MackCollier.com

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Behaving Badly Online and the Power of Eating Your Own Dog Food

A few months ago a well known ‘social media guru’ on Facebook said I was a hateful and fearful person, just because I disagreed with them on a particular social issue.  Actually, they didn’t single me out, they said that anyone that disagreed with them was hateful and fearful and intolerant (the irony of their intolerance was blissfully lost on them).  Then for good measure, another gooroo took the opposite stance on this same issue, and said that anyone that disagreed with them was hateful and fearful.  So we were screwed either way.

Over the last year or so, I’ve noticed an increase in people behaving badly online.  What’s most troubling to me is, a lot of this bad behavior is coming from ‘social media experts’ that advise companies on how to deal with customers online.  Consultants and agencies that train companies on how to respond appropriately online, then turn around and break their own rules when they get on their personal social media accounts.

Case in point, the recent episode with Justine Sacco’s tweet about her trip to Africa.  It was an incredibly bone-headed and immature tweet to leave, and it was pretty obvious as soon as she did that she was going to get canned, and she did.

What wasn’t expected was the near mob-mentality that erupted on Twitter especially.  It was as if her detractors on Twitter (and at this point there were many, mostly due to her own words) were waiting for a sense of closure that would only come from her being fired.  The longer it went without seeing her termination, the louder and angrier the mob got.  As my friend Ann Handley said:

I’m not trying to be sanctimonious here – I understand it’s human nature to grab a pitchfork and a club and join the march.

Or is it? Can’t we expect more from an evolved, networked, smarter world? Aren’t we better than that?

The challenge for companies is to treat content publishing as a privilege—to respect your audience and deliver what they want in a way that’s useful, enjoyable, and inspired. But the larger challenge for humans is to treat publishing with a similar respect—understanding the responsibility and power than comes with the ability to communicate with a global audience.

Additionally, I think that those of us that want to instruct companies on how to properly engage customers online should be held to a higher standard.  That means if you want to be noted as an expert in helping companies engage customers online, you lose the right to then go on Facebook and call Obama/Romney an asshole just because you’re a Republican/Democrat.

It means you have to eat your own dog food.

I’ll be the first to admit that I have slipped up a time or two and have discussed politics online.  I think most of us have, and there’s nothing wrong with that.  But if I start attacking people online simply because they support a different political party, I really do forfeit the right to call out brands for behaving badly.  We cannot hold brands to a higher standard than we hold ourselves.

We always talk about how brands need to be ‘more human.’ Sometimes we ‘humans’ do too.

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It’s 2014, Let’s Stop Talking About Social Media

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Happy New Year, y’all!  2014 begins my 10th year of being immersed in the world of social media.  I can remember when social media was simply blogs and MySpace.  Then Facebook and Twitter came along, and we all began to wonder when companies would begin to notice these amazing tools and what they could help them accomplish.

Finally, around 2008 0r 2009, companies start to pay attention to social media.  But in the five or so years since then, the conversation has largely remained focused on the tools themselves.  It’s long-overdue that we stop focusing on the tools and start focusing on understanding how and why people are using these tools.

Let’s stop focusing on social media and instead focus on how social media usage by our brand can relate to larger and far more valuable business objectives:

1 – Customer satisfaction

2 – Customer loyalty

3 – Sales

It’s time to elevate the conversation.  Actually it’s about 5 years past time to elevate the conversation.  We need to stop talking about the tools, and instead focus on the larger business goals that the tools help us reach.  For too long social media strategists/agencies and firms have been trying to sell companies on using social media with a tools-oriented argument.  Key executives that work within companies that approve marketing budgets don’t speak in terms of tools, they speak in terms of results.  A 15% increase in sales in Q3, a 10% reduction in product returns for the year or a 20% reduction in staff turnover.

When we change our conversation to stop focusing on the tools and instead focus on how the tools impact the bottom line, we earn the attention of companies.  It sends a completely mixed message to companies when we strategists say that companies need to invest in social media, but we talk about how that investment will lead to increased social media engagement, brand awareness, Likes and comments.  We tell companies that social media is important, then speak about that importance in metrics that are totally unimportant to the average company.  

So there’s no wonder they aren’t listening.  Neither are customers, because we are focused on ways to use social media to turn customers into digital billboards for our brands.

Stop the insanity!

If it’s 2014 and you are just now considering using social media to connect with your customers, I have good and bad news for you:

The bad news is: You’re way behind.

The good news is: Most companies that are using social media suck at it, so you can catch up quickly if you are smart.

