MackCollier.com

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Teaching a Brontosaurus to run; My review of #DellCAP


Last Monday, as the driver approached Round Rock and Dell’s HQs, he informed me that “I’ll be taking you to Building #1.  That’s where Michael Dell is!”  Unfortunately, Michael was out of the country last week, so I didn’t get a chance to meet him.

However, when we arrived at ‘Dell’s campus’, the driver explained that there were 37 buildings.  That when it hit me; whatever good works Dell is hoping to accomplish via social media will have to permeate and take hold in all 37 buildings.  And that’s just in the world HQs, Dell has offices in several other cities around the world.  That just drove home the enormity of a company as large as Dell trying to introduce a ‘new’ way of communicating with customers, and via a new set of channels.

Yet Dell has been using social media to communicate with its customers for at least 4 years now.  That effort took a very brave step forward last week, when Dell hosted its first CAP Days.  CAP stands for Customer Advisory Panel, and you can get more background on the event here, which was spread out over 2 days, involving Dell interacting directly with 30 of its most passionate customers.  I was hired by Dell to help them plan the event, and moderate it both days.  I wanted to share some of what I learned from being involved in the project.

Prior to the event, Dell sent out surveys to all 30 participants to try to get a better feel for what issues were most important to them.  These results would then play a large role in determining the structure of the topics to be covered for both days.  On the first day, Dell met with 15 customers that had had a negative experience with Dell’s products or service (or both), and had used social media to voice their displeasure.  Since customer service had been a problem area for several of the participants, it dominated discussion during the day.  At first, many of the participants were able to share their negative experiences, or ‘vent’ about what had happened to them.  Then later in the day, the discussion turned toward companies that provided exceptional customer service, and ideas were given for how Dell could improve their own efforts.

I noticed two things that surprised me a bit, from both the customers, and Dell employees, during the first day of CAP.

Several times I heard the customers explain that even though they had been involved in a negative experience with Dell, that they wanted to see Dell succeed, and they were happy to be involved with #DellCAP.  One participant even asked me at one point ‘So did Dell think we were going to be the antagonists?’  I’m not sure Dell knew what to expect, but I think they were thrilled with the honest and helpful information they got from the participants.

And on the Dell side, I was surprised a bit that there was very little ‘PR speak’ (almost none, actually), and that the employees present at each session, were honestly listening and processing what the customers were telling them.  I lost count how many times I heard a Dell employee say “Ok so based on what you’ve told us so far, what if we tried to do this? Would that work for you?”  It showed the customers that Dell was listening, and taking their problems seriously.

The second day featured 15 or so Dell evangelists, and 3 hours of the most enjoyable conversations I have ever had in the last 5 years of being involved in social media.  Picture this: I got to lead a discussion on branding, marketing, customer evangelism, and social media with Dell’s Chief Marketing Officer Erin Nelson, Michelle Brigman; Senior Manager of Customer Experience for Dell, social media geniuses like Liz Strauss, Susan Beebe and Connie Bensen, and a dozen or so Dell evangelists.  It was an amazing experience, and possibly the highlight of the week for me.

Also, the morning sessions perfectly illustrated the value that such an event can hold for companies.  A portion of the morning session on Day Two focused on customer service (This had been a VERY hot topic during Day One’s chats as well).  The general sentiment being expressed by the #dellCAP participants was that they loved Dell’s products, but the customer service, especially when it was outsourced to another country, was letting them down.  Dell’s participants explained that the company purposely outsourced a good deal of customer support overseas for consumer products, in order to keep the price of the laptops and desktops lower.  Dell seemed to be telling the participants that this was a conscious choice because they believed that most customers weren’t willing to pay higher prices just to get better service.

But the participants mostly agreed that they WOULD be willing to pay more for a desktop or laptop, if they knew they would receive exceptional customer service if they had a problem with it.  This seemed to be a marketing disconnect for Dell, and the feedback from #DellCAP participants was no doubt invaluable to the company.

And in the end, I think the true value for Dell came from them getting a chance to interact directly with their customers.  Honestly, I was a bit worried that Dell might be using this as a one-off event to simply ‘build some buzz’ online.  But I noticed as soon as the sessions started on the first day that Dell’s participants were listening, and then probing the #DellCAP participants with follow-up questions, based on the feedback they were getting from them.  And of course, when Dell’s CMO Erin Nelson kicked off the second day, that removed any doubts as to whether or not the C-Suite was taking this initiative seriously.

I’ve always said that perhaps the smartest thing a big company can do is connect directly with its most passionate online customers, and Dell did exactly that with #DellCAP.  I was beyond excited to be a part of it, and cannot wait to see what the next steps are.

BTW, this event has generated a ton of feedback on blogs, etc.  I wanted to close by listing some of these posts and videos, so you can see for yourself what everyone thought.  And if you were at #DellCAP, what did you think?  What did you like, what did you dislike?  What would you like to see Dell do moving forward?

