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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Marketing Shouldn’t be a Nuisance, it Should Be Sexy


Writing about marketing can be challenging. If it’s treated as merely a business function, writing on marketing can get very boring, very quickly. Not just for the reader, for the writer as well.

But marketing can often be so much more than it is. The best marketing is never noticed, and you could argue that the worst marketing isn’t either. The difference is, we immediately know bad marketing when we see it, but we often view great marketing as being anything but….marketing.

The challenge is, how do you teach companies to market better if they simply view marketing as a way to get more sales? And how do you create marketing that’s more interesting and even alluring to customers who have been conditioned all their lives to know that marketing is a nuisance?

I was pondering this as I came across this quote from Kathy Sierra:

“Knowledge cannot be pushed into someone’s head while they sit passively reading or listening. Knowledge is a co-creation… the learner must construct the new knowledge in his own head. And usually (or some say ALWAYS), the new knowledge must be mapped into something that’s already IN the learner’s head.”

Now obviously, Kathy’s point was concerning the learning process, and how people learn better when they do more than simply read content. If you can involve them in the process and give them a way to apply what they are reading as they are reading it, you increase learning. Basically, you learn by doing.

But the ‘co-creation’ part grabbed my attention, as did the part about mapping new knowledge to something that’s already IN the learner’s head. If you change ‘knowledge’ to ‘marketing’ and change the ‘learner’ to ‘customer’, you get: ‘marketing must be mapped to something that’s already IN the customer’s head’.

In other words, marketing must tap into something that the customer finds value and relevance in.

For example, think of the Volvo print ads from many years ago with the safety pin. That helped associate ‘safety’ with Volvo vehicles, and it’s a connection that carries over to today. The key is that customers were already interested in having a safe vehicle, so Volvo was smart enough to associate itself with something that was already important to the customer.

So in order for marketing to be effective and win the attention of the potential customer, it has to be related to something that the potential customer already values. This is the classic mistake that most companies make, they try to immediately close the sale with potential customers. A potential customer has little to no idea who you are or why they should buy from you. So obviously, you should not sell to these people UNTIL they understand who you are, what you sell and why it fits into their lives.

The key then is to market to what’s important to the customer. Volvo didn’t market their cars, they marketed safety to potential customers. That got the attention of those potential customers.

I’ve talked about this before, but in order to gain awareness with a group of customers who don’t know who you are, you must focus your marketing completely on the customer.  THAT is how you gain their attention. Once you have their attention, then you can market yourself to them. But not before.

This is why the best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing to your customers. Because we view marketing as being a nuisance, but if marketing is focused on what we as customers want and need, then it becomes USEFUL to us, and we actually can seek it out. We don’t view it as marketing and we don’t even realize we are being marketed to. But if marketing is bad, we immediately notice it, and ignore it.

The best marketing is invisible. The worst marketing becomes invisible.

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How to Convince Your Skeptical Boss to Invest in a Brand Ambassador Program

Whenever you attempt to sell your boss on launching a new initiative, there’s a few things you need to do to improve the boss’ chances of signing off:

1 – Help the boss understand the value

2 – Help the boss understand the cost

3 – Help the boss understand the scope of the initiative and the changes that will be required

 

Unfortunately, the idea of a ‘brand ambassador program’ can mean different things to different organizations, and it’s often difficult for your boss to know what the program is or the impact it could have on their business. When you tell the boss that such a program will cost likely tens of thousands to fully implement and it will take up to a year to see maximum results, well it’s easy to see why many bosses pass.

So in order to improve the chance that your boss signs off on launching a brand ambassador program, we need to address each of your boss’ possible objections head on.

 

Helping Your Boss Understand the Value of a Brand Ambassador Program

As I mentioned, a brand ambassador program can mean different things to different companies. Some companies, for example, hire infuencers or even celebrities to act as their brand ambassadors. Patagonia is a good example of a company that follows this model. When I work with clients, I typically advise them to structure their brand ambassador program so that the ambassadors they select are current customers that love the brand. These customers are already proactively engaging with other customers and promoting the brand, we are just going to build a program that gives us a framework to work with and connect with them regularly.

