MackCollier.com

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The Death Knell for Social Networking Sites: Mainstream Usage

Shopping

The first online portal I joined was Prodigy in 1991.  It was actually a great experience, there was just no one there.  But the few people that did use the mostly text-based service were very friendly and it wasn’t unusual to interact with someone on one of the pseudo-message boards and share your home address with an invitation for others to write a letter.  Different times.

From there I went to CompuServe in the mid-1990s and AOL soon after that.  Both CS and AOL were also internet providers, and at the time it was some outrageous amount, like $25 for 10 hours online.  For a month!  I often spend more than 10 hours online in a day!

Then around 1997 or so, AOL announced that it was changing it’s price structure and removing the hourly cap on online access.  They rolled out the $25 for unlimited access and it was a total game-changer.  Unfortunately, it also totally changed the experience on AOL.  Suddenly, there were kids everywhere!  I feel like the old man shaking his cyber-fist but suddenly I had to learn what ‘LOL’ and ‘OMG!’ meant, along with ‘trolling’, ‘noobs’ and the endless string of 🙂 😛 XOXO.

AOL had gone mainstream, and in the process, the experience that it’s core users had become accustomed to had changed greatly.  Ironically, we are now seeing the same thing happen in reverse with Facebook.  Facebook started out as a site for only college students.  Then the restriction of having an edu address to access FB was lifted, which meant that recent college grads and soon-to-be college students (IOW the younger and older siblings of current FB users) started checking out the site.

The social media geeks found FB in 2007.  Over the next 2-3 years its userbase grew at an astronomical rate.  Suddenly it seemed like every kid from the age of 14-24 was on Facebook.

Then the parents found out that their kids were on Facebook.  Suddenly parents everywhere that had little to no idea what their kids were up to, only had to go on Facebook at it was all there!

As you might expect, Facebook is quickly becoming ‘uncool’ to these kids. In fact, Facebook recently verified that young teens are leaving the site.  Where are they going?  To sites that their parents haven’t discovered yet like SnapChat, Instagram and Path.  Which are now growing like crazy, that is until mom finds out about them…

It’s truly the paradox of growing an online site or portal: You need to reach a certain mass of users to attract more users.  And you need to monetize those users, which is another reason you want more users.  But the simple fact is that adding more users changes the overall experience.  It has for every social media site I’ve used for the last 20+ years.  And when the overall experience changes from what made the site appealing to begin with, people leave.

If you are trying to create an online community site, or even if you are trying to build a blog readership, always focus on delighting and retaining your first users.  These are the builders of your base, the people that love your experience and tell others about it.  When you get in a rush to bring in new users too quickly, you change the experience, which means you lose those first users that are really the foundation for you entire community.  It’s like building a pyramid, you have a strong foundation, then you start slowly building the pyramid.  Then suddenly you start to quickly add on and going skyward with the pyramid, while at the same time you start removing the foundation.  Obviously the pyramid will soon collapse under its own weight.

Never pursue growth at the expense of user experience.  Facebook’s growth was driven by kids.  Kids that are now deciding they don’t like being on the site anymore.  When the foundation is removed the collapse isn’t very far behind.

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The Greatest Marketing Lesson: Passion Trumps Control

We all want to be rock stars, even brands.  Because rock stars have fans that love them like this:

Fans that so passionately love their favorite rock star that they literally break down and start crying when they talk about them.  And brands don’t have that. Except, when they do:

So if we accept that brands can have fans that love them just as passionately as rock stars do, then the question becomes why don’t more brands have such devoted fans? 

When I started writing Think Like a Rock Star, the question I wanted to answer is why so many rock stars like Lady Gaga have fans that love them, while most brands do not.  I expected to learn that rock stars simply have an innate advantage when it comes to creating and cultivating fans.

In fact, I learned that rock stars aren’t doing anything to create and cultivate fans that brands can’t do.  Instead, the answer to why rock stars have fans and brands don’t lies in what brands aren’t willing to do.

The Greatest Marketing Tool Ever Invented

The rock concert.

