MackCollier.com

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Your blog should be a passion project

I just saw a new post by someone on Facebook.  My first thought was ‘I need to read this because I haven’t shared any of their posts in a while’.  So I clicked over and read the post, but I quickly saw that the post wasn’t worth sharing.  It was short, and it covered a topic that everyone had blogged about, and brought nothing new to the topic.

The blogger had phoned in this post.

It happens sometimes, I do it as well.  I will think ‘I need to get a blog post up today’, and then looking back I realize that particular post shouldn’t have been published.

I was thinking about this after I read Lisa’s post today about her 1st year of blogging.  Lisa said “I chose the (blogging) path that had my name on it”.  Isn’t that wonderful?  By writing in her voice and being true to herself, Lisa is making her blog a passion project.  And it makes her blog more interesting to her readers, and the writing process more enjoyable for her.  It’s the difference between ‘ugh…I need to write something today’, and having something to write about.

This sage advice dovetails with something that Liz Strauss told me a few weeks ago.  We were talking about self-promotion and using your blog as a tool to promote yourself.  Liz said “There’s a difference between self-promotion, and sharing what you are passionate about”.  The enormity of that hit me right between the eyes.  Because when you are sharing your passion, it’s really NOT promotion.  You are sharing something you love with others.

Think about how this could impact your business blog.  What if changing your focus took your blog from being a place where you promoted your business, to one where you shared what you loved about your business?  Think about if Steve Jobs blogged, do you think he would post boring self-promotional brochureware posts about the next iPad?  Or would he blog ‘The iPad3 is the most amazing device you have ever seen, and here’s why!’

I think passion trumps promotion every time.  What do you think?

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Why setting realistic goals for your blog is so important

Several years ago when Technorati was still the rage, I used this trick to discover interesting new bloggers.  I would do a search by authority (which at the time was the number of links a blog had), and then sort in ascending order, so that the blogs with 0 authority would be shown first.  Normally, these were the bloggers that had just started blogging, and this method really helped me discover bloggers before the they became popular.

One day I found a blog that had really low authority, and it had about 2 months worth of posts.  I noticed for the first couple of weeks, there was a new post almost every day.  All very thoughtful, well-written (and lengthy!) posts.  But I noticed that none of them had comments.  For the next two week’s worth of posts, there was about 2-3 posts a week, then after that the frequency gradually fell to once a week, then once every couple of weeks.  All posts were well-written, interesting and thoughful reads.  And none of them had the first comment.

Then I noticed the newest post on the blog, which was over a month old.  In contrast to the other posts, this one was only one sentence long.  It read “Why doesn’t anyone comment on this blog?!?”

I realized that I had just seen this blog die.

When it comes to having a successful blog, realistic goals are so important.  Because your blog will only grow if you can commit to it, and you probably won’t be able to meet that commitment unless you can see that you are making headway.  And that starts with setting realistic goals that you have a chance of achieving.

If you are considering launching a blog, here’s some tips to make sure you are setting realistic goals for your blog:

1 – Underestimate how much content you can create.  For example, if you *think* you/your team can write 3 new posts a week, start out with 1 or 2 a week, and see if you can work up to 3.  It’s FAR easier to work up than it is to go back down.

2 – Underestimate how much time you can spend with blogging activities.  If you *think* you can spend 2 hours a day, then half that to only spend an hour a day.  And half that again to devote 30 mins a day to activities on the blog (such as writing posts, responding to comments) and 30 mins a day to reading other blogs and commenting on other blogs.  Maybe you can up that commitment over time, but it’s better to start low and go high, than to start out too high and have to back down.

3 – Think months, not weeks when you are timelining your blogging strategy.  Blogging is a marathon, not a sprint.  You have to remember that a lot of the ‘pro bloggers’ that have very successful and vibrant blogs are NOT in the same situation you are.  For many of these people, their blog represents the majority of their sales and promotional efforts.  As such, they can afford to devote the several hours a day that it usually takes to create an extremely popular and productive blog.  You probably cannot, so you shouldn’t compare yourself to these bloggers and look for similar results.  If you can only invest 30 mins a day to your blogging efforts that’s fine, just understand that it will take longer to see that blog gain traction if that’s the case.

 

Those are some quick tips to get you started setting your blogging goals, for those of you that blog for your company, what has worked for you?

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Where Empire Avenue Succeeds (and Fails) As a Community Site

A little over a week ago I finally caved and joined the Empire Avenue bandwagon.  The site is similar to a stock market, in that the idea is that you ‘invest’ in others by buying and selling shares in them.  As is always the case, I am trying to look at each of the Shiny Objects that the social media fishbowl goes gaga over through the lens of ‘is there any real reason for most businesses to be here?’

