MackCollier.com

Archives for December 2012

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Randi Zuckerberg Just Reminded Us Why It’s Important to Understand Your Customers

If you use Facebook, you’ve been there.  Either you post a goofy picture that you THINK is only going to your ‘Close Friends’ and it ends up being shared with the world, or someone tags you in a photo that goes public when they didn’t intent it to.  It’s long been a problem for Facebook users, and it speaks to how incredibly convoluted and confusing the privacy settings are on the site.

Well yesterday, it seems Randi Zuckerberg, Mark’s sis, got stung as well.  She posted a pic of her family having wild reactions to seeing the Poke app on their smartphones.

She meant to post it privately to her Facebook wall, and that’s what she thought she was doing.  It turns out with the way her privacy settings are set, she apparently didn’t realize that her subscribers could see the pic.

And one of them did, and posted it on Twitter.  And then Randi went apeshit.  And then a LOT of people pointed out the irony that facebook’s privacy settings are so confusing that even Zuck’s sis can’t figure them out.  After much teeth-gnashing, finally this happened:

In social-media circles, we call this a ‘tone-deaf response’.  To be fair, we probably shouldn’t be sharing her photo, even if she did (unwittingly) make it public.  And I’ve shared it twice now on Facebook via articles that included it, so if that makes be an indecent human being, then I guess I’ll have to take the blame for that.

But I don’t think people are sharing Randi’s photo because they are indecent people that are trying to hurt or embarrass Randi.  I think they are sharing Randi’s photo to back up what they have been saying for a while now:  That Facebook’s privacy settings ARE damn confusing!

The big problem I have with Randi’s response is that she’s placing the blame on others for sharing her photo, and not on her brother for creating a site that has such confusing privacy settings.  By blaming others to the point of lecturing them on human decency, all she is doing fanning the flames of a her self-created firestorm, and making it obvious to Facebook’s users that she either doesn’t understand their concerns over the site’s privacy settings, or she doesn’t care.

On the other hand, if she had laughed this off with something like ‘Wow, guess it’s time to talk to my brother about making those privacy settings less confusing!’, it would have garnered her a lot of goodwill with FB users, and likely would have resulted in far less sharing of the photo.

Remember, it’s not the initial action that determines the social media crisis, it’s how you respond to it.

Again, I totally get why Randi is upset about her photo being shared when she didn’t want it to be.  But I don’t think she understands why people are sharing it, and that’s where the disconnect lies.

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How to Make Your WordPress Blog Mobile-Friendly In Less Than 60 Seconds

Oh how I love quick and easy solutions!  I’ve been meaning to make a mobile-friendly version of this blog for a while now, and it just stayed buried on my To-Do list.  Then a couple of weeks ago I was out and I checked Facebook on my iPhone and someone linked to a post that Peter Shankman wrote.  I pulled it up on my iPhone and what I loved was the site was optimized for a smartphone!  It just served up the post, not the entire site, so it was much easier to read on my iPhone!

Then earlier this month I saw someone mention WPTouch as a plugin that optimizes your blog for viewing on smartphones, and I decided to check it out.  First, here’s what this blog looked like on my iPhone before I added the plugin:

Yeah you’re not reading that without some serious pinchin’ & zoomin.  So I went and installed the WPTouch plugin, and less than a minute later, here’s what the blog looked like on my iPhone:

MUCH better!  Now you clearly see the headline, date, plus number of comments!  Same content, but it’s been optimized to improve viewing on a mobile device.  I went in and changed it to show the full post title and this is what that looked like:

I like that a bit better!  And if you click on one of the posts, here’s what it looks like on your iPhone:

So much prettier than before!  If you want to add WPTouch to your own WordPress blog and make it mobile, it could NOT be easier:

1 – Log into your WordPress dashboard.

2 – Click on Plugins

3 – Search for WPTouch

4 – Install it

5 – Activate it

You’re done!  60 seconds, tops, you can probably do it in closer to 30 seconds.  Then you can go in and edit some of the features as I did.  It will be interesting to see if my mobile traffic, especially from iPhones, increases any.  See, you get the best tips and tricks at #Blogchat 😉

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A Case Study in How Your Blog’s Traffic Stats Can Fool You

I’ve been blogging since 2005, and in those last 7 years, I’ve learned that every year my blog’s traffic begins to fall off around the 12th or 13th of December.  Every year without fail.

But it turns out that last week was the 3rd best traffic week ever here.  What’s really interesting is that the first two weeks were driven by a spike one day due to a particular post, and then the traffic died down the rest of the week.  But as you can see, traffic here last week was high every day:

So I was excited about that, but as I said, I know that in the past traffic for the blog typically starts falling by now.  So I decided to do some digging into traffic sources to see what was going on.  Here was my first clue that something was amiss:

That’s my search traffic here over the last 7 days.  As you can see, the high point was Monday the 10th, and then it starts dropping.  That is the pattern I expected to see with the blog’s overall traffic as well.  So if Search traffic is acting normally for this time of year, and overall traffic is still up, that must mean that there’s another source of traffic that’s making up the difference.

