MackCollier.com

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Overcoming the curse of Hi-Res Blogging

Kathy Sierra has often talked about the idea of Hi-Res learning.  The idea being, as you learn more about a topic, you begin to see and notice things that people that are new to the topic, overlook.  For example, if you are an architect, you notice the lines of a building, the characteristics that define the structure in certain ways.  While all I notice are 4 walls and a roof.

And after almost 5 years, I think I could qualify myself as a ‘hi-res blogger’.  But that’s often a problem for me, and the actual blogging process is much more difficult for me than it was when I started.  The reason why is that I now KNOW what a good post and a good post title should look like.  I know (usually) when a post I’ve written will be valuable to the reader, and when it might not be.  So I am finding that the biggest problem I have in blogging isn’t writer’s block, it’s in writing posts that are ‘good enough’ and that I feel will be valuable to you guys.  So often I get an idea for a post, but once I start fleshing out the post, I realize that I can’t make it worth your time, so I scrap it.

But I’m trying to get better about fighting through this and actually making drafts work, instead of abandoning them.  Since some of you might be facing the same roadblocks, I decided to share what has worked for me.

1 – Put a new spin on an old idea.  A couple of weeks ago I wrote this post on why Lady Gaga has fans, and you don’t.  The post has gotten more RTs than any post I’ve ever written here, and it easily has the most views of any post I’ve written in the last month, and is in the Top 5 for all-time here.  And I came THIS close to not publishing it.  The actual ideas in that post are ones that I’ve written about several times.  In fact, the first dozen or so posts I wrote for The Viral Garden back in early 2006 focused on the same concepts.  I knew these were smart ideas, but when I blogged about them previously, they got a polite golf-clap of a response.

But by attaching the ultra-popular Lady Gaga to the ideas, and tying it into the rockstar metaphor of customers/fans, the idea took off.  Gaga’s name in the title got people’s attention, and that got them to pay attention to the ideas.  And I got more compliments on that post that any other in the last few weeks.  So I guess another lesson here is, don’t give up on an idea whose time has come.

2 – Pull back the curtain.  One of the things I love doing is sharing with you what I am learning here from my own blog.  I do this because I think it has value for you, PLUS, it communicates the point that even experienced bloggers don’t have all the answers.  This was exactly why I wanted to share the results of my one-day Twitter experiment with you, and then the results for the entire week.  And yes, I get that a lot of bloggers don’t like to share their numbers.  Look, I get that many bloggers have bigger numbers that I do. Who cares?  What’s important to me is, can I share my numbers with YOU, and help you improve your own blogging efforts?  If I think the answer is yes, I run with it.

3 – Let your readers bail you out.  This is one of the best blogging lessons I ever learned.  Often, I will have an idea for a post, and realize that I’m not confident enough in the issue to take a stand on either side.  If this is the case, instead of scrapping the post till I can, I will try to post it and ask my readers what THEY think.  Great way to let your readers claim ownership over the content of your blog AND their ideas are usually better than any you could have come up with.  At least they are if your readers are as smart as you guys 😉

4 – Let a popular post breathe. Ideally, I would have a new post up every day from Monday through Friday.  But that’s REALLY tough for me to do.  And sometimes when Wednesday morning comes around (like today), and it’s 8 am and I am trying to get up a post for the day, I’ll notice something.  That post from Tuesday has sparked a vibrant conversation and is still getting comments and RTs.  So if I don’t have a great post idea for Wednesday, then wait till Thursday to post again, and do your best to keep the conversation flowing on that post from Wednesday.

5 – Sometimes you just have to post it.  How often has this happened to you; The post you spend a week carefully crafting gets almost no response, but the post you pecked out in 5 mins after waking up at 3am from insomnia, THAT thing gets 30 comments.  Sometimes we overthink this blogging stuff.  I often do my best writing after midnight, and I think part of the reason why is I just let the words flow out and don’t worry so much about the ‘filters’ that they pass through.  The chips fall where they may, and a lot of my best blogging work has come about this way.

But for you, which is your bigger problem; writer’s block, or not writing posts that are ‘good enough’ for your readers?  For me, it’s the latter, I can get post ideas, but I often struggle to turn those ideas into something that I think has value for y’all.

Which is your bigger problem area?

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Here’s how you can help me

If you’ve read my writings for any amount of time, you know I love the rockstar metaphor as it applies to how companies can have fans as opposed to customers.  And I’m a big fan of how @amandapalmer connects with her fans and leverages those connections to grow her brand.  Yesterday I found this interview with her, and noted this section where she talks about musicians making money:

I think asking for money is generally considered shameful in the art and music world; it has been for ages. Art has this untouchable romanticism constructed around it; this cultural ideal about artists and how they shouldn’t touch money because it strips away the integrity of their art. But that’s obviously bullshit, especially if you look throughout history and see that artists have ALWAYS needed to fund themselves and their work creatively, sneakily, with gusto and with shamelessness. The only mistake I think I’ve made is not making the connection sooner. I think I was still living in the delusion back when we signed. Living inside this idea that we, as major-label-artists, would get to live on the Special Cloud of Art without Commerce. If I’d been thinking ahead, I would have been training and educating our audience from the very start to support us directly.

