MackCollier.com

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Stop Listening to Social Media Experts (Or At Least Be More Careful When You Do)

16224910474_93e761cc3a_zA few years ago I took my Acura to a Honda dealer to have them change the oil and rotate the tires.  About an hour later, the service manager comes out with a clipboard and I ask him “How’s everything look?”

“Ho boy!”, he exclaims.  “You’re going to end up on the side of the road soon if we don’t repair all this as soon as possible!”

Now I’m not a mechanic, but I do know a (very) little about working on cars.  With a skeptical eye, I took a look at his laundry list of items that all needed to be fixed immediately, or according to him I was “going to end up on the side of the road soon”.

I looked at his list, and immediately notice several items that either didn’t need to be fixed or were actually due to be replaced according to the mileage of the car and a ‘suggested maintenance schedule’.  “Ok”, I explained, “I just replaced the distributor cap and the wires, and the plugs were changed 3,000 miles ago so they are fine as well.  So out of what’s left, what needs to be fixed today?”

With a bit of a frown he looked at the list and sighed “Well…I guess the only thing that you need to worry about right now is the rear motor mount, it’s in pretty bad shape.  But everything else can wait at least another 6 months.”

So in 2 mins I had gone from a dozen or so items that all needed to be fixed that day if I wanted to make it home, to there actually only being one item that needed immediate repair.

I was recalling this conversation when I recently sat down with Kerry Gorgone to record Marketing Profs’ year-end episode.  One of the recurring themes that Kerry’s guests mentioned was that they wanted to see less criticism of brands, especially when it comes to digital marketing.  And for brands, don’t take that criticism to heart, and consider the source.

When I say ‘consider the source’, keep in mind that a lot of the criticism that’s being leveled at brands using social is coming from consultants and agencies that have a vested interest in selling these brands social media consulting services.  It can sometimes be a case of “You suck! But that’s ok, because for a low monthly retainer, I can teach you how NOT to suck!”

Not all consultants and agencies that provide digital marketing advisement to companies are like this, in fact most reputable ones are not.  But it’s truth that many of the people that are criticizing your brand have a vested interest in doing so.  Either they are hoping to sell you consulting services, or maybe they are piling on with the latest brand mishap in a race to get out a new post every day.

Use Social Media Experts and Thought Leaders For Advice, Not Instruction

One of the key pieces of advice you will hear as a blogging company is that you need to blog regularly.  That a regular stream of good content that benefits your audience is imperative.

Recently, I was talking to a fellow consultant.  He was telling me about how well his year was going, and I lamented the fact that I needed to find time to start blogging regularly again.  He said “Mack I haven’t written a blog post in 6 months. I just don’t have time.”  Here’s a consultant that’s having an excellent year, yet he is so busy with work that he goes months sometimes without blogging.  But obviously it’s not hurting his business!

The point is that just because everyone says you should do something, doesn’t mean you should.  The best way to leverage the advice of experts is to listen to multiple ones, and look for trends.  And then approach their advice as being a suggestion for you, not an order.  Your business is unique, I can tell you what will work for a business like yours in general, but until I sit down with you and we discuss the unique goals and challenges associated with your business, I cannot give you customized advice on how to improve your efforts.

Listen to the experts, but don’t discount your own intuition and knowledge.

Pic via Flickr user GotCredit

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You Will Share This Post, But You Won’t Read It

I check my Twitter notifications way more than I should.  Recently, I checked Twitter and didn’t see any new notifications.  I did some other work and came back just a few minutes later and was shocked at what I saw.

25 new notifications on Twitter.  That meant in just a few minutes, literally dozens of new notifications had come in.  I got excited, hoping this meant that someone had shared one of my posts, and then their followers had shared it, and then an avalanche of traffic would fall on my blog.  It would be glorious!

Sure enough, an ‘influencer’ had RTed one of my posts, and almost immediately, their followers started RTing the first RT, and within 10 mins, I had already gotten 25 people either RTing my post, or Liking it.

Excited, I rushed to my Google Analytics dashboard to check my traffic to see how many clicks this flood of RTs was sending to my blog and I was stunned at the number.

