MackCollier.com

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The Secret to Creating Word of Mouth That Most Companies Completely Miss

When you think of ‘Word of Mouth’, you probably think of ‘building buzz’, right? This is what most companies think word of mouth is about, what can you do to get people talking?  Seth Godin has the classic example of a purple cow in a field.  No one would talk about a regular cow, but if you saw a purple cow in a field, well everyone would talk about that!

So the generally accepted idea behind word of mouth marketing is “What can we do to get our customers talking?”  In other words, what can we do or create to give our customers something to talk about?

But what if your customers don’t need anything to talk about?

I have a Ford Fusion. In many ways, it’s a very average car, but it’s my car. It has every feature I want, it’s the right color, it’s got bulletproof reliability, I love it. I am also into detailing my car, so there’s certain products from companies like Klasse and Poorboy’s World that I love as well. These products make my Fusion look gorgeous, and increases my satisfaction with the car itself.

So here I am, a customer who loves my Ford Fusion, as well as Klasse and Poorboy’s World products.  There’s likely thousands or hundreds of thousands of customers just like me across the country.

All of us would happily promote Ford, Klasse and Poorboy’s World products, but these companies aren’t connecting with us. We would happily create word of mouth, and positive word of mouth, about these companies, if they would only help us do that.  Years ago, I worked with a major brand on a customer advisory event. We brought in several customers and spent all day with them talking with and listening to them. At the end of the day, we asked them what they would like to see the brand do for them.

The first customer answered “You guys have to figure out how to give us better tools to help us better promote your products to other customers”. This is the secret to creating word of mouth that most companies completely miss. Your happy customers would LOVE to create word of mouth on your company”s behalf, but you have to give them the tools and the permission to do so.

The reason why most companies don’t do this is because they don’t make the time to do it. It would be very easy to identify these customers that would love to create word of mouth for your products. One simple way would be to track online sales. You know what the average order amount is, how often the average customer places an order, etc.

Let’s say I am the online manager for Poorboy’s World, and I see that the average customer places 2 orders a year, for an average of $35 an order. You could create a threshold for your customers where if they buy at a level predetermined by you, that they will be offered a chance to join the Poorboy’s World Fan Club. Say, if you place 5 orders a year, you flag that customer as being a ‘loyal’ customer, and then invite them to join your fan club. Part of that could be giving them discounts, education on how to better use Poorboy’s World products, and encouraging them to promote the brand both offline and online by being active on message boards and forums devoted to detailing.

Your brand could easily do this, track customer sales (which you are already doing), and when an individual customer hits a certain level, you invite them to join your program devoted to encouraging your happy customers to create more word of mouth for your products.

It’s that easy. BTW, if you want to try out Klasse products, this guide is a great start. The two products you want are ‘All-In-One’ and ‘High Gloss Sealant Glaze’. AIO cleans and preps the paint, HGSG protects it for at least 6 months, possibly as long as a year. Cost for both is around $50 shipped (shop around), and they will last you for years, only need to apply twice a year, I use them in the Spring and again in the Fall.  Enjoy!

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It’s Time for a Social Media Reboot, Based on Communication, Not Narcissism

It’s not getting a lot of coverage, but social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are facing serious trust issues right now from their users. And it’s hurting their stock prices, Twitter’s stock has gone from close to $50 a share in June, to $35 a share today at the end of August. Facebook’s stock has also been hit hard, going from around $220 a share in July, to around $175 a share now.

What’s causing the drop? It would be easy to say that concerns over how the social media platforms display content and worries over potential censorship based on political affiliation is driving the fall. This is definitely playing a role, but I think there’s a far bigger underlying issue that’s been at play since the sites were launched over a decade ago.

Over the years, social media has morphed from being communications tools, to being ego tools. It’s somewhat understandable, appeals to ego (number of followers you have, how many Likes and RTs your updates get) are very strong, perhaps even necessary to some degree to drive user growth. But these appeals to ego have fundamentally changed user behavior.

And in a very bad way.

The great promise of social media was always that everyone has a voice. We are all connected. Conversation changes the world.

Yet if you look around, there’s not a lot of conversation happening on social media these days. There’s a lot of broadcasting, and a lot of yelling.

I’m in a rare place among most social media users, in that I can remember being active online before Facebook and Twitter. Back then, we didn’t call it social media, we called it ‘blogging’.  There were blogs, and MySpace.  That was pretty much social media in the days before Likes and ReTweets.

In those days, there weren’t a lot of numbers to game.  It’s wasn’t about how many followers you had or how many Likes a post got, it was about the conversation that it started. I can still remember waking up at 2am on many nights simply because I couldn’t get a blog post I’d read earlier that day out of my head. I’d have to get up, open Word and write a comment.  Or if the comment grew long enough, just open Blogger and write a new blog post.

As Facebook and Twitter grew (then later Instagram and Pinterest, etc), we became sort of ‘trained’ to gravitate toward shorter and faster communications. Which led to broadcasting more than talking. I mean if you have a deep thought you want to get out there, you have to constraint it to 140 characters in a tweet. And hell, who can wait 2 mins to see if anyone responds, so just stick it in a blog post, tweet out the link, and wait for everyone to ignore it.

Social media has changed our thinking, and our behavior. We don’t talk to each other anymore, because we don’t have the patience to wait 5 mins to hear what the other person thinks. We send out a tweet and immediately start looking for RTs and hearts. When you do that, it changes your behavior. You create content (tweets or updates) in a way to drive engagement. That means less talking and more yelling.  Because yelling drives engagement. Being angry drives engagement.

