MackCollier.com

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Millennials: They’re not Lazy, Entitled Punks

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By the year 2025, 3 out of 4 workers the world over will be Millennials. These oft-maligned young professionals will soon comprise the majority of our global workforce, so businesses should expend the effort to manage them in a way that maximizes their positive attributes and lets them excel.

Learning to manage Millennials will also boost the bottom line: it costs companies between $15,000 and $25,000 to replace each Millennial employee who leaves.

In the course of teaching a graduate and undergraduate classes in new media marketing, I’ve had the opportunity to observe how Millennials engage in an educational environment. Many students keep in touch after graduation, as well, and their professional experiences provide me with insight into how this generation works: their fabled strengths as well as their frailties.

Here are a few observations for companies who want to tap into Millennials’ brilliance and passion, while managing the traits that can sometimes make these workers less effective in a corporate environment.

1 – Provide recognition early and often.  80% of Millennials prefer immediate recognition over traditional performance reviews. And by “immediate,” they mean instantaneous, like your anticipated reply to their text message.

My students submit work at 11:59 p.m. on Sunday night, and by Monday morning, I routinely have several emails inquiring about grades.

Recognition also fosters competition, and Millennials love competition. Term after term, I see better quality work overall from groups that include a few standout stars: they raise the bar for everyone else, so long as I encourage them to continue putting forth the extra effort.

2 – Let them use social media on the job.  71% will anyway, and 56% of Millennials won’t accept a job at a company that bans social media. This carries over into education, as well. 19% of Millennials have said that they’ll be using social media to engage in the classroom.

My classroom is currently virtual, but having taught in a traditional classroom environment, I can attest to the fact that displaying a Twitter feed in class enables some students to participate in the discussion who would feel intimidated to raise their hand “IRL.” So long as access to social media isn’t undermining job performance, don’ t block Facebook and Twitter. (More to come on embracing a results-oriented business model!)

If you want to keep tabs on your Millennial workers, get on Facebook, which has the greatest penetration among that demographic. Nearly 2/3 of Millennials use Facebook.

3 – Facilitate giving back financially or through volunteerism.  Millennials are philanthropic. 81% have given money, goods, or services, and they place a higher priority on helping people in need (21%) than having a high-paying job (15%). Help them to help others: offer matching donations for their charities, or organize a volunteer project for your office.

4 – Get flexible, and fast.  In order to keep your Millennial talent, you’ll need to offer flexible schedules and location-independent work. 45% of Millennials will choose workplace flexibility over pay. Change your mindset from a 9 to 5 model to a productivity model. So long as your employees achieve the results you want by the time you need them, it shouldn’t matter how or when they do it.

Some of my students evenly divide their work into manageable segments, completing one per day leading up to the project due date. Other procrastinate and work all weekend. So long as the product demonstrates an understanding of our subject’s finer points, the approach they choose doesn’t matter to me.

5 – Give them a smartphone for work.  According to a recent survey, 74% of Millennial workers used a smartphone for work in the last 12 months. For coursework, students use their phones to email me, conduct research, and post to discussion boards.

If you’re planning to issue Millennial employees a desktop computer and a landline phone, you can expect them to jury rig a workaround that involves Skype or Google Voice. Make life easier for everyone involved: issue smartphones to new hires.

 

Whatever your opinion of Millennial workers might be, they’re a valuable asset to your company. Keep them engaged. Keep them, period! Recruiting a non-Millennial replacement is expensive, and will become increasingly difficult as older workers retire.

Note from Mack: This is a Guest Post from Kerry Gorgone, who is an instructor at Full Sail University, a lawyer, and also does an ahhhmazing podcast for MarketingProfs.  Check out her previous guest posts here on protecting yourself and your works online and on social media etiquette for brands.

Pic via Flickr.

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Seven Business Books to Make You a Better and Smarter Marketer in 2014

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I’m often asked about what some of my favorite business/marketing/social media books are.  Here’s seven of my favorites that will make your job as a marketer much easier in 2014:

Content Rules – The ultimate guide to content creation.  Walks you through how to create compelling content and the different ways in which you can do so.  If any part of your job includes creating online content then this is the book you must own to show you how to do so correctly.

