The attendees – mainly from all over West Virginia (yay for the great support from the Panhandles!), but also from Ohio and Kentucky – were able to ask questions pertaining to their own social media efforts both planned and in effect.  A huge thank you to the State Journal for putting on the event and everyone that came out.

Seibert then headed off to Columbus, OH the next day to present How to Protect Your Online Reputation at the Digital Media in a Social World conference. If you’re updating your Where’s Waldo maps for Seibert at home, that would mark four separate universities in the last month:

• West Virginia University
• The Ohio State University
• West Liberty University
• University of Charleston

This social media business forum features two speakers from our last series: Jeff James of Mythology Marketing and Justin Seibert of Direct Online Marketing. Jeff and Justin will sit on two panel discussions with a couple other great homegrown speakers, Emily Bennington of Dixon Hughes and Bob Coffield of Flaherty, Sensabaugh & Bonasso. Other speakers include Karen Saxe of netSpray, Julie Hewett of JulNet, and Kevin Nelson of Huddleston Bolen.

We’ll add another post when we receive registration information.  In the meantime, if you have any questions, keep a lookout for more information from the State Journal, either online or in print.  Hope you can join us!

Mallabo.net offers a look at issues pertaining to social commerce from someone who’s been deeply involved in it from his time at eBay, LinkedIn, and GSI Commerce.  So to read more about what Jose’s been up to – especially if you’re interested in using social media to increase your site’s ecommerce sales, take a look!

Developing relationships in marketing in an eHarmony stylee – the 29 degrees of ultimate connections. Is eHarmony that one with all those smug self-satisfied types wittering inane anecdotes about what they did after they met. Whoops….we’re onto something else.

Prioritizing Customers – in no particular order:

revenue – potential
revenue – historic
repeat revenue
profitability
lifetime value
relationship
influence on others
noise.

Let’s concentrate on the influencers. By the way, I might as well plug The New Influencers by Paul Gillin as some follow up reading.

What kind of weird term is pyschographic targeting? Is it one step removed from pyschopathic targeting? Sounds like facebook and Beacon.

Google Books preview of The Tipping Point

Mavens – connectors – salesmen.

Influencing influencers isn’t quite the same as trying to suck up to the cool kids at school. However, it’s key to find those people who personify and embody the exact values and demographic of your target market. If you can excite the people who may be purchasing your products or services then you can or should be able to excite the influencers.

Is it the same as John McCain and his his family bbqs for journalists?

It certainly isn’t the same as the John McCain campaign trying to spam / troll / influence other political blogs by sending out his online minions to comment on related posts and receive points for posting what they’ve posted back on his site.

I’m not having a go at Mr. McCain, just at a really dumb tactic.

Lunch time, my good fellows.

Just a little background info – Justin just so happens to be my boss and I just happen to be his “New Media Specialist”.

So you can rate this liveblog post on a scale of 1 to 10 on the blowing-smoke-up-backside-o-meter…

Anyway here’s the basic gist of the general gist:

• Organizational blogging

• Social networking, wikis, twitter, and other forms of social media

• Search engines, online press releases, and ways to fuse online and traditional forms of marketing

Blogs: Somebody not interested in reading blogs – man it’s like a personal slap in the face…..I shall get to this at some point.

It shouldn’t be a case of reading blogs so much as coming across information written on blogs. I mean, does anybody claim they don’t read forums as an entire mass? Pfft.

How many people write blogs…..stat attack. (will find)

Still amazes me about the low information threshold on RSS feeds and such.

Basic blog rules and ethics. Probably best to throw out a few top five lists on certain points Frightening or perhaps not or maybe I’m in my own little blogging bobble bubble.

SOCIAL MEDIA:

We’re at least fairly cogent on facebook mysapce and social networks.

PRESS RELEASES:
Brad wins for most press releases with 4-8 a day.

Press releases as SEO.

A big happy new media and old media conflab. All media is crap apart from the decent crap. Point out the uses of social media with regards to blended/universal search.

Not as much on this as there should be and that’s my fault.

So, seeming you’ve got your notes, go ahead and ask any questions you’ve got loitering in your frontal lobes.

I’m supposed to know about this stuff!

1. What has been the biggest change you’ve seen in how universities market and promote their sports programs since you started out at UConn?

The internet is biggest change. When I started at UConn in ‘93 the internet/email was in the very early stages (if we even had it all – I can’t remember ever using it at UConn in the beginning). Now, it is generally the first medium we think of when deciding how to best promote one of our games/events.

