Going Solo

Hi there, Im Henriette Weber a social marketing and branding professional having my own company called Toothless Tiger, working out of Copenhagen, Denmark. I am writing here to offer you some advice on “how to include mainstream media in your PR and marketing”.

I got to write this blogpost on the Going Solo blog because Stephanie and I had a conversation in the back of a car during the shift08 conference in Lisbon, Portugal. I told her about my strategy for mainstream and so far I am working my way around it, and so far it works.

Now:

Journalists wont be knockin on your door or ringing you. You need to contact them. nothing new here. There’s one keyword to a succesful mainstream media presence: proactivity.

I have defined it in three steps

1. You figure out who you are

Or let me rephrase that – you figure out who you are towards your peers – your community. Both Micro and Macro community (meaning people who knows you very well and people who knows you less well personal and workwise). What do they think about you – is your thought about yourself the same as other people think ? or are you way off ?. Conduct a research and figure out where you’re at, or who you are to others.

2. you become who you are

Either you change the perception that people have of you, or you change – so you are real close to be in sync with the thoughts about you from your peers.

3. you find out who you want to be

Make a strategy for how you want to be in the future.

4. you market who you are

you use the two above steps to market who you are – inside out. Both who you feel you are, but also other peoples perception of you.

You do it proactively. Say no to things and interviews that is not in sync with step 3.

write letters, columns and debates. proactively within your subject – that makes your person stand out more.

that’s my first advice here – enjoy

Promoting an event like Going Solo is a huge amount of work — often more than what you’d imagine (and more than what I imagined initially). That’s why everything the community does to help counts.

We don’t have a team of online marketers to get the word out there. It’s basically down to me, and of course to what all the kind people supporting Going Solo are willing to do.

I’m a blogger and a busy person, and so I know how easy it is to “want to do something” but not actually get around to doing it. Or how easy it is to think that what I can do won’t really make a difference.

So, I’ve tried to make it easy for you to “do something” to help get the word out about Going Solo Leeds (to your readers/network/community/friends) if you feel like it.

First, logos and blog badges which you can easily insert in a blog post or a sidebar by copy-pasting the code we provide, like these two for example:

<a href="http://leeds08.going-solo.net/" title="Going Solo Leeds Conference: 12th Sept."><img src="http://leeds08.going-solo.net/files/going-solo-leeds-logo-yellow-rectangle.gif" style="height: 75px; width: 150px;" alt="Going Solo Leeds logo." /></a>

<a href="http://leeds08.going-solo.net/" title="Going Solo Leeds Conference: 12th Sept."><img src="http://leeds08.going-solo.net/files/going-solo-leeds-badge-180x260.gif" style="height: 260px; width: 180px;" alt="Going Solo Leeds Badge." /></a>

(You can find others on the Promote Going Solo page.)

Second, the Going Solo Leeds home page provides you with the main information and links, as well as a brief description of the event if you’re looking for some stock text (we encourage you to speak in your own voice, of course, but sometimes it’s handy to know what the key points are).

Third, the videos and photos of the Lausanne conference are available (and embeddable — Flickr and DailyMotion) as illustration material. I guess this is particularly relevant if you were present in Lausanne and want to point out one of the highlights of your Going Solo experience to tempt others to follow in your steps.

Fourth, there are events on Upcoming and Facebook (as well as a Facebook group) to which you can invite your friends very easily (you certainly know how it works if you’re on one of those two services).

Fifth, if you’re into offline stuff, you can ask me (steph at going-solo dot net, or @stephtara on Twitter) to have a box of Going Solo MOO cards sent to you, or print out our posters and plaster them all over your neighbourhood:

And sixth, so that you don’t have to figure it all out for yourself, there are two links you can use to point people to registration:

• http://goingfar.expectnation.com/gsleeds08/public/register/order is the direct link
• http://leeds08.going-solo.net/registration provides some extra information.

While we’re at it:

• http://going-solo.net is the Going Solo blog
• http://leeds08.going-solo.net is the Going Solo Leeds website

Happy blogging, thanks in advance, and let us know if you don’t see your post appear in the coverage list soon!

Update 01.08.08: bloggers and community managers can now ask for their discount/referral code.