In general, there are four ways that brand ambassadors benefit your brand:

1 – Promotion. Brand ambassadors are constantly encouraging other customers to buy from your brand. Even if you don’t connect with them, they are already promoting your brand. These are the customers that will stop you in a store and give you an unsolicited recommendation for a product you are considering. The benefit of having a brand ambassador program is that you can work directly with these customers to help them promote your brand in the specific way that you want.

2 – Reputation Management. Your brand ambassadors are the customers that are online and offline protecting your brand. They are defending you from troll attacks, they are defending you when other customers criticize your brand. The benefit of a brand ambassador program is that it gives you a way to train these customers on how to best respond to complaints about your brand that they encounter either online or off.

3 – Customer Service and Support. Along with the previous point, brand ambassadors will proactively help other current or potential customers with issues associated with your brand and its products. The benefit of a brand ambassador program is that it gives your brand a way to provide training for these customers and to give them a way to contact the brand directly if they encounter a customer who needs more help than they can provide.

4 – Customer Feedback. Brand ambassadors are in constant, direct contact with your customers, and are constantly collecting feedback from them. This is honestly the most underutilized benefit that brand ambassadors provide for your brand. By launching a brand ambassador program, you have a more efficient way to collect, categorize and draw insights from the customer feedback that your ambassadors collect.

 

Now if you’re having to sell your boss on the idea of launching a brand ambassador program, the odds are he doesn’t fully see and/or appreciate the value that ambassadors bring to the table. For example, if you tell your boss that brand ambassadors help your brand by promoting it and the brand’s products, he probably sees the value in that promotion. But when you get further down the list to things like customer support and feedback, the value can appear a bit murkier for a boss that isn’t familiar with the idea of a brand ambassador program to begin with.

And it’s worth remembering that when you launch a brand ambassador program, it will likely need to be a gradual rollout. You will want to start with a smaller group of ambassadors, likely with limited responsibilities. I always tell clients when launching a brand ambassador program to “start small, nail the process down, then expand”.

So out of necessity, and in an attempt to make your best case for a brand ambassador program to your boss, it makes sense to start the rollout of a brand ambassador program gradually. For instance, start with the promotional aspect of a brand ambassador program first. This is where most bosses will understand and see the immediate value.

 

Helping Your Boss Understand the Cost of a Brand Ambassador Program

Building on the previous section, understand that if you start by first focusing on how your brand ambassadors can better promote the brand, you are also significantly lowering the cost of the program. Think of it as adopting a payment plan system for paying for a brand ambassador program instead of needing all the costs paid upfront. Start smaller, with just the promotional aspect, nail the process, then you expand.

Here’s another key: Start with a smaller group of ambassadors. This will also significantly lower costs. If you envision having a nationwide ambassador program, you could start with a single market, maybe it could be your most prosperous market, maybe it could be the one where your headquarters are. Either way, by starting with a small group focused on only one aspect of the program (promotional), then you greatly reduce the cost of the program, and make it much easier to manage.

Here’s the best part: By adopting this segmented approach, you not only reduce time and cost, you can, if managed correctly, have the brand ambassador program pay for itself as it is launched and rolled out. Increasing promotion will lead to increased sales and increased revenue. That increased revenue can then be used to fund the next stage of the program’s rollout; focused on brand reputation management. If done smartly, the only new costs associated with the program could be those involving the promotional aspect at launch.

 

Helping Your Boss Understand the Scope of the Initiative and the Changes Involved

By adopting a segmented or tiered launch/rollout of the brand ambassador program, we’ve significantly reduced the scope of the rollout, and the associated costs. Additionally, we are focusing only on the promotional aspect at launch, which is likely the area that even a skeptical boss will see and understand the value in. This also means that necessary changes within your organization will be kept to a minimum. If you start by first focusing on the promotional aspects of a brand ambassador program, this can be launched with minimal disruption or additional work from your staff. Ideally, your brand already has at least one manager for your social media efforts, and this person or team could also assist with helping your best customers promote your brand. Additionally, your brand may want to explore launching a brand ambassador program for your employees, and a promotional aspect is typically the cornerstone of such an initiative.

By starting with just the promotional aspects of a brand ambassador program, you’ve reduced associated costs and maximized the potential benefits.

