MackCollier.com

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In the Future Your Customers Will Completely Control Your Marketing

I recently saw a study into the content consumption habits of millenials that claimed that individuals ages 18 to 36 spend an average of 17.8 hours a day with different types of media.

Some forms of media are more important to millennials than others. Social media is a top priority, as 71 percent say that they engage in social media daily. User-generated content — which encompasses social-media posts, photos, blogs, email, texting and talking to others about media — occupies about 5.4 hours of the average millennial’s day. That’s 30 percent of their total daily media consumption.

The only rival to user-generated media is the old standby of traditional media — print, radio and television – which accounts for 33 percent of millennials’ media consumption.

Think about that for a minute.  Better yet, those of you that are over the age of 36, recall when you were children, in a pre-internet age.  How much time did you spend each day consuming media and what percentage of it was from traditional sources?  Contrast that with the 18 hours a day total and 6 hours of traditional media that millenials consume today and it’s clear to see how media consumption habits are changing.  More media is being consumed every day and increasingly it is coming from a source that is not paid for by brands.

This trend will only accelerate.  A couple of weeks ago when I went to get my haircut, the women that cuts my hair brought her 2 year-old nephew with her to the office.  How did she keep him entertained?  By giving him an iPad.  Here’s a child that cannot form coherent sentences yet, but he can use a computer.  By the time he’s 18, almost all of the media he consumes will come from people just like him, and little if any of it will come from your brand.

In the future your marketing messages will be spread via your customers.  They already are to a great degree, but your ability as a brand to create messages and send them directly to customers is increasingly being diminished.  Last week I keynoted at Strategy 2014 in Huntsville, and at the end of the day I participated on an ‘Ask the Experts’ panel (I call these ‘Stump the Chump’) with a few other speakers.  An attendee asked us which social media tool would be the next ‘hot’ thing.  What would be the next Twitter or Facebook.

It’s a question many brands want to know the answer to, and it’s completely the wrong question to ask.  Your focus shouldn’t be on understanding how to use social media tools, your focus should be on understanding why your customers are using social media tools.

That understanding only comes from increased interactions.  You need to focus today on increasing the number of direct interactions you have with your customers.  This will lead to you better understanding your customers, and they better understanding your brand.  Here’s why this is important:

Interactions

If you start interacting with your customers today, that will lead to understanding. So when we reach a not-so distant future where your customers completely control your marketing message, they will understand your brand, they will trust your brand and they will be able and willing to spread your marketing messages for you.

Your focus shouldn’t be on understanding social media tools, your focus should be on better understanding your customers so that you can create a more valuable experience for them today, so that you can earn their trust tomorrow.

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If You Want to Write a Book, Here Are Two Things You Need to Know

So in 2012 when I signed my contract to write my first book, I decided to write a post that would help my peers get a similar book deal.  It’s become one of the most popular posts I’ve ever written, but something unexpected happened as a result.  Every week I either get a comment or an email about this post from people that want to write a book.  Often, it’s from someone that shares a heart-breaking life story that they want to share with the world, and they are asking me if I can help them.

First, you have to remember that publishers are a BUSINESS.  They won’t publish your book or your story unless they believe they can make money off it.  That’s reality, and in order to get a publisher to buy your book idea, you have to make the case to them that it will earn them more money than they will pay you for it.

Let’s assume that when you approach a publisher that they have no idea who you are (don’t worry, most publishers my agent contacted had no idea who I was when she pitched Think Like a Rock Star to them).

That means you need to convince a publisher that you have two things:

1 – A story/book idea that they believe they can make money on by publishing.

2 – The ability to effectively market your book idea and sell copies.

If you don’t have both of these things, then you have almost no chance of getting a book deal.  I’m sorry, but that’s reality.

So you really need two things: A great idea for a book and a great platform for promoting your book.  A publisher will want to know what you can do to help promote the book and sell copies.

Will you be speaking regularly to promote the book?

Do you have an online following?  Are you active on social media?

Could your position at the company you work for potentially bring positive exposure to the book?

Do you have a huge marketing budget and can you spend a LOT of money to promote the book when it launches?

 

Let’s assume you said ‘NO!’ to all of these questions.  So what do you do if you have an idea for a book, but you have no way to promote it or market it?

