MackCollier.com

by

Pro Blogger will be co-hosting #Blogchat Sun nite!

This Sunday nite, I’m thrilled that @ProBlogger (Darren Rowse) will be joining us to co-host #Blogchat at 8pm Central.  Darren’s topic will be helping us learn how to monetize our blogs, and the schedule will break down like this:

From 8:00-8:30 PM Central – How to create blog content that can be monetized.  We’ll talk about how you decide what to sell (ads on your blog?  sponsored posts?), and whats your strategy for creating this content.  So if you’ve got questions about deciding what type of content to try to sell, this is when we’ll be discussing it.

From 8:30-9:00 PM Central – We’ll talk about ideas for selling existing content, such as, how do you create an ebook from existing posts, or repurposing existing content in new forms in order to sell it.  So if this is more what you are interested in, make sure you get your questions in here.

Darren will stay as long as he can, but as you can imagine, this #Blogchat should be extremely busy, and could be our most active ever.  So Darren will get to as many questions as he can, but won’t be able to get to everyone’s questions.  So my advice is if Darren doesn’t answer your question the 1st time you ask it, to try again after 9pm,  when the crowd thins out a bit.

And please make sure you are following Darren on Twitter, and subscribed to his blog, if you aren’t already.

Hope to see you all on Sunday nite!

by

#Blogchat Schedule for November

New to #Blogchat and want to figure out what the deal is with the hottest chat on Twitter?  Then click here.

After a stellar October lineup we’re going to start November off with a bang with another awesome co-host!

November 7th – Darren Rowse (@ProBlogger) co-hosting on “How to Monetize Your Blog”.  Darren will discuss ways we can monetize our blogging efforts, and also give us ideas for creating content that can be monetized.  The topic of ‘how do I make money off my blog?’ is one that #Blogchat regulars have constantly asked about, and I wanted to make sure we could get Darren to co-host this topic, as he’s probably the best person on the planet to help us in this area!  There will be a followup post here on Friday with more information about Darren’s session this Sunday, so please check back for that!

November 14th – Sponsored #Blogchat.  The second #Blogchat for this month will be reserved for sponsors, however, if a suitable one hasn’t been found by the 8th (Next Monday), then well have a ‘normal’ #Blogchat.  So if your company wants to pitch for sponsoring this slot, please email me with your topic ideas ASAP.  If you want to learn more about how the #Blogchat sponsorships work, click here.

November 21st – Topic TBA

November 28th – OPEN MIC #Blogchat! There still seems to be a bit of confusion from some people, especially those new to #Blogchat, over exactly what the OPEN MIC nites are about.  The last Sunday of every month is an OPEN MIC #Blogchat.  What that means is that there is NO set topic.  Everyone comes and discusses whatever blogging topic they want.  It sounds like it would be complete chaos, but it’s actually a lot of fun, and these are probably the most popular #Blogchats over the last 20 months.  So if you keep pitching a certain topic for #Blogchat that we aren’t covering, then come to OPEN MIC and get a conversation started around this topic!

Finally, if you aren’t already, please follow me on Twitter.  As the topics for the 2nd and 3rd weeks are set, I’ll be tweeting information out on those weeks, plus I always share links to the transcripts and other info about #Blogchat.  Hope to see you this Sunday!

by

How Social Media Saved One Company Over $100,000

There are two ways that social media initiatives can directly benefit your business:

1 – By generating revenue

2 – By lowering existing business costs

For whatever reason, most of the ‘What is the ROI of Social Media?’ discussion focuses on the first area.  But the 2nd area is just as important, if not moreso when it comes to social media initiatives.  I’ve talked before about how companies can and ARE reducing their costs by utilizing social media.

When I was in Atlanta last week working with NCI, Adam shared a few case studies of how NCI’s clients had benefited from using social media, and I wanted to share one of them with you.

In late 2009, The Bainbridge Companies hired NCI to provide social media services for 21 of its apartment communities.  Now several months into the program, Bainbridge was already seeing nice boosts in organic traffic to their property website (67% increase in total), and also was seeing the benefits from an SEO perspective.  So much so that Bainbridge decided to completely eliminate its pay-per-click advertising by the end of 2010.

