MackCollier.com

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Why It’s So Important to Have a Strategy Guiding Your Social Media Engagement

OpenRoadI have a love-hate relationship with planning and strategy when it comes to social media.  I hate the planning aspect, but I also understand it is necessary to see the best results.  And I love it when I see those results!

If you’ve read this blog for any amount of time, you know that as often as I can, I like to show you examples of how I am putting the lessons that I am trying to share with you, into action.  Yesterday’s post on social media engagement was a great example of this.

In the post, I talked about the importance of planning out the type of engagement you want from your social media efforts.  Too often, we fail to plan our engagement efforts, then are disappointed with our results.  Yesterday’s post was created to drive two specific types of engagement:

1 – New signups of my Think Like a Rock Star newsletter

2 – Social sharing to help the post rank higher in search engine results for the term “social media engagement”.

Additionally, the content itself was carefully created and crafted to help facilitate those types of engagement.  For example, a very clear Call to Action was placed at the end asking readers to please sign up for my newsletter, and to share the post.

So 24 hours later, what have the results been?  Let’s look at three areas:

1 – Newsletter signups.  This was honestly the top goal for yesterday’s post.  Previously, I had been averaging 3-4 new signups each day for my newsletter.  Over the last 24 hours I have received 21 new signups.  A pretty good jump.

2 – Social sharing.  I wanted to see a lot of sharing of the post, especially on Twitter and Facebook.  As you can see from the numbers at the end of each post, yesterday’s post was the most shared in weeks, with currently 82 retweets on Twitter and 70 Likes on Facebook.  Additionally, yesterday was the 5th best day for traffic so far in 2013.

3 – Search engine results.  I wanted yesterday’s post to rank as high as possible for the exact term “social media engagement”.  When the post was first indexed by Google yesterday at around 10:00 am, it was on the 26th page of the results for the term “social media engagement”.  By 5:00 pm it had moved up to page 10, and at 8:00 pm it was on page 9.  At 6:30 am this morning it was all the way up to page 3, and a few minutes ago at 9:30 am it was on page 2 for “social media engagement”.  Pretty darned good, and if I keep writing more posts with that term (as I did in this post) it will probably help push that post up further.

Pretty good results, right?  My point in writing this post is to impress upon you the importance of planning out your social media efforts.  Look at these results and think how quickly your blog could grow if you wrote just one post a week that was this successful?  I am definitely thinking more along these lines!

So before you write that next post for your business blog, ask yourself these questions:

1 – What am I trying to accomplish with this post?

2 – What type of engagement am I trying to get?

3 – How can this post drive that type of engagement?

Start doing this before you write every post, and see if you don’t start seeing much better results from your blog.  Oh and if you still aren’t seeing the type of engagement you want from your social media efforts, email me and I’ll be happy to discuss how I can help you!

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The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Engagement

community building, online communityIf you ask any company or even most individuals what their top questions are about using social media, one of the first answers you will hear is ‘How do I build more engagement on my blog/Facebook page/Twitter/etc?’  In my experience there are three main reasons why most of us struggle to get the level of engagement we want from social media:

1 – We aren’t creating engaging content.

2 – We aren’t making it easy for people to engage with our content.

3 – We don’t have an engagement strategy.

All of these three problems are inter-related.  For example, if you have an engagement strategy, then you have a plan for creating the type of engagement that’s meaningful to you.  Most people/companies don’t have an engagement strategy, they often go for whatever type of engagement is the easiest to measure, such as comments on a blog or Likes on Facebook.

We also struggle to creating engaging content, this one is trickier, but I think the problems start when we focus too much on trying to get people to engage with the type of content we create, versus trying to adapt the type of content we create in order to make it more engaging.  More on this in a minute.

Finally, we aren’t making it easy for people to engage with our content.  The interesting thing about social media is that engagement breeds engagement.  So what we want to do is lower the barrier to engagement with our content.  If we make it easier for people to engage with our content, then more people will engage with our content.

How #Blogchat Became One of the Most Engaging Chats on Twitter 

#Blogchat started in March of 2009, so it’s been around for over 4 years now.  Even during a ‘slow’ week, the hashtag still generates a few thousand tweets from a few hundred participants.  So it’s a pretty ‘engaging’ chat.  Here’s how I addressed each of the above three problem areas when it comes to building engagement in #Blogchat:

What’s the engagement strategy?  For #Blogchat I wanted as much participation as possible.  You might think that every chat wants this, but when you say you want as much participation as possible, it means you have to pay careful consideration to the topics of the chat.  So for #Blogchat, I purposely gravitate toward 101-level topics, because that lowers the participation barrier for others, and makes them more comfortable engaging.  If I picked say 201-level topics, the participation level would fall off a cliff.  You could argue that the conversations might be ‘deeper’, but there would definitely be fewer people having them.

Also, since I want more people to be engaging, I try to reward engagement.  One way I do this is I personally reply to anyone that I see tweet that they are joining #blogchat for the first time.  Why?  Because what better way to encourage someone to stay engaged than to reply to their first tweet and to have that reply come from the chat moderator?  Plus, more people participating in the chat means more overall engagement.