In reading that, do you see any parallels to bloggers/etc making money off social media? I sure do.  I think this is one of the biggest roadblocks for many of us that are active in social media: The fear of self-promotion.  Just in discussing the results of last week’s Twitter engagement experiment with others, so many people have told me that they never thought to tweet their new posts to Twitter, or that they could never do it more than once.

Folks I was tweeting a link to each day’s post 4-5 times every day on Twitter.  Not one person said a word about it.  Now I’m not saying that we should all suddenly turn into pimp machines for our content and brands, but I do think we need to get over some of our hangups about self-promotion.  We need to learn to ask for help, because most times our readers and the friends we have connected with WANT to help us.

So I want to practice what I preach, and do that here.  Here are some ways that you can help me, and I would really appreciate if you did:

1 – Hire me to help you with your social media efforts.  Or if you don’t need help right now, refer me to a friend or colleague that does.  If you need help creating and executing a comprehensive social media strategy, launching a blog or Twitter presence, or just need someone to look over your shoulder from time to time, I can help.  No matter how much help you need, or how little your budget is, I can find a way to work with you.  If you do, please email me at [email protected].

2 – If you’ve been thinking about starting a blog, ‘Just Do It’.  My friend Lisa Petrilli finally pulled the trigger on her blog last week, and her results have been nothing short of amazing.  In fact, her very personal post from today about asking a stranger for help partially inspired this post.

3 – When you learn something, share it with us. Every time I write a post where I share this blog’s stats, or where I talk openly about my prices, I get two types of reactions.  The first group is grateful that I gave them a ‘behind the scenes’ look at exactly what I did, and that it helped them understand the process.  The second group is stunned that I ‘shared the numbers’, and wonder if I made a mistake in doing so.  Guys, I understand completely that a lot of people looked at my posts from last week and thought ‘Whoa!  So Mack’s only getting that many visitors a day? I get more than that!’  Of course they do, so what?  If sharing my stats with you helps you understand exactly what I did AND helps you with YOUR blogging efforts, then I could care less who knows what my numbers are.  I’d rather be spending my time helping you, than worrying over who might have more visitors than I do.

4 – If you get value from my posts, please share them with others.  You can do this in two ways.  The first is by simply sharing the content itself with others, by forwarding it, RTing it to your Twitter network, or even emailing the posts to friends.  The second is by taking what you’ve learned here, and using it to help your own blogging efforts.  This is what excites me, if I can help you become a better blogger or better use social media to create value for others.

5 – Start the next #blogchat.  This week we had over 3,000 tweets and over 350 active contributors to #blogchat.  Both marks were records, almost doubling the previous marks.  Starting #blogchat has been one of the most rewarding endeavors of my social media career.  Think about some ways that you could create something that can help others, and run with it.  Then tell me about your efforts so I can tweet it to my friends 😉

6 – If you are ever at an event where I am attending/speaking, please find me.  Let me know that you read my posts, so I can shake your hand and tell you how grateful I am for you.  I’m dead serious here.

Those are some ways that you can help me.  Actually, there’s one more way you can help me: You can write this same post on YOUR blog. Tell your readers how they can help you, and my guess is they will be more than happy to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway what were the numbers?!?

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

# of posts for the week – 4

Average Traffic per day – 168 visitors

Average ReTweets per post – 59

Average Comments per post – 12

Average new Twitter followers per day – 37

Total new Email Subscribers for the week – 3

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

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

Average traffic per day – 647 (285% increase)

Average ReTweets per post – 82 (39% increase)

Average Comments per post – 26 (117% increase)

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

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

Now here are some random observations:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the hourly traffic for Monday:

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

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

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

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

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

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

In looking at Thursday’s traffic notice two things:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A big secret to social media success that most companies miss

If you think about it, a lot of the ‘best practices’ for using social media can seem completely counterintuitive to companies that are new to these tools.  Take linking, for example.  On the surface, the process sounds absurd: I’m spending time every day as a social media consultant purposely promoting what OTHER people are writing, doing and saying about social media.  And what’s worse, I’m using this as a strategy to increase my OWN exposure!

How many companies would balk if you suggested that they promote their competitors, and as a way to promote YOUR company?

But funnily enough, it works amazingly well.  Here’s why:

1 – As I am sharing valuable links, more people will start paying attention to me, and even following me as a result.  They share my links with THEIR networks as well, which means more exposure and followers for me.

2 – This means more people will want to find out more about me, and will check out my site.  This means more traffic for me, and more exposure for me.  BTW it also means that when I share a link to one of MY posts, that it will get more traffic and exposure!

3 – The people that I am linking to see that I am sending all these RTs and traffic to their site, and they are grateful.  That in turn makes them more likely to promote ME in return.  Which means more followers and more traffic and more exposure for me.