It’s not about understanding the tools, it’s about understanding the people that use the tools.  That should be your focus in 2014.  Tools change but it’s always a good idea to understand who your customers are and how you can create value for them, regardless of the tools they (and you) use.

Pic via Flickr user DigitalLeica

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Amazing #Blogchat Stats From 2013

Thanks to Hashtracking I was able to track the #Blogchat stats for 2013, and came up with some pretty interesting results that I wanted to share with you.

First, a caveat: Hashtracking switched me over from their account to an account just for me in February, so there’s a gap of 9 days where we didn’t have stats for #Blogchat.  So all stats associated with the chat are approximate.

#blogchatStats2Actually the number I currently have is right over 116,000, so if you add in the gap in February and the final 12 days of this year, we’ll end up with right at 125,000 #Blogchat tweets generated this year.  Yes, we are a chatty bunch!

Here’s how those tweets break down (Feb-now):

#blogchatStats3As you can see, 39% of the #Blogchat tweets are someone replying to someone else.  It’s a conversation, which is why #Blogchat has been so successful and what I love about the chat.  Smart people sharing what they know and learning from each other.

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Amazing number, isn’t it?  That’s the size of many small towns!  It also speaks to the diversity of the #Blogchat community.

#blogchatStats5I think this is really interesting.  26% of the tweets come from the 20 most active contributors, and 48%, almost half, of the tweets come from the 100 most active contributors.  So half the tweets are coming from 0.5% of the members!   

#blogchatStats6Thanks to Patrick, Linda, Bruce, Georganna and Janice for being the 5 most active members of the #Blogchat community this year.  If you are new to #Blogchat, these guys are a must-follow!

Of course, one of the things that makes #Blogchat so valuable is all the amazing co-hosts we get to learn from.  2013 was certainly no exception…

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 We were extremely lucky to learn from Kerry, Chris, Mitch, Jay, Carrie, Dave and Sheila this year.  As an added bonus, here’s the transcript from each co-host’s #Blogchat:

Kerry – Legal aspects of blogging

Chris – Incorporating video into your blogging

Jay – How to create Youtility in your blogging

Dave – Leveraging your blog as a networking tool

Sheila – Blogger outreach

Carrie – How a small biz can make money from blogging

Mitch – Lessons learned from a decade of blogging

Biggest #Blogchat of the year?  That came on the Sunday of March the 10th, when 3,038 tweets were generated!

Oh and who was the person with the most followers that used the #Blogchat hashtag in 2013?  That would be this guy:

#blogchatStats8Ok granted he only tweeted twice about #Blogchat and they were both RTs but hey, it’s MC Hammer!

And the biggie:

#blogchatStats10Isn’t that amazing?  And no, ‘Reach’ and ‘Impressions’ aren’t always the most accurate measurements around, but still, the number of people exposed to the #Blogchat hashtag this year cannot be denied. It’s a staggeringly large number.

Finally, thank you to everyone that has helped make #Blogchat the amazingly valuable and helpful community that it is.  Here’s to an even better 2014, which will be #Blogchat’s FIFTH year!

PS: Want to sponsor #Blogchat in 2014?  Here’s price and details.

 

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I Quit

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One of my goals for this year was to launch a newsletter.  Consistently, I had heard from marketers I trust that they were seeing great traction from their newsletters.  Then Chris Brogan said that the engagement level he was seeing from his newsletter was far better than what he was seeing on his blog.

That clinched it for me, and I launched the Think Like a Rock Star newsletter in February.  The goal was simple, I wanted to leverage the newsletter as a way to get new work leads.  My plan was to publish the newsletter once a week, all original content.  The format was that I would create original content for the newsletter, focused on how companies can better create and cultivate fans.  And I would end each newsletter issue with a reminder of one or two relevant ways that subscribers can work with me.  My thinking was that I would give subscribers valuable and original content, and then a sales pitch at the end.

The results?  They stink.  So far after 10 months I have gotten a grand total of zero dollars of business from my newsletter.

What’s worse, both the open rates and click rates for the newsletter have consistently fallen.  After the first few weeks the open rate was 50%.  Then it fell to 40%, then over the next few months down to 35%, 30%, 25% and lately it’s been barely above 20%.  The click rate was even worse, rarely getting above 3%.

After 10 months, the newsletter was averaging a 24% click rate, and a 1.9% click rate.  Honestly over the last few weeks I’ve seriously considered pulling the plug on the newsletter.  I’m putting 5-10 hours a month into it and literally getting nothing from it.  No emails, no contact, no clicks, nothing.

I was ready to say ‘I Quit’.