Zero.

Over 20 RTs within a 10 minute period had sent a grand total of zero people to my blog.  Something is definitely wrong.  We were all sold on the idea that sharing is caring.  That we want to see our content shared, because when its shared, that translates into more traffic.  And when you read a blog and see a post with a high share count, that means more people are reading it.

But is this really the case?

Research into the impact social sharing has on blog traffic has come up with a startling conclusion: There’s little to no relationship between social shares and a change in blog traffic:

A widespread assumption is that the more content is liked or shared, the more engaging it must be, the more willing people are to devote their attention to it. However, the data doesn’t back that up. We looked at 10,000 socially-shared articles and found that there is no relationship whatsoever between the amount a piece of content is shared and the amount of attention an average reader will give that content.

So if we accept that the relationship between social sharing and traffic is weak at best, what true value do those social sharing numbers really have?  Are they a true signal to readers that a piece of content is more popular (and thus more worthy of your attention), or is this another case of social media numbers being worthless?  Further, if we believe that social sharing numbers aren’t credible, what external factors can we use to judge if others find a piece of content valuable?  Comments seem like a likely starting point, but with more and more blogs turning off comments, that is increasingly being taken off the board.

What if you had no external signals to tell you if a piece of content was viewed by a larger community as being valuable? How would you know, would you have to (gasp!) actually read it?  Perish the thought!

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How to Create More Social Media Content For Your Business

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For years, the big focus in social media marketing was finding ROI.  It still is, to a great degree.  But as more companies bought into using social media, a new problem developed: How do we create more social media content for our business?  Scratch that, how do we create more social media content that is USEFUL to our customers, that also helps our business reach its goals.

It’s tough, it’s damn tough.  I was talking recently with a fellow consultant about balancing doing client work and creating a steady stream of content that helps us get more client work.  It’s a struggle for us, so I know it’s probably a struggle for your company as well.

The good news about content creation is that the more you do it, the easier it becomes.  So the first step, is to address content creation from a time standpoint.  We want to make the process easier and more efficient so that you can create more content in less time.

One of the main reasons that businesses explore using social media is because they want to build awareness for who they are and what they do.  Social media doesn’t excel at driving sales directly, but it can be a great channel for driving awareness.  It can also be a great channel for positioning and branding.  So if we attack our content strategy from the awareness/positioning/branding angle, we can accomplish multiple goals at once.

Remember the plant your flag approach to content strategy?  It means you ask ‘what do we want to be known for?’  If you were to explain your business and why its relevant in 30 seconds at a cocktail party, what would you tell someone?  What terms and ideas do you want to own?

Once you know who you are and why your business is relevant, you want to create and share content around those ideas.  Red Bull creates and shares content focused on extreme sports and extreme sports athletes.  Pedigree shares content focused on happy and healthy dogs.

So as you are keeping up to date on your industry and market, look for ways to share some of that content with your network.  At first this can seem counter intuitive; Why would you promote content that’s not about your business?  Because if it’s content that’s related to your business, it helps identify your business as being associated with those ideas or that industry, or that concept.

Plus there’s this: If someone isn’t aware of your business, they also aren’t aware of why they should pay attention to your business.  One way to increase the chances that they will pay attention is to associate your business with content that they DO find interesting.  For example, if your business is a hotel chain, sharing content that helps customers plan a road trip can increase the chances that they will pay attention to you.  The content on planning a road trip is interesting and relevant to them, so if you share this content, they will pay attention to it, and by extension they will be more likely to pay attention to you.

So start by identifying sources of relevant content for your intended audience.  If you want to reach single moms that need help cooking quick and healthy meals for their children, think about where they would get this information.  Then you want to find these sites, and share their content.  You are providing a service for them, and in the process you are giving these single moms an incentive to pay more attention to you.

So if you want to create more useful social media content, start by staying up to date on your industry and market.  When you can, share relevant content from sources that your audience trusts.  Just doing this can easily double the content you distribute via your social media channels.  As an added bonus, it also makes those sources more likely to want to promote your content.  I’ll talk about this more in Thursday’s post.

