MackCollier.com

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Social Media is Destroying Our Ability to Create Impactful Content and Meaningful Connections

Go scan your timeline on Twitter or your news feed on Facebook.  Look at the articles being shared, and more importantly, look at the headlines.

After a while, you’ll begin to notice something. The headlines are written in a way to attract people that are already on Twitter and Facebook.  This is important, because the content is created in a way to attract people from social media sites, instead of creating content that appeals to your blog’s current readers and subscribers.

Social media has trained us to chase bigger numbers.  We want to go ‘viral’, we want more social shares, we want that flood of visitors from Twitter that gives our analytics a nice hockey stick.

But there’s a trade-off in this approach, and it’s one that a lot of us haven’t really thought about. If you chase new readers, what impact does that have on your current ones?  Because when you chase new readers, you change the way you create content.  You create content that will be more likely to ‘go viral’ on Twitter and Facebook.  When in reality, you should continue to create content that your CURRENT readers love.

We rail on companies for trying to acquire new customers and ignoring their current, loyal customers.  But it could be said that we do the same thing with our own content.  We chase more shares, more visitors, when we should be delighting the people that are ALREADY reading and enjoying our content.

A few months ago I was listening to Rush Limbaugh, and he said that social media has nothing to do with the success of his radio show.  He said he built it before social media, and even now, he’s not on Twitter at all.  He does repost show updates on Facebook, but that’s all designed to drive people off Facebook and back to his website.  He said if social media went away tomorrow, it wouldn’t affect his show in the least. And he has the most popular radio show in the country.

Seth Godin really doesn’t use social media either. He blogs every day, and every one of his pithy posts gets thousands of social shares. For years he wasn’t even on social media. He now does have a Twitter account for his blog, but all it does is repost his daily blog posts.

Rush and Seth are both great marketers and both highly successful.  And neither really uses social media in any meaningful way.  Certainly, neither is creating content that’s tailored to sharing on social media. Now you can easily say that both of them built their following BEFORE Twitter and Facebook, and therefore don’t need either of them. And you’d be right. But the point is, neither is altering their content to leverage social media.

I think there’s a lesson in that for the rest of us. I was looking back at my early blogging from 2006 and 2007, before I joined Twitter or Facebook. I blogged in a completely different style, it was almost like every day I was writing a letter to friends. As a result, I had a devoted community of readers, many of which commented on every post I wrote, and we had wonderful discussions in the comments section. Then, I would go and read their blogs and leave comments as well.

When social media sites came along, the conversations for many of us moved from our blogs to those social media sites. We lament how commenting fell off a cliff on our blogs, as it was ‘just easier’ on everyone to comment on Facebook and Twitter.

But along the way, we also changed the way we created content, and that change in the way we create content had an even bigger impact on dampening the number of comments on our blogs. We stopped writing in a way to elicit conversations. We trust people that we understand, and we understand people we can connect with. Those connections start by creating content that helps us be vulnerable and accessible to our readers. Ironically, this is the very type of content that the ‘experts’ have told us not to create.  Don’t inject too much ‘personality’ into your posts, you don’t want to offend potential customers or clients. Focus solely on business, don’t blog about your passions, that’s being ‘off-topic’.

The reality is, the only true value you get from your blogging is in the connections that you make. It doesn’t matter if you are a personal blogger or if you blog for business. I can tie about 80% of the business I’ve gotten over the last 10 years of consulting to about 10 people. Those are all people that I made connections with over time, via my blog. Maybe once every 6-12 months do I get someone that I don’t know who comes to my blog from a search engine, and we end up doing business. Almost all of my customers know ME first, then trust me, then decide to do business with me.

What if there were no social media sites? What if you could only create content on your blog, and that was the only way you could connect with potential customers and potential friends?

Would that change the way you created content? Would you go from focusing on increasing social shares, to increasing subscribers and readers?

I bet you would. I know I am.

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Let’s Take a Closer Look at Patagonia’s Worn Wear Road Tour

Several years ago, Patagonia started its Worn Wear program. The program was based around Patagonia’s corporate values of extending the lifespan of every garment it creates. The Worn Wear program will repair your Patagonia clothing, and if the clothing is beyond repair, it will recycle it for you.

A few years ago, Patagonia decided to take it’s Worn Wear program on the road, literally.  The company loaded up in a wooden truck and with a couple of seamstresses in tow, toured the country, repairing clothing along the way.  All for free, and not just Patagonia clothing either, any clothing you had with a rip or a ruined zipper could be mended by the Patagonia team.

Here’s a video Patagonia created to give you a sense of why they take the Worn Wear program on the road:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7muOgpX8vaQ

As you might guess, this program has been wildly successful, and has expanded to stops outside the US, and within the US the Worn Wear road trip has grown to have it’s own tour of colleges. This is a very smart move by Patagonia because it lets the company connect with millennials on college campuses that will likely be even more receptive to the company’s reuse and recycle culture.

This is the one aspect of the Worn Wear road trips that’s always fascinated me.  It’s a wonderful opportunity for the company to connect directly with its customers in a one-on-one setting, and convert them into brand advocates. As the employees are repairing the garments (for free), they are also talking to the customers about why they have the Worn Wear program, and why they believe so passionately in the value of repairing old garments rather than simply throwing them away and buying something new. It’s an incredibly powerful tool that Patagonia has to spread its culture and mission to other people, and win them over as advocates for those causes.