 

One Final Note About Starting a Brand Ambassador Program

When you bring up the topic of launching a brand ambassador program to your skeptical boss, one of the thoughts he will have (whether he shares it with you or not) is “Ugh, how much is this going to cost us?” It’s worth remembering, and spelling out to your boss, that a brand ambassador programs takes what your business is already doing, and makes it better.

Your boss will likely understand and appreciate the value brand ambassadors can create by promoting your brand and its products. But make sure he understands the other ways that ambassadors can help your brand, and make your current efforts more efficient while also reducing costs.

For example, your brand likely has a set dollar amount placed on every customer service call it receives. In other words, your brand knows what the business cost is for each call it receives.  Let’s say that cost is $7.13 per call based on the call length and what your brand has to pay a customer service representative to handle the call. That means that every time one of your ambassadors helps a customer and eliminates their need to call your brand for customer service, your brand has saved $7.13. Each customer service call that is averted by the actions of your brand ambassadors is a cost-saving to your brand! You can find similar ways to calculate cost savings for reputation management (an improvement of online sentiment by one point results in an X percent increase in sales) and customer feedback as well. These cost-savings that the brand ambassadors create also help offset or even eliminate the cost of expanding the program.

So if you want to improve the chances of getting your skeptical boss to invest in a brand ambassador program, do the following:

  • Don’t try to launch everything at once, focus on a staggered rollout.
  • Start small, with a limited group and focus first on the area that your skeptical boss can clearly see the value in where your brand can quickly see results. Focusing on promotion first is a good start.
  • Once you see results from your initial efforts, grow as necessary, and use gains realized to fund the growth of the program.
  • Make sure your skeptical boss understands that your brand ambassadors will increase sales AND lower costs for your brand.

 

Still have questions about how to sell your skeptical boss on a brand ambassador program? Fill out this contact form and I’ll be happy to help you!

 

 

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Sears Turns its Twitter Account Over to Five Dads for Father’s Day

One of the things companies struggle with how to build engagement with their social media accounts. The cold reality is that most people don’t engage with a company on Twitter until there’s a problem. The majority of current or potential customers aren’t following a given brand’s Twitter account on a given day.

So how do you get people to pay attention to you, when they don’t want to? One way that companies have been testing is allowing a customer or fan to have temporary access to their Twitter account. During Alabama basketball’s NCAA tournament run in March, the Tuscaloosa News turned its Twitter account over to Bama super-fan Hunter Johnson. The move was wildly popular, it drove a lot of attention to the @TideSports account, and gave @HunterLJohnson a lot more attention as well.

Last week leading up to Father’s Day, Sears applied a similar strategy:

Sears picked five dads, and let each one have a different day, and a different topic:

One day the topic was favorite tools, another it was travel ideas, another it was cooking. All topics relating back to fathers and ideas for Father’s Day. This is a great example of focusing on customer-centric content. Instead of promoting Father’s Day sales, Sears brings in real dads all week to discuss their fathers and fatherhood. Naturally, shopping for Father’s Day will come up, but it’s not the focus of the strategy. The focus is to bring together five dads and their communities for a vibrant discussion, that Sears hosts.

Overall, I think this is a great idea and I think you’ll see more brands doing this moving forward. Sears can now improve similar efforts moving forward. Maybe bring in cooks to discuss baking for Thanksgiving, or parents to discuss shopping for children around Christmas.

I do have a couple of suggestions for Sears. If I were helping Sears with this effort, I would have stressed the need to leverage the new exposure Sears had to the communities of these five dads that took over the Sears Twitter account. The reality is, a lot of people will check out the Sears account while the dad they are following is running the account, but after that most of them will leave when the dad does. A good way to capitalize would have been for Sears to promote a special discount code for #AskDad participants, maybe give them the code ASKDAD to get a 20% discount.  This would also be a great way to track a lift in sales directly back to the #AskDad Twitter chats.  I would have also encouraged Sears to promote either its newsletter, or maybe a ‘Gift Buying Guide for Dads’, or something similar.

But overall, I thought turning #AskDad over to real dads for a week was a great idea by Sears, and will be interested in seeing how the brand builds on this idea!