This Thursday for the first time I’ll be speaking in two states on the same day (yeah it sounded pretty cool when I scheduled it months ago).  Thursday night I’ll be in Nashville  speaking to the Social Media Club chapter about Think Like a Rock Star.  But earlier that day I’ll be speaking at the Alabama Mountain Lakes Tourist Association’s annual meeting in Huntsville.

In Huntsville I’ll be talking about getting started using social media and how to start creating a social media strategy.  Despite what you hear in the ‘social media fishbowl’, many companies aren’t using social media and even fewer are doing so effectively.

If you want to start using social media effectively, there’s three things you need to focus on:

1 – Understanding how the people you want to reach are using social media.  The majority of people use social media as personal communication tools and to discover and share content.  Not as channels to receive marketing messages.  So if you want to connect with potential customers via social media, you need to adjust how you use social media to make it consistent with the experience your customers want and expect.    Most Social Media Marketing doesn’t fail because the brand doesn’t understand the tools, it fails because the brand doesn’t understand how its customers are using the tools.

2 – Focus on strategy, not tactics.  It’s not about using Twitter and Facebook correctly, it’s about creating a plan that helps you reach defined goals.  When I first meet with clients, one of the first things we talk about is what their goals are for using social media.  I ask them to answer this question: “What needs to happen in order for this to be a success”  If you want to launch a blog, what needs to happen in 90/180/365 days in order for you to see that the blog is ‘working’?  Asking these questions helps you decide why you want to use social media, and more importantly, what you want to accomplish via social media.

3 – Measure what matters, not what’s easiest to track.  If you start a Twitter account and you are measuring number of followers gained as your way of quantifying that your Twitter account is ‘working’ then #URDoingItWrong.  Don’t measure the metrics that are easiest to track, measure the metrics that lead to desired outcomes.  If you want to see Twitter drive sales, then figure out which metrics indicate either increased sales or an increased likelihood to buy, and track those.

If you want to use social media then you need to invest time in creating a solid plan and understanding the customers you want to connect with.  This is something that applies to any marketing initiative you want to begin.  What else do you think companies should focus on before they start using social media?

“Should we be using social media?‘ is a question being asked in many boardrooms and mom and pop stores around the country.  Yes, even today in 2013.  From the business’ perspective, it’s easy to see why they are hesitant to use social media.  Yes, you can throw all the stats at them about how Facebook has a billion users, Twitter has 200 million, Plus growing etc etc, but that’s not what they care about.  In order to start using social media they would need to take time and money from marketing sources that have (mostly) proven returns, and invest that time and money into social media, whose return is very difficult to measure.  If the local print shop starts running a radio ad today, they know they can count on seeing new customers come in the door as a result by this afternoon.  So if you want a business to invest in social media you are asking them to divert time and money from sources that they understand and know are working, and invest that time and money into a source that they don’t understand and can’t really measure the return on using.

So let’s start by explaining in very simple terms what ‘social media’ is.  Social media are online/mobile tools and sites that people use to create, share, collaborate with and distribute content.  That’s it.  Some of the ways that people frequently use social media include:

1 – Peer to peer communication.  Simply talking with friends and family.  This is by far the most popular way to use social media.

2 – As a way to share your opinions with the world.  Many people simply use social media as their way to share their thoughts and opinions on subjects that interest them, or to share what they do throughout the day.  Many people that social media frequently do this as well as use social media for talking with friends and family.

3 –  As a way to establish your expertise or build authority around a particular subject.  Now we are starting to get into a more professional or business use of social media.  Some people use social media as a way to create content that helps to establish a level of expertise around a particular topic.  Often, the goal is to establish that expertise so that the person can sell products or services related to their area of expertise.  This blog is a good example of creating content to establish expertise.