How do you create engaging content?  One of the things I do with #blogchat is I pay close attention to what people are discussing in the chat.  Often, certain themes. ideas and questions will come up repeatedly.  These are good indicators of future topics for the chat.  Also, I will simply ask #Blogchat what topics they want to discuss.  This also helps give the community ownership of the chat, which also makes it more likely they will engage with topics they want to discuss.  And also, 101-level topics lower the engagement barrier so more people will engage.  Because what I want to have happen is I want more people engaging and building off each other’s points.   That’s where the really great discussions happen, but you have to get a LOT of people engaging to reach that point.

Making it easy for people to engage with #Blogchat.  See the first two points.  Everything done is designed to make it easier for people to engage and contribute.  Whether it’s 101-level topics, using the community’s topic suggestions, or welcoming newbies when they arrive, a ‘culture’ is created that facilitiates and rewards engagement.

 

So how do you create more engagement around YOUR social media efforts?

First, you need a plan.  Yes I know, no one wants to create an engagement strategy.  And most of you don’t and this is the biggest reason why you aren’t getting the type of engagement you want.  You need to think about what type of engagement you want from the content you are creating, then you need to think about how you can create content that’s valuable for your audience, and that encourages the type of engagement you want.

For example, I have a specific engagement and content marketing strategy for this post.  As I said at the start, creating more engagement around social media IS a big problem for many companies.  So this post was written to not only give companies a way to solve this problem, but it was also written so that it will do well in search results for the term ‘social media engagement’.  That’s why that specific term is in the title, and why it’s used repeatedly in the post itself.  Because it helps Google understand what this post is about.  I want this post to do well in search results for these terms, because a big part of the work I do is helping companies create more engagement around the content they create.

Another form of engagement I am targeting is signups of my Think Like a Rock Star newsletter (note the Call to Action at the end).  I want people to signup for the newsletter, because its content will help them solve their social media engagement, and it also gives me a way to connect with them, and hopefully we can do business later.

Note I haven’t mentioned ‘getting a lot of comments’ yet as a desired form of engagement.  While I love getting comments and hearing from y’all, for this particular post, getting more comments isn’t my top priority.  The type of engagement I want for this particular post is I want people to share the post via Twitter, Facebook, and email it to their friends, boss and co-workers.  And I want them to signup for my TLAR newsletter.  If I wanted the ‘easiest’ form of engagement, I would structure this post a bit differently in order to get more comments.  But for what I wanted to accomplish, more shares and signups are the types of engagement that help me more than more comments.  Again, always consider what you want to accomplish, and that will help you decide what type of engagement you want to encourage.

What About Creating Engaging Content?  If you have an engagement strategy in place, then you know what type of engagement you want to see happen from your content.  This feeds into creating engaging content because it makes creating engaging content easier because since you created a plan, you now know what type of engagement you want to see happen!  (See?  Creating a plan is paying off already!)  In general, before your content can be engaging, it has to be valuable to your audience.  If it’s valuable, then it will earn their attention, and then you have a chance to facilitate engagement.  So first, the content needs to create value for your audience.

For example, this post is designed to help solve a common problem that companies have using social media:  Creating more engagement around their efforts.  I mentioned above the type of engagement I want to see happen (social shares that help boost search engine rankings and signups of my TLAR newsletter).  Also note that the title professes this post to be the ULTIMATE guide to social media engagement!  So I knew if I was going to write such a post, it would have to be extremely detailed and thorough.  As a result, this post is probably the longest and most detailed post I’ve written in at least two years.  And hopefully that will lead to a lot of you reading this post and thinking that there’s too much good content NOT to share, and you will.  Which is the type of engagement I want.

Something else to keep in mind is that different tools are better at encouraging different types of engagement.  You have to not only consider the type of engagement you want from your content, but you have to also consider which tools will help you get that level of engagement.  There’s a reason why I am posting this here on my blog that’s easily accessed by Google, and not as a Note on Facebook.  It also wouldn’t do very well broken down into 140-char tweets!  But if I wanted to have a discussion with someone about the concepts in this post, Twitter would probably work better for that type of one-to-one engagement versus comments here.

Making it as easy as possible for people to engage with your content.  Now that you have a specific engagement plan for your content and know the exact type of engagement you want, you need to think about ways to make it easier to encourage that type of engagement.  Think carefully about the action you want others to take (leave a comment, signup for a newsletter, request a product demo), then make sure you are not only giving them the motivation to engage in this activity, but that you are also making it easy for them to do so.

For example, a dead simple way to get more comments is to simply end your post with these four magic words: What do you think?  That signals to your readers that you are opening the floor for a discussion, and that you are interested in their thoughts.  If you have followed your engagement plan and have created content that’s easy for them to engage with and then close your post by asking for their thoughts, the odds are that your readers will indeed share their thoughts.  Then when readers do comment, if you engage them back and interact with them, that encourages the chance that they will respond again.  Then as more readers see that others are leaving comments, that makes them more likely to leave a comment as well (comments breed comments).  So if you are working to create content that helps facilitate the type of engagement you want, then you work to make that type of engagement as easy as possible for your audience to….engage in, then you’ll win!