In short, there’s not a lot of real business value to be had for the average company on EA.  It’s a game and distraction, no more, no less.  Sure, it’s possible to get some networking value there, but then again you can still get networking value on Identica if you want to bad enough.

But if you accept that EA is little more than a game and competition, it can be fun.  And it was for me.  After a day or so of wondering what in the hell I was supposed to be doing, I noticed that my EA ‘score’ was going up.  People were ‘investing’ in me constantly!  Soon I was at 20 points.  Then 30, then 35, 40, and 50!  I was gaining 5 or so points a day, and I saw that my ‘net wealth’ was up to a few hundred thousand Eaves (the EA ‘currency’).

Then on Saturday, something happened.  My EA score barely moved all day.  Few investments came in.  I shrugged it off, hey it’s just a bad day.  Then Sunday, the same thing.  What the hell was going on?!?  I wasn’t doing anything different (that I could tell), and yet suddenly it was as if someone turned off the faucet.  My score stopped going up, and no one wanted to invest in me anymore, it seemed.

Then yesterday, another flat day.  And that’s when it happened: I realized that Empire Avenue sucked.  Funny how when my score was going up several points every day (even though I never was sure why it was happening), I thought EA was awesome.  Then when my score flatlined, the site sucked and I needed to stop wasting my time on such a silly game.

There’s a really important lesson here if you want to emulate EA and create a competition-based community site.  You need to teach me how to win.  Throughout the last week, I was pretty much on my own in trying to figure out how to ‘win’ at EA, or even figuring out what ‘winning’ looked like.  I got little to no advice from the site, even through searching.  The best advice I got was from a few long-time EA members like @AdrielHampton.

But the bottom line is that my EA score started to suck, and I didn’t know why, so I assume then that Empire Avenue sucks!  (Because I am an irrational human being, remember? ;))

Here’s what should have happened:

1 – Empire Avenue should have made it painfully obvious to me on signup how to ‘win’ and what the object of the game was.

2 – EA should have helped me understand how specific activities are tied to my quest to ‘winning’ the game.  I was able to add my Twitter and YouTube and Facebook accounts to my EA account, but I’m not sure what impact it made.  My Facebook and YouTube scores are still stuck at 1, but I don’t know how to change that.  I should know, and EA should tell me.

3 – When my score started to plateau over the last few days, that should have triggered a way for EA to explain to me what I need to do to get my daily gain back up where it was.  I have no idea why my daily gains started flatlining, but EA should make sure that I do know.

4 – Interaction with other EA members should be a BIG part of ‘winning’.  Or maybe it is and EA never told me about it.

 

The bottom line is that for me, EA is a semi-fun distraction that I am losing interest in because I feel like I still haven’t crossed the Suck Threshold.  If you’ve tried out Empire Avenue, what do you think?  What am I doing wrong?

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Participation is no longer an option

Although he didn’t realize it at the time, this gentleman was actually live-tweeting the raid on Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad a couple of days ago.

Twitter ‘broke’ the news that Bin Laden was dead late last night, before mainstream media did.  As @ReallyVirtual’s tweets show above, the information was actually out there a couple of days earlier.  The lesson for mainstream media is the same as it is for your company: Anyone with access to the proper devices can use social media to create and distribute content faster than you can.

The days of creating and distributing a carefully-crafted message via only the channels you select, are over.  Mainstream media, to its credit, is realizing this, and is using social media to supplement its efforts and improve how it delivers news, and incorporates reactions from others.

Today, your business is no different.  You have to make the choice to begin to participate, or to begin to become irrelevant.  But thankfully, the choice is still yours to make.

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LiveFyre comment management added, let me know what you think!

As some of you have discovered, I’ve added the LiveFyre comment management system here at MackCollier.com.  This comes after seeing both Gini and Beth add it to their blogs, and rave about how it works.  Also, I was really sold after seeing how Gini’s readers (she’s been using it for about 7 months now) love it.

The Livefyre system will make it easier to facilitate actual conversations in the comments.  When I set up this blog I specified to have comments be nested, but it doesn’t always work.  Livefyre should take care of that problem.

Also, it adds a Like button to comments, which is great and most of us are used to seeing this on other blogs and Facebook.  And speaking of Facebook, you can also post your comment directly to Facebook AND Twitter when you leave it.

I really am excited about this system, and I am only adding it because I think it will help you.  So please try it out, kick the tires, and let me know what you think.  If you hate it, it will be gone.  If you love it, it will never leave.  The heart of this blog has ALWAYS been your comments.  Anything I can do to make it easier and more valuable for you to leave comments, is what I want.