4 – By sharing valuable content, I can become a TRUSTED source of information.  This makes people more likely to promote me to their networks.  Which means even more followers and traffic and exposure for me.

And now that you’ve gotten to the end, I can give you my REAL reason for adopting this strategy: I want to create value for others.  That’s the TOP goal, because I know if I am creating value for others by pointing them toward writings by other people that HELP them with their own social media efforts, I win.  Creating value is the DIRECT goal, because I know if I will do that, I will benefit INdirectly.  And it works beautifully.

More people will follow me because I am sharing valuable links.

More people will trust me because I am sharing valuable content that OTHER people are creating.

More people will be grateful for those links, and be more likely to link TO ME.

More people will be grateful for those links, and want to check out my site.

So in the end by promoting OTHER people, even competitors, I get more followers, more links, more traffic, and more exposure.

Whole process sounds completely insane, doesn’t it? 😉

PS: I will have data to back up the effectiveness of this strategy in a post on Sunday, be watching for it!

BTW if you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing so you can have posts from this blog sent to your reader for free! Or if you would rather have posts emailed to you, please enter your email in the Feedburner email form above. I will never share your email with anyone! Thank you!

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I threw a (Twitter) party and all these strangers showed up…

A fascinating series of conversations (and a couple of arguments) sprung up on Twitter last nite about managing your followers.  Some people, like my good friend Beth Harte are considering ‘resetting’ their Twitter account.  Beth’s rationale is that she wants to get back to following fewer people, and having strong connections with the people she does follow.  She lamented the fact that she doesn’t know most of the people that follow her, and have no idea why they are.

I have to admit, I have the same issue.

But while we were having this discussion on Twitter, Linda left this tweet:

That was the first time I can ever remember Linda sending me a message, and I followed her as soon as she did.  And Linda’s tweet explains perfectly why I could never reset my account.  If it meant unfollowing 99 spammers and 1 person such as Linda, who is following me because she gets value from my tweets, then it’s not worth it.

This is why I believe in following people back liberally, and then pruning followers later if they end up being spammers. And I guess I have always seen the power in the ‘little guy’, and I know that far too often, today’s little guy is tomorrow’s Chris Brogan.  Also as an introvert, I understand that just because someone isn’t connecting with me, doesn’t mean that they don’t WANT to.  They may just be looking for the opening that makes them feel comfortable doing so.

So moving forward, I am going to grow my Twitter network by liberally following back people that follow me, and following anyone that either RTs me, or replies to me.  The only exception would be someone would someone that’s an obvious spammer.  I think that method means I am following the people that are engaged in the type of activity I want to encourage.

What about you?  How do you manage your network on Twitter?  Would you be willing to reset your account and start over?  I will say this: I would be completely in favor of Twitter removing all mention of how many followers someone has from the site.  It’s mainly there to stroke egos, and doing so would make the site less attractive to those that are simply there to pad their numbers.

BTW if you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing so you can have posts from this blog sent to your reader for free! Or if you would rather have posts emailed to you, please enter your email in the Feedburner email form above. I will never share your email with anyone! Thank you!

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My one-day Twitter engagement experiment

As many of you do, I use Twitter as a tool to build awareness for my blog, and to increase traffic.  In fact the site is the top referring site for this blog, and has been since Day One.

Usually, I spent anywhere from 30 mins to a couple of hours on Twitter a day.  My activities include sharing links (here and to other sites), and interacting with others.  Recently, I’ve been spending less time on Twitter, and am averaging about 600-700 tweets a month for the past few months.  But when you consider that about 300-400 of those tweets come from #blogchat, that means that I’m not spending a lot of time during the week on Twitter.

So I wanted to conduct a little experiment yesterday with my Twitter usage.  I decided to amp up my usage, spending several hours, sharing dozens of links, and interacting with others all day.  I wanted to see how big of an impact it would make on this blog, and my Twitter network, versus the time required.  To measure the effectiveness of this strategy, I set four goals for Monday:

100 new Twitter followers (Avg is 20-50 per day)

75 retweets on Monday’s post (Avg is around 30 per post)

5 new email subscribers (Avg is 5 new subscribers in a MONTH)

300 visitors to this blog on Monday (Avg is around 150)

I wanted to first walk you through exactly what I did during the day.

First, over the weekend I set up HootSuite to tweet a link to a new post/article every 5 mins, starting at 7am, and ending at 9am.  At 8am, I linked to yesterday’s post for the first time.  I linked to yesterday’s post a total of 5 times yesterday, starting at 8am, then every 3 hours, ending at 8pm.

So as far as sharing links, on Monday I shared a total of 36 links, 6 were my own, 30 were other sites.  So that’s a 5:1 ratio of other people’s links to my own.

I left a total of 182 tweets on Monday, and for reference, I left 711 tweets in all of April.

Now let’s look at the actual results:

For new followers, the goal was 100, and I actually got 75.  That’s not bad and well above my avg, but still missed the mark.  I think the discussions that I was engaged in throughout the day probably played a role in helping get me followers, although the links at the beginning of the day helped as well.