 

So there it is, 2,000 words later, your complete attack plan for getting more engagement around your social media efforts.  In closing, here’s your cheat-sheet for creating more engagement with social media:

1 – Create a plan.  Figure out the exact type of engagement you want from the content you are creating (Hint:  The answer is NOT ‘whatever’s easiest to measure’).

2 – Create engaging content.  After you have figured out the type of engagement you want, focus on creating content that’s valuable to your audience, and that moves them toward the type of engagement you want with them.

3 – Make it easier to get the type of engagement you want.  If you’ve done the first two, this step will be easy.  Think about how you can not only motivate your audience to engage in the way you want them to, but make it as easy as possible for them to do so.  Also, remember that every social media tool does better or worse at facilitating certain types of engagement, so consider the tools as well.

Hopefully this post has been and will be helpful to you.  If so, please consider sharing it with your friends and co-workers on Facebook, Twitter, email, etc via the sharing buttons below.  (Remember how I mentioned that ASKING for the type of engagement you want helps ensure that you get it?).

Also, if you want to learn more about how to not only build engagement around your social media and marketing efforts but to actually cultivate fans of your brand, then please consider subscribing to my Think Like a Rock Star newsletter.  It goes out every week with actionable ideas that will help you create fans and become a rock star brand!

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Think Like a Rock Star is Now Available in Europe and the UK!

Collier_cvr_altI just received word from my European Marketing Manager that Think Like a Rock Star is now on sale in Europe and the UK!  You can buy the book on Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions.  I’ve been really pleased with the sales so far, and totally forgot that the book had a staggered release!

If you haven’t purchased Think Like a Rock Star yet, please check the early reviews on Amazon, they have been absolutely stellar, I could not be more proud of the reaction the book is getting!

Also, I have created three other resources besides the book to help you better connect with your fans:

1 – The Think Like a Rock Star newsletter.  Each week we discuss tips and ideas for how you can better connect with your fans.  It’s completely free and you can sign up here.

2 – #RockstarChat on Twitter every Wednesday at 1pm Central.  This is for brand marketers and really anyone that wants to learn how to better connect with their fans and build engagement around their social media and marketing efforts.

3 – Think Like a Rock Star Community on Google Plus – This is also a place where we can bounce ideas off each other about how to connect with our fans and create more engaging content.  This community just launched this week and already we are having some great discussions!

 

And if you have already read Think Like a Rock Star could you please write a review for Amazon and GoodReads?  Thank you so much!

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4 Questions Every Blogger Should Ask About Their Social Strategy

J0309040Note: This is a guest post by Mairead Ridge, Marketing Manager at Offerpop.  This post is part of Offerpop’s sponsorship of #Blogchat in April.  Click here to learn more about Offerpop’s services, and also note they are offering a free 14-day trial of its social media marketing services with no credit card required!  You can read Offerpop’s Tumblr here.

Also, if you want to learn how you can sponsor #Blogchat in June, click here and email me for pricing.

 

You’re an avid blogger; a Twitter aficionado. But have you invested time into building an actual social strategy?

The most successful bloggers treat social as a key marketing channel, employing well-defined plans to drive blog traffic and repeat visitors. You don’t have to be a self-promotion machine. The goal is to get more out of the great content you’re already sharing.

Take a step back and ask yourself the following questions:

Am I on the right networks?

Some bloggers never stray far from Twitter. Others spread themselves too thin, making minimal impact across an array of networks.

When figuring out the right mix, consider the demographics of each network and the kind of content that resonates. If you blog about highly visual subjects like art, or fashion, Pinterest and Facebook could work for you. If you’re blogging about business, invest some time in LinkedIn groups.

Is it worth running a promotional campaign?

Plenty of merchants run sweepstakes and promotions on Facebook or Twitter, handing out discounts and prizes to earn more fans. But bloggers with small budgets and no “product” often think this tactic is not for them.

Big mistake. If you’re creating big pieces of content, like e-books or webinars, try “fan-gating” them, requiring people to become fans or followers of your feed or page before downloading. It’s a low-barrier way to build a relevant audience, and an approach we practice ourselves.

You can also use giveaways for prizes, like free passes to a conference where you’re speaking. Or partner with a brand that shares your core audience to reward fans with products they love.

Do I give my fans reasons to visit my blog?

If your blog is the main show, social is your carnival barker, intriguing people to come on in. Attract new readers by teasing morsels of content from your latest posts, like a funny quote or an unexpected tip. But if you only share these posts once, most of your audience will miss them. Schedule posts with links to “evergreen” content for weeks and months to come.

And don’t fall behind on sharing content from other bloggers and influencers. Curating content helps you build a reputation as an educator and get more clicks and shares for your own stuff.

Do I know what’s working?

Even if you’re a Google Analytics junkie, your metrics aren’t complete until you know how your content performs within a social channel. Keep track of what posts get the most likes, comments and shares, and continuously apply that knowledge to future content.

Social media is a barometer for what drives readers’ passions, providing insights that can benefit your blog. And, as you’re testing new networks and campaigns, keep an eye on those blog analytics. You’ll see what traffic sources grow (and don’t grow) over time. Use the knowledge to make decisions about which networks to focus on.