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I just love this photo.  Look at those smiling faces!  Happy people in the audience, and on the stage.  Everyone happy, happy, happy.

Think about what a rock concert is.  It’s a way that rock stars have created to:

1 – Give a special experience to its biggest fans (that helps validate why they are fans to begin with)

2 – Sell that experience to its fans

3 – Sell merchandise to its fans

4 – Bring its biggest fans together in one place and connect them to each other

That fourth and final point is what makes concerts so valuable to rock stars.  Sure, the ticket and merchandise sales create a huge direct benefit to the rock star, but bringing all those fans together is an incredible driver of positive word of mouth for the rock star.  Think about it, thousands of people that share a common interest are placed in the same area for several hours.  What are they going to do before and after (and during) the concert?  Interact with other fans and talk about how and why they love their favorite rock star.  It helps validate why they are fans, and when they leave the concert, those fans will feel better about being a fan of the rock star and by extension better about themselves.

In essence, the fans are marketing for the rock star.  Those fans are going to go home and tell all their friends about what an amazing experience the concert was and they will encourage their friends and family to attend a concert as well.  So the simple act of connecting fans to each other is incredibly powerful.

And it’s backed by facts and science.  First, there are a plethora of studies that word of mouth is a more effective and trusted form of communication than any type of communication that originates from a brand.  IOW if you want to sell your widget to my friend Tim, the odds are that my telling him to buy your widget will result in a sale long before your commercial will.

Additionally, science backs the power of letting passionate people spread your message.   Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute concluded that it only takes 10 percent of a population holding an unshakable belief in order to convince the majority to adopt that same belief.  In fact, the scientists found that this will always be the case.  This study speaks to the power of letting your most passionate fans spread your message.  It’s no coincidence that two of the most popular business case studies for building fans (Maker’s Mark, The Fiskateers) both have elements built into it that connects fans to each other.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the average brand won’t trust its marketing messages with its most passionate customers even if that brand understands the business value of positive word of mouth.  Because even though most brands understand and appreciate the power of word of mouth, they value and covet having control over the marketing messages they send their customers even more.

So then the answer to why rock stars have fans and brands do not goes back to simple marketing.  But not so much the message itself, but how that message is conveyed to others.

If we accept that the average customer views another customer to be more credible than the average brand, then we also must accept that the average customer views marketing messages from another customer to be more credible than marketing messages from the average brand.

What you gain in control, you lose in credibility.  We talk about how brands need to build ‘relationships’ with their customers, but healthy relationships are built on trust.  If your brand doesn’t trust its customers, you probably won’t keep them very long.

Pic via Kmeron

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How to Mobilize Your Brand Advocates Through Storytelling

With the decline of traditional media and it’s effectiveness, brands have been turning to brand advocates to get their message across to potential customers.

Brand advocates are existing customers of a brand who are the biggest fans of that brand and who are passionate about the brand and its products. They don’t need an incentive to spread their love and ignite a word of mouth (both online and offline), because they are emotionally invested in brand’s mission and its story.

Neilsen’s 2012 survey of global trust in advertising found that 92 percent of respondents trust recommendations from people they know, and 70 percent trust consumers’ opinions posted online. And this isn’t the only data point that speaks to the power of advocates. At BRANDERATI we have put together a deck of the 26 stats marketers should know about advocacy that you might find interesting.

EkaterinaPic

The most powerful thing about organic advocacy is the story behind customer’s experience. And because the endorsement is not paid for by the brand, and the story is something others can truly connect with, it becomes a great motivator in getting others to act on the endorsement. Advocacy, done right, becomes true influence. And influence is what impacts behaviors. Because the ultimate goal of marketing is to not just to tell a great story, but tell a story that would make people want to get to know a brand and buy the product. And that’s what advocacy is all about.

Many brands have been turning to customers, asking them to tell their own stories and putting their own fans center-stage. By giving their most vocal advocates a platform to share their own experiences the brands are effectively turning their brand love into authentic influence. Brands are able to spark engagement around real stories from real customers in real-time, thus massively increasing the reach of their message and driving impact to company’s bottom line.

