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Innovative: Inside Elon’s Plan to Turn Twitter in 2023 into CompuServe in 1996

The slow, incrementalist march toward turning Twitter into a ‘pay to play’ platform continues. Here’s the latest news, which I mentioned in yesterday’s Monday’s Marketing Minute:

Call me a cynic, but it seems pretty obvious to me that this is simply part of a larger plan to eventually have all Twitter users pay a fee to use the platform. I think Elon knows that this will be another in a long line of highly unpopular moves, so he’s easing Twitter users into this. First he does it in select countries, like New Zealand and the Philippines, and it only affects new users. Later, he claims the trial in those two countries was a rousing success, and rolls it out worldwide to all new users.  Later, he claims that move has also worked, then he expands it to ALL Twitter users, regardless of how long they have been on the platform.

At that point it’s simply a matter of raising prices as much as he feels he can.

This whole episode reminds me of my days on CompuServe on the mid 90s, with a twist.  When I started using CompuServe in the mid 90s, its pricing was $25 a month, for 10 hours. If you went over 10 hours of access, you paid $2.50 for every hour over. Imagine my shock that one month when I received a $100 bill, yikes!

That bill was for about 40 hours on CompuServe for that month. I cannot remember the last month that I spent 40 hours on Twitter.  It’s been years, maybe over a decade.

And that’s the point: While CompuServe was expensive, it was also FUN TO USE! I got entertainment, business and social value from being on CompuServe. It was an experience worth paying for. We could argue how much, but it was worth something.

The experience on Twitter, honestly isn’t worth much, and hasn’t been for a long time. In the mid 90s, AOL became a competitor to CompuServe by offering similar functionality and features, at a LOWER PRICE.  While CompuServe charged $25 for 10 hours, AOL charged $25 for UNLIMITED access. It allowed AOL to quickly take massive amounts of market share from CS, and within a few years, AOL dominated the online services space and CS was all but done.

Elon seems to be attempting to do the opposite with Twitter in 2023. He’s taking a platform and differentiating it from his competitors by CHARGING users when they can get a similar experience on a competing site…for free.

Let’s go back to the AOL/CompuServe example. Let’s say AOL and CS were both offering unlimited access (I believe CS later switched to this model, but by then it was too late) in 1996. AOL announces it is launching AOL Plus, and it will be $50 a month for 50 hours a month of access.

What would need to happen in order for that move to be a success for AOL?  Obviously, AOL Plus would have to offer a MUCH better experience for users than they could get from AOL or CompuServe. Right?

Yet, Elon is trying to move Twitter from being free to paid…and he really isn’t improving the experience that much, if at all. Bots are still a massive problem on the platform. Every new ‘feature’ rollout that Twitter adds that charges users has the same disclaimer that ‘this is necessary to combat the bot problem’. Yet the bot problem continues, apparently unabated. As do the moves to charge users for features that have been free for the last 17 years.

A few months ago, Elon announced that users could participate in revenue sharing. They could actually make money from using Twitter!

Then the fine print: You had to be a Twitter Blue subscriber.

Moving from a free to paid model for a social media site only works if its users can see a clear value in the fees which they will be required to paid. I’m not seeing the clear value in any of Elon’s moves so far.  We finally got the ability to edit tweets…and you have to pay for it. Bots are still a problem. Censorship is still a problem. Porn and trolls and toxicity are still problems.

But I did lose my verified status, so there’s that.

This was Elon’s biggest mistake

He never embraced Twitter’s user community. To be fair, neither did Dorsey and his crew.  Elon came into Twitter, guns blazing, and made a ton of sweeping changes to the platform. And he did so without really consulting Twitter’s users.

That was a big mistake. One of Elon’s top priorities when joining Twitter and BEFORE making huge moves should have been to establish a board or council of Twitter users and let that board/council have a say in his decisions. This would have ensured that Twitter’s user community always had input into moves, and they could have helped communicate the need for any moves to the larger community.

Instead, Elon came in shooting from the hip, making decisions with little or no input from users, and as a result many of those moves were a disconnect to the Twitter userbase. Then we watched as Elon made move after move that wasn’t aligned with what we wanted for Twitter, or what we thought it needed.

The reality is, Elon had a lot of supporters when he first took over Twitter. Many of those supporters have since left Twitter as a result of the moves he’s made.

I remember in 2009 having a conversation on Twitter with several other users about why Twitter needed a Community Manager. We concluded at the time that Twitter was really starting to grow, and now was a good time for Twitter to invest in its community and incorporate feedback from users into its decisions.

