S&M Marketing: Welcome to the Echo Chamber

Baiting the S&M marketers. It worked.

This weekend, I discovered a fast, easy, and basically useless way to gain new Twitter followers.

Despite having more than 900 Twitter followers, my tweets these days often seem to disappear into thin air, with seemingly no one noticing.

But it’s different when I use the hashtags #SocialMediaMarketing or #ContentMarketing.

For those, the audience and “engagements” (follows, retweets, likes) are roughly four times normal. And all that action seems to come from the practitioners of those two over-hyped marketing methods, even when I’ve trashed them and their kind as charlatans.

So I conducted an experiment on Saturday:

Hypothesis: Using both hashtags in a single tweet will generate lots of new followers, regardless of what the tweet actually says.

Experimental Method: I sent the “basically sucks” tweet you see here on Saturday, followed a few minutes and five new followers later by the “robo-followers” retweet.

Results: In the next 48 hours, I picked up 27 new Twitter followers, almost all of them self-described social-media (S&M, for short) marketers or content marketers (CMs). (Or both, God help us.) I rarely get more than one new follower per day. I was added to two Twitter lists, which basically never happens. And both the tweet and retweet are still getting additional likes.

Conclusion: Hypothesis confirmed. A lot of S&M marketing consultants’ idea of marketing is to set their Twitter accounts to robo-like any tweet about S&M marketing and to robo-follow the sender. The same goes for CMs.

Testing the conclusion: Come “join the conversation,” as the S&Ms like to parrot: Try this experiment yourself -- preferably with a tweet about this article -- and see what happens. Of course, the likers won’t actually read your tweets and the followers won't look into who you are before following you.

ISIS could tweet “Hitler is God #SocialMediaMarketing” and I swear these Pavlovian sleazeballs would follow.

What this means is that any idiot can set himself (they’re usually men) up as an S&M marketing expert and immediately gain cred by racking up a host of followers from the S&M echo chamber. And look, Mr. Unsuspecting Client, every time our expert tweets, he gets lots of likes and even more followers. Wow, he must really know S&M marketing. (He ought to, as much as he tweets about it. But what can he actually do for your business?)

So what does robo-following, our Publishing Word of the Day, have to do with publishing? The S&M marketing and CM hype networks have for the most part set themselves up as enemies of advertising-supported publishing. (“Why do you need to pay for advertising? Everyone is on Facebook. So just let us set up a Facebook page for you. It's free -- except for our fees.”)

Some of what publishers offer, such as native advertising, is arguably content marketing. The CM purists, however, will have none of that, insisting that Paid Media doesn’t count, that CM marketing must be free. (“But pay me within 15 days or your blog is toast.”)

Don’t get me wrong: Not all S&M marketing and CM are a useless waste of time and money. Just the vast majority.


Set your social-media accounts to robo-follow Dead Tree Edition’s 31-part Publishing Word of the Day series, which explores such useful new terms as Facehumping and denialsizing.

Almost Live, From the Cutting Edge of Publishing

The reports I'm getting indicate that the Publishing Business Conference today in New York was bubbling with new ideas, new ventures, and even a few new words.

"Content is king-er than ever," several tweeters quoted one speaker as saying. Others tweeted "re-assetizing" and "transclusion" as additions to publishing's language. Or should I say "languages," since the conference is a mashup of book, magazine and web publishers?

Here are some of the most insightful tweets I've plucked from conference goers who used the hashtag #PBC13:

• Hearst email database has 10 million addresses. Do any traditional book publishers have even 1 million?
• Near full screen mobile ads interspersed every few pages get 10-12x click thrus than web
• Today, everyone is a publisher. And, everyone is a marketer. It's how well you do each that differentiates you from the pack.
• You can't collaborate effectively with Word files and email
• Brook's Law: Adding people to a late project makes it later
• We're making a transition to mobile. Sometimes we're dragging advertisers with us.
• Both HuffPost and Livingly reporters are writing, video, coding, If you had to wait for engineer, too late. 
• "We're in the midst of a renaissance for content" publishers. "This gloom & doom stuff is BS."
• the "network" book - the book is dynamically, incrementally updated as people add notes to it
• Authentic, personal, and live event video cuts through the noise. Nothing longer than 2 min.
• “If you're looking to make money, your point of purchase shouldn't be covered in barbed wire."
• Ebooks a stalking horse for print. How much sell b4 go to print? $1,000
• The more you narrow yr focus, the more people you reach. No one book is for 'everyone'
•  "Don't do what everyone else in your industry's doing." 
•  no such thing as a solo entrepreneur or innovator hire/partner to complement your weaknesses - true true true!! 
• Successful innovation is solving a problem in a new way. 
• What My Mom Wants To Know About #eBooks: Why are there errors in the eBook that aren't in the printed copy of the same book? 
• When will publishers realize they don't make books anymore? They make content destined for containers" (books, #eBooks, web, apps). 
•  "The future is knowing about your customers and giving them what they want." Data helps, but it's not the future, always been true. 
• Most of us judge reliability of info by how good it looks. We're moving back to traditional sources. 
• While Google is one of the biggest polluters with all those servers, digital has the appearance of being green 
• "Irony: most successful magazine ever was focused on what's on television." (That's a reference to TV Guide, I assume.)
•  "A newspaper reader who dies isn't replaced by a new reader. 
•  "Reading no longer linear nor static" good mantra for the future

