MackCollier.com

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Social Media’s Uncertain Future

Happy Monday, y’all! Hope everyone is having a wonderful week and ready for Halloween! Here’s a few news stories that caught my eye over the last few days:

 

And it appears that the government crackdown on big tech and social media has begun. The DOJ has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google. At the heart of this is the DOJ’s claim that Google takes the profits from its products and ad revenue, and then funnels them back into locking in exclusive agreements to offer its search engine and browser products. I saw one tweet that claimed that 15-20% of Apple’s global profits come from an exclusive agreement with Google to offer its search engine as the default on its devices! Immediately after the election, look for the CEOs of Twitter and Facebook to be hauled back before the Senate, which will mostly be a lot of hot air and pontificating from politicians, but some actual legislative action could eventually arise. As I’ve been saying for over a year now, the day of reckoning for social media is coming, I’d view Google, Twitter and Facebook as a short-term play, not a long-term one.

 

I’ve made no secret of the fact that my time spent on Facebook has decreased dramatically the last couple of years. At one time I was checking in multiple times a day, now I check the site once or twice a week. But while I see very little value on the site now, their Groups are one of the few bright spots. Building on their popularity, Facebook is testing a new concept called Neighborhoods, which would seem to be Groups organized around geographic area. I think this is a great idea and will be very popular. This would be a great way to discuss issues that affect a particular community, such as finding the proper polling location to vote in an election, or how to deal with coming weather issues. A rare smart move for Facebook.

 

And just because we all need a few laughs right now…

Have a great week, y’all! See everyone tomorrow!

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Depth vs Reach; Why Talking to a Few People Beats Yelling at Everyone

I suspect there will be an update in the next Monday’s Marketing MInute, but the DOJ, along with multiple states, has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google. The Senate has said it wants the CEOs of both Facebook and Twitter to come before it and explain why their platforms are censoring content. And both presidential candidates, Trump and Biden, have signaled that they will change CDA 230.

Over a year ago, I started talking about how there would be great disruption coming to the social media space over the coming years. Even before this, I began advising clients to lower their dependence on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, and focus more on communication channels they control, like their website/blog and email newsletters. Honestly, I don’t think Twitter and Facebook will be here 5 years from now. And I think as the social media landscape changes, I would hope that how we approach social media would change as well.

Years ago as influencer marketing was taking off, I advised companies interested in this space to invest in working with  the T-Shaped Influencer. A T-Shaped Influencer is one that doesn’t have a large following or reach, but who has a depth of connection with their smaller audience.  It’s the difference between an influencer who has 500,000 followers and no real connection with any of them, and am influencer who has 500 followers, who they know individually, and who all come from the same space.

Depth vs Reach.

One of the great failings of social media has been that it pushed us to pursue reach. Platforms weren’t built around communication (which is where depth occurs), they were built around extending reach. Build a network of followers, even buy them if you have to. Share your content  Track the number of Likes, Favs, ReTweets. If you really want to ramp things up, engage with only ‘Verified’ users or users that have over 100,000 followers!

Doesn’t this all sound like bullshit? How does any of this reflect ‘social’ as in social media? The reality is, social media for years has been far more about the media than it has the social. When Twitter first launched, if you followed someone, you saw ALL their tweets. You may think you do now, but you don’t. If you are following Sarah and Tom, and Sarah replies to Tom, you will see that tweet. But if you are following Sarah and NOT following Tom, you won’t see if Sarah replies to Tom. When Twitter first launched, this wasn’t the case. This allowed you to follow people, then see who they were talking to, and meet new people through their conversations. It was a wonderful way to build your Twitter network organically and make new connections and friends. But Twitter decided this was creating the need for a lot of bandwidth they didn’t want to pay for, so they ended this feature. When Twitter users complained, Twitter clarified that it was never intended to be a communications platform, but rather a broadcast platform.

Think about that for a minute. And then think about the UX at Facebook, is it positioned more as a communication or broadcast platform in your opinion?

I think we will see fundamental changes in social media over the next few years. I think as these changes are happening, we need to be vigilant in pushing for changes that bring the ‘social’ back into social media. We need platforms that allow us to forge deeper connections with fewer people versus having little or no connection with everyone.

Depth vs Reach. If Social Media 1.0 was all about maximizing Reach, let’s make Social Media 2.0 all about maximizing Depth.

