MackCollier.com

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Buzzwords Are Ruining Careers and Destroying Companies

Have you heard of the latest buzzword, ‘Emotional Intelligence’? I hadn’t either till I saw marketers using it all over Twitter last week.

What is ’emotional intelligence’?  Or rather, what other idea or thing has been co-opted by this buzzword?  As soon as I heard the term, my first thought was ‘Wait, they mean empathy, right?’

So I looked up the buzzword ’emotional intelligence’. Google tells me it means: “the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one’s emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically.”

Now apparently, this buzzword has been around for at least a decade or so, but it seems marketers are now discovering it and it is the latest ‘it’ concept that companies, and the agencies that consult them, are rushing to. Marketers do this every year or two, they rush to the latest buzzword/concept in an effort to better connect with clients and position themselves. I get why it happens, I just get irritated that we sell buzzwords over concepts. Years ago it was ‘social business’ then it was ‘digital transformation’, now it is ’emotional intelligence’. I even got some industry peers upset with me years ago when I said they needed to stop marketing the buzzword ‘social business’ and actually start educating companies on what they think the concept is, and how it would impact a business.

As we did with ‘social business’ and ‘digital transformation’, we will now start to see a landrush of consultants branding themselves as offering to teach your company how to leverage ’emotional intelligence’ into all facets of your organization. And we will no doubt begin to have many executives that will start to see all these articles about the importance of ’emotional intelligence’ popping up and think they are missing the boat if they don’t get them some of that ’emotional intelligence’!

Look, I get it. It’s a tough world out there for consultants, agencies, and the executives they want to work with. Those of us on the services side need every advantage to stand out and get noticed. It’s not enough to just be talented, I know that better than anyone (#humblebrag #buzzwordbingo). And for executives and even mid-level managers, you don’t want to miss the next wave. You see your peers suddenly talking about a buzzword like ‘digital transformation’ or ’emotional intelligence’ and you think ‘Is this something I need to know about?’

It’s not about the hype, it’s about the solution.

Seriously, if you were a VP of Marketing, which sounds more interesting to you?

A – “I’m going to show you how to improve your marketing efforts with #emotionalintelligence

B – “I’m going to show you how to improve your marketing efforts by better understanding your customers.”

 

I’ve been blogging for 15 years. I think I can safely say that I can count on one hand the number of posts I have written about ‘social business’, ‘digital transformation’ and ’emotional intelligence’. Because I think discussing concepts and solutions has more value than discussing buzzwords.

Hype or solutions. Which is more important to you?

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Understanding the Tool Doesn’t Help If You Don’t Understand Your People

I’ve often been told that I could make a nice career for myself just by advising companies how to start and maintain a blog and social media channels. I sometimes do such consulting, but not that often. One of the reasons why is because too many companies are focused on learning the social media tools moreso than learning to understand the customers they want to reach via social media. They want to talk about what is the best CMS, what’s the best way to schedule and automate content distribution. What’s the best way to tweak a tool’s settings to get more engagement and shares?

It really gets to be depressing sometimes.

Understand yourself, and your audience first, then you can focus on the tools. Too many companies focus on the tools and ignore their customers, which defeats the purpose.

Start by asking and answering these questions:

1 – Who am I creating content for?

2 – What impact will that content make on their daily lives?

3 – What action do I want these people to take after interacting with my content?

 

Notice those questions are focused on the audience for your content and have nothing to do with the tools you could use to reach that audience.

Know your audience first, then that will help you understand which tools you can best use to reach them. THEN you can dig into understanding the tools.  But it makes no sense to learn the nuts and bolts of Twitter, if your audience is on Pinterest.

BONUS: Understand yourself. How do YOU like to communicate with your audience? The content you create has to be interesting to your audience, but it also has to interest you. Granted, this is more of an issue for a solopreneur or maybe an executive versus a team, but the fact remains that if the content creator doesn’t enjoy the process, it will be more difficult for them to create their best content. If you love writing and your audience is reading blog, write a blog. If you think better on the fly and are comfortable in front of a camera, look at shooting videos. Or if you can better explain yourself by talking, but hate being on video, try a podcast.

The point is, understand who your audience is and what you are comfortable doing before you even consider which tool is best. The people decide the tools, not the other way around.

