MackCollier.com

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How to grow your blog by leaving it

Beau wrote me an email asking the following: “Some time ago, you wrote a post called “40 Dead Simple Ways to Get More Comments on Your Blog.” This is a great post, and #27 in particular intrigues me: “Leave comments on other blogs.” You state: “The best way to grow your blog is to leave it.”

Could you share with me briefly just how this works? How is it that commenting on other blogs brings traffic back to one’s own blog? I suppose I could always leave my blog URL in a comment on someone else’s blog, but at a certain point this seems like spamming to me. My sense is that “URL-dropping” is not exactly what you had in mind here.”

Beau thanks for the question, and here is Beau’s blog.

Let me give you an example of this idea from 2005 when I started blogging. I was completely new to blogging, and I was writing on a group advertising blog Beyond Madison Avenue. Personally, I was hoping the blog could be a tool I could use to help me land a job. So I had a very vested interest in seeing it succeed.

Now I had no idea what blogging was about, but I knew I need a lot of visitors and a lot of comments. And BMA had neither. So I started reading all the supposed ‘best’ blogs, with the thinking being that I could learn from these other bloggers what the ‘secret’ to blogging success was, and then copy it for BMA.  So for the next few weeks, I started reading and studying the top blogs religiously. At the same time, I was writing every day for BMA, sometimes as many as 4 posts a day.  Nothing was happening.  No traffic, no comments, virtual tumbleweeds were rolling by and taunting me.

And I really wasn’t learning anything from the blogs I was reading, either. But as I was reading I was discovering new blogs that were interesting, and once in a while I’d even leave a comment on a post if I thought it was interesting. Over the next couple of weeks, I discovered more blogs, and left more comments on blog posts.

Then suddenly one day, BMA started getting comments.  At first it was only a couple, then every new post we wrote would start getting comments within an hour or two.  In a week we’d gone from a blog with zero comments from readers, to one where every new post was getting 5-10 comments!

Which was amazing, but I still had no idea what had prompted the change.  Then one day a reader left a comment and said that they were thanking me for the comment I had left on their blog, and wanted to come leave a comment on my blog.  That’s when it hit me: All these comments were coming from bloggers who wrote blogs that I had already commented on!  They had followed the link back in my comment to come check out my blog!

Beau thats when I learned one of the most fundamental truths of building engagement via social media: The more you participate, the more participation you get.  The more comments I left on other blogs, the more comments I got back on my blog. And it doesn’t work just for blogs, the more active I am on Twitter, the more tweets I get as well as followers.  And I don’t mean simply ‘name-dropping’ but actually participating in conversations and trying to build the discussion.

When you participate via social media, it raises your awareness.  It’s a way of getting your name out there, and getting people to notice you.

Now for increasing comments on your blog by leaving it, here would be my tips:

1 – Watch your referral traffic. If you don’t have a way to track your blog’s stats, there are many free options available. I use both SiteMeter and Google Analytics here.  But tracking your referral traffic will show you who is linking to your blog.  If you see from your referral traffic that another blogger has linked to your blog, go back to their blog and thank them.  Or even write them an email thanking them.  That simply encourages them to link to your blog again, plus comment on your blog.

2 – Leave comments on the blogs of readers that comment on your blog.  Same as above, this simply encourages them to leave more comments on your blog, because you are doing the same for them. It’s all about rewarding the type of behavior that you want to encourage.  This is one that I honestly don’t do as much as I should.

3 – Leave comments on blogs that are influential to your readers.  Think about where your readers are going now to get their information and connect with each other, and go there. By connecting with them there, leaving comments on posts, etc, you will get on their radars.  By participating in their space, that will encourage them to come check you out on your blog.

 

So those are some ideas on growing interaction on your blog, by leaving it. Again, the key to building interaction via social media is to participate. Great content will only help you if people know it exists, and that’s where interacting with others in THEIR space helps you build your own awareness.