 

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Marketing and Movies: The Dark Knight

The original Batman film from 1989 was a critical and commercial success. In particular, Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of Batman nemesis The Joker, as well as director Tim Burton’s efforts were particularly praised. So when it was announced that the Batman series reboot would again feature The Joker in 2008’s The Dark Knight, many fans were rightly skeptical of actor Heath Ledger’s ability to match the performance that Jack Nicholson had brought to the character two decades before.

Ledger proved up to the task, not only meeting but surpassing the work of the screen legend Nicholson. Ledger’s performance of The Joker was simply a masterwork, his work dominated the film and made you believe you were actually watching an insane serial killer. Ledger was that scary good:

As it turns out, the marketing for The Dark Knight was scary good as well. I wrote about one aspect of the film’s phenomenal marketing campaign in my book Think Like a Rock Star:

Sometimes the best marketing doesn’t ‘look’ like marketing at all. When Warner Bros. was promoting the movie The Dark Knight, it put together all the standard online and offline marketing promotions that you would expect to see for a summer blockbuster. But the marketing campaign for The Dark Knight also had an element of ‘fun’ to it. Warner Bros. created an elaborate online marketing campaign, one element of which required you to ‘decode’ online websites that tied into the movie. If you were the first person from your area to decipher the website, you would be given the address of a local bakery that was holding a cake for you to pick up under the name Robbin Banks (robbin’ banks, get it?). When you received the cake, the icing said ‘Call Me Now’ and included a phone number. If you dialed the number, the cake itself started ringing! Inside the cake there was a packet containing a cell phone and other items from the company Rent A Clown, apparently set up by Batman’s arch-enemy in the movie, The Joker! Campaigns such as this were great fun for fans of The Dark Knight, and helped create a lot of extra buzz around the film.

Here’s the cake that you received for solving the puzzle:

Keep in mind this was done in 2008, just as YouTube was starting to take off, so The Dark Knight was one of the first films to really leverage UGC to help virally promote the film online. Also note that such a campaign isn’t aimed at casual fans of the franchise, but rather at fans that were already invested in the film as soon as it was announced. These fans are more loyal to the film and loved the idea of ‘solving a riddle’ to figure out the online puzzle, then to get the reward of getting the cake AND the phone and materials inside. The marketing is giving an incentive to the winner of the puzzle to promote the film even further. If you won one of these cakes, you wanted to brag about it, you wanted to share with your friends on social media, which simply leads to more promotion of the film, for free!

If you somehow haven’t seen The Dark Knight yet, please watch it ASAP. Heath Ledger died during the filming of The Dark Knight and this film left the world with a complete understanding of what a brilliant talent he truly was.

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The In-Person Renaissance Is Coming

Back around May, I saw a video on Facebook. It was two cousins, both around 8 or 9. They were standing about 6 feet apart, and giggling. A parent of one of the children explained that the cousins hadn’t been able to see each other for weeks due to covid restrictions, and they were about to get to hug for the first time since. They looked at each other and the mom said “Go ahead!”, and they sheepishly started inching toward each other, and then finally their eyes met and they tackled each other in a big hug.

And at the same time, both children started sobbing uncontrollably. It was honestly heartbreaking to watch, and it perfectly illustrated the loss we are all feeling of a human connection right now. I’m introverted, so not being in social settings hasn’t hit me as hard, but I know a lot of my extroverted friends have been struggling this year. Just as introverts feed off solitude, extroverts feed off contact with others. There will be many studies and books done on how this country handled dealing with coronavirus in 2020, but one aspect that cannot be denied is that being locked up at home has had a devastating impact on the mental health of this country. And some experts believe its actually made the spread of the virus worse, not better.

So when the country fully reopens, there will be a great desire to return to normalcy. But the realty is, we have all adjusted our lives this year, and some of those adjustments will become permanent changes. I can see two big behavioral changes that we will adopt as a society moving forward:

1 – We will do far less in-person shopping for food. Trips to the grocery store will more often be to pick up an order that we placed online, instead of going to shop for food while there. We will also use delivery services more both for meals from restaurants, and to order from services that offer meals we can prepare at home.

2 – Many companies will decide to make remote work from home permanent for their employees. This year has been a trial-by-fire for many companies in embracing remote work, but many companies will find out it makes sense for them and their employees.

 

So think about how that will change our behavior. A lot of the trips out to ‘run errands’ like grocery shopping, picking up dinner, etc, will now be handled via delivery services.  So fewer trips away from the house. And more of us will be working from home, so that will eliminate even more trips away from home.