4 – By curating valuable content from other sources in order to build your own level of influence.  This area has begun to emerge in the last few years as the rise of Klout and other tools that attempt to measure influence came into the market.  The idea is that if a person can share valuable content around  particular topics, it will help to identify them as a ‘go-to’ source of information on those topics.  Which helps to establish their influence and expertise around these topics.

Those are some of the most popular ways for people to use social media.  Keep in mind that if your customers are using social media (and the odds says they are) the overwhelming majority of their usage will fall into the categories of communicating with friends and family, and using social media to share their opinions.

So if you think about it, social media is really digital word of mouth, in very simple terms.  This is a very simple yet incredibly profound distinction to make.  If we think about word of mouth in an analog sense, our ability to spread a message was typically restricted by the analog tools available to us at the time.  Such as a landline phone, snail-mail letters, or simply interacting with other people face-to-face.  So in general, if we wanted to spread a message in the pre-digital world of the internet and social media, our ability to do so was typically one person at a time.

Social media has changed that dynamic completely.  Instead of one-to-one communication, I now have tools that let me engage in one-to-many communication.  Every piece of content that I share publicly can be easily shared by others.  For example, this blog post will likely be read by around 1,000 people that visit this blog today from various sources, including social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.  Another 1,200 or so people will have it delivered to their email inboxes that subscribe to this blog, and another 2,500 or so people that subscribe to this blog’s feed will see it.  All told, around 5,000 people will likely view this one piece of content over the next 24 hours.   

If we rolled back the clock to before the internet and social media, how would I be able to get this message in the hands of 5,000 people?  I’d likely have to pay someone to help me distribute this message.  But thanks to social media, I can distribute this message with the only real cost being my time in creating the message, and building the network to distribute it (which DID take a good amount of time).

So the biggest change that social media has made for your current and potential customers is their ability to more easily create, share and distribute content.  Plus, the huge advantage that social media offers your business is that the majority of that content is available publicly!  When word of mouth became digital via social media tools, it gave your business an incredible level of access to your customers that you really never had before.  Now you can not only easily see what your customers are saying about you, but you can interact with them.  This is a huge change in the customer/brand relationship, and it creates an enormous opportunity for your business as well.

So we’re back to the should my business use social media question.  If we approach answering this question from the standpoint of viewing how customers can easily create online content about and around your brand, then we need to consider what impact this content has on their decision to do business with you.  If your business is a fruit-stand that you run yourself in Houma, Louisiana, then investing in using social media to reach online customers might not make the most sense for you.  But if you work for a global brand that’s primarily a B2C company, then it’s all but a requirement that you invest serious resources into social media.

Then in very simple terms, your business should consider the role that online content created about your products and services influences your customers before they make a purchase.  This can be very difficult to track sometimes without sophisticated software and tools, so in general ask yourself one simple question:

1 – How likely is it that my current and potential customers are using social media to discuss my products and services before making a purchase?

If you can determine that social media content plays a role in influencing a customer’s intent to purchase, then it becomes much easier to justify investing money in social media.

In short, if your company derives any significant portion of its business from online sales, then it should be investing in social media.  Now the extent to which you invest in social media will depend greatly on understanding your own customer base and how they use these tools.

Not sure if you are ready to invest in social media or how to get started? Then fill out this contact form to connect with me and we can discuss your options!

Let’s be honest: No one likes to see that someone has left you.  And I’m not talking about your offline relationships, I’m talking about when someone stops reading your blog, or your newsletter, or unfollows you on Twitter.  Sometimes it’s because of something you did or said.

But sometimes it’s not about you, it’s about them.

I started the Think Like a Rock Star newsletter back in February(You can sign up HERE).  It’s had slow and steady growth, and now has over 500 subscribers.

I have two goals for this newsletter:

1 – Give subscribers information on how they can begin to create closer connections with their biggest fans

2 – Give subscribers information on how they can work with me

Now to help with that first goal, every newsletter has original content that you don’t see here.  Well you will occasionally see me talk about something here that’s already been in the newsletter.  But the newsletter subscribers will get that information first.  It’s honestly a LOT of work and I often wonder if I am putting TOO MUCH into the content I share there.