Let’s take a look at several examples.

Buick

Buick wanted to change perception of its brand, and they thought the best way to do this was to ask their own advocates why they love their Buicks and to share their stories. In only a few weeks, Buick advocates had written over 1,600 love letters and 16% of advocates had shared them on Facebook. The individual stories were magnified, thanks to the brand power of Buick – individuals were given a corporate platform and their stories reached further than they would have on their own.

 EkaterinaPicBuick.jpg

Google

One marketing problem that faces a brand like Google is that, although it is a truly massive, global brand, it is very hard to represent their services in a visual way. To give their marketing a human quality, Google asked customers to tell their own stories of the ways in which Google had changed their lives, their organizations or their businesses.

The results were commercials that were inspiring, touching and emotional – quite a feat from a software company. This one from Mark Kempton, whose survival of the Queenland flooding depended on his rescuers using Google Maps, has been viewed over 5.5 million times on YouTube, and brings an individual story to a global audience.

Weight Watchers

EkaterinaPicWWFor Weight Watchers, sharing customers’ stories is about inspiring others and giving credibility to their diet plan. They use celebrities for many of their campaigns, but they also give a platform to their ‘ordinary’ fans who have used their plan to shed the pounds. Their website, magazine and marketing all feature many stories of real people who have lost weight through Weight Watchers – so you can find someone just like you to use as a role model. The company is always on the look-out for success stories so that they can provide a constant stream of positive messages to inspire their customers through their online and off-line channels.

 

 

Conclusion

To tell customers stories effectively you need to connect with fans and ask them to tell you about the difference your product or service has made to their lives. Sharing their story widely can help their individual tales reach a much larger audience than they would ordinarily. Your brand platform combined with your customers’ inspirational stories can lead to a winning combination of advocacy and influence. But to do so effectively and in a sustainable way, you have to build authentic relationships with your advocates and fans long-term. Without that you will just create another short-term marketing campaign, whereas what you are really looking for is inspiring a movement around your brand, your mission, your story.

 

033Ekaterina Walter led strategic and marketing innovation for brands such as Intel and Accenture, and is currently a co-founder and CMO of Branderati. She is an international speaker and author of the WSJ bestseller “Think Like Zuck: The Five Business Secrets of Facebook’s Improbably Brilliant CEO Mark Zuckerberg” and co-author of “The Power of Visual Storytelling: How to Use Visuals, Videos, and Social Media to Market Your Brand.” You can find her on Twitter: @Ekaterina or her blog: http://www.ekaterinawalter.com/.

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The Free Economy: Why It’s Making Everything More Expensive

Over the past several years as publishing and content creation tools have flourished, so has the idea that anything free is inherently better or at least more desired than content or tools that cost money.  Whether you are an individual or company looking to make a name for yourself, the path is pretty linear: Create gobs of free content or give users free usage of your tool, and eventually they will want to pay you for your content or tool.

Until, they don’t.

For years, this sort of freemium model was successful: Provide limited and free access, then when people saw the value of your content/tool, charge them money for additional access and features.  But over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend among my peers and networks.  People will stay with a tool or content creator as long as their content/tool is free, but as soon as they ask for money, most people jump off and look for another free source.  There’s so many sources of information that the thinking seems to be that someone else will offer better functionality at a free price.  Or instead of paying this writer $9.99 for their ebook, I can get the same information for free from blogs.

Too often, the most important attribute assigned to online content or tools is that they be free.  Free = better in the minds of many.

Here’s an example: My modest newsletter is now up to 1,000 subscribers.  I publish a new issue every week or so, and the newsletter is designed to give subscribers information they can use to better create engagement around their digital marketing efforts and create fans of their brand.  All for free.  Yet every 4th or 5th issue (often I will publish this as an additional issue for that week), I will use the newsletter to directly promote a product or service I offer.  Many people do this with every newsletter issue they publish, but I like to do it about 20-25% of the time.  Typically when I publish a newsletter issue, I will have 1 or 2 people unsubscribe, on average.  But every time I publish a newsletter issue where I am trying to directly sell to my subscribers, the number of unsubscribes always spikes, typically it’s 500% or more higher than the average issue.  The people that unsubscribed left as soon as I asked for the sale.  In other words, they were willing to take and use my content as long as I was providing value for them, at absolutely no cost to them.  But the second they saw an ‘ad’, they left.