Who should buy it: Anyone that is tasked with any form of content creation, be it blog posts, podcasts, video, anything.

The Passion Conversation – I love marketing books that focus on science and research.  For example, early on in The Passion Conversation, the authors tackle the three forms of motivation that spark Word of Mouth: Functional, Social and Emotional.  I won’t give it away but I did do a Q&A with John Moore a few weeks ago here that has more information on the book.

Who should buy it:  Anyone that’s responsible for connecting either directly or indirectly with customers, and who wants to increase customer loyalty and improve brand perception.

YouTility – YouTility is one of the breakout hit in the business/marketing/social media space in 2013, and it’s a great read.  Jay walks you through how to change your marketing approach and to actually bake usefulness into your marketing messages.  Because if your marketing is useful to customers, they will spread it.  Jay said you should try to create marketing that’s so useful that people would pay for it.

Who should buy it:  Anyone that has ‘content marketing’ listed as part of their job description.

Resonate – Slide:ology is probably Nancy Duarte’s best-known work, but I’m actually a bigger fan of Resonate.  Resonate walks you through how to incorporate effective and compelling storytelling into your presentations.  She takes some of the most famous speeches in history by some of the world’s greatest orators (Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King, Jr, Steve Jobs, etc) and dissects their presentations literally line by line and unravels why what they said was so compelling and why it held our attention.  I’ve incorporated so much of Nancy’s teachings into my own presentations, and it’s greatly improved them.

Who should buy it: Anyone that’s responsible for creating presentations and materials (both internally and externally for clients or the public) that wants to sell others on adopting a particular idea.

Think Like Zuck – I will be honest, I did not expect to like this book.  I’m not a huge fan of Mark Zuckerberg or Facebook, but I am a huge fan of Ekaterina Walter, so I decided to give it a shot.  I’m glad I did because Ekaterina created a wonderful book that helps you not only understand Mark Zuckerberg, but also a lot of the driving forces behind most successful entrepreneurs.  Packed with case studies and littered with scientific research and takeaways, it’s an interesting read, even if you’re not a huge fan of Facebook.

Who should buy it: Anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit or who loves reading ‘how they got there’ accounts.

The Invisible Sale – Again with the scientific foundation!  I love Tom’s focus on the science of Propinquity, which says that the more you come in contact with someone and have favorable interactions, the more likely you are to enjoy their company.  The same applies to online interactions, if you can frequently interact with potential customers/clients and give them valuable content, the more likely they are to buy from you, or at least the more likely you are to move them closer to a sale.  Tom teaches you how to help potential clients and customers self-educated themselves, so that they literally reach out to you and when they do, they are ready to buy.

Who should buy it: Anyone that’s responsible for driving sales online, especially creating online content that helps generate sales.

Think Like a Rock Star – Think only rock stars have raving fans that literally love them?  You’re wrong, many brands have extremely passionate fans, fans that love them and that are driving real business growth for their favorite brands.  TLARS shows you exactly how to find, understand, embrace and empower your biggest fans.  With dozens of case studies, it walks you through exactly what rock stars like Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry and even Johnny Cash do to create fans.  The book also shows you how brands of all sizes and industries have built loyal followings of passionate customers that literally consider it their job to promote their favorite brands.  If you want to stop ‘acquiring’ customers and become a fan-centric brand where passionate customers happily bring customers to you, then Think Like a Rock Star is the book for you.

Who should buy it: Anyone in a marketing role that’s tasked with increasing customer loyalty, improving marketing efforts or generating sales.

 

BTW for each book above if you click on the title it will take you to Amazon where you can read the reviews and order.  You can’t go wrong with any of them.  Also, if you live in the US and want to buy a signed copy of Think Like a Rock Star for $25 shipped, click here.

Which books were your favorites this year?  Any that need to go on this list?

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Blog Layout, Navigation Tips and Best Practices, Tonight’s #Blogchat Topic!

Here’s the transcript to tonight’s #Blogchat.  Click Transcript on the right.