To help with that second goal (telling subscribers how they can work with me), once or twice a month I will publish an additional issue of my newsletter highlighting one or two services that I offer that I think they would be interested in learning more about.

Every time after I send one of these ‘work with me’ emails, I immediately see a spike in unsubscribers.

Is that a bad thing?  Not in my eyes, because by unsubscribing, these people are telling me that they have zero interest in working with me.  So much so that if I even mention the possibility, they are gone.  So if one of the main goals for my newsletter is to drive new business and they don’t want to work with me, then we are wasting both of our times, so them leaving is a good thing for both of us.

The people that unsubscribe have typically already made the decision a long time ago that your content wasn’t valuable to them, they just haven’t gotten around to officially ‘cutting ties’.  I’ll get a few unsubscribers from this post, I know because every day when I get an email saying my latest blog post has gone out, within 5 mins I will get a few notices of unsubscribes.

So don’t worry if people leave you online, that just makes it easier for you to find the people you are supposed to be connected to!

PS: And if you want to leave me after reading this post, I won’t hold it against you 🙂

I started blogging in 2005, and started checking out Twitter and Facebook in 2007.  While these tools have been popular topics for individuals for a while now, companies really didn’t begin to take an interest in social media as a pseudo-business tool till around 2008 or so.  So for five years, social media has been the next ‘it’ thing.

But eventually, we’ll all move on to talking and obsessing about something else.  Even now, some people are beginning to say that social media’s bubble is about to burst.  So when social media is officially no longer the ‘cool kid’ in school, what will take it’s place?

One idea that’s been gaining traction in the last year or so is that of Big Data.  In simplified terms, it’s collecting massive amounts of data about a sample (such as your customer base), and then analyzing that data in order to spot trends and characteristics about the customers that you might otherwise miss.  Currently, there are few software packages that can sufficiently analyze data on a massive enough scale to qualify as ‘big data’.  Putting that bottleneck aside, there are huge potential privacy concerns over the role of Big Data, GigaOm recently had a nice piece that outlines some of the possible negative scenarios.

But beyond those concerns, what strikes me about the Big Data discussion is that marketers are still trapped in a world where they are trying to understand the activities that customers engage in instead of focusing on what motivates them to engage in that behavior.

It’s not about understanding what behaviors your customers exhibit, it’s about understanding your customers.

Marketers don’t need to focus on Big Data, they need to focus on Big Understanding.  It’s one thing for Wal-Mart to understand that customers that shop from 8am-10am on Saturday spend 21% more than customer that shop from 10am-noon on the same day.  It’s quite another for the retailer to understand why this shift in behavior takes place.  Do the people that show earlier on Saturday simply have more money to spend?  Do they enjoy coming earlier before the crowds arrive so they can relax and spend more time shopping (and more money)?  It’s almost impossible to tell from just looking at numbers.

This is part of the reason why I posted yesterday that brands need to start committing to talking directly to their customers.  To me, this is one of the great and mostly untapped benefits of social media.  These tools give brands a way to talk directly with their customers for really the first time ever.  Brands need to commit to having more direct interactions with their customers.

Because interactions lead to understanding and understanding leads to trust.  And trust leads to advocacy.

It’s not about the tools and the technologies, it’s about what they allow us to do.  Don’t focus on the tools, focus on the connections that the tools help facilitate.

Yesterday I read an article that Amber-Lee shared here in the comments from a gentleman that was basically saying that Social Media was worthless in driving sales. This was my favorite quote from the article:

Like anything else, if you want even a 1 percent chance of succeeding with social media, it requires a strategy and a commitment. Bet you either don’t have a strategy or you have a strategy created by a person or people who have never been successful with social media…because no one really has been.

