MackCollier.com

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Where Have All The Great Thought Leadership Blogs Gone?

I had an interesting back and forth with Adam the other day on Twitter about his perception that ‘social media gurus’ don’t openly disagree or challenge each other’s thoughts.  I wanted to write a post about that, but then I realized that our discussion actually dovetailed a bit into another train of thought I’ve been having lately; Where have all the great thought leadership blogs gone?

2005 and 2006 was a magical time for me.  Not only was I discovering blogging for the first time, but I was also discovering some amazing bloggers and some profoundly provocative writing on the future of marketing.  Blogs like Horse Pig Cow, Gaping Void, Church of the Customer and Creating Passionate Users inspired me on a daily basis and their thoughts got my creative juices flowing and led to some/most of my best writing.

But around 2007 or 2008, the social media/marketing blogging space began to change.  We went from discussions largely around ‘What If…’ to ‘What Is’ when it came to social media and its impact on marketing.  At the time, this change was welcomed, I remember talk around 2007 or so that we ‘needed to stop talking theory, and start sharing real-world results if we want businesses to take social media seriously’.  By 2007 and 2008, a few innovative companies were starting to produce real case studies from their early social media efforts, and almost overnight, it seems as if we all stopped talking theory, and started embracing reality.

Which is good, to a degree.  It’s wonderful that we started incorporating ‘real world’ business examples into our writings.  But in the process, I think we went too far away from what made our writings so incredibly compelling to begin with.

We stopped asking ‘What If…’

The discussion around ‘Social Business’ has been nagging at me for a while now.  Last week, someone ( I wish I could remember where I saw it) said ‘What everyone is calling ‘Social Business’ seems to just be ‘Good Business’.  Exactly.  This was what was irritating me.  There’s nothing revolutionary or ‘bleeding edge’ about ‘Social Business’.  We just took the idea of running a ‘Good’ business and swapped in the ‘Social’ modifier, and it’s as if we slapped it in a Shiny Object wrapper.

Is it vitally important that companies facilitate collaboration between their employees?  That they find ways to better connect with their customers and they with the company?  That they have tighter connections and smarter conversations with their partners/vendors?

Yes, of course, and you betcha.  But all of those things were just as important in 1912 as they are in 2012.

Back to Adam’s point, somewhere along the line, I think we stopped publicly challenging and disagreeing with each other as much as we should.  Disagreeing with someone isn’t a bad thing (unless you are being disagreeable, there’s a BIG difference), and it encourages thought to have your ideas challenged.

I think we aren’t challenging and building on each other’s ideas like we once did.  As a result, I think the entire Social Media/Marketing blogosphere/whatever has become largely stagnant.  We haven’t run out of new ideas because there’s nothing new to talk about, we’ve run out of new ideas because we aren’t pushing each other to FIND those new ideas.

In 2005 and 2006 we had The Porous Membrane to explain why Corporate Blogging worked, we had Pinko Marketing to explain how customers were more empowered than ever and Influence Ripples to explain how ideas spread and bloggers become influential online.

Today we have ‘Why Your Business Should be a Social Business’, ‘How Pinterest is Killing (Insert SM site here)’, and ‘Klout Sucks’.

Seriously?

We need to do better.  Starting today, I promise to start asking ‘What If…’ here more often.  Sure, I may sometimes make a fool out of myself in the process (Because that doesn’t happen already ;)), but I think asking the occasional question is better than acting like you have all the answers.

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The Five-Year Engagement’s Blog Proves That Trying to Be Really Real Can Be Really Hard

Blogging, entertainment, Five Year Engagement, movie marketing

I found an interesting bit of movie marketing news yesterday on Emily’s blog.  She mentioned that the social media strategy for the April release The Five-Year Engagement includes a character blog!  I’ve blogged about this for literally five years, but I think character blogs can be an amazingly smart vehicle for movies and television shows.  Done right, it can be a completely immersive (did I just make up another word?) experience that extends the movie/show’s plot, and rewards its fans with a much deeper level of connection and engagement with the central characters.  Seriously, it’s low-hanging fruit that too many media companies completely miss.

So when I saw Tom and Violet’s Our Wedding Blog, I was pretty excited.  The blog is set up as a way for the movie’s two main characters to announce and walk their friends and family through their engagement and upcoming wedding.  The blog has a ton of posts up, written by both Tom and Violet, and so far there’s even a video Tom has created.

Here’s the problem:  You can’t comment on the blog posts.  If you try, you’re greeted with a ‘ Comments are closed! Please sign our Guest Book!‘  explanation.  What’s worse, the characters in the movie leave cutesy comments back and forth to each other in every post, but fans of the movie aren’t allowed to.