Here’s what I would suggests you do: Start a blog based on your book idea.  Starting a blog is your chance to do two very important things:

1 – It helps you flesh out the idea for your book

2 – It gives you the chance to prove to publishers that other people would buy your book and that you can write it

 

If you can go to a publisher and show them that you’ve been writing a blog for the last 6-12 months based on your book idea, and that readers are regularly commenting on your posts and enjoy them, then you are proving to publishers that there is a market for your book.

So that’s my advice if you want to write a book.  Instead, start with a blog, make it successful, and then show that to publishers with your idea.  If the writing on your blog is generating engagement with your readers then it greatly increases your chances of getting published.

Good luck!

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The Art and Science of Blogging With John Wall at #Blogchat!

Here’s the transcript for this #Blogchat with John.

I’m excited to announce that John Wall will be sponsoring the next two weeks of #Blogchat on 3-9-2014 and 3-16-2014!  For John’s sponsorship, he’s come up with a pretty cool two weeks of blogging topics.

Over the next two weeks John will teach us about The Art and Science of Blogging.  This Sunday, 3-9-2014, we’ll cover the 4 Keys to the Science of Blogging:

1 – Follow the Rules

2 – Build the System

3 – Measure Everything

4 – Always Be Testing/Closing/Selling

And to prepare you for Sunday’s chat, John has written an excellent post over at his blog outlining exactly what we’ll be discussing.  Next Sunday (the 16th) John will cover the Art of Blogging.  Over the next two weeks, John will teach us about several areas of blogging that have long been requested topics by #Blogchat members, such as responsive design for your blog, design with an eye toward improving your blog’s readability, and user experience and interface.

It will be a fabulous two weeks of #Blogchat discussions to please head over and read John’s prep post on the 4 Keys to the Science of Blogging for this week and also make sure you are following him on Twitter.

Also, check out John’s book B2B Marketing Confessions on Amazon!  And finally, John is co-host of the excellent Marketing Over Coffee, one of the very best business podcasts!  See you on Twitter Sunday at 8pm Central for #Blogchat!

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Five Proven Ways to Build More Engagement On Your Brand’s Blog

One of the biggest struggles that blogging brands face is creating engagement with their customers.  It’s tough to sell your boss on how effective your blog is if none of your customers are reading your content.  Here’s five proven ways to not only build readership, but convert passive readers into active participants on your blog:

1 – Create customer-centric content.  I’ve written in the past about how much I love the content strategy of Red Bull and Patagonia.  Both brands do an amazing job of creating content that resonates with its audience.  For example, on its blog The Cleanest Line, Patagonia rarely blogs about its products, instead Patagonia creates content about the activities that its customers engage in, and the causes they support.  Patagonia understands its customers well enough to know that if they create content that actually interests them, that it will not only give those customers a reason to engage with the brand on its blog, it will give them a reason to buy from Patagonia as well.

Patagonia

For your blog, think about how you can create content that relates to your brand, but that isn’t about your brand.  If you want the science behind why this works, Facebook actually did a study a couple of years ago of their most popular brand pages, and the type of content being created by these brands.  Facebook found that, across the board, the type of brand-created content that did the best job of driving customer engagement was content related to the brand but not about the brand.  In other words, write about the activities that customers love that are related to your brand.  For example, if your brand is in the hospitality industry, create content that helps your customers be better travelers.  If your brand is an automaker, write more about driving than your cars.  Write about the topics that matter to your customers, and then your blog will matter to your customers.

2 – Post regularly and on the same core topics.  This is very easy to do and few brand blogs follow this strategy.  The idea with posting regularly is to ‘train’ your readers to know when new content is going to be up on your blog.  So if you only write one new post a week for your blog, write it the same day every week.  That way I know that every Wednesday there’s a new post on your blog.

And as for topics, the best approach is to pick 2-3 core topic buckets that you write about.  I wrote before about the process for using topic buckets for a business blog, but the process is so find 2-3 sub-topics of your blog’s larger topic that you can blog about.  For example with Patagonia’s blog above, some of its topic buckets are outdoor activities, protecting the environment and sustainability.  These are three of the topic buckets that Patagonia creates content around.  Notice that each topic bucket is also focused on a topic that’s relevant to its customers (again tying back to the first point).  By simply creating a few topic buckets for your blog, it makes the content creation process much easier.  For example, if you want to write one new blog post a week, and you have 3 topic buckets for your blog, you can easily map out your posting schedule for the month by writing one post from each topic bucket!  That gets you three week’s worth of posts, and then for the fourth week you can write an additional post for one of those topic buckets.