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Review: 2011 B2B Forum in Boston

 

I’ve been going to Marketing Profs events for 3 years now, and they remain my favorite marketing-oriented conferences.  Even when I started writing articles for Marketing Profs 4 years ago, Ann stressed to me constantly to ‘give the readers a plan of action, something they can implement immediately’.  That really is the cornerstone of all content Marketing Profs’ creates, and the conferences are no different.  The sessions are designed so that you can take what you have learned back to your team in the office the next day and immediately get started improving your marketing efforts.

I wanted to share with you some of the things I learned from a few of the sessions I was able to attend:

Developing Enterprise Social Media Strategies led by David B Thomas and Mike Barlow

Some of the key points shared and discussed:

  • David talked about how at SAS they built a Marketing 2.0 council that gathered internal stakeholders and educated them on social media and new media tools.  David stressed that it is good to get legal and HR involved in the process, as legal is there to ‘identify risks and communicate them’.  Sam Fiorella added that his company has what it calls a Social Enablement Policy and that the policy spells out the ‘dos and donts’ of social media.
  • Social media needs to be spread throughout the organization, don’t leave it in the hands of the evangelists and proponents.  Mike added that you should build 3 quick stories that you can use to help sell social media to your organization or company.  It could be a success story that your company/org has had, or maybe something a competitor did that worked.  Or an opportunity lost.
  • One of the attendees (I apologize for not remembering who) said their company created a Social Media Marketing Cookbook, which took experiences of field marketers and then explained how social media could have helped them in this instances.  For example, dealing with customers directly, in a retail setting, etc.  How could social media have made their jobs easier?
  • Eloqua created a Social Media Playbook and encouraged others to ‘steal out Social Media Playbook’.  Good example of creating content that spreads.
  • David clarified that it took about a year and a half for the Social Media Council to gain some real internal traction at SAS, and that the biggest obstacle was ‘big company inertia’.  David said they overcame this by having a champion in the C-Suite and by ‘waiting it out’.  Persistence is key.
  • Help the C-Suite see the value of social media, show them what competitors are doing and show how they are gaining a competitive advantage.
  • Look at how each department is tracking engagement and measuring, then make the case for how social media could improve those engagement efforts.
  • Tim Washer had a wonderful point about experimentation.  He said executives will always ask for metrics and the ROI of social media, but that you should experiment.  Create content and promote it in different ways.  He said while he was at IBM, that they had workers create ‘This is where I work’ videos.  Tim added that workers were given ‘brand guidelines’, but also the freedom to otherwise be creative in creating their videos.  These were meant to be shared internally, but the best ones were taken and shared externally.  Fabulous example of using video to humanize a brand, and Tim led a session on that very topic.
  • A lot of B2B attendees mentioned having difficulty getting engineers involved in blogging.  Someone (I think it was Michael Brenner?) made the point to make sure that engineers understand that blogging gives them a way to connect directing with their customers on a one-to-one basis.

Next up was CK’s session on The Mobile Revolution and B2B.  What I love is that CK immediately grabbed the audience’s attention with a couple of OMG! stats:

  • 6.7 Billion people on earth, and there are 5 billion mobile subscriptions
  • 95% of text messages are read, and most within 5 mins

Here’s some other (action) points from her session:

  • Optimize your current website for mobile
  • Add a ‘mobile-friendly’ link at the top of every email you send
  • Make sure the online experience you are giving customers is optimized for mobile, and the content you create should be as well.
  • Think about how your customers are using mobile, think graphically, make sure mobile content maps to mobile needs
  • Conduct a full audit of all marketing programs and note how implementing a mobile aspect could increase efficiencies.  For example, at a trade show, have QR codes so attendees can get content and information without asking them to lug around papers they may throw away later.
  • Mobile doesn’t replace social media, it amplifies it’s effectiveness.  Think of all the sharing we do via social media, when we have a mobile device, we can do that on the go.

