of statements online. He’d lost a bunch of the paper versions and didn’t keep his receipts, so it was causing her all sorts of grief. She didn’t even know that banks were providing this new service for free and while it was a bit too much hassle to try and make her father in-law switch banks (he’s 80-years-old and he would rather change his left nostril than go through the paperwork of changing banks), if it had been her, she would have seriously considered becoming a NAB customer on the spot. And that’s just one person. If anyone else had been hit with some hefty random account-keeping fee by their bank, or had to wait too long in line at their local branch, or been given the run-around by a ‘customer service’ phone system, or been denied a credit card and then read that blog post, it could well have been enough to tip them over the edge too.

Don’t underestimate the power of one little blog post. Every time a blogger hits publish it creates another piece of the long tail that will more than likely live forever.

NAB (the National Australia Bank) made a profit of more than $4 billion last year, so they’ve been spending some of their cash experimenting with blogs. They know that blogs are important social media outlets and that the powerful ones have as much (if not more) influence and audience reach as traditional media. They are the modern equivalent of the newspaper opinion column (except they’re widely read). They know that if you can get people to blog about your product it’s a really cheap and effective form of promotion. NAB has been trying to figure out how to use blogs as a marketing tool.

Bludgeoning their way through the back door and spamming unsuspecting football forums with promotional messages backfired on them fantastically and earned the bank the wrath of the very people they were trying to get on side. They were hardly apologetic, but at least they admitted in an interview that they’d learned some lessons. Social networking blogger Julian Cole showed them that simply turning up, uninvited, on someone’s doorstep is not an effective way of getting your message across.

So, if espionage is out, how then, exactly, DO you get people to blog about your product? Actually, you might be surprised to learn that it’s relatively simple. In fact, I’m about to do it now.

I’m a NAB customer. I was preparing my tax return last night the way I usually do, that is, by going through piles of paper and manually entering data into a spreadsheet. It’s time-consuming and annoying. I had all my bank and credit card statements in front of me (the ones I had remembered to keep at least) and Excel fired up on the screen. It was taking ages. I remembered that last year I had tried to export data from NAB’s online banking system but it would only let me spit out the last couple of months worth of transactions, which wasn’t particularly handy. I went back in to have a poke around and saw a link that said ‘View Statements’. It turns out that there’s now an option to sign up for electronic statements, which means I can see the last seven years worth of transactions online and they won’t send me paper letters anymore. This was going to save me hours and hours of work, not to mention a couple of trees: brilliant! But why hadn’t they told me about this? They knew it was tax time and that people would find that feature useful, couldn’t they have popped a little message up in their system with a little tip saying something along the lines of “Access your statements online at the click of a button’. Click here to find out how.”

Well, *cough*, oops, it turns out that’s exactly what they’d been doing. I just hadn’t been paying attention. Right there, before my eyes, above my account balance in the online banking system was an inoffensive, appropriately-placed, subtle and concise message saying exactly that.

Why hadn’t I seen it?

Because it looked like an ad.

Research shows that people ignore online banner ads.

Whilst that’s still relevant and interesting, it’s a whole other point to the one I’m making. What I’m getting at is that I was so overjoyed with NAB’s efforts to help me view my statements and generally make my life easier, my first reaction was ‘I’m going to blog about that’. If NAB spent more time making my life easier, and found more effective ways of telling me about it, I’d be happy to broadcast their brilliance here at Zakazukha Zoo.

If they were really smart, they’d be paying attention to people who are blogging about them and they’d dive right in and start a direct dialogue. Just like The Body Shop and Vodafone UK are doing (read the comments sections of those blogs). Smart corporations have PR people who know the importance of cultivating relationships with journalists, if they want to get the blogosphere on side, smart corporations should spend more time on the right side of the coal face. We know you’re listening NAB. Come and join us…

Olive Riley loved the Internet and had hundreds of friends all over the world, but she didn’t have a Facebook account. She didn’t have a MySpace either. In fact, it was impossible for Olive Riley to have a Facebook account because she was born in 1899 and Facebook’s sign-up process only accepts people born after the year 1900, MySpace won’t let anyone over 100 join. Olive did, however, have a blog, and a YouTube account. Her tragic death over the weekend will probably lower the average age of social media users, but not by as much as you think.

A recent survey by Deloitte & Touche found that 43% of Internet users over 61 spent time sharing photographs with people. 36% watched and read personal content created by others. The average blogger is a white, 37-year-old male. 38% of Facebook users are over 35. More than 67% of MySpace users are 26 or over.

Don’t let anyone tell you social media is a youth phenomenon. Everyone is paying attention.