3 – Write better headlines.  The cold, hard reality is that most customers won’t read your blog, the best case scenario is that they will see a link to your blog with the title of your post pass by them on Facebook or Twitter.  Which means your post title has to be compelling enough to, in 2 seconds or so, convince the passive reader (who is literally scanning their social feed) to become active and click your link.  So in some respects, writing headlines is the most important skill you can possess as a blogger.

HeadlineI’ve written about how to write better headlines in the past, but I’ll share a couple of tips here.  In short, the biggest mistake that I see brand bloggers making in respect to headlines is writing a headline that summarizes the topic of the post, instead of focusing on it.  For example, a headline that summarizes this post could have been ‘Getting engagement on your blog’.  While that headline is somewhat specific, it’s also a bit boring.  You have to remember that the headline you write is going to be competing against headlines written by sites specifically trying to steal attention.  Your headline is going to be in the middle of a stream of links (and linkbait headlines) like this:

“This Man-Eating Tiger Stood Ready to Devour This Child, But What Happened Next Was Totally Unexpected And Will Break Your Heart”

” Free Download: How Twitter Can Solve 3 Major Challenges for Sales”

“Getting engagement on your blog”

“That Record-Breaking Selfie That Ellen Took at the Oscars? Here’s What Samsung Doesn’t Want You to Know About It”

See what I mean?  You have to learn to write amazing headlines to even have a chance of getting clicked in a stream such as this.  But the good news is that most bloggers are woefully bad at writing headlines.  So if you can learn how to write good headlines, it gives you a huge advantage versus the competition.  When you write your headline, review it with ‘The 2-Second Rule’.  Take two seconds to read your headline and then consider that’s at best what someone on Twitter or Facebook would give your headline.  So if your headline can’t grab your reader’s attention in 2 seconds and compel them to click the link, then it’s not a good headline.

Focus on making your headline as specific as possible, so the reader knows exactly what they are getting if they click.  Note the headline to this post, it’s very specific, and promises to give you five proven tips for building engagement.  So if you write for a brand’s blog and building engagement is a problem you are trying to solve, the headline of this post will probably (hopefully) compel you to click the link.

Remember, your headline has 2 seconds to work its magic.  Make it count.

4 – Use amazing visuals.  This goes along with writing a great headline, but consider that every time your post is shared on Facebook, it pulls up the lead image and attaches it to the link.  So if you write an amazing headline and have a visually-grabbing photo to go with it, you’re already halfway home to getting that person to click the link and read your post.  You have to constantly be aware that most people aren’t going to read your blog post by coming to you blog, they are going to read it from seeing someone else share a link to your blog.  So writing great headlines and adding amazing pictures works wonders.  

My favorite source for finding amazing photos for your blog is still Flickr, in particular the photos that have the Attrition License via Creative Commons.  You can use these photos, you can even adapt or build on them (like in a Powerpoint presentation), the only requirement is that you attribute (link) to the source.  Now recently, Getty Images has made waves by making a lot of its images free for the first time, and embeddable.  I was really excited about this at first, but unfortunately there are two big caveats to this move:

  1. Most of Getty Images photos of celebs, sporting and entertainment events are still off limits.  IOW many of its most desirable images.
  2. The images that are free to use cannot be used for commercial purposes.  And while I’m no legal expert on social media like Kerry Gorgone, I think that pretty much means your brand can’t use them.  I certainly won’t be using them and I’d advise you to check with your legal team before you do.

5 – Respond and be grateful for the engagement you do get.  The two most powerful words in social media (and probably life as well) are ‘Thank You‘.  Simply responding to and thanking readers for existing comments and engagement is a great way to get more of the same.  You want to reward the type of behavior that you want to encourage.  So if you want your readers to comment more on your blog or signup for your brand’s newsletter, or download that white-paper, you need to reward them when they engage in these activities.  When it comes to commenting, simply replying and engaging them back signals to them that you value their input, and appreciate it.

And we tend to stick around when we feel appreciated!

So there you have it, five proven ways to build engagement on your brand’s blog.  If you apply all these methods you *will* see readership and engagement on your brand’s blog increase.  And remember that now more than ever, your blog is your most important piece of social media real estate because you own it.