But…it kept nagging at me that I must be doing something wrong.  The newsletter is a tool that’s proven to work for others.  So far my newsletter was a failure, but I wasn’t ready to quit on it.

So I decided to re-evaluate everything about the newsletter.  I started subscribing to the newsletters of marketers that were seeing success with their newsletters.  I immediately noticed that their format was different from mine.  They weren’t publishing original content with their newsletter, in fact they typically were using their newsletter as a tool to drive subscribers back to their blog.  Often they would give a short summary of their latest post, then a link.

So on Monday I sent out my latest issue of my newsletter and tried a different approach.  I gave subscribers a recap of the recent changes that Facebook had made to its News Feed algorithm, and how it was likely impacting the reach of its brand page.  After telling subscribers what was happening, I added that if they wanted to see my two suggestions for handling this change, that they should click over to my blog to read my thoughts.

So my goal for this particular issue was two-fold:

1 – I wanted to see if I could significantly increase the open rate.  I wrote what I thought was a pretty good headline for the email: “The One Change Facebook Made That Could Kill Your Brand Page”

2 – I wanted to see if giving subscribers a lead-in to the post, then asking them to click here to read ‘the rest of the story’ would significantly increase the click rate.

The results?

The list’s average open rate is 24%, after two days the open rate for this issue is at 30%.  That’s a 25% increase over the list average.

The list’s average open rate is 1.9%, after two days the click rate for this issue is at 12.4%.  That’s an increase of over 500% above the list average.

There’s a couple of lessons here:

1 – Quitting is worse than failure.  When you fail you can still learn how to improve, but you can only realize that potential improvement if you keep trying to get better.

2 – It’s ok to change your path if you are lost.  I started out with a set of goals for my newsletter and certain tactics I was using to try to reach those goals.  After 10 months, it clearly wasn’t working, so I decided to try something new.

Now to clarify, simply getting people to click over to my site/content still isn’t the ultimate goal.  The ultimate goal is to get actual work from the newsletter.  But at least now, I have something I can tinker with.  Before, I wasn’t getting emails from subscribers, I wasn’t getting clicks, and the open rate was falling like a rock.  Now at least I have a way to generate more clicks, so that’s something.  I’ll still need to keep tweaking the format and content in order to see those clicks convert into leads, but today I feel much better about the newsletter than I did just a week ago.

The point is to keep trying.  It’s the same with your blogging strategy, your mobile strategy, etc.  It really does pay to experiment sometimes, for example, the headline to this post is an experiment.  I wanted to see if a very short and provocative headline would draw interest in the post.  Maybe it will, or maybe it won’t.

But if it fails, I’ll try something else.  I won’t quit.

Pic via Flickr

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The Simple Change Facebook Made That’s Screwing Up Brand Pages Everywhere

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A couple of weeks ago, Facebook altered the algorithm that determines what content you see in your News Feed (and no, you’re not seeing everything from your friends or the pages you Like).  Previously, content from friends/Pages that you had Liked or interacted with previously were more likely to show up in your News Feed in the future.

But earlier this month, Facebook again tweaked what content is shown in your News Feed.  When it did, the company said that ‘high quality articles’ would be given credence moving forward, and ‘the latest meme’ would get buried.

Instead, it appears that content from many company Brand Pages took a big hit.  Ignite Social Media, a social media marketing agency, analyzed almost 700 posts on 21 brand pages and had some pretty interesting/disturbing findings.  The biggest takeaway was that both organic reach and organic reach percentage fell by an average of 44% since the first week in December.  Five of the brands studied saw a decrease of over 60% and only one brand page in the study actually increased reach and reach percentage.  Since these results were revealed last week brand page managers everywhere have been lamenting similar findings on the pages they manage.

So what should your brand do now?

There are two things that I have consistently advised brands to do when it comes to social media:

1 – Plant seeds in the garden you own

2 – Focus on the people using the tools, not the tools themselves

Plant Seeds in the Garden You Own

The allure of Facebook for brands is obvious, there’s over a billion reasons why brands want to set up shop on Facebook.  Set up a brand page and suddenly you’ve got a free advertising tool on the biggest social networking site on the planet!  Why would anyone NOT want to do this?

Facebook knows that too.  Facebook is also now a publicly-traded company, and as such, revenue streams are of primary importance.  Which means if you want to keep having access to those users, increasingly Facebook will make it so you have to pay for that access.  Google does the same thing with its search engine, yes it says it is constantly tweaking its search ranking algorithm to give you better and more relevant results, but part of that is because Google wants you to pay for exposure.  It wants you to buy ads versus organically having your content rank highly.