I recently came across a great case study that Amp Agency did as they helped Patagonia organize the road trip portion of the Worn Wear program.  Here’s some key takeaways (These numbers appear to be from just one US tour, 21 stops):

  • 88% merchandise sell-through rate during the road trip. Patagonia takes used clothing as part of the tour and sells it during stops on the road trip.
  • 11,075 tour attendees
  • 68,481 visitors to the Worn Wear landing page

What I love about the Worn Wear road trips is the ability it gives Patagonia to connect directly with current and potential customers.  The seamstresses get to hear stories from the customers about how they ripped their Patagonia coat and what it means to them.  In the process, those Patagonia workers get to give the customer back their coat almost as good as new, and along the way they get to explain what the Worn Wear program is and why it’s so important to Patagonia.

The Worn Wear road trips should be viewed as a way to build a long-term relationship with Patagonia customers who believe in the Worn Wear cause, and who will willingly spread it to other people. I’m not sure what Patagonia gives customers that have their clothing repaired during these stops. But at minimum, the brand should focus on ways to give these customers the option to mobilize on behalf of Patagonia and to tell other customers about the Worn Wear program.  Customers who have their clothing repaired by Patagonia (for free) during these Worn Wear stops are going to naturally be very appreciative toward the brand for helping them. They will be very receptive to the Worn Wear message, and will be open to telling more people about what the program is, and why it exists.

If you go to the Worn Wear landing page, you do get a pop-up invite to get email updates:

If I were advising Patagonia, I would suggest they view the road trip portion of the Worn Wear program as a way to find like-minded customers who will champion the ideals of the Worn Wear program. I would even set aside a small area where Patagonia employees can talk to customers about how they can help nurture and grow the Worn Wear program. This is a message that many people who come to the Worn Wear road stops would be receptive to. These people would want to know how they can help Patagonia grow the Worn Wear program, and Patagonia should think about how they can better give these people an opportunity to help, during these road stops.

If your company is trying to decide how to create an initiative as successful as the Worn Wear road trip, you have to understand why it works.  The Worn Wear road trip stops aren’t focused on promoting the Patagonia brand, they are focused on helping Patagonia’s customers, and communicating Patagonia’s core values to its customers.

It’s worth noting that even though this initiative isn’t specifically build to increase sales, it will do just that.  It drives sales during the events, but also gives customers who have had their garments repaired an incentive to spread positive word of mouth about the brand.  This will result in additional sales, and additional positive PR for the brand.

By putting its customers and values first, Patagonia will realize increased sales as well. What a novel idea!

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What Gamers on Twitch Taught Me About Building an Online Community

I regularly check Twitter's trending topics, and a few months ago I noticed that the top trending topics were "The DOC" and "Twitch is Down".

Twitch being down grabbed my curiosity, why was it down? Now my sum total knowledge of Twitch at this point was that it was 'that site where people watch other people play video games".  I'd known about the site for years, but had maybe spent 15 mins total on it.  

So I clicked the trending topics, and quickly discovered that Twitch was down because a popular gamer, DrDisRespect had returned to Twitch after a long hiatus.

And his return had crashed the site. This definitely got my attention.

DrDisRespect is one of the most popular gamers on Twitch, and the self-appointed 'Face of Twitch'. He's a very skilled gamer and perhaps an even more accomplished marketer. Brash, flamboyant and over the top, he's a sort of a cross between Seth Godin and Ric Flair. 

And make no mistake, he's popular as hell. Check out this screenshot I took from a recent gaming session. He was playing Playerunknown's Battlegrounds, a 100-person battle royale online game, which is one of the more popular games on Twitch. Think of it as Fortnite's older brother. When I took the screenshot, he'd just won a game of PUB in spectacular fashion. Note in the chatbox that he got 15 comments in one second.  

It's not uncommon for his streams to have 25,000 or more viewers. On the day in February when he crashed Twitch, he had over 300,000 concurrent viewers, a Twitch record that would later be broken by a Ninja/Drake tag-team Fortnite session that would bring over 600,000 concurrent viewers to Twitch. His streams typically last for 6-8 hours a day, Monday-Friday. Twitch users can donate to their favorite streamers, and it's not uncommon for popular gamers to make well into the 6 or even 7 figures a year.  DrDisRespect is rumored to make up to half a million a MONTH off Twitch.  

There are many other streamers that are quite popular and making a lot of money off Twitch. But what I've noticed from watching the streams the last few weeks is that almost all of the gamers on Twitch are very cordial and even helpful to each other. Even the most popular streamers go out of their way to engage their followers. It's not uncommon to see the biggest streamers taking time out from playing to give members of their chat advice on how to build their own gaming community. And I found it interesting that a lot of the advice that Twitch streamers had for building a community apply to blogs and social media communities just as easily. Here's some of the frequent advice I've seen popular Twitch streamers share about building a community:

  • Don't start out streaming with the most popular games as your stream will get lost in the shuffle. Start with a game with a smaller number of views, so your stream can be more easily seen and so you can stand out. This is the same advice new bloggers are always given: Pick a niche and own it!
  • Be consistent. Stream on the same days, at the same times, so your subscribers know when your stream will be up. Again, bloggers are given the same advice: Pick a posting schedule and stick to it. 
  • Engage your followers. Talk to them in chat, acknowledge them when they subscribe or donate. Again, same thing we tell bloggers, reply to comments and THANK people when they do comment!
  • Don't be afraid to be yourself and show some personality. I think this REALLY works for Twitch because it's typically a younger audience, but having a personality and being entertaining counts for a lot. I'll be honest, watching DrDisRespect's stream has been a bit eye-opening in this regard. I've seen several other streamers that are as good as Doc or maybe even better, but Doc goes out of his way to also be ENTERTAINING in his streams, and I think that's a big reason why he's so much more popular than other streamers who may be as good at gaming, but who aren't nearly as entertaining as Doc is. Personality and voice matters, and it really does help your content stand out. 