Tonight (12-1-2013) at 8pm Central, we’ll discuss how to organize and layout your blog at #Blogchat!  This is a very important topic because your blog’s layout and how you present your content has a very important impact on its success.

To frame tonight’s conversation, I wanted to cover a couple of key points.  First, make a list of the top three things you want visitors to do on your blog.  If I come to your blog right now for the first time, what are the three most important things I could do?

Write a comment?

Signup for your newsletter?

Download a white paper?

Think about what you want me to do.  For example, the three things I’d like visitors to do when they visit my site is:

1 – Contact me about hiring me as a consultant or speaker

2 – Signup for my Think Like a Rock Star newsletter

3 – Read my posts on brand advocacy

Those are the three most important things that a visitor could do for me when they visit here.  So I plan my navigation and content here accordingly.  This leads to the second key point:

All content Above the Fold is prime real estate

‘Above the Fold’ means all the content that people see when your blog/site loads.  This is the stuff they can see WITHOUT having to scroll down.  So you want your most important stuff to be at the top of your site, and in general, to the middle and right.  Consider again the 3 most important actions a reader could take here, and where that content is:

1 – Contact me about hiring me as a consultant or speaker (All my consulting/speaking info is on the top nav bar)

2 – Signup for my Think Like a Rock Star newsletter (signup form is at the top of the left sidebar)

3 – Read my posts on brand advocacy (posts are at the top of the right sidebar)

 

All the content associated with those 3 actions is Above the Fold, at the top of my blog.  So if you want me to signup for your blog newsletter, guess what, that needs to be at the very top where I can easily find it.

So tonight we’ll be chatting more about blog layout, navigation and architecture.  Thanks to Jessica Northey for the topic suggestion!

Does your brand or company want to sponsor #Blogchat in January 2014?  Here’s price and all the details.  See y’all tonight at 8pm Central!

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How to Use TweetDeck As a Brand Monitoring Platform For Twitter

It’s deceptively easy to monitor your brand and industry mentions online.  Sure, you can do some amazingly sophisticated and valuable breakdowns with expensive monitoring suites, but for the average brand a lot of their basic monitoring needs can be covered by free tools.  In this post I wanted to walk you through how you can do some very simple brand monitoring on Twitter with TweetDeck for Chrome.

Before we talk about using these tools, let’s backup and talk some basic monitoring for your brand on Twitter.  First, what exactly should you be monitoring?

Start with brand mentions.  Make sure you are aware of what’s being said about your brand and also who is saying it.  You want to know what’s the conversation around your brand and who is driving it.

From there, you should also monitor industry mentions.  You want to be able to keep up with what’s happening in your industry and also what your competitors are up to.  You can literally extend this and monitor brand mentions for your competitors.  It can give you a quick and easy way to see how your competitors respond to customers on Twitter or even if they respond.

Now based on your resources, at this point you can also break it down further and monitor mentions of specific product lines or key executives within your company.  Or another example would be if your company has a major product reveal at an upcoming industry event, you could monitor the hashtag for that event and then track reaction to the reveal in real-time!

Now I want to show you how I do this with TweetDeck for Chrome:

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There’s four columns showing”

1 – Interactions: This shows me replies as well as when someone retweets me or favorites one of my tweets.  It also shows me when someone follows me or adds me to a list.

2 – Mentions: This shows me replies as well as retweets.  A bit of redundancy here, so if you want to create several columns you could probably go with just Interactions.  Pro Tip: You could also make a search term for your user name (ie mine would be ‘mackcollier’) and that would show you your replies as well as tweets you have left.

3 – #Blogchat tweets: This column is for a search I am doing for the #Blogchat hashtag.  I typically use TweetDeck for Chrome to participate in #Blogchat.  You can use this for search term you want.

4 – Super6: This is a private List I have created of a few marketing/social media pros that I follow because I know they create and share awesome content.  These tweets help me stay up to date on what’s happening in my space, and it also helps me find valuable content to share with others.  Twitter Lists are a very powerful tool for your social media marketing toolbelt and I’ll talk more about them here tomorrow.