But, spending all this time at home will also greatly reduce the amount of in-person contact we will have with friends and co-workers. So I starting in 2021, we will see many of us placing a greater emphasis on leaving the house in order to meet with friends, co-workers and family members. A greater percentage of our trips away from the house will be of a social nature to connect with others.

And I think this will go beyond just heading to a bar or movie with friends. I think you’ll see more deliberate thought put into our social gatherings, and they will be considered more special and meaningful. For example, for Halloween 2021, I could the return of community hayrides, maybe school Halloween carnivals, community-wide trick or treating that incorporates ways for parents to have social time together as well. Activities that were normally aimed at individuals could be promoted as group affairs. For instance, more guided tours for groups at museums, giving you a chance to sign up to join a group instead of going alone.

For companies, I could see a greater emphasis on trips for employees, and in-person team-building exercises. Maybe the annual company retreat becomes a bi-annual event every six months. Conferences could begin to incorporate fun social events in the evening rather than just telling attendees they were on their own at 5pm, ‘See you tomorrow!’ And conferences are going to come back in a big way starting I think in Fall of 2021 moreso than in the Spring. So those of you that are about to start planning for next year’s events, focus on building time into the schedule for attendees to interact with each other. We will want and need that time.

Human beings are social creatures. We need contact, we need to interact with each other. We were not meant to live our lives in fear locked up in our homes. This is not healthy for our bodies or souls. Starting in 2021 I believe you’ll see us yearning for more in-person contact and social events. The smart companies are the ones that will provide more social options for us.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Online Holiday Sales Spike, Top Brands For Loyalty, Turn Blog Posts Into Tweet Threads

Happy Monday, y’all! Hope you have a wonderful week planned, cooler weather is here, and Halloween is right around the corner. One of my favorite times of the year!

 

This is very believable. If you sell products or services online, you need to be auditing your website to make sure the purchase process is as smooth and frictonless as possible. Also keep in mind that even after the country completely reopens, many shoppers will continue to purchase more online, so building your website to handle eCommerce sales should be a priority moving forward.

https://twitter.com/shonali/status/1315746614552801281

 

So there’s two brands that I wanted to focus on for this list of top brands customers are loyal towards; Amazon and Dominos. First, I wonder how much of the loyalty people have for Amazon is associated with the brand itself, and how much is loyalty for the fact that it offers a level of price and convenience that its competitors cannot. I ask because I am constantly hearing from Prime users that lament they dislike the Amazon brand, but keep buying from it simply because it’s faster and cheaper.

As for Dominos, we all suspected that the covid-related slowdowns and more people staying at home would create opportunities for fast food brands in particular to win big business. It seems Dominos is one of the big winners in scoring loyalty from customers.

 

This is a feature that raised some eyebrows in the blogging community. WordPress has added the ability to turn blog posts into tweet threads. Honestly, I’m not a fan of this feature. As the author of this post points out, this seems to do a better job of drawing attention to your tweets than it would the blog post that the tweets are being created from. My advice would be to test ideas for blog posts as tweets on Twitter. For instance, if you have a topic you are thinking about writing a blog post on, bring it up on Twitter first, and see what the reaction is from Twitter users. You very well may find that you can then create a wonderful blog post from the conversation that happened on Twitter.

So there’s a few stories that caught my eye over the last few days! Just a reminder that we are headed into election season, just 15 days away! Be very mindful that there will be a LOT of very unbelievable and inaccurate ‘news’ being shared. Look at everything with a skeptical eye, and if something sounds too crazy to be true, verify the information with sources you trust. Have a wonderful week, see you tomorrow!

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Twitter Doubles Down on Censoring its Users

So less than 24 hours after I posted here about how Twitter’s political activism was threatening all content creators, Twitter validated my fears. Twitter spent most of yesterday actively censoring a NYPost story about Hunter Biden. Twitter locked the NYPost’s account for a time, then later started locking any accounts that shared the story, or disabled retweeting on the story so it was more difficult to share.

By the end of the day, CEO Jack Dorsey issued a mea culpa:

The general excuse given by Twitter is that sharing the story violated Twitter’s policy against sharing hacked material. But there was no evidence that the story was sourced by hacked material, and Twitter had allowed similar stories about Pres Trump to be shared without policing that content.