It just breaks your heart.  By not allowing fans to comment on the posts, all Universal has accomplished is to lessen the amount of content that fans would create around this movie.  Yes, opening up comments to the masses is going to create a LOT of extra work for the studio.  They can expect to spend hours pouring through comments and moderating them.

But what happens when Leslie, who can’t wait to see this movie, leaves a comment on the blog telling Tom and Violet that she can’t wait  for the wedding…and then sees it on the blog?  Think that might get her excited?  Think that might GREATLY increase the chance that she’ll blog about the movie, tweet about the movie, and mention it on Facebook?

And what if ‘Tom’ or ‘Violet’ actually RESPONDED to her?!?

Universal has in its hands a great opportunity to engage fans of this movie, and give them a reason to create content that will help the studio by increasing exposure and generating ticket sales.  But they either can’t see the potential of letting ‘regular folk’ comment on the blog, or they do see the potential, and don’t think it’s worth devoting a few hours a week to moderating comments.

So close…

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What the Hell is a ‘Social Business’ and Why Should You Care?

Social Business, Social Media, Brand advocacy, Mack Collier

If you’ve been following the social media marketing space/blogosphere over the last year or so, you’ve probably heard increasing chatter about the concept of ‘Social Business’.

So what IS a Social Business?  Good question, and it seems one that not even the people chattering about it can agree upon.  For example, The Wikipedia definition states “social business is a non-loss, non-dividend company designed to address a social objective within the highly regulated marketplace of today. It is distinct from a non-profit because the business should seek to generate a modest profit but this will be used to expand the company’s reach, improve the product or service or in other ways to subsidise the social mission.”

Ok…but here’s how @Armano describes it “At it’s core, it’s about connecting stakeholders who are critical to the success of your business. And as I’ve stressed before—it’s about executing initiatives leveraging the “3 P’s”—People, Process & Platforms.”  David also has a nifty drawing that helps explain the process at that link.

And here’s Augie Ray’s definition: “A new form of commerce where consumers, empowered by new social technologies and behaviors, bypass traditional channels and acquire more information, goods and services directly from each other.”

Finally, here’s how the Social Business Forum defines a Social Business: “An organization that has put in place the strategies, technologies and processes to systematically engage all the individuals of its ecosystem (employees, customers, partners, suppliers) to maximize the co-created value”

 

Three things I see from the above and other various definitions I’ve found for the term ‘Social Business’:

1 – We can’t even agree on the definition of the concept.  Which is no biggie, most of us can’t agree on the definition of ‘Social Media’ and it’s been around for 25 years in some form or another.

2 – The name ‘Social Business’ is terrible in that it immediately makes you think ‘Oh I get it, a business that does social media!’  Seriously, we marketers and business types put the ‘social’ modifier on waaaaay too many things.

3 – These definitions (and much of the discussion around the concept) seem to be focused on the companies that ‘get it’ when it comes to…whatever your definition of a ‘social business’ is.  If you’re a business that doesn’t ‘get it’, is talking about how becoming a social business will help you ‘engage with and empower your customers to increase co-created value’ REALLY going to get you excited?  I mean companies have been hearing about the potential of empowering and embracing their customers for at least 5 years now when we all got on a kick about how amazing social media is.  Right?  If that talk didn’t blow their skirts up, changing the name from ‘social media’ to ‘social business’ and trying again probably won’t either.

 

BTW here’s another interesting tidbit, the Wikipedia definition of the term ‘Enterprise 2.0‘: Enterprise 2.0 is the use of “Web 2.0” technologies within an organization to enable or streamline business processes while enhancing collaboration – connecting people through the use of social-media tools. Enterprise 2.0 aims to help employees, customers and suppliers collaborate, share, and organize information. Andrew McAfee describes Enterprise 2.0 as “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers”.

Ah we marketers do love to mark our territory by slapping labels on everything, don’t we?

But perhaps the biggest problem I have with most of the discussion around the concept of a ‘Social Business’ is that it seemed to be geared toward selling companies on the concept, versus the actual business benefits of integrating/embracing the concept.

Last month when I spoke at Bazaarvoice, I got to spend some time talking to CMO Erin Nelson and I learned more about BV’s offerings and how the companies is helping its clients.  In general, Bazaarvoice is creating products and systems that let clients get more detailed and relevant (read: valuable) product information and feedback, and then helping them ACT on that feedback, both internally and externally, in order to improve existing business processes.

A very simple example:  Erin noted that LL Bean tracked the reviews customers were leaving on their site for a popular sweater, and they noted that customers were asking for it to be produced in the colors green and purple.  So LL Bean started offering the sweater in those colors as well, and sales doubled as a result.  And the great thing about getting and ACTING on customer feedback is that it only encourages your customers to leave MORE feedback, which increases the chance that you can continue to improve existing business functions as a result.