But what’s great about TweetDeck is that it also gives you a very simple way to not only monitor for your brand, but to distribute information found and share it with your team.

TweetDeckUpCloseHere’s an example.  Look at the tweet from David Brown.  When I click on the … under the tweet to the right, all these other options open up.  I can Tweet to him, Unfollow, etc.  But note the final two options: Link to this Tweet and Email this Tweet.  This is very powerful because these two options give you a very easy way to share tweets with co-workers.  For example, let’s say you work for a brand and in monitoring brand mentions, you come across a customer that leaves a reply to your Twitter account asking a technical question about one of your products that you can’t answer.  With the Email this Tweet option, you can send an email off to a SME (Subject Matter Expert) within your brand that can give you the information you need to answer this customer’s issue!

Now I want to stress that obviously TweetDeck has some severe limitations in functionality and features that it can offer you.  And a lot of this can also be accomplished by using similar tools such as HootSuite.  The point I wanted to make with this post was to show you that social media monitoring doesn’t have to be complicated.  And even if your brand isn’t getting thousands of mentions a day and can’t afford (or need) a robust social media monitoring suite like Radian6 or Sysomos doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be monitoring.  I’d much rather you dip your toes in the waters and try some of this stuff for yourself vs just think ‘oh social media monitoring is something only big companies need to worry about’.  If anyone is online taking about your brand and/or your industry, then you need to know what they are saying, period.

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How Rock Stars Will Save Your Marketing and Your Business

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Most companies have completely missed the enormous business potential of the marriage of social media and mobile devices.  As smartphone ownership continues to approach ubiquitous levels, marketers are salivating at the opportunity to market to customers at home or on the go.

This is where most marketers tripped over the starting line.  “How can WE use social media to push OUR marketing messages to customers?”

Simply asking this question shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how its customers are using social media, and of its customers as a group.  No one joins Facebook to be marketed to.  We aren’t using social media tools so brands will have another way to pimp their shit to us.

We are using social media tools because we long for human connection.  We want a way to share our voice and make an impact on the world and on others.  We want to interact with friends and to make new ones.  We want to have personal communications with people, not business relationships with brands.

Now if you’re a self-centered marketer, you’ll read that and think that social media can’t help you because you are only interested in leveraging personal communication tools in order to drive direct sales.

But if you’re the smart marketer, you can read between the lines and see that the intersection of social media and mobile marketing could be the most fundamental change in how you market successfully since the invention of  the television.

Think about this for a minute: If we accept that most people use social media tools for personal communications, then we also can assume that most of the same conversations that these people would have offline, they can now have online via social media, and with social media sites and tools on mobile devices.

In other words, Word of Mouth just moved online.  What form of communications is universally accepted as the most trustworthy when it comes to convincing customers to buy from a brand?  A recommendation from another customer.  Thanks to social media sites and tools, those recommendations that were formerly trapped in an offline world where they might only impact 1 person at a time, can now be shared ONline, where its impact could literally reach millions.

This is where the Rock Stars come in.

Rock stars have always understood the business power of Word of Mouth.  As a result, almost all of a rock stars’s marketing efforts are geared toward connecting with its fans.  Because those fans are driving sales via word of mouth.  Rock stars don’t try to ‘acquire’ new customers because rock stars understand that by connecting with its existing fans today, that it will acquire new customers tomorrow.

So now that social media has brought the power of Word of Mouth into an online world, its created an enormous marketing opportunity for your brand if it is willing to embrace and empower its biggest fans to market for you.

In Think Like a Rock Star, I close the book with this passage:

“Because your fans are the real rock stars.  Your job is to build them a stage, give them a microphone, and listen to the beautiful music that they create.”

Your fans are the rock stars that will save your marketing, and your business.

Pic via Flickr

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Your Job as a Content Marketer is to Create Superheroes

KathyQuote2Content marketing has been all the rage for a couple of years now.  Most companies are allured by the idea of using content marketing as a way of generating inbound leads.  The problem is that too many companies take the term literally and think of it as content that markets, that promotes your brand and drives business.