What other questions should truly social bloggers ask themselves? Tell us in the comments!

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Putting Out a Social Media Firestorm BEFORE it Starts!

Note: A version of this post appeared in this week’s Think Like a Rock Star newsletter.  If you would like to subscribe, click here.

Last week when I was in Nashville something interesting happened: I was primarily in town to talk about Think Like a Rock Star with the Nashville chapter of the AMA at their monthly luncheon.  But earlier that morning, I briefly spoke to a group of about a dozen CMOs.

It was interesting to hear the feedback from both groups.  After the lunchtime presentation, some people wanted to talk about how to find and connect with their fans, many people loved the case studies, some people wanted to talk about creating more engaging content.  In other words, there were plenty of themes that resonated with the audience, and areas that they felt they needed help with.

But the group of CMOs were focused on one key area:  They wanted help in dealing with customers that were using social media tools to say negative things about them or even attack their brands online.

I *love* this topic because I believe it’s so misunderstood by many companies.  The first thing to realize is that the vast majority of the time when a customer says something negative about your brand, it’s not because she wants to cause your brand harm, it’s because she wants your brand to respond to her!  That’s it.  She’s tried calling your customer support line and she was put on hold for 15 mins, then hung up on.  She emailed your support department yesterday, and has never heard back.  She’s tried the ‘normal’ channels to get your brand to help her, and she’s gotten no response.  So she does the only thing she knows to do next: She’s turned to social media to bitch about you, hoping that it will get your attention!

That’s typically how it goes.  Granted, sometimes people DO want to start trouble for your brand, and sometimes customers DO attack your brand just to see what you will give them to shut them up, but these instances are the exception.

So how can you plan TODAY to better deal with a customer ‘attack’ that might be coming tomorrow?

First, you need this:

GuardDogStart connecting with your fans.  You want your fans to be more engaged with you, you want them participating and interacting with you on your social media sites.  There are countless reasons why this benefits your brand, but for the purposes of this topic it’s this:  Your fans are the ‘guard dog’.  If I am a person that TRULY wants to come to your Facebook page and cause a stink, seeing that you have several fans that LOVE your brand commenting and engaging there, scares me off.  Why?  Because your fans will come to your defense if someone shows up trying to start trouble.  So if I am there to pick a fight with your brand, I don’t want to fight with your fans.  So if your fans are ‘guarding the yard’, I will move on.  Think of your fans as your ‘Social Media Home Security System’.

Second, you need to create a plan for dealing with customer complaints.  The starting point is to assess why the person is complaining.  This helps you determine if the person is truly a disgruntled customer that needs your help, or a troll that’s just there to kick sand all over the place.  The disgruntled customer will typically talk about their experience, what went wrong, how they tried previously to resolve the issue, and could not, etc.  The troll will typically talk about your brand in more general terms, accuse you of not supporting Belief A or Agenda X, of creating a product that destroys the environment in Area B of the world, etc.  BTW the disgruntled customer should not be confused with ‘I want a freebie’, as these are trolls in disguise that think if they complain about you that you will offer them a freebie to shut them up.

The idea is, you want to give the actual customers the service they need and deserve, and not waste time on the trolls.  And again, the odds are you will rarely, if ever encounter a troll.  Especially if you have engaged with your fans and they are actively ‘in your yard’.

So if you currently need help dealing with angry customers ‘in your social media yard’, then I have three options to help you:

1 – Subscribe to the Think Like a Rock Star newsletter for free.  It’s a weekly newsletter and one of the most common topics we tackle is dealing with negative comments from customers online.  Click here to subscribe.

2 – Read Chapter Six of Think Like a Rock Star (click here to order it on Amazon).  The entire chapter is devoted to properly handling negative comments with multiple case studies from brands that did a great job of handling customer complaints, and a few that did not.  It walks you through the exact steps you should take to respond to unsatisfied customers in order to convert them into passionate fans.   The book costs $15 currently on Amazon, and this chapter alone is well worth that price.

3 – Hire me to help you deal with upset customers online.  I can work with you to craft a plan and strategy for handling future negative feedback you encounter from customers, as well as help you tackle current issues you might be facing.  I can also be available ‘on call’ to help you handle future issues that pop up that require your attention quickly.  Email me to discuss your exact needs and the help I can provide you.

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A Few Simple Tips For Making Your Blog More Secure

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Go here to let Sucuri scan your blog for free to tell you if you’ve been hacked or have malware.

So over the last few months I had been chasing a nagging malware issue on this blog.  It looks like (knocking on keyboard) it’s finally cleaned out, so I wanted to share what I learned so hopefully you’ll be able to avoid some of the same problems.

First, here’s what I think happened:  It looks like somehow someone got access to the blog, either via stealing a password (doubtful) or exploiting a security hole in an outdated plugin (likely).  Then what they did was they added code to the template and plugins that let traffic be redirected from this blog, to their site.

