Matt Bacak is a survivor. He survived bankruptcy to build up a multi-million dollar business. And more recently, the man, who for a short while held the title of “The. Biggest. Douche. in. Social. Media.” (sometimes referred to as a “New Media Douchebag”), survived a social media s**tstorm (it all started with this admittedly awful press release).

On my post about Lessons from social media marketing failures (and successes), I wrote that

When Matt Bacak’s over-the-top press release got him a great deal of negative attention on Twitter last week, he wasn’t afraid to apologize and admit his mistakes. While it took him longer that most of us would’ve liked, he certainly responded faster than the Motrin folks, or some of the old school horror stories like Kryptonite.

It turns out he’s done more than apologize. He’s gone person-to-person to address the criticism. He’s eaten a whole lot of humble pie, and is coming out not as an example of a failure (though that release will still go down on the top of my list of bad press releases), but as an example of how to handle yourself in a social media crisis.

He’s gone so far as to agree to have his picture taken with a t-shirt that I designed (see above–the shirt first appeared on a blog post by Warren Whitlock, which also includes a link to a long audio podcast interview with Matt). The shirt is not something I’d wear in mixed company, but he’s going to wear it to a session he’s leading tomorrow. That takes guts.

Matt, thanks for wearing my shirt. Keep up the good work. Tune down the rhetoric in those releases, but don’t lose your enthusiasm. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve more than redeemed yourself–you’ve come out shining.

You can see our complete, and extensive dialog on Twitter below. For Twitter neophytes, you’ll want to start from the bottom and work your way up, as they’re in reverse chronological order.

1. Don’t get caught snoozing. Marketers, you may get the weekends off, but bloggers don’t have that luxury. In fact, often their busiest times are the weekend. You need to have alerts set up about your brand’s presence in the blogosphere (and on social networks), and be prepared to respond quickly when they’re triggered. The folks at McNEIL-PPC were caught snoozing while their Motrin brand was circling the drain one weekend after a new marketing campaign offended the mommyblogger crowd and all hell broke loose on Twitter. They had no backup plan in place, no dark website ready to light up, and ended up taking the site down for more than a day while they figured out what to do.
2. Don’t be afraid to apologize. The good news is that the Motrin folks apologized. The bad news is it took them too long. When Matt Bacak’s over-the-top press release got him a great deal of negative attention on Twitter last week, he wasn’t afraid to apologize and admit his mistakes. While it took him longer that most of us would’ve liked, he certainly responded faster than the Motrin folks, or some of the old school horror stories like Kryptonite.
3. Take your campaign door-to-door. Another very smart thing that Matt did was respond directly to each Twitter (and a lot of the bloggers) who had called him out (he responded to my tweets, and even agreed to get a picture taken of him wearing the shirt I made him) but I’m still waiting for him to chime in on one of my blog posts).
4. Silence is deadly; you cannot not communicate. This is communications 101, folks: silence speaks volumes. In my old days as a social media consultant for a PR agency, a client approached us that had been called out for astroturfing. Apparently some well-intentioned junior marketing folks thought it was a good idea to reply to a negative post about their company and defend the product. They did so anonymously, representing themselves as users. The blogger smelled something fishy, checked the IP addresses and called them on it in an even bigger and more negative post. They asked us if they should respond. I said it depends on how influential the blogger is. Turns out, his blog post was on page one of Google searches for their name. That’s influence, my friends, even if you’ve never head of this blogger before. So I encouraged them to respond, and execute on an SEO campaign. They never responded, but they at least got the SEO campaign going.
5. Don’t fake it. You’ll get caught. My client did. Coke got caught, and so did Sony and Wal-Mart.
6. Don’t be afraid of controversy. Do you have a crazy but incredibly brilliant person in your office who may not always walk the company line, but who’s also very smart about your product, or one application of your product? Don’t keep that person chained up in the basement like another client of mine did—I guarantee they’ll get a readership. Why? Because crazy is authentic. Nobody talks like marketers do. Be real. Let the guy do three posts about your product and one post about Japanese sword fighting and its relevance to cloud computing (don’t know where that one came from).
7. Lawsuits are great publicity—for the people being sued. Think twice before you send that Cease and Desist letter. A former client got one from Apple and got tons of (overall incredibly positive) publicity around it. When T-Mobile’s parent company threatened to sue Engadget over its use of the color magenta, all hell broke loose online. Guess who came out looking like the loser?
8. Staff up. When Target became the target of a blogger’s ire, their response landed them in the New York Times, and not in a positive light. Why did they diss this blogger? Because, ultimately, they complained that they just weren’t staffed to deal with responding to every blog query. Folks, pony up the dough to get a few social-media savvy people on your marketing and customer service teams. Comcast did, and they’re now the heroes of corporate social media responsibility. Worth every penny!
9. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Have an outspoken critic? Bring them into the fold. Don’t ignore them—they’re passionate and will probably keep on blogging. Don’t sue them—that just gives them more to blog about. Reach out to them on a personal level, invite them into your organization to understand how things work. Your most outspoken critics can also be your biggest advocates—get them to think about you differently, and you’ve turned a critic into an ambassador… Or at least quieted them down a bit!