Setting up shop on sites like Facebook and Twitter comes at a price for brands.  Yes, you have potential access to millions of potential customers, but ultimately, the sites control how and even if you get that access.  Facebook in particular is constantly changing the rules for how brands can use the site and distribute content.  Now that Twitter is  publicly-traded company, don’t be surprised if they don’t look for similar ways to monetize the efforts of brands.

This is why its better to put your eggs in baskets that you own.  Whereas you are at the whims of Facebook and Twitter when it comes to your content and engagement strategies, you have far more control over channels you own, such as your website, blog or email list.  Channels that your brand does not own can be used to compliment your social media efforts, but it should never be at the heart of what you do.  You want the heart of your social media strategy to be centered on channels you own, not ones that Mark Zuckerberg does.

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Forget the Tools, Focus on the People

Who moved my ROI?  As Business Insider noted, this change could have a devastating impact for ‘social media marketers’ that are focused on helping brands get exposure for their content on Facebook.  Which is exactly the problem.  Too many brands and the agencies that service them are focused on gaming the system/tool versus trying to actually understand their customers.

What’s more important:

1 – Understanding how EdgeRank works to show your brand’s content higher in the News Feed of people that Liked your page

2 – Understanding why your audience is on Facebook

Understanding the people will always trump understanding the tools.  Your goal isn’t to understand how to game EdgeRank so that the picture you just posted will show up high on Sarah’s News Feed, your goal is to understand why Sarah is on Facebook.  What activities is she engaging in, and why?  What experience does she expect on Facebook, and why does she spend 3 hours a day on Facebook and has spent a grand total of 3 hours on Twitter this year?

Facebook is going to keep changing the rules.  You can either keep chasing the changes and wondering why you’re not seeing the social media riches your agency promised you, or you can stop chasing unicorns peeing rainbows and get to work creating something of value for your customers.

You cannot create that value for your customers until you understand them.  If you understand your customers and create value for them, then you win.  And nothing Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest does will change that.

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Your 2,000 Word Guide to Building a Better Blog

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First, start with where you are now.   

Before you can move forward with your blog, you need to assess where you are now.  Let’s start by looking at your blog’s stats.

First, are you tracking your blog’s stats?  Hopefully you are, if not, start by adding Google Analytics to your blog today.

Assuming you have access to your blog’s stats, look at your stats for this year.  Start broadly by looking at the entire year.  Look for trends.  How is traffic doing?  How is search traffic doing?  Pageviews?  You want to see if you can find movement up or down and then try to figure out what triggered that movement.

But the main point is, you want to baseline where your blog is now so you’ll know if you are improving on your efforts as the year progresses.

What were you blogging goals for the previous year?  Did you reach them?  Look at how successful you were at reaching your goals and then decide if you need to alter anything for the year ahead.

Creating a Blogging Strategy 

Let’s assume that you either need to create a strategy for your blog, or you need to totally revamp your existing efforts.  How do you get started?

First, you need to decide what you want to accomplish with your blog.  Here’s some examples:

Increase sales

Increase brand awareness

Establish thought leadership

And those are examples for a business blog, but the same principle applies for a personal blog.  Basically ask yourself “What needs to happen in order for my blog to be a success?”  Answering this question is imperative because it’s the foundation for your blogging strategy.  

Defining Your Audience

This is critical.  You have to understand who it is you are writing for and what actions you want that audience to take.  If you’re trying to use your blog to build brand awareness, then it’s probably not a good idea to post your political rants there!

Here’s an example.  My desired audience for this blog is marketers that are interested in either working with me to help them build programs to better connect with their most passionate customers, or who want to hire me to speak or lead a workshop at their event.  In order words, my desired audience is primarily marketers at mid-sized and larger companies.  A couple of months ago a friend of mine pointed out that my content focus had gotten off center.  She helped me realize that a lot of the content I was creating at the time was actually focused on helping small businesses and solopreneurs.  maybe even personal bloggers.  I went back and checked and she was right!  I was focusing so much on creating helpful content that I lost track of the fact that the content wasn’t as helpful to my desired audience.  So you need to not only define your audience, but keep who it is you’re writing for in mind at all times, so you can create content that’s useful to them.

What Actions Do You Want Your Audience to Take?

Let’s go back to your goals for your blog:

Increase sales

Increase brand awareness

Establish thought leadership

Once you’ve figured out what your blogging goal is and who your desired audience is, you need to decide what actions you want that audience to take.  And those actions should tie back to your goals for your blog.