So give it a try, and let me know what you think!  Also, here is Gini’s review of LiveFyre.

Oh and PS: Jenna Langer is head of Community for LiveFyre, and she was kind enough to attend the Live #Blogchat at SXSW!  Thanks Jenna!

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Which Fast-Food Brand Has the Best Twitter Presence?

So when it comes to fast-food chains, who is the King on Twitter?  McDonald’s? BK?  Starbucks?

The answer is, it depends.  Do you place more value on followers, or engagement?  How important is following back customers on Twitter?  Do more active accounts get higher marks?

I found a list of the Top 10 fast-food brands according to QSRMagazine and then used TweetStats to track the Twitter account for each of the Top 10 brands.  I then looked at 6 categories: Followers, Following, Tweets, Replies, RTs as Replies, and How Long on Twitter.

Here’s the brands that I looked at, and their Twitter account for each:  McDonalds, Subway, Burger King, Wendy’s, Starbucks, Taco Bell, Dunkin’ Donuts, Pizza Hut, KFC, Sonic.

Here’s my assessment of how these brands are using Twitter:

Best Twitter Presence – Starbucks

Starbucks leads 2 of the 6 categories I looked at, and was 2nd in 3 others.  The Seattle-based brand has a huge lead in number of followers, Taco Bell and McDonalds were tied for 2nd on the list with just a shade over 123K followers for each.  Starbucks has over 1.4 million followers.  They also have the most tweets, have been on Twitter since August 2008), and almost 80% of the company’s tweets are replies to others.  If there was one knock against the company, it might be that they are only following 79K people, which is the most on the list, but still only a fraction of its 1.4M followers.

Most Active and Engaged: Dunkin Donuts

DD has been on Twitter since October 2008, having left the most tweets on this list (8586), and 70% of those tweets have been replies to others.  Also, they have over 78K followers, and have over 52K people they are following.  I also think it’s interesting that while DD only has a fraction of the followers that competitor Starbucks has, the rest of its stats seem to closely track with what Starbucks has done.  DD joined Twitter a couple of months after SBUX, they have more tweets, and over 70% replies, like Starbucks.

Most Disappointing Twitter Presence: Burger King

BK arguably has the most brand awareness after McDonalds, but you couldn’t tell it from the company’s Twitter account.  The chain has less than 10K followers, a full 114K behind rival McDonalds.  Of course, The King isn’t doing himself any favors, only following 327 people, with only 223 tweets and roughly 1% of those are replies.  This proves that engagement matters, if BK were more active and responsive to followers, I bet its number of followers would spike.

Here’s the complete stats and how each brand ranked:

Number of Followers:

1 – Starbucks – 1,429,917

2 – McDonalds – 123,690

3 – Taco Bell – 123,557

4 – Dunkin Donuts – 78,449

5 – Pizza Hut – 53,306

6 – Subway – 47,821

7 – KFC – 32,808

8 – Wendy’s – 18,821

9 – Sonic – 12,144

10 – Burger King – 9,523

Replies as % of Tweets

1 – Sonic – 86.11

2 – Starbucks – 78.43

3 – Dunkin Donuts – 70.42

4 – KFC – 64.08

5 – McDonalds – 59.69

6 – Pizza Hut – 57.26

7 – Wendy’s – 53.52

8 – Subway – 45

9 – Taco Bell – 12.55

10 – Burger King – 1.79

Number of Tweets

1 – Dunkin Donuts – 8,586

2 – Starbucks – 6,936

3 – McDonalds – 4,946

4 – Taco Bell – 4,251

5 – Sonic – 4,243

6 – Subway – 3,824

7 – KFC – 3,044

8 – Pizza Hut – 2,047

9 – Wendy’s – 1,779

10 – Burger King – 223

 

Takeaways from these stats:

1 – Engagement matters, and isn’t optional.  All of these chains (with the possible exception of Sonic) have national footprints, and as such have to be on Twitter, because that’s where their customers are.  If you’re a national brand with a larger customer base (especially a B2C company), then it’s required that you be active on all major social media channels, because your customers will be.

2 –  Experience matters.  Three of the 10 brands listed here have been on Twitter since 2008, and all three are in the middle or top of all stats.

3 – Social Media is growing up fast.  If you look at the Twitter accounts of these brands, you’ll see that most are actively engaging their customers.  Remember just 2-3 years ago when it was big news if ANY brand replied to a customer on Twitter?  It’s the norm now.

 

Have any of these brands connected with you on Twitter?