Here’s what I did to clean it up:

First, I tried to download some security plugins to give me an idea of what had happened.  I added Wordfence, Better WP Security and Bulletproof Security.  What I liked about WordFence is that it scans your WordPress and plugin files and will tell you if any have been changed and will show you the exact changes that were made.  Better WP Security gives you a nice checklist of options you can take to make your blog more secure.  Plus, it gives you the ability to ban users that repeatedly try to login to your blog or access security holes in the setup.  Bulletproof Security has a few additional options and honestly I have it more as a ‘it can’t hurt’ option than anything else.

But the problem was, at best these plugins were alerting me to the fact that there were issues, but couldn’t fix them all.  So I ended up paying to get Sucuri’s service for my blog.  Sucuri costs $90 a year for one site/blog, but it was worth it.  They were able to go in and clean up my blog, and then give me tips and ideas on how to keep a re-infection from happening.  The problem was that the issue kept popping back up.  We’d clean the blog up, it would be fine for the next few days, then suddenly the following Friday or Sat, Google would blacklist the blog and we’d start the process all over again.

It turns out that what was happening was someone had access to the blog, and they were going in every Thursday and changing files to have traffic be re-directed to their sites.  This was somehow taking place the following day, and then triggering the Google blacklist.  After it happened about 3 weeks in a row, I finally figured out what was happening, and was able to alert Sucuri as soon as the files were changed on a Thursday, and they cleaned it up within a few hours and we never saw the blacklist from Google.

Also, I noticed that one of WordPress’ core files had been modified, Sucuri changed that back.  I went in and changed my WordPress password, and in two weekends since, there have been zero problems and no files have been changed.  So it seems that the problem, at least for now, is gone.

So if you want to avoid this headache, here’s some simple tips:

  • Create strong passwords for your blog, including numbers and letters.  It’s best to mix in upper and lower case letters, plus a few special characters as well.
  • Update WordPress and all your Plugins as SOON as the updates are available.  I learned this the hard way, but often plugins are updated simply to close an existing security hole.  Before I *hated* updating plugins and would often wait till I had several that needed updating before I would.  Never again.
  • If you have a user as ‘admin’ then delete it.  That’s the user account that hackers target the most.

BTW, if you install the above plugins you can see how often hackers try to access your blog and it happens CONSTANTLY.  One of the settings I have is I get an email if someone makes 10 bad attempts to sign into my blog.  They are banned and then I get an email saying they were banned.  I get 5-10 of these emails EVERY DAY.  Seriously, it’s scary stuff to see how often bad people will try to access your blog and look for any security hole they can find, so you have to be proactive about protecting yourself.

We’ll have more ideas for keeping your blog secure tonight at #Blogchat, so please check in and let’s learn from each other!  See you at 8pm Central!

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How Can You Create Monster Loyalty? Q&A With Jackie Huba

photo (3)I was so excited to hear that Jackie Huba’s new book, Monster Loyalty would be coming out soon after TLAR.  For the last decade, Jackie has been teaching us all about the value of embracing and empowering our fans.  With Monster Loyalty, she looks at how one of the most successful rock stars of all time creates and empower fans: Lady Gaga.  Here’s Jackie telling us more about why you should buy Monster Loyalty(I’ve already pre-ordered my copy!).

Q: You’re a customer loyalty guru who has written two previous books on the subject already – Creating Customer Evangelists and Citizen Marketers – what prompted you to add this book to the list? Why Lady Gaga?

A: I’ve been intrigued with Lady Gaga as an artist since she burst on to the music scene in 2009. In studying her in-depth for four years, I began to see that Lady Gaga is doing something casual observers and many business professionals may not really comprehend. While creating a buzz with her wild outfits and crazy performance art, she is methodically building a grassroots base of passionate fans for the long term. The more I observed, the more I began to realize that there is a lot she could teach the business world about how to generate customer loyalty.

 

Q: Lady Gaga has such a specific brand and audience; can the average business and businessperson really learn from her?

A: Gaga’s business of show business may be very different from the “average” business, but her focus on growing through devoted customer loyalty is a universal business objective. Research has long shown that it’s five times cheaper to keep a customer than to get new ones. Gaga gets the math. It’s her overarching philosophy to focus on her core advocates, the superfans, the Little Monsters. These advocates will ultimately be evangelists who bring in new customers on their own. This customer philosophy is one that businesses would do well to learn from Gaga.

 

Q. She is undeniably an eccentric icon. How do more practical companies partake in her business philosophies without going over the top?

A: The best ideas sometimes come from the unlikeliest sources, and this is how innovation happens. Gaga has blazed new trails in creating fan loyalty and setting the foundation for long-term success in her industry. Whether you love her or hate her, you can’t ignore her what she has accomplished. I think it’s important to study what she does, how she does it, and why, because there are ways to replicate her success in more traditional business settings. In every lesson from Gaga in the book, I highlight how traditional companies – from Whole Foods to MINI – are applying her methods to their customer base, and without wearing any meat dresses.

 

Q: In the book you explain that Gaga focuses on her “One Percenters,” a term that you and previous co-author, Ben McConnell, coined. Can you explain this concept?

