MackCollier.com

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How does search engine traffic affect your blog?

I am definitely not an SEO expert, but after a couple of years of studying up on how search engines work, I think I have at least a 101-level understanding of the topic.  Still, as with most other things, I can learn something better if I can figure out for myself why it works.

Earlier this year I started paying closer attention to the percentage of this site’s traffic that came from search engines.  I noticed that at the first of the year, less than 10% of the traffic came from search engines.  This seemed really low to me, and the most common answer I was given for increasing search traffic was to post consistently to the blog.  The idea was that over time, search traffic should rise as more content from the site was indexed.

And here’s the graph for the weekly search traffic here:

In February, search accounted for just 6.53% of the traffic here, but through last week, search was responsible for 34% of the traffic here for this month.  And the nice steady growth in search traffic you see in the above graph backs that up.

But I noticed something pretty interesting when I was reading my site’s stats.  For the year, 73.84% of the people that visited this site were here for the first time.  Yet when I look at just the search traffic for the year it was even higher, the percentage was 78.25%.  So that means that almost 80% of the search traffic here were people visiting this site for the first time.

I think this is pretty significant because many of us that blog want to avoid covering topics we have already previously discussed.  But at least for this site, roughly 75% of the people that see every post, are seeing this site as a whole for the 1st time.

This leads to some interesting questions, such as…

1 – Should we as bloggers be attempting to more narrowly focus our content?  For example, instead of covering 5 complimentary topics, focusing on just 1 or 2 areas, and creating content that often covers the same ground?

2 – Or should we instead be looking for ways to get more visits from return visitors?

3 – What IS the ideal percentage of new visitors?  Very little in social media is ‘one size fits all’, so how can bloggers decide what that percentage should look like, based on what they want to accomplish with their blogging?

Would be interested to hear what y’all think, and also how my stats compare with what you are seeing on your blog.  I used Google Analytics to find mine, and I don’t think there is a ‘right’ answer here.  If your percentages are higher, that could be good, and if they are lower, that could be good as well.

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Death by a thousand crappy blog posts

As 2010 comes to a close, it’s a good time to take a long, hard look at your blog.  That’s exactly what I am doing now, and I’m seeing a lot of areas that can and will be improved upon in 2011.

A good place to start is by first seeing what worked, and that means jumping into your site’s analytics.  Which posts were the most popular this year?  Which search terms sent the most traffic here?  Which topics were covered in your most popular posts?  Which month had the highest traffic?  Why?  Did one post do well, or did you have several that did better?

Here’s some problem areas I have found here, and what I want to do to improve in 2011:

1 – Get back on a regular posting pattern.  The goal I always have is to have at least 2 new posts a week, sometimes 3.  But the problem I keep running into is that when I am swamped with work, I get behind and let the blog go to pot.  My solution will be to start writing posts ahead of time and have a few ‘in the bullpen’ that I can publish when I get too busy with work.

2 – Create more compelling content.  Focus less on tools, focus more on HOW the tools are being used.  Post less about what’s happening NOW, and more about what could be happening tomorrow.

3 – Don’t post as much about social media, post more about how social media impacts OTHER areas of marketing and communications, and vice versa. The usage of these tools shouldn’t be siloed, and smart companies are amplifying their existing social media efforts by working with their existing communication efforts.

4 – Put myself in timeout if I write a single post about how another blogger is doing social media wrong, or a ‘I call bullshit’ post. Seriously, these almost always suck, and have been done to death anyway.  Focus the content on ideas, not people.

5 – Do more interviews with companies and people that are pushing the edges as far what’s possible with new media.  Better leverage my Twitter network for contacts (good tip for all of you, do you actually know what most of your followers do and who they work for?).

6 – Focus more on how mobile marketing is impacting social media.  CK was ahead of the curve here.

Those are some ideas I have for improving this blog.  How do you self-critique your blog?  Or do you?

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Twitter is growing like a weed again, thanks to…..mobile?

Twitter has seen an additional 40 million users since April.  That’s huge, but the interesting point is that usage among mobile devices like tablets and smartphones seems to be driving the majority of the growth.

Since April, Twitter has also seen a 62% jump in mobile traffic, and that coincides with it launching its own mobile version of its site.

