MackCollier.com

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In Defense of the ‘Silent’ Experts…

I wanted to go slightly off-topic today to discuss ‘experts’.  For the last several years in the social media space there’s been constant hand-wringing over how we vet who the ‘real’ experts are.  One of the common themes is that when people claim to be experts that really aren’t, it makes it more difficult to find and value the true experts.  The ‘fake’ experts are drowning out the voices of the ‘real’ experts, as it were.

Honestly, this is a problem.  And it does dilute the value (or at least the perceived value) of ‘real’ experts.  But it also creates another problem that I don’t feel we spend enough time talking about.

In order to deal with this idea of people promoting themselves as experts when they really aren’t, we’ve come up with a qualifier:  The larger group has to identify you as an expert, you can’t promote yourself as such.  The logic is that the true experts don’t need to promote themselves as being experts, because the larger group recognizes their expertise, and promotes them accordingly.

So by extension, if the group doesn’t call you an expert, then you aren’t one.  This addresses the ‘fake’ experts that promote themselves as being experts while the larger group does not.

But what about the ‘silent’ experts?  The people that have a level of expertise, and aren’t aware of it, or they are, but don’t feel comfortable promoting themselves as being experts?  I see this constantly in the social media space.  Often, these people are smart enough to qualify as being experts on some subject, but don’t feel comfortable speaking out as such or speaking out period, because the ‘group’ has told them that if they aren’t identifying them as experts, then they aren’t.  This leads to some people that truly are experts not voicing and sharing their expertise, because they don’t have the confidence in their own abilities.

A few years ago I was talking to someone in this space about #Blogchat on the phone.  She was telling me how much she loved the chat and I realized that she would make the perfect co-host for #Blogchat.  She was an expert in a certain area of blogging, so it made perfect sense to have her co-host on that particular topic.  She was delighted and we started talking about what her topic could be and how the #Blogchat she would co-host would be structured.  She just kept thanking me for the chance to co-host, and I tried to thank her for agreeing.  She then paused and I’ll never forget what she did next.

She started crying.  She started crying because she was so grateful to be put in a position of being acknowledged as an expert.  She felt this was truly an honor that she didn’t deserve.  But she did.

This period was an expert.  The ‘group’ wasn’t identifying her as such, but it was obvious to anyone that knew her and what she had accomplished, that she was an expert.  But because the ‘group’ didn’t feel she was, by extension she didn’t feel as if she had the ‘right’ to be treated as an expert.  She felt I was doing her a huge favor that she didn’t deserve by letting her co-host #Blogchat, when in fact she absolutely deserved to co-host, and I was thrilled that she would.  She was actually doing the #Blogchat community a big favor by agreeing to share her expertise with us.

It worries me that there are so many people out there, so many smart voices like my friend, that are afraid to share what they know, because we are telling them that their voice is not worth sharing.

Here’s some of the rules we are creating:

There’s a problem with ‘fake’ experts.  You can’t promote yourself as an expert, so if the group doesn’t tell you that you are an expert, then you aren’t.

There’s too much content out there.  So you should ONLY create new content that is original and that creates value for others.  Never never NEVER create content just to be creating content.  If your content isn’t epic, don’t share it.  IOW, don’t share your content unless you are an expert…..but remember that you aren’t an expert unless ‘we’ tell you that you are.

 

I say this is bullshit.  Instead of being worried about how many ‘experts’ are out there (real or claimed), instead we need to create an environment where everyone feels comfortable sharing their voice.  Where no one feels that they need permission to share their thoughts and ideas.  No one should feel like their ideas aren’t ‘good enough’ or don’t pass muster with someone that others have identified as being smarter than they are.  There’s no one arbiter of what ideas are and are not worth sharing.

Yes, that means there will be more ‘clutter’ and there will also be more ‘experts’.  There will also be more content and more distractions.

This is ultimately about what we value.  If we push for less ‘clutter’ and less content, by extension we will also get less expertise and less thought leadership.  Less means less of everything.

I say we should strive for a space where everyone feel comfortable sharing their voice and ideas.  When we start to throw up rules and boundaries to idea and information-sharing, then we all lose.

What do you think?

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Stop Chasing Shiny Objects, Invest in the ‘Classics’

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A few years ago an agency approached me and said they had figured out a plan to get ahead.  They were seeing at the time that Twitter was growing like a weed in the South in August, so they were going to hire a ‘Twitter person’.  This person would be an expert at using Twitter, and she would train the entire agency on how to use Twitter, so that they would have an agency full of Twitter experts.