That one small example to me does more to explain the possible reason why a company would want to become more connected  internally and externally because it details a real-world business benefit from doing so.

As a result, I think those of us that are talking about the concept of a ‘Social Business’ need to stop talking about it as if we are selling a concept/product, and start talking about it as if we are selling the BENEFITS of being a Social Business.  Because that’s what you SHOULD be doing, and besides, that’s a far more interesting conversation to be having anyway.

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Newsflash: We All Have the Attention Spans of a Gnat, So Blog About That Topic Again!

social media training, mack collier, social media consulting, twitter, blogging, facebook, social media strategyI was listening to an interview that Problogger had on his site (I would link to it but it was his ‘thank you’ for signing up for his newsletter), and he was interviewing a blogger about the success he’s had with his blog.  The blogger said that part of his success was due to a popular ebook he had created that he had achieved monthly sales of up to $30,000!  Impressive, but then the blogger told Darren that roughly 85% of the ebook had come straight from his blog posts.

My mouth literally fell open.  Then Darren remarked that he’d had similar success with an ebook, and that about the same percentage of that ebook’s content had come straight from his blog.

Seriously?!?

But then I thought about it, and it made total sense.  A lot of people would likely pay $9.95 or more for an ebook in order to get the convenience of the information all neatly organized and combined for them in one place. I think too many bloggers have the mindset that once they blog about a topic, it’s ‘off limits’ for them to ever discuss again.

In reality, I think it’s much safer to assume that most people MISS our blog posts.  Or really any content created via social media.  I think social media participation has ‘trained’ us to scan and release.  We give all the content a few seconds to catch our attention, then quickly move on.  When I was creating the recent #Blogchat survey that many of y’all took, I assumed at I could get 250 responses within a couple of days, and eventually get 500 after about a week.  I’d tweet it once, maybe twice a day.

Yeah, not really.  It took 10 days to get 315 responses and that was with me tweeting out begging for responses up to 5 times a day!  At one point within a 90-min period, I tweeted the link and then @MarketingProfs, @ChrisBrogan, @Barefoot_Exec, @JessicaNorthey, @JayBaer and @JasonFalls all RTed the link to the survey, as well.  That’s well over half a million Twitter followers, but do you know how many survey responses I got from that flood?  About 20.  Also, what I noticed every time I tweeted a link to the survey was that I would get about 3-5 responses within 3-5 mins, and then nothing.  This really hit home for me that if something isn’t RIGHT IN FRONT OF US on our social media channels, we miss it.  Plus it also suggests that Twitter isn’t the best medium to drive survey responses, but I digress…

Often I have blogged about topics more than once.  Never once have I had someone tell me ‘Yeah Mack, you blogged about this before, why are you covering it again?’

Now that doesn’t mean that you should simply repost an old post.  But it DOES mean that you should dig into your archives and find your ‘old’ popular topics, and resurrect them.  Remember yesterday when I talked about your blog’s analytics and using Pageviews and Search Keywords to help you discover popular posts?  Do that, find the posts that others are enjoying, and see if you can write a new post or two about those same topics.  Just this afternoon, I went through the Archives for the posts I wrote here back in 2009, and found 10 posts I can update and expand and republish as new posts.  If I can do the same for 2010 and 2011, I’ve suddenly created a new 30 or so posts for myself to publish here!

There’s no reason why you can’t do the same.  Dig in your archives and see if you have any buried blogging treasure in there that you can share again (or really for the first time) with your readers.  It will also lighten your blogging workload, and who knows, you may even find enough good stuff to make your own ebook and get your own $30,000 a month income!

PS:  I’ve written about this topic before as well, and I’ll forgive you if you missed it the first time 🙂

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The Beginner’s Guide to Blog Analytics

Analytics is an area that a lot of bloggers don’t pay as much attention to as they should.  And while I’m definitely not an expert when it comes to super-advanced analytics-tracking, I did want to give y’all a general overview of getting analytics tracking set up on your blog and some of the main metrics you should be looking at.

First, you’ll need to add a statistics tracker to your blog.  You can get a premium service if you want, but there’s plenty of free options that should be just fine for the average blogger.  On this blog, I use SiteMeter and Google Analytics to track my blog’s statistics.  Both of these services require you adding a snippet of HTML code to your blog’s template in order to ‘register’ the information about your blog’s visitors.  Now at one time, this could be a pain in the ass, especially if you weren’t comfortable editing your blog’s template coding.  Luckily, it’s gotten a lot easier now to do this.