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How to Get Started in Social Media When YOU Are the Business

I just had a reader send me an email with a problem that I think a lot of you are facing so instead of sharing this with only him via email, I decided to write this post.  His issue is that he’s a small business owner with no employees, that wants to start using social media to grow his business.  But the catch is he really has no time for social media and wants to know if it would be worth his time to hire someone to post updates for him on Twitter, Facebook, etc.  Any of this sound familiar to y’all?

If you are in a similar situation with limited time and resources, you need to remember two things:

1 – You don’t have to do everything.  You don’t HAVE to be on Twitter and Facebook and blogging, and on Instagram, etc etc.  It’s far better to start small and grow bigger.

2 – You WILL need to invest time in your social media usage.  Or you will need to pay someone else to do it for you.  In almost every instance, I would rather see your business use social media itself since no one can speak in your voice as effectively as you can.

 

So since you have limited time (and money) but still need to find time, we need to start small, but also make smart usage of the limited time you have.  In other words, it would be nice if the time we had to devote to social media was spent on activities we are already engaging in, so that way we can effectively ‘kill two birds with one stone’.

For these reasons, I would recommend starting out by blogging.  Your mileage may vary, but for most small businesses that are trying to get their name out there, a blog is a great vehicle.  As for what to blog about, here’s some ideas:

1 – Common questions you get from customers.  What are the 5-10 questions that you are answering from customers all the time?  Write a blog post for each question, and then you’ll have the answer on your blog.  Because if people are asking you this question in person, they are likely going to Google and looking for the answer as well.  And if your customers are asking these questions, the customers of your competitors are probably asking the same questions.  ‘

2 – The 3-5 reasons why customers won’t do business with you.  This is scary to deal with straight on, but a fabulous way to convert a skeptical customer into a new customer.  Think about the reasons why customers won’t do business with you, and address those reasons head on.  For example, customers might not want to buy your home improvement product because it’s 20% higher than the chain department stores.  But what customers don’t realize is that your product is made of better quality materials that will actually save customers 15% more per year in energy costs than the product that the chains sell.  So if you educate customers on the cost savings of your product over its lifetime, you may earn their business once they realize the actual savings from buying your product.

3 – Industry news.  You are likely already reading up on the latest news in your space, so why not share that information with your readers?  This isn’t quite as applicable in a B2C setting, but is a great idea if you are in the B2B space.  Also, sharing industry news creates a valuable resource for current and potential clients, which helps establish your expertise.  And again, this is likely information you are already searching for on your own, so just share your findings with your readers.

So the key with a small business is to start small with social media, and then grow as you can.  You don’t have to start using 3 or more social media sites at once, in fact that’s often the fastest way to kill your social media strategy.  Start small, and focus on the 1 or 2 channels that give you the best way to reach your goals for social media.

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Study: Popularity is Determined More By Peer Pressure Than Quality

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This morning I came across a fascinating study (via NPR) done by Princeton professor Matthew Salganik who attempted to learn why works of art become popular.  In essence, Salganik wanted to know if popularity was based more so on the actual quality of the art, or does social influence play a role?

To find the answer, Salganik surveyed 30,000 teenagers and let them listen to 48 unknown songs by unknown bands.  What Salganik did was divide these teenagers into one of two groups.  The first group would listen to the music and then rate the songs from one to five stars.  Then after listening to the songs and rating them, the person would then have the opportunity to download the song for free.  This was the ‘independent’ group.

The second group was called the ‘social’ group, and it was divided into eight smaller groups.  Each person in each of these eight groups follows the same process as the independent group.  They listen to the songs, then rate them and finally are presented with the option to download the song for free, or not.  The big difference is that with the social group, every member can see how many times every song has been downloaded by members of their group.  In short, they can see which songs are popular within their group and which ones are not, and they have this information available to them before they rate each song.  But they are only able to see the popularity of the songs within their group (of eight groups within the larger social group).  They can’t see the popularity levels for the songs in the other 7 groups of the larger social group.  Also, in some cases the songs are ordered based on popularity (most popular listed first) and in other groups the popularity of each song is shown, but the list isn’t sorted by popularity.

What Salganik found was that when participants were made aware of the popularity of the songs (but the songs were not sorted based on popularity) that the more popular songs were rated more highly.  When the songs were actually sorted according to popularity, this affect was magnified.  So the popular songs became much more popular and the songs that were lower ranked became even less popular.