Taking the time to listen to the other person’s perspective? Well you don’t get Likes or RTs for that, so to hell with it.

But How Can I Tell Who is the Most Popular or Influential on Social Media Without the Numbers?

The argument for Likes, Followers, Retweets, etc has always been that we need a way to measure who is ‘worth listening to’.  Who should you follow? The guy with the most followers, so the logic goes.

The problem with focusing on numbers is that numbers can be gamed. If you tell me that number of Twitter followers is the most important metric, then I can instantly get 1,000 followers in the next 24 hours by simply following 2,000 people.  About half will follow me back. Or I could simply buy 10,,000 followers, likely for a few bucks.

Again, if we just go by numbers, then someone will find a way to game the numbers. Look at Twitter, and note how many people you see with 50,000 followers who are following 50,000 people. Yet here you sit with 5,000 followers following 50 people, and you think that person is more influential than you are.

What if you had no idea how many Likes or RTs or Followers someone had on Social Media? What if all the numbers we currently use to decide if someone is worth following or listening to, were gone. How would we judge if someone is worth listening to?

By what they say. We would judge people based on the content they create. This is honestly how it should be. Our criteria for creating content shouldn’t be “Is this going to get social shares”, it should be “Is this going to make an impact on the people that read it?”

Think about the word ‘impact’. Think about something impacting another object. It changes that object. A literal impression is made.

Will your content make an impression on its audience? Because if it doesn’t, then what the hell are you doing?

 

BONUS: Great post from Kathy Sierra – More buzzwords, likes, RTs and followers are only a potential competitive advantage if both you and the competition are mediocre. Think about that.

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How Much Does a Brand Ambassador Program Cost?

cost of a brand ambassador program

Organized brand ambassador programs are becoming more popular with companies, but there’s very little information out there about the prices companies can expect to pay for creating and maintaining a brand ambassador program.

So I wanted to give you some information on pricing with this post.  Let me state up front that the prices you see in this post are intended to be used as a guide and a starting point for your research.  The prices you are quoted might be completely different, or they could be exactly in line with what’s listed here.  The prices listed here are based on my experience working with companies on  similar programs, information gained from talking to industry peers and from good old-fashioned online research.

First, let’s start with a definition of a brand ambassador program for the purposes of this post:

A Brand Ambassador Program is an ongoing business initiative designed to create a relationship with select customers that helps the brand work with these customers to reach certain business goals.

Keep in mind that a Brand Ambassador Program is more robust than a Brand or Customer Advocacy program.  These programs typically revolve around engaging with fans to help promote the brand and spread certain messaging about the brand.  A Brand Ambassador Program typically has a self-promotional element for the brand, but it’s also focused on other key business drivers, such as customer feedback, customer service and generating sales.

It’s also important to note that the brand ambassador program is ongoing.  Often when companies think of a brand ambassador program, they are considering something closer to a brand advocate outreach program, or an influencer outreach program.  Both of these are closer to a campaign in structure in that it typically has a starting and ending point.  A brand ambassador program is an ongoing effort.

Since a brand ambassador program is ongoing, there are two major considerations:

1 – Startup and maintenance costs are typically higher

2 – Business gains realized from the program are typically higher

So the answer to the question ‘How Much Does a Brand Ambassador Program Cost?’ is typically ‘it depends’.  Let’s look at the factors that influence the costs of launching a brand ambassador program:

1 – Determining the strategy and desired outcomes from the brand ambassador program.  Answer the ‘what will success look like?’ question.  What needs to happen as a result of this brand ambassador program in order for it to be deemed successful?  You’ll need to do an audit and strategy creation for the proposed program.  This is also where you can decide if it’s financially feasible to go forward and launch your brand ambassador program.

2 – The scope of the program.  Will your program have 5 members initially or 500?  The size of the program at both onset and over time will play a huge role in its cost.  Also, what type of relationship do you want to have with your Ambassadors?  Many brands are excited about the idea of launching a Brand Ambassador program because they like the idea of having passionate customers spread the brand’s message.  Brand promotion is only one way that ambassadors can help grow your brand.  Since ambassadors are constantly in direct contact with other customers, besides selling directly to them, your ambassadors can collect valuable feedback about your brand.  This feedback can then be applied to improve your brand’s existing marketing. design and customer service efforts.  These improvements can lead to a real decrease in business costs that should be considered when calculating the return of having a brand ambassador program.

3 – How many employees will be required to work with the program?  This ties into the previous point.  Keep in mind that the costs associated with this point and the previous one are typically far less when the program is launched, but will likely increase over time as the program matures.  However, as the program matures and grows, it will self-fund any additional staff that’s necessary to the program.

So as you can see, there are a lot of moving parts in place and it is difficult to get exact dollar amounts on the cost of your brand ambassador program.  A good rule of thumb is to shoot for breaking even during the first year of your brand ambassador program.  What I mean by that is have the costs associated with launching the program at least equal the amount of revenue/business value generated from the program’s first year.  Keep in mind that these projections should be included in the strategy plan and audit that’s created in the first point above.  Also keep in mind that in the first year you’ll incur some startup expenses that won’ be a factor after the program is up and running.  So once you factor in program growth and running it more efficiently over time, if you can break even during the first year, you’ll be in good shape.

So What Are the Actual Costs to Launch and Run a Brand Ambassador Program?

First, let’s look at the cost of the Brand Ambassador Audit.  This will give you the strategy for your proposed program, and help you decide if it is financially feasible to launch.