So next, let’s look at the top traffic sources here over the last 7 days:

Another ‘A-Ha!’ moment.  The #2 source of traffic to this blog over the last 7 days was Paper.Li.  That’s a referral source that I haven’t had in past years, so that helps explain why overall traffic isn’t falling yet like it typically does this time in December.  It seems that the boost from Paper.Li is making up for the fall in search traffic, which is typically 50-60% of my traffic here.

So at this point it’s safe to assume that the traffic I am getting from Paper.Li is coming from The #Blogchat Weekly that I set up, right?  Well, not exactly.  In fact, let’s look at the traffic that Paper.Li has sent here over the last 7 days:

What the hell?!?  From Monday to Thursday, Paper.Li sent about 20 visitors a day here, but from Friday to Sunday, it sent over 250 visitors a day!  That explains why traffic was up Friday-Sunday, when typically traffic on those 3 days is the lowest of the week.

But why the surge starting on Friday?  Because on those days, Paper.Li added a small band at the top of every Paper.Li page that encouraged users to join #Blogchat, gave them the topic, and a link back here.  Additionally, this is a wonderfully smart move on the part of Paper.Li as this month’s #Blogchat sponsor because they understand that the more they can do to help me, the more I will do to help them.  BTW, did you know they are currently offering a month of free Pro service with no credit card required? 😉

So as you can see, never assume when it comes to your blog’s stats.  If I had simply looked at overall traffic, I would have assumed that traffic for this week will be high as well.  But since I did some digging and saw search was starting to fall, I can assume that will continue and as a result, overall traffic this week will be down.  The point is, it pays to understand how your site’s traffic is influenced by multiple sources, because once you understand that, you have a better understanding of the overall health of your blog.

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The One Thing You Can Do Now to Help Your Blog Succeed in 2013

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!

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Charter Cable Kills Customer Support Via Social Media

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?

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Why It Took Me Six Years to Write Think Like A Rock Star

In 2008, I attended my first ‘social media’ event, South By Southwest.  At one point I was chatting with Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba, and we were talking social media and the state of the blossoming industry.  I remember specifically telling them that while social media was great, that the future of marketing was what they were doing, showing companies the power of connecting with and empowering their fans.

I believe that even more four years later.  You won’t find the future of marketing in tools and technology, you will find it in your fans.

In 2005 I began blogging at Beyond Madison Avenue.  It’s a blog that’s undergone many transformations and now looks nothing like it did from 2005-2007 when I was actively blogging there.  A year later in 2006 I started blogging at The Viral Garden, then in 2009 I moved my semi-regularly blogging here.

But in 2005 and 2006 I blogged extensively about two seemingly (at the time) divergent themes: Music-marketing and online community-building.  Oh I blogged about a lot of the same things I do now, the latest news in the social media marketing space, how companies can better use these tools to connect with customers, etc.  But the posts that excited me the most were the ones where I detailed how a particular rock star was connecting with their fans, or how a particular company was building an online community.

The problem was, no one seemed to care.  I could write a post about the latest example of how Company A is using Twitter to connect with customers, and get dozens of comments and RTs.  But if I wrote about how this rock star was leveraging digital technologies to connect with her fans, there were no comments, no emails, no response.  If I wrote about how companies could and should embrace and empower their fans, nothing, but the next post I’d write on Five Steps to Getting More ReTweets would get 33 comments and 87 RTs.

It honestly pissed the shit out of me.  Sure, I get that people want to learn how to get more RTs or subscribers or whatever, and if I can help them learn how to do that more effectively, I am happy to do so.  But I was (and continue to be) passionately in love with the idea of helping companies embrace and empower their fans to be something amazing.  And it honestly broke my heart that other people didn’t seem to be as excited about this idea as I was.

At some point in 2008, I realized there were only two possibilities for why these posts weren’t getting any feedback or interest:

1 – The idea that companies can benefit from connecting with their fans just isn’t an idea that has merit.

2 – The idea has merit, but I wasn’t explaining it so that companies could see the value of the idea.

I am extremely stubborn, so I decided that it was #2.  I kept fleshing out my ideas and toying with ways to make them more appealing to companies.  What was the ‘hook’ that I could give companies to make them see the value in connecting with their fans?

In 2009, Scott Schablow asked me to speak at Social South in Birmingham.  I said yes, and when he asked for a topic my first thought was that it needs to be something standard like ‘Five Ways a Business Blog Can Benefit Your Company’ or something straightforward like that.

But then I got an idea: What if I took these two themes I was passionate about (how rock stars embrace their fans and how companies can use social media to connect with their customers), and combined them into one presentation?  The result was What Rock Stars Can Teach You About Kicking Ass With Social Media.  I was honestly scared to death about what the reaction to this presentation would be.  Sure, it was one thing to post about this stuff on a blog and get no response, but if I did a presentation and no one showed up, it would be a pretty big indictment against the idea itself.