Salganik appeared at the Thought Leader Forum in 2011 and explained in more detail some of his findings from this study:

There’s this idea that the more people can see what other people are doing, the more they’re going to find the best thing. But in fact, what we see is that when people can see what other people are doing, they start following people, who are actually following other people who are following other people. And this process of following can become decoupled from the underlying reality.

To give a concrete example from these experiments, there is one song, “Lockdown” by 52 Metro, again a song no one has heard of by a band no one has heard of. In one world, this song came in first. It was the most downloaded
song. In another world, this exact same song came in 40th out of 48. This exact same song competing against the exact same other songs.

But you can see to the extent that when we have these kinds of feedback processes, when people are following what other people are doing, slight initial fluctuations at the beginning can become locked in, and then that leads to
very different outcomes, even for the exact same song.

Isn’t that fascinating?  All of this points to a fundamental truth: We as human beings gravitate to that which other human beings have identified as being ‘popular’.  We trust each other and seek out input when we are choosing, especially when given a wide variety to choose from, as the participants in Salganik’s study were given.

The takeaway for your business?  That much of the purchase decision the average customer makes is simply based on feedback from other customers.  Which is exactly why your business should be embracing and engaging with its most passionate customers so that they can help connect with other customers before they make a purchase.

Remember, rock stars don’t have fans because they are rock stars, they are rock stars because they have fans.  If you want to be a rock star brand, you need to learn to connect with your most passionate customers in much the same way that rock stars do.

AFTERTHOUGHT: Since this study was rooted in music (where ‘quality’ is more subjective), does that mean peer pressure has less impact on the popularity of products such as say, travel luggage, where the criteria for what defines a quality product is less subjective?

Pic via Flickr user Gonzalo Baeza  

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Sharing Your Expertise Without Being ‘The Expert’

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Here’s the transcript from tonight’s #Blogchat.

If you think about it, there’s a lot of seemingly contradictory advice being passed around about how to improve your blog.  On the one hand, one of the best arguments for blogging is that a blog allows you to share your expertise.  This is completely true and one of the best arguments in favor of blogging.

However, one of the problems that many bloggers of all stripes encounter is a lack of interaction and participation on their blog.  They create this place where they can share their expertise, and then no one wants to talk to them.

Often, there’s a reason why.  Because experts are scary people.  When you encounter an expert, the assumption is that they know more than you do.  And for many people it’s very intimidating to discuss a topic with someone that you believe knows far more about said topic than you do.

This is exactly why #Blogchat has a ‘No experts allowed’ rule.  Because when people are identified as the expert, what that really signals to everyone else is that you’re not the expert here.  And that shuts down communication.

So if you are the blogger, you need to walk a fine line of sharing your expertise without coming off as ‘The Expert’.  It’s a very tricky proposition, and even veteran bloggers struggle with this.  For example, I recently wrote a post that I was really excited about.  The topic was a bit more advanced and I envisioned it as creating a more high-level marketing discussion.

Instead, it got zero comments.  Because when you start a conversation at a more advanced level, you are setting the participation barrier at a high level for your readers.  For example, if you start a 301-level conversation about a topic, anyone that feels that they are below that level or ‘not as smart’ as the writer, likely won’t comment.

So if you are blogging to establish your expertise and also want to have engagement on your blog, you need to strike a balance between the two.  You need to share your expertise, but not in a way that discourages your readers from engaging with you.

That’s what we’ll discuss tonight at #Blogchat: How do you strike a balance between sharing your expertise and building engagement on your blog?  Please join us at 8pm Central tonight (3-2-2014) for the discussion.  Come on, who wants to watch the Oscars anyway?

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How to Better Track the Ability of Your Marketing Efforts to Drive Sales

Hundred Dollar Bills Folded in a Money Clip

Yesterday’s post from Kerry on a Ford Blogger Outreach program she’s involved with led to a fascinating discussion in the comments on tracking the effectiveness of marketing channels in driving sales.  Thanks to Jerome, Hugh and Kevin for chiming in with their thoughts.  The point was made that it would be difficult to track actual sales that resulted from the blogger outreach, then again it would likely be even moreso with offline marketing channels such as television or billboard advertising.