For a Small Business (Up to 500 employees) – cost for the Brand Ambassador Audit is typically $1,500 – $5,000.

For a Medium-Sized Company (500-10,000 employees) – cost for the Brand Ambassador Audit is typically $3,500-$25,000.

For a Large Company (Over 10,000 employees) – cost for the Brand Ambassador Audit is typically $10,000-$50,000

In short, the bigger the company the more extensive the audit required.  This audit is a one-time fee paid before you launch the program.

Next, let’s look at training and ongoing maintenance.  This is where you work directly with your chosen ambassadors to train them on how you want them to engage with customers, and what they should be working to accomplish.  Also included is time devoted to working directly with your ambassadors.  Keep in mind that, as mentioned above, the scope of your brand ambassador program is critical when calculating ongoing costs, as well as returns.  For example, many brands are simply interested in a program that helps them use fans/advocates for self-promotion.  To that end there are plenty of vendors that are focused on helping brands ‘activate’ their brand advocates, such as SocialToaster, Zuberance and Social Chorus.  However, if you also want your program to focus on other areas such as customer feedback, improved customer loyalty, etc, then additional costs will be accrued.

Monthly training and maintenance costs:

Small business – typically $500-$2,500 a month

Mid-sized company – typically $1,000-$10,000 a month

Large company – typically $5,000-$25,000 a month

Again, the main factors here are number of ambassadors (fewer means less cost) and scope of the program (more limited means less cost).

Employee and Ambassador Compensation Costs

Let’s look at the third major area of expense in a Brand Ambassador Program, the costs to compensate employees and ambassadors.  First, keep in mind that you should expect to compensate your ambassadors if you are asking them to perform certain functions on behalf of the brand that they normally would not do.  You will not only spend time training them, you will also be asking them to spend actual time working on behalf of your brand to connect with other customers.  They deserve to be compensated for their time.

This expense will be difficult to nail down, especially at first.  As the program matures you will get a much firmer handle on how much time is needed from both your employees and brand ambassadors and can budget accordingly.  Also as your brand’s ambassador program matures, the amount of time required for training and maintenance per ambassador will decrease to a degree as your processes become more efficient

In short, this expense fluctuates wildly based on what you expect from your brand ambassadors.  Also, keep in mind that you may not need to pay all ambassadors (In fact, paying ambassadors money is often the worst way to compensate them).  In general, if you are asking ambassadors to let you train them, or to jump on regularly scheduled conference calls, or in any way adjust their normal schedules to accommodate an ongoing relationship with your brand that benefits your brand, then you should consider paying the ambassadors.  But if all you are asking your ambassadors to do is hand out a coupon to any customer that expresses an interest in your brand’s products, then maybe not.  It’s a fine line between working with your brand’s fans to do what they want to do anyway (spread their love of your brand), and asking them to invest more time than they would normally.  In short, if it feels like you are asking them to work for your brand, then you should pay them as if they are workers.

For purposes of this post and to give you some numbers to use as a guideline, assume that 10% of your ambassadors will be paid at a rate of 5-10 hours a week.  Also assume that your employees will spend 10 hours a week managing your first 50 ambassadors, and 15 a week managing from 50-100.  Amount of employee time per ambassador will decrease as you add more ambassadors to your program.

So for example, if you have 100 ambassadors in your program, you would pay 10 of them 5-10 hours a week, and your employees would spend 15 hours a week managing the program.  That would total 65-115 hours a week for your brand ambassador program.  And again, this is just an estimate to give you an example of how you could budget time and how many hours compensation the plan would need.  Your actual hours required could be more or less.

So lets now total up the costs:

For a small business, the expenses are:

Brand Ambassador Audit (One-time fee) – $2,500 – $10,000

Monthly training and maintenance – $500 – $2,500

Monthly employee and Ambassador compensation (estimated) – $250 – $1,000

Total Year One costs for a small business to launch a Brand Ambassador program – $11,500 – $52,000

Yearly ongoing costs for a small business to maintain a Brand Ambassador program  – $9,000 – $42,000 each year

For a mid-sized company the expenses are:

Brand Ambassador Audit (One-time fee) – $5,000 – $25,000

Monthly training and maintenance – $1,000 – $10,000

Monthly employee and Ambassador compensation (estimated) – $1,000 – $5,000

Total Year One costs for a mid-sized company to launch a Brand Ambassador program – $29,000 – $205,000

Yearly ongoing costs for a mid-sized company to maintain a Brand Ambassador program  – $24,000 – $180,000 each year

For a large company the expenses are:

Brand Ambassador Audit (One-time fee) – $10,000 – $50,000

Monthly training and maintenance – $5,000 – $25,000

Monthly employee and Ambassador compensation (estimated) – $5,000 – $15,000

Total Year One costs for a large company to launch a Brand Ambassador program – $130,000 – $530,000

Yearly ongoing costs for a large company to maintain a Brand Ambassador program  – $120,000 – $480,000 each year

And again, let me reiterate that all of these numbers and figures are not absolute and should be considered a guide or starting point.

Now that you have the numbers in place based on the size of your company, you can take those numbers and compare them against the projected benefits from a brand ambassador program to decide if such a program makes sense for your brand.

For example, let’s say that you are a mid-sized company that, based on the above formula and numbers, decides that it will cost your brand approximately $50,000 in Year One, and $40,000 annually thereafter to create a brand ambassador program.  Now that you have a handle on the costs of the program, you can then look at the projected benefits from the program and decide if it makes good fiscal sense.