It’s not just content, any of you that conduct regular meetings for organizations such as the AMA or Social Media Club have seen the same thing.  If the meetings are free, attendance is high, but when you begin charging even a few dollars, attendance falls off a cliff.

The thinking seems to be that if your offering isn’t free, you can’t compete.  Which means that if there are more free options, there are also more bad options.  And we all spend more time trying to figure out which free option is the best, without realizing that the additional time is costing us more than paying a few dollars for a valuable service or piece of content.

You don’t become an expert by reading an expert’s blog.  You become an expert the same way they did; By doing stuff.  I’ll let you in on a secret: I’m not writing this blog to teach you how to become an expert, I’m writing this blog to establish *my* expertise in social media marketing, online community building and marketing strategy, so you will hire me.  Sure, some people will be able to read my posts here, follow my instructions and launch a brand ambassador program for their company.  But what I hope happens is that a company would read my posts, realize how much time and money it would cost that company to launch a brand ambassador program itself, and instead hire me to do it for them.  I get paid, they save time and money.

I’m not sure what the answer is, but what I fear happens is you have a lot of very smart individuals and startups that throw in the towel because they can’t make money on a product or content by giving it away for free.  For instance, consider the plugins on your blog, how many are you paying for?  Are you paying for any of them?  I have about 30 plugins, and only pay for two of them.  In both cases, I wanted a plugin that did specific things, and couldn’t find a free version that did, so I paid for the services I wanted.

Many of us bemoan the glut of content being created these days.  Everyone is creating content and it’s all the same.  But it’s also (mostly) free.  We complain about how Twitter or Facebook isn’t working right, how the sites run too many ads, yet we forget that we aren’t paying a penny to use either service.

Nothing is truly free and I think we need to realize that if we aren’t paying for content or a tool on the front-end, there is a cost in terms of time, diminished experience, etc on the back-end.  The myth of the free lunch is just that.

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Teaching Marketing Students to “Think Like A Rock Star”

You might understand marketing technologies like social media and mobile search, but can you explain them so that someone new to marketing would understand the value of these tools to their business?

Since 2010, I’ve taught a four-week course in New Media Marketing in the Internet Marketing Master of Science program at Full Sail University in Winter Park, Florida. At Full Sail, students earn their master’s degree in 12 months, and the pace is intense.

Given that the tools of the trade change frequently, I’ve always emphasized principles and approaches, rather than relying too heavily on specific social networks or technologies. My objective is to provide students with skills they can apply in a variety of industries to best suit their unique goals.

The Professor’s Conundrum
Throughout my tenure, I’ve updated the course materials, topics and exercises, but continued to encounter certain objections from students.

1. “My company can’t use mobile (or social media) because…” 

The rest of that sentence could be “our clients are older and don’t use mobile or social media,” or “mobile marketing is too expensive for small businesses,” or “I don’t have time for social media marketing.”

Whatever the nature of their objection, I had to counter the student’s own resistance, which took up valuable time and hindered the learning process.

2. “My company already does X.”

Many students base their course projects on large companies with robust marketing plans. These companies have tried many of the approaches we cover, leaving students little room for expansion or experimentation in the name of learning.

If we were talking about blogging and online video, I’d routinely run into situations where students’ companies were already using these (at least to some extent), though possibly not to their fullest potential. I needed a way to ensure that the course would prove valuable to students in any industry, from all types of organizations.

The Interview
In August 2013, I interviewed Mack Collier for the MarketingProfs podcast about his book, Think Like A Rock Star. I read the book prior to our conversation, and felt incredibly energized and excited about his approach to helping brands build their business by turning customers into fans using techniques effectively used by rock stars to build a fan-base.