9 Lessons From Toshiba's No-Print Day Debacle

Was it the negative feedback from printing-industry customers?

Or maybe seeing its "#noprintday" hashtag taken over by critics who screamed "Greenwash!"?

Or perhaps it flinched when the industry it attacked held up the mirror to its own questionable environmental record. (As the old cheer goes, "U-G-L-Y, You ain't got not alibi. You're ug-LY!")

For whatever reason, a U.S. arm of Toshiba pulled the plug today on its National No-Print Day campaign. Michael Makin, President and CEO of Printing Industries of America, announced the news this morning after a conversation last night with a Toshiba executive.

A few hours later, Toshiba's "Tree" spokescharacter got the axe; his video and web site were disabled. (Disclosure: Mr. Tree is no relation to D. Eadward Tree, the writer of this blog. I wouldn't touch him with a 10-foot branch.)

But let's not celebrate too much before absorbing some lessons from this saga:

1. We print lovers are still doing a crappy job getting the word out about how printing and paper usage are not necessarily bad for the environment. How many people do you suppose were involved in conceiving and approving of the No-Print Day campaign? (The main Toshiba web site linked to the campaign for the first few days, so the effort wasn't confined to some obscure corner of the organization.) Apparently not one of them questioned whether the campaign would actually help the environment or realized the effort would create a fact-based backlash.

Battleships or Motorboats: Which Publishing Model Will Thrive?

In the new world of multichannel publishing, is it better to be a big company with well-known brands or a small and nimble outfit?

Industry pundit BoSacks, who has worked for magazines at both kinds of outfits, has definitely made up his mind: “There are people making it on the web, but it’s not the big giants,” he told Dr. Joe Webb of WhatTheyThink? recently. And he doesn’t think the big publishers' recent scramble to change CEOs is paying off.

“They’re just shifting one corporate head for another, and they need to reach deep and get an entrepreneur there who understands this new environment that we’re in.” (Question for Bo: Does anyone really understand this new environment that we’re in? Or how it will look two years from now?)

A major publishing company “is a big battleship, and it’s awfully hard to turn,” BoSacks (AKA Bob Sacks) said. “When you spend 35 years learning how to make money with ink on paper and then you try to make that adjustment [to the web], that adjustment is not what you know best.”

But navigating stormy seas in a motorboat has its own challenges, entrepreneurial publishers tell me. Nimbleness alone doesn’t cut it when the waves are as tall as your boat is long. (Plenty of small publishers have shown that they too can run crappy, ill-conceived web sites.)

Dead Tree Edition Tops Twitter and the World Cup

RISI, "the leading information provider for the global forest products industry," shocked me and a lot of sane people as well this week by naming me to its "Power List" of the industry's top 50 movers and shakers.

"Written by the self-styled D. Eadward Tree, the Dead Tree Edition blog is not afraid to dig into the issues that the pulp, paper and publishing industry would rather lay buried under dead leaves," says the article explaining my selection as #43. It says this blog "has become a must-read for anybody involved in the pulp, paper and publishing industries, especially those who like a bit of spice with their breakfast reading."

OK, so #43 is pretty far down the list, but at least it's ahead of Domtar CEO John Williams (#48), FIFA World Cup (#49), and "Social Media: Twitter and LinkedIn" (#50).