Dave’s review of #DellCAP Day One for Fast Company

Allen’s review of #DellCAP Day One

Lauren’s video review of #DellCAP Day One

Vance Morton’s review of #DellCAP on Direct2Dell

Sarah’s #DellCAP Day Two review

Liz Strauss’ #DellCAP Day Two review

Susan’s #DellCAP Day Two review

Dell’s Flickr sets of #DellCap Day One, and Day Two

BTW, each #DellCAP session was ‘visually recorded’ by the fantabulous Sunni Brown.  Dell will be sending us digital copies of the work she created during #DellCAP, but this shot from Susan gives you an idea of her work

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Does your company need a social media evangelist? Why not hire a customer?

That’s exactly what Bruce’s Yams did.  If you follow @MissDestructo on Twitter, you know she is kinda crazy about Bruce’s Yams (in much the same way I am kinda crazy about Dr Pepper, so I don’t judge).  Well her friends on Twitter noticed this, and thought she would be the perfect candidate to work for the company!  So much so that they started a campaign to get Bruce’s attention and hire the gal!

And it worked. Amber (@MissDestructo’s secret identity) was contacted by Bruce’s Yams about handling their social media presences, and before you know it, Bruce’s Yams was on Twitter, managed by @MissDestructo.  Amber created a video explaining how this all came about:

My Bruce’s Yams Social Media Story. from Miss Destructo on Vimeo.

After watching the video and checking out the Bruce’s account on Twitter, I noticed something very important.  Amber is speaking as a ‘real-person’, and a fan of Bruce’s Yams first, and a marketer second.  This is big, because so many companies turn their social media efforts over to employees that are marketers trying to sound like real people.  Amber’s approach is much more personable, and as such, it makes her much more effective in actually connecting with customers.  Thanks to hiring Amber, Bruces is now speaking in a voice that’s much easier for the average customer to hear, and connect with.  Because it sounds like their voice, not the voice of a marketer trying to use Twitter to push links to press releases from the company’s website.  We respond better to messages that are spoken in a voice we can relate to, and understand.

So if your company is looking to create social media presences on certain sites or using certain social media tools, doesn’t reaching out to an existing evangelist that’s already an expert in using that tool, make a lotta sense?  Personally, I think it’s much easier to take an existing customer evangelist that’s an expert on Twitter, and teach them the business side, than it is to take an existing employee, and teach them how to use Twitter (for example) as an effective communication tool.

PS: If Bruce’s Yams had turned its Twitter presence over to an internal employee, and the company had created a video to promote its Twitter account, think it would have looked like Amber’s?

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Are you tracking your blog’s stats in real-time?

A fair number of you probably use Google Analytics for your blog’s stats.  GA is great for tracking information about your blog, and the trends that emerge from users interacting with your content.

But GA doesn’t give you real-time information on your blog.  For example, let’s say your blog averages 10 visitors an hour.  But let’s also assume that in the first 15 minutes of this hour, it’s suddenly gotten 237 visitors.

Obviously, something has happened to trigger that huge spike in traffic.  But if you are only using Google Analytics to track your blog’s stats, it will at best be a few hours before you can find out what is happening NOW to trigger a traffic spike.

This is where you really need a way to track your blog’s statistics in real-time.  There are several sites that will track your blog’s stats in real-time, for free.  I use Site Meter, and it installs almost exactly like Google Analytics does, you simply sign up for a free account, and add a small bit of code to your blog’s template, and you are done.

But the BIG reason why I love Site Meter, because it shows me what sites/sources are SENDING traffic to my site.  Here’s an example:

That’s a screenshot of the last 20 visitors here.  Now I’m not getting as much traffic so far today (mainly because I haven’t posted since Monday), but I can quickly see that those circled visitors all came from the same source.  That source ended up being a link that a Twitter user shared with his followers:

Notice that Tom linked to my post here, but didn’t mention me in the tweet.  So unless I was actively checking my referral traffic via SiteMeter, I would have probably never caught this.  And what’s worse, I checked Tom’s Twitter profile and found out he was following me and I was NOT following him!  So I quickly remedied that, and left this tweet:

So this is a quick example of the importance of checking your referral traffic via SiteMeter.  Here are some of the options I use the most:


Those options can give you a ton of real-time information about your visitors.  For example, if you just wrote a post about Kodak’s social media efforts, you can click on Details and it will show you if any of your recent visitors are coming from Kodak.com.  Or if you are attending an event in Tulsa, Oklahoma, you can use Location to see how many people from Tulsa are checking out your site.  Or Outclicks is a good one to see how visitors left your site.  If you just wrote a post asking visitors to subscribe, and you see most of the recent visitors are leaving via the link to subscribe via Feedburner, that’s a good thing!

So while I think Google Analytics is invaluable in tracking your blog’s statistics, for real-time information, I use SiteMeter.  Now you don’t have to use SiteMeter, there are other similar free services such as StatCounter, that more or less give you the same information.

Any other fans of SiteMeter?  Or StatCounter?  What do you use to get real-time information on your blog’s visitors?

