MackCollier.com

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The next evolution of social media for business is…

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

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

Connecting with customers to improve both product and marketing development.

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

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

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

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

Pic via Flickr user Lance Shields

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Here’s how you can help me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway what were the numbers?!?

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

# of posts for the week – 4

Average Traffic per day – 168 visitors

Average ReTweets per post – 59

Average Comments per post – 12

Average new Twitter followers per day – 37

Total new Email Subscribers for the week – 3

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

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

Average traffic per day – 647 (285% increase)

Average ReTweets per post – 82 (39% increase)

Average Comments per post – 26 (117% increase)

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

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

Now here are some random observations:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the hourly traffic for Monday:

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

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

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

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

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

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

In looking at Thursday’s traffic notice two things:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A big secret to social media success that most companies miss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Four reasons why Lady Gaga has fans and you don’t

Did you know there are over 2 dozen videos on YouTube of Lady Gaga crying during one of her concerts? Most involve her breaking down in response to something her fans have done, but then there’s this video. In that video, a teenager is in line to get Gaga’s autograph, and he’s crying because he’s about to meet Gaga. When he gets up to Gaga he breaks down, and Gaga reaches for him and hugs him for several seconds, then signs his CD, kisses it, and gives it to him. She then says ‘I love you’, and hugs him again.

If you are trying to understand why Lady Gaga is currently the hottest pop/rockstar on the planet, those 30 or so seconds explain all.

It also shows you what you are up against if you are trying to build fans around your social media efforts.  If you want to have REAL fans of your brand, or fans of your blog, or your company.

Here’s four more reasons why your efforts aren’t working:

1 – You aren’t participating in the community you are trying to build.  Believe it or not, communities do not form around the idea of being monetized.  Any community, even one as small as a blog, needs to be cultivated and grown from within.  That means you have to be a member of the community you are trying to reach.  You have to interact with them, and understand them.  More importantly, you have to WANT to do this.  If your prime motivation is to collect people in a spot so you can make money off them, your efforts are doomed from the start.  And the people you are trying to make money from will smell it a mile off.

You mean you’ve never answered a comment on your blog, and now you wonder why readers have stopped leaving them?  It’s the simple stuff, guys.

2 – You aren’t shifting control.  By definition, I believe a community is a group of people that have a shared sense of ownership in something larger than themselves.  Every member knows that they play a role, no matter how large or small, in shaping the larger community.  As your fan-building efforts begin to take root, some members will become more active and begin to take ownership of the growth and vitality of the community.  You want to encourage this because as you shift ownership to the community, they will feel empowered and energized.  But if you are too fearful and controlling, it’s like cutting off sunshine to a growing plant.

Find the people that are pushing your community forward, and put the spotlight on them.  These are YOUR rockstars, and they deserve their time on stage.

3 – Your efforts are focused on the product, not the customer.  Please tell me that you don’t think you can create a community of customers that want to come together and tell you how amazing your product is!  Seriously?  Focus instead on HOW your customers use your product.  What problem does it solve?  How does it fit into their lifestyle?  What benefits do they get from the product?

Focus your community-building efforts on the ‘bigger idea’ behind your product.  Here’s some ideas for reframing your efforts, do you want to focus on…

Your cameras……..or photography?

Your luggage for business execs……or travel for busy business execs?

Your eco-friendly outerwear………or conservationism and saving the environment?

Your home decorating products……or home decorating?

Reframing your efforts to create value for the customers you are trying to reach makes it MUCH easier to attract members, and have them take ownership in your community and evangelize it to others.

4 – You don’t embrace the people you are trying to reach.  We aren’t idiots.  We get that you have to make money off your efforts, but if you truly don’t care about us as people, we will pick up on that and your efforts are doomed from the start.  This one is really a ‘you’ve either got it, or you don’t’ proposition.  You can’t fake passion for us, and we won’t fake passion for you.

It’s very rare that companies have true fans and evangelists.  It’s not that they can’t, but it’s almost always because they aren’t willing to do the things necessary to spark enough of a connection in their customers that they would label themselves as a ‘fan’ of that company.

Hey if it was easy, anyone could be a rockstar…

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The introvert’s guide to speaking

I wrote a bit about this in the last post at The Viral Garden but the first social media event I ever spoke at was SXSW in 2008.