Almost 15 years later, and we are still waiting for Twitter to make that commitment to its users. I hate to say, but if it hasn’t happened by now, I don’t think it ever will. As a result, Twitter has never reached its full potential.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Gen Z Loves AI, Top 5 Industries For Digital Ads, Research on Social Media ROI

Happy Monday, y’all! I hope you are ready for a productive week.  Saturday is the first day of Fall! Fall is my favorite time of the year, I love it! Here’s a few business/marketing stories that caught my eye over the last week.

 

Not surprisingly, youngsters are more likely to use AI tools, and become proficient using them. A recent survey by SalesForce found that 49% of respondents have used generative AI tools, with 70% of Gen Z using them. The article also notes that 68% of Baby Boomers and Gen X have not used AI tools.  Apparently anyone born prior to 1981 is automatically ‘old’ now.

 

Five industries will see above average growth in digital ad spending in 2023. They are, in order; Travel, Retail, Healthcare, Automotive, Entertainment. I suppose all those make sense in one way or another, maybe automotive is the hardest to rationalize.  But the others I can see. Speaking of travel, the first Tourism Power List will debut this week, more on that at the end of the post.

 

Sprout Social has released its latest report on the state of social media marketing. From the takeaways that Sprout Social has shared, it seems like many marketers are still struggling to accurately measure the business impact of social media, which is amazing to say in 2023. It was interesting that the study found that 81% of respondents can already see that AI is making a positive impact on their work, but that makes sense from a content creation perspective.

 

So that’s it for this week’s edition of the Monday Marketing Minute. So tomorrow, I have a new post up on retail marketing, and on Wednesday, I will publish the debut edition of the Tourism Power List. I’m so pumped for that as the tourism space is probably my favorite to work in.  If you want to get a sneak peek at the Tourism Power List candidates, here they are.

I hope you have a wonderful week, enjoy the Fall weather!

 

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Elon’s Erratic Behavior, Money Troubles for ChatGPT, Social Media’s Age Divide

Happy Monday, y’all! Hope everyone is having a wonderful summer and ready for another productive week! Temps here in the Heart of Dixie this week are expected to approach 100 on multiple days. I am hoping this will be summer’s last gasp, as temps, or at least the humidity, normally starts to fall after Labor Day. Here’s a few business and marketing stories that caught my eye!

 

Elon Musk is making it super hard to defend him these days, and I reallllly want to see him turn Twitter around. It seems like every decision he makes either seems amazing, or totally insane. His latest, is he wants to remove the Block feature from Twitter/X. He may not even be able to do that, as it seems Community Notes has flagged some of his tweets saying that Apple and the Google Play app store require that the mobile app for Twitter offer a block feature.  But I just don’t understand why he thinks that’s a smart move.  Unless he is simply saying something provocative to get people to engage with him.  If so, that hints at far more problems. But taking away basic features then mocking users for losing those features OR that they will have to pay if they want them back is simply not good business on any level.

 

So this story made the rounds a few days ago, claiming ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAI could go bankrupt by the end of 2024. The article contends that it costs the company $700k a day to keep ChatGPT running, thus the financial calculations. Many have since chimed in that this probably wouldn’t happen anyway. The cynic in me wonders if this story wasn’t planted by OpenAI as a way to drive more investor interest in the company. Having said all that, it’s true that the userbase for ChatGPT is indeed leveling out. I suspect that will continue to be the case as other players in the AI space enter the game.

 

This chart forecasting social media usage by age group was a bit interesting. The only age group that’s forecast to see solid growth in social media usage over the next 5 years is Gen Z, the group born between 1997 and 2012.  So they would be age 11-26 today. Millennials will see very slight growth, but Gen X and Baby Boomers will actually continue to leave social media over the coming 5 years. I am playing this out as a Gen Xer myself.  The only social media channels I am active on these days are Twitter and LinkedIn, and I spend maybe 15 mins a day on Twitter and maybe an hour a week on LinkedIn. Actually I probably spend a total of 30 mins a week scanning my Facebook feed for any important announcements from friends, but that’s about it. Ten years ago, I was on social media channels for at least 5 hours a day during the week.

 

So that’s it for this week’s edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute. I hope you have a wonderful week!

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I Need Help Driving Sales to My Website

I Need Help Driving Sales to My WebsitePeriodically, LinkedIn will send me digital and content marketing leads from LinkedIn users who have said they need help with a project. One of the most common requests these users make is: I need help driving sales to my website.

Generating sales online is a process. You need several pieces in place before you can create sales.

Before you can sell products, you need a platform

Let’s say you want to open a retail store and sell clothing.

First, you need a supplier for your clothing.

Once you have that, then you need a store.

Then you need to hire salespeople to convert visitors into buyers.

Finally, you need foot traffic.  You need people to visit your store, looking to buy.