This is probably my favorite slide of the event, and it comes from the Beyond Blogs and White Papers session with Ann Handley, Pawan Deshpande, Joe Chernov and Becki Dilworth.  Here’s a few of the points they raised:

  • The ‘old way’ that companies spoke to customers was only when it had news to share, ie the Press Release
  • Ann made the point that ‘Your content is your sales staff’.
  • Becki told about how Bridgeline decided to sponsor a speaking tour for Ann across 9 cities.  She said the events had little to no promotion of Bridgeline, it was all about letting Ann create content that was beneficial to potential Bridgeline clients.  Becki said the Content Revolution Tour cost Bridgeline $150,000, but generated over 1,500 qualified leads for the software company.
  • Don’t repurpose or recycle existing content, re-imagine it.  The point is to look at how you can change existing content, such as taking a White Paper and making it into a podcast, or a video.  You could even take the FAQ on your website and expand some of those into individual blog posts.  For example, I created a lot of content during the B2B Forum.  I took a ton of pictures and live-tweeted the event as much as possible.  I then took the pictures and put them on Flickr, but now I am using them in my blog posts as well.  All those tweets I left resulted in my getting some new followers, but I also used them as a note-taking mechanism, and am now using them to help write this post.
  • Slideshare is a very under-utilized ‘social media outpost’.

 

And now…a word about Marketing Profs’ keynotes.

Marketing Profs is one of the few event organizers/planners that understand the purpose of a keynote session.  It is supposed to be amazing.  It is supposed to inspire you and make you look at the world differently.  Marketing Profs always has amazing keynotes, and the B2B Forum certainly did not disappoint.  If you are planning a conference, make sure you follow the Marketing Profs example here.  All their sessions are informative and valuable, but the keynotes are truly special.  As they should be.

Day One’s keynote was Guy Winch talking about How Your Unhappiest Customers Can (Paradoxically!) Help You Foster Fans.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

  • 95% of us will not complain when we have a bad customer experience, but we will in turn tell an average of 16 people about the bad experience!  And as Guy pointed out, as we keep retelling the story, we keep getting re-aggravated about the experience, and I am sure the telling of the story changes a bit after 16 times 😉  But that also helps cement our anger toward the brand.  The paradox here is that we voice our displeasure to everyone EXCEPT the people who could fix our problem.
  • In general, doctors aren’t sued due to mistakes they make, but because the patient thinks they don’t care about them.  Listening is key, but so is HEARING and showing empathy with what the customer is going through.
  • A sudden change in engagement levels is a hint that a customer may have a complaint that they aren’t telling you about.
  • Make it easy for your customers to complain to you, so they won’t complain to friends and other customers.  You WANT them to complain to YOU, because then you can do something about it.
  • To repair a damaged customer relationship, give an effective apology, open communication about the resolution process, and have a great follow-up to see if the customer is satisfied.
  • An effective apology must include an emotional validation. You have to communicate to the customer that you understand and sympathize with their point of view.  You should also match the emotional tone of your customer.  Your concern should reflect their level of distress.  And realize that validating feelings is NOT admitting fault!
  • To rebuild trust with a customer, first promise, then deliver.  Repeatedly.

 


Day Two Keynote: Nancy Duarte discussing Resonate: Presenting Ideas That Inspire Change

This session was going to show us how to create amazing presentations, so I was really looking forward to hearing Nancy, and she didn’t disappoint.  I thought she made one of the best points of the entire event when she said that took many speakers treat their presentations as if THEY are the hero.  The speaker is never the hero, it’s always the audience.  If you look at the above photo (any presentation with a Star Wars reference has to be amazing), the hero is Luke, who is the audience.  The speaker’s role is that of Yoda, or the mentor.  The speaker’s job is to move the audience to a better place via their presentation.

I have to apologize, because I didn’t take a lot of notes on this session, simply because Nancy had me mesmerized.  She did talk about the structure of an amazing presentation.  It alternates between What Is and What Could Be.  The idea is to re-enforce to the audience that the What Is is now, but if we change our mindset, or change our actions, or buy a product, that we could achieve What Could Be.  Here is a picture of the diagram:

She then pointed out how two different speeches followed this exact formula, she first looked at Steve Jobs’ iPhone announcement in 2007, and then Martin Luther King’s famous ‘I Have a Dream…’ speech.  Embedded here is her TEDx East talk where she covered both of these examples, so please do watch it:

 

All in all, this was another amazing Marketing Profs event.  You should definitely consider attending one of their events, they are a bit more expensive than other events, but you are getting what you pay for.  BTW if you’d like to read my review of the LIVE #Blogchat at B2B Forum click here.