I’ll use this blog again as an example.  I want to connect with companies that can either hire me as a speaker, or that can hire me to help them build smarter marketing programs to connect with their most passionate customers.  So keeping this in mind, note what you see at the top of the blog on the nav bar.  The options are to learn more about me, to buy my book, to learn about hiring me to speak, and to learn about my consulting.  Then look at the top of the sidebars on the right.  At the top of the first sidebar is a form to signup for my email newsletter.  At the top of the other sidebar is my brand advocacy posts.  All of this is set up to give you information on how we can work together, or give you valuable content that can help you improve your marketing, but that also helps establish my expertise.  So either way, I am trying to move the reader closer to hiring me to either speak for or work with them.

Keep in mind that your most important real estate on your blog is Above the Fold.  This refers to the area you see when you first arrive on a blog without scrolling down.  The content at the top of your blog is always seen, so make sure that you use this space wisely.  For example if you want to drive email newsletter signups, simply moving your signup form from the bottom of your blog to the top will greatly increase your signup rate.

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What’s Your Content Strategy?

Remember earlier when we talked about defining our audience?  A big reason why was so we could craft a content strategy to connect with that audience.  Essentially, you want to think about how you can create content for your audience that is valuable to them, but that also helps them move closer to engaging in the types of actions you want them to take.  Your content needs to ultimately help you reach your larger goals for your blog.

An important distinction to keep in mind is that they type of content that you feel is valuable for your brand might not be valuable to your audience.  For example, if your goal is to increase sales, then you want to create content that moves your audience closer to buying from you.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should create content that directly promotes your brand.  Often, content that teaches your audience a skill and that empowers them will make it easier for them to buy from you.  Sometimes pointing out what your competitors are doing can work because it can help your audience trust you.  Keep in mind that blogging is a great way to facilitate selling INdirectly.  Create valuable content for your audience, and that makes it easier for them to trust you, and easier for them to trust buying FROM you.

Developing a Posting Schedule

In many ways, your posting schedule will be a function of who you are writing for and what you are trying to accomplish (see how we are building the strategy as we add each layer?).  This post goes into creating a posting schedule a bit deeper, but we’ll talk about it here as well.  Think about who your audience is and when they are most receptive to your content.  In general (and please pay attention to the end of the post), posts seem to do better in the middle of the week.  For myself and most bloggers I have talked to since 2005 (whether personal or writing for a company blog), Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are the best days for traffic.  After that Monday, Friday, then the weekends.  So if you can only write one post a week, start running it on Tuesday or Thursday and see how it does.

Also keep in mind that certain goals will be dependent on creating more content.  For example, none of your goals for blogging will be easily reached if you can only write 1 post a month.  You need to create as much valuable content as possible.  Now ‘valuable’ is a very subjective term, but in general a good goal to shoot for is writing a minimum of one new post a week on your blog.  If you go below that it really becomes difficult to build readership.  A lot of people don’t like to talk about this, but there are several advantages to creating more content.  First, it trains you to become a better writer, quicker.  Second, search engines love sites that update their content frequently.  So new content helps your search rankings, and search traffic.  Third, new content helps build readership quicker.

So as a minimum baseline for your posting schedule, shoot for at least one post a week, ideally either on Tuesday or Thursday.  Another point to focus on is consistency of posting.  If you can only write 1 new post a week, then publish it the same day every week so your readers know when to expect it.  Not everyone will subscribe to your blog.

Tracking Your Blog’s Progress  

Did you take care of your blog stats as we discussed at the start of this post?  Good, because you’re going to need to have access to this information throughout the year.  Now comes the fun part, where we start tracking if this stuff is actually working.

First, read this post I wrote on blog analytics.  It will help you understand what you are looking for.  Go back and look at your goals for your goal.  What we want to do now is track metrics that relate to those goals.  Here’s some examples:

Stats1 These are metrics you can track to tell you that your content is helping you reach your goal of building brand awareness.  These metrics are all signals that your content is resonating with other people, and as such, that content is building a tool to help you or your brand build its reputation and awareness.

So when you start tracking metrics, pick metrics that tie back to your goal.  Don’t simply settle on the metrics that are the easiest to track, you want to make sure that you are focused only on tracking what makes sense for your blogging strategy.

Additionally, you will want to drill down and analyze your content to see which posts/topics are generating attention with your readers.  It’s a good idea every month or at least every quarter to look at your most popular posts for the last 30/60/90 days.  What you’re trying to figure out is which posts were more popular with readers and why were they more popular?  For example, if you look at your blogs stats for the last 90 days, you might find that 3 of your 5 most popular posts were posts that included industry news and links to stories within your industry.  That’s a key insight, and it could prompt you to start writing a post recapping industry news every Friday on your blog.  That one change could result in a 15-25% increase in blog traffic over the rest of the year.