Here’s another interesting stat: 83% of Millenials sleep with their smartphone within arm’s reach.  Makes sense, as many use it as an alarm clock, as do I.

The point is, people love their mobile devices, and many people that own one have it with them at almost all times.  And as CK shares, half the planet has a mobile phone.

Half the planet.

So I think this poses two interesting questions moving forward:

1 – How well do your existing social media efforts translate to mobile devices? Is your blog/site optimized for viewing on mobile devices?  Are you tracking mobile traffic patterns for your blog/site?  You should be.

2 – Will certain social media tools benefit more if usage continues to move to mobile?  This bears watching, for example, Twitter’s basic functionality is very similar to texting, which is well suited to mobile phones.  Tools that have more intricate functionality might not fare as well in the transition to mobile.

What do you think?  Have you been tracking your site’s mobile traffic?  Have you tried loading your blog on mobile devices to see how it looks?  Have you thought about what impact mobile growth among your customers will have on your existing social media efforts?  What are we missing?

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The difference between a customer and a fan…

Depends on the company.  More importantly, it depends on how the company views the person that buys their products.

On Friday I’ll be conducting a workshop at #Optsum that will center on one key question: Why do rockstars have ‘fans’ while companies have ‘customers’? Because at the end of the day, both groups are making a product that is being sold to people.  But when we go to categorize those people, we think of rockstars as almost always having fans, and we almost always think of companies as having customers.  Not fans.

Why?  Do rockstars simply have a natural advantage in that they are selling a type of product that somehow makes it easier for them to have fans instead of customers?  Perhaps to a degree, but at the same time companies Fiskars that sell products like scissors and products like WD-40 also have evangelists.  So ‘it’s the type of product’ doesn’t tell the whole story.

I think what matters far more than the type of product, is how the company views its customers.  Most rockstars have fans and most rockstars view their fans as people that they love and WANT to embrace.  While many companies want to keep their customers at arm’s length.  Some companies seem to even take an adversarial tone toward their customers.

I think rockstars feed off interaction with their fans, while many companies fear interacting with their customers.  I’ll talk more about what I think that is in Dallas this week, and I’ll share my slide deck here on next week.

But I wanted to give you that something to think about.  How does your company view its customers?  How do you think your customers view you?  If that perception was more positive on both ends, could those customers then become fans?

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Teaching a Brontosaurus to run; My review of #DellCAP


Last Monday, as the driver approached Round Rock and Dell’s HQs, he informed me that “I’ll be taking you to Building #1.  That’s where Michael Dell is!”  Unfortunately, Michael was out of the country last week, so I didn’t get a chance to meet him.

However, when we arrived at ‘Dell’s campus’, the driver explained that there were 37 buildings.  That when it hit me; whatever good works Dell is hoping to accomplish via social media will have to permeate and take hold in all 37 buildings.  And that’s just in the world HQs, Dell has offices in several other cities around the world.  That just drove home the enormity of a company as large as Dell trying to introduce a ‘new’ way of communicating with customers, and via a new set of channels.

Yet Dell has been using social media to communicate with its customers for at least 4 years now.  That effort took a very brave step forward last week, when Dell hosted its first CAP Days.  CAP stands for Customer Advisory Panel, and you can get more background on the event here, which was spread out over 2 days, involving Dell interacting directly with 30 of its most passionate customers.  I was hired by Dell to help them plan the event, and moderate it both days.  I wanted to share some of what I learned from being involved in the project.

Prior to the event, Dell sent out surveys to all 30 participants to try to get a better feel for what issues were most important to them.  These results would then play a large role in determining the structure of the topics to be covered for both days.  On the first day, Dell met with 15 customers that had had a negative experience with Dell’s products or service (or both), and had used social media to voice their displeasure.  Since customer service had been a problem area for several of the participants, it dominated discussion during the day.  At first, many of the participants were able to share their negative experiences, or ‘vent’ about what had happened to them.  Then later in the day, the discussion turned toward companies that provided exceptional customer service, and ideas were given for how Dell could improve their own efforts.

I noticed two things that surprised me a bit, from both the customers, and Dell employees, during the first day of CAP.

Several times I heard the customers explain that even though they had been involved in a negative experience with Dell, that they wanted to see Dell succeed, and they were happy to be involved with #DellCAP.  One participant even asked me at one point ‘So did Dell think we were going to be the antagonists?’  I’m not sure Dell knew what to expect, but I think they were thrilled with the honest and helpful information they got from the participants.

