MackCollier.com

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Don’t Make the Same Mistake This Company Made With Social Media

A few years ago I talked to a company that believed they had figured out how to get ahead with social media.  This company could see that (at the time) everyone was starting to use Twitter, so they wanted to hire a ‘Twitter expert’, someone that knew how to use Twitter, who could also train their team on using Twitter so the entire company could be up to speed with using this one tool.

I replied with “Ok, so you’ll spend say 3 months with the hiring process and selecting and qualifying the candidates and hiring the right one.  Then that ‘Twitter expert’ will spend another 3 months training your staff so that 6 months from now, your team will be ready to start using Twitter effectively.  So what happens when 6 months from now, Twitter is no longer the ‘hot site’, and there’s a new cool tool and you’re back behind the 8-ball?  Do you then fire the ‘Twitter expert’ and hire a new expert for this new cool site?  Your best bet is to stop chasing the tools and start investing your time in learning how your customers are actually using these tools.’

This is what you need to do as well.  So much time is spent by companies chasing tools and trying to understand how to use the tools effectively.  This is putting the cart before the horse.  You don’t need to understand how to use Pinterest, you need to understand what activities your current and potential customers are engaging in on Pinterest and why.  Understanding the behavior of your customers using social media is far more important than understanding the social media tools they use.

For example, I spend a lot of time watching the stats on sharing around the content I share.  I spend a lot of time promoting my content on Twitter, and I know that the average post here currently gets about 40-60 retweets.  But over the last month, these two posts got over 200 retweets each:

1 – Think You Know Social Media? These Stats Will Blow Your Mind

2 – My Guide to Writing Totally Awesome Blog Posts Every Single Time

So when I see certain posts like these get shared far more than others, I try to understand why people thought this content was useful, so I can replicate that with future content I create.  I look at these two posts and I make a list of what I think ‘worked’ for people with these two posts:

1 – Both posts had a very specific headline.  You know exactly what each post will be about and that’s key because when you share posts on Twitter, your post’s headline is competing with all the other content that everyone else that they follow is sharing.  I just went to my Twitter home feed and saw these 3 new tweets come in:

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Which tweet did you look at?  I bet you went straight to the tweet with the purdy pictures and ignored the first two, right?  The tweet with the picture earned your attention so you skipped over the first two tweets.  This is the point, you literally only have a couple of seconds to earn the attention of your followers, so that headline is crucial.  You have to tell people exactly what they are getting and make it interesting to them.  I actually changed the headline of this post to try to make it more interesting and relevant to people on Twitter.  Originally the headline was going to be Don’t Focus on the (Social Media) Tools, Focus on the People Using the Tools.  That headline sort of summarizes the post, and as I stated in the guide to writing awesome blog posts above, you shouldn’t do that with your headlines.  Which is why I changed the headline to be more specific, and I’ll be interested to see how many retweets and shares this post gets.

2 – Both posts addressed an exact need.  The first post on stats was a goldmine of stats about specific social media tools and usage in general.  This information is great for several different audiences: The guy or gal in the office that wants to convince their boss that they need to start using social media, the speaker that needs some great stats to add to their social media presentation or simply anyone that wants to self-educate when it comes to social media usage patterns.

The second post was a very specific How-To.  It was also a very detailed post that specific step-by-step instructions on how to solve a particular content-creation problem (creating awesome blog posts).  In fact if you read that post, you can hopefully see that I applied some of my own advice with that post, in writing this one.

BTW note that with both these examples, I’m trying to figure out how to get more retweets for my content on Twitter, but I’m doing so by trying to understand why people shared this content.  I’m not trying to figure out some ‘trick’ I can use on Twitter to get more retweets or some phrase to add in the tweet (like ‘Please RT!).  I’m far more interested in understanding customer behavior.  Why did people share these posts?  What made the content useful to them?  What did I do to earn their attention in those 2-3 seconds I had?  Because if I understand why this type of content was useful to others, then I can apply that understanding to all the content I create here from this point forward.