Also, look at the keywords that people are using to find your content.  This will also help you learn how to change your content to make it more accessible to search engines.  When you look at your keywords, you will probably find that a lot of the phrases used are something like this: ‘How do I….’ or ‘What’s the best way to….’  So if you start writing your post headlines as a question, that can really help your search results because your post’s headline will closely resemble the actual search phrases that people are using.  One of my most popular posts here is How To Write Your First Blog Post.  A big reason that post is so popular is because the headline closely resembles common search terms such as ‘how do I write my first blog post?’ or ‘how to write my first blog post’.  So factor in how people will search for content when you write your posts and especially your post headline.

Finally, Remember This is All a Guide, Not An Absolute

I want to close with a word of caution: None of this is absolute and it shouldn’t be taken as such.  The purpose of this post is to get you started.  But as you start fleshing out your blog in the coming year, you may find that some of the advice I’ve shared with you here doesn’t seem to be working on your blog.  That could be because you are doing something wrong, or it could be because your blog is different.  For example, it may be that your particular audience wants new content on Saturdays and Sundays, instead of during the middle of the week.  If you truly want to build an awesome blog then you need to experiment and be willing to try new things.  You need to tinker, and see what works and what does not.  I have been blogging now for over 9 years, and I am constantly trying new things.  The reason why I do this is because I want to get better.  Like you, I will read what others tell me I should be doing.  I look for best practices, but I also understand that just because something works for every other blogger doesn’t guarantee that it will work for me.

This post will get you started on your journey to have an amazing blog.  But if you hit a pothole along the way, don’t be afraid to step back, and try something different.  It might not work, but even if it doesn’t, you will still learn something in the process.   As long as you are constantly learning, you are constantly improving.

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You Don’t Look Smarter By Making Other People Feel Stupid

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One of the things I love about Marcus Sheridan is that he’s always sensitive to the point of view of someone that’s new to whatever topic he’s discussing, whether it’s social media, content marketing, etc.  I loved this post of his, especially this part:

So let’s be willing to embrace imperfection, shall we? Let’s allow the artist to learn as he or she goes. Let’s applaud what appears to be “mediocrity” when in reality the piece of art that was created may just have been the start of something very, very special for the creator.

This also dovetails with something Kathy Sierra talked to me about when I was writing Think Like a Rock Star, (paraphrasing) “A lot of the things that the writer adds to make themselves look like an expert, actually makes the reader feel dumb”.

We all start at zero.  The majority of people that are today considered ‘thought leaders’ when it comes to social media weren’t even using these tools 6-7 years ago.  The ‘A-List’ was completely different in 2005 when I started blogging than it is today.

Yet the best of these teachers are the ones that gained knowledge and expertise, without losing the ability to share those ideas in terms that could be easily understood.  If you are writing for others and using social media as a channel to build thought leadership you have to remember where your audience is along their path to understanding.  You cannot talk over them, you have to lead them at a pace that is comfortable to them.

Make your ideas more accessible and empower your audience to learn at a pace that’s comfortable to them.  Remember that if your words make the reader feel dumb then the reader might decide that you’re not an ‘expert’ after all.

Pic via Flickr

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Your Brand’s Guide to Creating Content That Earns Attention in 2014

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Unfortunately, we are all awash in content.  We have too much to see, to read, to process.  The shiniest pieces get seen, which isn’t always a good thing.

So how do you create content that earns attention?  For a brand, your job is doubly hard, because you are trying to connect with people (customers) that are purposely trying to avoid your content.  Most of us have an internal switch that flips in whenever we encounter any content from a brand.  Our brain immediately flips a switch and we view that content as ‘advertising’, and very few of us want to see more brand advertising.  We trust content from other customers, but not from brands.

If your brand wants to create content that attracts customers, you need to focus on the following:

1 – Understand that most customers don’t trust content from brands.  They are naturally suspicious of content from brands because they assume that the brand’s only desire is to sell them something.  You need to understand your customer’s point of view before you can create content that they’ll pay attention to.

2 – Understand that you build trust by creating useful content for customers.  That’s it.  If you create content that customers find value in, then they will pay attention to your content because they will trust that it’s valuable.

3 – You have to consistently create valuable content.  If you consistently create content that creates value for your customers, then they will trust your content.  No longer will they go through an internal vetting process to decide if your content is worth paying attention to.