This will let Bainbridge realize a cost savings of over $100,000.  In addition, Bainbridge reports a higher conversion rate from the non-paid, organic traffic that’s being generated by the properties’ social media efforts.

BTW one aspect that I thought was interesting was that several times during the last year, certain Bainbridge units have had to deal with severe weather issues from time to time.  Since the units had a set of social media channels in place, they could communicate severe weather information to residents, who were very appreciative of these efforts.  This is a classic example of how the potential of social media as an instant connection tool can improve customer satisfaction.

The arm of NCI that handled these social media initiatives for Bainbridge was Community Sherpa, and you can learn more about them here.

Just curious, has your business noticed a cost savings from using social media?   If so, what areas were affected?

by

Something interesting is happening in Atlanta…

Last week I spent a few days providing social media training for a company that probably provides social media services for more clients than any other company in the country, if not the world.

Where was I?  Well I wasn’t working with a hotshot PR firm, or a branding agency.  In fact, you’ve probably never heard of the company.  But they currently provide and execute social media strategies for well over a thousand clients.  The company currently creates over 2,500 blog posts a week for over 1,200 clients, and adds 30-75 new ones every month.  And their renewal rate for those clients is right at 90%.

I was in Atlanta training with the good people at Network Communications, Inc.  NCI is the largest national publisher of local printed and online magazines for the real estate market, and my guess is they probably provide social media services for more clients than anyone else in the country, if not the world.  They offer social media services to property managers, realtors, architects, interior designers, and contractors, just to name a few of their client areas.

And they’ve gone from 0 to 1,200 social media clients in just a year’s time.  All while providing an extremely affordable social media solution for clients.  Those clients get a blog (with 2 new posts every week), a Twitter presence, and a Facebook page, for usually $350-395 a month.

Blogging is a big part of what NCI is hanging its hat on as far as driving success via social media for its clients.  And that’s why I was in Atlanta last week, to work with 60 or so of the company’s bloggers on how they can better create blog posts that help them reach their client’s objectives.

What struck me in the weeks leading up to the training sessions, and during my time with the team in Atlanta, was that the engagement level on the blogs was often non-existent.  Few, if any comments, no retweets, no ‘signs of life’.  In fact, I was thinking to myself that many ‘social media people’ would look at these blogs, see little to no engagement, and view them as failures.

But obviously they aren’t failing their clients, who keep jumping on board.  So how does NCI create value for its clients via blogging?

“Our goal is to drive leads for clients on the web.” explains Adam Japko, the Senior VP and President of the Home & Design Area for NCI.

Customer leads for clients.  This is one of the points I keep stressing to those of you that are trying to get buy-in from your boss for your social media ideas.  You have to make the business case for social media.  NCI is doing that.  They are delivering a tangible return on their client’s investment.  As a matter of fact, Adam shared a case study with me from one of their clients that I will be sharing here with you on Thursday.  Let’s just say this client saw a pretty huge cost savings from letting NCI guide its social media efforts.

Now everything is not perfect sledding for NCI.  What they’ve done in the last year is literally invent a business model.  There’s few if any other companies that are providing social media services on such a widescale level.  So NCI is having to invent the template here, and that’s created some problems for them over the last year.

One of the company’s biggest challenges was that they grew quicker than they expected. “Our volume of clients came in faster and bigger bunches than anybody would have imagined. We have hired and trained more than 70 people this year as we ramped” explains Japko.  I saw that NCI is still dealing with managing the workload for workers, as well as shuffling people around and trying to find the best fit for everyone.  There are clearly growing pains at work here, but they ARE growing.

And I don’t see that growth slowing down any time soon, in fact, as they continue to improve their existing business processes, the growth should only accelerate.  Thanks again to Adam (who is also a wine buff with a great blog), Rick, Ed, Keith, Melissa, the bloggers, OCMs and all the good people at NCI for having me last week.  I hope to make it back again soon, and thanks to my dear friend Charity Hisle, who is also one of NCI’s shining stars, for the picture to this post.