She concluded by asking ‘what do you think?’ with a confident tone that told me that she fully believed she had just cracked the code on successfully propelling her agency into the next decade.

I told her the same thing that day that I will tell you today: Stop trying to understand the tools, and instead invest in learning how your customers are using the tools.  Earlier this month it felt like every marketer in the world was jumping on Jelly.  Marketers were infatuated by a new social tool and more importantly, a new sales opportunity.  These marketers had no clue who was using Jelly or if it would ever be relevant to their customers.  They rushed in at the promise of finding a hot new social channel to sell their wares via.

The true sales opportunity lies in figuring out where the customer is headed and then clearing a path to help them reach their destination.  The customer will eventually reach her destination with or without us, but the value we bring to the equation is to help the customer reach her destination as effortlessly as possible.  Helping the customer do this IS the sales opportunity.

There are two areas you need to focus on in 2014:

1 – Understanding how your customers are using these tools

2 – Understanding how customer behavior is changing because of emerging tools and technology

Over a decade ago, The Cluetrain Manifesto was published, and the work is perhaps best known for presenting the idea of markets as conversations.  The idea that the markets that companies sell to are actually made up of human beings having conversations with each other, and if you wanted to connect with these markets, you needed to understand the conversations they were having, and even participate in those conversations.

Marketers heard the ‘participate’ part, but they missed the ‘understand’ portion.  No matter how many shiny tools you master, none of that will help you if you don’t understand your customers.

BTW anyone notice that all the talk about Jelly died down as soon as it started up?  That’s because marketers got there, spent a few days with it and didn’t see an immediate sales opportunity, and left.  Agency folks camped out there long enough to see if they could sell their clients on ‘Jelly Management’ projects, and left when they realized everyone else was.

Which leads to another classic: There are no silver bullets.  Roll your sleeves up, invest in understanding your customers.  Do the work.

Pic via Flickr user dylan garton

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Is Your Blog Still Your Front Porch? Tonight’s #Blogchat Topic!

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Here’s the transcript for tonight’s #Blogchat

Tonight (Jan 26, 2014) we’ll discuss if your blog is still your front porch.  Recently, I went back through the archives of The Viral Garden, which was my blog before this one.  I started blogging there in 2006, before we all found Twitter or Facebook and years before there was a Google Plus.  In 2006 and 2007 if you wanted to share an interesting blog post or article, you didn’t tweet it or post it to Facebook, you shared it on your blog.  I did this as well, in fact once a week or so I would post a ‘Viral Community News’ that would have a roundup of 4-5 blog posts that readers of The Viral Garden had wrote that I thought were interesting.  It was also a great way to build readership.

But over time, I discovered Twitter, and then Facebook, and my linking behavior changed.  I stopped linking on my blog as much, and moved to sharing content via other social media channels and tools.  I think most other bloggers have done the same thing, but at the same time, it seems that bloggers are more worried today about building readership.  In my opinion, part of the reason why it’s more difficult to build readership is because of that change in linking behavior.  Years ago when linking was primarily confined to blogs, that meant traffic bounced back and forth among those blogs.  Today, linking has moved off blogs, and additionally a lot of our thoughts that years ago would have been shared as a blog post, are now shared as a Facebook update.

I wanted to talk about this tonight at #Blogchat, and specifically three areas:

1 – Has the way you use your blog changed in the last few years as Twitter and Facebook have become more popular?

2 – Are the things such as linking and content sharing that make social media as a whole more valuable to you, actually making blogging less valuable?

3 –  What can we do to make sure that blogging stays the centerpiece of our social media presence?  Should it be?

Hope to see y’all tonight at 8pm Central on Twitter!  If you are new to #Blogchat you can learn more here.

Pic via Flickr user YellowstoneNPS

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The Power of Integrating Customer Service Across Your Organization

While many companies are struggling to use social media as a channel to drive sales, some companies have discovered the power of using social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to provide effective and efficient customer service. For example, look at this recent exchange on Twitter between Ekaterina Walter and Nikon:

EkaterinaNikon

EkaterinaNikon2While the end result might be a customer service ‘win’ for Nikon, it also raises some glaring issues for the brand.  For example, if there’s consistently a disconnect between the level of customer service that Nikon offers via phone and Twitter, what happens when customers try the phone and don’t know to contact Nikon on Twitter?  In that case, Nikon likely doesn’t have a chance to redeem itself as they did here with Ekaterina.