In order to sell clothing, you need all of the above pieces in place. You need a store.  You need a supply of clothes. You need people to visit your store, and finally, you need salespeople who are skilled enough to convince them to buy your clothing, and to facilitate the purchase for them.

If you’re missing one of these pieces, you can’t expect to have sales.

So before you turn to social media to be the silver bullet to give you sales, you need to figure out why you aren’t generating sales now.  What areas are you missing now, that you need to get sales?  Because that will be the areas that you will be depending on social media to help you with.

You can’t sell products until you have a platform. 

What do I mean by ‘platform’ in this case? In terms of online, your platform is the audience for your content. How many email subscribers do you have?  How many followers on social media sites?  How many readers of your blog?

That’s your platform.  If your website gets 150 visitors a month, you can’t expect social media to suddenly drive website sales for you. You have to first build a platform with social media sites, tools and content.

Once you’ve built a platform, then you can sell to the people on that platform.

Social media is a great way to build a platform. So don’t think of social media as a way to generate sales. Think of social media, of the content you create, as a way to build a following, an audience.

A platform.

Once you have a platform in place, then you can convert some of the people on that platform into customers. The more people on your platform, the greater a chance for converting more sales.

What’s the best way to build a social media platform?

When you start building your social media platform, you want to consider what sites and tools you will use to build a following. I always advise companies to focus first on their blog, simply because it will be a channel your business will have control over. The great tradeoff in using social media sites like Twitter or Facebook or Instagram to build a following is that you lose control over your content and your ability to create new content. Yes, you will have access to a potentially large audience of people, but that access can be controlled by those sites.

When you create and publish content on your blog, you have far more control. Since building a platform on social media is a long play, you want to first invest in the tools that you have direct control over. Such as you blog, or an email newsletter, or maybe a podcast.

This isn’t to say that you can’t use social media sites to help build your platform. You absolutely can, and in most cases you should. But use social media sites as the spokes to drive traffic back to your hub (blog, email newsletter, podcast), which you control. Remember the example of how Harry uses social media sites to drive email newsletter signups. He’s pushing people from social media, back to his hub (email newsletter) which he controls.

The Two-Step Plan for Social Media Success

Step one: Build your platform.

Step two: Convert the following.

First, build your platform. We’ve already talked about how to do this.

Second, once you have a platform, then you want to convert the following you have built into sales.

Let’s go back to the beginning of this post when I mentioned what if your website gets 150 visitors a month. What if, you decided to build a social media platform. The heart of that platform was a blog, that in six month’s time. was generating 1,000 visits a month, and referring 150 visits a month to your website.

So in just six month’s time, you have effectively doubled the traffic to your website. You did this by creating a social media platform, including a blog, which is now driving 150 visits a month to your website.

But what happens after those 150 visitors come to your website?

Ideally, you want those visitors to convert. A conversion could be downloading a white paper, it could be completing a purchase, it could be signing up for your newsletter.

Let’s go back to the earlier example of a retail store that sells clothing. One of the we needed for that retail store to be successful was foot traffic. We need people visiting the store, looking to buy.

If we could effectively double foot traffic to the store in six month’s time, is that a good thing?

It depends. If the foot traffic doubles, but the sales (conversions) don’t increase, then we have a problem.

So you want to build the platform, then convert the following. You want to focus on creating content and a customer experience that drives people to your platform, but once they are on your platform, you need to convert them.

If you do both correctly, then your social media platform can generate conversions, including sales.

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The Risk of Using Social Media

It’s never been riskier for a company to use social media than it is right now. Social media requires a disciplined, and purposeful strategy and governance to guide and manage it at the corporate level. Any company that uses social media needs to view it as a serious investment, which must be managed properly to realize maximum returns.

What is Keeping Your CEO Up at Night?

Business as usual flew out the window around a year ago, and may never fully return. Business leaders are focused on how to better control and manage everything from marketing communications to even work forces that are suddenly remote for the first time. In fact, Inc. found that managing remote workers was one of the top concerns that CEOs have in 2021.

Today, I wanted to focus on helping you regain control of your digital content, and show you how to lower the risk associated with being a business and using social media. The lure of social media for marketers has always been that you will, in theory, have access to a large audience of current and potential customers. How many billions of users are on Facebook? A bunch! Which means billions of potential customers just waiting on our marketing messages! Or so the story goes…

This thinking has led to far too many companies over the years adopting a digital marketing strategy where social media sites like Facebook and Instagram served as the foundation, with support coming from owned media channels such as your blog or website.

