MackCollier.com

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We were right, most Social Media numbers are useless!

Yesterday I posted two examples of how some social media numbers are completely useless.

One of the examples was how I have almost 22,000 followers on Twitter, and yet I rarely get 1-2% of them to click on any link I share on Twitter.  I said we’d check out my traffic from yesterday and see what level of engagement I would have with those 22,000 followers.  Here’s the traffic sites from yesterday according to Google Analytics:

GA says there were 604 visitors here yesterday, 251 from referring sites, 226 direct traffic, and 78 from search engines.

For the record, SiteMeter says I had 597 visitors.  I tweeted out a link to yesterday’s post THREE times, and as of this writing, it was RTed 125 times.

And if we say that EVERY one of the 600 or so visitors I had yesterday came from viewing that link on Twitter, that still means that less than 3% of my Twitter followers clicked that link.  Obviously, not all of the traffic from yesterday came from Twitter, and not all of the traffic that DID, came from people that were following me.

I think there’s two key takeaways from this that I think we need to wrap our heads around:

1 – The level of engagement you have with your Twitter followers as a group is going to be low, and will likely be inversely proportional to the size of the group.  If you only have your 10 closest friends following you, obviously you will have a high level of engagement with that core group.  But as you grow to 1,000 followers, obviously you can’t be closely connected to all of those people, and their level of interaction and engagement with you will fall.

2 – The level of engagement you have with a certain portion of your Twitter followers will be MUCH higher than that of the larger group.  This point is somewhat speculative, but I would bet that most of the people that clicked yesterday’s link also click most of my links.   So while I may have a 1-3% engagement rate with my 22,000 followers as a whole, for those 500 or whatever number followers, I may have a 33% engagement rate.  Or some other number much larger than 1-3 % 😉

What do y’all think?  Does this make sense or sound like complete crap?  I think the core message here is to focus on your ‘fans’, and try to connect with them.  If you try to connect with everyone, then you’ll probably connect with no one.  But how do you figure out WHO is in that core group of fans, and who isn’t?  Or what about people that click some of my links, but not all?

Damn I’m getting a headache.

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Too many Social Media numbers are completely useless

And you and I will prove this together.

As soon as I publish this post, I am going to tweet out the link to my 22,000 followers on Twitter.  When that happens, click this link to see what SiteMeter says the traffic looks like for today.  This will give us a good idea of how many of the 22,000 people following me on Twitter are REALLY following me and what level of engagement I have with those 22,000 people.

I can tell you right now that at best probably 1 or 2 percent of those people will click that link I tweet out.  Think about that, of the 22,000 people following me, only 1 or 2 percent are likely to click on a link I share.  And honestly, that’s pretty good.

So that means that well over 90% of the people following me aren’t clicking on links I share.  So is it more accurate to say that 22,000 people are following me, or is it actually more like a few hundred?

Here’s a second example of how the numbers in social media can be deceiving.

That graph shows the number of feed readers that Feedburner says I have at The Viral Garden over the last month.  This is how FeedBurner explains the number it shows for # of feed readers:

FeedBurner’s subscriber count is based on an approximation of how many times your feed has been requested in a 24-hour period. Subscribers is inferred from an analysis of the many different feed readers and aggregators that retrieve this feed daily. Subscribers is not computed for browsers and bots that access your feed.

Subscribers counts are calculated by matching IP address and feed reader combinations, then using our detailed understanding of the multitude of readers, aggregators, and bots on the market to make additional inferences.

Now, this is the problem I have.  First, notice that the # of feed readers (the number shown in green on top of the above graph) has been steadily rising over the last month.  A month ago, it was at 5,238, yesterday it was up to 7,359.  That’s about a 40% increase in the number of feed subscribers Feedburner reports for The Viral Garden in the last month.

The problem: I have only written ONE post on The Viral Garden in the last month.  In fact, I have only written FOUR posts there in the last FIVE months.