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Review: #Blogchat LIVE at the B2B Forum

“So how does a Live #Blogchat work?”

I bet I heard that question fifty times this week, and my answer was always the same, “The same way #Blogchat works on Twitter”.

And it did. About 60 people showed up to Live #Blogchat, and we capped that number in order to have a smaller and more connected coversation.  What happened was a smart room full of people had a wonderful conversation and bounced ideas off each other and built on the ideas that others was sharing. It really was a perfect mirror to the online #Blogchat experience.  It even got to the point where smaller sub-conversations were developing (just like they do on Twitter), as people were going back to points someone else had made earlier to build on them.

To me, this represents among the best learning that can happen at conferences, when the attendees can connect with each other. As I said at the start of the #Blogchat, I think most people are smarter than they give themselves credit for, and I love that the Live #Blogchat was able to help facilitate these people to share their #smartitude.

And when it ended, I had several attendees tell me “You were right, it was just like it is on Twitter!”  Which was a very good thing 😉

Some of the main points we covered included:

  • Michael Brenner brought up a great point about content strategy in an enterprise environment. Should that strategy extend to govern how content is created no matter the tool?  Or should their be separate ‘rules’ governing content creation via different tools, such as a blog vs trade-show brochures? (Michael please chime in if you want to add to or clarify this point).
  • Bob Knorpp made the point that there is no ‘one size fits all’ rule when it comes to blogging.  He added that he is thinking of stopping his blog because he gets more traction on iTunes for his podcast.  Lou Imbriano countered that he thought every company should have a blog, and he talked about the impact his blog has made on his personal and professional life.
  • Matt Grant talked about how it can be hard to even determine exactly what a blog is, and how the tool is evolving over time.  He’s right, the line between a website and blog is getting blurry, and many people don’t consider it a blog if comments aren’t allowed.  I thought this point tied into Bob’s point about there not being a one-size-fits-all approach to blogging.

I definitely want to thank Marketing Profs for bringing the Live #Blogchat to the B2B Forum, and for Sensei Marketing and The Cooper Group for sponsoring the event.  Also, thanks to Sam Fiorella for co-hosting the Live #Blogchat, and for Brandie McCallum for live-tweeting the Live #Blogchat.  Click here to see the tweets from last night’s Live #Blogchat.  Thanks to everyone that attended the Live #Blogchat, and I wanted to share some of my favorite pictures below.  You can see all the pics in the set here.

 

How cool is this setup?
Meet and Greet before the smartitude starts!

 

Almost ready to get started!
A scholar and a gentleman, Lou Imbriano
It would not be a Marketing Profs event without CB Whittemore and Matt Grant

Seriously thanks to everyone that came, I love you guys!

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What impacts search traffic more, keywords in posts or post frequency?

So a couple of weeks ago I was blogging about how my search traffic seemed to be flat over the last few weeks.  I decided to do a 2-week experiment to try to see if posting frequency or posts with targeted keywords would have a bigger impact on increasing search traffic.  For the week 2 weeks ago, I posted 5 new posts during the week, but didn’t worry about targeting keywords in the post title or in the post itself.  Last week, I only posted 4 new posts, but I made more effort to target keywords and phrases in the post titles and the posts themselves.  Here’s a graph of search traffic over the life of this blog:

BTW, I promise my writing isn’t as terrible as it looks in this graph 😉  As you can see, there’s been a nice steady increase in traffic till the middle of April, and has been fairly flat since then.  The last two weeks at the end are with the red lines under the graph.

