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Baltimore Orioles Write Handwritten ‘Thank You’ Notes to Season Ticket Holders

Coming off an atrocious 108-loss season, the Baltimore Orioles decided to double-down on thanking the season ticket holders that stood by the team.

The players recently wrote handwritten thank you letters to season ticket holders. Orioles Director of PR Kirsten Hudak talks about pitching the idea to the players:

“I wasn’t sure what the reaction would be. The guys that I spoke to about it were immediately supportive. I saw many of them sit down and start writing right away. It felt like they had something on their minds or something they wanted to say and that was an opportunity for them to do it in a heartfelt way.”

Rewarding season ticket holders for their support is something many sports teams do at all levels. I’ve written before about how the Alabama Crimson Tide’s softball team (one of the top programs in the country), has its players and coaches hand-deliver season tickets to its fans.

As you can see, these two examples cover both ends of the spectrum from a fan support angle. The Orioles are no doubt scrambling for ideas to revitalize interest in a struggling team, and smartly thought of a way to reward their biggest fans with handwritten notes. On the other end, Alabama has been winning big for a while, and no doubt view the personal delivery of season tickets as a way to keep the momentum going with its fan support.

I think the word ‘fan’ has an interesting stigma around it. It seems like a special person who loves a sports team or rock star.

The reality is, a ‘fan’ is simply a customer. A passionate, loyal customer, but a customer nonetheless.

If you look at your customers in this context and overlap the above examples, you can easily see how ‘fans’ would be present in many businesses:

  • Frequent customers to your store that you recognize as soon as they walk in.
  • Loyalty club members
  • Subscribers to your company newsletter

All of these customers have signaled to you that they enjoy interacting with your company.  If you think of fans as being ‘people that love their favorite sports team or rock star’, why can’t you think of the above customers as being ‘fans’ or customers that love you?

In the previous post I talked about how rock stars have fans and companies have customers. Rock stars don’t have fans because they are rock stars, they have fans because they love their fans. They understand that having fans is a mindset, if you love and appreciate your fans, you deepen their love for you, and you act in ways that will encourage other people to become fans as well.

I shop a lot at WalMart and Publix. So much so that many of the employees at both stores will recognize me as soon as I walk in. Yet when I shop at Publix, the employees will always greet me with “It’s good to see you AGAIN’. They are communicating to me that they notice and appreciate my frequent visits. That’s one reason why I prefer to shop at Publix, because WalMart’s employees don’t bother to notice me, except for one cashier who always says “It’s good to see you AGAIN”. Guess whose line I prefer to go through at WalMart?

Creating and cultivating fans is about creating and cultivating a mindset that recognizes your fans and that communicates your appreciation to those fans.

Every business has loyal customers who are ‘fans’. The smart companies are the ones that reach out to their fans and let them know that they love them right back.

 

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Why Do Rock Stars Have Fans, While Companies Have Customers?

Gene Autry was a rock star decades before there was such a term. From the 1930s to the 1950s, “The Singing Cowboy” was one of the nation’s brightest film, radio and television stars. He died in 1998 as one of the richest 400 Americans, and the only entertainer in that group.

I was recently watching Ken Burns’ documentary series Country Music when they told a fascinating Gene Autry anecdote. Gene Autry often toured the country and at the same time he was receiving hundreds, sometimes thousands of fan letters every week. His wife would take the fan letters and cross-reference them against his touring schedule, and give him a list of every fan that had written him who lived in the next town that Autry was to perform in.  Autry would then take the list upon arriving in that city, and find the nearest phone book and look up the name of each fan who had written him, and he would call that fan and thank them for writing him.

Another story shared involved Garth Brooks. Every year Nashville has a country music Fan Fest, where artists sign autographs for their fans. One year, during the height of his popularity, Garth Brooks showed up, unannounced, at Fan Fest.  He picked an unmarked tent, and started signing. He pledged to sign for everyone there.  Organizers repeatedly attempted to stop the line so Garth could leave, but he was determined to stay until everyone had an autograph.

He signed for over 20 hours.

When I started writing Think Like a Rock Star and I began to research how rock stars create and cultivate fans, the key question I wanted to answer was “Why do rock stars have fans, while companies have customers?” I wanted to figure out what the secret formula was that rock stars used to cultivate fans, and find out if it was possible for companies to replicate that success.