So does it make any sense for Feedburner to say that over 7,000 people are accessing my feed every day, even though that feed hasn’t put out a new post in over 2 weeks?  Doesn’t common sense suggest that most of the people that are subscribed to my feed would only be accessing it when a new post is published?

To further put the FeedBurner numbers in doubt, let’s look at the actual traffic to The Viral Garden over the last 12 months, according to SiteMeter:

Up until the middle of May, I was keeping up a regular schedule of 2-3 posts a week over at The Viral Garden.   But since the middle of May, I have left 4 posts there.  Notice that the above SiteMeter graph reflects this, as traffic fell sharply in May, and again in June, before settling down to roughly half the traffic levels it was up till May.  This is exactly what you would expect, volume of posts fell sharply starting in May, and the traffic did as well.

So again, how is the number of feed readers steadily RISING, according to FeedBurner?  Does that make any sense?

These are just two examples, but I think it points to a larger problem: Too many of the numbers being used to measure social media seem to be way off.  And I think that because so many of these numbers are inaccurate, it is keeping more companies from investing more dollars in social media efforts.  Because if they don’t know to accurately measure how many people are seeing their message, or following them, or reading their content, or interacting with them, how can they justify spending dollars on ghosts?

They can’t.  And we shouldn’t expect them to.  We need better numbers, and until we get them, social media strategists such as myself need to keep pushing for them, and explain to our clients where the shortcomings are.

We can do MUCH better and the future of this industry depends on us finding a way to do so.

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#Blogchat 10-10-10 with @GrantGriffiths Recap

Last nite @GrantGriffiths from Headway Themes joined us for the 1st ever sponsored #Blogchat.  Headway is a premium blog theme, and the topic for last nite’s #Blogchat was How to Choose a Blog Theme/Template.

The discussion was broken into two areas; the 1st 30 minutes or so was devoted to a general discussion of what to look for when picking a blog theme/template.  The second 30 minutes focused on the difference between free blog themes, and premium ones.  Here’s some of the main points that we covered:

When picking a theme, look for the following features:

1 – Themes should be simple, with fonts and sizes easily readable for all ages – @abbisiler

2 – Consider your audience and what features would appeal to them – @prosperitygal

3 – Does the theme allow your content to be easily shared on social sites? – @galactic

4 – When picking a theme, remember that a light background for the text will make it easier for printing your posts – @abbisiler

5 – Look for themes that are SEO friendly, that have good code, and that offer support – @GrantGriffiths

6 – A reader-friendly layout is more important than cutesy colors and designs – @sueyoungmedia

7 – Also consider how much coding you’ll need to know to modify the theme, is it compatible with WordPress 3.0 and widget ready? – @GrantGriffiths

8 –  @BCarroll7 asked about going with a 2 or 3-column theme.  Seemed most people preferred 2-columns as they are less cluttered and have less code involved.

Next we moved to a discussion of free vs premium themes.  Most people were of the mindset that if you can afford it and are serious about your blog, that it’s worth the money to invest in a premium theme, and most are under $100 for a one-time fee.  Obviously since Grant is with Headway, it was a very popular choice among #Blogchat participants as a premium theme.  Others that were mentioned repeatedly included Thesis (this site runs on Thesis) as well as Genesis and Woo.

My take is this: If your blog is just for your own personal enjoyment, then you will likely be just fine with a free theme.  But if you are using your blog for business or think you might at some point, I would invest in a premium theme.

Now as you might expect, the majority of the rest of the #Blogchat discussion focused on premium themes, and especially the Headway Theme.  That was by design, as I wanted to make sure that there was a section of #Blogchat where y’all could learn more about Headway, since Grant was sponsoring #Blogchat last nite.