(Disclosure – NCI is a client, but did not pay me to write this post.  I wrote it cause I think their business model and how they are breaking new ground in providing a low-cost social media solution to clients is pretty interesting.  Plus, I enjoyed meeting all the managers and executives, as well as the bloggers and OCMs such as Amanda, Keenan, Craig, Justin, Natasha, Jo Anne, Deidre, Ashley, Lynda, Kali and the rest of the NCI team.)

by

Don’t miss #Blogchat Sun nite with special co-host Shannon Paul!

Got a company blog?  Not sure how to effectively manage and respond to the comments you get there?  Well Sunday nite’s #Blogchat is just what you need!  We’ll be joined by the amazing @ShannonPaul who will be educating us on “How to Respond to Comments on Your Company Blog”.  The #blogchat with Shannon will start at our regular time of 8pm Central, 9pm Eastern!

If you will be joining us, please read this post Shannon wrote on how to respond to comments on your company blog.  It will be a HUGE help for you.

As for the structure of this chat, there’s two areas Shannon will be hitting on:

1 – For the 1st 30 minutes up till 8:30, we will be discussing the basics of effectively managing and responding to comments on your company blog.  Such as, should you respond to every comment, should you moderate, who should respond, etc.

2 – For the 2nd 30 mins starting at 8:30, we will discuss how to handle negative comments on your blog.  This is an area where so many companies have problems with and worry about, so we wanted to devote a lot of time to covering it.

And please make sure you follow Shannon on Twitter, and also subscribe to her blog.  When it comes to experience handling/managing social media initiatives in a corporate setting, Shannon is really in a class by herself.  She handled the social media efforts of the Detroit Red Wings and PEAK6 Online, before taking on her current role as Social Media Manager for Blue Cross – Blue Shield of Michigan.  She’s a gem, and a helluva good person to boot!

And if you are new to #Blogchat (Welcome!)  and want to now what the deal is, here you go!

by

We were right, most Social Media numbers are useless!

Yesterday I posted two examples of how some social media numbers are completely useless.

One of the examples was how I have almost 22,000 followers on Twitter, and yet I rarely get 1-2% of them to click on any link I share on Twitter.  I said we’d check out my traffic from yesterday and see what level of engagement I would have with those 22,000 followers.  Here’s the traffic sites from yesterday according to Google Analytics:

GA says there were 604 visitors here yesterday, 251 from referring sites, 226 direct traffic, and 78 from search engines.

For the record, SiteMeter says I had 597 visitors.  I tweeted out a link to yesterday’s post THREE times, and as of this writing, it was RTed 125 times.

And if we say that EVERY one of the 600 or so visitors I had yesterday came from viewing that link on Twitter, that still means that less than 3% of my Twitter followers clicked that link.  Obviously, not all of the traffic from yesterday came from Twitter, and not all of the traffic that DID, came from people that were following me.

I think there’s two key takeaways from this that I think we need to wrap our heads around:

1 – The level of engagement you have with your Twitter followers as a group is going to be low, and will likely be inversely proportional to the size of the group.  If you only have your 10 closest friends following you, obviously you will have a high level of engagement with that core group.  But as you grow to 1,000 followers, obviously you can’t be closely connected to all of those people, and their level of interaction and engagement with you will fall.

2 – The level of engagement you have with a certain portion of your Twitter followers will be MUCH higher than that of the larger group.  This point is somewhat speculative, but I would bet that most of the people that clicked yesterday’s link also click most of my links.   So while I may have a 1-3% engagement rate with my 22,000 followers as a whole, for those 500 or whatever number followers, I may have a 33% engagement rate.  Or some other number much larger than 1-3 % 😉

What do y’all think?  Does this make sense or sound like complete crap?  I think the core message here is to focus on your ‘fans’, and try to connect with them.  If you try to connect with everyone, then you’ll probably connect with no one.  But how do you figure out WHO is in that core group of fans, and who isn’t?  Or what about people that click some of my links, but not all?

Damn I’m getting a headache.

by

Too many Social Media numbers are completely useless

And you and I will prove this together.