So then the question becomes how does a brand do two things:

1 – Better track actual sales generated from marketing efforts.  In other words, how can brands better understand which marketing touch point ultimately converted into a sale.

2 – Give its customers the tools they need to help convert those sales.  And which customers should have these tools?

First, let’s talk tracking.  If your marketing efforts have an online element, there’s really no excuse not to at least attempt to track online conversations generated, if not actual sales.  Typically this is done with coding, like a coupon or sales code for tracking purchases or now hashtags are being used more frequently to track online conversations.  The great thing about hashtags is they can be used in print and television advertising as well.  It’s a bit more difficult on radio, other than ‘Like us on Facebook!’ or ‘Tell ’em Jim sent you!’.

It’s imperative to think backwards and ask yourself ‘If this marketing campaign generates sales, how would we be able to track that?’  Other than measuring metrics and looking for clues, think about how you can give customers ways to signal to you that they are either driving sales via word of mouth, or that they interacted with your marketing and decided to purchase.  This approach still isn’t perfect or foolproof (for example if a customer had 4 different encounters with you marketing via different channels, it’s difficult to determine which channel by itself truly generated the purchase, if any).  But it gives you a headstart.

Now as for giving customers the tools they need to help convert sales.  This is important because it’s critical to distinguish between giving referral tools to everyone (such as ‘Refer 5 friends and win a $50 gift card!) versus giving tools to only certain customers.

For example, yesterday Kerry talked about the blogger outreach she’s doing with Ford.  And let’s say when she picked up the C-Max, Ford gave her some advice/training on how she could tell others about the car, if she wanted to.  Maybe use this particular hashtag on Twitter, maybe give them this code for an extended test drive, etc.

But what if Kerry got the C-Max and then hated it?  And here’s Ford, that had given her the tools and ability to tell other customers about her experience with the C-Max, without considering that Kerry might hate it!  

On the other hand, what if Ford gives Kerry the C-Max, then a few days later they follow up with her to see how her experience is going.  Kerry communicates to Ford that she’s in love with the car and has already been telling others about it.  At that point, Ford gives Kerry the tools they want her to have to attempt to refer sales to them, etc.  Ford waits until Kerry has identified to the brand that she is pleased with the C-Max.  It’s a bit more work, but from Ford’s end it pays to sort of qualify Kerry as being excited about the C-Max, then giving her the tools and ability to share her excitement with other customers!  For example in Kerry’s example she’s already proactively created her own hashtag to help Ford track conversations she is generating about her experience, she’s also reached out to Ford to see if they could transfer the car to other friends locally and let them drive it for a period.

So with the tracking it pays to first think about what actions you want your marketing efforts to result in.  It could be sales, or perhaps another action that your brand has tracked in the past as being an indicator of a future sale.  For example Ford might want to track test drives that bloggers in its outreach program generate because it has found that in X% of the test drives, a purchase is made.  So Ford may want to track test drives (it also gives them a way to track the conversion rate from test drive referrals from bloggers vs the larger customer base to see if there’s a noticeable difference).

Figuring out what action to track also needs to consider the audience for your message.  For example, if the marketing effort is aimed at a wide audience, like a television spot, something like a hashtag makes more sense because it can help you track activities toward the bottom of the sales funnel, where you’re in the awareness stage versus action.  But with a more precise effort like a blogger outreach, it makes sense to track actions closer to an end sale since the people involved would be able to have more individual contact with potential customers, plus they would likely have a closer relationship with them.

As always, the more planning you invest, the better results you’ll see.

The question I’d like to pose is, should your strategy for what to track vary according to the marketing channel used?  For example, if you run a television spot should you focus on trying to track increased conversation (hashtags) or should a sale be the goal (call now!).  Do certain channels lend themselves to different outcomes and different tracking strategies?  What do you think?

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How NASCAR is Building Its Fanbase With Social Media

While most sports finish its season with its biggest event (such as the NFL with the Super Bowl), NASCAR is different in that its biggest race is the season’s first, the Daytona 500.  And two years ago marked the most bizarre Daytona 500 on record.  First, rain showers moved into Florida, postponing the race’s noon start-time on Sunday to noon the next day.  Then the rains picked up again the next morning, and NASCAR made the decision to move the race to 7pm Monday, marking the first time the race had been postponed as well as the first time it would run in primetime.