Earlier this morning, content creators were being censored by Twitter for even WRITING about the story:

As a result, I won’t be sharing this story on Twitter. Think about that for a second; a content creator can’t feel comfortable sharing their own content on a social media platform because they fear the company will censor the link because it includes information they don’t agree with. Is this 2020 or 1984?

Bizarrely, these actions by Twitter seem to be all but begging politicians to regulate them.  Carol Roth actually made this observation yesterday:

That take may be the correct one. Regardless, Twitter is clearly acting like it does not care if it upsets politicians or not.

Now, perhaps the most disturbing thing I saw yesterday as this event was unfolding, was how my timeline on Twitter responded. The people I follow are a good mix of conservatives, liberals and moderates or independents. I have a good idea of which way most of the people I follow lean politically. Almost all of the outrage I saw at Twitter’s actions yesterday came from my conservative friends.  A few moderate friends chimed in, and my liberal friends had absolutely nothing to say about this story. Maybe they simply weren’t following it, or maybe they don’t understand that this isn’t a partisan issue. Everyone I follow on Twitter stands to be NEGATIVELY impacted by what Twitter did yesterday. It doesn’t matter if you were outraged or thrilled by what Twitter did. Twitter all but forced politicians to take actions on them, and when that happens, individual content creators like you and I, will likely get stung.

When I wrote about this issue on Tuesday, I mentioned CDA 230. That’s short for Section 230 of the Communications and Decency Act of 1996. I also included this link that gives a wonderful summary of the protections that CDA 230 gives content creators.  Here’s how this law protects individual content creators:

 

“This legal and policy framework has allowed for YouTube and Vimeo users to upload their own videos, Amazon and Yelp to offer countless user reviews, craigslist to host classified ads, and Facebook and Twitter to offer social networking to hundreds of millions of Internet users. Given the sheer size of user-generated websites (for example, Facebook alone has more than 1 billion users, and YouTube users upload 100 hours of video every minute), it would be infeasible for online intermediaries to prevent objectionable content from cropping up on their site. Rather than face potential liability for their users’ actions, most would likely not host any user content at all or would need to protect themselves by being actively engaged in censoring what we say, what we see, and what we do online. In short, CDA 230 is perhaps the most influential law to protect the kind of innovation that has allowed the Internet to thrive since 1996.”

So if you remove the protections of CDA 230, you could suddenly see sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter that currently allow user-generated content, to either stop users from creating content, or severely change or alter what content they can create and share.

 

But that’s platforms, how does CDA 230 protect individual content creators such as bloggers?

“CDA 230 also offers its legal shield to bloggers who act as intermediaries by hosting comments on their blogs. Under the law, bloggers are not liable for comments left by readers, the work of guest bloggers, tips sent via email, or information received through RSS feeds. This legal protection can still hold even if a blogger is aware of the objectionable content or makes editorial judgments.”

So if CDA 230 is eliminated, you will also see many bloggers (especially ones that aren’t monetizing their blogs) being forced to either remove comment functionality, or severely restrict it. Many bloggers will likely see it as too much hassle and worry, and drop their blogs altogether. I think we all can recognize that the impact of eliminating CDA 230 protections would be catastrophic to the blogging community.

And unfortunately, BOTH Presidential candidates have signaled that they want to eliminate CDA 230. Biden has said it all along. Trump has said he wants to modify CDA 230 to give social media platforms less protections, but after Twitter pulled its stunt yesterday, he started tweeting that CDA 230 should be repealed:

This has been so frustrating to me because I think my liberal friends see this as ‘Trump vs Twitter’, so they just assume what Twitter is doing is something they agree with. Without realizing that Trump and Biden now essentially hold the same position on CDA 230. This *should* be Everyone vs Twitter as it pertains to censorship. Every content creator should be unified in speaking out against what Twitter is doing, because they are pushing us toward a repeal of vital protections that bloggers have enjoyed since 1996.

If CDA 230 is repealed, blogging as we know it is probably over. Now is the time to educate yourself on what’s happening today, and how it could impact your ability to create content, tomorrow.

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Marketing and Movies: Hearts In Atlantis

Hearts In Atlantis is a wonderful drama that, when you finish watching it you will likely say “Wait, that was based on a Stephen King book?” It was, and it features a wonderful performance by the always brilliant Anthony Hopkins. Hopkins plays Ted Brautigan, a man with psychic powers who is being chased by a governmental group that wants to use Ted’s powers. Ted frequently moves to stay one step ahead of the government or ‘low men’ as he calls them.