And as I said above, this site runs on Thesis.  My personal take on Thesis is this:  It’s a very good theme.  For me, the big problem I have with Thesis is the upgrading process.  Even though Thesis offers from lifetime upgrades, the upgrading process involves going into your site’s file structure and manually adding some files, removing others, changing the permissions on some, etc.  IOW, if you are an idiot like me, there’s about 100 opportunities to break something during the upgrade process.  That’s why I am stuck on Thesis 1.5, when I think the latest version is 1.8.  I am scared to upgrade because I am afraid I will break something.

One thing I loved hearing from Grant was that Headway will offer automatic upgrading with it’s new 2.0 version coming out later this month.  That alone will guarantee that I will give it a closer look.  From everything I heard last nite, it seems like Headway is better if you want to do less coding (which is most of us), and I think Thesis is better if you are a total coding geek and love getting your hands dirty.  That’s just what I think based on using Thesis, plus talking to everyone last nite.

Grant was kind enough to also offer us a 20% discount off Headway for the next 2 days.  The regular price for Headway is $87 for a personal license, and $164 for a developer license.  If you want to use the discount, go to this link and use code ‘hwblogchat’.

Thanks again to Grant for joining us last nite.  He did a great job, and everyone seemed to love the topic and what they learned.  Last nite was the first attempt at a sponsored #Blogchat, and if you would like to learn more about how you could sponsor a future #Blogchat, click here.  If you have any questions, including how much a #Blogchat sponsorship would cost, please email me.

And finally, if you have ANY comments/suggestions/ideas about last nite’s #Blogchat, please either leave me a comment here, or email me.  I definitely want to hear your feedback on having a sponsor, and have already taken some of your comments into consideration for how future sponsors will be handled.

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Ford begins promoting 3rd-party content via Promoted Tweets

This is interesting!  Last week’s post with Ford CMO Jim Farley’s statements about how Ford has seen massive cost savings via Social Media proved to be quite popular.  In fact I believe it’s the most RTed post I’ve ever written.

Well last Thursday after publishing the post, Ford’s Scott Monty contacted me and said that Ford wanted to use my tweet as a Promoted Tweet on Twitter!  He explained that Ford is going to begin experimenting with using content from customers and 3rd party sources as Promoted Tweets, instead of just promoting its own tweets and content.  Apparently my tweet was the first one from a 3rd party source that they had used as a Promoted Tweet.

I think that’s a pretty damn gutsy move on Ford’s part.  And if Ford is willing to start promoting non-company content, it suggests to me that the company must be very satisfied with the results it has seen from previous social media efforts, to be willing to spend money promoting 3rd party content.

Why would Ford do this?  Well would you rather hear Ford say how amazing it is, or would you rather hear what a Ford customer has to say?  And even though I am not currently a Ford customer, Ford using my tweet as a Promoted Tweet is very innovative and of course I wanted to share it with you.  So there’s additional coverage for Ford.

So what were the results?  I asked Ford for the results and Brian shared these numbers with me from Ford promoting my tweet:

Impressions – 411

Clickthroughs – 26

ReTweets – 8

Clickthrough Rate – 6.3%

Engagement Rate – 8.27%

Now here’s how that clickthrough rate compares with other forms of online advertising/promotion:

Email – 5.9%

Google AdWords – 2%

Banner Ads – 0.2%

So the 6.3% clickthrough for this Promoted Tweet is higher than the avg clickthroughs for email, Google AdWords, and Banner Ads.  Now granted, this is a REALLY small sample, but the numbers suggest that the clickthrough rate for Promoted Tweets should be comparable to email, if not better in some cases.  I also think this could suggest that Twitter users are more engaged and as such, Promoted Tweets could be a real business driver for Twitter moving forward.

Now those 26 clicks accounted for about 3% of my traffic on Friday, so it wasn’t a huge bump for me.  Then again, Friday saw 754 vistiors here thanks to the popularity of the post with Jim’s video.  So on a normal day, 26 extra visitors would be 7-10% of my traffic.  So it’s a bit more significant.