Another byproduct of this is that by providing better customer service via one channel, you are training your customers to go to that channel first for customer service.  Which can be a plus assuming you have the bandwidth to support additional customers.  But if not, that likely means that the level of customer service provided by one channel (Twitter in this case) may fall lower and more in line with what customers are seeing via other channels (such as the phone).

So what’s the answer?  Try comparing notes.

Think about all the channels customers can use to contact you with support issues.  Email, social media, website, phone, even snail mail, maybe even in-person.  It’s important to remember that different customers prefer to use different tools.  So it’s entirely possible that each customer service channel you use is seeing complaints and questions from a completely different segment of your customer base.

For each customer service channel you use, you should have your employees that man these channels regularly provide every area of your customer service team with the following information:

1 – What is the nature of customer contact?

2 – Are customers inquiring about a particular product or service?

3 – Did the customer mention attempting to contact your company via another channel first?  If so, which one?

4 – Who was the customer?  Share any information you can about who they were, their age, location, how they used you product or service, etc.

If you can better communicate and integrate your customer service experience then the total quality of customer service you provide will increase.  That means more satisfied customers, and it increases the likelihood of creating more fans of your brand.  Most brands don’t understand this, but one of the easiest ways to create new fans is to give a frustrated customer excellent customer service.  That will often convert an upset customer into an advocate for your brand.

Share your successes, and your failures

No matter how many touchpoints your company offers customers to contact you with a service issue, the employees manning the frontlines should be in constant contact.  If your support team on Twitter, for example, is having success providing customer service, you want to share with other areas of CS what’s working.  Reverse-engineer why the CS experience on Twitter is better for customers so you can share what’s working with the rest of your organization.  That way your team that handles the call center may be able to apply some of the lessons learned from the Twitter support team to improve the experience callers see with customer support.

It’s equally important to share your failures.  Let other members of your customer support team diagnosis your efforts and give you insight into how to improve, based on what’s worked for them.  A fresh set of eyes are often necessary to spot shortcomings that can be corrected.  Another good idea is to have a private message board or forum just for your customer support team so they can bounce ideas off each other and share thoughts.

The bottom line is that just as communication with your customers facilitates understanding, the same process works internally.  The more communication between all areas of your customer service department, the greater the chance to improve the experience for your customers.

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The Death Knell for Social Networking Sites: Mainstream Usage

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The first online portal I joined was Prodigy in 1991.  It was actually a great experience, there was just no one there.  But the few people that did use the mostly text-based service were very friendly and it wasn’t unusual to interact with someone on one of the pseudo-message boards and share your home address with an invitation for others to write a letter.  Different times.

From there I went to CompuServe in the mid-1990s and AOL soon after that.  Both CS and AOL were also internet providers, and at the time it was some outrageous amount, like $25 for 10 hours online.  For a month!  I often spend more than 10 hours online in a day!

Then around 1997 or so, AOL announced that it was changing it’s price structure and removing the hourly cap on online access.  They rolled out the $25 for unlimited access and it was a total game-changer.  Unfortunately, it also totally changed the experience on AOL.  Suddenly, there were kids everywhere!  I feel like the old man shaking his cyber-fist but suddenly I had to learn what ‘LOL’ and ‘OMG!’ meant, along with ‘trolling’, ‘noobs’ and the endless string of 🙂 😛 XOXO.

AOL had gone mainstream, and in the process, the experience that it’s core users had become accustomed to had changed greatly.  Ironically, we are now seeing the same thing happen in reverse with Facebook.  Facebook started out as a site for only college students.  Then the restriction of having an edu address to access FB was lifted, which meant that recent college grads and soon-to-be college students (IOW the younger and older siblings of current FB users) started checking out the site.

The social media geeks found FB in 2007.  Over the next 2-3 years its userbase grew at an astronomical rate.  Suddenly it seemed like every kid from the age of 14-24 was on Facebook.

Then the parents found out that their kids were on Facebook.  Suddenly parents everywhere that had little to no idea what their kids were up to, only had to go on Facebook at it was all there!