So two weeks ago I posted 5 times and didn’t worry about targeting keywords or phrases. I had 767 visitors from search the week before, and it fell to 705 2 weeks ago.  Now since 2 weeks ago included Memorial Day, that affected the search traffic a bit, but didn’t account for all of the drop.

Last week, search traffic rebounded nicely, up to 804 visitors from search, which was the 4th best week here ever for search traffic. And that was with only 4 new posts, but I made an effort in each post to target keywords and phrases in the title and post.

So what can we learn from this incredibly unscientific experiment? It seems that targeted keywords and phrases do a better job of increasing search traffic than simply posting more does.  BTW in case you were wondering, overall traffic last week was up over 50% over the previous week.  So the fewer posts with targeted keywords and phrases resulted in more overall traffic as well.

Writing this from the Huntsville Airport, so I hope to see some of you at the B2B Forum this week!

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Get your blog reviewed during #Blogchat – June

It’s baaaaaaaack! Last month on a whim, I decided to have a #Blogchat where we all reviewed 3 blogs submitted by #Blogchat regulars. It ended up being a HUGE hit with all of you, so we’re going to make it a monthly feature on the 3rd Sunday of every month!

So if you want to submit your blog to be reviewed this coming Sunday (the 19th), please leave a comment to this post with the URL of your blog and exactly what areas you want us to look at.  If you want to know what everyone thinks of the information on your sidebars, let us know that.  If you want to know what you should be writing about, tell us who you are trying to connect with.  If you want feedback on your post titles, let us know.  Please be as specific as possible, if you leave a comment and all you say is ‘I would love to have my blog reviewed, thanks!’, then we have nothing to go on.  The more specific you can be, the better the chance you have of getting your blog picked.

I’ll pick three blogs to be reviewed, and those will be announced on Saturday.  We’ll spend the first 20 mins of the next #Blogchat reviewing one blog, the second 20 mins on the second blog, and the final 20 mins on the third blog.

To give you an idea of what type of information you should include in your comment, here’s the blogs that were chosen last month to be reviewed.  Good luck!

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Heading to Boston for the B2B Forum…

The B2B Forum is this week in Boston, and since its a Marketing Profs event, I know it will be stellar. If you are still wanting to attend, make sure you register via this link and use code BLOGCHAT to get a $100 discount. Remember that you have to attend the B2B Forum to participate in the LIVE #Blogchat on Tuesday the 14th.  Now if you can’t attend and still want to follow the sessions online, you can still register for viewing the B2B Forum online, use this link and register with code BLOGCHAT, that will give you a 30% discount!

I’m really looking forward to this event, and of course the second Live #Blogchat, which will be co-hosted by Sam Fiorella from Sensei Marketing, who is the main sponsor for this Live #Blogchat.  Thanks as well to The Cooper Group, who are also sponsoring this Live #Blogchat. If you cannot attend the Live #Blogchat (Bless your heart!), then please make sure you are following @SenseiMarketing on Twitter, as Brandie will be live-tweeting the Live #Blogchat on Tuesday night, just watch the #Blogchat hashtag!

Also, on July 1st I will have a special announcement of where the NEXT Live #Blogchat will be after B2B Forum. And what till you hear the venue that will be hosting it 😉

This week’s posting schedule will go like this: On Tuesday I will have a recap of my 2-week experiment on raising my search traffic by posting more vs targeting keywords.  We’ll look at the results, what worked and what didn’t.

On Wednesday, I will have a recap of the Live #Blogchat at the B2B Forum. On Thursday, I will have a recap of the B2B Forum. On Friday I will be back home and probably sleeping most of the day 😉

If you will be in Boston this week for the B2B Forum, please let me know! I’d love to connect with you and say hi!

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Delta’s latest PR episode details the need to engage your brand advocates

Steve Woodruff started an interesting discussion at his place about the latest PR quagmire that Delta Airlines finds itself in.  Apparently, some soldiers brought 4 bags onto their flights home, and were charged for those 4th bags, as per Delta’s policy.  The soldiers were assuming that they would not have to pay for the 4th checked bag, and were upset, and made a video about it (that has since been removed).

