.bodytext {float: left; } .floatimg-left-hort { float:left; margin-top:10px; margin-right: 10px; width:300px; clear:left;} .floatimg-left-caption-hort { float:left; margin-bottom:10px; width:300px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} .floatimg-left-vert { float:left; margin-top:10px; margin-right:15px; width:200px;} .floatimg-left-caption-vert { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; font-size: 10px; width:200px;} .floatimg-right-hort { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 300px;} .floatimg-right-caption-hort { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 300px; font-size: 10px; } .floatimg-right-vert { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px;} .floatimg-right-caption-vert { float:left; margin-right:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px; font-size: 10px; } .floatimgright-sidebar { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 200px; border-top-style: double; border-top-color: black; border-bottom-style: double; border-bottom-color: black;} .floatimgright-sidebar p { line-height: 115%; text-indent: 10px; } .floatimgright-sidebar h4 { font-variant:small-caps; } .pullquote { float:right; margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px; margin-bottom:10px; width: 150px; background: url(http://www.dmbusinessdaily.com/DAILY/editorial/extras/closequote.gif) no-repeat bottom right !important ; line-height: 150%; font-size: 125%; border-top: 1px solid; border-bottom: 1px solid;} .floatvidleft { float:left; margin-bottom:10px; width:325px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} .floatvidright { float:right; margin-bottom:10px; width:325px; margin-right:10px; clear:left;} Though the fame he gained by selling his soul on eBay ended almost as soon as he began taking bids online, Nathan Wright discovered firsthand the amount of attention someone can generate on the Internet. Now he is looking to help businesses find opportunities to spread the word about their products and services online through his new consulting business, Lava Row.

Wright is one of a growing number of people in marketing and advertising who recognize the value of social media and are using their knowledge of online technologies to help businesses effectively use these tools.

Social media are defined as online programs and practices people use to communicate with each other through forms such as text messaging, audio, video, blogs and message boards. Businesses are looking to participate in those discussions or be aware of them as a way to have some control over their brand image.

“What it comes down to in social media is, how do you relate to your customers?” Wright said. “How do you talk to them in the right way… online and the effective way. Posting a press release on your Web site, that’s not going to cut it.”

Social media have become popular in the past couple of years as online programs and technologies have blossomed and given people a way to generate their own content and share that content with others worldwide. These new resources have shifted people’s attention away from programming provided by traditional media, such as television and newspapers, Wright said, allowing them to choose what they want to watch and participate in online. It also has shed light on the number of people openly sharing opinions and experiences with others, making companies more aware of discussions about them.

“[Public relations] and marketing people want to control the message about their company, and that’s not the case anymore,” Wright said. “They can’t do that because the Internet is so powerful.”

Claire Celsi, a public relations supervisor with The Integer Group who specializes in social media, said: “People expect you to be there. They expect you to be out there with social media tools to engage you online. They expect you to try to reach out to them in ways besides direct mail.”

Ground zero

Blogging has traditionally been businesses’ first step into social media and is where Celsi and business blog coach Mike Sansone spend most of their time working with clients.

This online tool has skyrocketed over the past year. In Technorati’s April edition of “The State of the Live Web” report, it said it now tracks more than 70 million blogs and that 120,000 blogs are created daily.

Marketing consultants encourage businesses to listen to what bloggers are saying about them and to engage them in conversation rather than use blogs only as a marketing tool, where they make sales pitches and post press releases. Otherwise, Sansone said, “the conversation will sound pretty salesy.”

“You need an honest, candid voice and you need to be transparent about things going on in your company instead of trying to spin it,” Wright said.

Celsi said a dedicated blogger should be willing to write often and companies should allow consumers to respond as a way of engaging them in conversation. “Nothing annoys the consumer more than having dead links on your site or a blog not updated in a month,” she said.

Lava Row

Wright’s newest company, Lava Row – he selected the name because of its sound and because the Web site address was available – is designed to take a company’s social media efforts a step beyond blogging, such as posting video on YouTube, capturing the attention of online groups bound by a common interest in a consumer product and engaging consumers in an alternate reality game.