For SiteMeter, you’ll need to first sign up for a free account, and then SiteMeter will give you the code you need to add to your blog’s template.  If you are comfortable doing the coding yourself, all you’ll need to do is take the HTML code SiteMeter gives you, and put it right before your template’s closing </BODY> tag.  If you have no earthly idea what I just said, don’t worry, you can click this link for a tutorial.  Or to make it even easier, you can do what I did, I took the code and created a new text-based widget on my sidebar, and added it there.  Simple as can be.

The second way I track my blog’s analytics is with Google Analytics.  As with SiteMeter, this requires adding a snippet of code to your blog’s template.  You’ll again need to sign up for an account with Google Analytics, and then take the code they provide and add it to your blog’s template.  I used a plugin to do this for this blog, Yoast’s  Google Analytics for WordPress Plugin.  That link will show you some of the additional functionality you can get from using the plugin.  But again, if you are comfortable tweaking your blog’s template, you can probably add the GA code manually without much problem.

There are other services you can use, but these are the two I use here.  Now in general, I use SiteMeter to track real-time visitor information, and I use Google Analytics to look at trends over time.  Even with the new version of Google Analytics and it’s Real-Time dashboard, I still get more detailed information from SiteMeter, especially on individual visitors.

Now I wanted to give y’all an overview of first some of the ‘basic’ metrics you should be looking at, and then I wanted to walk you through some of the metrics that I spend more time looking at.

Traffic.  Everyone loves to look at their traffic.  But besides being an ego-gush, there’s some very valid reasons to pay close attention to your traffic.  First, you want to see how it’s trending over time.  For example, if your traffic was down 33% in January of this year versus January of 2011, it helps to try to figure out why that decrease happened.

Also, looking at your traffic can give you great clues about when you should be publishing new posts.  For example, here’s what the traffic looks like here over the last 30 days according to SiteMeter:

Note the red Xs.  Those are coming on Saturdays.  Also notice, those traffic levels are the low points for each week.  So that alone tells me that if I want my new posts to get maximum exposure, I probably shouldn’t publish them on Saturday!  But as with anything else on your blog, you still should TEST this!  In my case, I have published posts on Saturday, and the traffic level for those posts was below what similar posts have gotten that were published here during the week.  But still, you need to test to verify your assumptions.

And like many of you, I use Twitter as a tool to help promote my blog posts.  I also know from watching my traffic closely that during the week, the hourly traffic is very low here each day till around 8am, when it starts to increase through the middle of the day till around 3pm, when it starts to fall again.  So when I publish a new blog post, I try to run it at 8am.  For example, I am writing this post on Saturday and Sunday, but will publish it at 8am on Monday morning.  Then, I will schedule a few tweets to promote it during the day, starting at 9am.  I schedule the first tweet for an hour later because typically I will have a couple of comments come in from blog subscribers that see the post as soon as it goes live at 8am.

Then, I will tweet a link out to it at 9am, then again at noon, and finally at 3pm or so.  Now I know from tracking the traffic in the past that I will get a bump in traffic from Twitter for each time I share a link to this new post.  I also know from watching my traffic patterns in the past that the tweet at noon will likely send more traffic here than the tweets at 9am or 3pm.  I assume this is because more people are taking lunch and checking Twitter from their desk at work.

BTW, here’s a detailed post on how I used this strategy to increase my traffic here by 300% and email subscribers by 900% in ONE week.

So in general, you should know what your traffic levels are on a monthly, weekly, daily and hourly basis.  That way if there’s a change good or bad, you should be able to spot it immediately, and then you can investigate to figure out what triggered the change.

Search Traffic.  Now along with traffic, I also pay very close attention to Search Traffic.  The reason why is simple: If someone uses search to find my blog, they probably do not know who I am, and they probably are trying to solve a business problem.  I’ll talk about this a bit more below, but by looking at keywords, I can see what people are looking for when they arrive here.  For example, I know that a lot of people arrive here by looking for information on the pricing for social media marketing services.  That’s because since 2010, I’ve been doing an annual recap of How Much Companies Should Expect to Pay for Social Media.  Last year when I realized how much search traffic was being sent to those posts, I went back and added in a link to my Social Media Marketing Rate Sheet.  Since doing that, I’ve gotten several work inquiries that have specifically mentioned a service and price listed on my Rate Sheet, which was buried on here before I added them to those posts.  Just last week, a major organization emailed me wanting to inquire about one of my services and referenced seeing it listed on my Rate Sheet.

Now should you care about Search Traffic?  Well I think the answer is ‘Yes’, but also note that I care more because this blog is a tool I use to grow my business.  But even if your blog is a personal one, search can help you get found by people that share your interests, which means you can make some new friends, if you aren’t interested in attracting new clients.  If you want to increase your search traffic, there’s two ways that I have found that have worked for me: Post more often, and optimize your posts for search engines.  Here’s a beginner’s guide on how to optimize your posts for search engines.