Think about that for a moment; Here I am, an introvert that hasn’t spoken in a public setting for 5 years previously, and I am making my social media speaking debut at the Super Bowl of ‘social media’ conferences. I was scared to death, and the funny thing is, if this had been a smaller event, I probably wouldn’t have gone through with it. But since it was SXSW it was ‘too big’ to ignore. I knew that being able to say I spoke at SXSW was too important to not have on my ‘speaking’ resume.

So I bit the bullet, and did it anyway. Now 2 years later, I have gone from being an introvert that’s scared to death of speaking publicly, to an introvert that actually LOVES it. For any introverts out there that want to start speaking, here’s what I learned to make me more comfortable with the process:

During the creation process:

1 – KNOW your material, do NOT memorize it. Extroverts are just naturally chatty people, right? They are more comfortable ad-libing and making ‘small talk’, it seems. I think we introverts want to more carefully plan out our presentations, so we know exactly what to say.

But the big problem with that approach is that we can come off VERY stiff, and look as if we are reciting to the audience. Nothing turns off an audience quicker than a speaker that’s disengaged.

So here’s what I do. When I have created a deck and am ready to start rehearsing my presentation, I will carefully script out my session, so I know exactly what I want to say, and when I want to say it. I’ll do this about 5 times so I have pretty much memorized the material, and the key points I want to make.

At this point, I throw the script away. And I keep rehearsing the presentation without it. I also break up the flow, if I have 5 points I have been rehearsing in order, I’ll now do them in a different order, just to force myself to break away from the script and actually TALK about the points I want to make, instead of reciting them. I’ll even be in the middle of rehearsing a point and will cut myself off as if someone asked a question, then after a minute or so I’ll try to remember where I was and go back.

In the end you want your presentation to be a conversation with the audience. You want to KNOW the material. Because something will ALWAYS happen to throw you off base. If you KNOW the material, you can get back on track, but if you don’t, then you’re in trouble.

2 – Tell stories. Everyone has case studies, and everyone has numbers that back up the points they are trying to make. Big deal. What you want to do is weave those case studies and numbers into a story. A story that is entertaining, but that also shows the attendees why and how Company X used social media, and gives them actionable takeaways for how they can take what Company X learned, and apply it to their own situation.

When you arrive at the event:

3 – Find the room where you will be presenting, and get a feel for the layout. Walk around the room. Make sure you know where everything is, where your laptop will be setup, where all the jacks are. Will you have a mic, will it be a clip-on or standalone? Walk around the room. Sit in some of the chairs and make sure the audience can see you from everywhere in the room. Simply familiarizing yourself with the room beforehand really helps, especially for an introverted soul 😉

And try to attend sessions in the SAME room before yours. This gives you a chance to see how other speakers do. Are there some problems with the audio/video? Watch how the audience reacts to the session and the speaker. What does the speaker do that gets their attention, what does she do that they don’t like? Incorporate what you learn into your own session and delivery.

4 – Attend any pre-show meetups/tweetups. Most conferences will have a tweetup/meetup the night before the event kicks off. This is an excellent chance for you to connect with speakers and attendees. Try to connect with the attendees, especially the ones that will be attending your session. If you meet someone that’s planning on attending, ask them what they are hoping to learn, and why they are interested in the topic. And this also gives you a way to incorporate that into your talk. Like “Now let’s talk about getting more comments on your blog. I was actually talking to Carla last nite in the lobby about her blog…:” Suddenly Carla and all her friends at her table will immediately perk up and pay attention (if they weren’t already).

5 – Get to your session at least 15 mins early, so you have time to setup everything. This gives you plenty of time to get the laptop connected, your deck ready to go, and make a last-second bathroom run. Also, make sure you have a glass of water on hand. You’re going to be talking for 30-90 mins probably, and if you’re like me, you WILL be nervous, so not having dry-mouth helps 😉

If you have any extra time before you start, what I like to do is walk around the room and introduce myself to some of the attendees and thank them for coming. Good way to connect with them, and increases the chances that they will pay attention during my session.

Oh and one extra tip, if you are SUPER nervous right before you are to speak, eat a couple of saltine crackers, it will help settle your stomach and calm down the butterflies.

During your presentation:

6 – Thank everyone for showing up and MEAN IT. When I spoke at #optsum a couple of months ago, I was a bit worried about the topic, which was Think Like a Rockstar: How to Build Fans and Community Around Your Social Media Efforts. I was afraid that it might not be what the audience (mostly property managers and apartment complex owners) was looking for, and was a bit worried about how well it would be received.

