MackCollier.com

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How to set up Google Alerts for your business or company in 5 minutes!

If your company is looking for advice on getting started with social media, one of the first things you will likely hear is to start monitoring your company and brand.  And you’ll probably hear that you should ‘Set up Google Alerts for company and business mentions’.

But what if you have no idea what that means?  Then read on, as I’ll walk you through what is a very simple, but very beneficial process for your business.

First, you can set up Google Alerts through several different search sources, but for the purposes of this post, I wanted to focus on Google Blog Search.  If you click on that link, you’ll be taken to a page that looks very similar to this:

Now, I want to search just for mentions of my name, so I search for “Mack Collier”.  This is a very fundamental search tip, but by putting Mack Collier in quotation marks, Google Blog Search will give me results that include the exact phrase ‘Mack Collier’.  Where if I searched for simply Mack Collier, it would show me all results that included the words ‘Mack’ and ‘Collier’.  So if you know you want to search for an exact phrase, put the query in quotation marks, and you’ll get much better results.  Here’s what the screen looks like now:

That might be a bit hard to see, but notice that at the very top of the results, Google adds this site, as well as my other blog, The Viral Garden!  But if you scroll down to the end of the first page of results, you find this:

Ah ha!  Now we’re cookin’!  That gives me the option to take those results and create an email alert (This is normally what people mean by a ‘Google Alert’) for the results, or I can search Google News for the same term, add a blog search gadget to my Google homepage, or (and this is the one I like), subscribe to the results via Google Reader.

Let’s first look at creating an email alert for this term, when I click on Create an email alert for “Mack Collier”, I see this:

On the right, you see a box with 5 different input windows.

The first is for the term you want to create the alert for.

The second box is a dropdown menu where you select the source you want the results to come from.  The choices are ‘Everything’, ‘News’, ‘Blogs’, ‘Video’, and ‘Discussions’.

The third box is another dropdown menu where you tell Google how often you want it to email you results.  Your options are ‘As it happens’, ‘Once a day’, and ‘Once a week’.

The fourth box is where you set the length of the email, and your options are 10 or 50 results.  Keep in mind that if you are getting a decent amount of results for your search term, you may need to get more frequent email updates in order to catch all the results.  For example, if you want to set an email alert for the term ‘iPad’, and you only want to see 10 results per email AND you only want to get one email a week, well you are going to miss a LOT of results.

The fifth and final box is where you specify what email address you want the results set to, or if you want them set to a feed.  We’ll cover subbing to results via a feed in a moment.

Set the options you want, and you’ve just created your first Google email alert!  Piece of cake, right?  At first, you’ll probably start out by just searching for your company name.  But quickly, you’ll probably want to branch out and create email alerts for specific products you sell, or maybe key executives.  Then you might want to start getting alerts for your competitors as well.

Then one day you realize your inbox is under attack from all these freakin’ email alerts!!!

Is there a better way?  I think so, it’s called subscribing to these results via feed.

So how do you do that?  First, sign up for Google Reader (which is free, but you’ll need a gmail account, which is also free).

Now remember when we searched for “Mack Collier”, and one of the options at the bottom of the page was ‘Subscribe to a blog feed for “Mack Collier” in Google Reader’?  That’s what we want to do now, instead of creating an email alert.  What this will do is send the results for the term “Mack Collier” directly to my Google Reader, as they happen.

When I click on ‘Subscribe to a blog feed for “Mack Collier”‘, the search results then are shown in Google Reader, and reader asks me if I want to subscribe to these results:

That’s it!  Then as new results come in for that search terms, the feed results in Google Reader will show up in bold.  Here’s a screenshot of my Reader and some of the blogs I am subscribed to:

Note that some of the feeds are in bold, and these have a number after them. Such as Servant of Chaos (2).  That tells me that since Servant of Chaos is in bold, that there are new entries from that blog that I haven’t read yet.  And the (2) tells me that there are 2 posts that I haven’t read yet.

Once you become familiar with Reader you’ll really love it, I think.  You can not only have your alerts sent there, but of course you can subscribe to blogs and read them there as well.

Now as a monitoring tool for your company, what type of alerts should you set up?  I think your focus should be on three areas:

1 – Company-centric search terms.  Such as your company name, prominent products and brands, as well as key executives.

2 – Competitor-centric search terms.  Same as above, but for your top 2-3 direct competitors.

3 – Industry-specific terms.  Use this as a way to get a sense of trends in your industry.

Also keep in mind that with Reader, you can create separate folders for each of these areas, in order to better organize your efforts.

Does this post help?  I just know that so often we mention ‘oh just set up Google Alerts’, but to companies that are new to all this social media stuff, they may have no idea what a Google Alert is, or how to set one up.

So now you do 😉

BTW I am constantly writing Social Media How-To posts like this, so if you’d like to make sure you always get my updates, please consider subscribing!  Thank you!

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Overcoming the curse of Hi-Res Blogging

Kathy Sierra has often talked about the idea of Hi-Res learning.  The idea being, as you learn more about a topic, you begin to see and notice things that people that are new to the topic, overlook.  For example, if you are an architect, you notice the lines of a building, the characteristics that define the structure in certain ways.  While all I notice are 4 walls and a roof.