Another aspect that I noticed with these Twitch users is that most of them, especially the more popular ones, go out of their way to help their followers get better at playing the games they stream. The above screenshot is from Twitch user chocoTaco. He does a great job of helping his followers by taking the time to explain how to play the game, as he is streaming. He will carefully detail why he picked a certain weapon or why he went a certain route or how he beat another player. Plus, streamers like chocoTaco often play 'randoms', where they will invite their followers to play with them, they will pick a follower at random and play a game with them together. This is obviously a big thrill for the Twitch users to get to play alongside their favorite streamers. In fact, during one of DrDisRespect's streams, he mentioned that another Twitch streamer, CourageJD will often play Fortnite with his followers at random to help them get their first win at the game. You can see why this would really be a big deal for the first-time winner! 

This also speaks to a larger point; Don't focus on understanding the tools, focus on how people are USING the tools. To me, seeing how Twitch streamers are using the site and how they build community with their followers is far more valuable and interesting than the site itself. These streamers are creating value for their followers by teaching them how to become better at the games that they love playing. All they are doing is creating useful content. I've always written here that you should strive to create content that teaches your audience a skill, or how to get better at using your product. This is what these Twitch streamers are doing, and it's at the heart of why they are so popular. 

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What You Can Start Doing TODAY to Build Community Like Twitch Streamers Do 

  • Always reply to all comments, most especially positive comments you get on your blog or on other social media sites. This encourages people to continue to comment and engage with you.
  • Pick a schedule and be consistent with it. Post content at the same times, if you create content 'whenever I feel like it', then you're making it doubly hard on yourself to build a following. People need to know when they can expect a new blog post from you, or what times and days you'll be on Twitter or Facebook. 
  • Pick a smaller niche or topic, and own it. The broader your topic, the more content creators you will be competing with for attention. For example, there are millions of 'marketing' blogs out there. I specifically focus on customer engagement, customer loyalty, brand advocacy and brand ambassador programs. As a result, my content typically ranks on the first page of Google results for the term 'brand ambassador program'. By narrowly focusing on that marketing sub-topic, I've gone from competing against millions of other sites, to only a handful, for that top result on Google. 
  • Be entertaining and show your personality. This one is tricky because we've been taught that if we are trying to reach a professional audience, that our content should be professional as well. On the other hand, we're also taught that we need to find a way to make our content stand out from the crowd. Adding some personality to your content makes it different, more appealing, and helps it connect with your audience. This is the one area where I'm going to be focusing on the most in the future. 
  • Have fun! Going along with the above point, look for ways to have fun with your content creation, that's infectious and if you're having fun creating your content, your followers will probably have fun interacting with it, and you!

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How to Create a World-Class Brand Ambassador Program

Creating a World-Class Brand Ambassador Program

This post on 10 Thing to Remember When Creating a Brand Ambassador Program remains one of the most popular posts I’ve ever written. So to start off the new year, I wanted to do a deeper dive into the topic of creating and launching a successful brand ambassador program, and walk you through the process from the brand’s point of view.

So where do you start? How do you measure results? How do you choose your ambassadors? How do you integrate the program with your other marketing and sales functions? We’ll get into all that in this post, so read on…

First, I have to say of all the consulting work I do, helping companies build out brand ambassador programs is probably the most fulfilling. I love the challenge of creating a plan that’s going to help companies better build relationships with their most passionate customers. It’s so rewarding to know that you’re helping to build something that will greatly help the brand, but even more importantly, that will provide a much better product and experience for the customer.

If I were going to work with your company to help you build a world-class brand ambassador program, this would be the process:

Plan Your Brand Ambassador Program; How Does the Brand Benefit, and How Will Your Ambassadors Benefit?

Related: How to Incorporate Millennials Into Your Brand Ambassador Program

At a high level, your brand needs to ask and answer two questions when you start fleshing out your brand ambassador program:

  1. Who is our ideal brand ambassador?
  2. What relationship will we have with our ambassadors?

To further expand on the second point, you want to as clearly as possible detail how your brand benefits from an ambassador program, and how your ambassadors will benefit.

The benefits to both your brand and its ambassadors need to be clearly defined, and very obvious and desirable to both parties. Too many brands can clearly point to what they want to accomplish with an ambassador program, but they struggle to detail meaningful benefits to the ambassadors if they participate. This is why it’s so key to create solid benefits to the ambassadors. You want your ambassadors to be thrilled to join, in fact you want so many customers applying to be ambassadors that you could never accept them all.

Think of it this way: Let’s say you want to launch a brand ambassador program because you want to increase sales of a particular product line by 20%. That’s a pretty heavy lift that you’re asking of those ambassadors, so you have to do some heavy lifting of your own and make it worth the ambassador’s while to join and then be committed to acting in a way that will help you realize that 20% increase in sales.

The more clearly defined and OBVIOUS the benefits you offer ambassadors, the more likely they will be to want to join your program and help your program reach its goals.

    Benefits - Ambassadors

  • Salary
  • Greater Access to Brand
  • Early Access to New Products
  • Recognition and Promotion
  • Professional and Personal Development

          Benefits - Brand

  • Increased Sales
  • Increased Promotion
  • Product Feedback
  • Customer Feedback

As far as measuring and tracking results: Clearly define what your goals are for your brand ambassador program. Maybe you want to increase sales, or decrease calls to customer service centers, or improve customer sentiment online. Start with your core goal, then clearly define precisely what you want to see happen.  The more precise you are with your goals, the more accountable everyone will be for reaching them.  Don’t just say ‘increase sales’, say ‘increase sales by 8% for the first year of the brand ambassador program’. And your KPIs will flow from your goals and desired outcomes.