We still promote our events through traditional vehicles, but the internet is the one we think of first. It allows the most flexibility and the best opportunity to hit the most people during the course of a day.

2. How are you moving the WVU athletic department forward in terms of new methods of advertising, marketing, public relations, and measuring their effectiveness?

We are constantly looking at new ideas for our web site. Recently, we have started adding more video features to the site. We receive instant feedback with our web site via the traffic. We can see right away if something we did on there was well received. That is tougher with traditional television, radio or print advertising.

Most of measurement techniques are basic at this point. If it’s web based we look at the page views, unique users and or “click throughs” if it’s a pop up ad or something similar.

We are fortunate that we get most of our feedback about events by looking in the seats at a game. We can tell pretty quickly at a game if our promotion worked or not. I can expand more on this topic at the conference.

3. You mentioned in the last session that you’re moving ticket sales to an all electronic-based system in the near future and that you’ve experienced some resistance to that, particularly with older generations. If you could sit down with one such person, how would you explain why you’re moving these sales to online processing and why it’s a benefit to both them and you?

Great question. I still think it will take us a few years to become fully automated in this area. I think the benefits are the overall ease for the customer. No more waiting on the mail to arrive with the ticket application in there. No more writing out two different checks and sending them back. Click a couple of buttons, put your cc info in and you’re done. No filling out forms, doing the math on how much you owe. It’s all right there.

4. Which Web 2.0 / social media / new marketing applications are most exciting to you?

Facebook and MySpace I think are extremely interesting applications. It’s amazing to me how many students/people use one or the other. As I mentioned at the Charleston event, I think people have to be careful with this as well. While it can be a great marketing tool (both individually and for groups), people that post to and speak to our athletes about their image and how much one picture on their Facebook page could change the perception of them that is out there.

That said, they can be valuable promotional tools. We had interns post events on both sites this year in an effort to attract people to a soccer game, wrestling meet, etc…

5. You’ve now had the opportunity to speak at one city (Charleston) and listen to a couple of the sessions. Do you think this is the type of event marketers in West Virginia can use to their benefit?

I think these events are great. I think it is invaluable for marketing people to get out of “their world” and share ideas as often as possible. So often I think busy executives get hung up in their day to day duties and don’t have the time to think on a bigger scale. I know I do. It’s amazing how much more creative I feel after sitting in a room with a bunch of other marketing people and throwing around ideas. I think these conferences are outstanding and will only get better as they get more and more participants!

6. What do you think are the benefits of holding conferences such as Next Generation Marketing in West Virginia in cities like Morgantown and Charleston?

Both have so much to offer. Charleston is great because of the multiple ad agencies, gov’t groups and just the fact it is the capital. Morgantown because of the obvious draw of the University. But, Morgantown gives you more than just the Univ. It has been one of the few areas in West Virginia that continues to grow and thrive. Construction continues at an unbelievable pace. More and more students are coming to the Univ each year only leads to more and more growth in the business community.

Morgantown and Charleston are both vitally important to the growth of our state. I think bringing bright, energetic, talented people together (as these conferences are doing) will benefit not only the individuals, but also the cities in this state and the state as a whole!

Governor Manchin Emails State RE: Daughter’s WVU MBA Scandal

Alright,

Now I’m convinced the higher ups at WVU and in West Virginia State government are reading my blog and attending our Next Generation Marketing conferences.

I’m not going to go through the whole spiel again, but be aware that this article is written in a non-biased fashion meant to take a deeper look at the Heather Bresch pr crisis from an academic standpoint. Careful readers should be able to learn several ways to combat their own bad press.

For organizations with robust search engine reputation management and online pr crisis response needs, please contact us to discuss your options and develop a plan. We accept checks and all major credit cards and operators are standing by. Plus, call within the next 15 minutes and receive a free genuine ginsu link building plan.

You must understand two things:

1. You cannot bury your head in the sand. The conversation will happen. The question is: do you want to join it?

2. It is a million times easier to respond to pr crises with a proper plan in place before the dynamite goes boom.

Paid Search in Online Reputation Management

In my first blog post on the WVU MBA degree scandal, I discussed the issue from an online reputation management standpoint. As an aside, I pointed out that WVU – through its Google AdWords content match search advertising program – was advertising its MBA degree on the very same online articles that announced the record keeping discrepancies and questioned how it would impact the value of MBA degrees at West Virginia University.

A couple days later the ad was gone.