 

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Case Study: Why GE Started an Employee Brand Ambassador Program to Solve One Specific Business Problem

GE employee brand ambassador program

Proper planning is the easiest way to improve the efficiency of your campaign, program, or project. It’s imperative that you develop a clear strategy so that everyone involves understands precisely what they are doing, and what business outcomes they are working toward. In short, “Here’s what we are doing, here’s why it’s important”.

That’s why I love the reason for the creation of the GE employee brand ambassador program; because it was created to solve a specific problem the brand was facing.  The brand found that it was having difficulty recruiting for open positions. GE determined that a big part of the problem was a negative brand perception. Applicants viewed GE as a sort of monolith corporate entity, and employees weren’t very active online and weren’t doing a very effective job of telling the brand’s story. In short, applicants didn’t understand why they should want to work at GE.

What is an employee brand ambassador program?

Before we discuss what GE did, let’s define an employee brand ambassador program:

An employee brand ambassador program is similar to a brand ambassador program for customers, but instead, it focuses on the brand’s employees. The employees are the ambassadors, and they are given a way to connect with each other, as well as the brand’s management. Typically, employee brand ambassador programs are used as a way to give the employees the tools they need to better promote their brand to others, often via social media.

Here’s why GE decided to invest in an employee brand ambassador program:

A few reasons led us to create the brand ambassador program – like many change initiatives, they were rooted in limitations.

First, we had a $0 budget starting this adventure with GE. I looked around and asked ‘what do I have?’. One of the key assets we had was access was 350,000 colleagues around the globe.

The second challenge was our lack of polish in online profiles. I looked around at what our recruiters and hiring managers looked like online (not great). Many reacted with shocked expressions when I mentioned that candidates were doing their homework and googling them ahead of time. Connecting these dots for them helped set this initiative in motion.

Note that $0 starting budget. Unfortunately, this is a situation that brands, even global brands like GE, often find themselves in when launching a brand ambassador program. However, note that GE leveraged its employee brand ambassador program as an initiative to take what the brand was already doing, and make it better. The initial focus was on aiding HR in filling job applications more effectively. In short, GE was having to spend too much time trying to recruit employees, and it wanted to shift perception about and knowledge of the brand so that applicants were instead targeting the brand for employment. This would result in GE being more in demand among applicants, which would mean the hiring process would become easier, quicker and less expensive. Plus, the quality of the hires would improve.

Also note, since the core function of the GE employee brand ambassador program was to aid hiring, HR managers and talent acquisition was heavily involved from the start. HR managers were trained and then worked with employees to train them on how to improve their online profiles and how to better ‘humanize’ the brand:

We started with a small group of recruiters (that were in most need of help but also a group that I would call skeptics – I knew we would get all the feedback we needed). Then we incorporated their hiring managers. We held these sessions live and learned a LOT just from facial expressions. Of course there was no shortage of direct feedback as well.

We post-training surveyed through a quick online tool we have a GE. It included rankings for each part of the training as well as some open form fields for feedback. We maintained the same survey after the pilot to ensure data continuity/integrity and be sure we continued encouraging feedback. The open feedback helped us iterate and refine the training so it is highly tailored to our audience.

Also note that by having HR involved, it helps ensure the progress and growth of the employee brand ambassador program as a whole.  But note in the above quote the importance on collecting and acting on feedback from both the HR managers and the employees they were training. This is vital to the success of any brand ambassador program, collecting and acting on feedback, whether the ambassadors are customers or employees.

So What Were the Results?

Within the first month of leveraging its trained employee ambassadors to better tell GE’s story, the brand saw an 800% increase in applicants. Additionally, what GE has found is that since its employee ambassadors are more engaged online, it’s creating organic engagement that’s eliminating the need for purchasing traditional advertising to support the initiative. In Q1, 2017, social amplification from GE’s employee ambassadors created engagement worth $3 Million for GE, which reduced the amount of money spent on traditional social advertising to support the campaign to $0. Remember, if you smartly structure and execute your ambassador program as GE did here, it should improve your existing business processes and save you money.

One Final Note

This employee brand ambassador program was a vehicle for GE to take control of the conversation happening about the GE brand, among job applicants. There were several misconceptions that job applicants had about GE as a workplace and employer, so GE empowered its employees to tell the brand’s story through relating their own experiences working for the brand. This greatly enhanced the brand’s reputation among job applicants, and made it easier for applicants to relate to the brand and see themselves working there.

The program worked for GE due to proper planning, and focusing on how an employee brand ambassador program could take what GE was already doing (hiring), and make it better.