An additional note about goal-setting: Don’t be afraid to regularly revisit your goals and measurement tactics to make sure you’re on a realistic course. This is especially important during the first year of your brand ambassador program. Self-audit frequently, at least every 3 months, monthly is better for the first 6 months. There will be a lot of trial and error involved in launching your brand ambassador program at all levels. Be mindful of this, and don’t be afraid to change course if something isn’t working as expected.

Your Brand Ambassador Program Needs Internal Ambassadors

Before you do anything else as far as fleshing out your brand ambassador program, you need to know who will own it and who will fight for it internally. Ideally, you want more than one person who are customer-centric, and who can clearly communicate to their bosses the value of the brand ambassador program, especially in the early days when a direct impact on the business bottom line will be harder to quantify. These will be the people that understand how a brand ambassador program will benefit their brand, but they can also envision how such a program will improve the product and brand experience for the ambassadors, and all customers.

Your Brand Ambassador Program Should ALWAYS Be Integrated Into Your Existing Marketing, Sales and Customer Service Efforts

The quickest way to ensure that your brand ambassador program fails is to put it on an island within your organization. Left by itself, a brand ambassador program could take years to see measurable results that justify its cost. At best. Few companies will be willing to invest the money necessary to reach that point. The good news is that a brand ambassador program can begin benefiting your company almost immediately, if structured correctly.

A well-designed brand ambassador program will directly impact and positively affect most of the core functions of your business:

  • Marketing: Ambassadors will help promote your products to other customers
  • Sales: Ambassadors will drive new sales
  • Customer Service: Ambassadors will interact directly with customers both online and off, addressing their concerns and answering their questions.
  • PR: Ambassadors will not only spread positive news about your company, they will also proactively defend it against trolls and attacks.
  • Product Design: Ambassadors will collect valuable product feedback directly from customers, which your company can then implement to improve product design.

Think of it this way; You’re not reinventing the wheel by launching a brand ambassador program. As my friend Kelly Hungerford says, a well-designed brand ambassador program makes everything your company is already doing, work better.

Kelly Hungerford

" A well-designed brand ambassador program makes everything your company is already doing, work better."


Start Small, Grow Big

For most companies, the idea of launching a brand ambassador program is a completely new initiative. There’s a steep learning curve involved at first, and much of the process will honestly be trial and error in the first days. To minimize the expense and improve efficiency, it makes sense to start with a smaller core group of ambassadors. The idea is that you want to iron out the kinks with a smaller group, then once you’ve got the process nailed (and you’re seeing the results you want), then you can branch out with a larger group.

For example, if you are targeting single moms, maybe start out with a group of say 5 or 10 ambassadors, and over time as you develop your program, you can scale it out to 100 or even 1,000 single moms. If you want your brand ambassador program to drive sales at your retail locations, maybe focus on only your San Jose market at launch, with the idea being to eventually branch out into a national program.

Create Channels to Directly Connect Your Ambassadors to Each Other, and Your Brand

This can be something as simple as a Facebook or LinkedIn group or a Twitter group DM or a Slack channel.  Also, you want to have the brand representatives that they will be working with regularly present and active in these groups as well.

Why this is important:

  • It gives your ambassadors a place where they can get to know each other
  • It gives your ambassadors a place where they can share ideas, bounce questions off each other and get help
  • It gives your brand a place where they can directly communicate with your ambassadors
  • It gives your brand the ability to quickly and easily collect feedback from your ambassadors
  • It communicates to your ambassadors that you take their feedback and connection seriously, which further motivates them to be more active

Beyond this group, you want to ensure that your ambassadors have as much direct access to your brand representatives as possible, as often as they need it.  Let’s say one of your ambassadors is ‘in the field’ and talking to a potential customer about your product. The customer is considering purchasing your product, and asks a technical question that your ambassador doesn’t know the answer to. If your ambassador had a way to message a brand rep and quickly get that information, it could result in an easy sale. This works regardless of how you will be using your ambassadors and across many core functions such as sales, PR, customer service, customer feedback, etc.

Collect and UTILIZE Feedback From Your Ambassadors

No matter what your working relationship is with your ambassadors, you should always focus on how you can empower your ambassadors to do a better job of collecting feedback from the customers they interact with, and from the ambassadors themselves. There’s a couple of key reasons for this:

  1. Think of the feedback collected from your ambassadors as being free market research. They will interact directly with current and potential customers, and get unfiltered product and brand feedback. The ambassadors will also have their own feedback to provide.
  2. Current and potential customers are more likely to give HONEST feedback to an ambassador than to your brand. Your ambassador will, for the most part, be viewed as just another customer by the people they talk to, so those people will let their guard down and give unfiltered feedback. That feedback may be more critical, but it will also be honest, and it will tell your brand exactly what it needs to do to win that customer’s business.

Your brand’s ability to collect and utilize feedback from its ambassadors is one of the biggest benefits from launching a brand ambassador program. The feedback your ambassadors collect from other customers aids your marketing, PR, customer service, and even product design. It’s invaluable, and a core tenet of your ambassador program should be to design it so that a premium is placed on collecting customer feedback.

All Your Ambassadors MUST Be Compensated

Whenever I talk to companies about compensating ambassadors, I stress two points to them:

  1. All your ambassadors MUST be compensated
  2. Paying them with cash should be your last option

Let’s take a closer look at each point.  First, you must compensate your ambassadors. The level of involvement and work you’re asking of ambassadors is about the same as a part-time job. By compensating your ambassadors, you are communicating to them that you value and appreciate their hard work, and that you aren’t taking it for granted. This keeps them motivated to work hard on your brand’s behalf. On the other hand, if you don’t compensate your ambassadors, they feel as if you are taking advantage of them and their time. Because you would be.