And after almost 5 years, I think I could qualify myself as a ‘hi-res blogger’.  But that’s often a problem for me, and the actual blogging process is much more difficult for me than it was when I started.  The reason why is that I now KNOW what a good post and a good post title should look like.  I know (usually) when a post I’ve written will be valuable to the reader, and when it might not be.  So I am finding that the biggest problem I have in blogging isn’t writer’s block, it’s in writing posts that are ‘good enough’ and that I feel will be valuable to you guys.  So often I get an idea for a post, but once I start fleshing out the post, I realize that I can’t make it worth your time, so I scrap it.

But I’m trying to get better about fighting through this and actually making drafts work, instead of abandoning them.  Since some of you might be facing the same roadblocks, I decided to share what has worked for me.

1 – Put a new spin on an old idea.  A couple of weeks ago I wrote this post on why Lady Gaga has fans, and you don’t.  The post has gotten more RTs than any post I’ve ever written here, and it easily has the most views of any post I’ve written in the last month, and is in the Top 5 for all-time here.  And I came THIS close to not publishing it.  The actual ideas in that post are ones that I’ve written about several times.  In fact, the first dozen or so posts I wrote for The Viral Garden back in early 2006 focused on the same concepts.  I knew these were smart ideas, but when I blogged about them previously, they got a polite golf-clap of a response.

But by attaching the ultra-popular Lady Gaga to the ideas, and tying it into the rockstar metaphor of customers/fans, the idea took off.  Gaga’s name in the title got people’s attention, and that got them to pay attention to the ideas.  And I got more compliments on that post that any other in the last few weeks.  So I guess another lesson here is, don’t give up on an idea whose time has come.

2 – Pull back the curtain.  One of the things I love doing is sharing with you what I am learning here from my own blog.  I do this because I think it has value for you, PLUS, it communicates the point that even experienced bloggers don’t have all the answers.  This was exactly why I wanted to share the results of my one-day Twitter experiment with you, and then the results for the entire week.  And yes, I get that a lot of bloggers don’t like to share their numbers.  Look, I get that many bloggers have bigger numbers that I do. Who cares?  What’s important to me is, can I share my numbers with YOU, and help you improve your own blogging efforts?  If I think the answer is yes, I run with it.

3 – Let your readers bail you out.  This is one of the best blogging lessons I ever learned.  Often, I will have an idea for a post, and realize that I’m not confident enough in the issue to take a stand on either side.  If this is the case, instead of scrapping the post till I can, I will try to post it and ask my readers what THEY think.  Great way to let your readers claim ownership over the content of your blog AND their ideas are usually better than any you could have come up with.  At least they are if your readers are as smart as you guys 😉

4 – Let a popular post breathe. Ideally, I would have a new post up every day from Monday through Friday.  But that’s REALLY tough for me to do.  And sometimes when Wednesday morning comes around (like today), and it’s 8 am and I am trying to get up a post for the day, I’ll notice something.  That post from Tuesday has sparked a vibrant conversation and is still getting comments and RTs.  So if I don’t have a great post idea for Wednesday, then wait till Thursday to post again, and do your best to keep the conversation flowing on that post from Wednesday.

5 – Sometimes you just have to post it.  How often has this happened to you; The post you spend a week carefully crafting gets almost no response, but the post you pecked out in 5 mins after waking up at 3am from insomnia, THAT thing gets 30 comments.  Sometimes we overthink this blogging stuff.  I often do my best writing after midnight, and I think part of the reason why is I just let the words flow out and don’t worry so much about the ‘filters’ that they pass through.  The chips fall where they may, and a lot of my best blogging work has come about this way.

But for you, which is your bigger problem; writer’s block, or not writing posts that are ‘good enough’ for your readers?  For me, it’s the latter, I can get post ideas, but I often struggle to turn those ideas into something that I think has value for y’all.

Which is your bigger problem area?

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The next evolution of social media for business is…

Two weeks from today I’ll be at Dell’s world headquarters in Round Rock, Texas. (Disclosure: Dell is a client) Part of the reason why I’ll be there will be to moderate and help facilitate an event called CAP Days.  CAP stands for Customer Advisory Panel, and on the 15th and 17th, Dell will be bringing in 30 of its most passionate customers, 15 of them on the 15th, and another 15 of them on the 17th.  These are customers that are actively engaged in social media, whether it’s as bloggers, or on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or other sites.  On both days, Dell will be meeting with these customers during sessions that will run throughout the day in an effort to get to know them, and learn more about their opinions of Dell.

Here’s the twist that makes this event so interesting to me; The 15 customers Dell will meet on the 15th are customers that have issues with Dell, and want to voice those issues to the company.  The 15 customers Dell will meet on the 17th are evangelists of the company.  So over the course of 2 days, Dell will be meeting with 30 of its most passionate customers, from both ends of the spectrum.  I think this event is also an example of the next evolution of social media for companies.