The race began and for the first time all weekend, things got back to normal.  But all that changed with 40 laps left in the race.  There was a wreck, and what typically happens with a wreck is that there will be debris on the track and possibly liquid from the cars involved.  So trucks will be sent on the track to clear the track and while this is happening the race will be put under caution.  Meaning cars will stay on the track, but their speed will be greatly reduced (from 200 MPH to 50-60 MPH) and their position is frozen and so is the racing until the debris is cleared from the track and officials signal to the drivers to resume the race.

Driver Juan Pablo Montoya had reported some problems with his race car just before the wreck, and during the caution as his car was circling the track, something ‘broke’ and he lost control of his car and it spun out of control into one of the trucks on the track to clean up the mess.  When his car collided with the cleanup truck, the truck literally exploded, creating a huge fireball.  Luckily, both Montoya and the truck driver were fine.  NASCAR immediately ordered all drivers to stop their cars on the track where they were, as they cleaned up this additional mess.

And then, serendipity struck.  As the drivers were sitting in their cars on the track unable to move them, it turns out that one of them, Brad Keselowski, actually had his phone with him in the car, and took a picture of the track, and tweeted it to Twitter.  Marking the first time in the sport’s history that a driver had taken a picture and shared it during a race.

Brad Kesolowski, Twitter, Daytona 500, Fire, TideAnd just like that, NASCAR discovered social media.  Brad gained 55,000 followers just in the hour or so it took to clean up the mess, and during the downtime while waiting for the race to resume, Brad’s sudden fame on Twitter became the story.  Fox Sports showed Brad out tweeting and other drivers talking to him asking him what in the world he was doing.  Over the next few weeks, several of NASCAR’s drivers and on-air personalities started using Twitter, and the sport began pushing Twitter as a channel to connect before, during and after the race.  Typically with NASCAR races, since they are run outside, if there are any weather issues such as rain, the race will be delayed until the weather clears.  During this downtime, drivers will use social media to stay engaged with the fans, while the broadcast teams will interview the drivers on-air during the delays.  Fox has reported that some of its best rating periods for races actually come during delays when its able to interview drivers and get ‘behind the scenes’ chats and give fans a better sense of what their lives are like at the track.

On Sunday night, NASCAR kicked off its 2014 season with the Daytona 500, and again dealt with a rain delay that caused the race to be postponed until primetime for only the 2nd time ever.  But the wait was worth it for NASCAR and many of its fans, as the sports most popular driver, Dale Earnhardt Jr, won The Great American Race.

And then he celebrated by joining Twitter.

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What I love about Dale’s Twitter account is how he’s using it.  Even though the account has only been up for a couple of days, Dale has been giving fans like me a behind-the-scenes look at what he’s been experiencing since winning the Daytona 500, including pics from Victory Lane, and trips to do media appearances with David Letterman and ESPN.  This is exactly the type of content that fans want to see.  And to NASCAR’s credit, the organization has been very open to its drivers using social media.  They immediately saw the impact that Brad’s tweet from 2012 and how it resonated with fans, and the sport realizes the ability of Twitter in particular to drive interest in ongoing races.  Plus, NASCAR has always been a fan-friendly sport.

As for Dale’s Twitter account, the sport’s most popular driver is pretty popular on Twitter too, racking up over 300,000 followers in his first 6 hours on the site.  If Earnhardt can parlay this fast start into his first points championship this season, the business of NASCAR will get a huge boost.  And if the past two years are any indication, its fans on social media will be along for the ride.

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Skateboards, Sex, and Why We Are Always Chasing Numbers

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Last night I watched a Frontline episode called Generation Like.  The episode followed several teens that were learning how to use social media and learning how to create content that brought them popularity.  Switching from interesting to depressing, the show walked us through how teens were training themselves and each other to learn what type of content drove social sharing online.