The second goal was to get 75 retweets of Monday’s post.  I actually got 85 RTs.  I decided to link to Monday’s post 5 times during the day in order to drive more RTs.  I think this was effective in the morning and afternoon, but seemed to be less effective at 5pm and 8pm.  Tomorrow I am only going to link to Tuesday’s post 4 times, at 8am, 12pm, 4pm and 8pm.  I’m thinking that 2-4 times per day is probably the right range for linking to your new posts.

The third goal was 5 new email subscribers, and I actually got 5 new subscribers.  I did two things to try to encourage new email subscribers.  The first is I moved the email subscription form to the top of the blog on the first sidebar.  The second thing I did was ask readers that found the post to please subscribe, either by email or reader, and linked to the Feedburner reader subscription form.

The final goal was 300 visitors to the site on Monday, and there were actually 716 visitors, which was well over double the goal.  I was a bit surprised by how high the traffic was.  However, I wanted to show you the hourly traffic to point out two things:

First, notice that the 5 spikes in traffic came during hours that I linked to the ‘How I got 20,000 followers on Twitter’ post.  That’s understandable.

Second, notice that each spike is followed by a sharp drop-off in traffic immediately after.  But also notice that the drop-offs are much more pronounced after the 3rd, 4th and 5th times I link to the post.

Also notice that the traffic jumps from 6am to 7am.  At 7am is when I started sending links to Twitter via HootSuite, and did so every 5 mins till it stopped at 9am.  So the fact that traffic jumped a bit BEFORE I started linking to the ‘How I got 20K followers’ posts at 8am suggests that simply linking to OTHER people’s posts was actually driving traffic back to MY blog.

And from around 11am-3pm I was interacting with other people on Twitter.  This corresponds with the above graph and the sudden traffic drop-off that you see from 4pm through the end of the day when I wasn’t interacting very much.  Minus the two spikes at 5pm and 8pm from my tweeting links to the ‘How I got 20K followers’ post.

So ALL of this suggests that three actions drove traffic back to this blog yesterday:

1 – Linking to the ‘How I got 20K followers’ post five times.

2 – Linking to other people’s posts a total of 30 times.

3 – Participating in conversations on Twitter.

The first is obvious, but I think the second two are very interesting because by directly promoting others and interacting with others, it seems I was also giving people the incentive to check out my site.

But I think the biggest lesson here is to track and test your social media efforts constantly.  Even with this experiment, I will need to test further to  get a better idea of exactly what happened. And it remains to be seen how much of a cumulative affect spending this much time on Twitter EVERY day, could have. I got great results from yesterday’s experiment, but I probably invested 5-6 hours into it. That’s a big chunk of time to invest even every weekday, and the results would need to be pretty significant to justify the time investment, I think.

BTW if you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing so you can have posts from this blog sent to your reader for free! Or if you would rather have posts emailed to you, please enter your email in the Feedburner email form above. I will never share your email with anyone! Thank you!

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How I got 20,000 followers on Twitter

Last week I hit a milestone on Twitter, reaching 20,000 followers.  Plenty of people, myself included, have said that your follower number isn’t as important as it’s made out to be.  I think the term ‘follower’ implies that 20,000 people are actively attempting to engage with me.  In reality, I would guess it’s only a small fraction, possibly as low as 1%.

But I know many people on Twitter want more followers, so I decided to share what I’ve learned in the last 3 years of using the site:

1 – Be helpful.  I use Twitter primarily as a tool to connect with others.  As such, I am always looking for ways to share something of value with others.  Twitter, most than any other social media tool I use, works amazingly well as a networking tool, and that’s primarily how I use it.

Thing of it this way; what if you were at an offline networking event in a room of 100 potential employers.  What if you could show everyone in that room one thing that would make them more productive the next day?  At the very least, you would suddenly have 100 potential employers telling each other about what a great guy/gal you were for helping them.

But what’s more powerful than that, you wouldn’t have to go around the room promoting yourself to everyone, they would be telling each other about you.

Sidenote: I swear as I typed that out I switched to Tweetdeck to check my replies, and this one just came in on Twitter:

2 – Connect with people that want to connect with you.  I am continually refining and changing how I use Twitter.  Currently, I place a premium on following anyone that either RTs or replies to me.  Because they are engaging in the type of behavior that I want to ‘reward’.  I want to interact and engage with as many people as possible on Twitter, so when people are trying to connect with me, I want to encourage that.

3 – Introduce people of value to your network.  One of the things I love to do is meet interesting people and help them connect with the people I already know.  One reason is because I am appreciative for this person, and another is that I know my network will value from their insights, so it’s also a way to say ‘thanks’ to my existing network.

4 – Help people get started.  I *love* helping people get their feet wet either with Twitter, or blogging, or social media in general.  More than once I’ve had someone tell me they were grateful for my trying to help them, that others just ‘told me I was doing it wrong’.  We need to remember that we have all been newbies at one time, and if you help someone take their first steps, they will be even more grateful down the road.