Connecting with customers to improve both product and marketing development.

If you think about it, this is a natural progression of social media usage for a company.  They might start out blogging, maybe using Facebook, primarily as tools to ‘get their message out’.  But along the way, they begin to interact with customers, and see the value in those interactions.  Then maybe they’ll start using Twitter and encourage their employees to as well.  Maybe more of their employees will start blogging, or individual departments/areas of the business will.

Eventually, and simply as a byproduct of being comfortable using these tools to interact with customers, the company will want to reach out directly to their customers in an effort to better understand them.  This is where I think the ‘magic’ starts to happen, because when the company starts making a sincere effort to connect with the customer via social media, they get a much better understanding of where the customer is coming from.  And vice versa, the customer begins to better understand the company, which means both sides lower their ‘guard’ a bit, and more open communication is the result.  The customers begin to see their actual fingerprints on the company’s marketing and communication efforts, which will make them far more effective.

I think this is a natural progression of how you’ll see companies, especially big companies such as Dell, using social media.  I also think if a company can reach this point in their social media usage, that they’ll have reached the point where they can see huge improvements to their product development, and marketing efficiencies.  Simply connecting with customers and communicating to them that you WANT to connect with them, will go a long way toward lowering the communication barriers between both groups.

So I’m pretty excited to be involved in CAP Days, and hope to see more examples in the coming months of companies trying to use social media to establish deeper connections with their customers.  BTW if you will be in the Austin area next month, Dell will be having a tweetup/meetup on the 16th.  I’ll be there, as will several members of Dell’s team that are putting CAP Days on, and hopefully some of the CAP Days participants as well.  I don’t believe the location and time have been nailed down, so make sure you are following Richard, Lionel and Vance on Twitter to get the latest updates!  Hope to see you there!

Pic via Flickr user Lance Shields

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Here’s how you can help me

If you’ve read my writings for any amount of time, you know I love the rockstar metaphor as it applies to how companies can have fans as opposed to customers.  And I’m a big fan of how @amandapalmer connects with her fans and leverages those connections to grow her brand.  Yesterday I found this interview with her, and noted this section where she talks about musicians making money:

I think asking for money is generally considered shameful in the art and music world; it has been for ages. Art has this untouchable romanticism constructed around it; this cultural ideal about artists and how they shouldn’t touch money because it strips away the integrity of their art. But that’s obviously bullshit, especially if you look throughout history and see that artists have ALWAYS needed to fund themselves and their work creatively, sneakily, with gusto and with shamelessness. The only mistake I think I’ve made is not making the connection sooner. I think I was still living in the delusion back when we signed. Living inside this idea that we, as major-label-artists, would get to live on the Special Cloud of Art without Commerce. If I’d been thinking ahead, I would have been training and educating our audience from the very start to support us directly.

In reading that, do you see any parallels to bloggers/etc making money off social media? I sure do.  I think this is one of the biggest roadblocks for many of us that are active in social media: The fear of self-promotion.  Just in discussing the results of last week’s Twitter engagement experiment with others, so many people have told me that they never thought to tweet their new posts to Twitter, or that they could never do it more than once.

Folks I was tweeting a link to each day’s post 4-5 times every day on Twitter.  Not one person said a word about it.  Now I’m not saying that we should all suddenly turn into pimp machines for our content and brands, but I do think we need to get over some of our hangups about self-promotion.  We need to learn to ask for help, because most times our readers and the friends we have connected with WANT to help us.

So I want to practice what I preach, and do that here.  Here are some ways that you can help me, and I would really appreciate if you did:

1 – Hire me to help you with your social media efforts.  Or if you don’t need help right now, refer me to a friend or colleague that does.  If you need help creating and executing a comprehensive social media strategy, launching a blog or Twitter presence, or just need someone to look over your shoulder from time to time, I can help.  No matter how much help you need, or how little your budget is, I can find a way to work with you.  If you do, please email me at mack.collier@gmail.com.

2 – If you’ve been thinking about starting a blog, ‘Just Do It’.  My friend Lisa Petrilli finally pulled the trigger on her blog last week, and her results have been nothing short of amazing.  In fact, her very personal post from today about asking a stranger for help partially inspired this post.

3 – When you learn something, share it with us. Every time I write a post where I share this blog’s stats, or where I talk openly about my prices, I get two types of reactions.  The first group is grateful that I gave them a ‘behind the scenes’ look at exactly what I did, and that it helped them understand the process.  The second group is stunned that I ‘shared the numbers’, and wonder if I made a mistake in doing so.  Guys, I understand completely that a lot of people looked at my posts from last week and thought ‘Whoa!  So Mack’s only getting that many visitors a day? I get more than that!’  Of course they do, so what?  If sharing my stats with you helps you understand exactly what I did AND helps you with YOUR blogging efforts, then I could care less who knows what my numbers are.  I’d rather be spending my time helping you, than worrying over who might have more visitors than I do.