A: The idea of the One Percenters is based on research that my co-author Ben McConnell and I did for our 2007 book, Citizen Marketers. In the early days of online community and social media, we looked at online communities and tracked what percentage of members in those communities created content. In other words, who was most engaged. We found it amounted to just 1 percent of the total community members. This was surprising. The amount of super-engaged community members did not follow the usual 80/20 rule (aka the Pareto principle) which states that 80 percent of value comes from 20 percent of participants. Our research was showing the volume of content creators was much smaller, at just 1 percent. One percent is a very small part of the community, and yet this disproportionate number was creating most of the value for the entire community. Our thesis is that these One Percenters are businesses’ most die-hard customers who love the company, buy new products as soon as they released, give them as gifts, and evangelize the company to everyone they know.

 

Q: One of the seven loyalty lessons is “Give Fans a Name.” It’s well known that Lady Gaga calls her fans her “Little Monsters.” Can you give an example of a business applying this lesson?

A: One of the best examples of a brand naming their fans is Maker’s Mark, the premium bourbon company out of Loretto, Kentucky. In 2000, Bill Samuels, Jr., son of the founder, was looking for a way to better connect with the brand’s fanatical customers and created the Maker’s Mark Ambassador program. Ambassadors are those brand evangelists who volunteered to tell others about the product and also encouraged bars that didn’t carry the brand at the time to do so. Today, there are hundreds of thousand of Makers Mark Ambassadors who receive custom business cards from the brand, fun holiday gifts and gather for events at the history distillery in Loretto each year.

 

Q: Whether it’s about Lady Gaga, customers, loyalty or even yourself – what’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing this book?

A: Lady Gaga’s business sense impresses me, but her passion for changing the world for the better through any means possible is what truly inspired me to study her. She is influencing an entire generation of young people to stand up for each other, to be more tolerant of differences, and to be brave in the face of difficulty. I have spent hours and hours reading fan comments about how she has changed lives for the better. I have cried watching YouTube videos of kids saying they thought about hurting themselves or ending their lives, but that her belief in them, a woman they don’t even know, kept them from doing it. They listen to her music, especially “Born This Way,” and they feel better about themselves. Part of why I wanted to write the book is that I am compelled to share all of the things she is doing, not just her business acumen. I believe that if there was ever a candidate to continue Oprah’s legacy of inspiring people to live their best lives, it’s this five-foot-one, twenty-six-year- old in a studded bikini.

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How to Totally Botch a New Book’s Marketing In the First Month (Hint: Create a Plan)

Hey y’all!  So over the last few months as I began promoting the fact that Think Like a Rock Star was coming out, more and more of you started contacting me saying you were either starting to write your own book, or thinking about doing so.  So I wanted to share my experience with the book’s launch so that maybe it will help you.

First, you need to understand this: You are on your own when it comes to marketing your new book.  Seriously, 99% of the book’s marketing and promotion is on you.  No, your publisher isn’t going to help you, at least not very much.  Not because they are evil people, but they are in the publishing business, not the marketing business.  They have limited marketing resources, and what they do have goes to proven authors with big names.  That’s not me, and it’s not you.  So as Michael Hyatt says, you have to essentially assume the role of CMO of your own book.  Because you are.

Now, when you are marketing a new book, one of the big considerations is your launch strategy.  We’ve all heard stories about this author or that author that moved several thousands of copies of their new book at launch, and made the New York Times Bestseller List.  What that author won’t typically tell you is they sold 5,000 copies during launch week because they promoted the book at launch endlessly to their email list, which had 200,000 members that they have been building since 2000.  The point is, unless you have a huge platform to promote your book from, IMO it’s not worth the effort to focus most of your efforts on a big launch.  You SHOULD try to sell as many copies as possible at launch, but you should be trying to sell as many copies AFTER launch as well.  But there’s no denying that making a bestseller list is a huge deal, but for me, I felt my efforts could be better placed elsewhere.

Amazon sells your book when they get it

This is a lesson I learned the hard way.  First, let me back up and tell you what my plan was:

1 – The paperback version of TLAR was scheduled to go on sale on April 19th.

2 – From watching other books that had launched from my publisher, typically Amazon would start selling the Kindle version of the book about 3 weeks prior to selling the paperback version.

3 – That gave me a 3-week window to get as many reviews up as possible for the Kindle version of the book.  This is big, because a review for the Kindle edition also shows up on the paperback/hardback version of the book, even if it’s not out yet.  So if the Kindle version of the book comes out 3 weeks before the paperback version, that means any reviews of the Kindle edition will show up in the listing for the paperback edition.  What I wanted to happen was to have several great reviews up for the book at launch, to drive more sales.

4 – In February, McGraw-Hill put TLAR on NetGalley.  NetGalley is a site where publishers provide a free ebook version of their books, and potential reviewers ask for a copy of the book to review, and the publisher then sends the book to the people they approve.  The idea is that if you request a copy of the book via NetGalley, you are doing so because you intend to review it online.  Think Like a Rock Star was the most requested title on NetGalley that McGraw-Hill has ever published.  So I was pretty stoked about that, and thought it would drive a LOT of reviews leading up to the launch.

5 – In March and leading up through the end of April, I had planned on doing multiple guest posts on multiple sites.  Now this is something I honestly wasn’t looking forward to doing.  I hate the idea of asking (which to me seems like begging) other bloggers to let me write a guest post for them.  I had already done a few by the end of March and everyone I talked to was extremely gracious about it.