Email Marketing to Reach Advocates

Also in that blog post – and in my “Engagement & Dialogue” sessions in Huntington and Charleston, I mentioned that the Governor has often used email marketing very effective and what a powerful tool it can be. With RichRod, I received an email within 4 hours of his announcement about leaving for Michigan. Yet, I received not one email on the issue of Heather Bresch’s MBA degree.

Until a few minutes ago. I’ve copied and pasted the full text at the bottom for you to read. You’d think with all this help, we’d have a new contract with the state by now.

So come join us in Morgantown this Thurday and find out what free advice I’ll be giving out next. Oh, and if you represent the State of West Virginia, Mylan Corporation, or West Virginia University, please feel free to give me a call. I’ll set aside 3 ginsu link building sets in the meantime.

Note bene: Wrong – at least on the WVU front. They’re still advertising there. I may call some of my WVU contacts.

Click on the picture to open up a larger version you can actually read.

Copy of Governor Manchin’s Email

——– Original Message ——–

May 19, 2008

STATEMENT FROM THE GOVERNOR
REGARDING CONTINUING DISCUSSION
OF WVU E-MBA DEGREE REPORT

Contact: Lara Ramsburg, 304-558-2000

CHARLESTON, W.Va. – Gov. Joe Manchin today released the following statement about the continuing discussions regarding the report from the independent panel examining the E-MBA program and his daughter’s degree at West Virginia University.

“As a father, I must admit that I was hoping that the controversy surrounding my daughter’s E-MBA coursework at WVU would eventually resolve itself and subside. However, as a Governor, I recognize that is not realistic.

“In both roles, it has been extremely difficult for me to watch this controversy unfold. As governor, my natural instinct in a crisis is to do my very best to dive in and help bring all sides together to find a resolution. However, because of my family’s involvement in this particular situation, I feel that this is one time in which I am not in a position to follow that instinct, because it is likely that one side or the other would be inclined to question my ability to remain objective.

“WVU holds a special place in the hearts of both Gayle and I not only because we are proud graduates of WVU, but because it is also the place where we met, fell in love and started our family. From our perspective, this controversy all started because our daughter sincerely believed that she had her degree, because of a meeting that everyone admits took place with the program’s director in 1998, and when she contacted the university last year, she was simply asking them to find the records that she believed would confirm that.

“Had they told her that after looking through their records they didn’t have the proper documentation on file, we honestly believe that while she may not have liked that answer, she would have accepted it and moved on with her life.

“At no time would she have asked anyone to either ‘guess’ as to her records or to fabricate grades on those records. As a result, Gayle and I are both angry, in particular, at the fabrication of grades that took place, because it unfairly damages our daughter’s reputation as much as it does the University’s. It was absolutely wrong and, in my mind, completely unacceptable.

“Although I remain confident in President Garrison’s ability to follow the recommendations of the independent panel’s report, I am also fully aware of the concerns that have been raised by the faculty, staff, students and alumni of WVU and recognize that they must be addressed in some meaningful manner. WVU needs to find a way to begin to heal the wounds that have been created over these last few weeks, and it will take all parties working together to achieve that goal.

“To that end, I have seen it stated many times by individuals and the press that because I appointed certain members of the Board of Governors, they must be following my orders as to what to think and say regarding President Garrison and the independent panel’s report. This simply is not true.

“The Board of Governors is made up of extremely bright and accomplished people who were not given this responsibility lightly and who I trust to do the job assigned to them to the best of their abilities. While many members are appointed by a governor, they do not serve at the will and pleasure of a governor. They may act as they wish during their four-year terms as long as it is within legal and ethical reason.

“Therefore, the WVU Board of Governors members are not under my control and remain free, as they always have been, to make their own individual and collective decisions on this or any other situation. As I said previously, I am not in a position to make a recommendation to them in this instance even if I wanted to because, regardless of what it might be, it would not be viewed as being made objectively – and I absolutely understand and accept that.

“As a result, I consider this matter one that should be decided by the members of the Board of Governors based upon their own insights and beliefs and information, and as governor, I will continue to support whatever direction they believe is in the best interests of WVU both now and in the future.”

# # #

We all know that people live, socialize and communicate within networks … and today across social networks such as blogs, forums, e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, etc. People talk about their kids, hobbies, their vacation destinations and their favorite sports teams; naturally people also share their experiences as consumers.