4 – If you get value from my posts, please share them with others.  You can do this in two ways.  The first is by simply sharing the content itself with others, by forwarding it, RTing it to your Twitter network, or even emailing the posts to friends.  The second is by taking what you’ve learned here, and using it to help your own blogging efforts.  This is what excites me, if I can help you become a better blogger or better use social media to create value for others.

5 – Start the next #blogchat.  This week we had over 3,000 tweets and over 350 active contributors to #blogchat.  Both marks were records, almost doubling the previous marks.  Starting #blogchat has been one of the most rewarding endeavors of my social media career.  Think about some ways that you could create something that can help others, and run with it.  Then tell me about your efforts so I can tweet it to my friends 😉

6 – If you are ever at an event where I am attending/speaking, please find me.  Let me know that you read my posts, so I can shake your hand and tell you how grateful I am for you.  I’m dead serious here.

Those are some ways that you can help me.  Actually, there’s one more way you can help me: You can write this same post on YOUR blog. Tell your readers how they can help you, and my guess is they will be more than happy to.

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How Twitter increased my blog’s traffic by 300% in one week

As I blogged about on Tuesday, last Monday I spent a lot of time on Twitter, in an effort to see if my increased activity there, would boost traffic and engagement here.  I was very encouraged by the results I saw, so I decided to extend the experiment to the entire week.

Now that the week is over, I wanted to share with you what I learned.

First, I wanted to boost my activity on Twitter in two ways.  The first way was by sharing links on Twitter during the morning, from around 7am-9 or 10am each morning from Monday through Friday.  To help streamline this process, I used HootSuite to schedule tweets ahead of time, normally the day before.  Now the first time I did this was last Saturday (for Monday’s tweets), and it took almost 3 hours.  But by the end of last week, I had become better at the process, and that time was down to about 60-90 mins a day.

The second way I wanted to boost my activity on Twitter was by simply engaging in more conversations.  I have been on Twitter for 3 years now, and one constant has been that when I am on Twitter and talking to other people, I gain followers.  So along with sharing other links, I wanted to interact with others.

Now as part of sharing links, I also shared my own posts here.  Every day I would carefully schedule links to my post for that day.  On Monday, I tweeted the link to Monday’s post five times, the first was at 8am, and the fifth time was at 8pm, with 3 hour gaps inbetween.  For the rest of the week I trimmed that back to 4 times a day, and I think for this week I will try 3 a day.

Another key thing I wanted to know was, would tweeting links to OTHER people’s sites, and simply interacting on Twitter, would that alone be enough to drive traffic back here and to increase engagement.  This was difficult to track accurately, but I believe the answer is ‘yes’.  On every day I tweeted my first link to that day’s post at 8am (On Friday I did it at 9am).  But I started sharing links each day right at 7am.

What I noticed every day is that as soon as I stared sharing OTHER people’s links on Twitter, my traffic HERE went up.  Now part of that is no doubt simply a factor of people waking up and visiting blog’s more from 6am to 7am.  But on Monday (the first day of the experiment), this jump was especially pronounced, as I had 4 visitors in the 6am hour, and 38 visitors in the 7am hour, when I started sharing links.

Anyway what were the numbers?!?

Ok.  First, here’s how my blog did from May 9th-15th the week BEFORE I ramped up activity on Twitter last week:

# of posts for the week – 4

Average Traffic per day – 168 visitors

Average ReTweets per post – 59

Average Comments per post – 12

Average new Twitter followers per day – 37

Total new Email Subscribers for the week – 3

Now here’s the results from last week, and the % change:

#of posts for the week – 5 (25% increase)

Average traffic per day – 647 (285% increase)

Average ReTweets per post – 82 (39% increase)

Average Comments per post – 26 (117% increase)

Average New Twitter followers per day – 38 (2.7% increase)

Total new Email Subscribers for the week – 29 (867% increase)

Now here are some random observations:

1 – Starting on Tuesday, I began to notice that some of the bloggers I had tweeted links to on Monday and Tuesday, began to thank me publicly on Twitter, and began to RT *my* links.  No doubt part of this was their way of saying ‘Thank You’ for my RTing their posts, but also I think it helped get me on people’s radar.  When someone sees me RT a post of their’s, they probably thought ‘Hey that’s right I haven’t checked out Mack’s site in a while, let me see what he’s up to’.

2 – Once or twice a day, I noticed someone tweeting a link to a post I had written a few weeks ago, or a few months ago.  These people were normally Twitter users that I didn’t remember interacting with before.  This suggests to me that they had just discovered this site, and in doing some digging around, uncovered an older post they enjoyed, so they linked to it.

3 – I got multiple emails every day from people wanting to connect with me, either to have me write something for them, to do consulting work for them, one publisher even contacted me about possibly writing a book for them.  I would say the volume of these emails was up about 500% at least over last week.  I am sure this was a byproduct of my activity on Twitter, and by extension, the increased traffic and engagement here.

4 – Momentum is huge.  Look at the traffic for Saturday the 15th (no posts that day and a week before last week’s experiment).  I got 146 visitors that day(which over the lifetime of this blog, is pretty good for a Saturday).  Now look at the fact that I got 198 visitors yesterday, again with no new post that day.  That’s a 36% increase, and it no doubt comes from all the increased traffic and interaction here LAST week.