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The one simple change that boosted my email subscribers by 650%

The prime real estate on your blog is the area called ‘above the fold’.  This is the area of the blog you see when you arrive there.  If you have to scroll down your blog to find something, it is considered ‘below the fold’.

As a result, you want to think carefully about the content that’s ‘above the fold’ on your blog, because there’s no guarantee that a visitor will scroll down your blog.  And simply put, content that’s above the fold is more likely to be viewed/clicked on than if it is below the fold.

To illustrate this point, I recently moved the area for my email subscriptions, and feed subscriptions via RSS.  Up until May 15th, the ‘Mack Live’ section was at the top of the 1st sidebar, with the ‘Subscribe by Email’ graphic just underneath that, so that a visitor would actually have to scroll down to fill out the form.  The area to subscribe via RSS was under it, completely below the fold.

So on May 16th, I decided to move both the email and RSS feed subscription areas to the TOP of the blog, or above the fold.  Here’s the results:

In the 22 days since moving the email subscription form to the top of the blog, I’ve gained 45 email subscribers.  To put that into perspective, it took me 150 days, from December 17th 2009, to May 15th 2010, to gain 45 email subscribers when the form was BELOW the fold.  And for the 22 days prior to the move, I added a mere 6 email subscribers, thus the 650% increase in email subscribers by moving the email subscription form above the fold.  Now I did start asking for readers to subscribe via email during my Twitter experiment for about a week in the posts, but that started on the 17th of last month.  I moved the email subscriber box up on the 16th, and picked up 3 new email subscribers that day, where I had picked up only 4 in the previous 15 days.

As for new subscribers via RSS, according to Feedburner, that’s increased by roughly 20% since the 16th.  And email subscribers are factored into that growth.

This again, shows the value of tinkering with your blog, or ABT – Always Be Testing.  And it shows that you need to consider the layout of your blog, where you put your calls to action, and the type of calls to action they are.  For example, at the top of the far right sidebar, I have an area where you can click to get a quote on consulting services.  I almost never get any clicks here, even though the email subscription form to its left is clicked often.  These are obviously very different calls to action, but in about a week I am going to swap the two, and the track the differences I see in both.  In theory, I would think the far right sidebar would be a better place to have the ‘Get a Quote’ section, since it’s how your eye tracks before it leaves a page, but I don’t know for sure.  So I’ll test it.

You should too.  Look at your blog, especially if it’s a business blog, and notice where your calls to action are.  I am constantly hearing from bloggers that they want more subscribers, and in most cases, they either don’t have a way for readers to subscribe to their feed, or if they do, it’s buried below the fold.  Here’s a quick and dirty way to improve your blog’s performance based on the position of your calls to action:

1 – Identify the key metrics you are tracking to determine your blog’s success.  It could be subscribers, or comments, or sales generated.

2 – Identify the calls to action associated with the metrics you track.  And this might be a good time to get some, if you don’t have any.

3 – Note the location of those calls to action on your blog.  If they are below the fold, that means a lot of people probably aren’t seeing them at all, and they should be above the fold.

But above all else, TINKER with your blog.  This is how you learn, by breaking stuff.

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How to set up Google Alerts for your business or company in 5 minutes!

If your company is looking for advice on getting started with social media, one of the first things you will likely hear is to start monitoring your company and brand.  And you’ll probably hear that you should ‘Set up Google Alerts for company and business mentions’.

But what if you have no idea what that means?  Then read on, as I’ll walk you through what is a very simple, but very beneficial process for your business.

First, you can set up Google Alerts through several different search sources, but for the purposes of this post, I wanted to focus on Google Blog Search.  If you click on that link, you’ll be taken to a page that looks very similar to this:

Now, I want to search just for mentions of my name, so I search for “Mack Collier”.  This is a very fundamental search tip, but by putting Mack Collier in quotation marks, Google Blog Search will give me results that include the exact phrase ‘Mack Collier’.  Where if I searched for simply Mack Collier, it would show me all results that included the words ‘Mack’ and ‘Collier’.  So if you know you want to search for an exact phrase, put the query in quotation marks, and you’ll get much better results.  Here’s what the screen looks like now:

That might be a bit hard to see, but notice that at the very top of the results, Google adds this site, as well as my other blog, The Viral Garden!  But if you scroll down to the end of the first page of results, you find this:

Ah ha!  Now we’re cookin’!  That gives me the option to take those results and create an email alert (This is normally what people mean by a ‘Google Alert’) for the results, or I can search Google News for the same term, add a blog search gadget to my Google homepage, or (and this is the one I like), subscribe to the results via Google Reader.

Let’s first look at creating an email alert for this term, when I click on Create an email alert for “Mack Collier”, I see this:

On the right, you see a box with 5 different input windows.

The first is for the term you want to create the alert for.

The second box is a dropdown menu where you select the source you want the results to come from.  The choices are ‘Everything’, ‘News’, ‘Blogs’, ‘Video’, and ‘Discussions’.