I was surprised to learn that very few companies had any type of formal program in place for cultivating brand ambassadors. While Mack and I talked, I kept thinking about how valuable a skillset my students would have if they understood his approach.

Students could analyze their audience to identify influencers and fans, research where their target audience spends time online and off, and develop an outreach plan that would help them to achieve specific program objectives, as well as support larger business goals.

The Epiphany
After my talk with Mack, I had an epiphany. I could use the principles from Think Like A Rock Star to build a course that would teach students to create a completely customized approach, based on their specific business goals and audience: one that would offer value to all students’ businesses, large and small alike, whatever the size of their budget or current marketing mix.

As Mack had observed in our interview, very few organizations have brand ambassador programs, so offering interested students the option of creating that type of program would equip them to blaze a trail in the marketing industry by supercharging their company’s word-of-mouth marketing.

The Plan: Complete Customization
In the first week, students would set their business goals and create personas for their organization’s customers, influencers and fans.

Then, students could engage in audience analysis, identifying actual targets for outreach.

Using this insight, class participants would create a plan to implement influencer outreach or launch a brand ambassador program (either full-scale or smaller-scale, like a customer feedback panel).

Finally, students would spend 25% of the class covering measurement, which is an area of critical importance that marketing professional can’t afford to ignore.

In an effort to ensure that students had access to course content that accurately and thoroughly covered these topics, I worked directly with Mack to create custom webinars for each week’s lesson.

For each of the four weeks, we created lessons that would enable students to apply the concepts of influencer outreach and brand ambassadorship to all kinds of businesses. I provided additional course materials on content marketing, social media, and mobile technology, so that students could learn more about their channels of choice once they knew where their audience was on- and offline.

The Results
Having run the revamped course once, I can already see that students’ submittals are much more detailed and applied to their specific business objectives and audience, and that they’ve acquired valuable skills for audience research, metric selection and measurement that will serve them well no matter which vertical their business operates in.

Instead of teaching every student every approach, we narrowed the universe of possibilities to those uniquely suited to each class member’s industry, business goals, and audience preferences.

I’m excited about the course, but more excited to see what students do once they’ve graduated from the program. Mine is just one class in one program at one university, but my hope is that the success these students will bring to businesses across all industries will inspire other organizations to establish deeper, more lasting relationships with their brand’s influencers and fans.

Even if other businesses continue to lag behind, my students can reap the benefits of the first-mover advantage. That’s not such a bad outcome, either!

I’m incredibly indebted to Mack for his contribution to the class, and highly recommend him as an instructor or trainer in his own right: he’s a fantastic marketer and educator.

Any organization that wants to learn how to implement influence marketing or create a brand ambassador program would do well to retain Mack’s services, or at least buy a copy of Think Like A Rock Star for everyone on the marketing team.

Clearly Mack’s lessons work: I’m a passionate advocate of his approach to marketing, and recommend his book every chance I get. If you want to talk more about it, drop me a line: like any true fan, I love talking about it!

Kerry O’Shea Gorgone teaches New Media Marketing at Full Sail University. She also hosts the weekly Marketing Smarts podcast for MarketingProfs. Find Kerry on Google+ and Twitter.

 

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Stop Selling Ice to Eskimos, Get a Better Content Strategy in 2014

Last year I made a big mistake on my blog, and it’s a mistake I am constantly reminding y’all not to make.

Here’s a list of the Top 10 most popular blog posts here last year:

BlogStatsNote the #2 and #3 blog posts are about book publishing.  I wrote these last year while I was launching my book.  I wanted to share what I had learned so that the information could benefit other consultants, marketers or really anyone that wanted to be a writer or was considering writing a book.  And the top search term that people used to find this blog last year was ‘I want to write a book’.  By a 10 to 1 margin over the #2 search term.

There’s just one (big) problem.  Current or potential writers that want to make money off writing a book is not my target audience.  Not even close.  So while these two posts were very popular, they helped connect me with an audience that I had no services for.  But I forgot this because I was focused on how these posts could be valuable to readers.  I just lost sight of the fact that they wouldn’t really create value for a big portion of my target audience.