Delta, to its credit, was quick to address the situation on its blog, and has now changed its policy to allow for a 4th free checked bag for soldiers flying in economy.  But given what a hot-button issue this is, you can see in the comments that hundreds of people are outraged and angered over this issue.

And honestly, I feel sorry for Delta, especially the people on Delta’s blogging and social media team. They handled this issue about as well as they could, but they are still getting absolutely raked over the coals in the comments to their post.

But as I read through that post and scanned the wall of angry comments, I was looking for the one thing that I never saw: Comments from Delta’s brand advocates.  There are a few comments from people that are sympathetic to Delta’s position, but they are quickly targeted by multiple commenters siding with the soldiers.

And to be fair to Delta, they can’t stay and respond to the individual commenters. That would literally take them all day, and would likely generate even more angry comments.  Because this is an issue where most people, rightly or wrongly, are going to assume that Delta is in the wrong. And if any Delta representative tries to explain their side of the situation, more angry comments will be the result.

Which is why Delta should have its advocates speaking on its behalf. But Delta can’t rely on its advocates, because it hasnt invested time in connecting with and empowering them.

For example, let’s say Zappos caught itself in a PR nightmare similar to the one Delta is in now.  If angry customers started attacking Zappos, how soon would it be before Zappos’ fans would come to the brand’s defense? Pretty darn soon, and my guess is the number of negative comments against Zappos would decrease as a result. In the Delta example, in the absence of Delta’s advocates, the volume of negative comments seems to be increasing.

So my advice to Delta, who I am sure is scratching their heads wondering what they could have done differently, is to start today connecting with your brand advocates. Find your most passionate customers, and embrace them. Then the next time you have a PR fight like this one on your hands, you won’t be going it alone.

PS: And Delta if you or any other company is wondering how in the hell you embrace and empower your advocates, here’s your roadmap.

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Social Media is not a contingency plan for having a shitty product

For the last half decade, we’ve had it beaten over our heads that ‘it’s all about the conversation’. That all a company has to do is ‘be social’, to throw up a Twitter and Facebook account, and they have passed the marketing test. Add in a company blog for extra credit.

Of course, this is utter crap. If your product sucks today, it will still suck tomorrow if you start using social media. The only difference is that more people will know about it.

Now please understand that listening to your customers and monitoring what they are saying via social media is hugely important. But the quickest way to honk off your customers is to tell them ‘we’re listening’, and then prove to them that you are not.  You can’t simply monitor what your customers are saying, you need to apply their feedback and act on it.  You need to start a discussion with them.  You need to create a continuous feedback loop, so what your customers are saying about your product is understood internally at your company, and your company’s response is sent back to your customers.

The goal isn’t just to ‘be social’, it should be to establish connections with your customers that help you improve your existing products and business processes. For example, last year Dell had its first #DellCAP event in Austin.  This was where Dell brought in 30 customers that were actively using social media tools to discuss Dell and its products and services. Dell talked to these customers about several core areas of its business, as well as its products. Dell then took that feedback, and acted on it. A perfect example is its Facebook Tag Team app. One of the main feedback points that Dell customers gave during #DellCAP was that they would like a way to see how other customers are using Dell products. For example, if a Dell customer views himself as a hardcore gamer, he understands that fellow gamers will want Dell products that perform differently than a Dell customer that wants a PC to turn her home business.  So the Tag Team app was created with this feedback in mind. Here’s what Lionel Menchaca said when it was introduced:

Back when we invited customers to Dell for CAP Days, one of the clear requests we heard from customers regarding Dell.com is that we need to make it easier for them to find the system or accessories that will meet a specific set of needs.

Besides the request from CAP Days attendees, there’s  any number of studies that show most customers trust the opinions of their friends and family a heck of a lot more than what a company tells them. Here’s one of my favorite Hugh McLeod cartoons which illustrates that point beautifully.