On the other hand, you should only compensate your ambassadors with cash if there are no other options. Paying ambassadors with cash frames their work as being a job. You don’t want the ambassador’s involvement to be viewed as work, you want it to be viewed as an act of love. They love your brand, and they want to work in a way to help grow and foster it.

So if you take cash off the table, how do you compensate your ambassadors? I always tell clients that cash should be the last option and ACCESS should be the first. Give your ambassadors better access to your brand and its products. Let them talk directly with the people that bring their favorite products to market. Let them have a first-look at new products, before even the press gets a chance to review them. In fact, in many ways giving ambassadors early access to new products can be a simple extension of what your brand is already doing with reaching out to the press to let journalists review your products early before they hit the market.  Treat your ambassadors as special people, because they are. Give them early access to products, give them tours of your facility, let them talk directly to the product and brand managers that help bring their favorite products directly to market.

And above all, ask your ambassadors how you can make their involvement worth their while. You will be amazed, but one of the best ways you can compensate ambassadors is to give them better access to your brand, and to take their suggestions seriously. Listening to your most passionate customers and ACTING on their feedback is one of the best ways you can reward them.

To be honest, simply paying ambassadors is pretty lazy. If that’s your best idea for compensating your ambassadors, then you really don’t know them very well. Go back to the drawing board till you come up with a better idea.

Don’t Just Read This Post, Act on it 

Too many people will read this post, think it’s a great idea to launch a brand ambassador program, then do nothing about it.

Yes, it’s a lot of work.

Yes, it may be hard to convince your boss to commit to it.

Yes, it will take a lot of time.

But the bottom line is, your customers are worth every bit of it. A well-run ambassador program is one of the greatest competitive advantages your brand can have. And as a brand employee, there’s nothing more satisfying than working directly every day with customers that genuinely LOVE your brand.

That’s what you get to do if your brand runs an ambassador program.  Start today, building the case internally for launching a brand ambassador program. Analyze your business, and detail all the ways that a brand ambassador program could positively impact your bottom line.  Scroll back up to the section on integrating your brand ambassador program as I’ve already given you the list.

Create a proposal for a brand ambassador program and present it to your boss.  Don’t position as ‘this is what it will cost us’, instead present it as ‘here’s how our brand will benefit’.  At worst, a well-run brand ambassador program should pay for itself.  At best, it will be a huge competitive advantage for your business.

Besides all of that, you are creating something amazing for your customers. You are creating a vehicle that allows your brand to not only get a better sense of who your customers are and what they think, but that also takes that customer feedback and IMPLEMENTS it and utilizes it within your brand.

And if you need help making the case to your boss and creating your plan, feel free to email me.  I’ll be happy to answer any question you have about creating a brand ambassador program, even if we don’t work together on it. I’ll be happy to help you get started, no strings attached, just reach out and I’ll be happy to help answer any general questions you have.

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The Secret to Getting More Engagement on Our Blogs That We’ve All Forgotten

From 2006-2011, I did a weekly ‘Top 25’ list of the best marketing blogs on my first blog The Viral Garden. Yesterday, I was doing some maintenance on The Viral Garden, and I found a Top 25 list I did back in December of 2007.

Ten years ago! When I saw the list, I was immediately curious to see how many of the blogs were still around and active, ten years later.  Most of them had either ‘died’ years ago, or had moved to a new URL, a couple had apparently let the hosting for the domain lapse and someone else had taken it over. BTW, props to Valeria, her blog Conversation Agent is still going strong, looks to be even more prolific today than it was 10 years ago!

I spent probably two hours clicking the links and reading the blogs, several of which I hadn’t visited in years. It was a very interesting digital trip down memory lane. Putting my Content Strategist hat on, I immediately noticed several differences in the content being created on these blogs 10 years ago versus today:

  • Shorter posts. There weren’t a lot of 1,500-word posts floating around in 2007. In fact most where a few hundred words, if that.  Short, and to the point.
  • There were few ‘How-To’ posts. There was little, if any teaching and instructive content. I have a theory on why this is the case, and I’ll get to it in a minute.
  • No ‘Listicle’ posts. You know, “Ten Steps to Building a Better Blog” or “Five Ways to Improve Your Digital Presence Today!”

But what really struck me about the content being created on these blogs 10 years ago was the tone. Most of these blogs were written as if the blogger was talking to no more than 30 people. Because they probably weren’t! I think back to my own experiences blogging around this time, and there were many days when I wouldn’t crack 100 visitors. But the flipside was, I knew most of the people who visited my blog, because they were commenting on my blog!

And when you are writing for people that you know, and people who know you, you write differently. Remember I said that most bloggers in 2007 didn’t write ‘How-To’ or ‘Listicle’ type posts.  Instead, they mostly wrote ‘Here’s what happened to me today’ type posts, with a business slant or moral behind the post. But when you write in that way, it’s much more ‘folksy’, and it makes you much more relateable.

One of the constant complaints I hear from bloggers in #Blogchat, from clients who blog, is “No one ever comments on my blog anymore!” We know why some of this happens; Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other social sites are fragmenting conversations. Most bloggers and their readers weren’t using these sites in 2007, so as a result, social conversations were still mostly happening on blogs. Over the years, as these sites grew, we started to spend more time off our blogs, which meant our social interactions followed us.

Sidenote: Back in those days I had a ‘trick’ I would use to get more blogging readers. A decade ago, Technorati would list all the blogs (or it tried to) by their number of links. And you could sort them so that the list would be ascending or descending. I would sort the list of blogs so that it was ascending, meaning that it showed me the blogs that had few or no links, first. My thinking was that the blogs with few or no links were probably brand new bloggers, so I wanted to check them out and comment as often as I could, to help them get going and also to get on their radars so they would start reading and commenting on my blog! One day, I found a particular business blog with few or no links, and I clicked over and started reading the blog. It had about 5 or 6 posts, the first five were strictly business focused, on a particular topic, all written in a very textbooky tone. None of them them got any comments. Then the ‘newest’ post was simply the blogger asking “Why in the world isn’t anyone commenting?!?  I keep writing posts, putting a lot of effort into them and no one comments!”  That was the last post on that blog, the post was about 3-4 months old by the time I saw it, and I remember thinking “I just saw this blog die”. That’s always stuck with me, for whatever reason.