Somewhat to my shock, the session was literally standing room only, and we were still bringing in chairs to accommodate everyone 5 mins into the session. I was beyond grateful for the turnout, especially considering the caliber of the other speakers and sessions at that time slot, and made sure everyone knew how appreciative I was.

7 – Let the audience know exactly what’s coming. Tell them exactly what you will be talking about, the exact order of the talk, and tell them how they can get involved. Most sessions have a talk, then questions at the end. I generally encourage the audience to ask questions as they think of them, rather than waiting for them to wait till the end, when they might forget the question. But if you do this, you need to be mindful if the question-asking is cutting into presentation time. If you realize that after the 5th of 23 slides that you’ve just spent 10 mins answering questions, then you probably need to tell the audience that you need to move on at that point.

8 – Move around. At one of the first events I spoke at, the speakers were provided a podium up on stage, above the crowd, with lights shining down on them. No matter what they were talking about, having them chained to that podium having to stand in one spot behind a microphone made the session seem less interesting. The audience seemed less interested as well, I think the unintentional message that the format sent was ‘this is a lecture’.

When it came time for my talk, I told the organizer ‘You’ve got to mic me up, I can’t stay up there’. So I was the first speaker that didn’t present from a podium on stage. I was down eye-level with the audience, away from the lights, and interacting with the audience. The guy that was in charge of videotaping the sessions didn’t like it, but by simply being ‘ground-level’, the audience perked up. They paid attention, and that made them more engaged.

One thing I also like to do is get to the CENTER of the room. I’m sorry, but I just hate staying in front of a group for an hour. Chris Brogan had a great point one time about the difference between an audience and a community is the way the chairs face. I want to spend some time in the middle, interacting with people where they are.

9 – Realize that you WILL screw up, and likely no one will notice. Remember my first point about knowing your material, and not memorizing it? Here’s an example where I screwed that up. In preparing to moderate that first session at SXSW in 2008, I made a COMPLETE script of what I would say to each panelist. I knew the exact questions to ask, etc. I even made two scripts, one was detailed, and the other was a ‘loose’ script to keep me on track. I kept the detailed one to my left and the loose one to my right.

So as our session started, I set the groundwork for what we would be talking about, and the format of the session, closely following my very detailed notes. All was going off without a hitch.

Then I moved to introducing the panelists, and went back to my detailed list, and carefully started reading off who each panelist was. Then….it happened. I read the bio for one of the panelists off my detailed list, and looked up at the crowd to tell them about the panelist. Then when I looked back down…..I looked at the ‘loose’ script, instead of the ‘detailed’ one. I was expecting to see the detailed bio for Mario that I could read off, and instead I saw ‘Introduce Mario’.

At this point, I was completely confused, and after what seemed like 20 years (in actuality it was probably a couple of seconds), I realized I had stopped talking, and mild (read: OH SHIT!!!!) panic set in. After another second or two of literally being scared to death, I finally found my place in the script, and went on. The rest of the session went off without a hitch.

But the FIRST thing I did as soon as the session ended was apologize to my fellow panelists for the disaster I made during introductions with that seemingly 5 min pregnant pause. They had no idea what I was talking about. So I assumed they were just being nice, so I found a few people that attended the session and asked them about it, and they didn’t know what I was talking about either.

So in reality, I thought I had totally ruined the session 2 mins into it, over an ‘error’ that apparently no one noticed but me. That’s usually the way it goes when you are speaking, and I think introverts take even minor mistakes much more seriously than extroverted speakers. But the reality is, most people won’t even notice them.

10 – Engage with the people that are engaged with you. Another big advantage to knowing your material is that you can talk about it, and while you are, you can connect with the audience. I spend time looking around the room as I am speaking to see who I am connecting with. The woman at the front left table that nods along when I make a point. The guy in the middle right table that laughs when I tell a joke. If they are paying attention to me, I am paying attention to them. And they see this, and that makes them more interested in what I am saying.

11 – Close the presentation by thanking the audience for coming (and mean it), then tell them how to get in touch with you. This is where you can pimp yourself and your site. Make sure the audience understands that you want the session to be the START of a connection between you and them, not the end. Encourage them to email you if they have any questions, and I always give out my Twitter name and tell the attendees to please follow me, and I will follow them back.

12 – Let the audience ask questions. Even if it means you cut your presentation short, the audience deserves to ask you questions. And this is a little trick I picked up (actually it’s more about being considerate of your audience), but if someone in the BACK of the room asks you a question, walk TO that person and answer them. First, this keeps them from having to shout at you, and two, it means you don’t have to shout your answer back at them. Also, it makes other audience members around her more likely to ask you a question as well.

