Ever heard of John Chow? He has a blog with more than 15k subscribers to his RSS feed and which allegedly nets him over U$ 40k a month. And yet, you’d never find John Chow dot Com if you googled it.

You see, the ways through which mr. Chow gets his money are not exactly kosher. In fact, most of the people who follow his blog do so to read about his “evil tricks of the day” on how to bend the rules to make a couple bucks more with your website.
Tricks such as selling links, which is a definite no-no for search companies such as Google, since it messes with their pageranking algorithms.

It was almost two years ago that Google stopped ranking his blog. As you’d expect, he got kicked off quite a few other places, as well. But to this day, he’s still blogging and making money.

Social media is less mature now than blogging was when Chow began to write in 2005. There are no determined best practices. You probably know a few tricks to get massive exposure when things get ugly – using fake profiles on social networks, commenting on communities and blogs, mass adding people on Twitter. And you also know they’re wrong.

So next time a client or your boss comes asking you to add 20k people on Twitter and things like that, think about John Chow. Remember how you can still be wrong even if you’re getting positive results.

You’re the expert, you’re the one they’re relying on doing the right thing. And you’re the one who has to tell them you won’t fool people, you won’t game the system and you won’t poison the well.

P.S.: Of course, it should go without saying that this also means that just because what you’re doing is working, it doesn’t mean you’re doing it right. Or even that what you did right yesterday is right today. In a field with such an ever-changing landscape, you should be constantly re-evaluating your work.

(picture from Chris Lae’s flickr)

Newspapers have now existed for, at least, 400 hundred years. And as a general rule, so far people have only come up with two ways to make money with it: subscriptions and advertising (classifieds and any form of sponsorship included).

For 400 years, that’s been the tried and true business model for content production throughout the world. Which is why pieces like this from Danyel Lyons should come as no surprise:

More money was spent on e-mail advertising last year than was spent on blog advertising—yet you don’t see anyone touting e-mail as the next big billion-dollar media business. Technorati, a blog researcher, estimates that bloggers who run ads earn an average of $5,060 per year. Don’t call the Ferrari dealer just yet.

Which leads Laurent Huag to suggest it’s just a question of someone discovering the right business model for social media. As I noted when sharing his post on Google Reader, that would be very nice but the fact that to this day no one’s found an alternative for newspapers (neither for TV or radio, for that matter) doesn’t look very promising.

Also, I think there’s a fundamental flaw in the way people – especially advertisers – have been approaching social media lately, which has a lot to do with what Dave Winer said about Lyons’ piece:

I can’t promise you’ll make any money from your blog, and I think the more you try the less chance you have. Make a good product and listen to your customers to make it better, and use the tools to communicate, and you may well make money from the whole thing. To expect the blog alone to pay your bills is to misunderstand what a blog can do. You’ll only be disappointed like Dan Lyons was.

That is something bloggers should take into account when making their blogs, but also advertisers. If you look at social media as a means to make a quick buck, or attract thousands of pageviews to your website and product through a paid post on a high profile blog you’re doing it wrong.

Social media is a tool for you to reach out to your consumers, build a relationship and promote your message in the more transparent and direct way possible. Your ROI shouldn’t be measured in pageviews, CTR or direct impact in sales, but rather in how your consumer perceives your brand online.

Which is not to say that you can’t advertise on blogs. If you choose the right blogs, and make a pertinent campaign, it will only help you build your presence online. But you will still measure your ROI in terms of what people think of your brand.

(picture by zzzack)

“Product comes first” is something you hear a lot in ad agencies nowadays. But a post on Seth Godin’s blog made me realize that though its logic is sound, it fails to tackle the entire issue. In actuality, marketing comes first.

But the fact remains that if your product sucks, no ammount of publicity or advertisement will save it. Which is to say that, if you trust your agency to find out what your audience wants and how to talk to them, you should also allow it to take part in the product-development stage.

Obvious as it may seem – Jon Steel was already talking about this in 1998 -, we all know how hard it is to see it implemented. Most of the time, you get a company which believes it knows everything there is to know about its product, and only needs you to educate their consumers.

But how can you advocate integration to clients when you can’t even do it internally? In a time where people are talking about transmedia and convergence, you still see agencies where departments just don’t interact, creating a campaign as the sum of various parts instead of one connected whole.

And no department suffers more this sort of segregation than social media. Yes, it’s a new field, with no established best practices or competencies. Still, it should be fairly obvious that the “here’s the budget, here’s the campaign, build buzz and get blogs talking about it” approach just isn’t right.

“Marketing comes first” because marketers know what consumers want, and thus know what will work and what won’t when it comes to communicating the product.

The same way, social media analysts and experts know what will work and what won’t when it comes to engaging people on social networks, generating buzz on blogs and such. They’ll need specific information from the brief, have a better understanding of what kind of ROI to expect, information needed to pass on to consumers and possible feedback and reactions (oh, yeah, nowadays consumers react whether you want them to or not).

So, let’s get friendly, shall we?

Last November, a blogger at GEEK42 published a post (.br) complaining that Vivo’s website – the country’s largest cellphone carrier – didn’t work properly on Firefox. Also, upon contacting the company, he was informed that “all programming is done in files with the HTML extension, therefore Firefox is not compatible with this extension”.

Yeah, you read that right. According to this attendant, Firefox was incompatible with the Internet. But about two weeks and a lot of bad press later, in its corporate blog, the company acknowledged the issue (.br) and promised to make the website work with Firefox by the end of January.

Last week, Vivo made good on that promise, launching a redesigned website which worked not only on Firefox but also on Safari for the Mac and the iPhone. Not only do they now have a more accessible website, GEEK42 published a new post saying “Vivo embraces true browsers” (.br).

Kudos to Vivo – especially when you consider this is a cellphone carrier – for 1) paying attention to what people are saying about its products, 2) acknowledging it had a problem and 3) working as fast as possible to solve said problem. Great example of how to properly use social media to improve your products and engage customers.

(nod Update or Die )(.br)

Anyways, the idea is to give you all an overview of what’s being done in terms of marketing and advertising in social media here in Brazil, as well as what kinds of things people are discussing at one point. At first, I will be the only author around here – I’m a social media and online planner at a webdesign and advertising agency in São Paulo -, but I hope to be able to bring in some more guests who also work in the area, and whose opinions could greatly improve the quality of what’s discussed around here.

For now, this is what you have: myself as a writer, and this post as a marker. More as things come.