Want to learn how your company can create an amazing employee brand ambassador program as GE did? Then email me today.

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Jason Bourne on a Jetski is More Interesting Than Bruce Wayne in a Tuba

Think about ordering pizza and having it come to your house.  Not a big deal, right?  But what if that pizza was delivered in a Ferrari?  Suddenly it’s a memorable experience.

Recently someone on Twitter posed the question: What happens when you write what you think is an amazing blog post, and it falls flat. No one comments, no one shares, and it’s doubly frustrating because this was a post that you loved, and you thought others would love it as well.  This post was about a thing or a person or an idea that you are passionate about, and you wanted to share that passion with the world.

And it fell flat as a pancake.  The proverbial digital tree falling in the digital forest and no one heard it.

The question becomes, ok now what?

Whenever a piece of content doesn’t resonate as I thought it would, I ask myself “What is the core idea here that excited me, and why doesn’t it excite others as well?”  This forces me to re-evaluate the idea, question if it is really important, and also examine how I can frame the idea so that others can see its importance.

I’ve written before about the value of empathy in your marketing and really all your communications. In this context, empathy means seeing your content as your audience would see it. How will you frame your ideas so they are interesting and relevant for your audience?

When I was working on the book that would become Think Like a Rock Star, I had a core idea that was interesting and relevant that I wanted to share with the world. I saw how some brands had customers that literally LOVED that brand, and I wanted other brands to understand the power of creating and cultivating powerful advocates. But the reality is that most brands don’t have a core base of passionate customers, so it’s hard for those brands to relate to this idea and see the potential.

So I took my core idea and wrapped in the rock star analogy. While most brands couldn’t envision what it would be like to have passionate customers, they COULD relate to how a rock star has fans, They could understand how fans drive success for that rock star. So I started with the rock star frame of reference, that brands saw the value in, and worked backwards to relate the analogy to their brand.  The majority of the book is written to help brands understand how their customers can be converted into fans just like a rock star has fans. By presenting the idea in this way by using the rock star analogy, it immediately becomes more interesting and relevant to brands.

So when you are trying to frame or even reframe your idea for your audience, ask yourself these questions:

1 – Who is my audience for this idea?

2 – What impact or change will this idea make for my audience?

3 – How can I take my idea and make it relevant to my audience.

 

I think the third question is the hardest to answer as we’ve just discussed. The trap many of us fall into is believing that everyone else will love our idea for the same reasons we do. Nothing could be further from the truth. Understanding the point of view of your audience and having empathy for their reality are keys to creating an idea that connects with your audience,

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Fighting For Your Passion

One of the pieces of advice we are all given to having a happy life is to find your passion, The idea is, if you can find that one thing (or things) that you are truly passionate about, that moves your soul, especially in a work context, you can live a much happier life. If you are lucky, you can figure out what you are passionate about at an early age, and build a work history and even life around those passions.

But some people are different. Some people know what they are passionate about, and they let that passion be their fuel to be the best. They aren’t content with simply doing what they love, they want to be the best at what they love.

The late long-distance runner Steve Prefontaine once said “To give anything less than your best, is to sacrifice the gift”. This is one of my favorite quotes, as it is for many people. But there’s an underlying message in this quote that many people miss.

Consistently giving your best requires sacrifice.

If you look at people that are great at something, then you look at the people that are recognized as ‘the best’, the difference typically isn’t talent, but ”The best’ were willing to make sacrifices that others were not.

Being elite at anything comes at a cost. Not everyone is willing to pay that cost. But a few rare individuals value their gift enough to give it their all.

We lost one of those people on Sunday. Here’s who Kobe Bryant was:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y64OsZNYhp0

That was the final 3 mins of Kobe’s final game,. When this video starts, the Lakers were down by 10 points. Kobe scored 17 straight points, including the game-winner. Then he finished the game, and his career, with an assist.

And he is exhausted. He can’t catch his breath, he is wobbly as he comes off the court each time. If you’ve played basketball, you know that when you get tired, the first thing that happens is you start to miss jump shots, because your legs can’t give you the normal amount of lift that they do when you are rested.

Yet Kobe continued to hit long jump shot after long jump shot. He blocked the fatigue and even the pain, out of his mind, and dominated.

Because he owed it to his fans to give them a show in his final game. But he also knew he owed it to himself. He owed it to the gift that God gave him.