Doing things like this and thanking the audience for coming might seem trite, but by doing this you are showing the audience that you care about them, and are genuinely grateful that they came. This makes them far more likely to pay attention to you, and be interested in both you AND what you have to say. Simple common courtesy goes a long way.

After the event:

13 – Stay connected. One of the first things I will do is check feedback on Twitter. I will thank those that leave feedback, and pay close attention to what they are saying. Which points resonated with them. Did I do something that someone didn’t like? Did a particular story really hit home for attendees?

But the bottom line is that I am living proof that introverts can not only have successful speaking careers, but that you can learn to ENJOY it. Seriously if you had told me in high school and college that I would love speaking, I would have thought you were insane. But I really do, and I think you can as well. Fellow introverts, what tips for speaking do you have?

Pic via Jeremiah

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Forget optimizing for Google’s search engine, are you optimized for MY search engine?

When I travel I am obsessive about having all my paperwork and directions in place beforehand.  I even print out two copies of my boarding passes.  So last fall when I was traveling to Chicago to speak at the Marketing Profs Digital Marketing Mixer, I knew exactly what to do.  Fly into Chicago, leave the airport, go across the street to the shuttles, find the one for Hyatt, and they would whisk me off to my hotel.  No problem.

I land, leave the airport, find the Hyatt shuttle, get on board and then get the bad news.  Apparently there are TWO Hyatts in the area, and I don’t know which one I need!

So I fire up Social Scope on my Bold and ask my buddies on Twitter if anyone knows which Hyatt is hosting the Mixer.  A few friends are kind enough to tweet me replies that tell me which one it is.  Awesome!

Then someone sends me a DM with the name of the Hyatt I need, as well as its address and phone number!  And the phone number shows up as a link I can click on and dial directly from my phone.

Whoa.

As valuable a tool as Google’s search engine is, it would be impossible for it to do a better job of getting me the information I needed right then, than my network on Twitter.  This is the new reality for businesses that are attempting to reach a customer base that is increasingly hyper-connected, and in turn utilizing those connections to turn inward for its information needs.

Our search engine is no longer Google, it’s our own social networks.

So if you’re a business that’s invested in SEO, how can you connect with your customers if they are increasingly turning to each other instead of a search engine?  Here’s some ideas:

1 – Understand WHY we use social search over search engines.  For the most part, we turn to our networks when we want real-time information.  Help, advice, etc.  For example, if I’m about to go see a movie, I might tweet my followers to ask them if Iron Man 2 lived up to the hype or not.  Or if I’m at an event, I might look for the event’s #hashtag on Twitter of Facebook page to see who’s attending and maybe where everyone is headed after the days sessions are over.

What can you do? Help people find you.  If you’re planning an event, make sure you create a hashtag for the event and communicate that early on to everyone.  Because if you don’t, the attendees will pick their own, and it might not be the one you want.  Publicize your social sites at your business and post new information about your products and events at these sites.

2 – Be accessible and be responsive.  If your customers are connecting via social media, then you should be too.  But ‘being there’ isn’t enough, you have to find me.  If I mention you are your competitor, you need to be aware of that conversation, and jump in if you can.  Now that doesn’t mean you reply to every SINGLE brand mention, but if I mention your company and it’s obvious I am asking a question or wondering about something, there’s an invitation for you to reply and give me the information I am looking for.  At least.

What can you do?  Be aware, and be engaged.  Closely monitor online chatter about your brand, especially among the more popular social sites like Twitter and Facebook.  Interact where you can, but understand that there’s sometimes a fine line between being helpful, and being a pest.  View every brand mention as a chance to help, not to sell.

3 – Make it mobile.  As smartphones become cheaper and mobile devices like the iPad and Touch become more popular, more and more people will have a device with them that can send and receive data at all times.  And this ties back into the need to turn to our social networks for real-time information.  I may not have my laptop with me (or even if I do, there might not be an available wifi connection), but if I have my Bold with me, I have access to my social network, and can get information from them.  Or if I have an app, like say the Yelp app on my Bold, then I can use it to get restaurant reviews right from my phone.

What can you do?  Give me the ability to access your information on mobile devices.  Or give me information that I will need to have with me if I am out and about.  A good example of this could be a local news station that provides a smartphone app that will alert me via my phone when there’s severe weather in my area.  Or that will text me when there’s a weather warning in its viewing area.