The third box is another dropdown menu where you tell Google how often you want it to email you results.  Your options are ‘As it happens’, ‘Once a day’, and ‘Once a week’.

The fourth box is where you set the length of the email, and your options are 10 or 50 results.  Keep in mind that if you are getting a decent amount of results for your search term, you may need to get more frequent email updates in order to catch all the results.  For example, if you want to set an email alert for the term ‘iPad’, and you only want to see 10 results per email AND you only want to get one email a week, well you are going to miss a LOT of results.

The fifth and final box is where you specify what email address you want the results set to, or if you want them set to a feed.  We’ll cover subbing to results via a feed in a moment.

Set the options you want, and you’ve just created your first Google email alert!  Piece of cake, right?  At first, you’ll probably start out by just searching for your company name.  But quickly, you’ll probably want to branch out and create email alerts for specific products you sell, or maybe key executives.  Then you might want to start getting alerts for your competitors as well.

Then one day you realize your inbox is under attack from all these freakin’ email alerts!!!

Is there a better way?  I think so, it’s called subscribing to these results via feed.

So how do you do that?  First, sign up for Google Reader (which is free, but you’ll need a gmail account, which is also free).

Now remember when we searched for “Mack Collier”, and one of the options at the bottom of the page was ‘Subscribe to a blog feed for “Mack Collier” in Google Reader’?  That’s what we want to do now, instead of creating an email alert.  What this will do is send the results for the term “Mack Collier” directly to my Google Reader, as they happen.

When I click on ‘Subscribe to a blog feed for “Mack Collier”‘, the search results then are shown in Google Reader, and reader asks me if I want to subscribe to these results:

That’s it!  Then as new results come in for that search terms, the feed results in Google Reader will show up in bold.  Here’s a screenshot of my Reader and some of the blogs I am subscribed to:

Note that some of the feeds are in bold, and these have a number after them. Such as Servant of Chaos (2).  That tells me that since Servant of Chaos is in bold, that there are new entries from that blog that I haven’t read yet.  And the (2) tells me that there are 2 posts that I haven’t read yet.

Once you become familiar with Reader you’ll really love it, I think.  You can not only have your alerts sent there, but of course you can subscribe to blogs and read them there as well.

Now as a monitoring tool for your company, what type of alerts should you set up?  I think your focus should be on three areas:

1 – Company-centric search terms.  Such as your company name, prominent products and brands, as well as key executives.

2 – Competitor-centric search terms.  Same as above, but for your top 2-3 direct competitors.

3 – Industry-specific terms.  Use this as a way to get a sense of trends in your industry.

Also keep in mind that with Reader, you can create separate folders for each of these areas, in order to better organize your efforts.

Does this post help?  I just know that so often we mention ‘oh just set up Google Alerts’, but to companies that are new to all this social media stuff, they may have no idea what a Google Alert is, or how to set one up.

So now you do 😉

BTW I am constantly writing Social Media How-To posts like this, so if you’d like to make sure you always get my updates, please consider subscribing!  Thank you!

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Overcoming the curse of Hi-Res Blogging

Kathy Sierra has often talked about the idea of Hi-Res learning.  The idea being, as you learn more about a topic, you begin to see and notice things that people that are new to the topic, overlook.  For example, if you are an architect, you notice the lines of a building, the characteristics that define the structure in certain ways.  While all I notice are 4 walls and a roof.

And after almost 5 years, I think I could qualify myself as a ‘hi-res blogger’.  But that’s often a problem for me, and the actual blogging process is much more difficult for me than it was when I started.  The reason why is that I now KNOW what a good post and a good post title should look like.  I know (usually) when a post I’ve written will be valuable to the reader, and when it might not be.  So I am finding that the biggest problem I have in blogging isn’t writer’s block, it’s in writing posts that are ‘good enough’ and that I feel will be valuable to you guys.  So often I get an idea for a post, but once I start fleshing out the post, I realize that I can’t make it worth your time, so I scrap it.

But I’m trying to get better about fighting through this and actually making drafts work, instead of abandoning them.  Since some of you might be facing the same roadblocks, I decided to share what has worked for me.

1 – Put a new spin on an old idea.  A couple of weeks ago I wrote this post on why Lady Gaga has fans, and you don’t.  The post has gotten more RTs than any post I’ve ever written here, and it easily has the most views of any post I’ve written in the last month, and is in the Top 5 for all-time here.  And I came THIS close to not publishing it.  The actual ideas in that post are ones that I’ve written about several times.  In fact, the first dozen or so posts I wrote for The Viral Garden back in early 2006 focused on the same concepts.  I knew these were smart ideas, but when I blogged about them previously, they got a polite golf-clap of a response.

But by attaching the ultra-popular Lady Gaga to the ideas, and tying it into the rockstar metaphor of customers/fans, the idea took off.  Gaga’s name in the title got people’s attention, and that got them to pay attention to the ideas.  And I got more compliments on that post that any other in the last few weeks.  So I guess another lesson here is, don’t give up on an idea whose time has come.