I’ve always admired the sacrifice that Kobe was willing to make to be the best. He could have given half the effort and he probably still would have been a Hall of Famer, he was that good.

But he didn’t want to be good, he was driven to be the best. I think that’s the lesson I will take from Kobe, and maybe that is his lasting gift to us all: It’s not enough to simply find your passion, you owe it to yourself to let that passion consume you and make you be the best you can be.

Rest in Peace, Kobe. Thank you for the sacrifices you made, and the example that you left us with.

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Pinterest Passes Snapchat to Become Third Biggest Social Media Platform in the US

According to eMarketer, Pinterest passed Snapchat in number of US users in 2019, and will grow its lead through at least 2023.

I’m far from a Pinterest ‘expert’. In fact, I’ve probably only spent a few hours combined on the site since joining several years ago. But I’ve always thought it was interesting how that Pinterest continued to have its fans and devoted users, even though it maybe hasn’t gotten the level of hype of a Snapchat or even Tik Tok. The growth has been more ‘organic’ in that sense, fueled not by hype or a marketers land-rush, but by users loving the site and telling others.

I think you can learn so much about a social media platform’s users by asking and answering two simple questions:

1 – Who is using the site?

2 – Why are they using it?

 

Lets Compare the Ages of the People Using Snapchat and Pinterest

Referencing the eMarketer article again, let’s look at age penetration among US users for Snapchat:

12-17 years old – 66.5%

18-24 – 81.3%

25-34 – 49.2%

 

As you can see, Snapchat is very popular among the 12-34 age group. But the study listed 5 other age groups, and Snapchat didn’t see over 21% penetration in any of these groups. In fact, it only saw double digit penetration in the two groups of the five not listed.

So that tells you that Snapchat is popular among millennials (and whatever group is coming after them) and doesn’t see as much usage among Gen Xers and Baby Boomers.

Keep that in mind, now let’s look at the age penetration among different age groups for Pinterest users:

12-17 years old – 28.1%

18-24 – 35.6%

25-34 – 40%

35-44 – 39.6%

45-54 – 33.9%

55-64 – 26.1%

 

See the difference? While Snapchat enjoys roughly 50% and higher penetration in three age groups from 12-34 years old, Pinterest enjoys 25-40% penetration in every age group from 12-64 years old. So while Snapchat appeals to a mostly younger audience, Pinterest appeals to a wide age range. This means Snapchat’s userbase is more fragile and susceptible to loss if a competing app or platform emerges that appeals to a younger audience as well. Such as TikTok. Since Pinterest appeals to a much wide age range, it is in a better position to fend off any current or future competition.

 

So Why Do People Use Pinterest? 

I started blogging in 2005, started using MySpace that same year, Facebook and Twitter in 2007. I’ve typically been one of the early adopters of emerging social media platforms. For the last 15 years that I’ve used social media, it’s always been amusing (and a bit depressing) to see what happens when the MARKETERS discover a particular social media site. First the social media/marketing bloggers discover the site, then the marketers that follow them try it out, and we are off to the races. In each case, the marketers come in and try to alter the basic site functionality to fit within the marketing processes that they are used to.  With often mixed results because these social media platforms were primarily built as personal communication tools, not marketing communication channels.

But Pinterest was one social media site that the marketers never really spent much time on, and that’s always intrigued me. I think the main reason why marketers never spent much time on Pinterest is because it takes a lot of time and energy to create, curate and maintain boards. If you aren’t passionate about the process, you probably won’t stick with it. If you talk to Pinners or google why people love Pinterest, you will frequently hear users talk about how they love how the boards give them inspiration. The inspiration can fuel ideas, or future plans, or just give them something to dream about. But the Pinners who invest the time and energy in creating and maintaining their boards do so out of love. And they interact with other Pinners, they share their findings and likewise find other interesting boards to follow as well.

If you look at Pinterest usage from the angle of planning and inspiration, you can begin to understand how the site appeals to a wide age range. All of us have something we are planning. If you are young, it could be going to college, or getting married. If you are married, it could be travel, or relocating to a new city because of a job promotion. If you are older, you may be planning for retirement and that could involve a possible move as well. No matter what stage of your life you are in, there are major future events that you are planning for.

And besides that, there are things you need help and advice with every day. Maybe you need help landscaping for the Spring, or working on your car, or becoming a better painter, or growing your collection of old comic books. Whatever your interests and whatever your age, Pinterest users have no doubt already created boards that you can find inspiration from.