4 – Have FUN with it!  Most of you have probably heard of FourSquare, the service that lets you communicate to your network where you are at any given time.  Jimmy Choo used FourSquare last month in London to have a real-time treasure hunt.  They had a pair of shoes ‘check in’ at various locations across the city, moving every few minutes.  The first person to ‘catch’ the shoes at their current location, won them!  Great example of taking an innovative approach to social media marketing, but also doing so in a way that entertains and excites customers!

What can you do?  Think about the ways that customers are using social media, and tap into the functionality of the tools when crafting your social media marketing.  Keeping with the location-based theme, you could do similar treasure hunts but instead of using FourSquare, you could use Flickr, posting different pictures of the location where the item is hidden.  Or tweet clues to where the prize is hidden.

What about you?  Have you noticed that you are turning to your social networks more for information instead of Google?  If companies have connected to you via your networks, how did they do so?

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Five non-bloggy ways to showcase your smarts via social media

One of the most popular reasons for using a blog as a professional or business tool, is to establish you or your company’s expertise.  A blog is perfectly suited as a place to create a knowledge base of content that lets others know just how smart and qualified you are.

But what if we take blogs out of the equation?  What other tools/ways could you establish your expertise via social media?  Here’s some ideas:

1 – Commenting on items shared in Google Reader.  Lately I am spending a LOT of time with Google Reader.  Specifically, I am spending more time checking out the items that are shared by the people I subscribe to in Reader.  Every day I read dozens of interesting and informative articles and posts from my friends.

But as I was reading these the other day, I noticed that only a small fraction of them had comments.  When you leave a comment on an item sharedin Reader, then that comment will be seen on the post/article by all the people that are following you.  For example, I have around 130 people following me on Reader.  If you see an item I shared, and then comment on it, that means that your comment can then be seen by those 130 people.  Or if the item is shared by more than one person, you can choose which ‘version’ you want to comment on.  Like if Chris Brogan shares the same item I do and has more followers than I do, comment on the version he shared!

This is a great way to expose yourself to a new audience!  Here’s a screenshot of a comment I left on a recent entry by Jay Baer.

2 – Answering questions on LinkedIn’s Q&A.  This not only helps establish your expertise BUT it also exposes you to a new audience.  From my experience, the people that are active on LinkedIn, usually are a bit different from the people that are active on Twitter or Facebook.  So if I go to LinkedIn, I’m not bumping into the same friends I see on Twitter and Facebook.  Another great thing about answering questions on LinkedIn is that it gives the person that asked the question  the ability to rate your answer as a good or best answer, and it gives them a chance to contact you directly.

For every 10 questions I answer on LinkedIn, I get 1 or 2 replies directly from the person that asked the question.  Think about that, if you answered 10 questions from 10 potential customers/clients, you could have 10-20% of them contact you directly about your answer.  That’s not too shabby!

3 – Participating in Twitter Chats.  Oh you knew this was coming!  Seriously, I think Twitter chats are an amazing networking tool, and very underutilized as such.  Now there are well over 100 chats, so there’s bound to be a few topics that interest you.  Pick some that interest you, and share your ideas.  Make sure you let chat participants know how to get in touch with you, and most chats now set aside a time so you can introduce yourself to the other participants.  And make sure you check out #blogchat every Sunday nite!

4 – Comment on industry sites and blogs.  This is a great way to get exposure, and again, with the ‘right people’.  For example, people that work at agencies are going to be reading stories on Ad Age’s site, right?  So if you wanted to work for an ad agency, leaving thoughtful and informative comments on the same entries that these agencies will be reading and sharing, can only help you get noticed, right?

And if it doesn’t help you get a job, who knows, it could help you get a writing gig!  This is exactly how I got my blogging career underway, I was active on a recruiter’s message board, that recruiter decided to start a blog, and invited me to be one of the founding writers!  The same thing could happen to you!

5 – Actively participate on a company’s Facebook page.  Here is the Marketing Profs’ page on Facebook.  If you were an active member of that page, leaving wall posts, interacting with other members, it could have several advantages.  First, it would be a way to establish your expertise.  Second, Marketing Profs is constantly having events, so it becomes a networking tool with attendees.  And three, Marketing Profs is constantly looking for writers, so by demonstrating your ability to write well, you can not only connect with potential clients/customers, you just might get the chance to do some writing for Marketing Profs!

You can extend this to participating on board for industries, or events, or companies you want to work for.  Anyone that you’re trying to connect with, and any group you’re trying to get the attention of.