2 – Pull back the curtain.  One of the things I love doing is sharing with you what I am learning here from my own blog.  I do this because I think it has value for you, PLUS, it communicates the point that even experienced bloggers don’t have all the answers.  This was exactly why I wanted to share the results of my one-day Twitter experiment with you, and then the results for the entire week.  And yes, I get that a lot of bloggers don’t like to share their numbers.  Look, I get that many bloggers have bigger numbers that I do. Who cares?  What’s important to me is, can I share my numbers with YOU, and help you improve your own blogging efforts?  If I think the answer is yes, I run with it.

3 – Let your readers bail you out.  This is one of the best blogging lessons I ever learned.  Often, I will have an idea for a post, and realize that I’m not confident enough in the issue to take a stand on either side.  If this is the case, instead of scrapping the post till I can, I will try to post it and ask my readers what THEY think.  Great way to let your readers claim ownership over the content of your blog AND their ideas are usually better than any you could have come up with.  At least they are if your readers are as smart as you guys 😉

4 – Let a popular post breathe. Ideally, I would have a new post up every day from Monday through Friday.  But that’s REALLY tough for me to do.  And sometimes when Wednesday morning comes around (like today), and it’s 8 am and I am trying to get up a post for the day, I’ll notice something.  That post from Tuesday has sparked a vibrant conversation and is still getting comments and RTs.  So if I don’t have a great post idea for Wednesday, then wait till Thursday to post again, and do your best to keep the conversation flowing on that post from Wednesday.

5 – Sometimes you just have to post it.  How often has this happened to you; The post you spend a week carefully crafting gets almost no response, but the post you pecked out in 5 mins after waking up at 3am from insomnia, THAT thing gets 30 comments.  Sometimes we overthink this blogging stuff.  I often do my best writing after midnight, and I think part of the reason why is I just let the words flow out and don’t worry so much about the ‘filters’ that they pass through.  The chips fall where they may, and a lot of my best blogging work has come about this way.

But for you, which is your bigger problem; writer’s block, or not writing posts that are ‘good enough’ for your readers?  For me, it’s the latter, I can get post ideas, but I often struggle to turn those ideas into something that I think has value for y’all.

Which is your bigger problem area?

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The next evolution of social media for business is…

Two weeks from today I’ll be at Dell’s world headquarters in Round Rock, Texas. (Disclosure: Dell is a client) Part of the reason why I’ll be there will be to moderate and help facilitate an event called CAP Days.  CAP stands for Customer Advisory Panel, and on the 15th and 17th, Dell will be bringing in 30 of its most passionate customers, 15 of them on the 15th, and another 15 of them on the 17th.  These are customers that are actively engaged in social media, whether it’s as bloggers, or on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or other sites.  On both days, Dell will be meeting with these customers during sessions that will run throughout the day in an effort to get to know them, and learn more about their opinions of Dell.

Here’s the twist that makes this event so interesting to me; The 15 customers Dell will meet on the 15th are customers that have issues with Dell, and want to voice those issues to the company.  The 15 customers Dell will meet on the 17th are evangelists of the company.  So over the course of 2 days, Dell will be meeting with 30 of its most passionate customers, from both ends of the spectrum.  I think this event is also an example of the next evolution of social media for companies.

Connecting with customers to improve both product and marketing development.

If you think about it, this is a natural progression of social media usage for a company.  They might start out blogging, maybe using Facebook, primarily as tools to ‘get their message out’.  But along the way, they begin to interact with customers, and see the value in those interactions.  Then maybe they’ll start using Twitter and encourage their employees to as well.  Maybe more of their employees will start blogging, or individual departments/areas of the business will.

Eventually, and simply as a byproduct of being comfortable using these tools to interact with customers, the company will want to reach out directly to their customers in an effort to better understand them.  This is where I think the ‘magic’ starts to happen, because when the company starts making a sincere effort to connect with the customer via social media, they get a much better understanding of where the customer is coming from.  And vice versa, the customer begins to better understand the company, which means both sides lower their ‘guard’ a bit, and more open communication is the result.  The customers begin to see their actual fingerprints on the company’s marketing and communication efforts, which will make them far more effective.

I think this is a natural progression of how you’ll see companies, especially big companies such as Dell, using social media.  I also think if a company can reach this point in their social media usage, that they’ll have reached the point where they can see huge improvements to their product development, and marketing efficiencies.  Simply connecting with customers and communicating to them that you WANT to connect with them, will go a long way toward lowering the communication barriers between both groups.

So I’m pretty excited to be involved in CAP Days, and hope to see more examples in the coming months of companies trying to use social media to establish deeper connections with their customers.  BTW if you will be in the Austin area next month, Dell will be having a tweetup/meetup on the 16th.  I’ll be there, as will several members of Dell’s team that are putting CAP Days on, and hopefully some of the CAP Days participants as well.  I don’t believe the location and time have been nailed down, so make sure you are following Richard, Lionel and Vance on Twitter to get the latest updates!  Hope to see you there!