One thing I found interesting was that Brian and Scott told me beforehand that they were going to buy the Promoted Tweet for my tweet on Friday, and told me the keywords they had purchased.  Promoted Tweets work by showing up as the top search result when you search for the purchased keywords, and they are clearly marked as a Promoted Tweet.  On Friday I searched several times with the keywords Ford had purchased to see if I could get the Promoted Tweet to show up in search results, and I couldn’t.  So not sure how Twitter decides to insert the Promoted Tweets into search results.

BTW for the record, Twitter asked Ford to get my permission to use my tweet as a Promoted Tweet.

What do y’all think of Ford using content from its customers/other sources as Promoted Tweets instead of or in addition to its own?  Will we begin to see more companies doing this, and if you were exposed to Promoted Tweets, would you rather have them come from the company, or its customers?

UPDATE: Just to clarify, Ford didn’t pay me a penny to use my tweet as a Promoted Tweet.

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Ford CMO Jim Farley: Social media leading to ‘massive cost savings’ for Ford

How cool is this?  My friend Kaitlyn, who works for Ogilvy, wrangled some time with Ford CMO Jim Farley at the Paris Auto Show to answer a few questions about how the automaker uses social media.  So she reached out to me and a few other people to see if we wanted to ask Jim a question.  Of course I did, and Kaitlyn collected all the questions and then got Jim to answer them on video, and here it is:

Isn’t that awesome? My question to Jim was “Are there any areas that Ford can point to where social media has either lowered business costs, or improved existing processes?”

Here is Jim’s answer: “What happens is, by launching the vehicle early, getting people involved in talking about the new global Focus or the new Fiesta is the US before it goes on sale, we can lower the amount of traditional advertising we do after the vehicle goes on sale.  That’s where the massive cost savings have been.  I’ll give you an example; On the Fiesta Movement, we had higher unaided nameplate awareness than Fit or Yaris, and we spent 10 cents on the dollar, than a traditional tv ad campaign.  So by starting earlier and using social media to spread the word about the new product, we’re really reducing the amount of traditional advertising we have to spend.”

This is something that I think often gets overlooked in the whole ‘how do we tell if social media is working?’ debate.  There’s two ways that social media can ultimately help a business:

1 – Generate sales

2 – Lower business costs

As Jim explains above, social media is lowering the amount of money that Ford has to spend on traditional advertising.  That’s money that can then be spent on product development, customer service, and other areas that improves the quality of the product, as well as customer satisfaction.  Which ultimately…increases sales.  So this is another example of social media working indirectly.

And thanks to Kaitlyn for setting this up, and thanks to Mr. Farley for answering our questions.

This is a classic example of a wonderful blogger outreach.  Kaitlyn reached out to a small group of marketing and social media bloggers, with extremely targeted, exclusive and RELEVANT content (Hey marketing/social media blogger, want to ask Ford’s CMO a question about how Ford uses Social Media?  Ummmm…..YES!!!!).  I’ve been getting pitched by publicists and agencies and bloggers, etc, for 5 years now, and Kaitlyn is by far the best at what she does.  She rarely pitches me, but when she does, it’s always a story or content that’s extremely relevant to my readership, and I jump all over it.

And since the outreach is so well-done, I want to promote it here to share it with you.  Not just for the content itself (amazing takeaways from Jim on how Ford is utilizing social media, wasn’t it?), but I can also share what Kaitlyn did as an example of what a successful blogger outreach looks like.  Kaitlyn had established relationships with everyone she pitched, she knew who they were, and what type of content they were interested in.  That’s why she rocks.

Besides being a great example of blogger outreach done right, what else can your company learn from this?  What Kaitlyn did here is she found a way to get Jim involved in creating social content.  While it would be great if the top executives at a major company like Ford could devote time every day to interacting with customers directly via social media, it’s just not realistic.  So Kaitlyn found a way to spend a few minutes with Jim, and get him to answer some questions via video.  That content can then be placed on Ford’s YouTube Channel, or embedded in a blog post on a company blog, or more easily shared via social networks like Facebook and Twitter.  The point is, Ford’s CMO might not have time today to get on Twitter and answer customer questions directly, but Ford and Kaitlyn found a way to get him involved in a capacity that makes sense for him.