Pic via Robert-Couse Baker

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SEC Social Media Fan Experience: The Tennessee Volunteers and South Carolina Gamecocks

Every week through the start of the college football season on September 5th, I will be profiling how SEC teams are leveraging social media channels to connect with its fans.  Last week I looked at how the Florida Gators and Vanderbilt Commodores are using social media, this week I’ll show you how the Tennessee Volunteers and South Carolina Gamecocks are leveraging social media to connect with its fans.

How The Tennessee Volunteers Use Social Media to Connect With Their Football Fans

When looking at each SEC team, I start by seeing how many social media accounts each team has that are dedicated to just the football program, versus ones that are for the athletic program as a whole.  Tennessee has dedicated football accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. It looks like these three platforms are going to be very popular with SEC schools as all three are great channels to share visual and video content that will be popular with fans.  Plus, the content itself can remind SEC fans of the calendar:

As I’m going through this series, I’ve decided to not look ahead on what the other SEC schools are doing.  This is purposeful because as I’m doing the series I am going to comment on what I’d like to see the remaining schools do with their social media efforts.  For example, last week I mentioned that moving forward, I was going to be paying close attention to whether or not the remaining SEC programs gave fans a backstage pass via its social media channels.  One way to do this would be to give fans access to Fall camps, which are starting right about now.  I was delighted to see that Tennessee is doing exactly this, by leveraging Periscope to give fans special access to the Vols’ Fall camp. IMG_0572 LOVE this!  Looks like the Vols are going to use Periscope to give fans coverage of Fall camp as well as the head coach’s press conferences after each practice.  The bar has been raised, if the other SEC schools aren’t doing something very similar to this, they should be. Tennessee is doing a great job of creating photos from Fall camp, and then using those photos on multiple channels.  Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, even using the photos via Exposure, which is a service I hadn’t heard of before this.  So kudos to the Vols for understanding how important visual content is to its fans!

Not a lot of video content (where are the hype videos?), but there’s such a feast of photos being created by the Tennessee social media accounts that it’s hard to quibble.  The Vols are doing a great job of leveraging Fall camp as a content stream for its social media platforms.  As we continue through the series it will be interesting to see if the other SEC teams can match or exceed what Tennessee is doing.

How the South Carolina Gamecocks Use Social Media to Connect With Their Football Fans

Now let’s venture to the Palmetto state and look at how the SC Gamecocks are using social media.  South Carolina has a dedicated Twitter and Instagram account for the football program according to its main site here.

South Carolina is creating a lot of photos from Fall camp just like Tennessee did, but I noticed they are also creating video content from Fall camp such as this video posted on Instagram:

29 days til kickoff! Day 2 of practice in the books, full recap on GamecocksOnline.com. #SCCamp15 #HereSC #Gamecocks

A video posted by Gamecock Football (@gamecockfb) on

Also, I noticed something interesting with this tweet, see if you notice what I did:

They are using the same video that was posted on Instagram, so they are re-sharing content among multiple channels.  But what I love about this tweet is notice they add a call to action that asks fans to go back to GamecocksOnline.com for the full recap.  I *love* that because they are leveraging social media to move traffic off Twitter back to their website.  This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it is.  Once SC moves fans back to its website, then they can sell them merchandise and tickets.  Anytime you move traffic from sites you don’t own to sites you do, that’s a win and you can’t do that without that simple call to action.

South Carolina also has uploaded a ton of videos devoted to coverage of Fall camp from its main YouTube channel for its athletics programs.  These are great and easily shared via other channels like Twitter and Facebook.  You can see all the social media accounts related to the South Carolina athletic programs here.  Also notice that 3 of the football coaches have their own Twitter accounts listed, but unfortunately that doesn’t include the Ol’ Ball Coach, Steve Spurrier.

Even though South Carolina only has a Twitter and Instagram account dedicated to its football program, they are creating both visual and video content from Fall camp at a pretty healthy clip.  Again, this is ‘behind the scenes’ or backstage content that fans love.  I also love that they are sprinkling in calls to action to move fans back to GamecockOnline.com.  Very smart.