5 – Email subscribers increased by almost 900% last week.  But I think this was mostly because of two key changes I made her on the blog.  First, last Sunday I moved the email subscription to top of the sidebar, so it’s the first thing you see on the sidebars.  Then at the end of every post I ran last week, I asked readers to please subscribe to the blog.  I’m sure both of these tactics are a big reason for the huge jump in email subscribers.

6 – My number of Twitter followers per day only increased by one last week.  But my guess is if you have a smaller number of followers that you would see a bigger gain from employing a similar strategy.

Now let’s break down what happened each day with the traffic here:

Here’s the hourly traffic for Monday:

The hours marked 1,2,3,4 and 5 are when I linked to Monday’s post on Twitter.  Notice the traffic spike from 6am to 7am.  At 7am I started linking to OTHER people’s posts.  Then at 8am I linked to MY post for the first time that day.  Notice the 5 big spikes for the day were all during hours where I linked to my post.

Also, notice how traffic is steady from 7am – 3pm, even in the hours when I wasn’t linking to my post.  I think this is mostly because during those hours I was active on Twitter, either linking to other people’s posts, or interacting with people on Twitter.  I think that interaction drove traffic back here.

Now let’s look at Tuesday’s hourly traffic:

For Tuesday I only linked to that day’s post here 4 times (the hours that are numbered in red), still starting at 8am and ending at 8pm.

The big difference in Tuesday’s traffic versus Monday’s is that the two biggest traffic spikes did NOT come during hours where I linked to my post, but in hours where SOMEONE ELSE linked to my post.  As I mentioned above, by Tuesday some of the people I had linked to earlier in the week, started RTing my posts.  I believe the spike at 11am actually came from Jay Baer RTing my post.  This is where you begin to see momentum becoming a factor.   I think you can also see this in the fact that there wasn’t a drop in traffic at the end of the day like there was on Monday.

I forgot to take a screenshot of the hourly traffic on Weds (sorry guys!)  So let’s move on to Thurs (hours I linked to my post marked in red):

In looking at Thursday’s traffic notice two things:

1 – Again, the biggest hour for traffic was NOT when I linked to one of my posts.  For Thursday the biggest hour was 3pm when @Brett from Mashable linked to my Lady Gaga post from Weds.

2 – Notice the spikes appear a bit less pronounced.  This is mainly because traffic during the 7am-8pm hours was around 40 or more, whereas in previous days it was 20 or more.  Again, momentum seems to be coming into play here.

Finally, let’s look at Friday’s hourly traffic (hours I linked to my post marked in red):

Overall, traffic for the day was down, but hey, it’s Friday.  Notice again, five hours had spikes, and two of them weren’t hours in which I linked to my post.  So I think we can see a trend here, on Monday it took me linking to my own posts to move the traffic needle, but by the end of the week, my Twitter network was helping me RT my posts, and they were creating traffic spikes as well.  This is a big reason why starting Monday I am going to scale back to linking to my posts three times a day, instead of 4.

And finally, here’s the daily traffic for the last month, with Monday through Friday being the last five days on this graph:

That jump at the end of the graph tells the story, doesn’t it?

And I know some of you might be thinking ‘Yeah Mack, but you have 20,000 followers on Twitter, so no wonder you had great results!’  True, I have a lot of followers, and I love them to death.  But you don’t have to have as many followers as I do to get success from engaging on Twitter.  Look at what Lisa Petrilli did in her FIRST week of blogging.   Her first two posts averaged over 125 RTs and 75 comments each.  That easily bests what I saw last week AND, she ‘only’ has 2,700 or so followers.  But Lisa is very engaged with her Twitter network, so that network helped her get the word out about her posts.  Plus the fact that both posts were amazing didn’t hurt 😉

The point is, even if you only have 100 followers, you can still leverage Twitter as a tool to build your blog IF you are active on Twitter.  Active interacting with others, engaging in conversations, and linking to valuable content.

As a matter of fact, we’ll be discussing strategies for using Twitter to grow your blog at tonite’s #blogchat on Twitter.  See you there at 8pm Central?

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A big secret to social media success that most companies miss

If you think about it, a lot of the ‘best practices’ for using social media can seem completely counterintuitive to companies that are new to these tools.  Take linking, for example.  On the surface, the process sounds absurd: I’m spending time every day as a social media consultant purposely promoting what OTHER people are writing, doing and saying about social media.  And what’s worse, I’m using this as a strategy to increase my OWN exposure!

How many companies would balk if you suggested that they promote their competitors, and as a way to promote YOUR company?

But funnily enough, it works amazingly well.  Here’s why:

1 – As I am sharing valuable links, more people will start paying attention to me, and even following me as a result.  They share my links with THEIR networks as well, which means more exposure and followers for me.

2 – This means more people will want to find out more about me, and will check out my site.  This means more traffic for me, and more exposure for me.  BTW it also means that when I share a link to one of MY posts, that it will get more traffic and exposure!