But as the movie opens, we are in the present day and the studio of Bobby Garfield. Bobby has just received a package from the attorney of his childhood friend ‘Sully’ Sullivan. Bobby, Sully and Carol Gerber were childhood friends, and when they were children, Sully had once promised Bobby that he would leave Bobby his baseball glove in his will. Bobby opens the package to find that baseball glove inside. He soon learns that Sully was killed in a car accident, and travels back to his hometown to attend the funeral. While there, he meets with Sully’s attorney, and mentions that he hadn’t seen Carol yet, and that he was very much looking forward to seeing her during his trip. The attorney then informs Bobby that Carol had actually died a few years earlier. Shocked, Bobby returns to his old childhood home, and the majority of the movie is shown as Bobby remembering what his life was like one summer with Sully and Carol, and then later, when Ted Brautigan came into their lives.

One of the over-arching themes of the movie is the magic of being a child during the summer. So many of us seem to have that one magical summer of our youth where we made special friends, had our ‘summer love’ or just enjoyed being a carefree child enjoying a magical time in our lives. The movie does a great job of making us nostalgic for the summers of our youth. I’ll talk about this more in a minute. When Ted arrives on the scene, he is living next door to Bobby and his mom. Ted soon offers to pay Bobby $1 a week to read the newspaper to him, claiming his eyesight is failing him. Bobby shrewdly suspects that there’s more to the offer, and asks Ted to tell him what the REAL job is. Ted then explains that what he really wants Bobby to do is keep an eye out around town for the government group or ‘low men’ that are chasing him. One of Ted’s psychic abilities includes being able to ‘sense’ when his pursuers are closing in on him. Ted can also read minds, and when Bobby’s mom suddenly arrives home and yells for him, Bobby flinches, but Ted quickly grabs his hand and tells him “She can’t tell what you are thinking. You think she can, and that’s her power over you.”

All three of the childhood friends grow a quick affection for Ted, especially Bobby. Bobby’s father died when he was very young, and one of the subplots of the movie is Bobby recalling his love of his father. And in this scene, we find out that Bobby’s father and Ted were once at the same football game sharing another love, that of former Chicago Bears great Bronco Nagurski:

Nostalgia in marketing is very powerful, and I think it’s even more impactful in volatile times like this when we want to return to a time when things were more…pleasant. More peaceful, more normal. Nostalgia often involves us returning to our youth, and note that Ted made his story far more interesting to Bobby by involving his dad in the telling of the story.

Whenever I talk about creating content that builds awareness, I mention that you (as the content creator) need to remember that you are trying to connect with an audience that doesn’t know who you are. So you create content that focuses on what’s important and relevant to the customer. In the above scene, what if Ted had told Bobby a story about “Jim Thorpe, the greatest football player that ever lived.” Bobby’s first reaction might have been “Well he wasn’t as good as Bronco Nagurski, my dad LOVED Bronco Nagurski!” Bobby likely doesn’t know who Thorpe was, but he knows who Bronco Nagurski was, cause his dad loved him. Ted reaches Bobby by telling a story about a football player that his dad loved.

Nostalgia in marketing can be very powerful. Anytime you can tie your marketing messages to something else that your customer loves and remembers fondly, it’s a good thing. And if you haven’t, do check out Hearts In Atlantis, a wonderful movie. This quote from Ted may tell you where the movie gets it title from “Sometimes when you’re young, you have moments of such happiness, you think you’re living in someplace magical, like Atlantis must have been?”

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Twitter’s Political Activism May End Up Costing All Content Creators

Over a year ago, Twitter launched its ‘Managing the Conversation’ initiative. This was adopted, according to Twitter, to start monitoring and moderating interactions on Twitter based on user intent or perceived intent. In other words, if a Twitter user was engaging another Twitter user in a way that didn’t break the current Twitter rules, but that Twitter felt was harassing or hostile, then Twitter would have the ability to censor that user.

This idea immediately grabbed me as being a bad one, because Twitter was creating a way to shift from one-size-fits-all rules that apply to the entire community, to Twitter having the power to make judgement calls and independently police content. It created a scenario where two users could engage in the exact same behavior, but only one of them be policed by Twitter, with Twitter saying that the first user had a a negative ‘intent’ behind his content that the second user did not.