So that’s this week’s look at how the Tennessee Volunteers and South Carolina are leveraging social media to connect with its fans.  Last week we looked at Florida and Vandy, so that means we’ve covered 4 teams from the SEC’s Eastern division so far.  Next week we’ll move out West, and look at how the LSU Bengal Tigers and the Mississippi State Bulldogs are using social media to connect with their fans.  See you next Thursday!

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SEC Social Media Fan Experience: The Florida Gators and The Vanderbilt Commodores

Over the next 6 weeks till the start of the college football season, I’ll be examining how the schools in the SEC are using social media to connect with their fans.  College football in the SEC is huge business, and the primary driver of revenue in the richest athletic conference in the nation.  Last year alone, the profit from Alabama’s athletic programs topped every NHL franchise and the majority of the NBA teams as well.

SEC football is huge business, and I wanted to take a closer look at how these programs are leveraging social media to better connect with their fans.  On the surface, this might not seem that important, because SEC football already has passionate fans in place, why is it so important to connect with them via social media?  There’s two big reasons why: Recruiting, and ratings.

Social media has become an incredibly valuable recruiting tool for college athletics.  And for the SEC, a dominance in recruiting has translated to on-field dominance over the last decade, so these programs have a vested interest in using every advantage they have when it comes to recruiting.  Social media is a powerful way to attract and keep the attention of potential recruits.  So while SEC programs are trying to connect with existing fans, they are also trying to appeal to potentially the next 5-star QB that could lead them to a National Championship in a few years.

Then there’s TV ratings.  Anyone that’s followed Twitter during a major TV finale knows that Twitter chatter drives ratings.  And ratings play a major role in where teams are slotted when it comes to television coverage.  It’s why the South Carolina – Vandy game will be on the SEC Network at 11 am, and the LSU – Alabama game will be on CBS primetime at 7 pm.  And having your program shown on a more high-profile network and timeslot means more exposure for your brand and a greater ability to connect with recruits.  It’s a very powerful recruiting tool, if a top high school running back is sitting at home and he sees that Texas A&M is being shown nationally as the Game of the Week on ESPN, it makes an impression on him, especially if he is considering other schools in Texas whose games aren’t getting national coverage.

So over the next 6 weeks I’ll cover the social media efforts of the football programs for each of the 14 teams of the Southeastern Conference.  Keep in mind as you read these posts that these programs are trying to connect with two main audiences: The fans that buy the tickets, and the recruits that help them win more games (which sell more tickets!).

Here’s the schedule for the series:

Today: The Florida Gators and The Vanderbilt Commodores

August 6th: The Tennessee Volunteers and The South Carolina Gamecocks

August 13th: The LSU Tigers and The Miss State Bulldogs

August 20th: The Texas A&M Aggies and The Kentucky Wildcats

August 27th: The Georgia Bulldogs and The Missouri Tigers

September 1st: The Auburn Tigers and The Arkansas Razorbacks

September 3rd: The Alabama Crimson Tide and The Ole Miss Rebels

 

How The Florida Gators Use Social Media to Connect With Their Football Fans

One of the aspects of this series that will be interesting will be to see which teams have created social media channels that are dedicated to just the football program, and how many they use.  For example, Florida has accounts for the football program on Twitter, Instagram, and Vine.  The Vine account is a bit of a surprise, but it’s sparsely used, only one Vine so far this year.

I was also a bit surprised that there wasn’t a dedicated Facebook page for the football program, instead Florida has one for the athletics programs as a whole.  I will say, whoever mans the Florida Facebook page does a good job of engaging with fans and also has a pretty good sense of humor!

FloridaFB And custom graphical images featuring players like this from Florida’s Instagram account will be very popular with fans:

Gotta keep a lookout for these #Gators. All named to pre-season award watch lists this week.