Thanks again to Jim for answering our questions, and Kaitlyn for setting this up.  BTW as an aside, if a company is using social media tools to engage with you, doesn’t that improve your perception of the company, at least on some small level?  Granted, this video alone isn’t going to convince me to buy a Focus today, but as a result of Jim taking the time to answer my question, I now have a slightly better impression of the company, versus their competitors.

UPDATE: Scott Monty left a fabulous comment and I wanted to add it here so everyone could see it: “There’s no need for time to tell – we’ve already demonstrated that it worked for the Fiesta. We had a higher level of awareness for the subcompact than for vehicles we had in the market for 2-3 years; we collected over 125,000 hand-raisers who indicated they wanted to learn more when the car became available; and the conversion of reservations to sales was 10X higher than our traditional conversion rate.

All before we began any major media efforts toward the launch of the Fiesta.”

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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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#Blogchat Schedule for October

If you missed last nite’s #Blogchat, here is the transcript.

I’ve been so excited about the lineup for October that I could barely wait till today to get this post up!  We’ll have TWO amazing co-hosts plus #Blogchat will have its first sponsor!  Here’s the lineup:

October 3rd – Brian Clark (@CopyBlogger) Co-Host on “How to Create Compelling Content For Your Blog”.  Brian will teach us how to create content that is not only search engine-friendly, but that also engages our readers.  And he will also show us how to improve our headline writing, including making them more interesting, but also consider SEO implications and making them more ‘shareable’ on social sites.  Brian is an absolute genius at improving boring headlines, as well as creating more interesting content.  I cannot wait to have him join us so we can learn from him!

October 10th – SPONSORED #Blogchat – Grant Griffiths (@GrantGriffiths) from Headway Themes will join us to discuss “How to Choose a Template For Your Blog”.  This will be the first sponsored #Blogchat, and it will be broken into 2 parts.  The first 30 mins will focus on discussing which elements you should consider when choosing a blog template.  Then in the 2nd 30 mins, we’ll discuss if you should go with a free blog template, or if you should purchase a premium template such as the one Headway offers.  This would be the perfect opportunity for #Blogchat participants to learn more about what premium blog templates offer, and to ask Grant any questions you have about Headway, such as its price, features, and support.  Or if you’re undecided if you should stick with a free template or go with a premium, we’ll try to help you decide!

October 17th – Shannon Paul (@ShannonPaul)  Co-Host on “How to Respond to Comments on Your Company Blog”. Shannon has one of the most extensive corporate social media backgrounds on the planet.  Before taking on her current role as Social Media Manager for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, she helped shape the social media strategies for WeSeed and the Detroit Red Wings.  She’ll be joining us to tackle a topic she’s been successfully dealing with for years, how companies should handle and respond to comments on their blog.  She just wrote a fabulous post detailing how to handle this, with a bonus slideshare deck!

October 24th – TBA

October 31st – OPEN MIC ON HALLOWEEN! Holy crap this might be more awesomeness than I can stand.  We’ll have to have some fun with this, maybe show up in our favorite monster avatars?  Hmmmm….let me think on this.

Seriously, is that one incredible line-up, or what?  Now I wanted to close with a word on sponsors and co-hosts.  If your company is interested in sponsoring a future #Blogchat, then please check out this page for more information.  The 2nd Sunday of every month is reserved for sponsorship, with November the 14th being the first available slot.  All sponsorship slots are available on a first-come, first-served basis.  If you want to reserve a slot, you’ll need to contact me at least 2 weeks before the slot you want, so we can get your payment processed, plus I want at least a week prior to properly promote your sponsored #Blogchat.  The link above has more information on topic matter, but for the most part, I am looking for topics that will promote your company/offerings, but that also address topics that #Blogchat participants need help with.  Check out the topic for this month’s sponsored #Blogchat above, as an example of what I am talking about.  And also think about ways that your sponsorship could also benefit #Blogchat participants.  Maybe a 10% off coupon, or a trial subscription to your site/service.  If your sponsorship creates value for #Blogchat participants, then it will benefit you by creating goodwill with and positive reviews from #Blogchat participants.