The answer was surprisingly simple: Rock stars have fans because they WANT fans. Gene Autry didn’t have to go to the time and trouble of calling up every fan who wrote him a letter, he wanted to. Garth Brooks didn’t have to show up unscheduled at Fan Fest and sign for over 20 hours, he wanted to.

The reality is, you have earned the relationship you have with the people that buy your products and services. If you have fans, then you have earned them. If you just have customers, well you’ve earned them as well. If you want to have passionate customers who consider themselves to be ‘fans’ of your company, then you have to put forward the effort to make that happen.

“But Mack, you’re talking about actual rock stars, we’re just a boring company making boring products!”

Why can’t your company have the CEO personally reply to a positive comment from a customer left on Twitter? Why can’t you send a small ‘thank you’ gift box to a customer who emails you and thanks you for great customer service? When you have a culture that appreciates and values your customers, you create and cultivate fans.

A few years ago I was working with Dell on a customer advocacy event. We had a group of about 20 customers that had been flown in to Austin and we were meeting with them all day, having roundtable discussions, product demos, etc. We had just finished lunch and we were about to go onto another event when one of Dell’s PR team pulled me aside and told me to have everyone go into the conference room, that Dell had a surprise for them. The group filed in and quietly chatted, after a few minutes they began to wonder what was happening next.

In walked CEO Michael Dell. For this group of passionate Dell customers, it was as if a rock star had entered the room. Cameras immediately started flashing and everyone suddenly sat at attention, smiling and on the edges of their seats. Dell already had a full day planned for the group, this was obviously a ‘bonus’ they had wanted to add in at the last minute, since I had been involved in the prior planning and didn’t know about it until 5 mins before he arrived. Dell wanted to communicate to these passionate customers that they appreciated them so much that one of the busiest CEOs in the world was going to make time to come talk with them.

Introducing CEO Michael Dell to the DellCAP group

Former Maker’s Mark CEO Bill Samuels Jr often said that the brand viewed its customers as ‘friends’, and as such, that shaped all its communications with the people that buy its bourbon. You don’t pitch your friends, you don’t market to your friends, so Maker’s Mark changed how it communicated with its customers, to shape the type of relationships it wanted to cultivate.

Every company has passionate customers who consider themselves to be fans. The most successful companies are the ones that go out of their way to create, appreciate and reward their fans.

 

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Selling Your Passion vs Selling Your Product

The vast majority of companies I work with are using social and digital media to build awareness for their brands. Typically, they contact me because their efforts aren’t getting the results they need. One of the first mistakes I often find is that these companies are selling before the buyer is ready to make a purchase. You can’t sell to someone that isn’t ready to buy, and if you are trying to build awareness with customers, obviously these customers are unaware of who you are and why they should buy from you.

So instead of selling your product or service directly to these customers, you talk about the customers. Think about it, if you see or hear a marketing message, but it’s about something that you can relate to, that interests you, then you pay attention! If you want to grab the attention of unaware customers, then you talk about the customers.

In this post, Tom Martin talks about how he networks at events. He makes a point to talk to the person he’s just met and hone in on any common interests. Why does Tom do this? Because by talking about something that BOTH Tom and the person are passionate about, it helps the person more easily connect with Tom. The other person will let their guard down and be more willing to listen to Tom. On the flipside, if Tom had introduced himself and immediately started talking about him, about his business, the person would have likely lost interest very quickly. So Tom smartly puts the focus on the other person, let’s talk about you, let’s find a common ground, and let’s talk about that something that we are both passionate about. Also note that Tom adds that one of the people at the event later remarked that someone had told her that they appreciated that Tom didn’t sell them immediately, but now that they’ve talked to him for a bit, they want to hear ‘the pitch’.

Your marketing should follow the same path that Tom does when trying to connect with new customers. First, focus completely on the customer. Then, once you have their attention, focus on that common passion point that relates to both the customer, as well as your brand. After doing this, the customer will be more open to ‘the sell’, so then you start to promote and market your products and services directly.

A key element, perhaps the most important element, of connecting with a customer is establishing trust. Once the customer trusts you, they will lower their guard and give you their full attention. Think about how you interact with your friends. How much of your conversations revolve around common interests? We can relate to our friends, and we trust our friends.