Those are just a few ideas, but what has worked for you besides blogging?  What are some unusual ways that you are leveraging other social media tools to connect with others and share your smartitude?

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Social Media is not an ‘all or nothing’ proposition

We’ve all seen the studies and have heard the hype.  Social media is taking over the world and every company will have to have a full-blown social media strategy by 2011 (originally it was 2008, then 2009, then 2010…), or they will be obsolete and left behind.

Give me a break.

Right now CEOs and business owners all across the country, no all across the world, are wringing their hands about social media.  Because they don’t understand it, but are being bombarded with messages that claim they HAVE to understand it in order to succeed in the future.  These are people that like carefully crafted plans with predictable outcomes, yet we are telling them to get moving NOW with a set of tools that are completely new to them.  AND on top of that, we are telling them to use these completely new (to them) tools to do something that they likely aren’t comfortable doing; communicating directly with their customers.

So the end result is that we are scaring these companies into standing still.  They want to wait until they can use social media on terms that they are comfortable with.  Or many are thinking/hoping that social media is ‘all a fad’ and will ‘go away’ if they wait long enough.

To these companies, I apologize.  It’s unfair for us to ask you to dive headlong into social media like this.  We are asking you to run, no to sprint, before you can walk.

Here’s the deal; Yes, social media is a big deal.  Yes, you need to be aware of how/if your customers are using social tools to connect online and share ideas.  No, you probably won’t be out of business in 12 months if you keep ignoring social media.

So instead of worrying about how you can go from 0-60 in under 4 seconds, let’s do something different.  Let’s make a deal: I agree not to push you to jump into social media full speed ahead without any idea/plan other than ‘just do it!”  And you agree to go at your own pace, BUT….to keep moving forward.

That doesn’t mean that we’ll have a blog up and running for your company in a week.  But what that does mean is that you’ll need to start making yourself familiar with social media, and how your customers are using these tools.  Start monitoring social media for company mentions, something as simple as Google Blog Search can help here.  See who is talking about you.  See who is talking about your competitors.  See what they are saying, and notice the tools they are using.

The bottom line is, learn at your own pace.  If it takes you six weeks or six months to start to grasp what social media is about, that’s ok.  If you have a boss that’s skeptical about social media, or know someone that owns a business that’s worried about social media, please share this post with them.

Moving forward is what counts, and it definitely beats being too scared to move.

Pic via Flickr user Bouzafr

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Don’t blame the blog if you are the idiot

This is one of those classic ‘You can learn from me being a dumbass’ posts.

I launched this site/blog almost a year ago because I wanted to get serious about marketing my business and services.  Also, I wanted to use this site as well as all of my social media interactions to make people aware of who I am, and what I do.

And for the most part, it’s been very successful.  Referrals and simple contacts from potential clients come in regularly now, where a year or so ago, they were infrequent at times.  As part of this, I’ve learned to do a better job of promoting myself, there’s now information about who I am and what I do, and even a price stuck here and there.  I’ll admit that I was once in the ‘it’s a sin to promote yourself via social media’ camp, but luckily, I got past that.

Still, one of the things that’s been nagging me for months is that I really don’t have a good handle on how much business this blog is DIRECTLY bringing me.  So I’m left to wonder how much business it is INdirectly helping me get.  I know it is, as are my efforts on Twitter and other places, but I don’t know how MUCH.

Then, as if God decided to take pity on me and reach down and slap me upside the head, I realized something.  I have no products available for sale DIRECTLY on this site.  You can email me from here, you can fill out a contact form, hell you can even call me from here.  But if you come here and are ready to buy something RIGHT NOW, you can’t.  The best you can do is contact me about my services, then we can go from there.  But I don’t have any set products at set prices that you can purchase HERE.

So then I started thinking if there were any of my services that I could let customers buy directly from the blog.  I thought of a couple, and then I started thinking about other types of products in other forms that I could sell here.  Then the wheels really started turning, and I started thinking about once I create a few products, then I could have giveaways involving the products, maybe start awarding a ‘Commenter of the Week’, or a ‘Reader of the Month’, or who knows.

But this all started because I realized that I was asking my blog to solve a problem (generate sales directly), without giving it the ability to do so.  So that’s my plan for the next couple of weeks, to investigate ways that I can start selling products directly from this blog.

If you are already selling products directly from your blog, I’d love to hear about how it’s going for you.  Please leave a comment with your story, and please link to your blog so we can check it out for ourselves!