But looking back at these ‘old’ blogs from 2007 and such, I’m reminded of the role that the tone of our blog posts plays in driving engagement. Or, how the tone used can stifle engagement. Remember I said that I saw few ‘How-To’ or ‘Listicle’ posts on these blogs from 2007 years ago. Now, these are all the rage on blogs, but think about why that is. These types of posts are written to EXPAND your audience. They are written to help more people, many of which you don’t know. So you write in a tone that’s more formulaic and impersonal. This makes your message more accessible to a larger audience, but it also makes your message less engaging, in a way.

I want to illustrate how this applies to one of my favorite blogs from 10 years ago, Kathy Sierra’s Creating Passionate Users. Kathy’s blog was always brain candy to me, but even though she had a massive audience, her blog always felt welcoming and engaging in a way that I never really understood. As I was reading these old blog posts from 2007, I noticed that one of the blogs had Creating Passionate Users on their blogroll (remember those?), so I clicked over and started reading Kathy’s blog. I was immediately struck by the tone! She wrote in a way that made it seem like she knew all her readers and was just chatting with us at a bookstore and having a casual conversation just with us. It made her content much more interesting, and engaging, even if I didn’t realize why at the time.

So if you want to write to expand your audience and to establish your expertise, the ‘How-To’ posts and really any content that teaches a skill is a good idea.

But if you want to increase engagement, if you want to get more comments and interaction, do like we used to do in the ‘old days’ of blogging; Write like you only have 30 readers, and you know who each of them are.

Try it! It really does change the way you write, doesn’t it?

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Research: Online and Offline Conversations Account for 19% of Sales

An exciting new study from Engagement Labs (Formerly Keller-Fay) had some very interesting takeaways for brands concerning the impact that online and offline WOM has on sales.  The study tracked the correlations between conversations (online and offline) and sales for 170 brands.  The research found 19% of sales resulted from both online and offline conversations.  Further, the study found that both sources contributed almost equally; 10% of sales resulted from offline conversations (Word of Mouth) and 9% resulted from online conversations (Social Media).

The study also looked at how a brand uses social media can impact sales: “By improving social performance by just 10 percent, the brands included in this study can realize a two percent increase in sales and large improvements in profit margins compared to business-as-usual figures. For example, the sentiment of conversations, both online and offline, were proven to be a big driver of performance. Therefore, by improving sentiment, a brand can experience a sales lift.”

The More Positive the Conversation Around Your Brand, the Higher Your Sales

So let’s unpack that previous paragraph a bit. If a brand improves the efficiency of its social media efforts by 10%, it realizes a 2% increase in sales. That alone is incredibly significant. But additionally, positive sentiment about a brand online and off leads to an increase in sales.

And what group is the biggest driver of positive sentiment about your brand online?  Your happy customers!  Your biggest fans are not only the biggest contributors of positive conversations around and about your brand, but they are also the group that is the most motivated to talk positively about your brand!

This is precisely why I am so dedicated to helping companies better connect with and empower their happy customers. Additionally, customers are more likely to listen to and trust a fellow customer than they are a marketing message that comes directly from a brand! You know this to be true from your own experiences: Which are you more likely to trust; A commercial for a brand, or an endorsement for that same brand from a customer you meet in a store? You’re going to trust the customer over the commercial, right?  Of course you are.

If you want to improve the sentiment of the conversation around your brand online, then make sure your happy customers are more active participants in that conversation.  That’s it.  If you don’t take a role in engaging your happy customers, they will be less likely to create positive content around and about your brand online.  Which will lead to fewer sales.

But we want you to have more sales. And as this study found, just a 10% increase in the efficiency of your social media efforts results in a 2% increase in sales.  For a small business with at least one employee, average annual revenue is $4.9 million.   So if a small business with one employee could improve its social media efforts by just 10%, it could realize an increase in sales of $98,000.00.

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Connecting With Your Customers Should Be a Part of Your Culture, Not Part of a Publicity Stunt

You may have seen over the last few weeks how a user on Twitter spotted an odd pattern to the few people that KFC was following on Twitter:

And KFC responded by sending him several goodies, including a rather large painting of himself along with the Colonel:

Now, on the surface, this is a cool thing for a brand to do. It got KFC a ton of positive publicity and will no doubt win Wieden & Kennedy (The agency behind this idea) a ton of awards. But whenever I see something like this from a brand, my first question is “Ok, now what comes next?”

The problem is, these ‘let’s send a customer something cool’ stunts typically end up being just that: Stunts. They aren’t part of a larger strategy or initiative.  They are typically one-offs designed to generate short-term publicity for the brand, and the agency of record.  W&K can easily point to social media engagement and claim this is a ‘win’.  Just look at the first tweet from @edgette22, it has over 700K RTs currently.  I’m sure KFC is thrilled with that, and W&K will win a ton of social media awards for this.

But at the end of the day, what needles were moved?  What long-term impact will this have for KFC?

Since this happened, I’ve had strategy discussions with two major brands (everyone here has heard of both of them and you likely use their products).  In simple terms, we discussed how these brands can better connect with their customers. We discussed what they could do to better collect feedback from customers, and better ACT on that feedback to improve existing business and marketing processes.