So shouldn’t you talk to your customers as if they were your friends? Remember in the previous post we talked about how Bill Samuels Jr at Maker’s Mark said the brand strove to view his customers as friends, and he called this ‘marketing without fingerprints’.

What’s the common interest or passion point that runs through your brand and your customer? If you’re looking to build awareness with your customers, start there.

 

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What’s the ‘Purpose’ of Your Marketing?

We all need a purpose in our lives and day to day activities. Sure, we get up, go to work, pay bills, and live life. But beyond that, we need to live a life of purpose. We need something to motivate and inspire us to get up in the morning. We need something to look forward to, we need to feel like we are accomplishing something worthwhile.

We need to feel like our life has a purpose.

In much the same way, your brand’s marketing needs a purpose. I’m not talking about separating your customers from their wallet, that’s not inspiring or motivating for the brand or customer. Does your marketing simply broadcast and promote on behalf of your brand, or does it have a purpose?

At Maker’s Mark, the brand gives its marketing purpose by reframing who its customers are. The brand views its customers as ‘friends’, and as such holds all marketing communications through the lense of ‘how would we talk to our friends?’ Additionally, the brand understands that you don’t broadcast to your friends, you have a one-to-one conversation with them. For years, the brand’s founders did this literally in the state of Kentucky where Maker’s Mark originated. But as the brand grew and became a nationwide sensation, it obviously became impossible for founders in Kentucky to have a one-to-one conversation with its customers all across the nation.

But Maker’s Mark held true to the ‘purpose’ of its marketing; to treat its customers as friends and have a one-to-one conversation with them. This led to the creation of a brand ambassador program, which allowed its ambassadors to scale those one-to-one conversations with customers all across the country. By holding true to the ‘purpose’ of its marketing, to treat its customers as friends, the brand was able to create an incredibly profitable brand ambassador program, which allowed the brand to have those one-to-one conversations with their friends.

The ‘purpose’ of Pedigree’s marketing isn’t to sell dog food, it’s to create happier and healthier dogs. This is also a focus that motivates its customers to pay attention to Pedigree’s marketing. Pedigree’s customers don’t care about dog food, they care about the health and well-being of their dogs, of all dogs.  Pedigree also uses its marketing to draw attention to dog adoption, to supporting your local pet shelter. All of these things tie into the ‘purpose’ of creating happier and healthier dogs.

If you’re trying to wrap your head around what the ‘purpose’ of your marketing is, think about how your brand’s products and services fit into the lives of your customers, and more importantly, how do those products and services improve the lives of your customers? If you can understand how your brand’s products and services improve your customer’s lives, that can become what you market.  That can become your marketing’s ‘purpose’ and what drives and inspires you as a marketer.

Don’t market your product, market how your product fits into my life and makes it better.  That should be the purpose of your marketing.

 

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How to Segment Your Engagement Strategy Based on Customer Type

Most companies have a customer engagement strategy, but that strategy views customers as one type and structures the strategy accordingly.

Yet your customers are very different people, they might be a part of a larger group, but there are many smaller subsets of the larger group that your company should be aware of.

Let’s review the Buyer’s Journey:

Buyer's Journey, Creating Better Content

In looking at this process, you can see that some customers would be at each of these four stages leading up to a purchase. Let’s quickly review the type of content you should deliver to these customers at each stage, and then talk about how to engage each group:

Unaware: These are customers that don’t know who you are or what you do. The content you create for these customers should be focused heavily on the customer, and light on the brand. When you create content that talks about the customer, it gets their attention, and you will need their attention to move the customer closer to a sale. When you hear companies talk about wanting to ‘build awareness’ via social media and content marketing, these are the customers they are wanting to reach.

Engaging With Unaware Customers: When engaging with these customers, remember that they aren’t ready to buy, so attempting to sell to them will be a waste of time. This stage is about gaining attention, and developing trust. It’s why you want to invest so much time talking to and about the customer. Doing so will get their attention, and it helps them lower their guard and begin to trust you.