That’s the indirect result of effective content marketing.  Your job as a content marketer is to create superheroes.

“What the hell does that mean?”

It means that you ask yourself “What superpower would I give my readers?”  What new skill would you teach them, how would you make them more amazing?

THAT is the goal of your content.  Your content should make the people you are trying to connect with better.  Better at some core competence that is important to them.  For example, if you sell cameras, your job isn’t to create content that sells more cameras, your job is to create content that teaches your customers how to take better pictures.  If you can connect with a grandmother that has never used a digital camera and with one blog post teach her how to use a digital camera to take great pictures of her granddaughter’s wedding then you have indeed given her a superpower.

And you’ve created a new fan that will tell everyone about your site and your cameras.  Because fans generate sales.

So when you are crafting your content marketing strategy, do this:

1 – Figure out who you are trying to connect with, who your audience is. (For me I am trying to connect with companies that want to learn how to better use and understand social media marketing)

2 – Figure out what skills this group  needs, or what information has value to them.  (This group needs to understand not only how to use social media tools effectively, but how to use these tools to drive business growth)

3 – Decide on the focus of your blog/social media content , ie the ‘superpower’ you will give your readers (I am focused on teaching companies how to better use social media marketing to connect with customers and to create fans)

So when you are crafting our your content strategy, think about what’s important to your audience, whether it’s new skills, the latest information, or whatever.  Once you’ve decided what that audience needs, create content that helps give them these new superpowers that will make them more successful and more awesome.

Besides, creating superheroes is a pretty sweet gig to have!

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Time’s Running Out to Land the #Blogchat Sponsorship in December

#BlogchatTweetIanHey y’all! I wanted to bring the #Blogchat sponsorship to your attention for a couple of reasons:

1 – December has 5 Sundays, so that means 5 #Blogchats.  So you are effectively getting 25% more #Blogchat for your money!

2 – Rates will increase by 33% starting in January.  Due to constant demand for sponsorships, the monthly rate starting in 2014 will increase from $1,500.00 a month to $2.000.00 a month.  So I wanted to make sure you have a chance to get the $1,500.00 rate before it disappears.

You can get full details here on what’s included in the sponsorship.

One area I wanted to cover here is that when you sign on as a sponsor of #Blogchat, I’ll work with you to make sure you get as much bang for your buck as possible.  We’ll work together to determine what you need to happen as a result of the sponsorship in order for it to be a success for your brand.  I don’t want this to just be a box you check off, I want you to see positive gains to your business from this partnership.

Also, please keep in mind that all potential sponsors are vetted.  I want to make sure that the sponsorship makes sense to you, and makes sense to #Blogchat.  In fact I have turned down three requests to sponsor #Blogchat just in the last week because I didn’t feel that the company would be a good fit for #Blogchat, or vice versa.

One of the first questions most potential sponsors have is ‘Will we have a say in the topics chosen for #Blogchat?’  The answer is ‘yes’, to a degree.  Obviously, I want to make sure that we cover topics that are relevant to you as the sponsor.  At the same time, I want to make sure the topics are relevant to the #Blogchat community as well.  Don’t worry, I am pretty creative in setting topics that create value for everyone, and here’s some examples of topics that were set for previous #Blogchat sponsors.

By the numbers, #Blogchat is one of the biggest if not the biggest Twitter chat around.  Each week 20-30 Million impressions of the #Blogchat hashtag are generated, and usually 2,000-3,000 tweets during the week.  Typically 1,200-1,500 tweets are generated during the hour of #Blogchat, Sunday at 8pm Central.  That’s an average of a new tweet every 2-3 seconds!

Additionally, I did a survey of #Blogchat participants early last year, and you can see the results here.  In general, about 1,000 people follow the #blogchat hashtag each week, half of those people blog for a company, typically a small B2B company.  And the majority of the participants are female.

If you’d like to sponsor #Blogchat in December, the rate is $1,500.00.  The sponsorship will be sold on a first-come, first-served basis, and if you are interested please email me and we’ll go from there!  Also if you know a company that would be a good fit to sponsor #Blogchat or one you would like to see sponsor #Blogchat, please share this post with them.  Thank you!