5 – Give back to your network.  Look for ways to show your network that you appreciate and value them.  For me, #blogchat is a good example of this.  I try to use #blogchat as a tool to help others become better personal/professional/business bloggers.

6 – Promote others.  Complete no-brainer.  As I write this post, HootSuite is sending a tweet every 5 mins with links to posts that I picked over the weekend that I thought my network would value.  My network is then RTing these posts to THEIR networks, and when I publish this post in a few minutes, it’s probably going to be RTed a few more times by the people that saw me link to their posts, and my network, which is (hopefully) appreciative of the great links I have been sharing with them this morning.

The upshot of all this is obviously, I use Twitter as a way to help others.  But there still needs to be a financial gain for me as a consultant, or else this is all a hobby.

Last year I made more income on a yearly basis than I have in my life, and roughly 50% of that income came from sources that I connected with via Twitter.  Within the last 12 hours I have received both work and speaking invitations from people via Twitter.

As with most areas of social media, Twitter is a great way to make things happen indirectly.  Help others and create something of value for your network, and your network will attempt to return the favor.  At least that’s how it’s worked for me.

Those are my tips for getting more followers on Twitter.  What’s working for you?

PS: I thought I should clarify the timeline for how I reached 20,000.  Simply to make the point that it took me a long time.

As of the fall of 2007, I had about 100 followers.  I started really ramping up my Twitter usage in December of 2007, and by March of 2008 I had about 500 followers.

I had almost 7,000 followers by March of 2009, and am at 20K now.  I add about 20-50 followers a day, on average.

BTW if you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing so you can have posts from this blog sent to your reader for free!  Or if you would rather have posts emailed to you, please enter your email in the Feedburner email form above.  I will never share your email with anyone!  Thank you!

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The introvert’s guide to speaking

I wrote a bit about this in the last post at The Viral Garden but the first social media event I ever spoke at was SXSW in 2008.

Think about that for a moment; Here I am, an introvert that hasn’t spoken in a public setting for 5 years previously, and I am making my social media speaking debut at the Super Bowl of ‘social media’ conferences. I was scared to death, and the funny thing is, if this had been a smaller event, I probably wouldn’t have gone through with it. But since it was SXSW it was ‘too big’ to ignore. I knew that being able to say I spoke at SXSW was too important to not have on my ‘speaking’ resume.

So I bit the bullet, and did it anyway. Now 2 years later, I have gone from being an introvert that’s scared to death of speaking publicly, to an introvert that actually LOVES it. For any introverts out there that want to start speaking, here’s what I learned to make me more comfortable with the process:

During the creation process:

1 – KNOW your material, do NOT memorize it. Extroverts are just naturally chatty people, right? They are more comfortable ad-libing and making ‘small talk’, it seems. I think we introverts want to more carefully plan out our presentations, so we know exactly what to say.

But the big problem with that approach is that we can come off VERY stiff, and look as if we are reciting to the audience. Nothing turns off an audience quicker than a speaker that’s disengaged.

So here’s what I do. When I have created a deck and am ready to start rehearsing my presentation, I will carefully script out my session, so I know exactly what I want to say, and when I want to say it. I’ll do this about 5 times so I have pretty much memorized the material, and the key points I want to make.

At this point, I throw the script away. And I keep rehearsing the presentation without it. I also break up the flow, if I have 5 points I have been rehearsing in order, I’ll now do them in a different order, just to force myself to break away from the script and actually TALK about the points I want to make, instead of reciting them. I’ll even be in the middle of rehearsing a point and will cut myself off as if someone asked a question, then after a minute or so I’ll try to remember where I was and go back.

In the end you want your presentation to be a conversation with the audience. You want to KNOW the material. Because something will ALWAYS happen to throw you off base. If you KNOW the material, you can get back on track, but if you don’t, then you’re in trouble.

2 – Tell stories. Everyone has case studies, and everyone has numbers that back up the points they are trying to make. Big deal. What you want to do is weave those case studies and numbers into a story. A story that is entertaining, but that also shows the attendees why and how Company X used social media, and gives them actionable takeaways for how they can take what Company X learned, and apply it to their own situation.

When you arrive at the event:

3 – Find the room where you will be presenting, and get a feel for the layout. Walk around the room. Make sure you know where everything is, where your laptop will be setup, where all the jacks are. Will you have a mic, will it be a clip-on or standalone? Walk around the room. Sit in some of the chairs and make sure the audience can see you from everywhere in the room. Simply familiarizing yourself with the room beforehand really helps, especially for an introverted soul 😉

And try to attend sessions in the SAME room before yours. This gives you a chance to see how other speakers do. Are there some problems with the audio/video? Watch how the audience reacts to the session and the speaker. What does the speaker do that gets their attention, what does she do that they don’t like? Incorporate what you learn into your own session and delivery.