Studies prove this. The Coca-Cola Company conducted a study in the late 1960’s and found that a highly satisfied customer is likely to tell four to five people, on average, about a positive experience. On the other hand, a bad experience will also be communicated—to an even greater extent. Coke learned that a dissatisfied customer is likely to spread the bad news to nine or 10 people.

Such information provides substantial motivation to the business owner to seek out and repair customer complaints. In fact, such situations create an opportunity for a company to inspire a loyal, engaged customer. (Remember, you cannot convert a customer to a loyal advocate. You have to inspire them to become advocates.)

When a company successfully recovers from a service snafu (i.e., makes it right for the customer and successfully addresses the situation), it can be a very powerful experience. The Coca-Cola study found that in service recovery situations the consumer is likely to share the news of the resolved problem with nine to 15 people. Today with the prevalence of social networking tools the numbers are likely multiplied. Still, the ratios are likely to remain intact.

As Justin Seibert explained: “You only have two opportunities to make a good first impression. One occurs upon initial contact; the other occurs after you’ve screwed up (and fixed things).”

In these emails, you will receive ways to get in touch with the speakers in case you had any specific questions you didn’t want to address in a public setting or thought of afterwards. In the meantime, please feel free to learn more about us and join our LinkedIn networks:

• Skip Lineberg on LinkedIn
• Jeff James on LinkedIn
• Justin Seibert on LinkedIn

We look forward to continuing our discussions with you and again thank you for all your attention, contributions, support, and feedback.

In getting ready for the Next Generation Marketing series across West Virginia this spring, I began thinking about my presentation on Engagement and Dialogue. In it, I will go over the premise and some recommendations for online reputation management. The last time I spoke about that publicly was at the Online Marketing: Innovations that Work marketing conference in Southpointe, PA when I delivered They Said What? Protect Your Reputation with Search Engine Marketing.

I really want to do a post on the subject – if only there were some really big public scandal involving reputations being changed on the internet that involved West Virginia and the Pittsburgh, PA area. Hmmm. Let’s see. [shuffles through piles of old newspapers by desk - who needs the internet?]

Oh that’s right – how about Heather Bresch? Do a search on her name, particularly a news search, and see what you come up with. For those readers either too lazy to do the search or too enthralled with my hypnotic musings (read: put you in a catatonic state), it comes down to the following:

Ms. Bresch was promoted to Chief Operating Officer of Mylan, Incorporated in October 2007. In doing some fact checking for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a reporter named Patricia Sabatini called West Virginia University to verify that Ms. Bresch had received her Masters of Business Administration there. WVU could not find any record of it.

The pieces of information that have the makings of a good scandal, but may or may not actually mean anything include: Ms. Bresch is the daughter of Governor Joe Manchin; she has previous dealings with WVU President Mike Garrison; and Mylan’s head is WVU’s largest benefactor.

Fast forward two seasons.

Last week WVU rescinded her degree, which was recognized / awarded last fall after the initial story broke. Two top WVU administrators, College of Business and Economics Dean R. Stephen Sears and Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Gerald E. Lang resigned today. Additional fallout in one form or another is likely.

Ground Rules

Now before I move any further, let me clue you in on some ground rules I laid out for myself:

1. I am going to write this without any bias or come as close as I possibly can. West Virginia is a very close-knit state, or as Mary Hunt-Lieving recently told a group of young professionals at the Generation West Virginia launch party, in West Virginia, it’s not six degrees of separation, it’s two. Therefore I’m going to stay out of this as best as possible even though I know folks involved with this issue and these institutions. And I fully expect at least one of my friends to call me names for doing so.

It also means, no super cool photoshopped pictures that cost me an hour’s worth of time and add little to the post. I was thinking based on the title of a “Extreme Home Makeover” collage with some of the principal players and Ty Pennington. Either that or an X Games theme with lots of Mountain Dew and maybe the idiot bullies from Harold and Kumar go to White Castle (please don’t ask why I saw that).

Having said that, feel free to comment however you think appropriate.

2. No linking to any reports or stories for this article. You read what’s out there – there’s no shortage of material – and come to your own conclusion.

3. I am going to write about this strictly from an online reputation management perspective.

Okay, with those rules set, let’s look at what happened.

The Ostrich Approach

When the story originally, broke, it led to several internal meetings, but – for the most part – no comment for the press or any real proactive response.

In the old days, that was fine. Think about it – it’s pretty much just a West Virginia story. About the only paper that picked it up in any sort of negative way (from WVU’s and Ms. Bresch’s perspectives – correct me if I’m wrong) until recently was the paper that broke the story: the Post-Gazette. Since the paper’s in Pittsburgh, not that many folks in WV would have the paper delivered. Stick your head in the sand for six months and when you pull it back up, the story’s probably gone away.