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Blogging Case Study: How the OpenHouse Blog Builds Engagement With Readers

One of the biggest problems that business blogs (and many personal blogs, for that matter) have is building engagement with its readers.  Today I wanted to highlight a blog that does a fantastic job of connecting with readers, the HomeGoods OpenHouse blog.

It starts with the strategy

First, the OpenHouse blog does such a good job of building engagement because it’s a focal point of the blog’s strategy.  “The strategy for HG Openhouse is for our most passionate customers to talk to other customers about the love for their homes and surroundings whether that is in the form of decorating, entertaining, organizing, gifting, etc”, explains HomeGoods’ Marketing Manager, Kristie Rogers.  “We want the bloggers to talk about what inspires them and how they make their home their happy place.”

homegoods, blog engagement, blog marketing

Note in this screenshot that you can see the pictures of three different bloggers.  The entire visual component of the blog is build around making you as comfortable as possible with the bloggers themselves.  All have their pictures posted in each post they write, and rotating on the sidebar to the right, as well.  HomeGoods wants you to get to know the OpenHouse bloggers as people, and truly understand the value of posting pictures of their bloggers.  They also make it very easy to click the bios of the bloggers and learn more about them as people.  All of this makes it easier for the readers to connect with the bloggers, which makes it more likely that they will comment on the blog.

And when readers do comment (almost every post has comments), note how the OpenHouse bloggers make a point of referring to the commenter by their first name.  Here’s a good example, note that in both the comments Cathy wrote, she referred to the commenter by their first name.  And note that Sandy picked up on this, and referred to Cathy by her first name in her comment back.  The comments begin to look less like comments, and more like letters that friends are writing to each other.

So if you are wanting to get more engagement on your blog, look at what is working for OpenHouse on its blog; Lots of pictures and bios for every blogger, encouraging interaction and comments in the posts, and referring to commenters by their first name.  All of this works together to help HomeGoods reach its blogging goal of creating interaction with its readers.

BTW this is the first in a series of posts I’ll be doing on company blogs. I’m looking for company blogs that excel in one particular area.  For example in this post, the OpenHouse blog excels at creating engagement on its blog, so that’s why it was highlighted.  If you have a favorite company blog that you would like to see me highlight next, please either leave a comment, or email me.  Also, if you think your own company blog would be a good candidate, please send me a link so I can check it out!

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Coca-Cola’s CMO talks about how the company’s marketing approach is changing

Joe Tripodi, Coca-Cola’s Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing and Commercial Officer, recently penned a great article for the HBR on how the brand’s marketing is shifting from impressions to expressions.  I wanted to focus on one point that Joe made:

Build a process that shares successes and failures quickly throughout your company.Increasing consumer expressions requires many experiments, and some will fail. Build a pipeline so you can quickly replicate your successes in other markets and share the lessons from any failures. For example, our “Happiness Machine” video was a hit on YouTube so we turned it into a TV commercial, and we’ve replicated that low-cost, viral concept in other markets.

This is vitally important, especially when you are dealing with emerging marketing areas such as social media and mobile, and within big brands.  I recently wrote about the need to facilitate feedback internally AND externally (and among both groups), and I think this is an area that brands that have more mature social media marketing efforts will definitely capitalize on.  One of the big ‘knocks’ against social media especially is that it’s said to take a lot of time to implement and execute properly.  To Joe’s point, if a feedback system/cycle is put in place internally, the outcomes discovered by one area of the company, can be shared throughout, so that there’s no need to constantly re-invent the wheel.

Check out Joe’s article, and here’s the tv commercial that resulted from the success of their YouTube spots.

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Recruiters: Should job applicants mention using Social Media?

As you might know, Beth Harte has been looking for a job for the past few months.  Recently, she shared this feedback she had gotten from a recruiter:

“Remove all of your personal speaking, writing, blogging, and social media (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, SlideShare links, etc.) items from your resume. Companies don’t give a crap about that, they only care what you will do for them. Those items are red flags letting them know that you’ll request to be out of the office speaking or on Twitter all day and that you will not be helping to solve their day-to-day problems (i.e. tactical work).”

What do you think of this advice?  And I especially want to hear from recruiters, feel free to email me if you don’t want to comment here, and I will be happy to post your thoughts anonymously.  I am sure that most of us in the ‘social media fishbowl’ will gasp at this advice, but I would really like to see if this is the advice that recruiters are giving job applicants.