4 – Attend any pre-show meetups/tweetups. Most conferences will have a tweetup/meetup the night before the event kicks off. This is an excellent chance for you to connect with speakers and attendees. Try to connect with the attendees, especially the ones that will be attending your session. If you meet someone that’s planning on attending, ask them what they are hoping to learn, and why they are interested in the topic. And this also gives you a way to incorporate that into your talk. Like “Now let’s talk about getting more comments on your blog. I was actually talking to Carla last nite in the lobby about her blog…:” Suddenly Carla and all her friends at her table will immediately perk up and pay attention (if they weren’t already).

5 – Get to your session at least 15 mins early, so you have time to setup everything. This gives you plenty of time to get the laptop connected, your deck ready to go, and make a last-second bathroom run. Also, make sure you have a glass of water on hand. You’re going to be talking for 30-90 mins probably, and if you’re like me, you WILL be nervous, so not having dry-mouth helps 😉

If you have any extra time before you start, what I like to do is walk around the room and introduce myself to some of the attendees and thank them for coming. Good way to connect with them, and increases the chances that they will pay attention during my session.

Oh and one extra tip, if you are SUPER nervous right before you are to speak, eat a couple of saltine crackers, it will help settle your stomach and calm down the butterflies.

During your presentation:

6 – Thank everyone for showing up and MEAN IT. When I spoke at #optsum a couple of months ago, I was a bit worried about the topic, which was Think Like a Rockstar: How to Build Fans and Community Around Your Social Media Efforts. I was afraid that it might not be what the audience (mostly property managers and apartment complex owners) was looking for, and was a bit worried about how well it would be received.

Somewhat to my shock, the session was literally standing room only, and we were still bringing in chairs to accommodate everyone 5 mins into the session. I was beyond grateful for the turnout, especially considering the caliber of the other speakers and sessions at that time slot, and made sure everyone knew how appreciative I was.

7 – Let the audience know exactly what’s coming. Tell them exactly what you will be talking about, the exact order of the talk, and tell them how they can get involved. Most sessions have a talk, then questions at the end. I generally encourage the audience to ask questions as they think of them, rather than waiting for them to wait till the end, when they might forget the question. But if you do this, you need to be mindful if the question-asking is cutting into presentation time. If you realize that after the 5th of 23 slides that you’ve just spent 10 mins answering questions, then you probably need to tell the audience that you need to move on at that point.

8 – Move around. At one of the first events I spoke at, the speakers were provided a podium up on stage, above the crowd, with lights shining down on them. No matter what they were talking about, having them chained to that podium having to stand in one spot behind a microphone made the session seem less interesting. The audience seemed less interested as well, I think the unintentional message that the format sent was ‘this is a lecture’.

When it came time for my talk, I told the organizer ‘You’ve got to mic me up, I can’t stay up there’. So I was the first speaker that didn’t present from a podium on stage. I was down eye-level with the audience, away from the lights, and interacting with the audience. The guy that was in charge of videotaping the sessions didn’t like it, but by simply being ‘ground-level’, the audience perked up. They paid attention, and that made them more engaged.

One thing I also like to do is get to the CENTER of the room. I’m sorry, but I just hate staying in front of a group for an hour. Chris Brogan had a great point one time about the difference between an audience and a community is the way the chairs face. I want to spend some time in the middle, interacting with people where they are.

9 – Realize that you WILL screw up, and likely no one will notice. Remember my first point about knowing your material, and not memorizing it? Here’s an example where I screwed that up. In preparing to moderate that first session at SXSW in 2008, I made a COMPLETE script of what I would say to each panelist. I knew the exact questions to ask, etc. I even made two scripts, one was detailed, and the other was a ‘loose’ script to keep me on track. I kept the detailed one to my left and the loose one to my right.

So as our session started, I set the groundwork for what we would be talking about, and the format of the session, closely following my very detailed notes. All was going off without a hitch.

Then I moved to introducing the panelists, and went back to my detailed list, and carefully started reading off who each panelist was. Then….it happened. I read the bio for one of the panelists off my detailed list, and looked up at the crowd to tell them about the panelist. Then when I looked back down…..I looked at the ‘loose’ script, instead of the ‘detailed’ one. I was expecting to see the detailed bio for Mario that I could read off, and instead I saw ‘Introduce Mario’.

At this point, I was completely confused, and after what seemed like 20 years (in actuality it was probably a couple of seconds), I realized I had stopped talking, and mild (read: OH SHIT!!!!) panic set in. After another second or two of literally being scared to death, I finally found my place in the script, and went on. The rest of the session went off without a hitch.

But the FIRST thing I did as soon as the session ended was apologize to my fellow panelists for the disaster I made during introductions with that seemingly 5 min pregnant pause. They had no idea what I was talking about. So I assumed they were just being nice, so I found a few people that attended the session and asked them about it, and they didn’t know what I was talking about either.

So in reality, I thought I had totally ruined the session 2 mins into it, over an ‘error’ that apparently no one noticed but me. That’s usually the way it goes when you are speaking, and I think introverts take even minor mistakes much more seriously than extroverted speakers. But the reality is, most people won’t even notice them.