Years ago, I worked as a vendor for a company that sells consumer pesticides. Part of the job required that on the weekends, I had to sell the products. My trainer taught me how to sell the products, and he told me to never sell the product until you had talked to the customer, and then always suggest the best product to help them, even if it wasn’t the vendor’s product. I stocked the shelves during the week and on weekends I would be in the store primarily to sell the products, as were the competitor’s vendors.  One weekday I was stocking the shelves and an older gentleman came up and I asked him if he needed help and he started explaining an insect problem he was having in his lawn. After hearing his story, I saw that my company didn’t make a product to treat his particular issue, so I recommended a competitor’s product, which he bought.

That Saturday, myself and another vendor were selling on that same isle. I looked up and noticed the older gentleman I had sold the competitor’s product to walking up. The other vendor stopped him immediately and asked if he could help him. “Nope!”, he replied. “I came to talk to him!”, and he pointed at me. He then told me how the product I had suggested worked for him then asked me to tell him about the products MY company sold! Remember when you craft an engagement and content strategy for Unaware customers, that you want to focus on the customer because you want to get their attention, and you want to build trust with them. A hard sell at this point will turn them off immediately.

 

Slightly Aware: These are customers who are beginning to understand who your brand is, and what it does. Content aimed at these customers should help them understand how your brand’s products and services fit into their lives. So at this stage, you want to shift your content a bit to begin to discuss your product and services, but in the context of ‘Here’s how our stuff can help you”. In that way you are communicating that you know and understand who the customer is, and also that you know how your products and services can help them.

Engaging With Slightly Aware Customers: Here, you want to remind the customers how your products and services fit into their lives and IMPROVE their lives.

A good example of this is using a Twitter chat to talk about the larger topic that’s relevant to both your brand, and your customers.  Marriott has a #ParadiseChat, which is focused on travel, but in the context of the chat, Marriott can help establish the link between traveling, and staying at a Marriott hotel or resort. The Twitter chat also gives Marriott’s social media team a way to engage directly with potential customer before, during and after the chat, giving them more information about the brand’s offerings and how they could fit into the customer’s future travel plans.

 

Interested: Customers at this stage are now considering making a purchase. So your content should shift more toward the product itself. NOW is when you can FINALLY start to sell your brand’s products and services. Customers at this stage are doing research in your products and services and those of your competitors, before making a purchase decision.

How to Engage With Interested Customers: Customers at this stage will be doing research, so you want to engage with them in a way that helps them get the information they need. These customers will be consulting online reviews on sites such as Amazon, so if you have a current brand ambassador or loyalty program, you want to encourage its members to write reviews on sites such as Amazon for any of your products and services that they use.

Another example of how you can engage these customers is by giving them better access to product information. Taylor Guitars began to notice in its retail stores that customers would inspect a guitar in the store, but when they saw the price, they would often put the guitar back and decide to go home to do more research. Taylor Guitars took this customer behavior into account, and incorporated research tools into its smartphone app. This gives customers access to better product information in store, and can help them justify the purchase. Too many companies attempt to change customer behavior, when the smart play is to accept customer behavior and work with it, not against it.

 

Ready to Buy! Customers at this stage are…ready to buy! Your content should do one thing, help them complete the sale.

How to Engage With Customers Who Are Ready to Buy: Sell to them. Don’t ask them to sign up for your newsletter or follow your brand on social media, just help them complete the purchase because that’s all the customer is interested in doing.

 

As you can see, your engagement strategy can’t be ‘one size fits all’, because you don’t have just one type of customer. You have to take into account what type of customer you are attempting to engage with at any touchpoint, and adjust your engagement strategy accordingly.

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Instagram’s Threads Messaging App Attempts to Take Social Media ‘Back to the Future’

The rumor is that Instagram plans on launching a new standalone messaging app called Threads. This app would be geared toward letting Instagram users connect with their closest contacts only. The idea of a social media app that focuses on only your closest friends isn’t new (remember Path?), but what’s interesting here is how the app’s functionality is arrived at. Instagram looked at its users and found that they connected differently with their closest contacts. Most Instagram users preferred to communicate with close connections via instant messaging rather than public interactions.  In other words, Instagram found that most users communicate publicly with everyone, and privately with just their close friends.

I’ve written about this before, but I think we will see social media sites and apps begin to move toward helping us foster closer connections with fewer people versus platonic connections with everyone. Social media was originally focused on growing your network organically via simple interactions with friends and family. Everyone had smaller networks, and a much closer connection to the members of their network.