The problem with this ‘social media as our foundation’ approach is that you don’t have control over your foundation. If your Facebook brand page is your de facto ‘website’, then what happens when Facebook changes its algorithm and lowers the organic reach that content originating from a brand receives?  That’s right, your brand’s reach suffers. So how do you get your reach numbers back to previous levels? Why Facebook can help with that, let us tell you about Facebook ads!

So now you are paying to get back the reach that used to be organic. This is what happens when you marry your digital marketing efforts to a channel that you don’t control.

Wait, why is my business page restricted? 

I follow several marketing/content/social media groups on Facebook. I do this as a way to get a barometer on issues that companies are dealing with when it comes to their social and digital efforts. I want to see what questions they have and what issues they are facing.

You would be surprised at how often members of these groups are sharing how they were recently locked out of their Facebook business page or maybe from running ads, and want to know what the issue could be. Often, the issue will be that the brand owner (often the CEO or maybe the company’s social media manager) posted something on their personal Facebook profile that violated Facebook’s rules, so as a result,Facebook then restricted their ability to manage their brand page as a result.

Recently, Twitter and Facebook have suspended the accounts of thousands of users for what it claims were violations of its content policies. Whether you view these actions as censorship or completely appropriate, the reality is that social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram can pretty much suspend any user that it deems is violating its user agreement. So if your business is using Twitter, Facebook and Instagram as the foundation of its digital communications, you are effectively ceding complete control of those communications to these social media platforms. If these platforms decide that your content isn’t acceptable, then you are gone from those platforms. Simple as that.

Regain control of your social media and digital communications

Let’s focus on taking back control of your social media and digital communications. The foundation of your digital marketing strategy should be your Owned Media channels. Such as your website, your blog, your newsletter, your podcast. These are the channels where you control the content creation, and distribution.

Social media channels should never be the foundation of your digital marketing strategy. Social media channels should SUPPORT your owned media channels, not replace them.

Remember, we want to give you MORE control over your digital communications and LOWER the associated risk.  Social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are NOT your social media strategy, they are tools you use to support it.

How Harry’s Marketing Examples Grew Its Newsletter From Zero to 19,000 Subscribers in One Year

Harry’s Marketing Examples is a great site you should check out. I noticed this article on how Harry grew its newsletter from zero to 19,000 subscribers in one year. That’s pretty impressive!

Harry had a very simple, three-pronged strategy for his content distribution:

1 – Customize all content for the platform he was sharing it on. For instance, content shared on Twitter would be threaded and long-form. The same content shared on Facebook would much shorter and more visual. This is honestly something I am terrible at, I tend to share a link to my latest post and a picture on every platform. I need to get better about this and Harry’s strategy has got me thinking about how I can improve.

2 – Move everyone from the social media platform where they see your content, to your platform. Give everyone a reason to leave Twitter/Facebook/Instagram, and go back to your website or blog. Remember, the social media platforms should SUPPORT your digital marketing strategy.

3 – Convert visitors into newsletter subscribers. Create content that engages users on the social media platforms where they are. Get them to engage with that content and GO BACK to YOUR platform (blog/website). Then once they are on your platform, convert them into an email subscriber.

Why is this so important? Because once Harry has the social media user converted into an email subscriber, then the can connect DIRECTLY with them VIA EMAIL! He no longer needs Twitter and Facebook to connect with this person, he’s got them locked into his email newsletter.

Remember, this is about giving you MORE control over your digital communications and LOWERING the associated risk.

Social Media will continue to be volatile in 2021 and beyond

If you’ve been reading my blog, you know that I’ve been warning for a while now that 2021 will be a pretty volatile year for social media. Over the last couple of years, there will be #DeleteFacebook movements that gain steam quickly then die out just as fast. As touched on at the start of this issue, there’s a growing sense among many Twitter/Facebook/Instagram users that the companies are getting a little too ham-fisted with their moderating or policing of content. In fact, as I’m writing this, I just learned that Instagram has admitted that it is reading private messages from users and suspending users for sending messages that violate its terms of service.

Earlier this year, Clubhouse seemingly came out of nowhere to become the hottest social media app available. While its popularity has definitely waned the last few months, it shows that people that use social media regularly are hungry for new experiences and context. Gone are the days where social media simply meant, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The rise of Clubhouse shows that social media users will support new apps and sites, and that they aren’t locked into Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Twitter and Facebook are very well aware of what’s happening, and they are trying to make moves to counter a potential exodus of users:

Twitter can see that its user growth is slowing, and is anticipating a potential decline in revenue. So the site is considering its options, including adding a charge to some of its basic features that have been free up till now. Also, Twitter has considered charging for Tweetdeck, a popular standalone viewer that many users enjoy to better organize and follow tweets on Twitter. This is a risky move if Twitter goes ahead with it. The only way I could see this working is if Twitter added significant functionality to Tweetdeck or its basic Twitter account as a way to justify wanting to charge for previously free features. Either way, it signals that Twitter understands that it’s user base isn’t as predictable as it once was.