A photo posted by Florida Gators Football (@gatorsfb) on

Also, remember that fans want a backstage pass.  They want to see content that goes behind scenes.  Show us how the facility upgrades are coming along.  Give us some videos of summer workouts.  This is the kind of content that the casual fan that doesn’t really follow football until the season starts might not care about, but the hardcore fans love to see what’s happening behind the scenes.   As I go through this series and look at the other 13 programs, I’ll be paying close attention to how well each school does at creating content that takes me backstage. Now to be fair, Florida’s Facebook page does a nice job of linking to media coverage that each sports program receives.  For example, SEC Media Days in Birmingham were earlier this month, and the Facebook page for the Florida athletics program has a nice stream of links to coverage from Media Days on Florida coach Jim McElwain and the attending players.  Given that Facebook is going to appeal to a more general audience, this type of content is a good idea. Also it’s worth noting that Florida has a very robust list of social media channels devoted to the athletics department as a whole, including the channels you would expect like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google Plus, but also some surprises like SoundCloud and Storify.  Here’s a complete list of the social media channels Florida utilizes across all sports. How the Vanderbilt Commodores Use Social Media to Connect With Their Football Fans Vanderbilt, affectionately known as ‘The Harvard of the South’ is a University more known for its academic prowess than its athletic accomplishments.  Looking at how Vandy allocates social media usage, all major sports teams have a dedicated Twitter account, and a few, not including the football program, also have a Facebook page.  Vandy has a dedicated Twitter account for each sport, including the football team.  However, the athletic department as a whole has dedicated accounts on all the major platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest. As with Florida, Vandy is currently putting a lot of promotion via social media for ticket sales for the upcoming football season.  I did see a few specially-designed images of football players to get fans excited for the upcoming season such as this one on Twitter:

Honestly, I’m surprised that I haven’t seen a lot more of these type of custom pictures/images from both Vandy and Florida.  Images such as these are very popular with fans, who often use them as wallpaper for their mobile devices or PCs. Without looking ahead, I am betting the remaining SEC schools will make good use of such images to hype fans for the upcoming season.

But remember that earlier I said it’s not just about the images for fans, it’s also about the video content.  Especially video content that gets fans excited for the upcoming season or ‘hype’ videos.  This one from Vandy’s YouTube channel is a great example of  the type of video content that fans will eat up as we’re just weeks from the start of the season:

Great video and note that the branding at the end reminds viewers of the value of the Vanderbilt degree. This is one area where Vandy has a real advantage vs most of the rest of the SEC schools, and it’s smart of VU to play off that.  What’s interesting to see from Vandy’s social media content is that they are really trying to appeal to prospective students as well as fans, again realizing the value of the Vandy degree.  Check out this blog post about a service trip to Cuba that some of the student-athletes took recently.

 

So that’s this week’s look at how the SEC is leveraging social media to connect with its football fans.  Next Thursday, we’ll do the same for the Tennessee Volunteers and the Kentucky Wildcats.  As we move into August, Fall camps will begin so it will be interesting to see if the profiled teams include any content from Fall practices as a way to give fans a backstage pass.

If any of you are Florida or Vandy fans, what do you like best about your team’s social media efforts?  Have you tried to engage with either Florida or Vandy via Twitter, Facebook or another channel?

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The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show Episode 30: Measuring the ROI of Social Media and Brand Advocacy

Hey y’all! Welcome to the 30th episode of #FanDamnShow! In this episode I talk a bit about finding the ROI of your social media marketing or brand advocacy efforts and how to structure the measurement process.

PPC_200x200 Standard no codeBut first a reminder that this episode is brought to you by the Marketing Writing Bootcamp, from Marketing Profs.  The Marketing Writing Bootcamp begins on June 11th and features 13 classes with almost 8 hours of instruction!  You can learn more here about the Marketing Writing Bootcamp and if you enroll with promo code FANDAMN you’ll save $200 on Marketing writing bootcamp. Plus, you’ll get over $1,000 worth of Marketing Profs seminars, classes, and video tutorials, free – just for registering!

Social Media ROI is a big struggle for a lot of companies and it doesn’t have to be.   A good way to get a handle on figuring out the value that your marketing efforts are creating is to do a little planning BEFORE you launch that initiative or campaign.  Here’s a quick checklist:

1 – Ask “What will success look like?”  In other words, before you start that blog or that outreach campaign or launch a brand ambassador program, ask yourself what needs to happen as a RESULT of this in order for it to be a success?