4 – Your desire to sell will have to take a backseat.  This is the most important lesson to creating valuable content for customers, and the most difficult for most brands to grasp.  The great thing about social media is that it makes things happen indirectly.  What this means is that you have to stop thinking of social media and online content as a way to directly drive sales.  Instead, view these tools as a way to directly create value for customers, with the understanding that doing so will indirectly lead to sales.

5 – Customers buy from brands they trust.  Remember earlier when we talked about how customers don’t trust content from brands because they assume brands just want to sell to them?  This is why it’s important to shift your thinking on the content you create.  Because when you create valuable content for customers, then customers begin to trust that content.  Which means that by extension, they will begin to trust your brand.

And customers buy from brands they trust.

Want to use social media to sell more stuff in 2014?  Don’t focus on monetizing your customers, focus on creating valuable content for those customers, with the understanding that doing so, will lead to sales.

Pic via Flickr

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Your Brand’s Guide to Creating an Amazing Twitter Chat

PanteneChatOver the past 4 years I’ve run a pretty popular Twitter chat, I’ve also worked with sponsors and brands to help them facilitate their own.  Twitter chats can be an amazing way for your brand to connect with customers, if you know what you are getting into.  Here’s how to get started:

1 – Pick a theme for your chat that’s related to your brand but not about your brand.  This is a subtle distinction, but it will make all the difference in the success of your twitter chat.  If you theme of your chat is related to the brand then it will be focused on the customer and their wants and needs.  That’s how you’ll win their attention.  Here’s a few examples:

Nikon – How to take amazing photographs

Southwest Airlines – Managing holiday traveling

Purina – Raising a happy and healthy dog

See how the focus has shifted to the customer?  That’s what you want, ask yourself ‘What need is this chat addressing for the customer, or what problem is it solving for them?’  It will help create a popular and exciting chat which ends up being great promotion for your brand.

2 – Pick the day and time.  Think about who you want to be in the chat and who you are connecting with.  Factor in when they can be available to join a chat, and plan accordingly.  Also, consider what other entertainment options might be available to them that could distract their attention.  For example, if you decide to hold a chat next Thursday night at 8pm, remember that’s primetime for television watching so see if there is a major series or event that will be on opposite your chat that might steal some participants.

3 – Pick your schedule.  Will your chat be regular, or a one-time deal?  Fair warning, unless your brand is pretty big, getting traction from just one chat will be difficult.  If one of the main reasons why you are starting the twitter chat it to raise awareness of your brand, then having a weekly chat is your best bet.  Yes, it will be a lot of work and yes it will likely take a while to gain traction, but most things worth pursuing are a lot of work.

4 – Find Influencers, Experts and Customers that can help you get the word out about your chat.  This really helped me take #Blogchat to the next level.  After about 6 months or so of doing #Blogchat, we’d run through most of the ‘basic’ blogging topics, and needed some fresh topics.  So I started asking blogging experts to come in and co-host on a certain topic that they were the expert on.  They also brought their audience with them, so the reach of #Blogchat expanded greatly, plus it was good exposure for the co-host.  You can do the same thing with your brand’s twitter chat.  Look for customers that are already engaging with your brand (fans are even better) and ask them if they would be willing to join your twitter chat and participate.  Also, if you have the budget, you can bring in experts that will not only help drive the conversation, they will also bring their audience with them.  But it needs to make sense for the chat, for example if you are launching a twitter chat on gardening, Gary Vee might not be your best bet for a co-host.  Sure, he’s a smart guy with a massive following, but you’d rather have someone whose following is interested in gardening, and a person that’s recognized as an expert in that space.

5 – Decide on how the chat will be organized and moderated.  Most chats have a main topic, then ask a series of questions based on that topic.  For example, many chats ask a new question every 10 mins or so.  This is the most common form of organizing a chat.  If you are going to do a weekly chat, ask your participants which method they want.  For #Blogchat, I typically have the main topic then no more than 2 questions.  But #Blogchat is such a large chat that I can do that, for a smaller one it would probably be better to have more questions to better organize the conversation and help facilitate it.

6 – Pick as short of a hashtag as possible for your chat.  Remember that you are working within the restrictions of Twitter’s 140-character limit for tweets.  So every character you use for a hashtag is one that you take away from the tweet you can write.  You want your hashtag to be as short as possible and as memorable as possible.