As soon as I publish this post, I am going to tweet out the link to my 22,000 followers on Twitter.  When that happens, click this link to see what SiteMeter says the traffic looks like for today.  This will give us a good idea of how many of the 22,000 people following me on Twitter are REALLY following me and what level of engagement I have with those 22,000 people.

I can tell you right now that at best probably 1 or 2 percent of those people will click that link I tweet out.  Think about that, of the 22,000 people following me, only 1 or 2 percent are likely to click on a link I share.  And honestly, that’s pretty good.

So that means that well over 90% of the people following me aren’t clicking on links I share.  So is it more accurate to say that 22,000 people are following me, or is it actually more like a few hundred?

Here’s a second example of how the numbers in social media can be deceiving.

That graph shows the number of feed readers that Feedburner says I have at The Viral Garden over the last month.  This is how FeedBurner explains the number it shows for # of feed readers:

FeedBurner’s subscriber count is based on an approximation of how many times your feed has been requested in a 24-hour period. Subscribers is inferred from an analysis of the many different feed readers and aggregators that retrieve this feed daily. Subscribers is not computed for browsers and bots that access your feed.

Subscribers counts are calculated by matching IP address and feed reader combinations, then using our detailed understanding of the multitude of readers, aggregators, and bots on the market to make additional inferences.

Now, this is the problem I have.  First, notice that the # of feed readers (the number shown in green on top of the above graph) has been steadily rising over the last month.  A month ago, it was at 5,238, yesterday it was up to 7,359.  That’s about a 40% increase in the number of feed subscribers Feedburner reports for The Viral Garden in the last month.

The problem: I have only written ONE post on The Viral Garden in the last month.  In fact, I have only written FOUR posts there in the last FIVE months.

So does it make any sense for Feedburner to say that over 7,000 people are accessing my feed every day, even though that feed hasn’t put out a new post in over 2 weeks?  Doesn’t common sense suggest that most of the people that are subscribed to my feed would only be accessing it when a new post is published?

To further put the FeedBurner numbers in doubt, let’s look at the actual traffic to The Viral Garden over the last 12 months, according to SiteMeter:

Up until the middle of May, I was keeping up a regular schedule of 2-3 posts a week over at The Viral Garden.   But since the middle of May, I have left 4 posts there.  Notice that the above SiteMeter graph reflects this, as traffic fell sharply in May, and again in June, before settling down to roughly half the traffic levels it was up till May.  This is exactly what you would expect, volume of posts fell sharply starting in May, and the traffic did as well.

So again, how is the number of feed readers steadily RISING, according to FeedBurner?  Does that make any sense?

These are just two examples, but I think it points to a larger problem: Too many of the numbers being used to measure social media seem to be way off.  And I think that because so many of these numbers are inaccurate, it is keeping more companies from investing more dollars in social media efforts.  Because if they don’t know to accurately measure how many people are seeing their message, or following them, or reading their content, or interacting with them, how can they justify spending dollars on ghosts?

They can’t.  And we shouldn’t expect them to.  We need better numbers, and until we get them, social media strategists such as myself need to keep pushing for them, and explain to our clients where the shortcomings are.

We can do MUCH better and the future of this industry depends on us finding a way to do so.

by

#Blogchat 10-10-10 with @GrantGriffiths Recap

Last nite @GrantGriffiths from Headway Themes joined us for the 1st ever sponsored #Blogchat.  Headway is a premium blog theme, and the topic for last nite’s #Blogchat was How to Choose a Blog Theme/Template.

The discussion was broken into two areas; the 1st 30 minutes or so was devoted to a general discussion of what to look for when picking a blog theme/template.  The second 30 minutes focused on the difference between free blog themes, and premium ones.  Here’s some of the main points that we covered:

When picking a theme, look for the following features:

1 – Themes should be simple, with fonts and sizes easily readable for all ages – @abbisiler

2 – Consider your audience and what features would appeal to them – @prosperitygal

3 – Does the theme allow your content to be easily shared on social sites? – @galactic

4 – When picking a theme, remember that a light background for the text will make it easier for printing your posts – @abbisiler

5 – Look for themes that are SEO friendly, that have good code, and that offer support – @GrantGriffiths

6 – A reader-friendly layout is more important than cutesy colors and designs – @sueyoungmedia

7 – Also consider how much coding you’ll need to know to modify the theme, is it compatible with WordPress 3.0 and widget ready? – @GrantGriffiths

8 –  @BCarroll7 asked about going with a 2 or 3-column theme.  Seemed most people preferred 2-columns as they are less cluttered and have less code involved.