2 – What are you trying to accomplish?  Raising brand awareness?  Improving customer loyalty?  Generating sales?  Think about what you want to happen.

3 – What metrics will you measure that tie back to your goals?  If you want to launch a blogger outreach program to increase sales, how will you measure if sales are up?  What metrics will you track?

4 – Measure meaningful metrics, not easy ones.  This is where a lot of companies mess up.  Just because it’s easy to track retweets on Twitter or Likes on Facebook doesn’t mean they impact your bottom line or indicate that you are reaching your goals.  Put in the time to figure out what the more meaningful metrics are to your company, and measure those.

 

So that’s what I talk about in this episode of #FanDamnShow!  Please give it a listen and let me know what you think in the comments! Here’s where you can download and listen to the episode directly.  And if you can, please subscribe to The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show on iTunes, and I would *love* it if you could review the podcast on iTunes as well.  Also, #FanDamnShow is now available on Stitcher as well!

Also, don’t forget that sponsorships are now available for The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show. This page that has all the information on how your brand can sponsor #FanDamnShow and the rates. Please note that all available sponsor slots (starting with July) will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis, so please email me if you are interested in sponsoring #FanDamnShow.

We’ll talk again next week!

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The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show Episode 28: 10 Easy Ways to Create Fans With Social Media

Hey y’all! Welcome to the 28th episode of #FanDamnShow! In today’s episode I give you 10 quick tips for creating fans via social media.  This is perfect if your business is just getting started using social media and want to quickly ramp up your efforts.

PPC_200x200 Standard no codeBut before I get into the Show Notes, a reminder that this episode is brought to you by the Marketing Writing Bootcamp, from Marketing Profs.  The Marketing Writing Bootcamp begins on June 11th and features 13 classes with almost 8 hours of instruction!  You can learn more here about the Marketing Writing Bootcamp and if you enroll with promo code FANDAMN you’ll save $200 on Marketing writing bootcamp. Plus, you’ll get over $1,000 worth of Marketing Profs seminars, classes, and video tutorials, free – just for registering!

The Marketing Writing Bootcamp will be the sponsor of The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show through the middle of June.  If your company is interested in sponsoring #FanDamnShow, slots are available starting in July.  You can learn more about sponsoring The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show and get rates by clicking here.

Show Notes:

2:20 – Four ways you can use the content you create to cultivate fans

11:20 – Three ideas for engaging with your customers in a way that creates more fans

15:25 – Three ideas for putting the spotlight on your best customers

 

Here’s where you can download and listen to the episode directly.  And if you can, please subscribe to The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show on iTunes, and I would *love* it if you could review the podcast on iTunes as well.  Also, #FanDamnShow is now available on Stitcher as well!

Also, don’t forget that sponsorships are now available for The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show. This page that has all the information on how your brand can sponsor #FanDamnShow and the rates. Please note that all available sponsor slots (starting with July) will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis, so please email me if you are interested in sponsoring #FanDamnShow.

We’ll talk again next week!

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The Art of Finding Your Voice With Your Social Media Content

Last night at #Blogchat we had an interesting discussion about finding your blogging voice and the importance of tone with the content you create.  Maybe it’s not completely accurate to talk about ‘finding’ your voice.  Perhaps it’s more about being willing to give yourself permission to share your voice.

But it is my contention that many bloggers, whether they are personal or blogging for someone else, lose interest in blogging because they either aren’t allowed or don’t allow themselves to share their unique writing voice.  I saw multiple people in #Blogchat last night referencing ‘write as you talk’, and I think that’s correct.  If you don’t feel comfortable expressing yourself naturally, then the very act of writing and blogging can feel forced.  As a result, it becomes less like an enjoyable activity and more like a job.

If this contention is correct, then the opposite must be true.  Bloggers that embrace their unique voice (or point of view) are more passionate about blogging.  And that passion carries through into their writing, making it more interesting to the reader.

Look at the tweet above from Southwest.  It was created in a humorous and light-hearted voice.  If you’ve ever flown with Southwest, you know that the flight attendants have this same voice.  They are light-hearted, fun and energetic.  The voice of Southwest’s content on social media is consistent with the brand’s voice across all communication channels.  That’s important.