With Going Solo, I’m learning tons about how to advertise/promote something through social media. It might seem ironic, as a large part of my work has to do with explaining social media to people, but this is the first time I’m really actively trying to get the word out about something. Of course, I have established my reputation as an individual through social media, but I never really tried to achieve that. It’s something that happened to me, took time, and sometimes almost feels like an accident. I didn’t have an agenda.

In the case of Going Solo, however, things are different. From the start, time was of the essence, as there was a set date where everything had to come together (and that date is now less than two weeks away). I had an agenda: get the word out to as many relevant people as possible, encourage people to blog about it, to register, or to sponsor. Gather feedback, leads, and even get help. Encourage a community to form around Going Solo.

A new experience for me. I made mistakes of course, and learnt from them (I won’t detail everything in this post, or you’ll still be here reading it tomorrow morning — if you haven’t fled by then).

One of the things I still haven’t quite figured out is whether it’s better to “spread the word” all over the place, or concentrate on one or two spots. It’s the same kind of headache I faced recently with videos: upload everywhere, or chose one service and stick to it? My tendancy is to be present in as many spaces and communities as possible, though I’m not sure I quite trust my judgement there. Urs of ComMetrics thinks it’s better to concentrate on a few tools rather than spread oneself too thin (see the end of his post):

As well, to sustain your competitive edge it is necessary to limit the social media tools you use – using a blog and Twitter well is better than doing Facebook, MySpace, blogging, and Twitter – it just fritters away your time.

Urs Gattiker, unified communications – what it means with Twitter, Friendfeed, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us

The discussion is open.

In the meantime, as I’ve spread Going Solo all over the place, I’d like to give you a round-up of where you can find us.

Facebook

• Going Solo event
• Going Solo group (this seems to be working really well!)
• Going Solo fan page
• Going Far fan page
• we’ll be adding public events for the pre-conference drinks and the party shortly
• video of LIFT08 Open Stage speech

Upcoming

• Going Solo upcoming event

E-mail

• Going Solo newsletter on Google Groups

Twitter

• Going Solo Twitter account

Crowdvine

• Dedicated Going Solo social network (for attendees only)

There, I hope I didn’t forget anything! I’ll write another post on keeping track of coverage, but in the meantime you can check the link collection on del.icio.us (includes blogs posts and interviews, mainly).

You know that one thing that’s important for us at Going Solo is to take advantage of all the modern tools that social media provide us. That’s why, for example, we’ll talk about how you can use blogs and other forms of social media (Twitter, for example) to help make yourself known to prospective clients.

And of course, we’re also eating our own dog food. Going Solo was blogged about even before the date and time were set, and of course we have a Twitter account, Facebook group, and of course a dedicated social network for the event attendees (reminder: looks like many of you still need to join there!)

Hell, a few days ago, I even created an e-mail newsletter for Going Solo! How about that?

As you can see, we have no fear trying out all sorts of exotic means of getting the word out about Going Solo. Registration will close soon, yes (I still need to blog the exact date, thanks for reminding me), but until it closes, it’s still open, and Hotel Aulac just next to the venue still has free rooms. So, it’s worth the trouble!

We’ve gone a bit over the top here and taken the trouble to create a poster you can actually print out on paper (completely portable). You can even send it out to your friends as a PDF e-mail attachment if you want!

Enough blah-blah. Here are the links to the files (A3 colour is best, but not everybody has an A3 colour printer, so there are A4 and black-and-white version too):

• Going Solo poster, A3, colour
• Going Solo poster, A4, colour
• Going Solo poster, A3, black-and-white
• Going Solo poster, A4, black-and-white

Now, obviously, the Going Solo crew cannot travel all over Europe this week-end to plaster posters all over the place. So, we need your help. Grab a friend, print out a bunch of posters, and go put them up in strategic (but legal!) places. For added online fun and sharing, take a photo of your poster (make sure the context is well visible), upload it to flickr with the tag “goingsoloposter” and put the link to the photo in the comments or e-mail it to me.

Thanks for helping out!

Here’s something I’ve been waiting to be able to announce for a few weeks now: I’m excited to let you know that Going Solo is now open to discussing sponsorship opportunities.

If your company is interested in taking advantage of the unique marketing opportunity offered by the Going Solo conference, contact Lily Yacobi at lily@going-solo.net. Lily is managing sponsor relations for Going Solo, and will present you the variety of sponsorship opportunities we are providing. We’re waiting to hear from you!