 

If you are a regular Pinterest user, how do you use the site? What do you love about it? Pinterest is the one social media site that I rarely visit, but every time I do, I think to myself “I need to spend more time here!’

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Twitter Will Soon Give Users the Ability to Control Who Can Reply to Tweets

I’ve been pretty critical of Twitter’s recent attempts to ‘manage the health of the conversations‘ on its platform. Too often, these efforts seem to set in place mechanisms that could automatically enhance or suppress content based on whether or not this content contains certain topics. It could lead to giving an artificial impression that some content is actually more popular than it is, or that other content isn’t gaining in popularity, when in fact it is being shared widely.

But I tend to agree with Twitter’s signaling that it will add more user controls into who can and cannot reply to a user’s tweets. In general, I think its better to let the individual user have more control over how it views and creates content, versus having more content consumption decisions made at the platform level where everyone is subject to the same guidelines.

The new settings will let users specify which group they want to be able to reply to their tweets, and they can select for each tweet.  The four groups include:

Global – Any Twitter user can reply

Group – Any Twitter user you follow or mention in your tweet

Panel – Any Twitter user you mention in your tweet

Statement – No Twitter user can reply

 

Oddly, there’s not a planned setting to allow only Twitter users who follow you reply to your tweets. This seems like a no-brainer as it would be an easy way for Twitter users to gain followers; Want to talk to me? Gotta follow me first.

 

At any rate, since it appears these changes are coming, now is a good time to decide how you or your company might utilize these new settings to better connect with others. Each of these settings give you the ability to improve or restrict engagement, based on who can reply. I also think it gives you a chance to revisit your content strategy, at least for Twitter. Each setting gives you the chance to reach a different audience, and as such, gives you the opportunity to accomplish different things.

Global – Any Twitter user can reply. For most companies or individuals using Twitter, this will continued to be the preferred setting.

Group – Any Twitter user you follow or mention in your tweet can reply to you. This is where it begins to get interesting. For instance, let’s say you or your company sells training via a subscription model. You could follow all your members, and then change the settings so only those members can reply to your tweets. Or if you were a popular Twitch streamer or YouTuber, you could tell your subscribers that you will follow all subscribers back on Twitter, so if they want to be able to reply to your tweets, they need to subscribe to your content.

Panel – Any Twitter user you mention in your tweet can reply to that tweet. I could possibly see a use for this with Twitter chats, where the organizer questions the guest, that way you could follow the organizers tweets during the chat if you only want to hear what the guest has to say, and the larger hashtag for the chat if you want to interact with everyone else.

Statement – No Twitter user can reply to your tweets. I think this setting holds a lot of potential for experimenting with driving engagement OFF Twitter. Think about it, if you say something on Twitter and I want to reply, but can’t, then what are my options? I either forget about it and move on, or I find another way to reply to you, likely through email. When I reply via email, the interaction changes to ONE TO ONE. On Twitter, I can reply then others can chime in and it can quickly become a one to MANY interaction, which for a company can present a LOT of problems, especially in regards to customer complaints. Additionally, it can be much easier to convert a follower into a customer via an email interaction, so I think there’s a lot of potential for companies in regards to the Statement setting.

 

As I said earlier, now would be a good time to revisit your Twitter content strategy with an eye toward these coming changes. Start thinking now about how you could incorporate these changes into how you use Twitter, and to your advantage. Hopefully we will also get a Followers setting so only the people following us can reply to our tweets. That could be the most useful setting of all.

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Don’t Sweat the Technique: The Rock Star’s Guide to Content Creation, Content Marketing and Promotion

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For most of us, we write a new blog post, then maybe we share it on Twitter and Facebook, and hope for the best.  We tell ourselves that ‘good content will find an audience.’

But is that really true?  Can we realistically expect to spend 30 mins writing a blog post that becomes a masterpiece just because we publish it?  Or do we need a more robust strategy to give our content a fighting chance to be seen among all the other millions of pieces of digital content that are being created right now?

I would say that we do, and I think we can take a lot of inspiration from how rock stars create and market their new music.  Let’s look at the creation process and then the promotional process:

Step One: Writing the songs

This is where the rock star gets the basic idea for the song down on paper.  The lyrics, the chorus, the title.  None of this is finalized, it’s sort of a rough draft of what the song could be.  The songwriter is telling a story and while the fine details may need to be ironed out, the basic idea is there. This is very similar to you writing a draft for your blog post.  You might want to revisit that draft and refine it, but you have the general idea down for your post and the point you want to make.  If you need advice on how to write an awesome blog post, here’s my 2,000 word guide on how to do so.