6 – I created a small Street Team to help me promote the book.  This was honestly the smartest thing I did, as it was effectively tying into the core concept of TLAR: Connect with your fans and give them control of your message.  The Street Team would help get the word out about the book, review it on Amazon and elsewhere, etc.

7 – I created #Rockstarchat in March to help support readers AFTER they bought the book.  This was also smart, because it provides value for people AFTER they buy the book, but it also drives NEW sales as people participate in the chat.

8 – I sent out a small number of paperback review copies to people that I *knew* would likely buy the book.  I didn’t see this as losing sales, I saw it as a way to THANK people that were supporting me and the book.  This was a very small number, maybe 10 copies total.

 

So now I had my launch strategy

And when I say ‘launch strategy’, I don’t mean ‘my strategy to move enough copies at launch to make the New York Times Bestseller List’.  I just assumed THAT would never happen.  But I did want to make a splash at launch to give the book a nice jumpstart and help it hit the ground running.  But again, I wanted the launch to be the START of the book’s sales, not the high point!

So the plan was this:

1 – From mid-March through the end of April, do multiple guest posts for other bloggers to build exposure and awareness for the book

2 – The Kindle version of the book should drop around late March, the paperback version on April 19th.  That gave me a 3-week window to get as many reviews up as possible on Amazon.  Inbetween the Street Team, the people on NetGalley that had requested a review copy, and sales from new customers, the goal was to have a few dozen reviews up by April 19th.  My feeling was that that many would be enough to help drive NEW sales of the paperback at launch.

 

So I was ready to go, and then Amazon pulled the rug out from under me

On March 26th, I noticed that the Kindle edition of TLAR went on sale.  Excellent, this was the 25 days before the paperback version was set to go on sale, which was exactly where I was thinking it would start selling.  Perfect.  I immediately emailed the Street Team, and a few friends that I knew had read the book and asked (read: begged) them to please post their reviews on Amazon ASAP.  By the next day Amazon already had 3 reviews up, and I was feeling like the plan was starting to click into place.

Then it happened.  On Friday, March 29th, I got an email from Amazon saying the on-sale date for TLAR had been moved up from April 19th to April 1st!  So that 3-week window I was expecting between the on-sale date for the Kindle version and the paperback version had been reduced to 5 days.

Lovely.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the worst part.  The paperback version of TLAR went on sale on April 1st on Amazon, and immediately sold out.  And was out of stock for three freaking days.  Which was awesome and terrible all at the same time.  It’s awesome that the book was so popular that it had sold out, but terrible that I missed three days worth of sales during launch week because Amazon can’t properly manage its inventory for a book that had pre-sold well for 6 months prior.  As you can tell, I am no longer bitter 🙂

So it’s now the 1st week of this month, and my launch strategy is officially in the toilet.  Best laid plans, and all that jazz.  But I started noticing something happening:  People started telling me that their copy of the book had shipped, or a few had already received their copy of the book, and were posting pictures of them on Twitter.  Of course this thrilled me and I went out of my way to thank them and engage with them.  Then strangers started doing the same thing.

Then it hit me:  The fans of the book needed to be the people that were driving the promotion of the book, not me!  So I went out of my way to start engaging with fans of the book, which is what I was going to do anyway, but I did so aggressively.  I thanked them profusely, and I noticed that they started promoting the book MORE as a result!  They started encouraging other friends to buy the book.  They started reviewing it on their blogs and other sites.  Of course I would ask them to also review it on Amazon if they could (a couple of people THANKED ME for asking them to please review MY book on Amazon!)

This is just a sampling of what I was seeing on Twitter during launch week:

TLARTweets3

What I also noticed was that sales went up after launch week.  More reviews started coming in on Amazon (Four 5-star reviews last Thurs and Friday alone), and more people started talking about the book on Twitter and Facebook.

Then last Tuesday just before I started presenting TLAR at Jacksonville State, I saw this on Amazon:

Amazon#1#2

BOOM!  That was the high-point for sales of the book at that point, and what’s most important was it was being driven by fans of the book.  Now I’m not posting this just to brag (ok I am a little because I’m super proud of this book), but mainly to make the point to you that this was painfully easy to do!  All I did was embrace the fans of the book and THANK them for helping me promote the book.  How many times have I said that the two most important words in social media are ‘thank you’?  This is not rocket science, folks.  Find the people that are supporting you (your fans), and embrace them and THANK them.

Say ‘Thank You!’ early and often, and mean it.  That’s really all there is to it when it comes to driving new sales.  If I can figure this stuff out, anyone can do it 🙂

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#RockstarChat Today is With Billboard’s Social Marketing Manager Katie Morse!

katie mo headshots 4Today’s #RockstarChat will have its first co-host, Billboard’s own Katie Morse!  I interviewed Katie for Think Like a Rock Star, and in today’s chat she will talk to us about how rock stars are using social media and other marketing channels to connect with their fans.  Then we’ll talk about what brands can learn from rock stars in connecting with their own fans.