This is why it’s important to understand that in order to get the budget necessary to fund a brand ambassador program, you are going to need to be able to show that the program will generate more than it will cost.  So if you go to your boss with a plan to start a brand ambassador program that will cost $25,000 a year and generate $15,000 annually in sales, you won’t get that check signed.

Here’s a real-world example:  When Fiskars launched the Fiskateers brand ambassador program, it had two key goals:

1 – Increase product sales by 10% in 4 specific cities within 9 months

2 – Increase online mentions of the Fiskars brand by 10% within 9 months

With these specific goals, Fiskars can track the profit it would make from these sales as well as the sales generated from the increase in online mentions, and compare that to the cost of the program, and know if it makes sense.  BTW according to the book Brains on Fire, the Fiskateers program doubled sales in those 4 cities within 9 months and increased online mentions by 240% in the first 4 months.

Again, keep in mind that these numbers are a guide, and your figures might vary greatly.  For example, former Maker’s Mark CEO Bill Samuels Jr has claimed that it cost the brand $2 Million to launch its wildly successful brand ambassador program.  That program is now rumored to have over 500,000 ambassadors, all of which consider it their job to promote the Maker’s Mark brand.

On the other hand, let’s say your brand would love to launch an ambassador program, but you simply don’t have the budget to outsource the creation of such a program.  Here’s an excellent recap of how Paper.li is launching its brand ambassador program in-house.

UPDATE: Kelly Hungerford, who is spearheading Paper.li’s Brand Ambassador program, left a fascinating comment with more information on its program, make sure you check it out.

 

Are you considering launching a Brand Ambassador Program for your company and want to know what it would cost?  I’ll be happy to help answer any questions you have, simply email me!

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How to Convince Your Skeptical Boss to Invest in a Brand Ambassador Program

Whenever you attempt to sell your boss on launching a new initiative, there’s a few things you need to do to improve the boss’ chances of signing off:

1 – Help the boss understand the value

2 – Help the boss understand the cost

3 – Help the boss understand the scope of the initiative and the changes that will be required

 

Unfortunately, the idea of a ‘brand ambassador program’ can mean different things to different organizations, and it’s often difficult for your boss to know what the program is or the impact it could have on their business. When you tell the boss that such a program will cost likely tens of thousands to fully implement and it will take up to a year to see maximum results, well it’s easy to see why many bosses pass.

So in order to improve the chance that your boss signs off on launching a brand ambassador program, we need to address each of your boss’ possible objections head on.

 

Helping Your Boss Understand the Value of a Brand Ambassador Program

As I mentioned, a brand ambassador program can mean different things to different companies. Some companies, for example, hire infuencers or even celebrities to act as their brand ambassadors. Patagonia is a good example of a company that follows this model. When I work with clients, I typically advise them to structure their brand ambassador program so that the ambassadors they select are current customers that love the brand. These customers are already proactively engaging with other customers and promoting the brand, we are just going to build a program that gives us a framework to work with and connect with them regularly.

In general, there are four ways that brand ambassadors benefit your brand:

1 – Promotion. Brand ambassadors are constantly encouraging other customers to buy from your brand. Even if you don’t connect with them, they are already promoting your brand. These are the customers that will stop you in a store and give you an unsolicited recommendation for a product you are considering. The benefit of having a brand ambassador program is that you can work directly with these customers to help them promote your brand in the specific way that you want.

2 – Reputation Management. Your brand ambassadors are the customers that are online and offline protecting your brand. They are defending you from troll attacks, they are defending you when other customers criticize your brand. The benefit of a brand ambassador program is that it gives you a way to train these customers on how to best respond to complaints about your brand that they encounter either online or off.

3 – Customer Service and Support. Along with the previous point, brand ambassadors will proactively help other current or potential customers with issues associated with your brand and its products. The benefit of a brand ambassador program is that it gives your brand a way to provide training for these customers and to give them a way to contact the brand directly if they encounter a customer who needs more help than they can provide.

4 – Customer Feedback. Brand ambassadors are in constant, direct contact with your customers, and are constantly collecting feedback from them. This is honestly the most underutilized benefit that brand ambassadors provide for your brand. By launching a brand ambassador program, you have a more efficient way to collect, categorize and draw insights from the customer feedback that your ambassadors collect.

 

Now if you’re having to sell your boss on the idea of launching a brand ambassador program, the odds are he doesn’t fully see and/or appreciate the value that ambassadors bring to the table. For example, if you tell your boss that brand ambassadors help your brand by promoting it and the brand’s products, he probably sees the value in that promotion. But when you get further down the list to things like customer support and feedback, the value can appear a bit murkier for a boss that isn’t familiar with the idea of a brand ambassador program to begin with.

And it’s worth remembering that when you launch a brand ambassador program, it will likely need to be a gradual rollout. You will want to start with a smaller group of ambassadors, likely with limited responsibilities. I always tell clients when launching a brand ambassador program to “start small, nail the process down, then expand”.

So out of necessity, and in an attempt to make your best case for a brand ambassador program to your boss, it makes sense to start the rollout of a brand ambassador program gradually. For instance, start with the promotional aspect of a brand ambassador program first. This is where most bosses will understand and see the immediate value.

 

Helping Your Boss Understand the Cost of a Brand Ambassador Program

Building on the previous section, understand that if you start by first focusing on how your brand ambassadors can better promote the brand, you are also significantly lowering the cost of the program. Think of it as adopting a payment plan system for paying for a brand ambassador program instead of needing all the costs paid upfront. Start smaller, with just the promotional aspect, nail the process, then you expand.