This is one of the lessons I am always preaching here, to keep in mind the audience you are writing for.  I want to create helpful content for my desired audience.  The two posts on book publishing were very helpful, just not for the people I am trying to connect with.

Here’s a simple way to keep your content focused in 2014:

Create three content areas or buckets.  These will be the three areas of your business that you want to focus on with your content.

For example, if your blog is for your lawn care business, your three buckets could be:

1 – Killing insects in your lawn

2 – Growing healthier flowers for your yard

3 – Proper maintenance of your lawn

So for every post you write, you need to make sure it fits into one of these three buckets.  If it does not, you need to justify why you should publish the post.  This is a great way to keep your content on track and to make sure that you are only creating content that’s focused on your business.  An added benefit of this is that as you are creating content around the relevant areas of your business, you will be helping Google identify your blog with certain relevant keywords.  For example, I would rather people find my blog via a search term like ‘building a brand ambassador program for my company’ versus ‘i want to write a book’.

Additionally, you need to always consider who you are writing for.  For example, this blog is a business development tool for me.  Which means if I am creating content, I need to create content that is useful to the people that can give me business.  In evaluating my content here from last year, I noticed that too often I was creating content that was useful to solo bloggers.  I love helping solo bloggers (a big reason why I launched #Blogchat) but solo bloggers aren’t the audience I want to be getting business from.  So that’s why the majority of my content this year will be focused on how brands can market more efficiently, because brands and companies are the audience that I want to do business with.

It pays to go back every month or maybe every quarter and self-evaluate your content and your content strategy for your blog.  Look at what type of progress you are making on reaching your goals, and then make sure that you are still creating the type of content that you need to in order to reach those goals.

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Reaching a More Connected Customer Requires a More Connected Company

Over the Holidays I was reading an issue of the Wall-Street Journal about how companies are leveraging Twitter to improve its marketing.  Companies that sell cold medicines and items, especially those related to treating the flu, are closely monitoring Twitter.  They are tracking instances of people complaining on Twitter about having flu symptoms such as body aches, coughing and colds.  Then they will track where these people live, and make sure that local retailers are have sufficient inventory of any cold treatment products or medicines that the company sells.  Clorox and Kimberly-Clark (makers of Kleenex brand tissues) both reported double-digit sales growth by utilizing Twitter and online chatter to drive shipments of cold products during the previous flu season.

While this type of conversation-mining might seem revolutionary to many companies, it can seem a bit underwhelming to the customers these companies are trying to reach.  This type of functionality has long been available even in basic and free versions.  The now-defunct site Monitter.com provided users location-based searching based on zip code.  Even Twitter now provides this functionality, and you can even factor in user sentiment.

community building, online community

We’ve been chattering on Twitter for several years now.  When companies first arrived their goal was to market and promote.  As the above examples illustrate, now they are beginning to understand the value of listening.  One of the great marketing benefits of social media for companies is word of mouth in digital form.  Before social media and the internet, if customers in Nashville began complaining about flu-like symptoms in December, they did so via analog tools that were largely inaccessible to companies that sold products that could have helped them relieve their flu symptoms.  Today, we are increasingly using digital and social media tools, and as such, our word of mouth is now in digital form so companies can access it and act on it.

But the key is that companies must make the effort to access that customer feedback.  If your company is consistently tracking and analyzing this digital word of mouth from your customers, you will begin to notice trends and patterns.  You will begin to develop a deeper understanding of your customers.

Which means you can market more efficiently to them.  By 2014, most companies that do any business online are at least experimenting with social media.  But few companies are truly utilizing social media efficiently to drive real business growth.

If you want to be in the minority of companies that are using social media marketing correctly, start by leveraging these tools to better understand your customers.  Too many companies start using social media to better sell to customers.  That should come later.  Use this simple format:

1 – Listen first, then take what you learn and apply it to…

2 – Engaging with your customers.  Interact with them, help them, and create value for them.  That leads to…

3 – Sales

Instead, too many companies put the cart before the horse and jump in immediately trying to sell to people they don’t understand via tools they don’t understand.