My selection to this prestigious list has led to some questions that I will now try to answer:

• Q: How much did you have to pay RISI's editors to get on the list? A: Nothing, I swear.
• Q (from my roommate/partner): So does this mean you will get paid actual money instead of just link-bait when Web sites re-publish your articles? A: Hope springs eternal.
• Q: Now that you've given Twitter a good thrashing, will Dead Tree Edition do an IPO? A: Yeah, right. Wanna buy some shares?
• Q: Will Dead Tree Edition start showing up in Google News? And will search engines start giving higher rankings to articles on Dead Tree Edition than to excerpts and quotations of those articles on other Web sites? A: You obviously don't understand how the search-engine gods rule the www.world. They judge an article on Dead Tree Edition to be the unreliable work of an obscure, anonymous blogger. But when those same words appear in a newspaper or an industry Web site, they suddenly become imbued with authority.
• Q: Is it true you almost wrote an article about how certain famous white people could help save forests? A: Yes. I read that the U.S. Department of Agriculture was releasing parasitic WASPs into the Chicago area to stop the spread of emerald ash borers that were killing trees. Finally, I thought, here's a real job for Prince Charles to do while waiting for Mum to, you know. And this could even give Paris Hilton a chance to do something useful. Then I realized that the article was talking about parasitic insects, not parasitic White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Oh well. I still wonder what happens to the wasps after they eat all the ash borers. Maybe they buy mini-vans and join the local country club.
• Q: If you're so influential, why do members of Congress and most news media still insist that Obamacare was paid for partly by closing a $23 billion loophole for black liquor -- a loophole that you repeatedly said never existed? A: Alleged influence in the forest products industry doesn't carry much weight on Capitol Hill or with the news media. 
• Q: How did you end up ranked ahead of Williams, whose company probably had much to do with preventing the early demise of the U.S. black liquor tax credit (despite your attacks on the program) and then became the #1 recipient of Canada's version of the credit? A: Good question. I guess Domtar employs more voters in Maine and Canada than I do.
  

Other, barely relevant articles about D. Eadward Tree and Dead Tree Edition include:

• D. Eadward Tree Unmasked! A top U.S. Postal Service executive was revealed to be the man behind Dead Tree Edition.
• Dead Tree Makes the AP!
• Can You Trust an Anonymous Blog with an Aggravating Name? Not everyone thinks Dead Tree Edition should be taken seriously.
• Dead Tree Edition's Best of 2009, which will help you understand why I'm especially happy to be ranked ahead of Twitter (as will Twitter vs. RSS: So Much for Superior Technology).

OMG! I Was Only Kidding, Not Psychic : Twitter as Person of the Year?

A few months ago, I joked that Twitter was “no doubt [Time] magazine’s leading candidate for Bird of the Year”. Now, it’s no joke.

Three of six panelists at a Time Inc. event Thursday night voted for Twitter as the top candidate for Person of the Year, Folio: reports. The other three voted for another non-human, The Economy, which seems like last year’s news: Anyone who was surprised by The Economy in 2009 wasn’t paying attention more than a year ago when the financial system was circling the drain.

If Time’s going to feature old news for Person of the Year, it might as well go with Obama again. One magazine executive jokes that Obama is “the new Jesus” because putting him on the cover does wonders for newsstand sales, just as a Christianity cover around Easter or Christmas always sells well for magazines like Time. (The latest word on the President, by the way, is that after blowing up balloons for one of his daughter’s birthday parties, he’s being nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics.)

Panelist Bahbwa Walters suggested an interesting competitor for Bird of the Year – jailbird Bernie Madoff. Nope. If you’re going to go the evil route, select someone really evil – like maybe the Microsoft sadists who invented Vista or the idiot at Geico who decided to give less air time to the gecko so they could run those awful cavemen ads.

Speaking of Bird of the Year, some folks in the magazine business already awarded that informally to Rosie magazine back in 2001 for its infamous staph infection cover. (Hubba, hubba, Rosie in a bathrobe!). It sure looks as if that bandaged hand is flipping the Great Speckled Bird to the millions of former McCall’s subscribers who had recently been involuntarily switched over to her magazine.

For the record, I’m still using Google Reader instead of Twitter to track favorite Web sites and have only tweeted to my 53 followers about the newly posted articles. I should note that a few of those followers were clearly trying to get me to follow them in return so they could pelt me with Twitter spam. (What, by the way, do you call tweets that resemble spam? Twam? Spitter? Shredded tweet? Bird poop?)

As for Bird of the Year, I’d vote for the AFLAC duck if he’d start showing up more in magazine ads. Especially in my magazines.

Related articles:

• Twitter vs. RSS: So Much for Superior Technology 
• Poe-Tweet for Twitter Quitters, which features a 140-character poem about why so many people quit Twitter.
  

Getting Noticed, Getting Ignored

Tired of reading my articles on this cheap-looking blog?

Now you have a chance to read some of my stuff at real Web sites -- "real" as in they have corporate sponsors and are created by companies with full-time employees and actual business models.

WhatTheyThink?, the respected Web site covering the printing industry, has posted "Newspaper Production Enters Colorful, Outsourced Era" on its PrintCeo site. (The original is here.) They even figured out how to put the San Francisco Chronicle's video with the article. And don't those ads from the likes of Kodak and Presstek look much prettier than some of my cheesy-looking Google Adsense ads?