3 – The people that I am linking to see that I am sending all these RTs and traffic to their site, and they are grateful.  That in turn makes them more likely to promote ME in return.  Which means more followers and more traffic and more exposure for me.

4 – By sharing valuable content, I can become a TRUSTED source of information.  This makes people more likely to promote me to their networks.  Which means even more followers and traffic and exposure for me.

And now that you’ve gotten to the end, I can give you my REAL reason for adopting this strategy: I want to create value for others.  That’s the TOP goal, because I know if I am creating value for others by pointing them toward writings by other people that HELP them with their own social media efforts, I win.  Creating value is the DIRECT goal, because I know if I will do that, I will benefit INdirectly.  And it works beautifully.

More people will follow me because I am sharing valuable links.

More people will trust me because I am sharing valuable content that OTHER people are creating.

More people will be grateful for those links, and be more likely to link TO ME.

More people will be grateful for those links, and want to check out my site.

So in the end by promoting OTHER people, even competitors, I get more followers, more links, more traffic, and more exposure.

Whole process sounds completely insane, doesn’t it? 😉

PS: I will have data to back up the effectiveness of this strategy in a post on Sunday, be watching for it!

BTW if you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing so you can have posts from this blog sent to your reader for free! Or if you would rather have posts emailed to you, please enter your email in the Feedburner email form above. I will never share your email with anyone! Thank you!

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I threw a (Twitter) party and all these strangers showed up…

A fascinating series of conversations (and a couple of arguments) sprung up on Twitter last nite about managing your followers.  Some people, like my good friend Beth Harte are considering ‘resetting’ their Twitter account.  Beth’s rationale is that she wants to get back to following fewer people, and having strong connections with the people she does follow.  She lamented the fact that she doesn’t know most of the people that follow her, and have no idea why they are.

I have to admit, I have the same issue.

But while we were having this discussion on Twitter, Linda left this tweet:

That was the first time I can ever remember Linda sending me a message, and I followed her as soon as she did.  And Linda’s tweet explains perfectly why I could never reset my account.  If it meant unfollowing 99 spammers and 1 person such as Linda, who is following me because she gets value from my tweets, then it’s not worth it.

This is why I believe in following people back liberally, and then pruning followers later if they end up being spammers. And I guess I have always seen the power in the ‘little guy’, and I know that far too often, today’s little guy is tomorrow’s Chris Brogan.  Also as an introvert, I understand that just because someone isn’t connecting with me, doesn’t mean that they don’t WANT to.  They may just be looking for the opening that makes them feel comfortable doing so.

So moving forward, I am going to grow my Twitter network by liberally following back people that follow me, and following anyone that either RTs me, or replies to me.  The only exception would be someone would someone that’s an obvious spammer.  I think that method means I am following the people that are engaged in the type of activity I want to encourage.

What about you?  How do you manage your network on Twitter?  Would you be willing to reset your account and start over?  I will say this: I would be completely in favor of Twitter removing all mention of how many followers someone has from the site.  It’s mainly there to stroke egos, and doing so would make the site less attractive to those that are simply there to pad their numbers.

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Four reasons why Lady Gaga has fans and you don’t

Did you know there are over 2 dozen videos on YouTube of Lady Gaga crying during one of her concerts? Most involve her breaking down in response to something her fans have done, but then there’s this video. In that video, a teenager is in line to get Gaga’s autograph, and he’s crying because he’s about to meet Gaga. When he gets up to Gaga he breaks down, and Gaga reaches for him and hugs him for several seconds, then signs his CD, kisses it, and gives it to him. She then says ‘I love you’, and hugs him again.

If you are trying to understand why Lady Gaga is currently the hottest pop/rockstar on the planet, those 30 or so seconds explain all.

It also shows you what you are up against if you are trying to build fans around your social media efforts.  If you want to have REAL fans of your brand, or fans of your blog, or your company.

Here’s four more reasons why your efforts aren’t working:

1 – You aren’t participating in the community you are trying to build.  Believe it or not, communities do not form around the idea of being monetized.  Any community, even one as small as a blog, needs to be cultivated and grown from within.  That means you have to be a member of the community you are trying to reach.  You have to interact with them, and understand them.  More importantly, you have to WANT to do this.  If your prime motivation is to collect people in a spot so you can make money off them, your efforts are doomed from the start.  And the people you are trying to make money from will smell it a mile off.

You mean you’ve never answered a comment on your blog, and now you wonder why readers have stopped leaving them?  It’s the simple stuff, guys.

2 – You aren’t shifting control.  By definition, I believe a community is a group of people that have a shared sense of ownership in something larger than themselves.  Every member knows that they play a role, no matter how large or small, in shaping the larger community.  As your fan-building efforts begin to take root, some members will become more active and begin to take ownership of the growth and vitality of the community.  You want to encourage this because as you shift ownership to the community, they will feel empowered and energized.  But if you are too fearful and controlling, it’s like cutting off sunshine to a growing plant.

Find the people that are pushing your community forward, and put the spotlight on them.  These are YOUR rockstars, and they deserve their time on stage.