This all began to change when social media sites like Facebook and Twitter began adding ‘vanity metrics’ to a user’s account and activity. Suddenly, everyone could see how many people followed you, or how much engagement every bit of content you created had earned. It also changed how we created and shared content. If a particular piece of content had many Likes or Retweets, it was a sort of ‘social proof’ that other people enjoyed this content, so it must be worth our attention. Or at least worth sharing with others.

I’ve wondered how our behavior on social media today would change if no one knew how many followers someone had, or how much (or little) engagement their content had earned. Would we go back to communicating instead of broadcasting? Would we judge content on its own merits, rather than the number of Likes or Retweets it had gotten?

At the end of the day, I think most of us would like to return to a time when it was more about the ‘social’ and less about the ‘media’.

If you’d like to learn more about the potential of the Threads app and why Instagram could go in this direction, check out this episode of eMarketer’s Behind the Numbers podcast.

 

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Why Great Storytelling is So Important to Your Brand

I’ve been working with my friends at MarketingProfs this Summer to create a course for their Storytelling Summit for Marketers, which launches on September the 10th. As a way to give you a sneak peek at my course, Storytelling on Social Media, I wanted to talk a bit about why it’s important for your brand to tell stories.

Stories power Word of Mouth. By using story, you have a way to relate information to other people via a method (the story) which makes the information not only much more interesting, but you also increase the chance that other people will continue to pass that information along by sharing that same story.

I am an Alabama football fan, as most of you know. Recently, I was talking to a friend about the last two seasons, and Alabama’s starting QB, Tua Tagovailoa. If I had wanted to simply share information with this person, I could have said “Alabama beat Georgia the last two seasons.” While factually correct, both those wins were wrapped in incredible stories that make the information (Bama beat Georgia) far more interesting and memorable.

In 2017, Alabama faced Georgia for the National Championship. Jalen Hurts was Alabama’s starting QB, but Tua was the gunslinging backup that dazzled fans every time he played. Every time Hurts struggled, the fans clamored for Tua to come in, but he never did.

In the NC game against Georgia, the Bulldogs jumped out to a big lead by halftime.  Hurts was having a terrible game for Alabama. At halftime, the switch was made to start true freshman Tua in the second half, and he led Alabama to a come-from-behind victory, sealed by a 41-yard TD pass in Overtime.

The following year Alabama played Georgia for the SEC Championship and the roles were reversed. This time Tua was the starter and Jalen was the backup. And once again, Georgia jumped out to a big lead as Tua battled injuries. In the 2nd half, Jalen was put in and as Tua did the year before, he led Bama back to score a late win over Georgia. Jalen’s heroics led to a very emotional postgame interview with Nick Saban:

Now isn’t that a lot more memorable and interesting than saying ‘Alabama beat Georgia the last two seasons’?

Brand storytelling is about using story to communicate information to your customers. Ideally, that information will be both interesting and relevant to your customers, and relevant to your brand as well. When thinking about creating stories for your brand, think about what stories you can tell that will be both relevant to your customers, and also speak to what your brand stands for and is about.

A very simple way to do this can be by utilizing the stories of your customers, which you are probably already doing with testimonials. You can also let your employees tell what it’s like working for your brand, this can help streamline the hiring process, reducing hiring costs.

Also keep in mind when you are thinking about telling stories, that you can always use hypothetical examples in your stories. In fact, mixing real examples with abstract ones is one of the best ways to teach difficult concepts. You can tell a story about how one of your customers uses your product, then add a hypothetical “here’s how you could use our product” story to supplement the customer’s story.

Just remember that storytelling is a wonderful way to deliver information to your customers, and give them a way to easily relate that information to others, enhancing word of mouth.  Besides, who doesn’t love hearing and sharing a good story?

If you want to learn how to up your brand storytelling game, check out MarketingProfs’ Storytelling Summit for Marketers. Courses go live on September 10th, with additional live keynotes on the 17th and 24th.

 

PS: To wrap up the story with Tua and Jalen, at the end of the 2018 season, Jalen transferred to Oklahoma, where he won the starting QB job in the Spring. Last Saturday was the season opener for both Alabama and Oklahoma. Tua was amazing for Alabama, passing for over 300 yards and 4 TDs. But Jalen was the talk of the college football world, accounting for over 500 yards rushing and passing, and 6 TDs. After Week One, both are considered frontrunners for the Heisman trophy, given to the top player in college football.