I follow a small group of reporters on Twitter who have a track record for giving accurate and credible information. It’s how I keep up with national and political news. Earlier this year, I began to notice that they were mentioning with frequency that ‘conservative’ Twitter users were having their accounts banned or blocked for ‘no reason’. At first I didn’t really pay much attention to this, the person being banned rarely thinks they deserved it. But a few months ago, Twitter began actively censoring President Trump’s tweets.  That got my attention.

A few days ago, Pres Trump, upon beating covid, tweeted that he was now immune from catching covid. This is a claim that many doctors around the world agree with. There is no consensus, but many doctors believe that covid patients who survive do have immunity from catching it again, either for a limited amount of time, or permanently.

When Pres Trump tweeted that he was immune from catching covid, Twitter labeled his tweet as being a violation of Twitter’s rules and potentially ‘harmful’ information:

https://twitter.com/Alan46285607/status/1315347487004086273

 

And as we can see, other Twitter accounts making essentially the same claim, aren’t being censored:

 

Doubling-down, Twitter recently announced that it will be very aggressively moderating content created about the US Election in 3 weeks:

 

Twitter is saying that any content created on election day that claims that someone has won a race (either congressional or presidential) that hasn’t been called by a ‘credible’ source, can be removed by Twitter. Twitter says it will also add ‘restrictions’ to any content that Twitter deems to be ‘misleading’ concerning the election.  For instance, if on election night I tweet that ‘Wow, I really don’t think (candidate) can win’, Twitter could censor that tweet or identify it publicly as ‘misinformation’.

You can see how this creates an environment where Twitter’s team can let their own political biases cloud their judgment and literally turn the site into a platform for election interference. By creating these broad ‘guidelines’, Twitter is signaling that it can and likely will censor political content that it doesn’t agree with.  As we see above, Twitter has already shown to inconsistently apply it’s own stated guidelines toward political content.

Now, those of you that don’t like Trump or don’t like conservative viewpoints in general, I can hear you saying ‘So what? This sounds great to me!”  Here’s why you should care:  There’s a law called CDA 230.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is probably the most significant law protecting speech on the internet. In general, it says that content creators, whether they are individuals, or sites that host content from users (such as Twitter and Facebook), will be treated as if they are PLATFORMS, not publishers, under the law. But at the same time, they will have the ability to censor and moderate content left on their platforms by third-parties, as a publisher could.  If content creators were treated as if they were publishers under the law, then they would also be liable for content created by their users.  For instance, under CDA 230, as a blogger, I am not legally responsible for the content that a third party might create and leave here via a comment. Without the protections of CDA 230, I could be. That’s the advantage of being classified as a platform versus a publisher. CDA 230 was designed to shield us from legal liability for the content created by our commenters or users.

In essence, what Twitter is doing is skirting the good intentions of CDA 230. They are using the protections of CDA 230 to, it at least appears, censor content that supports certain political viewpoints. As we can all hopefully agree, this is not what free speech and open discussion is about. As you might guess, both President Trump and even the DOJ have signaled that they want to re-examine the protections that sites like Twitter have under CDA 230, and possibly modify it in ways that could hurt individual content creators like you and I, as well.

And before you take that as a reason to vote for Joe Biden, Senator Biden wants to go even further than Pres Trump, Biden wants to eliminate CDA 230 completely. Politicians on both sides of the isle have said they want to amend, change, or remove CDA 230 completely. As an individual content creator, that scares me.

So if you are a blogger like me, understand that your ability to create content and publish it as you have been could be on the ballot as well this November. Please educate yourself about what’s happening in regards to content moderation on social sites like Twitter and Facebook, educate yourself on CDA 230 and what it is, and finally educate yourself on what state and national politicians are proposing for the future of CDA 230. One of the most powerful aspects of the internet is that through tools like blogging, we all have a way to share our voice with the world. It’s vital that we maintain that precious freedom.

 

PS: This post gives a very mild recap of some laws regarding internet speech. This post is not offered as legal advice, and should not be taken as such. Please do your own research on these topics and consult a qualified legal professional if you have questions about how these laws might apply to you.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Personalization Drives Revenue, Nike’s Founding Marketing Principles, WOM is Still King

Happy Columbus Day and Happy Monday! I hope everyone has a fantabulous week! I wanted to share a few marketing and business stories that caught my eye over the last few days:

My goodness, but my friend Kelly Hungerford finds so many great business and marketing articles. She’s a must-follow on Twitter. This study she shares found that businesses that personalize the marketing communications they deliver to customers see increased revenue from those customers. The study also found that the more customized the personalization, the higher the percentage of companies that realized increased revenue. So a more robust and customized personalization strategy works better, but of course will cost more. So there’s the fine line to walk between cost and benefit.