Step Two: Recording and producing the song

Now at this point many bloggers feel their post is finished, and they will publish it.  But rock stars take their song, and give it to a producer.  That producer will then consult with the rock star on the song’s arrangement and musical elements and how they can compliment the lyrics of the song.  This would be very similar to a blogger handing her post over to an editor to review it before publishing.  If the rock star works with a stellar producer, the end result will be a much better song, just as when you let an excellent editor review your post, it will be improved.

But again, most bloggers skip this step and never let their posts be edited or reviewed.  This might not be as big of a deal for a seasoned blogger that can self-edit, but for the new blogger especially, it helps to have a trained set of eyes reviewing your content.  One of the key areas where bloggers short-change themselves is on the post’s headline.  Headlines are an art for bloggers and songwriters.  John Denver’s iconic song Leavin’ on a Jet Plane was originally released as ‘Babe I Hate to Go’.  His new manager listened to the song and recommended the change based on what the song was actually about. Many bloggers have the same issue, they summarize the post with the headline instead of actually telling readers what its about.  Here’s some tips on improving your headline writing.  Headlines are insanely important, so are the visual elements of your post; the picture you use to accompany the post, any videos you choose.  Sweat the details.

Step Three: Promoting the song and helping it find an audience

Now for the average blogger, this means sending out a tweet on Twitter, an update on Facebook, and hoping for the best  Rock stars do this as well, but they also actively court radio stations to play their songs.  Rock stars know that radio play is wonderful exposure for their music.  You can do the same thing by actively courting friends and fellow bloggers to promote your content.  You can also greatly improve your chance of having other bloggers promote your content if you do two things:  First is actively promote their content.  If you are already promoting my content and you ask me to promote yours, odds are I will unless your content is a complete mis-match for my brand.  Second, selectively ask bloggers to promote content that they would be interested in.  Don’t ask me to promote your new blog post on how to grow an organic garden.  But do ask me to promote your new post on launching a brand advocacy effort at your company.

BONUS: Social media isn’t just Twitter and Facebook anymore.  Social media savvy artists are leveraging multiple tools online, a blog, Twitter Facebook but also Instagram (big hit with artists and fans) and YouTube.  The point is to hustle.

Step Four: Promotion leads to hit songs and that leads to concerts and appearances

As a rock stars’ new music is promoted, some of those songs will find a large audience and become popular.  One hit song can take a band playing local clubs and turn them into an international star.  As rock stars start to create hit songs, their fanbases grow and spread.  So connecting directly with them via concerts and appearances makes good sense.

You can do the same thing with your blog posts that become popular.  Let’s say you write a blog post “5 Tips For Marketers That Want to Crush It On YouTube Today”, that ends up being incredibly popular.  The popularity of that post makes you more marketable.  You can reach out to twitter chats and ask to co-host, I bet the #YouTubeMarketing twitter chat (if such a thing exists) would love to have you co-host to discuss the tips from your post.  Also, reach out to bloggers and ask to write a guest post on YouTube marketing tips.  Remind them of how popular your post was and they will probably be interested as you have already proven that your topic resonates with readers. All of this means more exposure for you and your content.

Step Five: Rock stars take their biggest hits and create a Greatest Hits album

There’s a lot of talk about ‘re-imaging’ content these days, but rock stars have always done this.  They take their most popular music and use it in as many ways as possible.  One example is how rock stars that have had a successful career will sell a Greatest Hits album.  This gives fans new and old a way to get most of the rock star’s biggest hits and most popular songs, all on one album.

Now at this point, it’s time to take a step back for a second.  A week or so ago I was watching a PBS documentary on John Denver.  Denver had a pretty long musical career, from about 1969 to 1984 or so.  About 15 years, and for the majority of the 1970s, he was one of the biggest musical stars on the planet.

But as I was watching this documentary, I realized that I could only really recall 2-3 hit songs of Denver’s.  Rocky Mountain High, Take Me Home Country Roads, and maybe Leavin’ on a Jet Plane.  Sure, there were a few others and diehard John Denver fans are already rattling off several other songs, but for the casual John Denver fan, that 15 year career resulted in maybe 3-5 songs that were memorable.