And on the Dell side, I was surprised a bit that there was very little ‘PR speak’ (almost none, actually), and that the employees present at each session, were honestly listening and processing what the customers were telling them.  I lost count how many times I heard a Dell employee say “Ok so based on what you’ve told us so far, what if we tried to do this? Would that work for you?”  It showed the customers that Dell was listening, and taking their problems seriously.

The second day featured 15 or so Dell evangelists, and 3 hours of the most enjoyable conversations I have ever had in the last 5 years of being involved in social media.  Picture this: I got to lead a discussion on branding, marketing, customer evangelism, and social media with Dell’s Chief Marketing Officer Erin Nelson, Michelle Brigman; Senior Manager of Customer Experience for Dell, social media geniuses like Liz Strauss, Susan Beebe and Connie Bensen, and a dozen or so Dell evangelists.  It was an amazing experience, and possibly the highlight of the week for me.

Also, the morning sessions perfectly illustrated the value that such an event can hold for companies.  A portion of the morning session on Day Two focused on customer service (This had been a VERY hot topic during Day One’s chats as well).  The general sentiment being expressed by the #dellCAP participants was that they loved Dell’s products, but the customer service, especially when it was outsourced to another country, was letting them down.  Dell’s participants explained that the company purposely outsourced a good deal of customer support overseas for consumer products, in order to keep the price of the laptops and desktops lower.  Dell seemed to be telling the participants that this was a conscious choice because they believed that most customers weren’t willing to pay higher prices just to get better service.

But the participants mostly agreed that they WOULD be willing to pay more for a desktop or laptop, if they knew they would receive exceptional customer service if they had a problem with it.  This seemed to be a marketing disconnect for Dell, and the feedback from #DellCAP participants was no doubt invaluable to the company.

And in the end, I think the true value for Dell came from them getting a chance to interact directly with their customers.  Honestly, I was a bit worried that Dell might be using this as a one-off event to simply ‘build some buzz’ online.  But I noticed as soon as the sessions started on the first day that Dell’s participants were listening, and then probing the #DellCAP participants with follow-up questions, based on the feedback they were getting from them.  And of course, when Dell’s CMO Erin Nelson kicked off the second day, that removed any doubts as to whether or not the C-Suite was taking this initiative seriously.

I’ve always said that perhaps the smartest thing a big company can do is connect directly with its most passionate online customers, and Dell did exactly that with #DellCAP.  I was beyond excited to be a part of it, and cannot wait to see what the next steps are.

BTW, this event has generated a ton of feedback on blogs, etc.  I wanted to close by listing some of these posts and videos, so you can see for yourself what everyone thought.  And if you were at #DellCAP, what did you think?  What did you like, what did you dislike?  What would you like to see Dell do moving forward?

Dave’s review of #DellCAP Day One for Fast Company

Allen’s review of #DellCAP Day One

Lauren’s video review of #DellCAP Day One

Vance Morton’s review of #DellCAP on Direct2Dell

Sarah’s #DellCAP Day Two review

Liz Strauss’ #DellCAP Day Two review

Susan’s #DellCAP Day Two review

Dell’s Flickr sets of #DellCap Day One, and Day Two

BTW, each #DellCAP session was ‘visually recorded’ by the fantabulous Sunni Brown.  Dell will be sending us digital copies of the work she created during #DellCAP, but this shot from Susan gives you an idea of her work

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The next evolution of social media for business is…

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

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

Connecting with customers to improve both product and marketing development.

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

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

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

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

Pic via Flickr user Lance Shields

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway what were the numbers?!?

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

# of posts for the week – 4

Average Traffic per day – 168 visitors

Average ReTweets per post – 59

Average Comments per post – 12

Average new Twitter followers per day – 37

Total new Email Subscribers for the week – 3

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

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

Average traffic per day – 647 (285% increase)

Average ReTweets per post – 82 (39% increase)

Average Comments per post – 26 (117% increase)

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

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

Now here are some random observations:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the hourly traffic for Monday:

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

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

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

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

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

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

In looking at Thursday’s traffic notice two things:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your cameras……..or photography?

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

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

Your home decorating products……or home decorating?

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

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

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

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

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