 

BONUS: Well isn’t this awesome? Kerry at MarketingProfs has given me a $100 discount code to pass along to you, use code KERRYLIKESME to save $100 on the Storytelling for Marketers Summit!

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The Secret Language of Happy Customers

Let’s say you are a die hard fan of the movie Memento, like I am. Think about the conversation you would have with someone who just saw the movie for the first time last night. Most of their input would likely be along the lines of “WTF did I just watch???”

Now how would that conversation change if you met another fellow die hard fan of Memento?  You would have a COMPLETELY different conversation. You would get into dissecting individual scenes, the plot as a whole, you would question if it was really Teddy who slipped the note under Leonard’s door at the hotel, or was it someone else?

In her wonderful book Badass: Making Users Awesome, Kathy Sierra talks about how your most passionate users/customers have a different conversation than your regular customers. They are the ‘experts’ who hear music differently, the photographers who notice details in a landscape and how to frame a picture perfectly that the rest of us completely miss. They have a more advanced understanding of the things they are passionate about, and as a result, their conversations are more advanced as well.

I was remembering Kathy’s teachings when I recently heard the wonderful episode of the Punch Out podcast with David Meerman Scott as guest. First, David is absolutely brilliant and has some incredibly fascinating hobbies, so the episode is a must-listen purely for the entertainment value.

But David said something fascinating that ties into Kathy’s point about passionate users/customers having a different conversation around the things they love.  David said “It’s a way to form really strong bonds with people, around a shared fandom, a shared emotional connection. At one time I was like ‘this is a frivolous hobby’, but it’s not. It’s something that’s really important for us humans, to be around like minded people.”

Whenever I talk to companies about building a brand ambassador program, one of the key elements I always address is the need to have a way for the members of the program to connect with each other. It’s incredibly important to have people that share a passion around an idea, a belief, or even a brand, connect directly with each other.  I’ve often said that a rock concert is one of the greatest marketing inventions created. Think about what a rock concert is; you take hundreds if not thousands of fans of a rock artist or band, and stick them in the same arena and let them interact with each other. Being that close to so many people that share a similar passion or interest as you makes the entire experience that much better and more rewarding. It also increases your attachment and passion for the rock star.

So it makes sense to find a way to connect these customers to each other. Such customers are often great candidates for Customer Advisory Panels, or any group you create where you regularly solicit and act on feedback from customers. If you have a formal brand ambassador program, one of the important aspects is creating channels or tools that allow ambassadors to connect with each and become more comfortable together. This can easily be done with something as simple as a Facebook group or Slack channel.

Now, how could these special customers fit into your current marketing efforts?

Let’s remember we are talking about customers who are highly knowledgeable about your products and services. So much so that they likely will know more about your products and services than some of your newer employees. In other words, these special customers have the ability to be some of your best salespeople, if you tap into their abilities.

At this point, let’s revisit the buyer’s journey:

Buyer's Journey, Creating Better Content

The best place to utilize these customers would be in helping move potential customers from the Interested to Ready to Buy stage. Potential customers who are already interested are likely doing research on your products and services as the final step before committing to a purchase. Think of these customers as your ‘closers’, the customers that come in and seal the deal/sale for the person who is almost ready to make a purchase.

Let’s remember that customers who are in the Interested stage of the buyer’s journey are doing independent research. They are perusing your company website for specific product information and details. They are also searching for feedback from other customers. Customer reviews on websites such as Amazon are a common choice as its important to hear what people thought about your product or service AFTER buying it. Savvy customers will also search for complaints about your products and services, looking for common issues or problems that customers encountered.

Which is why it pays to engage with your more advanced customers and give them the incentive and structure to engage with customers who are in the ‘Interested’ stage of the buyer’s journey.  Encourage these customers to write reviews, publish blog posts, interact on message boards and forums.

The reality is that your most passionate customers are also your best salespeople.  Research has shown time and time again that we don’t trust brands, but we do trust other customers.

 

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How to Write Great Blog Comments

Writing better blog comments
Are you a commenting superhero?