 

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Which Needle Are You Moving? How to Tell If Your Business Blog Is Working

BlogMouseOver the past few weeks I have, as you’ve probably noticed, seriously ramped up my blogging.  I’ve gone from writing 1-2 posts here a week to 5-6.  The reason why is because I want to see if I can turn my blog into a serious driver of work leads and referrals.  I started blogging more on October 20th, and I wanted to walk you through some of the metrics I am tracking to tell if my efforts are working.

First, a caveat:  We are talking very small numbers and very inconclusive data at this point.  After another 2 months or so, I should have some decent numbers and trends I can look at and tell if my efforts are paying off.  The goal here isn’t to pass judgement on my efforts after less than a month.  What I want to do is walk you through my thought process in measuring and tracking my efforts so you can apply this same formula to your own business blog to help decide if your efforts are working.

Traffic.  When it comes to blogging, traffic is likely the first metric that you’ll look at.  But traffic is often a ‘feel good’ metric that doesn’t always translate into actual business value.  For example, typical daily traffic here from Monday-Friday prior to October 20th was 700-800 visitors a day.  Now it’s 1,100-1,200 visitors a day.  That’s about a 50% increase in less than a month and sounds nice.  But my main goal from blogging more isn’t to get more traffic, it’s to get more qualified leads.

Now there are some ancillary benefits to increasing traffic.  For example, increasing traffic drives up readership and that makes sponsorships here or as part of a #Blogchat sponsorship more appealing to potential sponsors.

So What Metrics Should You Track to Tell If Your Business Blog is Working? 

First, you need to consider what action you want visitors to your blog to take.  For example, if you ultimately want to sell a particular product on your blog, then the metrics to track could be:

1 – Actual sales from blog visitors

2 – Visits to the product page on the blog

3 – Signups for a free trial of the product

Again, traffic to the blog doesn’t really matter unless that traffic is engaging in the actions that you want.

For me, I want visitors to engage in one of three different actions (ranked in terms of priority):

1 – Contact me about working with me.

2 – Visit pages related to working with me, such as my Work With Me page, or Speaking page, or Bio

3 – Share my content online

The idea is that if they aren’t contacting me directly about possibly working with me, I want them to either check out my info here, or at least share my content with other people so that they might be interested in working with me.

But it’s important to note that the type of engagement that’s likely to be the easiest to get (sharing my content) is the least valuable of the three.  This is common with blogging.  For example I can tell anyone how to get more traffic to their blog; Write more posts.  But just because you can easily get more traffic doesn’t mean that traffic by itself has any real value for you.  Sure, it can make your ego feel good to see that needle moving, but is that meaningful?

So when you are tracking your blog’s efforts, follow this process:

1 – Figure out what you want visitors to do on your blog.  What’s the one most important thing that a visitor could do on your blog?  Order a product?  Sign up for your newsletter?  Share your content?

2 – Track metrics that lead back to that most important goal.  If possible, you want a straight line from the metric you are measuring to the goal.  Prioritize your metrics so that you are tracking the one that most directly leads to your goal for your blog first.

3 – Only track metrics that feed back to your goal for the blog, either directly or indirectly.  If a metric doesn’t impact your ability to reach your goal then don’t track it.

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The Key to Social Selling is to Make Buying More Convenient, Not Marketing

Today Entrepreneur ran an article on FourSquare’s new ‘passive check-in’ feature where, apparently, when you are in proximity to a business, your phone will receive tips and information about the business.

Immediately, you can see how this feature could hold great potential for creating value for members, as well as spamming them.  On the one hand, relevant tips and suggestions upon entering a retail business could create value and convenience for the user.  On the other, it’s frustrating to pull your phone out every time you enter a new store just to hear about the weekly special, which you have no interest in.

In many ways, this represents the demarcation  line between success and failure when it comes to social media marketing.  On one side of the line you have the ability to create value more easily for customers, while on the other you have the ability to more easily market to customers.