Here’s another key: Start with a smaller group of ambassadors. This will also significantly lower costs. If you envision having a nationwide ambassador program, you could start with a single market, maybe it could be your most prosperous market, maybe it could be the one where your headquarters are. Either way, by starting with a small group focused on only one aspect of the program (promotional), then you greatly reduce the cost of the program, and make it much easier to manage.

Here’s the best part: By adopting this segmented approach, you not only reduce time and cost, you can, if managed correctly, have the brand ambassador program pay for itself as it is launched and rolled out. Increasing promotion will lead to increased sales and increased revenue. That increased revenue can then be used to fund the next stage of the program’s rollout; focused on brand reputation management. If done smartly, the only new costs associated with the program could be those involving the promotional aspect at launch.

 

Helping Your Boss Understand the Scope of the Initiative and the Changes Involved

By adopting a segmented or tiered launch/rollout of the brand ambassador program, we’ve significantly reduced the scope of the rollout, and the associated costs. Additionally, we are focusing only on the promotional aspect at launch, which is likely the area that even a skeptical boss will see and understand the value in. This also means that necessary changes within your organization will be kept to a minimum. If you start by first focusing on the promotional aspects of a brand ambassador program, this can be launched with minimal disruption or additional work from your staff. Ideally, your brand already has at least one manager for your social media efforts, and this person or team could also assist with helping your best customers promote your brand. Additionally, your brand may want to explore launching a brand ambassador program for your employees, and a promotional aspect is typically the cornerstone of such an initiative.

By starting with just the promotional aspects of a brand ambassador program, you’ve reduced associated costs and maximized the potential benefits.

 

One Final Note About Starting a Brand Ambassador Program

When you bring up the topic of launching a brand ambassador program to your skeptical boss, one of the thoughts he will have (whether he shares it with you or not) is “Ugh, how much is this going to cost us?” It’s worth remembering, and spelling out to your boss, that a brand ambassador programs takes what your business is already doing, and makes it better.

Your boss will likely understand and appreciate the value brand ambassadors can create by promoting your brand and its products. But make sure he understands the other ways that ambassadors can help your brand, and make your current efforts more efficient while also reducing costs.

For example, your brand likely has a set dollar amount placed on every customer service call it receives. In other words, your brand knows what the business cost is for each call it receives.  Let’s say that cost is $7.13 per call based on the call length and what your brand has to pay a customer service representative to handle the call. That means that every time one of your ambassadors helps a customer and eliminates their need to call your brand for customer service, your brand has saved $7.13. Each customer service call that is averted by the actions of your brand ambassadors is a cost-saving to your brand! You can find similar ways to calculate cost savings for reputation management (an improvement of online sentiment by one point results in an X percent increase in sales) and customer feedback as well. These cost-savings that the brand ambassadors create also help offset or even eliminate the cost of expanding the program.

So if you want to improve the chances of getting your skeptical boss to invest in a brand ambassador program, do the following:

  • Don’t try to launch everything at once, focus on a staggered rollout.
  • Start small, with a limited group and focus first on the area that your skeptical boss can clearly see the value in where your brand can quickly see results. Focusing on promotion first is a good start.
  • Once you see results from your initial efforts, grow as necessary, and use gains realized to fund the growth of the program.
  • Make sure your skeptical boss understands that your brand ambassadors will increase sales AND lower costs for your brand.

 

Still have questions about how to sell your skeptical boss on a brand ambassador program? Fill out this contact form and I’ll be happy to help you!

 

 

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What’s the Difference Between a Blog and a Newsletter?

CoffeeCupPadFor years I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the difference between a blog and a newsletter.  I keep seeing smart people saying that I need to have a newsletter, that a blog alone isn’t enough.  A few years ago when I was planning for Think Like a Rock Star to come out, I started seriously investigating this whole newsletter thing.  I started subscribing to ones from a lot of people that were supposed to be smarter than I was.

Wait, why are you calling this a newsletter?

What I noticed (and this really confused me) is that 99% of these supposedly smart people were using their newsletters just to resend their latest blog post.  Seriously, I subscribed to one newsletter from a guy that has hundred of thousands of ‘followers’ on Twitter, and each newsletter email I got from him was little more than ‘Hey check out this post I wrote on…I think you’ll like it! (Link Here).’

So if you were already subscribed to his blog via email and getting his new posts directly straight to your inbox already, why would you also subscribe to his newsletter, which was just linking to his latest blog post (Which you had already read)?

See?  Confusion.  It seemed like most of the ‘smart’ people were using their newsletters to replicate their blog subscriptions, and that didn’t seem very ‘smart’ to me.

Then there’s Ann Handley. Ann has a biweekly newsletter called Total Annarchy.  It’s delightful. Everyone loves Ann’s emails.  Everyone raves about Ann’s newsletter, so I subscribed. Ann’s emails were different, she didn’t just re-link to her latest blog post, she wrote a new ‘post’ for her emails.  Actually, they were like letters, and everyone seemed to love them because they were.  So I thought that was interesting…but I still wasn’t getting the importance of a newsletter vs a blog.

A blog and a newsletter serve different audiences

Then I ran across a site that explained the difference perfectly for me:

A blog is a tool you use to meet new people, whereas a newsletter is a tool you use to make a deeper connection with people you already know.

Perfect!  This really helped me understand the difference not only between the two tools, but also the difference in the two audiences.  This explained why Ann’s emails seemed more like letters she was writing to a friend, because she’s writing to an audience (her newsletter audience) that already knows her!