Blogs are sexy again. As we move away from social media sites and toward a more decentralized social web experience, people and businesses are devoting more time to their blogs as a way to connect with readers and potential customers. If you’re devoting more time to your blog, don’t forget to focus on writing better blog comments. Whether you are replying to a reader on your own blog or leaving a comment on someone else’s blog, commenting is one of the best ways you can connect with new readers/customers, and build exposure for your business. Let’s talk about how to write great comments whether it’s on another blog, or on your own.

 

How to Write Great Blog Comments on Other Blogs

One of the best ways to grow your blog, is to leave it. What I mean by this is leaving comments on other blogs is a great way to create value for others, and ultimately grow awareness for your own blogging efforts. This is especially helpful for new bloggers that are looking to build a readership or following as compared to established bloggers.

But not all blog comments are created equal, and here’s some of the tips I’ve learned over the years for writing great blog comments:

1 – Add something to the conversation. Often I will read a post and think ‘wow, great post!’ But go past that, highlight issues that the blogger addressed, and add your own take. You don’t have to agree completely, and you don’t have to stick with their point. If one example they mentioned reminds you of another instance from your own experiences, mention that. But try to avoid simply repeating what others have said. And this is easier to do when you…

2 – Comment early. Sure it’s nice to let a few people comment first, so then you can build off what they say, as well as the blogger’s post. But what if you wait too long and everyone has addressed the points you wanted to raise? Don’t be afraid to put your thoughts down and to share your opinions. This is how you generate conversation and attention.

3 – Don’t over-promote yourself. No one likes reading a comment that’s blatant self-promotion.  We’ve all seen these comments, “Hey Mack, really great thoughts on this topic, I recently blogged about this as well…”, then they include a link to their blog (In fact, I often delete these comments if someone attempts to leave one here). Obviously, the only reason they left the comment was to link out to their site. Remember that you aren’t leaving the comment to promote yourself, you are trying to create value for the blog by adding to the conversation. If you’ve done your job, you’ll get promotion as an indirect result of your efforts.

4 – You can disagree, without being disagreeable. I might be a bit different from some in how I approach disagreements in the comments section, but I love it when readers disagree with my posts, and challenge my points. The biggest reason why, is because when you bring in alternative points, that extends the conversation and gives more people a chance to jump and leave their point of view.

However, always remember that it’s ok to ‘attack’ the ideas, but not the people presenting the ideas. Challenging stances and ideas are fine, but personal attacks add nothing to the conversation, and make you look like a jackass. Not what you want. Feel free to disagree, but don’t be disagreeable.

5 – Ask questions. What if you find a post and agree with the post, and everything the commenters have said. Now what? Why not ask a question or bring up a point that no one has raised yet? One thing that often happens, especially on blogs where the writer is very popular, is the readers may all agree with the writer. Why not offer a contrarian view and bring up the other side of the issue? Again, this helps extend the conversation, and you might find that others will then chime in saying that they agree with your point of view.

6 – Know why you are commenting. Are you leaving a comment to draw attention to yourself, or to add to the conversation? As with most everything else in social media, blog comments work best as a way to INdirectly promote yourself. Write a comment that others find value in, and that encourages others to check out your blog, follow you on Twitter, etc. Write a comment that was clearly intended to promote your blog, and you will likely gain nothing, and hurt your reputation.

 

How to Write Great Blog Comments on Your Own Blog (And Tips For Leveraging Great Blog Comments Left By Your Readers)

So that covers how to write great blog comments on someone else’s blog, but how do you handle blogs written on your own site?

My over-arching rule for comments on your own blog is Reward the Behavior You Want to Encourage. If your blog allows readers to comment, then you want readers to comment.  So if commenting is the reader behavior that you want, then you need to think about what you can do to encourage more readers to comment. Here’s some of my tips:

1 – Reply to as many comments as possible. If a reader comments on your blog, you want to reply to that comment if at all possible. This signals to the reader that you read their comment, and that you appreciate their comment enough to take the time to respond to them. This also ENCOURAGES this reader to comment again, since they know you will reply to them if they do.

2 – Ask the reader to expand on their thoughts. If a reader has left an indepth comment, then feel free to engage them in your reply and ask them to clarify or expand on a point they raised in their comment. This doesn’t always work as the reader that left the original comment may not see your reply to them or they may not feel like replying. Still, by replying to the commenter you are signaling to them and all your readers that you value their comment and that encourages your readers to comment more often.