Let’s take the above example from Purina starting a chat about raising a happy and healthy dog.  Which hashtag makes more sense:

#PurinaLovesHappyAndHealthyDogs

#HappyDogsChat

Yes, I know the good folks at Purina would love to have the Purina name in the chat’s hashtag, but I’m betting participants would much rather have #HappyDogsChat.  Also remember the longer and more complicated you make your hashtag, the greater the chance that people will use the wrong hashtag or misspell it.

7 – Create prep materials for the chat.  (Almost) every week for #blogchat I will write a ‘prep post’ that outlines what we will be talking about during that Sunday night’s #blogchat.  Here’s the one from last Sunday.  That way, participants know what to expect and the chat will flow better.  Plus, an added benefit to me is that it sends traffic back to my blog.  You could also post this on your Facebook page or on Google Plus, but it’s best if you post it on a property you own (blog, website) cause then that traffic comes back to you.

8 – Think about what action you want to drive from participants.  Remember this, if you have created a valuable chat for your customers, then you have earned the right to ask them for something.  Maybe you want them to go to your website and download a white paper, or signup for a free trial of your new service.  Many brands will do giveaways in association with their chat, this is a great way to drive interest and reward participants as well.  But you need to think about how you can move twitter chat participants OFF Twitter and onto a property you own.

9 – Invite and welcome newbies.  As your chat begins you will likely see some people tweeting ‘Hey just found this chat, what is it?’ or similar.  Always always ALWAYS welcome newbies and THANK them for joining.  If they tweet asking what the deal is and are immediately welcomed and thanked for coming, that greatly increases the chances that they will stay and participate.

10 – Ask for feedback, and act on it.  This is especially important if you want to run an ongoing twitter chat.  Ask participants what you can do better.  Ask them what topics they want to see covered.  Yes it can be scary to ask for feedback and hear them tell you what you are doing wrong.  But when you ask for feedback you are doing something very powerful: You are making the participants the owners of the chat.  When Jessica tells you what she wants to see you discuss and then you pick her topic, then that chat is HER chat!  That makes her more invested in the chat, so she’s more likely to participate and promote it to others.  It also sends a signal to all the other participants that you value and appreciate their feedback.

11 – Say ‘Thank You’ and mean it when you say it.  It’s damn hard work to get a twitter chat off the ground.  Even if you only have 3 people show up for your first chat, make sure they understand how much you appreciate them, because that will encourage them to come back. And next time they’ll likely tell their friends to come with them.

 

If you’ve participated in brand-run twitter chats, what would you add to this list?

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This is Exactly Why Brands Hate Social Media

PaceTweetSo over the Thanksgiving weekend there were two big ‘stories’ being covered by all the ‘entertainment’ blogs and bouncing around Twitter.  The first was where a guy got on a plane and claimed to have gotten in a ‘feud’ with another passenger.  He detailed how she was mean and inconsiderate, then proceeded to bully her with a series of notes that he took pictures of and said he sent her.  Then later it was ‘revealed’ that the woman actually had cancer, and that the guy had made her miss her connecting flight, and Thanksgiving dinner, which might very well be her last.

Then later it was also ‘revealed’ that the guy made the whole story up.  Still with me?

A day or two later, a supposed comedian got into a Twitter ‘war’ with what we were led to believe was Pace Picante’s Twitter account.  This led to a series of embarrassing DMs from the brand, a few employees getting ‘fired’, then the brand shutting down its Twitter account.

Then the revelation that no, wait, it wasn’t Pace Picante at all, it was another unknown comedian that was ‘pranking’ the first one.

We all must have been bored as shit last weekend.

Unfortunately, the popularity of Twitter has led to some people simply creating drama to draw attention to themselves (and by extension, get them bunches of followers).  Double-unfortunately, these antics are always prime to get coverage on hundreds of blogs that are desperate to hit their 10-a-day quota for new posts.

Now we’re upping the game with complete hoaxes.  Or hoaxes within hoaxes, as we saw when one guy’s hoax about an inconsiderate passenger took an unexpected turn when she ‘got’ cancer.  Which led to the guy mocking the people that followed him on Twitter for basically believing she had cancer without checking.

Elan tweetThese stunts are exactly why brands are scared to death of using social media.  Thanks to a couple of guys trying to make a name for themselves, there are now literally thousands of blog posts and articles out there claiming that Pace Picante is totally clueless when it comes to Twitter.  When the reality (apparently) is that they had nothing to do with this.  Will all these bloggers that wrote a quick 200-word post on how ‘clueless’ Pace was, update their posts and clarify that it was all a hoax?  A few will, but most won’t.

But the damage is pretty much done for Pace-Picante.  We always talk about how brands need to be ‘more human’.  Sometimes we ‘humans’ do too.