Earlier this year, both Facebook and Twitter decided to get into the newsletters game:

Twitter and Facebook can see how popular newsletters are becoming, and are attempting to incorporate newsletter functionality into its sites as a way to keep users in their ecosystem, and generate more revenue from users.

This is a big part of the reason why I want your company to seriously assess its dependence on major social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. You should absolutely leverage these tools to support your owned media channels if it makes sense, but don’t become so dependent on them if they experience massive changes, or force you to change how or if you can continue to use the sites.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: All Eyes on Clubhouse, Kroger’s Smart Shopping Cart, B2C Marketing Priorities

Happy Monday! Hope you’re ready for an amazing week, off to a rainy start here, but at least it’s not bitterly cold! By the way, a quick thought, I know a lot of us are really worried about everything that’s happening in the world right now and even locally. A few weeks ago I was driving and listening to the news and just felt overwhelmed with all the ‘bad’ news and stories. Suddenly, I had this thought come into my head ‘You are responsible for your own happiness”. That thought has given me a lot of comfort and calm since, as well as a feeling of empowerment! I hope it does for you as well!

On with the news…

 

So I’ve always had this rule when it comes to ‘new’ social media tools; I usually wait a month or so to try them out. This is because marketers being marketers, we want to overhype every new social media tool, each tool or site immediately becomes the new Facebook killer or the new Twitter killer. So I generally wait a while for the hype to die down, then see if anything sustainable is left.

But I’m jumping in a little faster with Clubhouse simply because the tool offers a different experience than most. If you aren’t familiar with Clubhouse, in a nutsell, it’s an app (only for iOS currently) that has audio chat rooms. You pick a chat room and LISTEN to everyone, you don’t chat by typing. The app is super hot, even though it’s in closed beta and you can only join if given an invite, it still has over 2 million users. I think this speaks to how we are hungry for new offerings in the social media space. 10 years ago, it seemed like a hot new social media tool came out every 3-4 months that everyone gushed about. We haven’t seen that environment in a long time, but I think the pendulum may be swinging back. Clubhouse has some obvious monetization issues to work out both for itself, its investors and hosts, but the future looks bright. For now.

 

Ok I would love this if it came to Wal-Mart, which I only shop at when I have to. The biggest reason why I can’t stand Wal-Mart is going to checkout and seeing those massive lines. But a new ‘smart’ shopping cart that Kroger is testing could make the buying process in grocery stores so much easier! It lets you scan items as you place them in the cart, link up your loyalty cards and coupons, even pay with your credit card! That would help eliminate the biggest detriment most people have to grocery shopping, the checkout line. It’s all about finding and addressing the pain points that your customers have.

 

This always blows my mind. I saw this story from Marketing Charts on top priorities for B2C marketers in 2021.  The top three priorities are: 1 – New customer acquisition, 2 – increasing engagement, 3 – increasing customer loyalty. These are pretty standard, and new customer acquisition is almost always the top priority for all marketers. Yet the same marketers that plan to focus on customer acquisition, loyalty and engagement typically won’t invest in the customer advocacy programs that drive all three. These same marketers could deliver on all three by investing in advocacy programs such as Voice of the Customer, Brand Ambassador and Customer Loyalty programs. And the hell of it is, such advocacy programs are much easier to create, execute and measure in a B2C environment.

So those are some stories that caught my eye on this Monday! Hope you have a wonderful week, check back tomorrow, I’ll have a new post up on how the push to decentralize social media is underway, and look at two people that are making it possible. One you will expect, the other will definitely surprise you! See you tomorrow!

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Dominos Shows You How to Respond to Trolls on Twitter

It seems everything is political during an election year. There was a great reminder of this recently when a ‘political activist’ dug through the old tweets of Dominoes on Twitter and somehow found a tweet from 2012 where Domino’s was thanking a customer for tweeting a compliment to the brand.

So what? This brand did what every brand should do, right? They acknowledged and THANKED a customer for complimenting them. How many times have I talked about how you ‘reward the behavior you want to encourage’? When a customer leaves you a compliment on ANY platform or via ANY channel, you thank them.

So what’s the problem? The problem is, the Domino’s customer in question who left a compliment to the brand in 2012, happens to be the Press Secretary for the Trump Administration in 2020.

That led to the ‘political activist’ tweeting to Domino’s that ‘you just killed your brand’.

Here’s how Domino’s responded:

Isn’t that the perfect response? They respond to the troll, but in a way that also shows how ridiculous their behavior is.