3 – Add great reader comments to the body of the post they are commenting on. This is a great way to acknowledge and thank your reader for a great comment, and it encourages them to comment again. If a reader leaves a comment that I want to highlight, I will add it to the end of the post (or in another part of the post, if relevant), and make special mention of the comment, and the person who left the comment.  If the commenter added a link to their blog when they commented, I will add a link to their blog when I add the comment to my post, as an extra incentive for the readers to comment more often, as well as an additional way to acknowledge and thank the reader for their great comment. Also, doing this encourages readers to check out the comments and may encourage them to leave their own comment.

 

These are some tips I have learned from my own experience in writing blog comments. What did I miss that works for you?

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Tiny Love Spaces – Why Smaller is Often Better in Social Media

I wanted to talk about three distinct groups of friends I’ve followed over the last year or so. The first is a group of friends who are frequent business travelers, and we share stories and purchase suggestions in a group on Facebook.  The second is a group of friends who are fellow members of Adobe’s Insider Group, and we stay in touch via a Twitter group DM and Slack channel.  The third group of friends are people I have met on, of all things a phone game, and we have a group on messaging app Line.

These three groups are almost completely distinct (a few of my friends in the Facebook group are also in the Adobe Insiders group DM), and have formed around three very different social apps/platforms.

In fact, someone recently asked me what my favorite current social media site or app was and I immediately said ‘Line’. But I quickly realized that there’s nothing really spectacular about Line, I just thought of it first because that’s where my newest group of friends are.

These examples cover two trends that will be relevant to social and digital media over the coming years that I wanted to discuss.

1 – We are long past the saturation point in social media content. Notice I said social media CONTENT. Originally, social media sites and tools were used for communication. Over the last few years, social media sites have morphed into content distribution platforms first, with communication happening a distant second. As a result, user behavior has changed. Some people have adapted their social media usage, and have started sharing more content on social media sites. I certainly have. Others have changed their behavior by spending less time on these sites as the experience has shifted.

Yet another way that users have adapted to the content sharing saturation on social media sites is by creating small groups or clusters of people who can more organically interact with each other. The three examples I mentioned above; Facebook groups, Twitter group DMs and Line groups, represent this idea of going back to when we could connect and interact with our friends and peers on these sites. I also wonder if we might see this happening more on blogs, as bloggers try to re-cultivate reading communities on their sites. It’s about self-creating a way to cut through the clutter and get back to having a small group of friends or people that share a common connection or interest.

2 – People use social sites and apps based on whether or not their friends are using them. A few months ago I started playing a phone game and as soon as I did, everyone in the game told me “You have to get on Line!”  So after weeks of needling about not being on Line, I finally joined.  And the app itself is nothing that spectacular, but I enjoy using it because it gives me a way to stay in touch with the friends I’ve made while playing the game.

I think this is something we all do, we don’t pick a social app or site based on form and functionality as much as we do because we want to stay in touch with the people we know. Ten years ago there were far more social media sites and apps vying for eyeballs, and as a result many of those sites offered their own quirky user interface or functionality elements to try to attract attention.  Today, there are far fewer successful social media sites, and most of the mainstream ones share many of the core functionality elements. So functionality isn’t really a deciding factor in social media usage as it might have been a few years ago.

 

I’ve written about this before, but I think we are seeing a move away from a decentralized social web back to centralized, smaller groups or clusters of people organized around a common theme, belief or idea. I also think marketers need to understand this shift, and prepare for it.  This is why you are seeing companies move from working with influencers with huge followers, to working with T-Shaped or micro-influencers that have smaller followings, but a much deeper connection to those people.

What made social media so amazing in its earliest days was that it gave us an easy way to build deep connections with small clusters of people.  Over time, that’s morphed into having very shallow connections with as many people as possible.

I don’t think that’s ideal, or sustainable. Smaller and deeper groups of friends are preferable than having everyone on a site, and not really knowing anyone.

 

PS: I wanted to say thanks to BuzzSumo for including me in its list of the Top 100 Digital Marketing Influencers for 2019, at #20. A wonderful honor, check the list as there are a ton of smart people to follow.