Don’t focus your time on understanding how to use social media.  Invest in first understanding how your customers use social media.  

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The Common Sense Guide For Brands That Want to Show Support Without Looking Like Asshats

One of the themes last week at #SoMeT13US was how do you create social media content that communicates that your brand supports people involved in a tragedy or situation, without giving them impression that you are simply trying to leverage the situation to promote yourself?

First, you don’t do this:

RandiTweetHere, Randi has taken a holiday that’s important to so many of us, Veteran’s Day, and she’s attempted to leverage the feelings we have for Veteran’s Day to support her book.  This isn’t the first time Randi has gotten into hot-water over an ill-advised tweet.  This tweet doesn’t honor Veteran’s Day or veterans at all, it’s a thinly-veiled promotion for her book, which many people quickly picked up on, which is why she’s caught flack over it.

Now check out how Three Dog Bakery mentioned Veteran’s Day on Facebook yesterday:

ThreeDogBakeryFB

See the difference?  The focus is on veterans, not the brand.  But notice that by including dogs in the update, Three Dogs Bakery was able to make the update somewhat relevant to its brand without making it about the brand!  That’s the difference between these two updates.  Randi’s update was about Randi.  That’s why it honked people off.  Three Dogs Bakery’s update was about honoring all veterans, ‘both two and four-legged’.  So the update was about Veteran’s Day and related to the brand.  Since it didn’t directly promote the brand, it didn’t upset people the way Randi’s tweet did.

It’s always risky to use social media to comment as a brand on an event or situation that many people have strong feelings about.  Still, many brands do want to communicate to their customers that they sympathize with their feelings and that they care about the people being affected.

So if your brand feels compelled to use social media to comment on a new event or other situation that many of your customers have strong opinions about, there are three ways you can respond:

1 – Show your support and sympathy for those involved and impacted, without any mention or promotion of your brand.  Unless your brand is a natural part of the story, then it’s incredibly risky to insert them into your update in any shape, form or fashion.  If in the future there is, God-forbid, a tragedy that affects your customers, you want to communicate that your thoughts and support are with those affected, without giving any impression that you are trying to leverage feelings associated with this event to promote your brand.  Remember that emotions will likely be high at this time for your customers, so you don’t want to send them any message that could possibly be misunderstood.

2 – If you must involve your brand in the update, mention ideas and themes related to the brand, not about the brand.  This is exactly what Three Dog Bakery did.  They didn’t insert their brand in the update, they mentioned dogs.  Which are related to its brand.  This is very tricky to do correctly, so be careful.  If it doesn’t pass the ‘smell’ test with you, then don’t post it.  At #SoMeT13US I mentioned that you should have a ‘devil’s advocate’ that comes up with all the possible objections that people might have to your update.  That can help you figure out if the tone and content of the update is too self-promotional or not.  Again, if your audience smells even a whiff of self-promotion from your brand, it will quickly backfire.

3 – Use the event/holiday/situation as an excuse to promote your brand.  This is obviously what you want to avoid in almost every possible situation.  You’re just inviting backlash and anger from the very people you want to connect with.

Before you publish that update ask yourself this simple question:  Where are we putting the spotlight?  If you are putting the spotlight on your brand, then start over.

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How to Turn Big Ideas Into Big Gains For Your Brand


How many times have you attended a conference or a webinar or read an article that included that ‘big idea’ that you felt could really impact your business?  The idea that immediately sparked that ‘a-ha!’ moment and you felt that rush of excitement at the thought of implementing it.

Then you got back to the office the next day and realized that you had no idea how to implement that amazing idea!

It’s a Short Walk From Feeling Inspired to Feeling Overwhelmed 

The problem is we attend these events and connect with our peers and discuss these big ideas.  We convince each other that the big idea will have a big impact on our brand and get more excited about the prospect of acting on this big idea.  Then we go back to our office and have to implement these big ideas by ourselves.  This is when inspiration turns to feeling overwhelmed.  It’s also when many of these big ideas die before they’ve had a chance to help us.