In my book Think Like a Rock Star, the 6th chapter is devoted to handling negative comments aimed at your brand via social media. In that chapter, I talked about how you need to identify the person leaving the negative comment to your brand, as that will dictate in part, how you respond. For instance, are they an actual customer of your brand, or do they appear to be a troll looking to draw attention to themselves and hassle your brand, as appears to be the case in the Dominoes example.

The problem I see many brands make when responding to trolls, is they treat them as if they were customers.  They engage them, they apologize, and they attempt to diffuse the situation as quickly as possible.  Which often has the opposite affect, trolls want and crave attention, and if they feel the brand is placating them, they will typically double-down on their efforts.

If you’re dealing with an upset customer, that upset customer will typically give you MORE details about SPECIFIC transactions with your business. They will often reference doing business with your brand on a particular date, maybe even at a particular retail location. Trolls tend to be very vague in their criticisms, as we see in the Dominoes example.

I do NOT envy social media managers having to manage brand accounts in 2020. It’s a mostly thankless job to begin with, but in today’s highly political environment, your brand may have to deal with people who are not your customers, leaving you negative comments in an attempt to make a larger political point or to simply troll your brand. It can be VERY upsetting to wake up at 6am and see 200 angry tweets toward the brand account you manage.

Just remember to act quickly, but act smartly. Figure out what happened, who is upset, and why they are upset. If the negative comments are coming from actual customers, absolutely address and do all you can to make it right for the customer. And clearly communicate to the customer what steps you are taking.  This communicates to the customer, and everyone following the exchange, that you take their concerns seriously. That also communicates to them and others that you respect your customers.

If you are dealing with an actual troll, in general, the less you respond, the better. Trolls feed off attention, if you attempt to engage and placate them, they will just double-down and troll you even harder.  And others will pile on once they see your brand is responding from a position of weakness. I know it’s hard to remember sometimes, but the Twitter/Social Media mobs get angry fast, and move on to something else just as fast. So many brands make the mistake of attempting to diffuse trolling by apologizing to the trolls or worse, changing behavior based on their demands. This typically has the opposite affect of what the brand intended, as changing behavior because of trolling will often anger your customers, since the change in behavior will often impact them.

Always keep two questions in mind:

1 – Is this negative comment coming from a troll or an actual customer?

2 – Is it more important that we do what’s best for the troll, or for our customers?

 

If you always do what’s best for your customers, your customers will always have your back when you defend them. Keep that in mind.

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Social Media is Toxic, Broken, and it Needs to Go Away

Adversity doesn’t create character, it reveals it.

I had my first exposure to what could be called a ‘social network’ when I joined Prodigy.net in 1991  I have two main memories of being a Prodigy member:

  • The users were insanely nice and courteous
  • There were very few users

I remember there being many message boards and forums, organized by interests. Some of these had decent activity, others had little to none. But if a forum had posts, there were friendly and civil discussions to read and join. As I said, it was a wonderful environment, and I had no qualms about reaching out directly to users and it was quite common to share a physical address with members and continue conversations via mail.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about those online conversations some 30 years ago, the civil tone as a stark contrast to the toxicity that many social media sites swim in these days.

The Rise of the Shame Culture

In theory, 2020 should have been social media’s finest hour. Never before have we needed to have conversation, communication. Never before have we needed to listen to each other, to understand each other, to learn from each other. So at a time when we all needed to listen to each other and understand each other, instead these social media tools are being used by many to shame others. If you don’t hold a certain opinion, you are being shamed for it. If you don’t hold a certain opinion on a certain issue, you are told to unfollow that person.

I’ve disconnected from probably 25% of my online network simply because these people were being judgmental assholes. And we are talking people I have been connected to for years, some over a decade. But all it took were a few hot-button issues, and suddenly these people turned into tyrants. And they used social media to do it. Many of these same people have advised clients to NOT do the very things they were doing every day on Twitter and Facebook.

Why is This Social Media’s Fault?

It’s easy to look at what’s happening on social media sites right now and say that you can’t blame the tools, you have to blame the people using the tools. I can’t completely agree with that. The reality is that social media sites aren’t built to facilitate conversations, they are built to facilitate engagement.

Let’s look at Twitter. I’m a bit of an outlier, in that I started using Twitter back in the social media stone ages of 2007. If you talk to any long-time Twitter user that joined prior to 2010, they will tell you that Twitter was a completely different environment ‘back then’. Organic conversations that were CIVIL sprung up like kudzu in the South in the Summer. If a day went by where you didn’t get sucked into at least one engrossing 30-minute conversation on Twitter, then you probably didn’t get on Twitter that day.

