Archives for December 2012

Is to create a plan for your blog.  This is the perfect time of the year to create a blogging plan for 2013.  Everyone is slowing down and shifting away from work and toward the Holidays.  Use this down time to get your plan in order now, so you start 2013 with a bang.

Now, I know even mentioning the word ‘plan’ can cause hives for some.   It can seem like once you make a ‘plan’ that you are locked into a set course of action.  But that’s not the case, the true value of creating a plan for your blog is that it helps you crystallize your thoughts around what you really want to accomplish.

For example, let’s say I ask you what’s your blogging goal for 2013 and you say ‘To make money’.

How much?  ‘I dunno…$2,500 I guess?  I just want to start getting paid for all the time I am putting into this blog’.

Now that you have a dollar amount in mind, you can start to break it down.  $2,500 a year is roughly $200 a month.  So how would you use your blog to raise $200 a month?

Could you do that with AdSense?  Probably not without a LOT more traffic than you have now.  What other options are there?  Maybe sell monthly sponsorships on the blog?   Or sell ad blocks yourself?  What about ebooks?  White-papers?

The point is, now you’ve started to think about HOW you are going to reach your blogging goal of ‘to make some money’.  You are now thinking about WHAT you could sell to make money, whether it’s ads, sponsorships or products.

And that’s the whole point of a plan.  Most of us have a general idea of where we want to be, but we don’t know what the road looks like that we take to get there.  When you start creating a plan, then you start to understand why you need to do in order to reach your end destination.  It’s a big time-saver as well.

So first, let’s think about how to create a plan for our blog for 2013:

1 – Ask yourself what do you want to accomplish with your blog in 2013.  And at this point it is ok to DREAM BIG.  Maybe you want to make $10K from your blog next year, or maybe you want to land a book deal from your blog.  Give yourself permission to be honest about your dreams.

2 – Once you have a goal in mind for your blog in 2013, then start to break that goal down and think about what it’s going to take you to reach that goal.  We talked above about making money from your blog, but let’s say now your plan is to leverage your blog in order to get a book deal.  There’s two things you really need to focus on (assuming you are a first-time author) in order to help you get a book deal.  The first is a killer idea, and the second is a big platform.  Your blog can help you in both regards, you could use your blog as a platform for establishing your killer idea, and at the same time, if your idea really is killer, then your blog readership should grow as well.  So the blog becomes a way for you to flesh out and improve your killer idea, and at the same time, your following is growing, which appeals to publishers.

3 – Regularly evaluate and measure if your efforts are working.  Say once a month look at what’s happening and see if you are making satisfactory progress.  This is important not just to make sure everything is working, but to see if something is working well that you weren’t expecting.  Let’s say you are implementing a plan to make money from your blog in 2013.  As part of this, you are posting more content, and your readership is growing.  But in March, companies start contacting you asking if you would like to post a monthly column on their site, for $100 an article.  Suddenly this is a new opportunity for you to make money from blogging that you hadn’t considered before.

There’s some pointers to get help on how to create a blogging plan for 2013.  Need more advice?  Perfect, because this Sunday’s #Blogchat topic is creating a plan for your blog in 2013!  Please join us on Twitter at 8pm Central by following the #Blogchat hashtag!

I saw Ike Pigott mention on Facebook that Charter Cable was killing customer support via social media, especially Twitter:

“As you may have heard, Charter will no longer have a customer care team tasked, specifically, with resolving matters raised on Social Media…

Monday, December 10, 2012: We will no longer respond to posts that we discover while conducting Charter searches. We will, however, continue to respond to @Charter and @CharterCom mentions until Saturday, December 15th.

Friday, December 14, 2012 (5pm): All the Umatter2Charter accounts (which includes: @Charter, all our individual accounts, as well as the Umatter2Charter Facebook page, Forum accounts, and accounts on Consumer Advocate Sites) will be removed.”

I checked the responses on Twitter to the @Umatter2Charter Twitter account (oh the irony), and saw responses like this:

What I found interesting about the responses to @Umatter2Charter was that none of them were critical of the team on Twitter, in fact many customers stated that the customer support they received on Twitter was the only thing they liked about being a customer!

So why would Charter pull the plug on using social media as a customer service channel?  I am not a Charter customer, but my guess is that Charter wants to use social media as a channel to drive new customers, instead of providing customer service to existing ones.  So they likely see the team’s efforts on Twitter as a ‘waste’, even though as these tweets prove, Charter’s CS efforts on Twitter are actually improving the brand’s image.

But additionally, this likely speaks to the core problem that social media is not a contingency plan for having a shitty product.  This is also one of the points I hit on in Think Like A Rock Star, but the true value of connecting with your customers online isn’t as a sales channel, it’s as a feedback channel.  By closely analyzing feedback from your customers, you can not only get a better understanding of who they are and how you can help them,but your marketing efforts become much more effective and efficient.

Recently, I did a social media strategy audit for a client in the hotel industry.  As part of this, I looked at how their competitors were utilizing social media.   In general, what I found was that on Facebook, the walls of every brand were turned into an area where customers bitched about the service the brand had given them.  They bitched, the brand apologized and gave them an email of someone to contact, and that usually ended the exchange.  Occasionally, the customer would return to point out that the situation still hadn’t been resolved.  I can easily see how an out-of-touch brand could look at this and think ‘No matter what we do, customers will keep complaining, so let’s just kill Twitter and Facebook and spend that money on something else that we know works.  Like advertising!’

If Charter had told you that they were going to stop providing customer service via social media because they didn’t see the value in it, what advice would you have given them?