Referral Traffic.  This tells me what sources are sending traffic to my blog.  For example, it could be Twitter or Facebook, or a link that someone has put on their blog.  It can also help you identify sudden increases in traffic.  For example, if you see that within the last 5 minutes you’ve got as much traffic as you usually get in 5 hours, you can click the referral sources of that traffic, and that will usually tell you where that surge of traffic is coming from.  Often, it will be a new link that someone has posted on their blog, or maybe a popular Twitter user just tweeted out a link to one of your posts.

This also really helps you determine where you should be spending your time promoting your blog, on other sites.  For example, if you see that Facebook is sending your blog 1% of its traffic, but Plus is sending it 8%, then that’s probably a good indicator that your posts are more popular when they are shared on Plus.  A good way to test this is to share your new post on different sites at the same time, and tracking the referral traffic.  For example, if you write a new post tomorrow, share a link to it on Plus, Facebook, and Twitter at 11am on each site, and then track how much traffic each link sends back to your blog.  This is a ‘quick n dirty’ way to test how engaged your network is on each of these sites.

Pageviews for top posts.  This is a great way to tell which posts are most popular on your blog.  Here’s a list of the Top 10 most popular pages on this blog via Pageviews, over the last month:

Note that the top four pages on this blog all deal with the price of social media services.  That tells me that people are hungry for that type of information.

Search Keywords people use to find your blog.  This is really important because it not only gives you better insight into what posts are most popular, but also the search keywords are more about what topics people are interested in.  Also, remember that a lot of people ask search engines questions.  Look at this list of the most popular search keywords here over the last month:

Note that the #6 search term is ‘How to Write Your First Blog Post’.  I actually wrote a blog post with that exact post title.  I’ve talked about this before, but when you write your post titles, think about how people would find your post if they Googled it.  We often Google a question we are looking for the answer to.

Now note that the #1 search term for the last month is ‘social media crisis management’.  Also, looking at the picture above the one above, we see that the post I wrote on social media crisis management is the 7th most popular here in the last month.  That suggests to me that ‘social media crisis management’ is a topic that I may want to consider blogging about again soon.

Now paying close attention to your stats can also give you clues about the type and even FORM of content your visitors enjoy.

For example, here’s a screenshot of the 10 most viewed posts here in the last month from my Direct Traffic, which are usually visitors that came here directly from putting in the URL:

Note the two red circles:  The avg time spend on those two posts is 2:13, whereas the other posts are as low as 5 seconds?  Why is the avg time spend on those particular two posts so much higher?  I think part of the reason why is because both of those posts either have a video or audio file in them.  But I can’t be sure because the post inbetween them on Social Media Crisis Management also has a video embedded, and yet people are spending over a minute LESS time on it.

But this is a good example of why it pays to pay close attention to your blog’s statistics, so that you can better understand how visitors are finding, and interacting with your content.  Investing some time now to better understand blog analytics will not only save you time down the road, it will also make you a better blogger!  If you have any additional questions about your blog’s analytics, please leave a comment and I’ll try to help you!

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Stop focusing on making money with Social Media Marketing, focus on creating value for your customers

Social media, value creation, sales, business, customers

There’s a fundamental truth that many companies don’t understand or ‘get’ about social media.  Here it is:

Social media are sites and tools that people use primarily as personal communication channels.

Too many companies don’t understand this, and attempt to use these tools and sites as direct sales channels, and typically have poor results.  That’s not to say that you can’t make money with social media, you absolutely can.

But the companies that are doing so are usually the ones that are using these sites and tools to create and develop PERSONAL relationships with their customers.  The sale is a SECONDARY objective.

Read that part again:  These companies understand that by participating in social media and creating VALUE for their customers, that sales will occur INDIRECTLY.

How many times have you heard that ‘It’s all about the sale!’ or ‘Why are we doing social media if it’s not getting us sales?!?’  Total BS.  Because that mindset is focused on what’s good for the company.  If your company wants to succeed in social media then you have to create value for your customers.

Period. End. Of. Sentence.

Don’t focus on how you can turn social media into a sales funnel for your company, think about how you can use these tools to create value for your customers.  Do that, and the money will follow.

 

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Sunday’s #Blogchat Topic: How to Amplify Your Blog’s Visibility

Build engagement and visibility for your blogThanks to Rosie Taylor for suggesting this week’s #Blogchat topic on our Facebook page.

We all want to know what we can do to make our blog more visible and build awareness for it.  I think when we look at this, we need to consider what we can do on our blog, and what we can do off our blog.  And I don’t want to steal anyone’s thunder, but I wanted to offer some ideas for each, and hopefully this will get you thinking as we get ready for tonight’s discussion.