Then later yesterday I was running some errands and as I was out driving, I heard a local hotel advertising their Valentine’s Day special for couples.  They told you all about the wonderful room you’d get, the amenities at the hotel that were provided, a meal at the on-site restaurant, etc.  Really selling you on how amazing this offer was, then at the end of the commercial they give you…their street address.

No telephone number, no website address, they don’t even clarify the city in which the hotel is located (and it’s in an area affectionately known as ‘The Quad Cities’).  They used the radio spot to do a great job of selling you on why this hotel and its Valentine’s Day offer was wonderful, then when it came time to close the sale, they only gave you a street address as a way to contact them.

The lesson here is:  You can’t blame the tool when you don’t use it correctly.  This makes about as much sense as driving a Hummer into the lake and when it sinks, cursing it as being a terrible boat.

The question isn’t ‘can social media effectively drive sales for my business?’, the question is ‘do I know how to effectively use social media to drive sales for my business?’  It’s been well established that social media CAN be used as a tool to drive sales.  It’s also been well established that many businesses have great difficulty in using social media as a tool to directly drive sales.

See what I did there?  I added that many businesses have great difficulty in using social media as a tool to directly drive sales.  Social media simply doesn’t function very well as a direct sales channel.  It does functions exceptionally well as a channel to build networks and relationships.  And frequently as a result of those relationships, you can generate sales.

But as with any form of marketing or contact you have with your customers, your ability to use the tool successfully depends on your understanding of its proper use.  Often the blame falls on the shoulders of the carpenter, not the hammer.

I participate in a lot of Twitter chats.  Granted, I’m no @LttleWys, but I at least lurk in a few every week.  The one thing I’ve noticed is the ‘power’ Twitter users, say those with over 50,000 followers, almost never join Twitter chats.  UNLESS they are the co-host/guest host.  In other words, if they can’t be the center of attention, it’s not worth their time.

In fact, I started looking at the Twitter streams for a few of the ‘big name’ Twitter users.  I saw the same pattern:  Twitter bigshot throws out statement, such as ‘The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing at all’, or some-such business witticism.  Then the Twitter power-user spends the next 30 minutes answering @ replies to his statement.

Folks, that’s not engagement.  I even tweeted this, saying something like ‘If all you do is answer tweets directed at you, then you aren’t engaging, you’re responding.’

Then after about 5 minutes of responding to ‘amen!’ replies to my statement, a tiny voice inside my head said ‘hey dumbass, you just did the same thing you were trying to call out the Twitter ‘power’ users for doing’.  Oops.

Is that being social?  Really?  And if you think about it, that’s how most of us use social media, because that’s how these sites have trained us to do it.  Go look at your Facebook newsfeed: It’s an endless stream of friends and connections throwing content out there, then other people responding to it.  We’ve been taught that the content that gets the most reaction is the ‘best’.

In other words, we’ve been taught that social media is about creating content that gets the most Likes, the most RTs.  We’ve been taught that these represent levels of engagement.

Folks being engaged with someone’s content is NOT being engaged with them.  And if someone IS engaged with your content, that doesn’t mean you are engaged with them.

‘Dude get off my back, the majority of my tweets are replies!  I engage!’  Really?  Are those replies where you tweet someone out of the blue and ask them how their day is going, or do those replies come from you sitting back and fielding replies to your cutesy statements that you tweet out every couple of hours?

Think about it.

We don’t always have to be the center of attention.  Social Media is a wonderful idea, but instead of focusing on the SOCIAL part, it seems we are gravitating more to the MEdia part.  It’s all about creating content that draws attention to ourselves.  And to be fair, I’m just as guilty of this as anyone.

So what do you think; Is Social Media making us more or less social?  We’ll be getting all social and discussing this tonight at #DadChat, starting at 8pm Central on Twitter.  #DadChat is run by my friend Bruce Sallan, who has asked me to co-host tonight’s topic.

I’m looking forward to the discussion, hope to see you there!