Pic via Flickr user Lance Shields

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Here’s how you can help me

If you’ve read my writings for any amount of time, you know I love the rockstar metaphor as it applies to how companies can have fans as opposed to customers.  And I’m a big fan of how @amandapalmer connects with her fans and leverages those connections to grow her brand.  Yesterday I found this interview with her, and noted this section where she talks about musicians making money:

I think asking for money is generally considered shameful in the art and music world; it has been for ages. Art has this untouchable romanticism constructed around it; this cultural ideal about artists and how they shouldn’t touch money because it strips away the integrity of their art. But that’s obviously bullshit, especially if you look throughout history and see that artists have ALWAYS needed to fund themselves and their work creatively, sneakily, with gusto and with shamelessness. The only mistake I think I’ve made is not making the connection sooner. I think I was still living in the delusion back when we signed. Living inside this idea that we, as major-label-artists, would get to live on the Special Cloud of Art without Commerce. If I’d been thinking ahead, I would have been training and educating our audience from the very start to support us directly.

In reading that, do you see any parallels to bloggers/etc making money off social media? I sure do.  I think this is one of the biggest roadblocks for many of us that are active in social media: The fear of self-promotion.  Just in discussing the results of last week’s Twitter engagement experiment with others, so many people have told me that they never thought to tweet their new posts to Twitter, or that they could never do it more than once.

Folks I was tweeting a link to each day’s post 4-5 times every day on Twitter.  Not one person said a word about it.  Now I’m not saying that we should all suddenly turn into pimp machines for our content and brands, but I do think we need to get over some of our hangups about self-promotion.  We need to learn to ask for help, because most times our readers and the friends we have connected with WANT to help us.

So I want to practice what I preach, and do that here.  Here are some ways that you can help me, and I would really appreciate if you did:

1 – Hire me to help you with your social media efforts.  Or if you don’t need help right now, refer me to a friend or colleague that does.  If you need help creating and executing a comprehensive social media strategy, launching a blog or Twitter presence, or just need someone to look over your shoulder from time to time, I can help.  No matter how much help you need, or how little your budget is, I can find a way to work with you.  If you do, please email me at [email protected].

2 – If you’ve been thinking about starting a blog, ‘Just Do It’.  My friend Lisa Petrilli finally pulled the trigger on her blog last week, and her results have been nothing short of amazing.  In fact, her very personal post from today about asking a stranger for help partially inspired this post.

3 – When you learn something, share it with us. Every time I write a post where I share this blog’s stats, or where I talk openly about my prices, I get two types of reactions.  The first group is grateful that I gave them a ‘behind the scenes’ look at exactly what I did, and that it helped them understand the process.  The second group is stunned that I ‘shared the numbers’, and wonder if I made a mistake in doing so.  Guys, I understand completely that a lot of people looked at my posts from last week and thought ‘Whoa!  So Mack’s only getting that many visitors a day? I get more than that!’  Of course they do, so what?  If sharing my stats with you helps you understand exactly what I did AND helps you with YOUR blogging efforts, then I could care less who knows what my numbers are.  I’d rather be spending my time helping you, than worrying over who might have more visitors than I do.

4 – If you get value from my posts, please share them with others.  You can do this in two ways.  The first is by simply sharing the content itself with others, by forwarding it, RTing it to your Twitter network, or even emailing the posts to friends.  The second is by taking what you’ve learned here, and using it to help your own blogging efforts.  This is what excites me, if I can help you become a better blogger or better use social media to create value for others.

5 – Start the next #blogchat.  This week we had over 3,000 tweets and over 350 active contributors to #blogchat.  Both marks were records, almost doubling the previous marks.  Starting #blogchat has been one of the most rewarding endeavors of my social media career.  Think about some ways that you could create something that can help others, and run with it.  Then tell me about your efforts so I can tweet it to my friends 😉

6 – If you are ever at an event where I am attending/speaking, please find me.  Let me know that you read my posts, so I can shake your hand and tell you how grateful I am for you.  I’m dead serious here.

Those are some ways that you can help me.  Actually, there’s one more way you can help me: You can write this same post on YOUR blog. Tell your readers how they can help you, and my guess is they will be more than happy to.

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How Twitter increased my blog’s traffic by 300% in one week

As I blogged about on Tuesday, last Monday I spent a lot of time on Twitter, in an effort to see if my increased activity there, would boost traffic and engagement here.  I was very encouraged by the results I saw, so I decided to extend the experiment to the entire week.

Now that the week is over, I wanted to share with you what I learned.

First, I wanted to boost my activity on Twitter in two ways.  The first way was by sharing links on Twitter during the morning, from around 7am-9 or 10am each morning from Monday through Friday.  To help streamline this process, I used HootSuite to schedule tweets ahead of time, normally the day before.  Now the first time I did this was last Saturday (for Monday’s tweets), and it took almost 3 hours.  But by the end of last week, I had become better at the process, and that time was down to about 60-90 mins a day.