Don’t put the digital cart before the digital horse.  It’s not about understanding the tools, it’s about understanding how and why your customers are using the tools.  Then you can move forward.

 

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Behaving Badly Online and the Power of Eating Your Own Dog Food

A few months ago a well known ‘social media guru’ on Facebook said I was a hateful and fearful person, just because I disagreed with them on a particular social issue.  Actually, they didn’t single me out, they said that anyone that disagreed with them was hateful and fearful and intolerant (the irony of their intolerance was blissfully lost on them).  Then for good measure, another gooroo took the opposite stance on this same issue, and said that anyone that disagreed with them was hateful and fearful.  So we were screwed either way.

Over the last year or so, I’ve noticed an increase in people behaving badly online.  What’s most troubling to me is, a lot of this bad behavior is coming from ‘social media experts’ that advise companies on how to deal with customers online.  Consultants and agencies that train companies on how to respond appropriately online, then turn around and break their own rules when they get on their personal social media accounts.

Case in point, the recent episode with Justine Sacco’s tweet about her trip to Africa.  It was an incredibly bone-headed and immature tweet to leave, and it was pretty obvious as soon as she did that she was going to get canned, and she did.

What wasn’t expected was the near mob-mentality that erupted on Twitter especially.  It was as if her detractors on Twitter (and at this point there were many, mostly due to her own words) were waiting for a sense of closure that would only come from her being fired.  The longer it went without seeing her termination, the louder and angrier the mob got.  As my friend Ann Handley said:

I’m not trying to be sanctimonious here – I understand it’s human nature to grab a pitchfork and a club and join the march.

Or is it? Can’t we expect more from an evolved, networked, smarter world? Aren’t we better than that?

The challenge for companies is to treat content publishing as a privilege—to respect your audience and deliver what they want in a way that’s useful, enjoyable, and inspired. But the larger challenge for humans is to treat publishing with a similar respect—understanding the responsibility and power than comes with the ability to communicate with a global audience.

Additionally, I think that those of us that want to instruct companies on how to properly engage customers online should be held to a higher standard.  That means if you want to be noted as an expert in helping companies engage customers online, you lose the right to then go on Facebook and call Obama/Romney an asshole just because you’re a Republican/Democrat.

It means you have to eat your own dog food.

I’ll be the first to admit that I have slipped up a time or two and have discussed politics online.  I think most of us have, and there’s nothing wrong with that.  But if I start attacking people online simply because they support a different political party, I really do forfeit the right to call out brands for behaving badly.  We cannot hold brands to a higher standard than we hold ourselves.

We always talk about how brands need to be ‘more human.’ Sometimes we ‘humans’ do too.

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It’s 2014, Let’s Stop Talking About Social Media

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Happy New Year, y’all!  2014 begins my 10th year of being immersed in the world of social media.  I can remember when social media was simply blogs and MySpace.  Then Facebook and Twitter came along, and we all began to wonder when companies would begin to notice these amazing tools and what they could help them accomplish.

Finally, around 2008 0r 2009, companies start to pay attention to social media.  But in the five or so years since then, the conversation has largely remained focused on the tools themselves.  It’s long-overdue that we stop focusing on the tools and start focusing on understanding how and why people are using these tools.

Let’s stop focusing on social media and instead focus on how social media usage by our brand can relate to larger and far more valuable business objectives:

1 – Customer satisfaction

2 – Customer loyalty

3 – Sales

It’s time to elevate the conversation.  Actually it’s about 5 years past time to elevate the conversation.  We need to stop talking about the tools, and instead focus on the larger business goals that the tools help us reach.  For too long social media strategists/agencies and firms have been trying to sell companies on using social media with a tools-oriented argument.  Key executives that work within companies that approve marketing budgets don’t speak in terms of tools, they speak in terms of results.  A 15% increase in sales in Q3, a 10% reduction in product returns for the year or a 20% reduction in staff turnover.