 

I love this list of the marketing principles from the first head of marketing for Nike, circa 1980. In particular, I love the first two rules:

1 – Our business is change

2 – We’re on offense. All the time.

This speaks to a leaders’ mindset. Nike is saying upfront that its marketing will be proactive, not reactive. It will set market trends rather than respond to them. I love that.

https://twitter.com/MohapatraHemant/status/1314818580198817792

 

Word of mouth is still the King when it comes to recommendations. A recent study from Bluecore found that Word of Month, Online Ads and Influencers were the top three drivers of recommendations. I did think this quote from the article was interesting: “However, when sorting by age, the results indicate that younger consumers are notably more impacted by the top three channels than older consumers. Comparing those younger than age 45 to those who are older, differences can be seen in the influence attributed to online ads (55% vs 30%), email (47% vs. 40%) and word of mouth (71% vs 59%).”  This suggests that as customers age, they are perhaps less receptive to recommendations from digital or younger sources, and more open to sources that they have had a longer exposure to?  Maybe, it’s interesting to ponder.

 

That’s it for this week, I hope yours is wonderful! Thanks for reading, see you back here in 24 hours!

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Toolbox Saturday: Writing Better Headlines

One of the best skills you can learn as a content creator is how to write better headlines for your content.  It can be a blog post title, a YouTube video title, a title for your Twitch stream. The headline you give content is vital to grabbing attention and then letting people quickly know what your content is about, and why it is interesting.

When I first started blogging, I wrote horrible headlines.  I’m fair to middlin’ now, as we say in the South. At first, I would write my post, then when the post was done, whip up a short headline that basically summarized what the post was about. The problem with this approach is that the headline is often the only thing someone sees about a post when it is shared on other social media sites. So as sharing on social sites became a more important way to boost awareness for your content, I began to get more serious about crafting better headlines.

What you want to do with your headline is give readers the most interesting parts of the post so they are compelled to click that link and read your post. If you write a boring headline or one that simply summarizes the post, your content can quickly get lost in a sea of links on social media homefeeds.

Let’s look at a few post examples and then talk about bad and good headlines you can write for that post.

1 – You are writing a post on the last decade in college football.

Boring headline – A Brief History of Modern College Football

Great headline – Rising Tide: How Alabama and the SEC Have Dominated College Football For Over a Decade

 

See how specific the second headline is? The first headline is pretty bland, it gives you a general sense of what the post is about, but by adding specifics, you can spark greater interest. Also note that with the second headline, we are honing in on a story within a story; we’ll look at recent college football history, but more specifically how Alabama and the SEC have dominated. This will interest fans of Alabama and the SEC, but it can also interest fans of programs like Clemson, who may think their program should be talked about more.

 

2 – You are writing a post financial planning.

Boring headline – Creating a Retirement Plan From Scratch

Great Headline – The Four Things Financial Experts Say You Can Do Today to Increase Your Retirement Nestegg By Up to 500%!

 

Again, the second headline is much more specific and gives the reader a better idea of what content they will be reading if they click the link and go to your blog. With the first post, you really have no idea how in-depth the post will be or how helpful.  The second post tells you there’s four things you can do, and doing those four things can increase the amount you have for retirement by up to 500%.  A slightly less effective version of this headline could be “Financial Experts Say Doing These Things Could Greatly Increase Your Retirement Nestegg!” That’s better than the boring headline because it’s slightly more specific, but the ‘great’ headline is even more specific, so it works better.

 

Now, the one thing you don’t want to do is go overboard with your headline and make it too ‘interesting’. You never want to make a promise with your headline that your post can’t back up. There’s nothing worst than clicking on an amazing headline, then finding out that the post itself is an ad for a product or a post that’s completely different from what the headline promised. That’s the quickest way to ensure that I never click on your links again.

So when you’re writing headlines, look and post and ask yourself ‘why is this post interesting?  What’s the HOOK that will grab readers attention and make them want to click the link and read the post?’  Again, make the headline as specific and interesting as possible, but make sure your post delivers on the big promises that the headline makes. Do both those things, and you’ll see your content getting more views and more exposure!