RISI, the leading information provider to the paper industry, has posted "Smackdown: Printed Editions vs. Digital Editions" (the original is here). They even created a neat little logo for Dead Tree Edition, though that tree looks suspiciously alive to me.

WhatTheyThink?'s Going Green site has also recognized the smackdown article with very favorable commentary, followed by insightful reader comments.

It never fails to amaze me which articles get multiple links and five-figure audiences -- and which get ignored.

Last week's article about the possibility of emergency increases in postage rates next year has been cited by numerous Web sites I've never even heard of -- and ignored, as far as I can tell, by every major publication and Web site serving industries that rely on mail.

Unless you count Folio:, the bible of the magazine industry. It posted an article yesterday referencing "speculation" about an exigent rate increase of 2% to 3% or maybe an increase of the First Class stamp to 50 cents. I think those are obvious references to my article (Do you agree?), but the Folio: piece never mentions Dead Tree Edition.

Now about those Google ads. I find it interesting to watch Google try to deliver ads that are "context sensitive" and to see how those ads perform -- or don't perform. And getting a few bucks from Google every once in awhile helps me respond when my roommate/partner asks, "Exactly why are you putting all this time into your blog?"

I think I actually came close to earning minimum wage on one quickly written piece -- "Monkeying Around With Postal Pallets". It was a surprise hit among disgruntled postal workers (Are there any gruntled postal workers?) who had fun comparing the orangutans to certain members of Postal Service management. It got more than 20 times as many "hits" as my piece about Twitter quitters, which I thought was much funnier.

You just never know.

Twitter vs. RSS: So Much for Superior Technology

I’m coming to the conclusion that RSS is the Betamax of the Web and Twitter the VHS.

Some of you old-timers will remember the infancy of VCRs, when Betamax and VHS were the two competing and incompatible formats. Many techies concluded that Betamax was the superior technology, but within a few years VHS's superior marketing made it the format of choice.

Although I still don’t like Twitter (as I made clear in my 140-character poem about why so many Twitterers quit), I have signed up for it because it seems to be the way many people keep up with favorite Web sites.

Don’t expect me to tweet every time I go to the bathroom or watch a TV show. (Note: Because D. Eadward Tree is a mythical person, he does not engage in such mundane and disgusting activities.)

I plan to use it mainly to notify followers of newly posted articles – and occasionally to seek information and advice.
But, frankly, I don’t see any reason to use Twitter rather than RSS to keep track of favorite Web sites.

It’s much easier to glance at a program like Google Reader to get a summary of updates at favorite Web sites than to scroll through a bunch of tweets and then click on the ones that you hope are relevant.Like VHS before it, however, Twitter is capturing the public’s attention despite the existence of a superior technology.

Twitter has the cute little bird logo that goes with its name, while RSS's logo is -- what the hell is that? Twitter is all over the mainstream media, recently making the cover of Time magazine and no doubt the magazine’s leading candidate for Bird of the Year. But the glitterati have decided that RSS is not worth discussing.

That’s such a shame, even for an old print dinosaur like me who didn’t know his RSS from a hole in the ground until a few months ago. Give it a try: Go to Google.com/Reader and click "Create an account" on the right to open a free account.

After you sign in, click the "Add a subscription" button on the upper left, then enter this: http://deadtreeedition.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default. Now whenever you open Google Reader, you’ll get capsule views of Dead Tree Edition’s latest posts. But if you’d rather follow me via Twitter, here you go: http://twitter.com/DeadTreeEdition.

Poe-Tweet for Twitter Quitters

If you believed some of the pundits earlier this year, no one had time to read printed matter any more because they were too busy with Twitter.

This print dinosaur in recent months has learned various aspects of Web 2.0, or 3.0, or whatever -- using Google Reader to keep track of various Web sites, participating actively in LinkedIn, and adding a button on this Web site for sharing articles via Digg, StumbleUpon, and the like.

But I could never get my head around Twitter. How can anyone say anything useful in just 140 characters, the maximum per “tweet”.

It turns out that even those who have tried Twitter are having the same trouble. Nielsen Online recently revealed research suggesting that most people who sign up for Twitter quit within a month.

Still, trying to keep an open mind, I thought I’d see what it’s like to compose a tweet. I figured that using poetry and writing about Twitter itself would lead to concise language. I did my best, but still came up a few characters short:

Join Twitter, some urged.
I pondered it.
OMG, they pleaded,
Get with it.
But most tweeters, I read,
Abandon it,
Finding most tweets 2b
Just pure s

Gotta run. I want to finish the actual book I'm reading.