The second way I wanted to boost my activity on Twitter was by simply engaging in more conversations.  I have been on Twitter for 3 years now, and one constant has been that when I am on Twitter and talking to other people, I gain followers.  So along with sharing other links, I wanted to interact with others.

Now as part of sharing links, I also shared my own posts here.  Every day I would carefully schedule links to my post for that day.  On Monday, I tweeted the link to Monday’s post five times, the first was at 8am, and the fifth time was at 8pm, with 3 hour gaps inbetween.  For the rest of the week I trimmed that back to 4 times a day, and I think for this week I will try 3 a day.

Another key thing I wanted to know was, would tweeting links to OTHER people’s sites, and simply interacting on Twitter, would that alone be enough to drive traffic back here and to increase engagement.  This was difficult to track accurately, but I believe the answer is ‘yes’.  On every day I tweeted my first link to that day’s post at 8am (On Friday I did it at 9am).  But I started sharing links each day right at 7am.

What I noticed every day is that as soon as I stared sharing OTHER people’s links on Twitter, my traffic HERE went up.  Now part of that is no doubt simply a factor of people waking up and visiting blog’s more from 6am to 7am.  But on Monday (the first day of the experiment), this jump was especially pronounced, as I had 4 visitors in the 6am hour, and 38 visitors in the 7am hour, when I started sharing links.

Anyway what were the numbers?!?

Ok.  First, here’s how my blog did from May 9th-15th the week BEFORE I ramped up activity on Twitter last week:

# of posts for the week – 4

Average Traffic per day – 168 visitors

Average ReTweets per post – 59

Average Comments per post – 12

Average new Twitter followers per day – 37

Total new Email Subscribers for the week – 3

Now here’s the results from last week, and the % change:

#of posts for the week – 5 (25% increase)

Average traffic per day – 647 (285% increase)

Average ReTweets per post – 82 (39% increase)

Average Comments per post – 26 (117% increase)

Average New Twitter followers per day – 38 (2.7% increase)

Total new Email Subscribers for the week – 29 (867% increase)

Now here are some random observations:

1 – Starting on Tuesday, I began to notice that some of the bloggers I had tweeted links to on Monday and Tuesday, began to thank me publicly on Twitter, and began to RT *my* links.  No doubt part of this was their way of saying ‘Thank You’ for my RTing their posts, but also I think it helped get me on people’s radar.  When someone sees me RT a post of their’s, they probably thought ‘Hey that’s right I haven’t checked out Mack’s site in a while, let me see what he’s up to’.

2 – Once or twice a day, I noticed someone tweeting a link to a post I had written a few weeks ago, or a few months ago.  These people were normally Twitter users that I didn’t remember interacting with before.  This suggests to me that they had just discovered this site, and in doing some digging around, uncovered an older post they enjoyed, so they linked to it.

3 – I got multiple emails every day from people wanting to connect with me, either to have me write something for them, to do consulting work for them, one publisher even contacted me about possibly writing a book for them.  I would say the volume of these emails was up about 500% at least over last week.  I am sure this was a byproduct of my activity on Twitter, and by extension, the increased traffic and engagement here.

4 – Momentum is huge.  Look at the traffic for Saturday the 15th (no posts that day and a week before last week’s experiment).  I got 146 visitors that day(which over the lifetime of this blog, is pretty good for a Saturday).  Now look at the fact that I got 198 visitors yesterday, again with no new post that day.  That’s a 36% increase, and it no doubt comes from all the increased traffic and interaction here LAST week.

5 – Email subscribers increased by almost 900% last week.  But I think this was mostly because of two key changes I made her on the blog.  First, last Sunday I moved the email subscription to top of the sidebar, so it’s the first thing you see on the sidebars.  Then at the end of every post I ran last week, I asked readers to please subscribe to the blog.  I’m sure both of these tactics are a big reason for the huge jump in email subscribers.

6 – My number of Twitter followers per day only increased by one last week.  But my guess is if you have a smaller number of followers that you would see a bigger gain from employing a similar strategy.

Now let’s break down what happened each day with the traffic here:

Here’s the hourly traffic for Monday:

The hours marked 1,2,3,4 and 5 are when I linked to Monday’s post on Twitter.  Notice the traffic spike from 6am to 7am.  At 7am I started linking to OTHER people’s posts.  Then at 8am I linked to MY post for the first time that day.  Notice the 5 big spikes for the day were all during hours where I linked to my post.

Also, notice how traffic is steady from 7am – 3pm, even in the hours when I wasn’t linking to my post.  I think this is mostly because during those hours I was active on Twitter, either linking to other people’s posts, or interacting with people on Twitter.  I think that interaction drove traffic back here.

Now let’s look at Tuesday’s hourly traffic:

For Tuesday I only linked to that day’s post here 4 times (the hours that are numbered in red), still starting at 8am and ending at 8pm.