As you might expect, Facebook is quickly becoming ‘uncool’ to these kids. In fact, Facebook recently verified that young teens are leaving the site.  Where are they going?  To sites that their parents haven’t discovered yet like SnapChat, Instagram and Path.  Which are now growing like crazy, that is until mom finds out about them…

It’s truly the paradox of growing an online site or portal: You need to reach a certain mass of users to attract more users.  And you need to monetize those users, which is another reason you want more users.  But the simple fact is that adding more users changes the overall experience.  It has for every social media site I’ve used for the last 20+ years.  And when the overall experience changes from what made the site appealing to begin with, people leave.

If you are trying to create an online community site, or even if you are trying to build a blog readership, always focus on delighting and retaining your first users.  These are the builders of your base, the people that love your experience and tell others about it.  When you get in a rush to bring in new users too quickly, you change the experience, which means you lose those first users that are really the foundation for you entire community.  It’s like building a pyramid, you have a strong foundation, then you start slowly building the pyramid.  Then suddenly you start to quickly add on and going skyward with the pyramid, while at the same time you start removing the foundation.  Obviously the pyramid will soon collapse under its own weight.

Never pursue growth at the expense of user experience.  Facebook’s growth was driven by kids.  Kids that are now deciding they don’t like being on the site anymore.  When the foundation is removed the collapse isn’t very far behind.

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The Greatest Marketing Lesson: Passion Trumps Control

We all want to be rock stars, even brands.  Because rock stars have fans that love them like this:

Fans that so passionately love their favorite rock star that they literally break down and start crying when they talk about them.  And brands don’t have that. Except, when they do:

So if we accept that brands can have fans that love them just as passionately as rock stars do, then the question becomes why don’t more brands have such devoted fans? 

When I started writing Think Like a Rock Star, the question I wanted to answer is why so many rock stars like Lady Gaga have fans that love them, while most brands do not.  I expected to learn that rock stars simply have an innate advantage when it comes to creating and cultivating fans.

In fact, I learned that rock stars aren’t doing anything to create and cultivate fans that brands can’t do.  Instead, the answer to why rock stars have fans and brands don’t lies in what brands aren’t willing to do.

The Greatest Marketing Tool Ever Invented

The rock concert.

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I just love this photo.  Look at those smiling faces!  Happy people in the audience, and on the stage.  Everyone happy, happy, happy.

Think about what a rock concert is.  It’s a way that rock stars have created to:

1 – Give a special experience to its biggest fans (that helps validate why they are fans to begin with)

2 – Sell that experience to its fans

3 – Sell merchandise to its fans

4 – Bring its biggest fans together in one place and connect them to each other

That fourth and final point is what makes concerts so valuable to rock stars.  Sure, the ticket and merchandise sales create a huge direct benefit to the rock star, but bringing all those fans together is an incredible driver of positive word of mouth for the rock star.  Think about it, thousands of people that share a common interest are placed in the same area for several hours.  What are they going to do before and after (and during) the concert?  Interact with other fans and talk about how and why they love their favorite rock star.  It helps validate why they are fans, and when they leave the concert, those fans will feel better about being a fan of the rock star and by extension better about themselves.

In essence, the fans are marketing for the rock star.  Those fans are going to go home and tell all their friends about what an amazing experience the concert was and they will encourage their friends and family to attend a concert as well.  So the simple act of connecting fans to each other is incredibly powerful.

And it’s backed by facts and science.  First, there are a plethora of studies that word of mouth is a more effective and trusted form of communication than any type of communication that originates from a brand.  IOW if you want to sell your widget to my friend Tim, the odds are that my telling him to buy your widget will result in a sale long before your commercial will.

Additionally, science backs the power of letting passionate people spread your message.   Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute concluded that it only takes 10 percent of a population holding an unshakable belief in order to convince the majority to adopt that same belief.  In fact, the scientists found that this will always be the case.  This study speaks to the power of letting your most passionate fans spread your message.  It’s no coincidence that two of the most popular business case studies for building fans (Maker’s Mark, The Fiskateers) both have elements built into it that connects fans to each other.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the average brand won’t trust its marketing messages with its most passionate customers even if that brand understands the business value of positive word of mouth.  Because even though most brands understand and appreciate the power of word of mouth, they value and covet having control over the marketing messages they send their customers even more.

So then the answer to why rock stars have fans and brands do not goes back to simple marketing.  But not so much the message itself, but how that message is conveyed to others.