Now, as for Co-Hosts.  As #Blogchat has grown in popularity in the last few months, a lot of people have started asking me if they could co-host a #Blogchat.  Moving forward, #Blogchat will have one co-host a month, on the 1st Sunday of every month.  Currently, I have November’s co-host booked (And it’s another amazing co-host, I can’t wait to share who it is!), and am talking to a couple of people about co-hosting in December and January of next year.  So if you are interested in co-hosting, please understand that we’ll need to come up with a blogging topic that you can teach on that makes sense for the #Blogchat audience, and also understand that the earliest you could join as co-host would probably be January of 2011.

That’s it! Once again, thank y’all SO much for coming every week to #Blogchat!  The bar just keeps getting higher but I think we’ll have an awesome November in store for y’all as well 😉

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Would you follow your customers to prison?

Last week in Dallas I led a workshop at #Optsum called Think Like a Rockstar, that looked at how rockstars connect with their customers and turn them into fans.  And what companies can learn from rockstars in cultivating their own brand advocates.  I included several examples of how rockstars connect with and embrace their fans.

But a couple of days ago I realized that I left out one of the best examples of a rockstar embracing his fans.

By the late 1960s, Johnny Cash’s career was on its downward slide.  His constant problems with drugs, as well as the fading popularity of country music, had conspired against Cash to leave his star shining at a flicker of what it had once been.  That’s when fate intervened in 1968 in the form of a California prison.

In 1955, Cash recorded the song “Folsom Prison Blues’, a song that was immediately popular with inmates across the country.  In fact, many of them would write to Cash asking him to perform at their prison, and Cash actually did this several times over the next decade.

“John looks as mean as they do, and they identify with him”, Cash’s wife June would later explain.

Still, a decade later by 1968, Cash’s career needed a jumpstart before it drifted away.  This was when Cash made the bold move of requesting that his label allow him to perform another prison concert, but this time he suggested that the label record the concert as an album.  His label at the time, Columbia, agreed, and Cash along with The Statler Brothers, Carl Perkins and the Tennessee Three as well as June, went to California to rehearse for the trip.

One of the main focuses of the rehearsal time was to learn a song called Greystone Chapel, a song written by Folsom inmate Glen Sherley.  Cash performed two sets at Folsom Prison on the morning of January 13th, 1968.  Both sets closed with Greystone Chapel, and featured Cash performing for hours just a few feet away from hundreds of screaming fans, some of who also happened to be murderers.

Yet when this concert was released to the public, it instantly became a huge success.  The energy at the prison on that day was electric, and Cash fed off that and gave the performance of his career.  The performance and album revitalized Cash’s career, and resulted in what many rock historians view as one of the greatest performances of all-time.  All this happened because Johnny Cash was willing to embrace his fans, even if it meant going to prison to do so.

But companies aren’t always so willing to embrace their fans if they don’t approve of their behavior.

In 2006, Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz became the darlings of the internet with a series of videos where they dropped Mentos candies into Diet Coke, then filmed the geysers that resulted.  The videos went viral and brought instant internet fame to Grobe and Voltz, and sparked imitators all across the world to start buying Mentos and Diet Coke for their own ‘experiments’.

But the two companies that make Mentos and Diet Coke had decidedly different reactions to this sudden fanfare.  While Mentos completely embraced this playful activity (and the surge in visibility that it gave their candy), Coke all but chided their customers for ‘playing’ with their product, when they should be drinking it.  Eventually, Coke realized that their customers weren’t going to stop ‘playing’ with Coke, and tried to launch their own version of these videos in the form of a contest on their own site.  Of course, the popularity of this move paled in comparison to the original videos created by Grobe and Voltz.