What you can do on your blog to build visibility:

  • How can you create compelling content?  What type of content is more likely to attract attention?
  • How can you engage with readers via comments?
  • How can you draw awareness to other blogs as a way to draw attention to your own?
  • What about bring in other bloggers to write guest posts?
What you can do off your blog to build visibility:
  • Are you actively commenting on your space’s more popular sites and blogs?
  • Are you actively commenting on your reader’s blogs?
  • Can you write guest posts for other bloggers?
Those are just some quick ideas.  As a primer for tonight’s #Blogchat discussion, what are some other ways you can build your blog’s visibility?  What has worked for you?

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Here’s the ‘Video’ From Live #Blogchat at Blog World Expo!

Feed subscribers, click here to watch the video on YouTube.

I am so happy to be able to share the following video from our Live #Blogchat session at Blog World Expo.  It’s technically not video, it’s a screenshot of the tweets that were coming in for #BWELA as the #Blogchat was progressing (which is obviously disappointing).  But the audio is very good, and it will give you a good sense of what a Live #Blogchat is like.

As I said in my review post, the Live #Blogchat at Blog World Expo was by FAR my favorite Live #Blogchat in 2011.  A big reason why was because several audience members were active #Blogchat participants.  At all of the previous Live #Blogchats this year, most of the audience had never participated in the Twitter version of #Blogchat, so they had no idea how it would work.

And as I was listening to the audio yesterday, I was reminded of how many great discussions we had, whether it was @JasonFalls talking about how he balances his business blog and his personal blog, or @HardlyNormal talking about using video on his blog to help homeless people tell their story, or @MarcyMassura talking about viewing your blog as a tv channel, there was a ton of #smartitude on display from everyone, and we all learned from each other.

Which is really the whole point of #Blogchat anyway 😉  I hope you enjoy it, and I hope to see YOU at a Live #Blogchat in 2012!

The above video is only one of over 100 recorded sessions from BlogWorld Los Angeles 2011. You can get all of the videos — plus nearly 100 bonus interviews and other bonus content — by picking up the entire Virtual Ticket here: http://www.blogworldexpo.com/virtual-ticket-la-2011/

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How to Increase Participation in Your Twitter Chat or Any Online Community

Interaction and participation.  It’s something many community sites and managers struggle with and focus on increasing.  Engagement is the lifeblood of many online communities, and yet, so many struggle to reach that ‘critical mass’ of participants.

When #Blogchat started in early 2009, participation wasn’t an issue.  Even in those 1st few weeks where we’d only have a few hundred tweets, there was plenty of engagement.  But even then, I noticed some problems.  It seemed that there were a core group of really smart bloggers that were, for the most part, answering the questions of everyone else.  So the core group of smart bloggers were mainly talking to each other, and fielding questions from everyone else.

If you think about it, you see this in a lot of online communities, especially knowledge-based ones.  You have the ‘newbies’ and the ‘experts’.  And early on, that’s what we saw with #Blogchat, the ‘newbies’ were asking questions of the ‘experts’.  And there’s nothing wrong with that, but the problem is this: If you’re not a ‘newbie’ or an ‘expert’, how do you participate?

What started happening is that I would talk to people that follow #Blogchat, and when they told me they lurked, I would invite them to participate.  “#Blogchat is so much better when more people participate so we can all learn from each other!” I would tell them.  Almost every time, they would reply by saying “Oh no! I don’t have anything to add, I’m not an expert!”

I hated hearing that.  So I added a new rule for everyone in #Blogchat: No experts allowed.

That’s not to say that smart people can’t and shouldn’t participate, but I wanted to communicate to everyone that they should feel comfortable participating.  #Blogchat works best when everyone is comfortable sharing what they know.  Does that mean that some people make some points that are completely off the wall?  Yep, but that also leads to new discussions, because others feel comfortable questioning and debating those claims.

But if your community only has interaction from the experts and newbies, you’re going to be ignoring everyone else.  Kathy had a great point about this several years ago, and her point is the same as mine, that you need to communicate to your community that everyone should participate, and help them feel comfortable doing so.  For #Blogchat, when they hear ‘No experts allowed, we are all here to learn from each other’, it puts everyone at ease.  Most people are smarter than they give themselves credit for, they might not believe they are ‘qualified’ to join a discussion, but they almost always have something they can share that can benefit the group.

One of your key roles as a community manager is to get everyone to a place where they are comfortable contributing as they can.  And remember that when people start participating in a community, they begin to take a sense of ownership in that community.  That greatly increases the motivation they have to help you grow that community, and make it more valuable for everyone.

This starts by finding ways to get everyone more interactive.  Not just newbies asking experts questions, but everyone asking and answering questions.  This will generate more discussions and more value for everyone.