10 – Engage with the people that are engaged with you. Another big advantage to knowing your material is that you can talk about it, and while you are, you can connect with the audience. I spend time looking around the room as I am speaking to see who I am connecting with. The woman at the front left table that nods along when I make a point. The guy in the middle right table that laughs when I tell a joke. If they are paying attention to me, I am paying attention to them. And they see this, and that makes them more interested in what I am saying.

11 – Close the presentation by thanking the audience for coming (and mean it), then tell them how to get in touch with you. This is where you can pimp yourself and your site. Make sure the audience understands that you want the session to be the START of a connection between you and them, not the end. Encourage them to email you if they have any questions, and I always give out my Twitter name and tell the attendees to please follow me, and I will follow them back.

12 – Let the audience ask questions. Even if it means you cut your presentation short, the audience deserves to ask you questions. And this is a little trick I picked up (actually it’s more about being considerate of your audience), but if someone in the BACK of the room asks you a question, walk TO that person and answer them. First, this keeps them from having to shout at you, and two, it means you don’t have to shout your answer back at them. Also, it makes other audience members around her more likely to ask you a question as well.

Doing things like this and thanking the audience for coming might seem trite, but by doing this you are showing the audience that you care about them, and are genuinely grateful that they came. This makes them far more likely to pay attention to you, and be interested in both you AND what you have to say. Simple common courtesy goes a long way.

After the event:

13 – Stay connected. One of the first things I will do is check feedback on Twitter. I will thank those that leave feedback, and pay close attention to what they are saying. Which points resonated with them. Did I do something that someone didn’t like? Did a particular story really hit home for attendees?

But the bottom line is that I am living proof that introverts can not only have successful speaking careers, but that you can learn to ENJOY it. Seriously if you had told me in high school and college that I would love speaking, I would have thought you were insane. But I really do, and I think you can as well. Fellow introverts, what tips for speaking do you have?

Pic via Jeremiah

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Forget optimizing for Google’s search engine, are you optimized for MY search engine?

When I travel I am obsessive about having all my paperwork and directions in place beforehand.  I even print out two copies of my boarding passes.  So last fall when I was traveling to Chicago to speak at the Marketing Profs Digital Marketing Mixer, I knew exactly what to do.  Fly into Chicago, leave the airport, go across the street to the shuttles, find the one for Hyatt, and they would whisk me off to my hotel.  No problem.

I land, leave the airport, find the Hyatt shuttle, get on board and then get the bad news.  Apparently there are TWO Hyatts in the area, and I don’t know which one I need!

So I fire up Social Scope on my Bold and ask my buddies on Twitter if anyone knows which Hyatt is hosting the Mixer.  A few friends are kind enough to tweet me replies that tell me which one it is.  Awesome!

Then someone sends me a DM with the name of the Hyatt I need, as well as its address and phone number!  And the phone number shows up as a link I can click on and dial directly from my phone.

Whoa.

As valuable a tool as Google’s search engine is, it would be impossible for it to do a better job of getting me the information I needed right then, than my network on Twitter.  This is the new reality for businesses that are attempting to reach a customer base that is increasingly hyper-connected, and in turn utilizing those connections to turn inward for its information needs.

Our search engine is no longer Google, it’s our own social networks.

So if you’re a business that’s invested in SEO, how can you connect with your customers if they are increasingly turning to each other instead of a search engine?  Here’s some ideas:

1 – Understand WHY we use social search over search engines.  For the most part, we turn to our networks when we want real-time information.  Help, advice, etc.  For example, if I’m about to go see a movie, I might tweet my followers to ask them if Iron Man 2 lived up to the hype or not.  Or if I’m at an event, I might look for the event’s #hashtag on Twitter of Facebook page to see who’s attending and maybe where everyone is headed after the days sessions are over.

What can you do? Help people find you.  If you’re planning an event, make sure you create a hashtag for the event and communicate that early on to everyone.  Because if you don’t, the attendees will pick their own, and it might not be the one you want.  Publicize your social sites at your business and post new information about your products and events at these sites.

2 – Be accessible and be responsive.  If your customers are connecting via social media, then you should be too.  But ‘being there’ isn’t enough, you have to find me.  If I mention you are your competitor, you need to be aware of that conversation, and jump in if you can.  Now that doesn’t mean you reply to every SINGLE brand mention, but if I mention your company and it’s obvious I am asking a question or wondering about something, there’s an invitation for you to reply and give me the information I am looking for.  At least.

What can you do?  Be aware, and be engaged.  Closely monitor online chatter about your brand, especially among the more popular social sites like Twitter and Facebook.  Interact where you can, but understand that there’s sometimes a fine line between being helpful, and being a pest.  View every brand mention as a chance to help, not to sell.

3 – Make it mobile.  As smartphones become cheaper and mobile devices like the iPad and Touch become more popular, more and more people will have a device with them that can send and receive data at all times.  And this ties back into the need to turn to our social networks for real-time information.  I may not have my laptop with me (or even if I do, there might not be an available wifi connection), but if I have my Bold with me, I have access to my social network, and can get information from them.  Or if I have an app, like say the Yelp app on my Bold, then I can use it to get restaurant reviews right from my phone.