So how do you find or share your unique blogging voice?  While I do think it’s more about giving yourself permission to share your voice versus finding it, I do think that writing consistently helps you to refine your voice.  For example, over time I’ve learned to share and develop my unique voice here.  My readers are primarily interested in information about how to more successfully create social content, and manage their efforts.  In other words, it’s a space where a lot of people have questions with few straight answers.  So over time, I decided to start sharing everything I knew about creating and managing social content.  Even my own content.  I share how I create content here, and how effective that content is in helping me reach my goals.

And I purposely share when something goes wrong.  This not only helps me communicate to my readers that no one is perfect when it comes to creating social media content, but it also helps me build trust with my readers.  This is also why I openly share all the prices I charge for my speaking/training/consulting services.  Remember at the first of the post when I talked about how not giving yourself permission to share your voice can contribute to you losing interest in blogging?  I hate being vague, especially when it comes to pricing services.  I hate talking to a company that needs help from someone like me with building out their social media strategy, and not addressing the pricing for my services up front.  If they are wanting more information on a $5,000 service and only have $500, then everyone’s time is wasted if we spend 2 weeks of discussing how we can work together if we are that far apart on money.  So I prefer to save everyone’s time and manage expectations by being upfront.

With brands, there are some unique challenges: Finding writers that can write in that brand’s unique voice, disconnects when the brand’s social voice doesn’t match the voice of customer service delivered via other channels, etc.

Whether you write for yourself or an employer, what has been your biggest challenge in finding and sharing your blogging voice?

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It’s Not About the Tools, It’s About the People Using the Tools

6847365223_4b5bdabf97_z“Sometimes the world is cruel to shiny things.” – Lucky, King of the Hill

So you’ve heard of Meerkat, right?  If you read more than 2 social media blogs a month, you have.  If you don’t, you think the mammal, not the app.  Meerkat is an app that lets you stream live video.  And it was also this year’s overhyped SXSW darling.

Every 6 months or so, the social media echo chamber goes batshit-crazy over a particular site/tool/app.  Identi.ca.  Quora. Color.  Gowalla. Ello.  And the Super Bowl of overhyping shiny objects happens each year at SXSW.  This year, it was all Meerkat, all the time.  Social media gurus/ninjas/experts were everywhere proclaiming how amazing Meerkat was, and yes, how it was a total ‘game-changer’.

For future reference, whenever you hear that a shiny new social media site/tool/app is a ‘game-changer’, this is the tech equivalent of shark-jumping.  It likely means this cool site/tool/app is about to die.

And it looks like Meerkat just did:

The ugly truth that U.S. tech media has declined to mention even in passing is that Meerkat had never been a hit to begin with. All those breathless media reports about “the hot new app” and “the break-out app” were deeply misleading at best — and cynical legerdemain at worst.

Meerkat’s highest daily ranking on the U.S. iPhone download chart was No. 140, on March 20th. At this point, the app had already generated thousands of news stories and blog posts, most of them enthusiastically describing it as a hit. But actual American consumers never showed the slightest sign of warming up.

Meerkat’s “success” was the creation of a handful of West Coast tech bloggers who managed to lure major newspapers into covering a phenomenon that did not exist.

It’s not accurate to say that Meerkat is dying.  Moreso, the buzz/hype around it is.  This is the problem with sites/tools/apps like Meerkat that get an explosion of hype from social media types: Usually, that hype is driven more by peer pressure than utility.  Meerkat and every site/tool/app I listed above all at one time reached a tipping point when buzz was being driven by the ‘social media cool kids’.  This A-List tech blogger started claiming it was the next big thing, so this A-List Twitter Power User said the same.  Then suddenly almost overnight you either said this site/tool/app was cool or YOU were the one that was uncool.  Then another shiny object comes along (Hello Periscope!) and suddenly the cool kids realize that their current love is about to become uncool, so they dump it and quickly move to the next ‘big thing’.

Did I mention that social media is high school?  Because it is.

Earlier this month I had people asking me what I thought about Meerkat.  I told them to ask me in a month, and this is why.  Whenever a new social media site/tool/app gets really hot like Meerkat did, I always wait till the influencers and ‘social media hipsters’ leave before I decide if it’s for real.