The big difference in Tuesday’s traffic versus Monday’s is that the two biggest traffic spikes did NOT come during hours where I linked to my post, but in hours where SOMEONE ELSE linked to my post.  As I mentioned above, by Tuesday some of the people I had linked to earlier in the week, started RTing my posts.  I believe the spike at 11am actually came from Jay Baer RTing my post.  This is where you begin to see momentum becoming a factor.   I think you can also see this in the fact that there wasn’t a drop in traffic at the end of the day like there was on Monday.

I forgot to take a screenshot of the hourly traffic on Weds (sorry guys!)  So let’s move on to Thurs (hours I linked to my post marked in red):

In looking at Thursday’s traffic notice two things:

1 – Again, the biggest hour for traffic was NOT when I linked to one of my posts.  For Thursday the biggest hour was 3pm when @Brett from Mashable linked to my Lady Gaga post from Weds.

2 – Notice the spikes appear a bit less pronounced.  This is mainly because traffic during the 7am-8pm hours was around 40 or more, whereas in previous days it was 20 or more.  Again, momentum seems to be coming into play here.

Finally, let’s look at Friday’s hourly traffic (hours I linked to my post marked in red):

Overall, traffic for the day was down, but hey, it’s Friday.  Notice again, five hours had spikes, and two of them weren’t hours in which I linked to my post.  So I think we can see a trend here, on Monday it took me linking to my own posts to move the traffic needle, but by the end of the week, my Twitter network was helping me RT my posts, and they were creating traffic spikes as well.  This is a big reason why starting Monday I am going to scale back to linking to my posts three times a day, instead of 4.

And finally, here’s the daily traffic for the last month, with Monday through Friday being the last five days on this graph:

That jump at the end of the graph tells the story, doesn’t it?

And I know some of you might be thinking ‘Yeah Mack, but you have 20,000 followers on Twitter, so no wonder you had great results!’  True, I have a lot of followers, and I love them to death.  But you don’t have to have as many followers as I do to get success from engaging on Twitter.  Look at what Lisa Petrilli did in her FIRST week of blogging.   Her first two posts averaged over 125 RTs and 75 comments each.  That easily bests what I saw last week AND, she ‘only’ has 2,700 or so followers.  But Lisa is very engaged with her Twitter network, so that network helped her get the word out about her posts.  Plus the fact that both posts were amazing didn’t hurt 😉

The point is, even if you only have 100 followers, you can still leverage Twitter as a tool to build your blog IF you are active on Twitter.  Active interacting with others, engaging in conversations, and linking to valuable content.

As a matter of fact, we’ll be discussing strategies for using Twitter to grow your blog at tonite’s #blogchat on Twitter.  See you there at 8pm Central?

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A big secret to social media success that most companies miss

If you think about it, a lot of the ‘best practices’ for using social media can seem completely counterintuitive to companies that are new to these tools.  Take linking, for example.  On the surface, the process sounds absurd: I’m spending time every day as a social media consultant purposely promoting what OTHER people are writing, doing and saying about social media.  And what’s worse, I’m using this as a strategy to increase my OWN exposure!

How many companies would balk if you suggested that they promote their competitors, and as a way to promote YOUR company?

But funnily enough, it works amazingly well.  Here’s why:

1 – As I am sharing valuable links, more people will start paying attention to me, and even following me as a result.  They share my links with THEIR networks as well, which means more exposure and followers for me.

2 – This means more people will want to find out more about me, and will check out my site.  This means more traffic for me, and more exposure for me.  BTW it also means that when I share a link to one of MY posts, that it will get more traffic and exposure!

3 – The people that I am linking to see that I am sending all these RTs and traffic to their site, and they are grateful.  That in turn makes them more likely to promote ME in return.  Which means more followers and more traffic and more exposure for me.

4 – By sharing valuable content, I can become a TRUSTED source of information.  This makes people more likely to promote me to their networks.  Which means even more followers and traffic and exposure for me.

And now that you’ve gotten to the end, I can give you my REAL reason for adopting this strategy: I want to create value for others.  That’s the TOP goal, because I know if I am creating value for others by pointing them toward writings by other people that HELP them with their own social media efforts, I win.  Creating value is the DIRECT goal, because I know if I will do that, I will benefit INdirectly.  And it works beautifully.

More people will follow me because I am sharing valuable links.

More people will trust me because I am sharing valuable content that OTHER people are creating.

More people will be grateful for those links, and be more likely to link TO ME.

More people will be grateful for those links, and want to check out my site.

So in the end by promoting OTHER people, even competitors, I get more followers, more links, more traffic, and more exposure.

Whole process sounds completely insane, doesn’t it? 😉

PS: I will have data to back up the effectiveness of this strategy in a post on Sunday, be watching for it!

BTW if you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing so you can have posts from this blog sent to your reader for free! Or if you would rather have posts emailed to you, please enter your email in the Feedburner email form above. I will never share your email with anyone! Thank you!