In both cases, we never discussed “Hey guys what if we did some Twitter stunt where we send something cool to a customer?” Because if you really want to connect with your customers, you can’t do it just once, it has to be your commitment and your culture.

Now to be fair to KFC, they could very well have many other customer engagement efforts underway. Maybe they’ve launched a customer advisory board, maybe they have a brand ambassador program, or maybe they are looking to launch such efforts.  If so, I wrote the book on both topics.

I just get a little testy when it appears that brands are only embracing their customers as a way to get a public pat on the back. Actually committing to embracing your customers is damn hard work, and much of it goes without public acclaim. Your brand has to literally love and care for its customers. You have to value them and view bringing the voice of the customer into your organization as being a cause worth fighting for.

If you only do it in public, you’re committed to the publicity.  If you also do it in private, you’re committed to the cause.

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What’s the Difference Between a Brand Ambassador Program and an Outreach Program?

Influencer Marketing and working with Brand Ambassadors are two of the hottest areas in marketing today, but they are completely different tactics often aimed at completely different audiences.  So what’s the difference?

A Brand Ambassador program is where the company and its customers (fans) have a sort of informal and ongoing relationship.  Typically, the participants in a Brand Ambassador program have signed up with the company, so they are raising their hands and telling the brand that they want to work directly with them.  Most Brand Ambassadors are compensated for their involvement.  That compensation could be in the form of cash, or products, or discounts on products, or greater access to the brand, or possibly all of the above.  The benefit to the brand is that it gives them a way to stay connected with its most passionate fans, so they can work with those fans to help them better promote the brand’s products to others, but also the brand can get valuable feedback from its ambassadors and apply that feedback to the business and product cycle.  The Brand Ambassador benefits by having a closer connection to a brand it loves and supports.  Often, Brand Ambassadors will get advance access to upcoming products or projects, and get to go ‘behind the scenes’ at the brand, and are given a level of access that the average customer could never gain.  If the Brand Ambassador program is organized and executed properly, there are clear and obvious benefits to both the brand and its Brand Ambassadors.

For example, Chick-Fil-A has a program where it works with moms, #ChickFilAMoms. It will send them coupons for certain items and also promote certain items to them (especially new menu items). CFA tries to get the moms to try the items, but they also want the moms to tell other moms about the products so they’ll give them coupons but also instructions on messaging, how to promote the items to other people, etc. The customers will also give feedback on the items and brand experience, and Chick Fil-A can then leverage that feedback for change (see Chick Fil-A launching a Mom’s Valet service for moms that bring kids to Chick Fil-A). Customers opt-in to be a part of the program, it’s all about having an ongoing relationship with fans that have raised their hands and told the brand that they want to help them.

Outreach programs are a bit different.  Typically, these inititiatives are designed to raise awareness among a particular group, often a group of influencers.  For example, if Chick-Fil-A wanted to work with influencers, what they might do was identify say 25 moms that were also ‘influencers’, and fly them into Atlanta and let them spend the day with their chefs, see how the food is prepared, maybe learn more about how CFA works with moms, etc.  As Janice Person explained in a recent MarketingSmarts podcast with Kerry Gorgone (Click to listen), Monsanto brings in foodie bloggers to its partner farms to give them a complete look at the process in bringing food from the field to the table, and along the way they also learn more about Monsanto’s role in helping to facilitate that process.  In both examples, the idea of the outreach is to educate the influencers with the hopes that they will then go and tell others about their experience.

And in that regard, both a Brand Ambassador program and an Outreach program are tactics to drive Word of Mouth.  The tactics are simply aimed at different audiences.  With a Brand Ambassador program, you’re working with an audience (your existing customers) that loves your brand and who is already spreading Word of Mouth about your brand.  You want to work with these customers to help them do a better job of this as well as working with them to gain better product feedback from customers they interact with.  With an Outreach program, you’re dealing with an Influencer that has often built a large and (ideally) engaged online following, and you want to expose them to your brand so that they can share their experiences with their networks.  So the Outreach program is a brand awareness tool as well.

Another way to think of the difference is, an Outreach program is a good way to build awareness for a new product line or initiative, whereas a Brand Ambassador program is a good way to increase the marketing efforts of your customers around an established brand.

Is your company looking for a kick-ass Content Marketing Manager? I’m in the market!  Here’s my details, please email me if you have a remote opening! 

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Facebook Study Reveals How Brands Can Drive Engagement With Users

Facebook did a study in 2012 to determine what type of content drives engagement on its brand pages.  From the study:

“We examined four weeks of Page posts, across 23 brands and six industries and divided the posts into three types of content:

Messages about the product or service

  • Travel brand example: Our new resort just opened! Book your trip today.

Messages related to the brand

  • Travel brand example: I decided to go on my first cruise because______.

Messages unrelated to the brand

  • Travel brand example: Hang in there everybody. Monday will be over before we know it!

Posts on topics related to the brand, but not specifically about the product or service, were the sole universally significant predictor of all types of engagement.”

The study also clarified that brand content related to the brand but not ABOUT the brand was the top driver of Shares, Likes and Comments for these brands.

Does this surprise you?  It shouldn’t, people will engage with content that taps into the Bigger Idea behind a product or service.  Nike figured this out 30 years ago with the iconic slogan Just Do It.  It’s not about the shoes, it’s about what you do while WEARING the shoes.  If you want to create more engaging content and marketing, think less about promoting yourself, and more about promoting the themes/beliefs/lifestyle that ties into your brand.  Think about why people buy your product and how they use it.  Create content that’s customer-centric instead of product-centric.

For example, check out this commercial from Nike.  Nike’s content and marketing taps into the Bigger Idea about its products.  The product itself is secondary to who its customers are, and why they buy its product.  This COMMERCIAL has been viewed over 4 Million times.