Think about that for a minute.  Even truly successful rock stars only have a handful of big hits over their entire careers.  Now think about your favorite blogger.  Name your favorite 3-5 posts from your favorite blogger.  Hard to do, isn’t it?  The point is that you are NOT going to have many posts go ‘viral’ and it is often hard to predict which ones will.  You can improve your changes through simple trial and error, but for most of us, even if you blog for years you will be lucky to have even 2-3 posts that truly spread like wildfire.

So as a blogger, you want to make it as easy as possible for other people to find your best content.  Look at the top right of this blog.  Notice I have created a Most Popular Posts section.  These are hand-picked posts that I want you to check out.  These are some of my ‘greatest hits’.  Also, when I share posts on social media sites, I focus on about 10 posts that cover topics I want to be known for.  Community-building, brand advocacy, content marketing.  It helps brand me, plus it gives more exposure to posts that cover topics that I want to see be more popular.

The Secret Bonus Tip: 

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Hopefully you’ve picked up on something while reading this post.  There is a LOT of work involved in creating successful content.  It’s not just about writing a masterpiece in 15 mins and then waiting for fame and fortune.  You have to work hard on writing great content, and even harder promoting the content after its done.  Now all of this process becomes easier as you become more experienced, but there’s no shortcuts.  You need to have a robust strategy in place for creating your content, for polishing it, and then for promoting it.

I’m guilty of this too.  Too often I whip out a post in 30 mins, then tweet it on Twitter and that’s it.  Professional bloggers don’t do this.  They invest hours in each post.  They research, they agonize over the perfect headline, the perfect accompanying picture.  They sweat every detail.  Which is exactly why their content has an audience that hungrily devours everything they write.

I love the tweet from Jessica above.  She’s killed it with #CMChat as she’s turned it from being a Twitter chat to a literal online empire.  But it took hard work and harder sacrifices.  Following your dreams and creating something amazing usually does.

So change the focus of your content creation.  Stop thinking of each post and throw-away, but instead view every piece of content you create as a potential mega-hit that you are releasing to the public.  Focus on the creation, the post-writing editing, and the publishing and promotion.  And if you need help, I’ve created this graph to keep you straight rockin’ your content from now on:

$300 BILLION (4)

PS: It took about 10 hours to write this post, including research, visual elements and creating a custom graphical checklist.  And now the real work begins..and all I’ve done is increase the chances that the content will be more popular.

Pic via the amazing Kmeron

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Over the Hills and Far Away: The Rock Star’s Guide to Building an Online Community

Jessica Northey-Shaw is kind of a big deal in the country music scene. She’s worked with many of the industry’s top artists, and her #CMChat is probably the largest chat on Twitter, she’s had artists such as The Oak Ridge Boys, Charlie Daniels, Clint Black and Alabama as guests. She told me once that one of the first pieces of advice that Taylor Swift got when she started her career was “Shake half a million hands to get a Gold record”.  The message was that Taylor was going to have to connect individually with her fans if she wanted to be successful.

Taylor took that advice to heart and has always embraced her fans. In 2010 Taylor Swift agreed to have a free autograph signing for her fans as part of a CMA event in Nashville. Taylor was scheduled to start signing at 8am, and she agreed to sign for a staggering 13 hours.

Instead, she signed for 15 hours. The only breaks she took during the marathon signing session was to stop signing long enough to perform music for the over 2,000 fans who stood in line for her autograph.

Content creators of all stripes, whether it be a blogger, a Twitch streamer, a YouTuber or a budding Instagram star, want to grow their followings. Most of them are in a race to grow as quickly as possible. Growth is equal to success in their minds, and fast growth equals fast success.

Yet when you look at how most rock stars become successful, the ‘growth’ process typically takes years. There are rarely overnight success stories.

A big part of the reason why is rooted in how rock stars create and cultivate fans versus how the rest of us do.

Growing Slow Trumps Growing Fast

Consider how the average rock star gets their start. Maybe they perform for a local coffeeshop every Thursday, or maybe a local bar every Saturday night. In either case, the rock star performs for a very small crowd. The crowds are typically small enough that afterward, the singers have a chance to talk individually to the people that took the time to listen to their music. They can connect with these people individually. They can get their feedback, and apply it to the next performance.

Connecting individually with these people greatly increases the chance that they will become fans. Which means they will come back next week and when they do, they will likely bring some friends. Those friends will connect with the band after their performance and they will likely become fans as well. As a result, the crowds that the artist performs for each week become a bit larger. Soon, they are too large for the small bar or coffeehouse, and they have to move to a larger club, maybe a local arena.