Next we moved to a discussion of free vs premium themes.  Most people were of the mindset that if you can afford it and are serious about your blog, that it’s worth the money to invest in a premium theme, and most are under $100 for a one-time fee.  Obviously since Grant is with Headway, it was a very popular choice among #Blogchat participants as a premium theme.  Others that were mentioned repeatedly included Thesis (this site runs on Thesis) as well as Genesis and Woo.

My take is this: If your blog is just for your own personal enjoyment, then you will likely be just fine with a free theme.  But if you are using your blog for business or think you might at some point, I would invest in a premium theme.

Now as you might expect, the majority of the rest of the #Blogchat discussion focused on premium themes, and especially the Headway Theme.  That was by design, as I wanted to make sure that there was a section of #Blogchat where y’all could learn more about Headway, since Grant was sponsoring #Blogchat last nite.

And as I said above, this site runs on Thesis.  My personal take on Thesis is this:  It’s a very good theme.  For me, the big problem I have with Thesis is the upgrading process.  Even though Thesis offers from lifetime upgrades, the upgrading process involves going into your site’s file structure and manually adding some files, removing others, changing the permissions on some, etc.  IOW, if you are an idiot like me, there’s about 100 opportunities to break something during the upgrade process.  That’s why I am stuck on Thesis 1.5, when I think the latest version is 1.8.  I am scared to upgrade because I am afraid I will break something.

One thing I loved hearing from Grant was that Headway will offer automatic upgrading with it’s new 2.0 version coming out later this month.  That alone will guarantee that I will give it a closer look.  From everything I heard last nite, it seems like Headway is better if you want to do less coding (which is most of us), and I think Thesis is better if you are a total coding geek and love getting your hands dirty.  That’s just what I think based on using Thesis, plus talking to everyone last nite.

Grant was kind enough to also offer us a 20% discount off Headway for the next 2 days.  The regular price for Headway is $87 for a personal license, and $164 for a developer license.  If you want to use the discount, go to this link and use code ‘hwblogchat’.

Thanks again to Grant for joining us last nite.  He did a great job, and everyone seemed to love the topic and what they learned.  Last nite was the first attempt at a sponsored #Blogchat, and if you would like to learn more about how you could sponsor a future #Blogchat, click here.  If you have any questions, including how much a #Blogchat sponsorship would cost, please email me.

And finally, if you have ANY comments/suggestions/ideas about last nite’s #Blogchat, please either leave me a comment here, or email me.  I definitely want to hear your feedback on having a sponsor, and have already taken some of your comments into consideration for how future sponsors will be handled.

by

Join us this Sunday to discuss How to Choose a Blog Template at #Blogchat!

I’m proud to announce that this Sunday will mark the 1st sponsored #Blogchat!  Joining us will be Grant Griffiths, who is the co-founder of the Headway premium blog theme.  Grant will be discussing How to Choose a Blog Template with us, and he’ll also be answering our questions about the Headway Theme.

Here’s how the format for this #Blogchat will run:

1 – We’ll start at our normal time of 8:00 PM Central.  For the 1st 30 mins, we’ll be talking about the elements and features that you should be looking for when choosing a blog theme/template.  So if you are a new blogger that’s ready to start blogging, this is probably where you will want to go for getting the most help.

2 – At 8:30 PM, we’ll shift the conversation to discussing if you should choose a free or premium template.  This is where you should probably go if you have any questions about Headway in particular.  Grant will be happy to help explain Headway’s many features and answer any questions you have about Headway.  BTW if you are interested in the Headway theme then it might be a good idea to check it out on their website before #Blogchat starts, then you can ask Grant any specific questions you have when you get to #Blogchat.  And we’ll both help answer any questions about you might have about whether you should be going with a free or premium theme.