What is Nike selling with this commercial?

https://youtu.be/KSPJkauND68

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Ford’s Philosophy on Influence Marketing: Always Be Nurturing

I don’t know what you’re into, but I’m into cars. Muscle cars, to be specific. Dodge Challengers, Chevy Camaros, Ford Mustangs—any vehicle with some power under the hood really gets my attention.

That’s why I accepted Ford Motor Company’s invitation to attend a 2013 event for women bloggers. (You can read the whole story in my previous post on this blog.)

Little did I know that luncheon would be the start of a partnership that would last for several years, and take me places I never imagined I’d go (like Dearborn, Michigan).

For 2015 and 2016, Ford Motor Company invited me (and more than 100 other “digital influencers”) to Detroit to attend the North American International Auto Show (“NAIAS”), the premier show for car enthusiasts and automotive industry insiders.

For three days, our group got access to Ford’s “Behind the Blue Oval” area at NAIAS, primo seats at Ford press conferences, and special events that brought us behind the scenes at Ford, like the Rouge Factory tour.

You might be wondering what the return on marketing investment is for something like this, and it’s a smart question.

First, let’s talk reach. During the event, Ford racked up thousands of social media mentions on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Periscope, etc., and the Twitter coverage alone reached millions of followers.

By inviting a diverse group of influencers, Ford managed to dominate in terms of event coverage. They invite not just auto industry journalists, but parenting bloggers, Periscope personalities, social savvy businesspeople, and car enthusiasts.

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“We are looking for folks who are enthusiastic, who create great content, who really have audiences and know what works best for them,”explains JT. Ramsay, digital media manager at Ford. “When we bring them to something like Detroit Auto Show, we know we’re going to have great content for them to share.”

And beyond NAIAS, Ford keeps in touch with influencers throughout the year, hosting regional events, like “Quality Time with Ford” at the Aveda Institute Orlando (manicures were involved).  Ford also gave attendees tickets to the Central Florida International Auto Show so we could see Ford’s new line of cars up close and personal.

“These are relationships that we maintain all year long,” says Ramsay. “Whether that’s ‘Driving Skills for Life’ or Ford’s Smart Mobility Tour that we did this last summer, there are all kinds of different touch points that we have with our influencers that I think have been profoundly successful for us.” (Check out the full interview I conducted with JT. for MarketingProfs for more about Ford’s approach to influencer marketing and content.)

As a result, Ford maintains buzz about the brand and its line of cars throughout the year, with bloggers posting across social media and on their own sites. For example, check out Lynette Young’s post on Go Further With Ford, and Bess Auer’s post on lessons other brands can learn from the way Ford involves online influencers.

But does it sell cars? Probably some, although it’s difficult to know how many.

“Attribution is tricky,” acknowledges Ramsay. “However, I think that with some of our influencers they’ll even tell us, ‘I went to this event, I told a friend, and that friend bought a Ford.”

For what it’s worth, my last three cars have been Fords, and when I’m in the market for another, I’m very likely to choose a C-Max after my experience driving one for several months. (And that’s worth about $30,000!)

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Here are some tips for nurturing influencer relationships (and measuring the contribution these bloggers and social media stars bring to your bottom line):

Don’t forget your influencers in between major events.
As Ramsay observes, “[Ford is] working very closely with our regional teams to keep in touch, and not simply parachute in for a national event or two per year.

”Those smaller events might seem insignificant, but they deepen your relationship with your influencers and keep a baseline of buzz going all year long.

Know what you want out of the influencer relationship.
Engaging digital influencers is a smart way to amplify your reach, but is that where your aspirations end? It shouldn’t be! Give influencers personalized links to landing pages, so you know exactly where your traffic came from. Give them discount codes so you know when people convert because they’ve come across an influencer’s content.

Give them direction in terms of what you’re hoping to achieve: what product lines you’re interested in promoting, what upcoming events you’d like people to attend, what corporate charity initiatives you want people to know about.

If you want influencers to share your story about sustainability (like Ford’s “Farm to Car” initiative) or charitable giving (like how Mullinax Ford dealerships in Central Florida give all employees $250 per year to contribute to any charitable organization they like), you have to tell them so.

Otherwise, influencers will do their best to promote your brand, but might miss the points you’re trying to emphasize. This ties into the next tip.

Give influencers the information they need to share your brand story.
Influencers appreciate gaining an insider’s view of your brand (if they’re truly passionate about what you do), and they’ll want to help you get our brand message out. That’s easier to do if you give them event press kits and real-time press releases as you hold conferences and make announcements.

Remember to build relationships with each individual influencer, not “digital influencers” as a group.In between group events for area influencers, occasionally reach out to individual influencers when you have something going on you know would interest them in particular.

For example, before driving the C-Max, I had expressed interest in hybrid vehicles, so after my successful experience with that car, Ford gave me the chance to test drive a Fusion hybrid. They asked only that I provide them feedback about how the two vehicles compared.

This kind of personalized outreach ensures that influencers feel like partners, rather than shills—a critical difference to people who love your brand, but don’t post product reviews for a living.

Finally, choose your influencers carefully.
You want people who are passionate about your brand (or at least your industry), and who will represent you in a professional manner.

The last thing you want as a brand is to have someone stand up and poke his head out of the sunroof of your roped-off prototype vehicle, then wave away show staff while saying “it’s okay, I’m an influencer.”

I’m a muscle car girl, but I’m also a marketing industry professional—nice fit for an auto brand!

Which brings us full circle: muscle car girl makes friends with Ford, gets to attend NAIAS and see the sexy cars.

Who will your brand’s best friends be?

Sexy @Ford Shelby! #FordNAIAS

A photo posted by Kerry O’Shea Gorgone (@kerrygorgone) on