Because honestly, the tools are very very boring to me.  Painfully so.  But the people that use them, and considering why they are and how they could use these tools?  That fascinates me.  Look at podcasts.  I launched my first podcast 8 years ago.  I dumped it after about 5 episodes because the creation, the post-production, the distribution, was all a huge pain in the ass.  And it was difficult for listeners to take the episodes with them as downloads, they pretty much had to be landlocked to their desktop to listen.  But I knew the idea of a podcast was a good one, it was just a matter of the creation and distribution processes becoming easier, as well as making listening to audio files more accessible and convenient for the listener.  Eight years later, technology has caught up, and podcasts are hotter than ever.  I’ve launched a new podcast and absolutely love it.

Don’t focus on the tools, focus on the connections the tools help facilitate.  The tool isn’t cool, what the tool allows the user to do is what’s interesting.  Let’s go back to Meerkat and Periscope for a minute.  Both apps allow you to stream live video.  So think about instances where watching someone’s live video stream could be compelling.  Maybe for covering a breaking news story?  Or a live event?  A concert maybe?  A ballgame?  Although there may be copyright issues that need to be ironed out in these cases.  The point is, don’t get too caught up on whether or not the tool is ‘cool’, think about how users could potentially use it.  Why would people want to use a live-video app?  Why would they want to use a site that lets them send 140-character messages?

The tool isn’t cool.  The behavior of the human being using it is what’s cool.

Pic via Flickr user Chris Lott

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Review: Paper.li’s iPhone Content Sharing App, Juice

(Disclosure: Over the last year I worked with Paper.li on its marketing and user-engagement strategies, but not on the development of its Juice app. I agreed to review the app here in exchange for letting me have a sneak-peek at it before it went public.)

Earlier this week, Paper.li launched its first iPhone app, Juice.  The idea behind Juice is simple:  Every day it analyzes your Twitter followers, and finds the 10 most popular links they are sharing, and gives them to you so you can share them as well.  Now at first this seems counter-intuitive, why would you want to share back the same content that’s already been shared?  But believe me, most of your Twitter followers have not seen the stories, and for most of them it’s great content that they enjoy seeing.

So when you download the app (You can get it here from the site and here from the iTunes app store), you sign in and it starts analyzing your Twitter followers to see what they are sharing.  Then, it gives you the 10 recommended stories for that day.

Here’s a couple of screenshots of what the suggested stories look like:

JuiceScreenshotsThen you can read the source, and/or share it. One thing I love is notice underneath the story it gives you some data either on the story, or the source.  Like for the Moz article on the left, underneath it adds that the story is ‘Shared 104.0x above average rate’.  This can help you decide which stories to share.

Then when you select to share a story, you get this view:

IMG_0461Guys look closely, when you share a story from Juice, the app automatically pulls a picture from the story and includes it in the tweet.  Adding a picture to your tweet is HUGE for bumping engagement.  I am constantly looking for stories to share from my feed reader or on other social sites, and when I click the RT button on a site, 99% of the time it does not add the post’s picture to the tweet.  Just the title of the story, and the link.  Which is crazy (click the blue Twitter button at the top of this post and you’ll see that the picture is automatically added to the tweet you’ll send out).  Adding the photo means a higher engagement rate.

Now there is one thing I don’t like about Juice, it currently doesn’t have an option for scheduling when the tweets can go out.  For example, let’s say Juice gives me 10 suggested stories to share today, and I decide that I want to share 7 of them.  The tweets will go out as soon as I send them.  I would like a way to schedule the tweets so that they go out say one every hour.  That way I can share the 7 stories over the span of the next 7 hours, instead of blasting out 7 links in 7 minutes.  By doing that, it limits the visibility that these tweets will get.

Other than that, I think Juice is a pretty lightweight and easy way to find and share content that your followers will enjoy.  It’s currently only available for iPhone users, but I believe they will be rolling out a version for Android users soon.  You can download the Juice app here from the site and here from the iTunes app store.  If you do use Juice, let me what you think!