So if you have general questions about picking a blog theme/template, you’ll probably want to pay more attention to the 8:00-8:30 PM block.  If you have more specific questions about free vs premium themes and especially about Headway, then you’ll want to pay more attention to the 8:30-9:00 PM slot.  And as we always do, we’ll be chatting after 9:00PM for a bit, I just know that some of you have to leave at 9:00PM.

Sound good?  If you have any questions, please leave a comment or email me.   As I said this will be the first sponsored #Blogchat, but I think you can see that the topics and format should be consistent with what you’ve seen every week from #Blogchat.  BTW if your company or organization would like to sponsor a future #Blogchat, you can learn more about #Blogchat sponsorships here.

Thanks guys, see you Sunday at 8pm Central!

by

Ford begins promoting 3rd-party content via Promoted Tweets

This is interesting!  Last week’s post with Ford CMO Jim Farley’s statements about how Ford has seen massive cost savings via Social Media proved to be quite popular.  In fact I believe it’s the most RTed post I’ve ever written.

Well last Thursday after publishing the post, Ford’s Scott Monty contacted me and said that Ford wanted to use my tweet as a Promoted Tweet on Twitter!  He explained that Ford is going to begin experimenting with using content from customers and 3rd party sources as Promoted Tweets, instead of just promoting its own tweets and content.  Apparently my tweet was the first one from a 3rd party source that they had used as a Promoted Tweet.

I think that’s a pretty damn gutsy move on Ford’s part.  And if Ford is willing to start promoting non-company content, it suggests to me that the company must be very satisfied with the results it has seen from previous social media efforts, to be willing to spend money promoting 3rd party content.

Why would Ford do this?  Well would you rather hear Ford say how amazing it is, or would you rather hear what a Ford customer has to say?  And even though I am not currently a Ford customer, Ford using my tweet as a Promoted Tweet is very innovative and of course I wanted to share it with you.  So there’s additional coverage for Ford.

So what were the results?  I asked Ford for the results and Brian shared these numbers with me from Ford promoting my tweet:

Impressions – 411

Clickthroughs – 26

ReTweets – 8

Clickthrough Rate – 6.3%

Engagement Rate – 8.27%

Now here’s how that clickthrough rate compares with other forms of online advertising/promotion:

Email – 5.9%

Google AdWords – 2%

Banner Ads – 0.2%

So the 6.3% clickthrough for this Promoted Tweet is higher than the avg clickthroughs for email, Google AdWords, and Banner Ads.  Now granted, this is a REALLY small sample, but the numbers suggest that the clickthrough rate for Promoted Tweets should be comparable to email, if not better in some cases.  I also think this could suggest that Twitter users are more engaged and as such, Promoted Tweets could be a real business driver for Twitter moving forward.

Now those 26 clicks accounted for about 3% of my traffic on Friday, so it wasn’t a huge bump for me.  Then again, Friday saw 754 vistiors here thanks to the popularity of the post with Jim’s video.  So on a normal day, 26 extra visitors would be 7-10% of my traffic.  So it’s a bit more significant.

One thing I found interesting was that Brian and Scott told me beforehand that they were going to buy the Promoted Tweet for my tweet on Friday, and told me the keywords they had purchased.  Promoted Tweets work by showing up as the top search result when you search for the purchased keywords, and they are clearly marked as a Promoted Tweet.  On Friday I searched several times with the keywords Ford had purchased to see if I could get the Promoted Tweet to show up in search results, and I couldn’t.  So not sure how Twitter decides to insert the Promoted Tweets into search results.

BTW for the record, Twitter asked Ford to get my permission to use my tweet as a Promoted Tweet.

What do y’all think of Ford using content from its customers/other sources as Promoted Tweets instead of or in addition to its own?  Will we begin to see more companies doing this, and if you were exposed to Promoted Tweets, would you rather have them come from the company, or its customers?

UPDATE: Just to clarify, Ford didn’t pay me a penny to use my tweet as a Promoted Tweet.