When we change our conversation to stop focusing on the tools and instead focus on how the tools impact the bottom line, we earn the attention of companies.  It sends a completely mixed message to companies when we strategists say that companies need to invest in social media, but we talk about how that investment will lead to increased social media engagement, brand awareness, Likes and comments.  We tell companies that social media is important, then speak about that importance in metrics that are totally unimportant to the average company.  

So there’s no wonder they aren’t listening.  Neither are customers, because we are focused on ways to use social media to turn customers into digital billboards for our brands.

Stop the insanity!

If it’s 2014 and you are just now considering using social media to connect with your customers, I have good and bad news for you:

The bad news is: You’re way behind.

The good news is: Most companies that are using social media suck at it, so you can catch up quickly if you are smart.

It’s not about understanding the tools, it’s about understanding the people that use the tools.  That should be your focus in 2014.  Tools change but it’s always a good idea to understand who your customers are and how you can create value for them, regardless of the tools they (and you) use.

Pic via Flickr user DigitalLeica

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Amazing #Blogchat Stats From 2013

Thanks to Hashtracking I was able to track the #Blogchat stats for 2013, and came up with some pretty interesting results that I wanted to share with you.

First, a caveat: Hashtracking switched me over from their account to an account just for me in February, so there’s a gap of 9 days where we didn’t have stats for #Blogchat.  So all stats associated with the chat are approximate.

#blogchatStats2Actually the number I currently have is right over 116,000, so if you add in the gap in February and the final 12 days of this year, we’ll end up with right at 125,000 #Blogchat tweets generated this year.  Yes, we are a chatty bunch!

Here’s how those tweets break down (Feb-now):

#blogchatStats3As you can see, 39% of the #Blogchat tweets are someone replying to someone else.  It’s a conversation, which is why #Blogchat has been so successful and what I love about the chat.  Smart people sharing what they know and learning from each other.

#blogchatStats4

Amazing number, isn’t it?  That’s the size of many small towns!  It also speaks to the diversity of the #Blogchat community.

#blogchatStats5I think this is really interesting.  26% of the tweets come from the 20 most active contributors, and 48%, almost half, of the tweets come from the 100 most active contributors.  So half the tweets are coming from 0.5% of the members!   

#blogchatStats6Thanks to Patrick, Linda, Bruce, Georganna and Janice for being the 5 most active members of the #Blogchat community this year.  If you are new to #Blogchat, these guys are a must-follow!

Of course, one of the things that makes #Blogchat so valuable is all the amazing co-hosts we get to learn from.  2013 was certainly no exception…

#blogchatStats7

 We were extremely lucky to learn from Kerry, Chris, Mitch, Jay, Carrie, Dave and Sheila this year.  As an added bonus, here’s the transcript from each co-host’s #Blogchat:

Kerry – Legal aspects of blogging

Chris – Incorporating video into your blogging

Jay – How to create Youtility in your blogging

Dave – Leveraging your blog as a networking tool

Sheila – Blogger outreach

Carrie – How a small biz can make money from blogging

Mitch – Lessons learned from a decade of blogging

Biggest #Blogchat of the year?  That came on the Sunday of March the 10th, when 3,038 tweets were generated!

Oh and who was the person with the most followers that used the #Blogchat hashtag in 2013?  That would be this guy:

#blogchatStats8Ok granted he only tweeted twice about #Blogchat and they were both RTs but hey, it’s MC Hammer!

And the biggie:

#blogchatStats10Isn’t that amazing?  And no, ‘Reach’ and ‘Impressions’ aren’t always the most accurate measurements around, but still, the number of people exposed to the #Blogchat hashtag this year cannot be denied. It’s a staggeringly large number.

Finally, thank you to everyone that has helped make #Blogchat the amazingly valuable and helpful community that it is.  Here’s to an even better 2014, which will be #Blogchat’s FIFTH year!

PS: Want to sponsor #Blogchat in 2014?  Here’s price and details.