From a business standpoint, the episode focused on how teens were building audiences for their content, then leveraging those audiences to secure payments (typically in the form of sponsorships) from brands.  Often it was in the form of products that would then be used in their videos, but sometimes cash was involved as well.  The story that I thought was quite telling (and also depressing) was of a 13 year-old skateboarder that was trying to create videos of his skateboarding that would be popular enough for him to make money off them so he could help his impoverished family.  He started out making videos just of him performing skateboarding tricks and stunts, but found that those only generated enough views on YouTube to land him sponsorships from companies in the form of skateboarding gear and clothes.  So he had to find a way to get more views for his videos (because more views means more money).  He started (again, 13 year-old boy) adding older girls to his videos, showing him dancing provocatively with them and performing sexual poses, basically videos that had little or nothing to do with skateboarding.  He would also make videos where he went around doing all sorts of silly stunts with complete strangers.  These videos had far greater reach than just his skateboarding videos, which meant he could make money off them, versus just getting product for his skateboarding videos.  The kid then talked about a friend of his that was a far better skateboarder than he was, but the friend admitted that he couldn’t get high views for his videos (even though his tricks and skills were better) because his videos didn’t include the sexual overtones and raunchy humor that were making his less talented friend’s videos more popular.

These teens are getting a crash course in a basic reality of this social media age: If you build an audience for your content, that opens doors for you.  It’s no different from how I leveraged this blog’s readership and my Twitter following to help land a book deal.  When I was talking to publishers about Think Like a Rock Star, they wanted to know about my online audience.  Every readership and following stat I could show them pointed to a greater online reach and the ability to more easily move people toward a piece of content.

But aside from the business implications, the episode also touched on how the teens wanted and even needed to see their content be Liked online.  Teens would dissect each other’s Facebook pages and question why one girl’s cover photo got hundreds of Likes compared to the others.  At one point a small group of teens were analyzing each other’s Facebook content and they all agreed that when the girls posted selfies that these would get more Likes than when the guys did.

The race for Likes is a race for validation.  Just as the teens do it in their circles, their parents are as well.  Everyone reading this blog knows that in general, if you have bigger numbers (more followers, more Likes), your content is typically viewed as being more trustworthy.  As I was talking to Daniel about last night on Facebook, the best content doesn’t always get the most exposure, it’s typically the content that’s shared via the largest platform that spreads further.  We want to see bigger numbers associated with ourselves and our content because it helps to validate that we are helping others, and quite honestly, we need the external validation that the numbers provide on some level to enhance our own sense of self-worth.

Yet our need for numbers to provide external validation isn’t a social media condition, it’s a human condition.  This is a popularity contest that’s been around much longer than Facebook has.  When I was in 9th grade I attended an extremely small country school that didn’t have a student body large enough to go past the 9th grade, so it ended there.  My ‘graduating’ class in the 9th grade had 9 students and only 6 of them went on to the 10th grade.  Moving onto the 10th grade meant literally changing schools, and where I lived, there was only one option, transferring to the much bigger high school in a nearby city.  While the school itself offered a much better education, for a shy introvert it was at first a nightmare.  I went from having 8 classmates in the 9th grade, to having 175 in my first year of high school in the 10th grade.  What’s worse, the kids at the high school had already made their friends in the 9th grade, so everyone had established friendships and even cliques by the time I arrived in the 10th grade as a complete outsider.  In fact my 10th grade in high school was definitely one of the most miserable of my life.  But by midway or so through 11th grade, I started making friends, and got to be a bit popular with classmates.  I remember that in 10th grade I bought an annual, which students would get to sign for each other.  I hated my 10th grade annual because I only had a handful of signatures from classmates, but I loved my 11th grade annual.  By then I had made friends and I got a lot of signatures.  Those signatures were my ‘numbers’ and external validation that I was no longer an outsider.  I still to this day remember asking someone to sign my annual and they said ‘Wow Mack, you have so many signatures already!’, and I remember how proud I was of those signatures.

Looking back, I realize now that everyone else was doing the same thing I was, they were seeking signatures from each other, the more the better.  If you went to sign someone’s annual and they already had a ton of signatures, that mostly meant that they were popular, and that everyone wanted to sign their annual.  Nevermind that most of the signatures were a result of me asking them to sign it (follow me on Twitter and I will follow you back, so both our numbers go up).  Ironically, I see the same thing happening today.  Often I will have a stranger tweet me ‘Hey Mack I followed you, will you follow me back?’  The need to raise our numbers, and the sense of self-worth we tie to the numbers, is always there.

With any luck, either from enlightenment or simply tired legs, we learn to stop chasing numbers and external validation.  We begin to realize that we don’t need others to tell us things about ourselves, that we should be confident in our own abilities and value.  I’m not completely there yet, but since those days as an insecure 10th grader I am relying less on strangers to tell me things about myself that I already know.  I hope you are as well.

Pic via Flickr user LeoHidalgo