 

Two content channels, two content strategies

Many content creators use a blog as a tool to build awareness for themselves or their employer. Once people are aware of you and your content, you want to build a deeper relationship with them. A newsletter, is one of the forms of content you can create and provide to deepen a relationship with people who know who you are.

If you think about it, this makes complete sense. If someone isn’t aware of who you are or what you do, asking for their email address to sign up for your newsletter isn’t the smart play. But if someone is a regular reader of your blog, then you offer them the opportunity to get a different type of content via your newsletter, then that can be an appealing offer!

If you have a newsletter, how are you using it differently than your blog?  Do you have a different content strategy for both, or do you tailor your strategy for each?

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Social Media Demands Perfection and Punishes Mediocrity

I have a small list of political reporters that I follow on Twitter. I avoid political coverage on mainstream media at all costs since I know most of it is propaganda, but I follow a few trusted sources for actual political news. One of the reporters I follow is a huge St. Louis Cardinals fan. She tweets almost daily about their exploits, the home runs, the clutch wins, everything. I haven’t watched a pro baseball game in probably 20 years, and know nothing about the league. But from her tweets alone, I assumed the Cardinals must be one of the best teams. Yesterday she tweeted that the team had fired their manager.

For years, I was a big Dale Earnhardt Jr. fan. I promoted him on all my social media accounts, including here and even on my podcast. Last year after a frustrating race in a frustrating season, I left a rare critical tweet about Dale, which earned my first and only response from him:

To be fair, I took his advice. The whole episode reminded me of this scene from A Christmas Story, and I had pretty much the same reaction that Ralphie did:

Years ago, I was added to a private group on Facebook for frequent business travelers. At first, the group was incredible, several professional travelers sharing advice and tips on how to make business travel more convenient and efficient. I loved it, and the advice of the group led to my making several travel-related purchases (Social Media ROI). Unfortunately, the group quickly devolved into a game of social media one-upmanship as people began to use the group to brag about their first class travel or the upgrades and perks they were getting. The utility and value of the group decreased as the bragging increased.

A few weeks ago I was watching a particular Twitch streamer who constantly creates YouTube videos of his game-playing, which are very popular, mainly because of how well he plays in the videos. This particular streamer had just completed a game where he didn’t perform very well, and one of his followers asked him if he would be posting that game to YouTube later. “Hell no!”, he replied. “I didn’t get enough kills!”

There’s a common thread running through all these stories. The promise of social media was always in its ability to connect everyone to everyone. Everyone gets the chance to have a voice and we all get to see the world as it really is.

Social media has delivered spectacularly as a way to foster connections, and it has failed miserably as a way to show the world, and our lives, as they really are. To be fair, much of the sharing problem is of our own making. We are trained to only share our ‘highlights’ on social media. We brag about our ‘wins’ and never mention our ‘losses’. Every moment is viewed through the lens of “will this make a good picture on IG?’ instead of simply living IN the moment.

The problem with the ‘perfection’ of social media is that it’s too easy to compare yourself to a completely warped view of other people’s lives. I especially worry about the impact this can have on teenagers and millenials. In fact, many studies now suggest there could be a link between the rise of social media usage and the stark increase in teenage suicides over the last decade or so.

Ironically, when social media first began to take off on a widespread scale about 10 years ago, one of the unwritten ‘rules’ for brands using social media was ‘be authentic’. It seems like that’s a great rule for the rest of us to follow as well.

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Macy’s Brand Ambassador Program Leverages its Employees as Influencers

Last year, Macy’s launched an employee brand ambassador program called #MacysStyleCrew with 20 associates. The idea was to let Macy’s employees turn to social media to promote and sell the store’s clothing and other items. Employees are incentivized by additional pay for sales they generate via social media.

The program has shown promise, and was later expanded to over 300 employees. Now, the program is being opened to all Macy’s employees. The success of the Macy’s Style Crew has also allowed Macy’s to shift budgets away from external influencer marketing, and instead leverage its employees as social media influencers.

Notice that with this video, there is an instructional element as the employee is trying to teach viewers about how to select colors for their wardrobe based on the season. The clothing is promoted as well, but it’s more about teaching potential customers a skill and how to stay stylish. And yes, the audio is way too low and the background music is overshadowing it. That almost works, as it makes the video seem more ‘authentic’ and less ‘corporate’.

Of course, many of the updates are like this one, strictly promotional:

Still, I think this initiative has a lot of potential, and Macy’s must be seeing results they like, as they continue to grow and expand the program. Also, I love that Macy’s started with a small group of 20, and scaled later. I always advise clients to follow this format, to start with a smaller group, and then grow. Any time you launch a new initiative like an employee brand ambassador program, there will be plenty of mistakes made through simple trial and error. It’s better to make those mistakes with a smaller group, then iron out the issues and scale growth.

I do think that this initiative will show more fruit in the future if the employees are trained to focus more on creative instructional content versus promotional content. However, since employees are being encouraged to sell items with their content, this can be a confusing and tricky line for employees to walk. Just remember that brands like Patagonia, Red Bull and Nike sell an awful lot of products by rarely promoting the products directly.

I think the #MacysStyleCrew program is a great idea and if you work for a retail brand it gives you a chance to see what’s possible by unleashing your employees to serve as influencers to online customers. I do think that Macy’s will find an unexpected benefit from this program: It will help Macy’s hire better employees. As the #MacysStyleCrew grows, it can become a recruitment tool for new employees, seeing that they will be given the freedom to leverage their social media skills to bring in new customers.