If we accept that the average customer views another customer to be more credible than the average brand, then we also must accept that the average customer views marketing messages from another customer to be more credible than marketing messages from the average brand.

What you gain in control, you lose in credibility.  We talk about how brands need to build ‘relationships’ with their customers, but healthy relationships are built on trust.  If your brand doesn’t trust its customers, you probably won’t keep them very long.

Pic via Kmeron

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How to Mobilize Your Brand Advocates Through Storytelling

With the decline of traditional media and it’s effectiveness, brands have been turning to brand advocates to get their message across to potential customers.

Brand advocates are existing customers of a brand who are the biggest fans of that brand and who are passionate about the brand and its products. They don’t need an incentive to spread their love and ignite a word of mouth (both online and offline), because they are emotionally invested in brand’s mission and its story.

Neilsen’s 2012 survey of global trust in advertising found that 92 percent of respondents trust recommendations from people they know, and 70 percent trust consumers’ opinions posted online. And this isn’t the only data point that speaks to the power of advocates. At BRANDERATI we have put together a deck of the 26 stats marketers should know about advocacy that you might find interesting.

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The most powerful thing about organic advocacy is the story behind customer’s experience. And because the endorsement is not paid for by the brand, and the story is something others can truly connect with, it becomes a great motivator in getting others to act on the endorsement. Advocacy, done right, becomes true influence. And influence is what impacts behaviors. Because the ultimate goal of marketing is to not just to tell a great story, but tell a story that would make people want to get to know a brand and buy the product. And that’s what advocacy is all about.

Many brands have been turning to customers, asking them to tell their own stories and putting their own fans center-stage. By giving their most vocal advocates a platform to share their own experiences the brands are effectively turning their brand love into authentic influence. Brands are able to spark engagement around real stories from real customers in real-time, thus massively increasing the reach of their message and driving impact to company’s bottom line.

Let’s take a look at several examples.

Buick

Buick wanted to change perception of its brand, and they thought the best way to do this was to ask their own advocates why they love their Buicks and to share their stories. In only a few weeks, Buick advocates had written over 1,600 love letters and 16% of advocates had shared them on Facebook. The individual stories were magnified, thanks to the brand power of Buick – individuals were given a corporate platform and their stories reached further than they would have on their own.

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Google

One marketing problem that faces a brand like Google is that, although it is a truly massive, global brand, it is very hard to represent their services in a visual way. To give their marketing a human quality, Google asked customers to tell their own stories of the ways in which Google had changed their lives, their organizations or their businesses.

The results were commercials that were inspiring, touching and emotional – quite a feat from a software company. This one from Mark Kempton, whose survival of the Queenland flooding depended on his rescuers using Google Maps, has been viewed over 5.5 million times on YouTube, and brings an individual story to a global audience.

Weight Watchers

EkaterinaPicWWFor Weight Watchers, sharing customers’ stories is about inspiring others and giving credibility to their diet plan. They use celebrities for many of their campaigns, but they also give a platform to their ‘ordinary’ fans who have used their plan to shed the pounds. Their website, magazine and marketing all feature many stories of real people who have lost weight through Weight Watchers – so you can find someone just like you to use as a role model. The company is always on the look-out for success stories so that they can provide a constant stream of positive messages to inspire their customers through their online and off-line channels.

 

 

Conclusion

To tell customers stories effectively you need to connect with fans and ask them to tell you about the difference your product or service has made to their lives. Sharing their story widely can help their individual tales reach a much larger audience than they would ordinarily. Your brand platform combined with your customers’ inspirational stories can lead to a winning combination of advocacy and influence. But to do so effectively and in a sustainable way, you have to build authentic relationships with your advocates and fans long-term. Without that you will just create another short-term marketing campaign, whereas what you are really looking for is inspiring a movement around your brand, your mission, your story.

 

033Ekaterina Walter led strategic and marketing innovation for brands such as Intel and Accenture, and is currently a co-founder and CMO of Branderati. She is an international speaker and author of the WSJ bestseller “Think Like Zuck: The Five Business Secrets of Facebook’s Improbably Brilliant CEO Mark Zuckerberg” and co-author of “The Power of Visual Storytelling: How to Use Visuals, Videos, and Social Media to Market Your Brand.” You can find her on Twitter: @Ekaterina or her blog: http://www.ekaterinawalter.com/.