How do we make it easier for customer to find the system they need based on how they plan to use it and augment that with content that’s written by our customers instead of us? The Tag Team app is our first attempt to bring those things together. We know a lot of our customers use Dell.com to research what kind of machine is right for them. That usually means starting with a product, browsing the product page, then digging into ratings and reviews from other customers.  With Tag Team, you can start by thinking about how you will use the machine and find the reviews from customers who are using reviews for that same thing.

 

Dell went beyond simply listening to the feedback its customers were giving, and actually used that feedback to improve its offerings based on its customers recommendations.  This is the difference between taking a crappy product and making it social, versus leveraging social media to improve your product.

Extra credit: Listening to your customers and then ACTING on their recommendations increases brand advocacy. Nothing impresses a customer more to tell them that you are listening, and to then prove that you are.

If you want to start using social media to actually improve your products and services, here’s some tips to get you started:

1 – Start monitoring what your customers are saying online. You should already be doing this, but if not, make sure you start ASAP.

2 – Make sure that information and feedback from Step 1 is collected and distributed internally within your company.  Marketing, PR, Product Design/Development, Customer Service, etc.

3 – Incorporate customer feedback as applicable. Just because one customer in Idaho says you should change a product feature does NOT mean you should spend millions of dollars to change your existing manufacturing process to accommodate one customers’s wish. But if thousands of customers are saying the same thing and many are saying they won’t buy your product as a result of this feature, then maybe its in your best interest to make the change.

4 – When changes are made based on customer feedback communicate that back to your customers. This will not only increase customer satisfaction once they see you are actually acting on their feedback, it will greatly increase the volume of feedback you get. And getting more feedback means the quality of that feedback improves. It becomes easier to distinguish between issues that are marginally important to your customers, versus ones that are affecting the majority, as illustrated in Step 3.

 

But make sure you push for Step 2, getting the feedback you collect via social media monitoring, distributed to relevant departments in your company or organization. That should get the ball rolling and help your customer move from being one that simply listens to social media conversations, to one that acts on them.

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Fans, Friends, Followers, and the Reason Why None of it Matters

I’ve tried to stay off the soapbox for the most part here the past two years, but the first blog post from Kathy Sierra in 4 years has got my mind racing.

I’ve been blogging for 6 years now, and the blogging and social media spaces have gone through a lot of changes in that time. One significant change I’ve noticed is how we define who the ‘authority figures’ are in this space. In 2005, if you wanted to know who the top bloggers or the ‘A-Listers’ were, you asked around.  Robert Scoble, Jeff Jarvis, Hugh MacLeod, Kathy Sierra, Seth Godin and Jason Calcanis were some of the names you heard over and over again.  All people that were moving the needle, that were legitimate ‘thought leaders’.

Then, rankings aspects began to enter into the picture. Technorati started tracking the number of incoming links a blog had (later called the site’s Authority).  That changed the A-List a bit, as now a site’s ability to gain incoming links became more prized.

Later, around late 2006/early 2007, we all discovered Facebook, and that added a new layer to defining the A-List: Number of friends.  As a result, the A-List changed a bit more.

Then around 2008 or so, Twitter really started to gain steam. Which, you guessed it, meant that Followers now became a new way to define who the ‘A-Listers’ were.

What I’ve noticed is that how we define who the thought leaders are in this space has changed dramatically. In 2005, we figured out who the experts and A-Listers were by listening to each other.  The A-Listers were the ones that got talked about the most, and linked to the most, and who were on the most blogrolls.  There wasn’t really a way to ‘rank’ them, we just knew who was creating great and valuable content, and those were the people that we listened to, and whose opinions we valued and trusted.

Now, the rules for defining authority have changed. Yes, good content still matters. But so does your number of Facebook friends, your number of Twitter followers, and your Klout score.

The problem is, your number of friends, followers and your Klout score can be gamed.  Let’s be honest, I would be seen as a greater authority in the social media space by many people if I had 50,000 followers instead of my current 25K.  And we also know that all I’d have to do to hit 50K, is follow another 25K people.  That would be gaming the system.