“I always tell companies, don’t create your own communities online or build your own MySpace,” Wright said, “but what you’ve got to do is find existing communities and warm up to them.”

Wright, who graduated with a degree in fine arts, has invested time in learning online programs and worked on interactive projects and Web sites with a marketing company, Meyocks Group Inc., for seven years before deciding to focus on Lava Row this spring.

“I know a lot of companies that want to extend their brand to social media and try to control their brand,” Wright said, “and these companies don’t have the time or the resources to go to it or to have someone there who understands all about it. That’s where I think this company is going to come in and help them navigate this network of sites that are popping up every day.”

Wright is working on about eight projects and developing relationships with other clients from an office he is renting in downtown Adel. Late this summer, he hopes to move to a newly renovated office in the East Village with his business partner and would eventually like to hire more creative people who bring a different skill set. “I don’t pretend to be the foremost expert,” Wright said. “I want people to come in and teach me things.”

Getting the business started has been relatively easy in terms of investing in new equipment and office space, Wright said, and he has an investor group helping fund some of the costs. The challenge, he said, is educating businesses about the opportunities that exist.

The possibilities

Wright considers himself to be in the business of selling ideas.

With so many new technologies cropping up and others evolving, the possibilities for companies are endless and a social media strategy needs to be tailored to the business’s needs.

Wright cites several examples of what companies have done before.

First, he talks about JetBlue Airways Corp. posting a video on YouTube of its CEO apologizing for allowing passengers to be stuck on its airplanes for more than nine hours and the changes he was going to make to avoid similar mistakes in the future, as a way of controlling a potentially damaging incident. As a way to use YouTube to show that a company is hip to young adults, Wright said he helped create a video for Kum and Go LC, featuring its 100-ounce mug, which was acted out by three Iowa State University students with a loose script about what happens when Mentos and Diet Coke mix. After he posted the video online and e-mailed it to about 80 people, it received more than 6,000 hits.

Wright also sees opportunities in marketing to extremely specific groups of people through online social networks, like MySpace and Facebook, as well as <a href="http://www.joost.com/" target="_blank"Joost, a new program that allows people to watch television shows while chatting with other users. As an example, he said the makers of Templeton Rye could market to a Templeton Rye group on Facebook and use them as spokespersons for their product.

The most complex social media opportunity, Wright said, is alternate reality games, which are interactive narratives where people receive clues online, by phone or in the mail and have to solve puzzles and perform tasks online and in the real world to continue the story. The most famous example is when Microsoft Corp. created an adventure for fans awaiting the release of the Halo 2 game, which ended in an invitation to play the game before its release.

“You can engage your customer as an interruption with a radio or TV spot for 30 seconds,” Wright said, “or you can create something like this that engages them for three weeks to three months.”

Biz connection

The biggest asset to participating in social media programs seems to be marketing rather than trying to make a profit online, said Brian Mennecke, an associate professor in the College of Business at Iowa State University. Mennecke teaches a course on e-commerce through Second Life, the three-dimensional online world, and researches programs like this.

“The real question is what does it add in value beyond what you have with the Web,” Mennecke said, “and I think it offers medium- and large-size firms the opportunity to brand their products, test it out with customers and try concepts out.”

He uses Adidas as an example, which allows players at its virtual store in Second Life to access its Web site to buy real products. “They may not have tremendous sales,” Mennecke said, “but it shows they’re on the cutting edge, which helps their brand overall.”

Mennecke added that the other business opportunities related to social media programs seem to be what Wright is setting out to do: help companies utilize these resources.

Consultants have become an important resource in helping companies take the first step in the social media realm. Many fear losing control of their brand image, Sansone said, and they don’t understand the importance of engaging or at least listening to their customers online. Celsi said many companies also want to measure the results of a specific marketing campaign, which you cannot do with social media marketing.

However, Sansone believes social media have proved to be a lasting trend. Five years from now, he said, “if there’s not some sort of engagement with (a company’s) customers, they’re not going to have any customers. It’s not a fad.”