Many marketers are drawn to the appeal of being able to more easily market to customers via social media tools and mobile devices.  The problem is, those customers aren’t using their social tools and mobile devices to receive marketing messages, they are primarily using these tools and devices to facilitate personal communications with friends and people they know.

For example, if I walk by a Target and get an ad sent to my phone saying Pepsi is on sale for $1.89 a 2 liter, that has no value for me, as a Dr Pepper drinker.  But if I get a text from my friend Tim that tells me that the Publix in Florence is running a special today on Dr Pepper for $1.00 a 2 liter, that might prompt me to go there to buy some.

So the key, especially with a mobile app like FourSquare is to give me relevant content that also moves me closer to the sale.  And be brave enough to understand that content might not need to come from you or your partners, but instead it might be more value if it comes from other users.  That might not always be your best sales opportunity upfront, but its likely your best way to create more satisfied users.

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Post This, Not That: Social Media Etiquette for Brands

6129906404_23b3c21065_zNote from Mack: This is a Guest Post from Kerry Gorgone, who is an instructor at Full Sail University, a lawyer, and Wonder Woman in her spare time.  Check out her previous guest post here on protecting yourself and your works online.

Your brand needs to participate in the conversations that people are having about you in social media. 44% of Americans get information about brands via social networks, and more than half of consumers who mention a brand on Twitter expect a response within one hour. You can’t have a positive impact on brand sentiment or customer service until you join the discussion.

Consequently, going where your audience is makes good sense, provided the content you post there enhances your audience’s experience, rather than disrupting it. Here are some pointers.

Be conversational, not promotional.

For starters, don’t overtly shill. No matter which social network your brand is on, every post can’t be “Enjoy a hot cup of Brand X coffee!” People will unfollow you—or at least hide your posts—if your content is too self-serving.

Hidden posts are especially detrimental for marketers, because it looks as though you have a certain number of “Likes” for your business page, but people aren’t seeing your content, so engagement rates plummet.

Facebook’s algorithm already engineers things so that only a small percentage of people who have liked your page will see your posts, so you can’t afford to lose any.  For some general guidelines on how to behave on Facebook, check out Jennifer Kane’s excellent primer.

Instead of pitching or selling via social, ask questions, share tips or quotes, or share photos. Visuals are playing an increasingly important role across the board. Multi-photo posts on Facebook increased engagement 1290% in one case (and that’s not a typo).

Exercise caution when “newsjacking”

“Newsjacking” done right can masterfully direct traffic to your social media profiles and site while the news story you’re playing off of remains “hot.” Newsjacking done wrong can really damage your brand.

Social media posts during a crisis demand extra-thoughtful consideration. While your brand may well want to express sympathy for people impacted by a tragedy, it’s better to say nothing than to post something that people perceive as insensitive or exploitive.

Entrepreneur suggests asking 5 questions to guide you through the decision-making process on social media posts about the news. Run through them before you post: you won’t regret taking the time to reflect.

Match the tone of the conversation

Also remember that each social network has its own culture, so people who follow you on Twitter will expect a different conversational tone than those who follow you on Facebook or Instagram. If you haven’t been active yet, spend some time observing how your audience posts on each social network, so you’ll know what they expect.

Amy Howell of Howell Marketing shared this apt explanation: “Twitter is like being in a crowded, noisy bar. Facebook is like your living room. LinkedIn is like the chamber of commerce.”

Know when and where to use #Hashtags

Including hashtags in your social media posts can help people to find your content and follow the conversation, but they don’t work on every social network, and even if the functionality is supported, they might not be a fit for the culture.

Tweets with hashtags get twice the engagement, but hashtags actually lower engagement for Facebook posts, and hashtags don’t work on LinkedIn at all.

Understand your unique audience

Social media statistics provide a good starting point, but understanding your own audience will help you to deliver the kind of content that users will truly appreciate. Gather information on your audience through analytics and customer surveys, and test different types of posts, as well as post times.

Whether you sit down in a “noisy bar” or network at the “chamber of commerce,” think of social media as an extension of your relationship with your audience.

Is a brand you follow doing it right (or wrong)? Post a comment and tell us about it!

Pic via Flickr user Brett Jordan