Now if Beth were 21 and fresh out of college and her only social media experience was creating a Facebook profile where she shared her photos of shoe shopping and frat parties, then yes, I could see not mentioning that.  But Beth has active social media presences on Twitter, Facebook, her blog, that all work to establish Beth’s thought leadership when it comes to how businesses can leverage integrated marketing, social media, customer service, etc etc.  Also, the fact that she has over 20K followers speaks volumes to her ability to build online communities.

But anyway, I wanted to ask recruiters if this is solid advice for job applicants.  Should any job applicants be removing all social media activity from their resumes?  And those of you that are also applying for jobs, what feedback are you getting from recruiters?  As I told Beth, I can understand the recruiter saying she shouldn’t mention her speaking, but the removal of all social media activities floors me.  I don’t think it should be the focus of her resume, but I also don’t think it should be deleted completely.

Recruiters, what do you think?  Job applicants, what advice are recruiters and employers giving you about listing social media on your resume?  And BTW, I don’t care what any recruiter says, if you need a smart marketer, you should definitely hire Beth!

 

UPDATE:  We’ve had a few recruiters chime in with comments (Thanks guys!), and they seem to be agreeing with what the recruiter told Beth.  I am wondering if part of it is simply social media having a negative perception as being only personal content?  Beth creates business-oriented content on her blog and Twitter feed, so I would think that would have value for businesses that need someone who can connect with these same people.

So to ask a slightly different question to recruiters:  If Beth didn’t have ANY social media accounts/presences, but did have a business newsletter that was aimed at CMOs and brand managers that had 50,000 subscribers, should she mention that on her resume?

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What’s the REAL business value of blog comments?

Amy has an interesting post on her blog today on the value of blog comments.  In it, she writes:

I think blog comments are VERY overrated. “Social media experts” act like they are the be-all-end-all but personally I think they are insignificant for many (not all, but the majority of) companies.

If I ran an SEO blog, I’d expect comments from my peers and MAYBE a few clients.  However, if I was in charge of a blog for plumbers, I would NOT expect any comments. Plumbers are going to be out fixing sinks and such all day long, they are not going to be sitting in front of their computers waiting to weigh in on clogged toilets and whether or not industrial Drano is environmentally friendly.

Now I could easily see a plumber having a blog that created content on teaching others how to do simple plumbing upgrades/repairs on their own, and how blog comments could have value as it would let the plumber answer questions from readers and in the process, establish the plumber’s credibility and expertise with potential customers.  But I think Amy’s larger point on the true value of comments, is valid.

Companies need to understand that while comments DO have value on a blog, that value will be different for each company.  And that comments are NOT the end goal for any blogging strategy.  If any of you write for a company blog that is judged ultimately on how many comments you generate per post, I’d love to hear from you.

Let’s assume a fictional company blog has the end goal of generating more sales on its website.  So the average path that a person might take on the blog would look something like this:

1 – Arrive on blog

2 – ???

3 – ???

4 – ???

5 – Leave blog and go to website

6 – ???

7 – ???

8 – Purchase product from website

 

Let’s say this visitor commented on the blog before leaving it and going to the website and purchasing a product.  If so, that action would have taken place at #2, #3, or #4.  Probably #2 or #3.  The point is, the visitor leaving a comment is low on the totem pole of importance.  What you want to look at more closely is what happened at #4 to prompt the visitor to leave the blog and go to the website, and then what happened at #6 and #7 to prompt the person to purchase the product once they arrived on the website.

But even IF a comment happens at #2, it still has value if it moved the visitor on to the action they took at #3.  The point is, you need to understand that you can’t judge the blog’s effectiveness solely on comments per post, you need to look higher up the chain to find the value.  And it could be that for your unique blogging goals, that getting comments on the blog is more important to you.  For me,  getting more comments per post has value for me in several areas:

1 – It helps me learn from my readers, which means the content I create here is (hopefully) more useful.

2 – It gives me ideas for future posts.

3 – It helps establish for event organizers that the content I am talking about resonates with readers, so they should hire me to speak at their event.

4 – It helps establish for clients that I know how to build engagement and interaction via blogs and social media.

Now if your company’s blogging strategy is built around building engagement and your online presence, then comments on your blog has a higher value for you.  Each company’s situation is different and the only ‘one size fits all’ rule when it comes to blogs and social media is probably that there is NO ‘one size fits all’ rule 😉

So blog comments will have different value for each blogging company.  While comments are NOT the silver bullet that some social media experts claim, they aren’t totally worthless, either.

Those of you that blog for your business, what value do YOU place on comments? And I’d like to hear from business bloggers moreso than personal bloggers.  If you have a personal blog, comments are absolutely more valuable for you.  But I’d like to hear what business bloggers feel the value of comments are.