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The Free Economy: Why It’s Making Everything More Expensive

Over the past several years as publishing and content creation tools have flourished, so has the idea that anything free is inherently better or at least more desired than content or tools that cost money.  Whether you are an individual or company looking to make a name for yourself, the path is pretty linear: Create gobs of free content or give users free usage of your tool, and eventually they will want to pay you for your content or tool.

Until, they don’t.

For years, this sort of freemium model was successful: Provide limited and free access, then when people saw the value of your content/tool, charge them money for additional access and features.  But over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend among my peers and networks.  People will stay with a tool or content creator as long as their content/tool is free, but as soon as they ask for money, most people jump off and look for another free source.  There’s so many sources of information that the thinking seems to be that someone else will offer better functionality at a free price.  Or instead of paying this writer $9.99 for their ebook, I can get the same information for free from blogs.

Too often, the most important attribute assigned to online content or tools is that they be free.  Free = better in the minds of many.

Here’s an example: My modest newsletter is now up to 1,000 subscribers.  I publish a new issue every week or so, and the newsletter is designed to give subscribers information they can use to better create engagement around their digital marketing efforts and create fans of their brand.  All for free.  Yet every 4th or 5th issue (often I will publish this as an additional issue for that week), I will use the newsletter to directly promote a product or service I offer.  Many people do this with every newsletter issue they publish, but I like to do it about 20-25% of the time.  Typically when I publish a newsletter issue, I will have 1 or 2 people unsubscribe, on average.  But every time I publish a newsletter issue where I am trying to directly sell to my subscribers, the number of unsubscribes always spikes, typically it’s 500% or more higher than the average issue.  The people that unsubscribed left as soon as I asked for the sale.  In other words, they were willing to take and use my content as long as I was providing value for them, at absolutely no cost to them.  But the second they saw an ‘ad’, they left.

It’s not just content, any of you that conduct regular meetings for organizations such as the AMA or Social Media Club have seen the same thing.  If the meetings are free, attendance is high, but when you begin charging even a few dollars, attendance falls off a cliff.

The thinking seems to be that if your offering isn’t free, you can’t compete.  Which means that if there are more free options, there are also more bad options.  And we all spend more time trying to figure out which free option is the best, without realizing that the additional time is costing us more than paying a few dollars for a valuable service or piece of content.

You don’t become an expert by reading an expert’s blog.  You become an expert the same way they did; By doing stuff.  I’ll let you in on a secret: I’m not writing this blog to teach you how to become an expert, I’m writing this blog to establish *my* expertise in social media marketing, online community building and marketing strategy, so you will hire me.  Sure, some people will be able to read my posts here, follow my instructions and launch a brand ambassador program for their company.  But what I hope happens is that a company would read my posts, realize how much time and money it would cost that company to launch a brand ambassador program itself, and instead hire me to do it for them.  I get paid, they save time and money.

I’m not sure what the answer is, but what I fear happens is you have a lot of very smart individuals and startups that throw in the towel because they can’t make money on a product or content by giving it away for free.  For instance, consider the plugins on your blog, how many are you paying for?  Are you paying for any of them?  I have about 30 plugins, and only pay for two of them.  In both cases, I wanted a plugin that did specific things, and couldn’t find a free version that did, so I paid for the services I wanted.

Many of us bemoan the glut of content being created these days.  Everyone is creating content and it’s all the same.  But it’s also (mostly) free.  We complain about how Twitter or Facebook isn’t working right, how the sites run too many ads, yet we forget that we aren’t paying a penny to use either service.

Nothing is truly free and I think we need to realize that if we aren’t paying for content or a tool on the front-end, there is a cost in terms of time, diminished experience, etc on the back-end.  The myth of the free lunch is just that.

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Stop Selling Ice to Eskimos, Get a Better Content Strategy in 2014

Last year I made a big mistake on my blog, and it’s a mistake I am constantly reminding y’all not to make.

Here’s a list of the Top 10 most popular blog posts here last year:

BlogStatsNote the #2 and #3 blog posts are about book publishing.  I wrote these last year while I was launching my book.  I wanted to share what I had learned so that the information could benefit other consultants, marketers or really anyone that wanted to be a writer or was considering writing a book.  And the top search term that people used to find this blog last year was ‘I want to write a book’.  By a 10 to 1 margin over the #2 search term.