If you want to get more discussions and participation among your community, consider these steps:

1 – Encourage involvement from lurkers.  As I am watching #Blogchat’s stream, it’s obviously moving way too fast for me to catch even a fraction of the tweets.  But if I see anyone tweet that they are joining #Blogchat for the 1st time, I *always* go back and thank them for joining.  Nothing makes a lurker feel more welcome than announcing to the group that they are joining for the 1st time, and immediately getting a thank you tweet from the moderator.  Additionally, other #Blogchat members have started doing the same thing, which only increases the chance that this lurker will move to being a participant.

2 – Understand that statements are NOT discussions.  Often, I will notice that a member of #Blogchat isn’t directly engaging with anyone, but rather they are tweeting out general statements like ‘Blog from the heart!’ or ‘Make your post as long or as short as it needs to be!’  These tweets will probably get a lot of RTs, but by themselves, they don’t often generate a lot of discussion.  If I see someone that’s constantly leaving tweets like this, I try to engage them.  I’ll ask them questions about their statements, and hopefully get a discussion started with them.  Then, others have an opportunity to join in.

3 – Encourage all members to be helpful.  When I first started #Blogchat, I asked regular contributors to please help me by welcoming new participants, and to help them with any questions they have.  The #Blogchat regulars do a wonderful job of being helpful to everyone.  Now I tell everyone that if they are new to #Blogchat, to feel free to ask any of us any questions, that we will be happy to help.  And I am constantly seeing others tweet about how helpful and friendly the #Blogchat community is, so I think the #Blogchat regulars view it as a badge of honor.  At least I hope they do, because I do 😉

4 – Clearly spell out for all members how they can participate and what is expected of them.  All it takes is a simple post listing out the purpose of your community and any guidelines.  This is important, because if someone stumbles upon an established community, it can be a very daunting thing, and a ‘road map’ can definitely help put them at ease.

5 – If you are active in your community (as you should be), then make sure you are following your own rules.  For example, when I participate in #Blogchat, I am usually asking questions of other participants.  I try to avoid always making statements, and I use the words ‘I think….’ a lot.  If I am asking questions as the ‘moderator’ of #Blogchat then it sets the tone of everyone else to the same.

 

Remember at the end of the day if you can reach a point where community members are creating value for themselves, then everyone wins.  A great way to do this is to increase the level of participation within that community.

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What Rockstars Can Teach You About Creating Kick-Ass Online Content

Think about it, Rockstars are amazingly effective content creators.  They create content (music) that we are not only willing to pay to get, but we also pay to view and hear them creating that content (concerts)!  And then there’s all the merchandise we purchase as well that celebrates them as content creators.

So as you are looking to rev up your content creation efforts, take a closer look at how Rockstars create amazingly compelling content that not only resonates with their fans, but delights them.

1 – Rockstars always play their Greatest Hits.  If you go to an Eagles concert, it wouldn’t be complete without hearing them play Hotel California.  Likewise, if you load up the Little Monsters and go to see Lady Gaga perform, you can’t wait to hear the ‘Ra ra ah ah ah…’ that tells you Bad Romance is the next.  Likewise, if you are a content creator, there are going to be certain types of content, certain topics you cover, that simply resonate more with your audience.  These are your Greatest Hits.  These are the topics you love to talk/blog/tweet about, and this passion you have for these topics means you create better content, that your audience wants more of.  So know what your Greatest Hits are, and feel free to cover these topics regularly, because this is what your fans want.

Now there is a slight caveat to this:  Often with Rockstars, their DIE HARD fans don’t want to hear their ‘mainstream’ hits as much as they do their more obscure songs.  For example, up until about 10 years ago (or around the time she lost her mind and started playing country music) I was a HUGE Jewel fan.  But I wasn’t really a fan of her mainstream hits, I was a fan of her more obscure songs.  Mainly, because I had already heard all of her hits before.  So when I heard her perform in Birmingham in 1999, I didn’t care if she played You Were Meant For Me, I wanted to hear I’m Fading (The K-Mart Song, not the popified Wal-Mart version she’s done since).  So if you are a content creator, what this could mean for you is that if you have die-hard fans, they might be willing/wanting to pay you for more exclusive/unique content.  If it’s content that only THEY have access to, even better!

Tip: Check your blog’s analytics and see what your Top 10 posts are all-time ranked by views, and comments.  Also, check your keywords and see what terms people are searching for that are leading them to your blog.  This will give you a great idea of what your most popular content is.  If you see that every time you write about X topic, that your audience responds, then that’s a BIG hint that you’ve found one of your Greatest Hits!  Don’t be afraid to blog about the same topic more than once!  The next time writer’s block has set in, dig into your analytics and archives and see if you can resurrect a past hit and post about it again!

