MackCollier.com

by

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

2953086295_696683204f_z

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

by

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?

by

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.

 

by

How to Staff and Structure to Become a Fan-Centric Brand

5960102222_44d08e8f19_z

First, please read this post on 10 Things to Remember When Creating a Brand Ambassador Program.

This post is based on the framework that I introduced in my book Think Like a Rock Star: How to Create Social Media and Marketing Strategies That Turn Customers Into Fans.  So if you already have a copy, this post relates to Chapter 9.  The framework discussed in this post is independent of  whether or not your company has a brand ambassador program.  It can work with or without one.

There are two many teams to focus on creating and inter-relating:

1 – The Brand Advisory Panel.  This is an internal team within your brand made up primarily of select employees.

2 – The Customer Advisory Panel.  This is an external team made up primarily of selected customers.

The key is that both of these groups have their own responsibilities, but they also work together and are in constant contact.

Core Responsibilities:

Brand Advisory Panel:

  • Working with the CAP (Customer Advisory Panel) to ensure that it receives all relevant information from the brand
  • Works with the CAP to ensure a flow of feedback in both directions
  • Works to distribute all relevant customer feedback from the CAP within the brand to make sure that the feedback is distributed to the areas within the brand that are best suited to act on that information.
  • Works within the brand to create a structure so that employees that connect directly with customers are able to collaborate and share ideas
  • Responsible for educating employees on how to properly communicate with customers, including handling complaints, etc

Customer Advisory Panel:

  • Ensuring that the brand hears and understands the voice of the customer
  • Works with the BAP to ensure a flow of feedback in both directions
  • Provides the BAP with all relevant feedback from customers, including complaints as well as praise
  • Receives feedback from the BAP based on previously provided feedback from the CAP as well as new information, and communicates feedback to customers as appropriate

Basically, both groups are designed to encouraged a flow of feedback and information.  The CAP connects with customers directly and receives feedback from them.  This feedback is then relayed to the BAP.  The BAP then takes that feedback from the CAP and distributes it internally within the brand as appropriate, and/or supplies the CAP with feedback based on its feedback.  By facilitating this flow of information from the brand to the customer and vice versa, both brand and customer has a better understanding of each other.  Which means the brand can more effectively market to the customer, design products and services it is more likely to purchase, etc.

How to Staff the Brand Advisory Panel and the Customer Advisory Panel

To a great degree, the size of both the BAP and CAP is a direct function of the brand’s resources.  There are a few considerations regardless of the available resources:

1 – There should be at least one employee who is a member of the CAP and there should be at least one customer that is a member of the BAP.  For example, you want a brand employee to be a member of the CAP so that employee can work with the customers that are a part of the CAP to give them the brand’s point of view.  Likewise, you want a customer to be a member of the BAP to ensure that the voice of the customer is heard and understood by the BAP at all times.

2 – If you have a dedicated Brand Ambassador Program, the BAP will oversee this program.

3 – Customers who are selected to the CAP should be considered at minimum part-time employees and should be compensated.

I cover this process in much greater detail in the book including a breakdown of the exact employee roles on both the BAP and CAP, and how to vet potential customer candidates for the CAP.

But the main points to remember if you want to create a similar structure for your brand:

1 – Create an internal (brand-side) and external (customer-side) group, each of which is responsible for collecting feedback from the brand/customer and relaying it to the other group, and vice versa.

2 – Have a specific feedback flow within your brand, so that your brand can take feedback from your customer group and communicate that feedback internally to the area within your brand that is best suited to act on that feedback.

3 – Work with your customer group to ensure that the brand’s point of view is understood and relayed to the customer, and vice versa.  Again the overarching goal of this structure is to facilitate the flow of feedback and information between the customer and the brand.

by

Millennials: They’re not Lazy, Entitled Punks

9246980895_8141efe99b

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.

by

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

DSCN1571

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?

by

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!

by

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:

TweetDeckScreenshot

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.

by

How Rock Stars Will Save Your Marketing and Your Business

5956902927_f45c80298f_b

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

by

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!