To prep for today’s chat, I wanted to share an interview I did with Katie several months ago while I was still writing Think Like a Rock Star:

Mack: For Rockstars, it just seems so natural for most of them to have a very close connection with their fans.  Yet for most brands, the exact opposite is true.  Why do you think Rockstars go out of their way to embrace their fans, when most brands keep their’s at arm’s length?  

Katie: I think this dichotomy exists for 2 reasons.

1 – Brands never HAD to “embrace their fans” before social media. Many brands spent millions doing the opposite, in fact – turning their customers into anonymous data points and trying to make the most amount of money possible based off of statistical models and predictions.

2 – Rock stars have a necessary connection with their fans based off their model of monetization… in these days (and even previously) you had to tour to make money. Now that’s apparent more than ever, and who goes to a show? PEOPLE! Musician’s couldn’t ignore their fans the way brands could before.

I also think that brands, for a long time, were afraid of “being human”. You see this pop up in all sorts of areas… scripted customer service calls, for an example. Somewhere along the line from the mom and pop shops of the 1800-1900’s to the monolithic corporations of today brands lost that “human touch” which musicians could never afford to lose.

Mack: Throughout your professional career, and especially now handling Social Media Marketing for Billboard, you’ve been exposed to how Rockstars connect with their fans.  What do you think is the most important lesson or two that brands can learn from the relationship Rockstars have with their fans?

Katie:  1 – Go off-script. I Tweeted the other day(Edit by Mack, this interview was done last Aug for the book ;)) that Josh Groban’s Twitter account is consistently one of my favorites to follow. Why? Because he’s not a marketing machine. He’s a real person with a personality. He even has some pretty good jokes! Brands don’t need to learn to “be human” but they DO need to learn how to better communicate with real people online. That requires adopting a more conversational and human tone and not being afraid to be honest, or deal with the unexpected.

2 – Less Wizard of Oz, more Dorothy. People want to see what’s behind the curtain more than ever these days. Musicians have taken to Instagram en masse, just as an example, and many share photos of life on tour or even daily live (Rihanna, Drake, etc). This content is GOLD in fans eyes… who doesn’t want to see what Drake’s hotel room in Cannes really looks like, or what Rihanna really gets up to on a “night out with the girls”? The same thing should apply to your brand. No, not everyone cares to see photos of worker bees in cubicles, but we DO want to take a peek into how your bottled beverage is really put together, or what the raw incredients for my favorite meal at a restaurant really look like. GE does a wonderful job of this with their Instagram account, by the way.

Mack: How can a brand measure the bottom-line impact of connecting with their biggest fans?  I think most brands accept that fans probably spend more than the average customer and speak more positively about the brand, but if a CMO wanted to convince her boss to launch a formal program to connect with its brand advocates, how would she sell the boss on spending the money to do so?

Katie: It has to tie back to revenue, so start there. First – start with proving that your biggest fans DO spend more, do your research! From there, I’d suggest asking for a small budget to launch a pilot program to connect with and reward brand advocates. They may love your company, but everyone loves getting a little something in return, too. Perhaps a small meetup (drinks on your company!) might be a good place to start. You can invite the CMO, structure it like an informal focus group and get opinions from your biggest fans. From there, show them that you used their feedback in some way! Measure the amount that they spent before and after, and also measure the buzz they helped to create for your company online over time. Those are the results the CMO wants to see and those results also give you a great parameter in asking for budget. On the up side, if your initial foray ends up creating more referrals/sales/revenue than you projected, you can ask for a bigger budget! Increased online buzz is great, but ultimately if that leads to sales, page views, or whatever your revenue driver is it’s a win. If not… try again.

 

And Katie will be joining us today at 1pm Central at #RockstarChat on Twitter to share more smartitude like this.  Hope you can join us!

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Two Upcoming Think Like a Rock Star Speaking Dates

Collier_cvr_altI wanted to let y’all know about two speaking dates I have within the next 3 weeks for Think Like a Rock Star.

The first is next Tuesday at Jacksonville State University, in Jacksonville, Alabama.  I will be joining CK to do an all-day workshop on Social Media and Mobile Marketing.  CK is the foremost expert on mobile marketing for business, especially in the B2B space.  She will be doing two sessions on getting your mobile marketing efforts up to speed.  In addition, I will be doing a session on Social Media Marketing, and we’ll close the day with the newest version of my Think Like a Rock Star workshop.

This entire day event is a staggering low $99.  Ah pricing in the Deep South, this exact same workshop would be closer to $999 in NYC.  You can see the full agenda here, and you can register here.  The first 25 people to register get a free. signed copy of Think Like a Rock Star.  There will be additional copies available for sale if you don’t get one of the free ones.  Also, every attendee will get a copy of CK’s newest Mobile Marketing ebook.

The second event is I will be presenting Think Like a Rock Star at the Nashville AMA’s monthly meeting on May 2nd.  You can register here for this event and with first 75 AMA members to register get a free, signed copy of Think Like a Rock Star!

If you want to keep up with where I will be presenting Think Like a Rock Star for the rest of 2013, you can find the latest updates here.  If your company would like to have me conduct an on-site Think Like a Rock Star workshop, please click here for more information.

BTW, if you’ve already read Think Like a Rock Star, what did you think of it?