If you’re a retailer, could you see a program like #MacysStyleCrew working with your employees? These efforts are still in their infancy, but over time I think you will see more retailers move in the direction of leveraging its employees as social media influencers rather than working with outside sources. It’s a notable shift and both retailers and those marketing themselves as ‘influencers’ will need to adjust.

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Whole Foods Wipes Out Its Instagram Feed to Raise Awareness of Declining Bee Populations

Corporate storytelling can be a tricky thing to master. Brands often interject political and social news into its content, with mixed results. If the views are consistent with the company’s values, they will ultimately benefit the brand and strengthen ties to its core customer base.

Whole Foods gave us a great example last week of letting corporate values drive its storytelling. The brand deleted all its previous posts on Instagram, unfollowed everyone, and then posted this cryptic image:

Which, as you can see, is an image of…nothing. This immediately got people talking; was Whole Foods hacked? Then the brand followed Beyonce…was there a collaboration coming?  Then Sting, Jon Bon Jovi, Jerry Seinfeld.

Eventually, a few smart people noticed a ‘bee’ connection to the few people that Whole Foods had followed.  Then a ‘bee’ emoji was added to Whole Foods’ Instagram profile. Then after 4 more ‘blank’ images were posted on IG, Whole Foods posted this:

Which confirmed that the account hadn’t been hacked, but that there was a ‘bee’ connection here. Then, Whole Foods started posting videos of some of the common (and delicious) foods that we might lose without bees.

The goal of this campaign on Instagram was to raise awareness of the declining bee population around the world, and to support the Whole Kids Foundation in helping bring beekeeping materials and education to 50 schools and nonprofits around the country. Declining bee populations can have a huge impact on agriculture around the world, and Whole Foods is also helping to raise awareness of how “one of every three bites of food eaten worldwide depends on pollinators, especially bees, for a successful harvest.”

Some of the most engaging content that brands can create is content that’s focused on the brand’s core values and those of its customers.  Whole Foods sells healthy food and is concerned about the ingredients in those foods and how they are sourced and grown. This campaign helps educate customers and followers on how the food it sells is created, while also being true to the brand and its values.

If your brand wants to do compelling storytelling like Whole Foods did on Instagram, here’s what to keep in mind:

1 – Have a compelling story to tell that’s focused on ideas/themes/beliefs that are associated with the brand, but not about the brand. There are always exceptions to every rule, but in most cases, the most engaging content is related to the brand but not about the brand. Here, Whole Foods focused on the declining bee population and how that could impact the supply of healthy food. The potential impact on food supplies is the focus that’s related to the brand, but not about the brand. The topic is important to Whole Foods’ customers as well, which is why they paid attention. Patagonia creates content focused on protecting the environment, not its clothing. Red Bull creates content focused on extreme sports and athletes, not its energy drink. Pedigree creates content focused on happy and healthy dogs, not its dog food. All of these examples show the value of creating content that’s focused on the connection between the brand and its customers.

2 – Let the story develop on its own. By deleting its feed and only following a few people and then only posting a few blank images, Whole Foods left people speculating on what was happening with its Instagram account. That speculation led to a lot of extra media coverage and….’buzz’ about its bee-related content. It also led to people on Instagram trying to solve the mystery on its own.  Here’s some of the comments IG users left:

“but who has enough time and patience to hack into a supermarket’s social media and delete every single post one by one and unfollow people one by one ?”

“If you look up Beyoncé Whole Foods, you’ll see there’s a pic of her on their website”

“Bees!! Check out the 5 people WF follows! This is genius!”

“They are following Beyoncé and Sting. Bee emoji. You’re supposed to read between the lines. There are no posts about food anymore because WITHOUT BEES, WE WILL HAVE NOTHING.”

“None of the food they sell would be possible without the bees! The bee emoji, only following queen bee. Did I solve this ?!??‍♂️”

By letting the story play out or ‘breathe’ for a couple of days, followers on IG got more interested and invested in the developing story.  They engaged more, they speculated more, and they created more ‘buzz’ for what Whole Foods was doing.

3 – Let the benefits be obvious to the customer. If we lose the bees, then we lose our food. That was the simple message from this campaign, and everyone can immediately see the significance. This also communicates to Whole Foods’ customers that Whole Foods cares about how its food is grown, even down to protecting the insects that may play a role in the growth of the foods we all love. This helps build loyalty and brand advocacy among Whole Foods’ customers for the brand.

 

All in all, I thought this was a great campaign by Whole Foods and if you pay close attention to how this campaign was structured and executed, you can improve your own corporate storytelling efforts.

BTW, if you want to donate to the Whole Kids Foundation to support the Give Bees a Chance campaign, click here. As of this writing, the current sum donated is just over $64k, with a goal of $100,000.

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Make Your Event Sponsorships Better By Making the Event Itself Better

Event sponsorships

A few years ago a conference approached me about doing a Live #Blogchat session during their event, and I agreed. I told the event that if they wanted to, they could sell a sponsorship to the Live #Blogchat to recoup some or all of the costs that they were paying me for the session. I added that if they decided to go this route that I would be happy to work with the sponsor before and during the Live #Blogchat to make sure they got their money’s worth, and made the session better.

The event said great, and I never heard from them again. I showed up at the conference and was surprised to learn from the event organizers that they had sold a sponsorship to my Live #Blogchat. I was told this minutes before the Live #Blogchat was to start, when I was introduced to the sponsor representative. A bit taken aback, I quickly huddled with the sponsor representative to ask them if they would like to be involved with the discussion as the Live #Blogchat unfolded.  “Nope, this is your event, we are just happy to be here!”