But in today’s age, anyone can access that original expose piece and all in the series that followed it online. So whether you live in the hollers of southern West Virginia, the hills of the Eastern Panhandle, or anywhere else across the state, as long as you had an internet connection, you could read those stories (and not have to pay the two quarters to boot).

And not just West Virginia, either. With national exposure from multiple stories in papers like the New York Times, this issue will likely start getting major mainstream national press.

Basic Online Reputation Management Techniques Avoided

While some things can still be done, all parties facing the reputation attack – WVU’s President Mike Garrison and various administrators, Mylan, Ms. Bresch, and Governor Joe Manchin (let’s call them Team West Virginia since that’s a lot to type; the Post-Gazette can be Team Pittsburgh for a sort of a Back Yard PRawl – get it, that’s Brawl, but with a PR instead. Sorry no ban on bad puns in my ground rules) – really missed the boat on some things that could have been done from the beginning. Wow, was that really just one sentence?

Instead they did virtually nothing. For example:

1. WVU President Mike Garrison has a blog. This is a very forward thinking strategy for advancing the ideals of the University and I applaud him for it. This would have been the ideal place to join the conversation and discuss the matter. Discuss what? I don’t care – just something. It could be something like, “we take this very seriously…we’re looking into…have an independent investigation….” Get people looking to your blog for information. Make it show up in the search engines. Otherwise, it will be mostly the things that are negative from Team West Virginia’s perspective.

Instead, the first post about the subject did not appear until April 24th. And on that post, there are two dozen almost universally negative comments that were posted…but not one response in the comments from Mr. Garrison. You made the good first step of writing about it, sir. Now just follow up and respond directly.

Update: Read Mr. Garrison’s email to WVU employees.

2. Governor Joe Manchin sends out emails frequently on everything from business reports to news on our military personnel. What an incredible tool for communicating directly with the people! Within three hours of WVU football coach Rich Rodriguez leaving for Michigan, the Governor emailed the State. Yet, to date not one email has been sent out about this issue, and as far as I can tell, only one quote on the subject has been given to the press.

3. Mylan, Incorporated offers its Web site visitors email alerts and houses an entire media center, but it has repeatedly offered no comment on the subject. It’s only change was removing the MBA information from her site bio. Ms. Bresch hefself has only spoken with the press twice and neither time with the paper investigating her situation.

Bottom line, folks should have joined the conversation at the beginning or at least much earlier than they did.

Advanced Methods of Online Reputation Management

Beyond just getting in the game and utilizing some of the tools already at their disposal, Team West Virginia should have gone on the attack early. Issued press releases, written about it on their sites, given interviews. But, like many, many companies these days, they didn’t do anything until after the crisis had peaked.

So much more could have been done in concert with whatever internal discussions, investigations, and changes occurred, such as:

1. Run some paid search campaigns. Think people are searching for “Bresch” right now on the search engines? Go to Google Trends and see the spikes in traffic.

Related to this, be careful how you’re advertising. The Post-Gazette runs Google content ads on its site. When looking up one of the old articles today, I saw this:

It’s possible you can’t read that because I had to shrink it down. In case you can’t, WVU is advertising MBA degrees for its Integrated Marketing Communications on this story entitled, “MBA mystery in Morgantown:Questions raised over how WVU granted Mylan executive her degree.”

2. You have WVU fans and friends of all involved individuals out there. Encourage them to go out and post / comment on sites and blogs. Tell people to be patient, that they know these people and their good folks. Whatever they’re comfortable saying.

3. Get aggressive – start a Web site on just this subject. Nothing else. Address it head on.

4. Help other folks writing good things (or neutral, or nothing at all, but related to the material) optimize their sites through search engine optimization. Get everything else pushed down in the news.

Conclusion

Those are just a few of the things that should have been done and some that could still be done even in this late stage. Dozens of other tactics exist. You just need a good plan and good execution – come to think of it, I can think of a local West Virginia firm close to Pittsburgh that specializes in online reputation management and I hear they’re taking on clients.

Or if you just want to learn more about joining the conversation, check out the Next Generation Marketing executive series, coming to a West Virginia town near you.

Final note bene: I really want all of this to be accurate. If I missed anything or misstated anything, please let me know and I’ll do a quick update. Please send links if possible so I can verify.