2 – Tell a story with your content that connects with your audience.  Rockstars are great storytellers.  They find a way to write songs that touch listeners.  That stir emotions within us and make us believe that this song was written JUST for us.

For example, the next time you hear a Taylor Swift song playing on the radio, actually stop and listen to the lyrics.  There’s a reason why millions of teenage girls absolutely love Taylor: It’s because she is singing about THEIR lives!  She’s talking about their hopes, their fears, their failures, and their dreams.  They connect with her because she’s singing about everything they are experiencing right now.

You want to do the same thing with the content you create.  You want to tell stories that help you illustrate your points and make them more relevant with the audience you are trying to connect with.  If you’ve ever seen me speak, you know I do this in all of my presentations.  I make a point, then I use an example/case study of a business that has executed that point that I’m trying to illustrate.  I do this because I want to make the content relatable to the audience.  It’s one thing to talk to non-profit marketers about how they can use social media as a crisis communication tool, it’s quite another to tell them the story of how the Red Cross is doing just that.

Tip: Use case studies or even personal examples and stories to illustrate the points you are trying to make.  Any advice you are attempting to share with your content is always easier to understand if you can share a story of how someone else has already done what you suggest.

3 – Be memorable.  There’s so many songs I remember for just one or two lines:

“Many is the word, that only leaves you guessin’.  You guess about a thing, you really oughta know…’ Led Zeppelin, Over the Hills and Far Away

“I’d like to fly, but my wings have been so denied…” Alice in Chains, Down in a Hole

“Where did the Angels go? Cigarette smoke is all that’s left. I traded my wings in for a string of pearls, and the string’s all I’ve left…” Jewel, I’m Fading

“All and all, you’re just another brick in The Wall” – Pink Floyd, Another Brick in The Wall

Rockstars do a great job of giving us that ‘hook’ in their songs that make them memorable.  You can do the same thing with your content and blog posts.  It could be the headline of your post.  It could be the infographic or picture that grabs attention.  It could be the key stat that drives home the point you’re trying to make.

Tip: When creating content, whether a blog post, a video, even a tweet, think about what the ONE key takeaway you want people to have.  Look at what would make the most impact, is it a picture, a stat, what?

4 – Be real.  Rockstars do an amazing job of creating songs that are raw, emotional, and strip all the bullshit away to get to what’s real.  Look at this amazing music video for the song Hurt by Johnny Cash.  Look at how Johnny sings about living a life of regret, then it shows an old home video of Johnny standing in his yard with a contemplative look on his face.  Or notice how as Johnny sings, June looks on with a worried look.  All of this does a fabulous job of relating to us that Johnny is singing from his soul.

Tip: Don’t be afraid to speak with your own voice when you create content.  How often have you seen someone write a short blog post that says something like, “I think Chris Brogan and Shannon Paul are onto something, check out their posts here and here.”  We’ve probably already read what Chris and Shannon think, I want to hear what YOU think!  Don’t just parrot what another blogger says, share your own opinion, especially if you have a DIFFERENT take on the issue!  Sharing your own voice is a great way to build your following and audience because your voice is unique and distinctive!

5 – Turn a negative into a positive.  Up until 1993, Sarah McLachlan was very well-known in her home country of Canada, but not internationally.  All that changed with the release of the LP Fumbling Toward Ecstasy, and her first breakthrough mainstream hit, Possession.  The lyrics to Possession were very stark and even haunting, a definite break from what we’d heard of Sarah’s catalog up until this point.  “Into this night I wander, it’s morning that I dread.  Another day unknowing of the path I fear to thread.  Into the sea of waking dreams I follow without pride. Because nothing stands between us here, and I won’t be denied!”  

After the song’s release and international popularity, it was revealed that Sarah had endured multiple stalkings just prior to writing this song, including letters being sent to her regularly.  One of her stalkers even sued Sarah, claiming that the lyrics to Possession were taken from his letters to her.  This person later committed suicide.  But Sarah found the strength to take these traumatic events and focus her energy into her music, and the result was a hit that took her from being a celebrity in Canada, to an international superstar.

Tip: Incorporate setbacks into the content you create.  Obviously, your examples don’t have to be (and hopefully won’t be) as severe as what Sarah endured, but maybe you could offer a Lessons Learned post from what went wrong with a Social Media campaign, or how you handled what could have been a potential negative for your brand, and turned it into a positive.  Case in point, check out this wonderful video by Gary Vee on how he turned a potential PR disaster, into a positive experience:

Remember, don’t just focus on creating useful content, create remarkable content!  Content that others want to share and talk about, and build upon.  Your goal should be to create content that inspires others to build content as a result.