Yet on the other hand, Mentos scored a big payday as a result of the videos, seeing sales spike 20% in 2006, the largest such increase for the company at the time.  Mentos realized that ultimately their customers were buying and enjoying their product, so they embraced them for doing so.

How far would your company go to embrace its fans?

Pic via Flickr user PearlyV

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#Optsum Review: Social Media isn’t the only cool kid in town anymore

At one point on Thursday during her session at Optimization Summits in Dallas, CK mentioned a type of technology and how marketers could utilize it effectively.  Then she mentioned another, and the audience was so enthralled that an hour-long discussion on just these tools commenced.

Was she talking Twitter?  Facebook?  Blogs? Hell no, she was talking QR codes and Geo-Fencing.

Want more? Chris Penn was talking email marketing, Geno Church was talking creating customer evangelist movements. Even those of us that did discuss social media, did so in the context of combining it with other areas.  Jason Falls talked about improving the SEO of your company blog, I talked about learning from rockstars to use social media to cultivate brand advocates.

This is one of the things I loved about #Optsum, Tami put together a stellar speaking lineup.  Yes, I am probably biased since I am friends with most of these speakers, but I learned something new in EVERY session I sat in.  And you have to remember that most of these speakers I had already heard before.  But they brought something completely new to the table for attendees, and gave them a completely new way of thinking about improving their marketing efforts.  In fact I would rank the speaking lineup at this event on par with Social South 2009 and the first Digital Marketing Mixer in 2008 as being the best group of speakers at any event I’ve attended.

The sessions were all engaging, and the speakers made a point of getting the audience involved.  Most of the sessions were fairly well-attended, even though there were up to 8 tracks available for some slots.  More on that in a moment.

The content was top-notch, and the speakers were excellent.  At the end of the day, that’s probably the most important factor in determining if an event was worth your time.

Here are the things I didn’t like about #Optsum, and I want to mention these to help other event planners in organizing similar events.  But I should point out that Tami has been interacting with attendees and based on their feedback, will likely improve most or all of these points for the next event.  Which is another reason why Tami rocks!

First, #Optsum was running alongside Brainstorming, which is a much larger event aimed primarily at the Apartment industry.  #Optsum usually had 4 tracks going at once, and if Brainstorming did as well (as it did for much of Thurs), then attendees had to choose between EIGHT tracks, assuming they bought tickets to both.  I noticed higher attendance in the sessions on Friday, and I am sure this factored into it.

Second, I hated the layout of the hotel.  It was absolutely huge, so big that it covered two adjacent blocks.  Which meant that knowing that the session you wanted to go to was on the 1st floor wasn’t enough, you also needed to know which side of the street on the 1st floor it was!  Which made for a LOT of running around.  And the directions posted in the hotel weren’t very helpful and the maps were very hard to read.  This wasn’t really Tami’s fault, it was a byproduct of the Sheraton just being too damn big and confusing.

Other than those two areas, the event itself was wonderful and at $500 or so for admission, it was an absolute steal of a bargain for attendees for 2 days of learning.  And I have to say that Tami and her team did a fabulous job working with me as a speaker to get me to the event on time, on coordinating all my travel, and everything.  In fact it was probably the best experience I have had so far with event organizers.

Below is the deck from my Think Like a Rockstar workshop.  I was proud to say that the session was very well-received, and the deck itself was the biggest I’ve ever made.  If you attended, thank you SO much for doing so, I was thrilled with the turnout, I believe the room was full by the time the session got started.

All in all, I would heartily recommend #Optsum to anyone that is considering it, and if Tami asks me to speak at the next one, I would accept in a second.  It was a wonderfully informative and valuable event, and I honestly didn’t hear one negative word about any of the speakers or sessions, which is actually quite rare.

If you attended #Optsum, what did you think?

View more presentations from Mack Collier.

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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?