Instead, I had a standing-room-only crowd for the session, and there was a ring of people standing up against the wall of the room.  I cannot tell you how rewarding it was to see people finally see the value of this idea as I had!

The problem wasn’t the idea, it was how I was presenting the idea.  Before when I talked about how rock stars connect with their fans, people that worked for companies dismissed these posts because well…they weren’t rock stars, so it was hard for them to see the significance.  When I talked about how companies should connect with their brand evangelists, it didn’t resonate because most companies had no idea how to do that.  And even if I tried to explain the process, they couldn’t visualize the benefit because they didn’t have a reference point that inspired them to take action.

But when I married the two ideas, they became something more.  Companies can’t always see the value of cultivating brand evangelists, but if you talk to them about how they can have raving fans like rock stars do, suddenly they perk up because you’ve given them a reference point that they understand.  The rock star analogy was the ‘hook’ that got people to pay attention to the larger idea: The value that brands can create for themselves by embracing and empowering their fans.  I started showing people how rock stars benefited from connecting with their fans.  Then I showed them how other companies just like their own are applying these same lessons to cultivate fans just like rock stars do.

The idea resonated when I started putting it in terms that companies could understand and that they saw the value in.  After another year or so of fleshing out the ideas behind Think Like A Rock Star, I decided it was ready to present to publishers.  Over the course of about 12 months my agent and I pitched the book idea to over 30 publishers.  Finally, McGraw-Hill said yes, and my editor Casey Ebro immediately ‘got’ why the idea behind the book was so powerful.  And thanks to her and amazing help from Kathy Sierra, I’ve continued to build the ideas this year and the book has become a complete tutorial and framework for how brands can not only connect with their biggest fans, but how they can transform (step by step) into a truly fan-centric company.

The point in all this is, if you truly love an idea, don’t give up on it.  I didn’t write Think Like A Rock Star because I wanted to speak more or make money, those will hopefully be happy byproducts.  I wrote it because I believe in the power of an idea.  The idea that your brand isn’t the rock star, your fans are.

I don’t know what idea you are in love with, but I do know this:  If you truly love your idea, then you owe it to us, and yourself, to not give up on it.

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The 80/20 Rule is Alive and Well in #Blogchat

I honestly don’t spend a lot of time diving into the stats and numbers behind how people are participating in #Blogchat, because ‘what gets measured gets managed’ too often.  But I decided to check out the numbers this week since Paper.Li is on as sponsor for December.

What I thought was interesting was that almost exactly 80% of the tweets came from the top 20% of the contributors.  There were a total of 250 contributors to the #blogchat hashtag last night.  Of those:

The Top 10 contributors accounted for 34% of the tweets.  That means the top 4% of the contributors were responsible for over a third of the tweets.

(Sidenote:  I was the top overall contributor, and accounted for roughly 5% of the total tweets.  Lesson:  It pays to be an active member of any online community you are trying to grow.)

Past that, the Top 20 contributors accounted for approximately 51% of the tweets.

The Top 50 accounted for 79% of the tweets.  Since there were 250 contributors, that means that 20% of the contributors created 79% of the tweets.

In other words, 80% of the content is being created by 20% of the people.  Those Top 50 contributors have a HUGE impact on the entire flow and tone of the larger conversation taking place.  Again, it’s no accident that I was the top contributor because when I take an active role in participating in the #blogchat conversation, I have more control over shaping that conversation.

This is exactly why I constantly harp on the need for brands to actively participate in the online conversation around their brand.  That conversation will happen with or without your brand, so why wouldn’t you want to take an active role in that conversation, and as a result have more control over its flow and tone?

So if you are trying to build an online community, remember to always think about how you can reward the behavior you are trying to encourage.  For example, there’s a couple of things I want to encourage each week with #Blogchat:

1 – Great conversations.  So I try to respond to every reply I get, plus I am constantly asking everyone questions about the topic at hand to get them engaging with me and everyone else.  Plus, I will scan the tweets and see when others are making points, and I will ask them to expound on their point, or maybe I will offer a counter-point.  The bottom line is that there are a lot of smart people in #Blogchat, and it’s up to me to find ways to get them to share what they know.

2 – Participation by newbies.  I will be the first to admit that I never see about 90% of the tweets in #blogchat.  There’s simply too much happening, look at the transcript, there were over 2,000 tweets.  At best, I could see 300-400 of those.  But if I ever see someone tweet that it’s their first time joining #Blogchat, I will always reply to them and thank them for coming.  Because what better way to encourage someone to keep participating in a chat than by responding to their first tweet in the chat?  And I am constantly asking other #blogchat regulars to please welcome new contributors, and to help them with any questions they have.  I cannot tell you how awesome it is to see 2-3 other #Blogchat regulars welcome a newbie before I can even reply to them 😉

If you have started a Twitter chat or a Facebook group or a message board, have you seen similar stats as far as contributors?  What have you done to reward engagement within your community?