So what changed?  The celebs discovered Twitter:

And those of us that had been using Twitter before they arrived began to notice something: Literally every silly thing these celebs tweeted got hundreds, even thousands of Likes and Retweets! And they gained thousands of followers every day! If you’re using Twitter every day and you only have 237 followers and nothing you tweet seems to get a Like or Retweet, well it’s natural to envy the huge engagement numbers the celebs were getting!

Which often led to a change in behavior. Many Twitter users stopped focusing on engrossing conversations, and started trying to drive higher levels of engagement.

The Birth of the ‘Twitterbyte’

I was speaking at a conference in 2008, and at one point found myself chatting with my fellow presenters. One of the speakers had come up with what they felt was a brilliant idea that they had to share. The speaker remarked how as the audience was tweeting out our talks, they would condense our ideas into 140 characters or ‘Twitterbytes’, So on the fly, this speaker had bought that domain name. But this story is a great example of how we, as content creators, were working within the parameters of the Twitter platform. We were trying to distill complex ideas down into 140 chars so they would be easily memorable and…drive engagement.

As Twitter’s growth exploded, the sheer volume of tweets went through the roof as well. It made it increasingly hard for each individual tweet to stand out.  So again, content creators adapted. They started working on how to make their tweets stand out in a stream where dozens of new tweets are coming in every second. So of the changes were innocent enough, like simply adding a picture or a link.

But somewhere along the way, we all figured out a basic truth of social media: If you say something inflammatory, it’s more likely to have higher engagement. Everyone stops to watch the trainwreck. If you are yelling, people will pay attention. So again, user behavior adjusted. Yelling and being outrageous resulted in higher engagement levels.

Notice that we continue to get further and further away from the one thing that made social media so appealing from the start: The power of organic, civil conversations.

Think about this for a minute: How would the way you use Facebook and Twitter change if you had no idea how many Likes a Facebook update received, or how many RTs a tweet on Twitter had received?  I suspect you would spend more time actually reading the content and paying closer attention to what was said in order to decide if it was worth your time. I saw this coming years ago and began arguing that social media sites should remove all public engagement metrics.  Don’t tell me how many friends or followers someone has, don’t tell me how many Likes or RTs their content gets, don’t tell me how many comments it has.  FORCE me to judge the content’s value on the content itself, not on engagement metrics, which can easily be inflated.

Are Blogs Also Social Media? Should They Go Away As Well?

I’ve always had a problem with classifying blogs as being social media. Yes, I get that in simple terms, it probably makes sense to call blogs social media. But I’ve never really felt comfortable with the description. I think the reason why, is that blogs are a space that YOU control. And they are a place where you have the ability to clearly and completely explain your opinions. Whereas social media sites are geared toward engagement, blogs are geared toward conversations. Think of the mess it would be if I tried to take this same post, and put it on Twitter. I’d have to create a thread of probably 50+ tweets that would end up being a jumbled mess that most people would never read all of. A few tweets would get some engagement and shares, the majority would be ignored.

We need less engagement-driven content, and more conversations. I’ve reached a point where I would be fine if Facebook and Twitter went away today. But don’t take my blogs, don’t take my conversations. That’s what we need. We need more opinions, we need less shame, we need more humility, we need fewer closed minds.

At one point, social media was offered as the solution to our problems. Now it IS the problem. And we need to solve it.

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Twitter is Not a Social Network

I was listening to a recent episode of eMarketer’s Behind the Numbers podcast when the host made a claim that I cannot source, but still believe. He claimed that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said that he doesn’t think of Twitter as a social network, but rather as an ‘interests’ network. As a place where everyone comes to discuss their interests. Such as TV shows, events like the big Wilder – Fury fight this weekend (Go #BombSquad).

Two points. First, Twitter has always been uniquely situated as the one social site that can best facilitate live ‘in the moment’ conversations around breaking news. Whatever the event is, planned or not, Twitter is where you go to learn what’s happening and what people are saying about what’s happening. No other social site can match Twitter’s ability in this area.

Second, Twitter has always tried to push its users toward using the platform to discuss events and interests rather than as a direct communications or networking tool. Twitter’s users have been smart enough to figure out ways to leverage the platform for their own needs, but Twitter’s leadership has always attempted to re-position the site away from simply being a platform where we go and talk to each other. They have always wanted us to be using Twitter to talk about someone or something else. That’s been how they view many of their monetization opportunities.

I mention all this because it’s important for any company using social media sites to consider two things:

1 – How are users engaging on the site? Why are they there, what are they trying to do?

2 – How would the site like to see its users engage with each other? How does Facebook want users to use the platform?  How does Pinterest? How do these sites want to position themselves as being different from the competition?  What unique experience do they want users to have?