A very unfortunate side-affect of using rankings such as friends and followers to determining authority is that the ability to teach isn’t as important as it once was.  Let’s revisit that list of A-Lister from 2005:   Robert Scoble, Jeff Jarvis, Hugh MacLeod, Kathy Sierra, Seth Godin and Jason Calcanis.  All teachers. But today, it seems that more of the supposed leaders want to tweet about how you should ‘be awesome’ instead of teaching us how to be awesome.

We don’t need another ranking board. We don’t need to know who has the most followers, or fans, or the highest stock price on Empire Avenue. We don’t need to know how to get more RTs or how to get on more lists.  And we sure as hell don’t need to deal with the grief of thinking we aren’t smart or influential if we don’t have X number of any of the above metrics.

We don’t need to see tweets telling us to ‘be awesome’, we need more teachers that will roll up their sleeves and teach us how. And if someone can’t do that, then do they really deserve to be viewed as authorities?

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You need a company blog because the customer (thinks he) is always right

This morning I was making myself a Belgian waffle. I know from past experiences that if I put too much batter in the maker, that it will run out the sides, and when I open the maker, the batter will stick to both sides, and I’ll have a ruined waffle on my hands, and a mess to clean up.

Again, I know this.  But I went ahead this morning and added too much batter, it ran out the sides, and sure enough, I had a ruined waffle on my hands.  As I was cleaning up the mess, I caught myself thinking ‘This thing sucks’.

It wasn’t the waffle-maker’s fault that the waffle was ruined, it was my fault. But like a lot of people would do in a similar situation, I tried to pass the blame to the product, instead of admitting it was my fault.  Completely irrational, but who ever accused humans of being rational creatures? 🙂

I decided to check, and the waffle-maker (Black and Decker) does have a blog.  But the blog doesn’t allow comments. If your company decides to turn off comments then you have to realize that you are effectively limiting yourself to only being found via search engines.  And yes, I understand that many companies don’t want to allow comments because they don’t want to deal with negative feedback from customers. But as studies have proven, negative feedback is usually good for your company, if you handle it correctly.

Don’t view your blog as being a marketing tool, but more as being a customer service tool. A place where you can help me solve problems with your products, or get more information. A company blog is an especially wonderful place to help me with problems that *I* create, such as the above episode with my waffle maker.  Black and Decker could use its existing blog to write a post on 5 Steps to Creating the Perfect Belgian Waffle, and make one of those steps be ‘Don’t put too much batter in the maker!’  Then if the blog turned on comments, I could have left one saying that I used the blog’s tips, and created a perfect Belgian waffle, and am happy with my Black and Decker Belgian waffle maker!

So if your company has a blog, keep these content creation tips in mind:

1 – Don’t create product-centric content, create customer-centric content. Think about how your customers will use your products, and why. For example, a post from Black and Decker touting the production advantages and benefits of its waffle-maker is almost meaningless to me, since I already own it. But if B&D writes a post on how to create the perfect Belgian Waffle, that helps their existing AND potential customers, because the content is customer-centric.

2 – View your company blog as a customer service tool more than a marketing tool. The blog isn’t a place to sell your products, it’s a place to sell the products benefits, and connect with your customers. If you’ll open up comments and use the blog as a place to address customer concerns, you’ll find that your customers will not only become more loyal, they will promote you to others. Which, ironically, becomes far more effective marketing than anything you could do via a blog post!

3 – Your blog should supplement your existing content, not replace it. A big reason why you don’t want to include a lot of product-centric posts on your blog is because all that information should already be on your website. Your customers will come to the blog to get more specific information on how to use your products, or to get in touch with you about an issue they are having.  For example, if I had no idea why my waffle maker was ruining my waffles, I would have searched to see if Black and Decker had a blog, before I searched for the company’s website.  Because I know that I have a better chance of finding information that would solve my issue on the company blog versus the company website.  You need to understand this as well, and give your customers the information they are looking for, in the place where they are looking for it.

Just curious, but when you have a problem with a product, are you more likely to go to the company website or blog to look for help?