There’s just one (big) problem.  Current or potential writers that want to make money off writing a book is not my target audience.  Not even close.  So while these two posts were very popular, they helped connect me with an audience that I had no services for.  But I forgot this because I was focused on how these posts could be valuable to readers.  I just lost sight of the fact that they wouldn’t really create value for a big portion of my target audience.

This is one of the lessons I am always preaching here, to keep in mind the audience you are writing for.  I want to create helpful content for my desired audience.  The two posts on book publishing were very helpful, just not for the people I am trying to connect with.

Here’s a simple way to keep your content focused in 2014:

Create three content areas or buckets.  These will be the three areas of your business that you want to focus on with your content.

For example, if your blog is for your lawn care business, your three buckets could be:

1 – Killing insects in your lawn

2 – Growing healthier flowers for your yard

3 – Proper maintenance of your lawn

So for every post you write, you need to make sure it fits into one of these three buckets.  If it does not, you need to justify why you should publish the post.  This is a great way to keep your content on track and to make sure that you are only creating content that’s focused on your business.  An added benefit of this is that as you are creating content around the relevant areas of your business, you will be helping Google identify your blog with certain relevant keywords.  For example, I would rather people find my blog via a search term like ‘building a brand ambassador program for my company’ versus ‘i want to write a book’.

Additionally, you need to always consider who you are writing for.  For example, this blog is a business development tool for me.  Which means if I am creating content, I need to create content that is useful to the people that can give me business.  In evaluating my content here from last year, I noticed that too often I was creating content that was useful to solo bloggers.  I love helping solo bloggers (a big reason why I launched #Blogchat) but solo bloggers aren’t the audience I want to be getting business from.  So that’s why the majority of my content this year will be focused on how brands can market more efficiently, because brands and companies are the audience that I want to do business with.

It pays to go back every month or maybe every quarter and self-evaluate your content and your content strategy for your blog.  Look at what type of progress you are making on reaching your goals, and then make sure that you are still creating the type of content that you need to in order to reach those goals.

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Reaching a More Connected Customer Requires a More Connected Company

Over the Holidays I was reading an issue of the Wall-Street Journal about how companies are leveraging Twitter to improve its marketing.  Companies that sell cold medicines and items, especially those related to treating the flu, are closely monitoring Twitter.  They are tracking instances of people complaining on Twitter about having flu symptoms such as body aches, coughing and colds.  Then they will track where these people live, and make sure that local retailers are have sufficient inventory of any cold treatment products or medicines that the company sells.  Clorox and Kimberly-Clark (makers of Kleenex brand tissues) both reported double-digit sales growth by utilizing Twitter and online chatter to drive shipments of cold products during the previous flu season.

While this type of conversation-mining might seem revolutionary to many companies, it can seem a bit underwhelming to the customers these companies are trying to reach.  This type of functionality has long been available even in basic and free versions.  The now-defunct site Monitter.com provided users location-based searching based on zip code.  Even Twitter now provides this functionality, and you can even factor in user sentiment.

community building, online community

We’ve been chattering on Twitter for several years now.  When companies first arrived their goal was to market and promote.  As the above examples illustrate, now they are beginning to understand the value of listening.  One of the great marketing benefits of social media for companies is word of mouth in digital form.  Before social media and the internet, if customers in Nashville began complaining about flu-like symptoms in December, they did so via analog tools that were largely inaccessible to companies that sold products that could have helped them relieve their flu symptoms.  Today, we are increasingly using digital and social media tools, and as such, our word of mouth is now in digital form so companies can access it and act on it.

But the key is that companies must make the effort to access that customer feedback.  If your company is consistently tracking and analyzing this digital word of mouth from your customers, you will begin to notice trends and patterns.  You will begin to develop a deeper understanding of your customers.

Which means you can market more efficiently to them.  By 2014, most companies that do any business online are at least experimenting with social media.  But few companies are truly utilizing social media efficiently to drive real business growth.

If you want to be in the minority of companies that are using social media marketing correctly, start by leveraging these tools to better understand your customers.  Too many companies start using social media to better sell to customers.  That should come later.  Use this simple format:

1 – Listen first, then take what you learn and apply it to…

2 – Engaging with your customers.  Interact with them, help them, and create value for them.  That leads to…

3 – Sales

Instead, too many companies put the cart before the horse and jump in immediately trying to sell to people they don’t understand via tools they don’t understand.

Don’t put the digital cart before the digital horse.  It’s not about understanding the tools, it’s about understanding how and why your customers are using the tools.  Then you can move forward.