Does this still work in today’s day and age? I guess the same can be asked of spam, and the inevitable answer is yes, it does. “He who blasts, lasts,” once joked a colleague of mine who ran direct marketing. Nevertheless, I and many others found Matt Bacak’s hard sell a little hard to swallow. His (social media-friendly, I might add) press release yesterday took every rule out of the 1995 Internet Marketing Playbook and ran with it. I haven’t seen so much hyperbole in one place since WrestleMania III back in 1987.

Now I’m told that Matt is a multi-millionaire, and probably has a lot of great techniques, but his credibility has been hurt a bit recently. This kind of blatant self-promotional, superlative-rich, content-free press release died back in 2002 along with sock puppet corporate mascots. And I should know—I’ve written plenty of press releases since 2002, and none of them have been anywhere near as bad as this one.

Press releases are designed to attract attention, and he did well at that. But can he execute on a strategy for responding to the criticism that’s cropped up all over the blogosphere and the Twitterverse?

I hope so. His supporters are speaking up, and he has come out of seclusion (he’s been teaching a class) to respond to at least one blogger (Media Pirate–you’ve got to scroll down a LOT to find his response). Here’s an excerpt:

I never suggested to my writer to have it even say that I am a twitter god or an expert in social media or to challenge anyone because I’m not. I am new to social media (as you can tell) and have a lot to learn. But, I am very good internet marketer and email marketer. I have over 300k subscribers to my online newsletter. That’s exactly what I teach my clients (email marketing and direct response marketing).

Kudos to Matt Bacaks for coming clean, fessing up, clarifying and apologizing (with just a little chest thumping on the side). Now, get to commenting on all those other blogs that may start to get some Google juice with your name… And think about revisiting your messaging and marketing strategy for the Web 2.0 world…

We got to talking about the history of Boston’s tech community—Adam has survived more than one downturn over the years—and then the conversation turned to how we are positioning ourselves for the downturn. After sharing how my company positions itself, he questioned, given the current economic slump and growing concerns over the viability of the many startups which have banked on low-revenue “if you build it they will come” business models, whether “web 2.0” is a term anybody will want to associate themselves with a year from now.

Then, on Tuesday, I presented to a class of Emerson students about social media and PR, and got asked to predict what would be hot in the next couple of years. Of course I said “Web 3.0,” which Wikipedia concisely describes as “the evolutionary stage of the Web that follows Web 2.0″—um, yeah, thanks! I like the way the conference organizers described it:

The Web 1.0 concept was simple: web pages linking to web pages. Then came Web 2.0 – a powerful movement from web pages to web applications. Web 2.0 applications have evolved into often slick viewports into proprietary or personal collections of information. This means they still primarily house data in silos inaccessible to and disconnected from the larger world, and most importantly, from each other.

But as we approach 2009, the clear outlines of the new web are forming. Some call this next generation the Semantic Web, but we think that term is confining, and so, instead, we refer to it as simply Web 3.0.

The new web is moving beyond connecting pages to interconnecting data objects, concepts, and things. Ultimately Web 3.0 is really about creating technology that more accurately mirrors how we see and think about the world around us.

So these are the key areas I think will see a lot of development over the next couple of years:

• Trust. Trust is one of two remaining economic scarcities in the Internet Economy—there’s just not much of it out there. Chris Brogan put it nicely: “Though a company like Microsoft spent millions and millions of advertising and marketing dollars trying to improve our perception of the brand, none of us gave a sh!t until Robert Scoble came along and put a human shape around their online and event presence for us.” The trust barrier will be solved by understanding how human “trust agents” (as Chris puts it) work, and by allowing us to layer “trustworthiness” over all of our online interactions (not just in search, but social networking, bookmarking, blogging, etc.)
• Attention. Attention is the other economic scarcity remaining. There are only 24 hours in the day, and we have to sleep for a good chunk of them. The competition for the rest of them is fierce. Applications that are smartest at competing for our attention—or at helping us understand what we should be paying attention to—will have a distinct advantage in the web 3.0 world.
• Agents. Chris Brogan talks of human trust agents, but digital agents will finally come back into the public’s view as well. I’m not talking about the old school “tickler” agent (“Hey, don’t forget you’ve got to pick the girls up from soccer practice tonight”), nor am I talking about Google Alerts (“You asked me to keep an eye out for blog posts mentioning ‘Web 3.0′, so here you go…”). It’s closer to the kind of capability you see in good contextual advertising (my favorite example of which is all the “Bacon Salt” ads I get on Facebook after I signed up as a fan of the bacon page), but it’s both cross-platform and cross functional. As just one small example, you tell it that you want to be kept abreast of upcoming social media events, and it checks Upcoming.org, Facebook, Evite, Meetup, etc. and shares with you the events it finds, allowing you to sign up for them through its own interface.
• RSS. I can’t tell you how wrong-headed so many interpretations of Forrester’s recent report are (Paul gets it right in this link). RSS is not dead. It’s simply buried so deep that most people don’t even know it’s there. But that doesn’t mean they’re not using it. Content syndication will be at the heart of web 3.0. It empowers almost everything I’ve been talking about in this post to some extent. Don’t sell it short. Look for ways to use it and build applications around it.
• Semantic Web. I’m sorry. I hate to use this term. It has such negativity surrounding it. But let’s put all that bias aside for a second, and ask ourselves a question: What if there was a way, for instance, that my blogging software could understand that what I was writing about—in plain English—was an event I was trying to promote, and could translate that information so that it could automatically be shared with Upcoming, Evite, Eventbrite, Facebook, etc.? Tell me that wouldn’t be cool. The AI behind something like that isn’t too far away—hell, the Turing Test is pretty close to being passed.

Am I missing anything?

[ADDED 30 OCT 2008 1:30PM]

YES! I’m missing something:

• OpenID! A conversation between myself, @RodBegbie, @al3x and @sbtodd on Twitter made me realize how important something like this will be to Web 3.0. If you assume that trust and interoperability will be at the heart of Web 3.0—go ahead, try to argue otherwise—then an idea like OpenID becomes critical. It provides a common identity platform for interoperability. YES, to quote Alex Payne, “It’s confusing for users and developers, it doesn’t bake security in, and it doesn’t solve a problem that non-geek users care about.” But it’s just confusing because nobody’s been able to explain it well. Security can presumably be fixed. And Like I said on Twitter, it might not solve a problem most non-geeks care about*, but down the road they might!

* THIS geek certainly cares about it. I am LIVID every time some sites password security mechanism forces me to create YET ANOTHER password that I will ultimately forget. And what about interoperability? To make that happen, you’ve got to give away some security. For instance, for a lot of the cool (not to mention necessary) Twitter apps, I need to share with them my Twitter username and password. Having a security layer on top that ultimately ensured that Twhirl doesn’t have to know my password, or that I didn’t forget the super-strict password that I had to create especially for one service, could ultimately make my life easier.

I am very much enjoying Paul Gillin’s new book “Secrets of Social Media Marketing”. I’ll write a full review shortly, but I was inspired by the leadoff quote in chapter one, from A.G. Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble:

The more in control we are, the more out of touch we become. But the more willing we are to let go a little, the more we’re finding we get in touch with consumers.

Being a science nerd, I was struck by the similarities of this to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal, which essentially states that the more precisely you know a particle’s position, the less precisely you can know its momentum.

Media training has been part of my job for about 8 years now, and boy has it changed. Anybody who’s still trying to sell the control paradigm is selling snake oil. Even old school PR master Apple can’t keep the genie in the bottle when it comes to secret projects and bad news (though the news has been good lately).

Here’s what I wrote way back in 2006 while at Topaz (emphasis mine):

It’s clear that companies are learning to give up control. Our media training slides, for instance, don’t talk about controlling the conversation any more. Richard Edelman stressed this issue of control at the last Syndicate show, and most PR agencies, if they haven’t fully embraced social media, are definitely talking about blogs and how they change the corporate conversation. A few of them are taking a stab at podcasting and even video.

Those who remain staunch supporters of the old “command and control” model of PR will ultimately either adapt or die. Forget “disruptive technology:” In astronomical/geological terms, social media is what you would call an ELE (Extinction-Level Event, pronounced “Ellie”).

I used to think that there was room for tradition. But the more I work in social media, the more I see all media heading in this direction. Yes there’s still plenty of room for good media training and good messaging. But if you don’t prepare your company or your clients for this, it will be your loss–look out for that fireball.

Folks, as Paul Gillin so deftly states in his opening chapter, bad news isn’t always bad news (emphasis his):

Negative feedback isn’t necessarily bad. We know that criticism is more useful than praise. It helps us to understand our shortcomings and make our products and business better. If customers are willing to offer you free advice, why would you not want to listen? If negativity exists, wouldn’t you rather find out now than wait until it turns up in The Wall Street Journal?