3 – Your efforts are focused on the product, not the customer.  Please tell me that you don’t think you can create a community of customers that want to come together and tell you how amazing your product is!  Seriously?  Focus instead on HOW your customers use your product.  What problem does it solve?  How does it fit into their lifestyle?  What benefits do they get from the product?

Focus your community-building efforts on the ‘bigger idea’ behind your product.  Here’s some ideas for reframing your efforts, do you want to focus on…

Your cameras……..or photography?

Your luggage for business execs……or travel for busy business execs?

Your eco-friendly outerwear………or conservationism and saving the environment?

Your home decorating products……or home decorating?

Reframing your efforts to create value for the customers you are trying to reach makes it MUCH easier to attract members, and have them take ownership in your community and evangelize it to others.

4 – You don’t embrace the people you are trying to reach.  We aren’t idiots.  We get that you have to make money off your efforts, but if you truly don’t care about us as people, we will pick up on that and your efforts are doomed from the start.  This one is really a ‘you’ve either got it, or you don’t’ proposition.  You can’t fake passion for us, and we won’t fake passion for you.

It’s very rare that companies have true fans and evangelists.  It’s not that they can’t, but it’s almost always because they aren’t willing to do the things necessary to spark enough of a connection in their customers that they would label themselves as a ‘fan’ of that company.

Hey if it was easy, anyone could be a rockstar…

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My one-day Twitter engagement experiment

As many of you do, I use Twitter as a tool to build awareness for my blog, and to increase traffic.  In fact the site is the top referring site for this blog, and has been since Day One.

Usually, I spent anywhere from 30 mins to a couple of hours on Twitter a day.  My activities include sharing links (here and to other sites), and interacting with others.  Recently, I’ve been spending less time on Twitter, and am averaging about 600-700 tweets a month for the past few months.  But when you consider that about 300-400 of those tweets come from #blogchat, that means that I’m not spending a lot of time during the week on Twitter.

So I wanted to conduct a little experiment yesterday with my Twitter usage.  I decided to amp up my usage, spending several hours, sharing dozens of links, and interacting with others all day.  I wanted to see how big of an impact it would make on this blog, and my Twitter network, versus the time required.  To measure the effectiveness of this strategy, I set four goals for Monday:

100 new Twitter followers (Avg is 20-50 per day)

75 retweets on Monday’s post (Avg is around 30 per post)

5 new email subscribers (Avg is 5 new subscribers in a MONTH)

300 visitors to this blog on Monday (Avg is around 150)

I wanted to first walk you through exactly what I did during the day.

First, over the weekend I set up HootSuite to tweet a link to a new post/article every 5 mins, starting at 7am, and ending at 9am.  At 8am, I linked to yesterday’s post for the first time.  I linked to yesterday’s post a total of 5 times yesterday, starting at 8am, then every 3 hours, ending at 8pm.

So as far as sharing links, on Monday I shared a total of 36 links, 6 were my own, 30 were other sites.  So that’s a 5:1 ratio of other people’s links to my own.

I left a total of 182 tweets on Monday, and for reference, I left 711 tweets in all of April.

Now let’s look at the actual results:

For new followers, the goal was 100, and I actually got 75.  That’s not bad and well above my avg, but still missed the mark.  I think the discussions that I was engaged in throughout the day probably played a role in helping get me followers, although the links at the beginning of the day helped as well.

The second goal was to get 75 retweets of Monday’s post.  I actually got 85 RTs.  I decided to link to Monday’s post 5 times during the day in order to drive more RTs.  I think this was effective in the morning and afternoon, but seemed to be less effective at 5pm and 8pm.  Tomorrow I am only going to link to Tuesday’s post 4 times, at 8am, 12pm, 4pm and 8pm.  I’m thinking that 2-4 times per day is probably the right range for linking to your new posts.

The third goal was 5 new email subscribers, and I actually got 5 new subscribers.  I did two things to try to encourage new email subscribers.  The first is I moved the email subscription form to the top of the blog on the first sidebar.  The second thing I did was ask readers that found the post to please subscribe, either by email or reader, and linked to the Feedburner reader subscription form.

The final goal was 300 visitors to the site on Monday, and there were actually 716 visitors, which was well over double the goal.  I was a bit surprised by how high the traffic was.  However, I wanted to show you the hourly traffic to point out two things:

First, notice that the 5 spikes in traffic came during hours that I linked to the ‘How I got 20,000 followers on Twitter’ post.  That’s understandable.

Second, notice that each spike is followed by a sharp drop-off in traffic immediately after.  But also notice that the drop-offs are much more pronounced after the 3rd, 4th and 5th times I link to the post.

Also notice that the traffic jumps from 6am to 7am.  At 7am is when I started sending links to Twitter via HootSuite, and did so every 5 mins till it stopped at 9am.  So the fact that traffic jumped a bit BEFORE I started linking to the ‘How I got 20K followers’ posts at 8am suggests that simply linking to OTHER people’s posts was actually driving traffic back to MY blog.