Eventually, as the singers become more popular, they can tour the state, then the region.  Then the nation. But the growth, the growth started small by connecting with each of those few fans that showed up the first time to hear them sing.  From that point, the growth of the rock stars was fueled by their fans.

Which person are you more likely to listen to:

A – Me when I tell you that my blog is awesome and you should read it every day

B – Your best friend when she tells you that my blog is awesome and you should read it every day

 

Of course, you’re going to listen to your best friend. When I say it, it’s advertising, when your best friend says it, it’s a recommendation from a source you trust.

Rock stars have always understood this.

This is the Loyalty Graph, and it’s one of the most popular features of my book, Think Like a Rock Star: How to Create Social Media and Marketing Strategies That Turn Customers Into Fans. The Loyalty Graph is designed to give you a visual representation of the difference between how most rock stars market themselves, and how most companies do. For the purposes of our discussion, you could consider most companies to be most content creators, and most customers to be readers or followers or viewers.

Most rock stars spend almost all of their time interacting and marketing directly with their CURRENT customers, or fans. They do this because they know that their fans will grow their base for them. On the other hand, most companies try to acquire new customers, and all but ignore their current ones. Many bloggers or streamers do the same thing, they create content in a way that will grow their following, but they don’t focus on developing deeper connections with the people that are already consuming their content.

“But Mack, if my following grows, what difference does it make how it happens?”

Here’s the difference: Go to Twitter right now and tweet a link to your latest blog post and ask your followers to RT it for you.

Now email your 5 closest friends and ask them to do the same thing.

I suspect you will get more RTs from your 5 closest friends than you ever would from ALL of your followers on Twitter. Why?  Because the people following you on Twitter aren’t your friends. They aren’t connected to you and don’t have a relationship with you. Sure, some of your friends are also following you on Twitter, but if you’re like most people, you follow an awful lot of people on Twitter that you NEVER interact with.

Case in point: I have about 43,000 followers currently on Twitter. I could grow my Twitter following to 75,000 by the end of the month.  How? By simply following 2,000 people every day.  About half the people I follow would follow me back, and by the end of the month I’d have 75,000 followers. But how many of those additional 30,000 or so followers would answer my call for a RT?  Few, if any. So if I just gained 30,000 followers who I will never interact with and who will never interact with me, what is the point?

If you want to grow your online community, do it slow. Connect deeply with every individual person. Let them drive growth for you. The more you do to drive your growth directly, the less influence you will ultimately have over the people that follow you.

If you are a blogger and you have 5 readers, you have an incredible power. You have the ability to connect directly with EVERY reader of your blog. That’s going to convert them into fans who will grow your readership FOR you.

That’s precisely how rock stars grow their fanbases. One fan at a time.

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Instagram is Testing a New Feature That Might Save Social Media

So let’s do a social experiment, please leave a comment telling me if you have had this same thing happen to you: Often when I am either scanning my feed on Twitter/Facebook/Instagram or reading a blog, I will come across a piece of content that seems pretty ‘meh’ to me. But just as I am about to move on, I notice it has a huge number of social shares. I often stop, and think “wait, am I missing something here?”, and I will go back and review the content a second time.

Have you done this? I do it all the time, and studies have shown that most of us do as well. We often let number of social shares and popularity metrics such as Likes influence if we will consume and share content.

Well with that in mind, consider that Instagram is experimenting with a pretty revolutionary feature; Hiding the number of Likes its posts get. If this feature rolls out to all users, then Instagram users would have no idea how many (or how few) Likes any content posted on the site receives.  The content creators would still have access to this information, but not the content consumers or users.

I’ve long speculated that behavior by both content creators and content consumers would change drastically if the number of social shares content received wasn’t public. Too many of us consume and share content simply based on number of social shares or Likes.  If this was taken out of the equation, we would likely share less content, but it would be content we were more likely to have personally vetted. So it would, in theory, be of more value to our networks.

If Instagram rolls out the hiding of Likes to everyone, I suspect that will actually lead to MORE comments. I believe users will feel more compelled to explain why the DID share the content, what they liked about it.  If so, this would be invaluable information for the content creator.

What do you think about this idea of Instagram hiding Likes on its posts? Do you like it? Hate it?  Would you like to see more social media sites adopt a position of hiding social shares?