This is why the concept of event sponsorships is interesting to me, because there’s so much unlocked potential. With many event sponsorships, there’s little more involvement from the sponsor than this.  There’s typically some signage, maybe some free swag for attendees, maybe a comped booth at a trade show.

Smart sponsors know that the best way to truly make an impression on attendees is to leverage your sponsorship to make the event better for those attendees. Too many sponsors try to ‘be seen’ at the events they partner with.  Your goal isn’t to be seen, it’s to be remembered.

When you are considering working with an event on a sponsorship package, ask yourself these questions:

  • Who is attending the event?
  • Why are they there?
  • What are they hoping to accomplish?

Your sponsorship should factor in the answers to each of these questions, especially the third question. Then once you’ve answered these questions, then think about how your sponsorship can help the attendees reach their goals for the event.

For example, let’s say that the attendees at the event you want to sponsor are there to learn about digital marketing. Your sponsorship could then be tied to something that helps the attendee take home as much useful information as possible about the event.  Maybe you could do something as simple as sponsoring a notebook for each attendee to during each session.  Or maybe sponsor a free jump drive with the presentation slides from each track.  Or maybe your company could sponsor a few bloggers doing recaps of each session and then at the end of the day you could provide these recaps as handouts to attendees so they could learn about the sessions that they missed.

All of these ideas are rooted in sponsorships that are structured in a way that takes into account what the attendee is trying to accomplish, and makes it easier for them to reach their goals for the event.

Remember, the idea isn’t to be seen, it’s to be memorable. If you provide utility for the attendees, that makes you useful to them, and memorable.

Besides, with most event sponsorships, ‘being seen’ is the quickest way to be ignored.

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How I Increased One Post’s Traffic by 255% in One Year

As content creators, there’s always a push on to create more content. Bloggers know that on average, the more often they create content, the quicker their traffic and readership grows.

But one of the best ways to grow your traffic is to actually improve your existing content. For the past year, I’ve been ‘remastering’ my posts by following the process outlined here. I wanted to walk you through the results I’ve seen for one of my posts.

The post is this one: Want to Create a Brand Ambassador Program? Here’s 10 Things to Remember When You Do. By improving this post over the last year, it’s traffic has increased by 255% this year versus the same period last year.

 On the above graph, the orange line is the post’s weekly traffic from last year for Jan 1st – June 19th.  The blue line is this year’s weekly traffic.  You can see that traffic for this year is much higher than last year, and growing.  You can also see that the orange line for last year was already starting to increase in April, which is when I first started working to improve this post.

So what did I do? First, let me address the elephant in the room: Probably the biggest improvement you can make in the traffic to an old post is to change the date.  Simply giving an old post a new date typically results in a lift in traffic. However, I would advise that you never change the date of a post without also changing the content of that post. If you get in the habit of simply giving your old posts a new date to get more traffic, you run the risk of alienating your readers and possibly risk the wrath of Google if they start to penalize publishers for using this practice.

If I can’t improve the post, I don’t get to change the date. This is the rule I go by when applying this process. This post was first published in 2011. Over the years I’d made minor changes to the post, maybe correcting a typo or the like. But last year for the first time I went through and significantly changed and improved the post. That was when I first changed the date to 2017. Then earlier this year, I changed it again, and updated the date again.

Here’s the process I followed:

1 – Proofread the existing post. I go through and see if there’s anything I need to change or improve about the post as is. Any typos that need to be corrected, or grammar that needs to be addressed.

2 – Can I do a better job of explaining the topic or flesh out my ideas more completely? This makes the post more in-depth and comprehensive, which also increases social sharing.

3 – Is there any new research or case studies on the topic that I can reference and add to the post? This also makes the post more valuable to readers, and a better resource on the topic.

4 – Can any new visual elements be added that are relevant to the topic? It’s great to improve and expand an existing post, but you don’t want to risk turning the post into the dreaded ‘wall of text’. A good way to avoid this is by adding additionally images to break up the flow and make the post more engaging. There are several sites that offer free images, such as Pixabay, Unsplash and Pexels.

5 – What questions does this post answer? Think about how someone would find your post if they did a google search. What search query would your post answer?  For my post, questions like ‘What is a Brand Ambassador?’ or ‘What is a Brand Ambassador Program?” might be questions someone would ask before finding my post in search results. In fact, I recently edited the post to add definitions for both terms at the start of the post. If you want to apply this same methodology to your own post, the site Answer the Public is a good place to start generating ideas.

 

For this particular post, I also used the Headline Optimizer plugin from Thrive Themes (affiliate link) to give the post a new headline.  The old headline for the post was 10 Things to Remember When Creating a Brand Ambassador Program. The new headline, Want to Create a Brand Ambassador Program? Here’s 10 Things to Remember When You Do drew a 19% increase in engagement. Plus, I liked the fact that the post’s main keyword phrase, ‘brand ambassador program’ was closer to the start of the headline. It’s been shown to improve search rankings if the post’s keyword phrase is at the start of the headline.

In fact, this post typically ranks first or second in Google search results for the term ‘brand ambassador program’. A big reason why is because I continually improve and expand the post. When I first published this post in 2011, it had 1230 words. Today’s version has 1600, along with additional images and links.

Seven years ago when I first published this post, up till 2016, this post averaged around 100 pageviews a week. Today, it’s the 2nd most popular post on this blog, and last week it had its best week ever with 461 pageviews. I expect it to have close to 500 pageviews this week.

All of this shows that by consistently improving a post, you can see big gains, over time.