And from around 11am-3pm I was interacting with other people on Twitter.  This corresponds with the above graph and the sudden traffic drop-off that you see from 4pm through the end of the day when I wasn’t interacting very much.  Minus the two spikes at 5pm and 8pm from my tweeting links to the ‘How I got 20K followers’ post.

So ALL of this suggests that three actions drove traffic back to this blog yesterday:

1 – Linking to the ‘How I got 20K followers’ post five times.

2 – Linking to other people’s posts a total of 30 times.

3 – Participating in conversations on Twitter.

The first is obvious, but I think the second two are very interesting because by directly promoting others and interacting with others, it seems I was also giving people the incentive to check out my site.

But I think the biggest lesson here is to track and test your social media efforts constantly.  Even with this experiment, I will need to test further to  get a better idea of exactly what happened. And it remains to be seen how much of a cumulative affect spending this much time on Twitter EVERY day, could have. I got great results from yesterday’s experiment, but I probably invested 5-6 hours into it. That’s a big chunk of time to invest even every weekday, and the results would need to be pretty significant to justify the time investment, I think.

BTW if you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing so you can have posts from this blog sent to your reader for free! Or if you would rather have posts emailed to you, please enter your email in the Feedburner email form above. I will never share your email with anyone! Thank you!

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How I got 20,000 followers on Twitter

Last week I hit a milestone on Twitter, reaching 20,000 followers.  Plenty of people, myself included, have said that your follower number isn’t as important as it’s made out to be.  I think the term ‘follower’ implies that 20,000 people are actively attempting to engage with me.  In reality, I would guess it’s only a small fraction, possibly as low as 1%.

But I know many people on Twitter want more followers, so I decided to share what I’ve learned in the last 3 years of using the site:

1 – Be helpful.  I use Twitter primarily as a tool to connect with others.  As such, I am always looking for ways to share something of value with others.  Twitter, most than any other social media tool I use, works amazingly well as a networking tool, and that’s primarily how I use it.

Thing of it this way; what if you were at an offline networking event in a room of 100 potential employers.  What if you could show everyone in that room one thing that would make them more productive the next day?  At the very least, you would suddenly have 100 potential employers telling each other about what a great guy/gal you were for helping them.

But what’s more powerful than that, you wouldn’t have to go around the room promoting yourself to everyone, they would be telling each other about you.

Sidenote: I swear as I typed that out I switched to Tweetdeck to check my replies, and this one just came in on Twitter:

2 – Connect with people that want to connect with you.  I am continually refining and changing how I use Twitter.  Currently, I place a premium on following anyone that either RTs or replies to me.  Because they are engaging in the type of behavior that I want to ‘reward’.  I want to interact and engage with as many people as possible on Twitter, so when people are trying to connect with me, I want to encourage that.

3 – Introduce people of value to your network.  One of the things I love to do is meet interesting people and help them connect with the people I already know.  One reason is because I am appreciative for this person, and another is that I know my network will value from their insights, so it’s also a way to say ‘thanks’ to my existing network.

4 – Help people get started.  I *love* helping people get their feet wet either with Twitter, or blogging, or social media in general.  More than once I’ve had someone tell me they were grateful for my trying to help them, that others just ‘told me I was doing it wrong’.  We need to remember that we have all been newbies at one time, and if you help someone take their first steps, they will be even more grateful down the road.

5 – Give back to your network.  Look for ways to show your network that you appreciate and value them.  For me, #blogchat is a good example of this.  I try to use #blogchat as a tool to help others become better personal/professional/business bloggers.

6 – Promote others.  Complete no-brainer.  As I write this post, HootSuite is sending a tweet every 5 mins with links to posts that I picked over the weekend that I thought my network would value.  My network is then RTing these posts to THEIR networks, and when I publish this post in a few minutes, it’s probably going to be RTed a few more times by the people that saw me link to their posts, and my network, which is (hopefully) appreciative of the great links I have been sharing with them this morning.

The upshot of all this is obviously, I use Twitter as a way to help others.  But there still needs to be a financial gain for me as a consultant, or else this is all a hobby.

Last year I made more income on a yearly basis than I have in my life, and roughly 50% of that income came from sources that I connected with via Twitter.  Within the last 12 hours I have received both work and speaking invitations from people via Twitter.

As with most areas of social media, Twitter is a great way to make things happen indirectly.  Help others and create something of value for your network, and your network will attempt to return the favor.  At least that’s how it’s worked for me.

Those are my tips for getting more followers on Twitter.  What’s working for you?

PS: I thought I should clarify the timeline for how I reached 20,000.  Simply to make the point that it took me a long time.

As of the fall of 2007, I had about 100 followers.  I started really ramping up my Twitter usage in December of 2007, and by March of 2008 I had about 500 followers.

I had almost 7,000 followers by March of 2009, and am at 20K now.  I add about 20-50 followers a day, on average.

BTW if you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing so you can have posts from this blog sent to your reader for free!  Or if you would rather have posts emailed to you, please enter your email in the Feedburner email form above.  I will never share your email with anyone!  Thank you!