 

Too many companies view social media sites as an homogeneous pot where every platform and user is the same. Nothing could be further from the truth, and one of the biggest reasons why most companies have lackluster results with their social media strategies is by not having platform-specific strategies as well. Social media is not one-size-fits-all at either the user or platform level.

Smart companies know the users are different, but I don’t think enough thought is given to how these platforms want to position themselves as being different and how they want to encourage different user behavior. It’s worth considering and factoring into your social media strategy.

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Pinterest Passes Snapchat to Become Third Biggest Social Media Platform in the US

According to eMarketer, Pinterest passed Snapchat in number of US users in 2019, and will grow its lead through at least 2023.

I’m far from a Pinterest ‘expert’. In fact, I’ve probably only spent a few hours combined on the site since joining several years ago. But I’ve always thought it was interesting how that Pinterest continued to have its fans and devoted users, even though it maybe hasn’t gotten the level of hype of a Snapchat or even Tik Tok. The growth has been more ‘organic’ in that sense, fueled not by hype or a marketers land-rush, but by users loving the site and telling others.

I think you can learn so much about a social media platform’s users by asking and answering two simple questions:

1 – Who is using the site?

2 – Why are they using it?

 

Lets Compare the Ages of the People Using Snapchat and Pinterest

Referencing the eMarketer article again, let’s look at age penetration among US users for Snapchat:

12-17 years old – 66.5%

18-24 – 81.3%

25-34 – 49.2%

 

As you can see, Snapchat is very popular among the 12-34 age group. But the study listed 5 other age groups, and Snapchat didn’t see over 21% penetration in any of these groups. In fact, it only saw double digit penetration in the two groups of the five not listed.

So that tells you that Snapchat is popular among millennials (and whatever group is coming after them) and doesn’t see as much usage among Gen Xers and Baby Boomers.

Keep that in mind, now let’s look at the age penetration among different age groups for Pinterest users:

12-17 years old – 28.1%

18-24 – 35.6%

25-34 – 40%

35-44 – 39.6%

45-54 – 33.9%

55-64 – 26.1%

 

See the difference? While Snapchat enjoys roughly 50% and higher penetration in three age groups from 12-34 years old, Pinterest enjoys 25-40% penetration in every age group from 12-64 years old. So while Snapchat appeals to a mostly younger audience, Pinterest appeals to a wide age range. This means Snapchat’s userbase is more fragile and susceptible to loss if a competing app or platform emerges that appeals to a younger audience as well. Such as TikTok. Since Pinterest appeals to a much wide age range, it is in a better position to fend off any current or future competition.

 

So Why Do People Use Pinterest? 

I started blogging in 2005, started using MySpace that same year, Facebook and Twitter in 2007. I’ve typically been one of the early adopters of emerging social media platforms. For the last 15 years that I’ve used social media, it’s always been amusing (and a bit depressing) to see what happens when the MARKETERS discover a particular social media site. First the social media/marketing bloggers discover the site, then the marketers that follow them try it out, and we are off to the races. In each case, the marketers come in and try to alter the basic site functionality to fit within the marketing processes that they are used to.  With often mixed results because these social media platforms were primarily built as personal communication tools, not marketing communication channels.

But Pinterest was one social media site that the marketers never really spent much time on, and that’s always intrigued me. I think the main reason why marketers never spent much time on Pinterest is because it takes a lot of time and energy to create, curate and maintain boards. If you aren’t passionate about the process, you probably won’t stick with it. If you talk to Pinners or google why people love Pinterest, you will frequently hear users talk about how they love how the boards give them inspiration. The inspiration can fuel ideas, or future plans, or just give them something to dream about. But the Pinners who invest the time and energy in creating and maintaining their boards do so out of love. And they interact with other Pinners, they share their findings and likewise find other interesting boards to follow as well.

If you look at Pinterest usage from the angle of planning and inspiration, you can begin to understand how the site appeals to a wide age range. All of us have something we are planning. If you are young, it could be going to college, or getting married. If you are married, it could be travel, or relocating to a new city because of a job promotion. If you are older, you may be planning for retirement and that could involve a possible move as well. No matter what stage of your life you are in, there are major future events that you are planning for.

And besides that, there are things you need help and advice with every day. Maybe you need help landscaping for the Spring, or working on your car, or becoming a better painter, or growing your collection of old comic books. Whatever your interests and whatever your age, Pinterest users have no doubt already created boards that you can find inspiration from.

 

If you are a regular Pinterest user, how do you use the site? What do you love about it? Pinterest is the one social media site that I rarely visit, but every time I do, I think to myself “I need to spend more time here!’