What can you do?  Give me the ability to access your information on mobile devices.  Or give me information that I will need to have with me if I am out and about.  A good example of this could be a local news station that provides a smartphone app that will alert me via my phone when there’s severe weather in my area.  Or that will text me when there’s a weather warning in its viewing area.

4 – Have FUN with it!  Most of you have probably heard of FourSquare, the service that lets you communicate to your network where you are at any given time.  Jimmy Choo used FourSquare last month in London to have a real-time treasure hunt.  They had a pair of shoes ‘check in’ at various locations across the city, moving every few minutes.  The first person to ‘catch’ the shoes at their current location, won them!  Great example of taking an innovative approach to social media marketing, but also doing so in a way that entertains and excites customers!

What can you do?  Think about the ways that customers are using social media, and tap into the functionality of the tools when crafting your social media marketing.  Keeping with the location-based theme, you could do similar treasure hunts but instead of using FourSquare, you could use Flickr, posting different pictures of the location where the item is hidden.  Or tweet clues to where the prize is hidden.

What about you?  Have you noticed that you are turning to your social networks more for information instead of Google?  If companies have connected to you via your networks, how did they do so?

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Five non-bloggy ways to showcase your smarts via social media

One of the most popular reasons for using a blog as a professional or business tool, is to establish you or your company’s expertise.  A blog is perfectly suited as a place to create a knowledge base of content that lets others know just how smart and qualified you are.

But what if we take blogs out of the equation?  What other tools/ways could you establish your expertise via social media?  Here’s some ideas:

1 – Commenting on items shared in Google Reader.  Lately I am spending a LOT of time with Google Reader.  Specifically, I am spending more time checking out the items that are shared by the people I subscribe to in Reader.  Every day I read dozens of interesting and informative articles and posts from my friends.

But as I was reading these the other day, I noticed that only a small fraction of them had comments.  When you leave a comment on an item sharedin Reader, then that comment will be seen on the post/article by all the people that are following you.  For example, I have around 130 people following me on Reader.  If you see an item I shared, and then comment on it, that means that your comment can then be seen by those 130 people.  Or if the item is shared by more than one person, you can choose which ‘version’ you want to comment on.  Like if Chris Brogan shares the same item I do and has more followers than I do, comment on the version he shared!

This is a great way to expose yourself to a new audience!  Here’s a screenshot of a comment I left on a recent entry by Jay Baer.

2 – Answering questions on LinkedIn’s Q&A.  This not only helps establish your expertise BUT it also exposes you to a new audience.  From my experience, the people that are active on LinkedIn, usually are a bit different from the people that are active on Twitter or Facebook.  So if I go to LinkedIn, I’m not bumping into the same friends I see on Twitter and Facebook.  Another great thing about answering questions on LinkedIn is that it gives the person that asked the question  the ability to rate your answer as a good or best answer, and it gives them a chance to contact you directly.

For every 10 questions I answer on LinkedIn, I get 1 or 2 replies directly from the person that asked the question.  Think about that, if you answered 10 questions from 10 potential customers/clients, you could have 10-20% of them contact you directly about your answer.  That’s not too shabby!

3 – Participating in Twitter Chats.  Oh you knew this was coming!  Seriously, I think Twitter chats are an amazing networking tool, and very underutilized as such.  Now there are well over 100 chats, so there’s bound to be a few topics that interest you.  Pick some that interest you, and share your ideas.  Make sure you let chat participants know how to get in touch with you, and most chats now set aside a time so you can introduce yourself to the other participants.  And make sure you check out #blogchat every Sunday nite!

4 – Comment on industry sites and blogs.  This is a great way to get exposure, and again, with the ‘right people’.  For example, people that work at agencies are going to be reading stories on Ad Age’s site, right?  So if you wanted to work for an ad agency, leaving thoughtful and informative comments on the same entries that these agencies will be reading and sharing, can only help you get noticed, right?

And if it doesn’t help you get a job, who knows, it could help you get a writing gig!  This is exactly how I got my blogging career underway, I was active on a recruiter’s message board, that recruiter decided to start a blog, and invited me to be one of the founding writers!  The same thing could happen to you!

5 – Actively participate on a company’s Facebook page.  Here is the Marketing Profs’ page on Facebook.  If you were an active member of that page, leaving wall posts, interacting with other members, it could have several advantages.  First, it would be a way to establish your expertise.  Second, Marketing Profs is constantly having events, so it becomes a networking tool with attendees.  And three, Marketing Profs is constantly looking for writers, so by demonstrating your ability to write well, you can not only connect with potential clients/customers, you just might get the chance to do some writing for Marketing Profs!

You can extend this to participating on board for industries, or events, or companies you want to work for.  Anyone that you’re trying to connect with, and any group you’re trying to get the attention of.

Those are just a few ideas, but what has worked for you besides blogging?  What are some unusual ways that you are leveraging other social media tools to connect with others and share your smartitude?