Think Big But Start Small

The problem is that the big idea can seem like a big hassle to implement.  The key is to start small and to focus on the key element of the idea and start there.  For example, one of the big ideas that came from the Social Media Tourism Symposium was the power of embracing your fans.  Leveraging your fans to help grow your business or drive visitors to your destination is a great idea, but you shouldn’t let that great idea overwhelm you.

For example, if your company has never proactively connected with its fans, its can seem overwhelming to suddenly decide to launch a full-scale brand ambassador program.  That’s like trying to run before you’ve learned to walk.  Start small and give yourself time to grow into a place where you can fully tap into that big idea.

What’s the Core Idea of Your Big Idea?

Think about what makes that big idea a ‘big idea’.  If you want to embrace your fans, why is that important?  The main point is you want to start connecting with your most passionate and loyal customers.  If you aren’t ready to launch a dedicated program to connect with your advocates, then pick a smaller starting point.  For example, start by simply replying via social media tools like Twitter and Facebook when your fans reach out to you.  Saying ‘thank you’ when a customer says something positive about your brand might not seem like a big step, but if you start thanking all the customers that praise your brand via social media, it leads to more customers praising your brand! Starting small can grow into something big!

Starting Small is Better Than Never Starting at All

It’s far too easy to talk yourself out of getting started on that big idea.  You think about how difficult it is to get started (or to figure out how to get started!).  You think about how much work it is, how long it will take to see results, and how much work it would be.

Then three months later you read another article talking about that big idea that you forgot about because it was too difficult to implement.  You realize that if you had started working on that big idea three months ago when you discovered it, that by now it would be paying off for your brand.

What big idea are you passing on today, that three months from now you’ll wish you had acted on?

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Giving Up Control of Your Marketing Without Losing Your Mind

MP900438571Last week I keynoted the Social Media Tourism Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama.  It was a fabulous event and one of the recurring themes covered was the importance of giving up control of marketing to your destination’s fans and advocates.  Obviously I was thrilled with this, but at the same time I realize that this can be scary as hell for many marketers regardless of the industry you’re in.

What it comes down to is changing your mindset, and understanding the mindset of your fans and advocates.  Let’s tackle each area separately:

Changing Your Marketing Mindset

As a business/brand/destination/organization your marketing mindset is to promote yourself.  To get the word out about who you are and what you do.  Because people can’t and won’t buy from you until they know who you are and what you can do for them, right?

But in recent years the advent of digital content creation tools has changed the game for marketers.  Now there is an incredible amount of content being created every single day.  In the days before social media it was far easier to buy attention.  Today, it has to be earned.

So how do you earn attention?  By creating useful content.  Look at the content I have created here.  Hopefully you’ll look at the posts and view them as useful posts that can help people.  But when you get down to it, these posts are marketing.  I am marketing my ability to work with companies to help them better connect with their customers and cultivate advocates via social media and other marketing channels.  There’s not a lot of directly promotional content, in fact I probably should have more.  The idea is to create useful content that you will use and share with others.  In doing so, the content spreads to people that can hire me and it also helps to establish my expertise.

So instead of creating content that directly promotes your business, create content that’s customer-centric, that focuses on problems that your customers are having.  Becky McCray suggests that you should think of every question that your customers have about your products and business, and answer those questions on your blog.  In short the rule is this:  The more valuable your content is for your audience, the more it will spread and the more it will promote you.

Understanding the Mindset of Your Fans and Advocates

Many marketers view their fans and customers as being more or less the same.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Customers feel little to no natural affinity for your brand, while fans have extremely high levels of loyalty toward your brands.  Fans want to interact with you and will in fact seek out ways to do so.  On the other hand, your average customer could care less if it ever interacts with you unless there’s a problem or issue it wants you to address.

Additionally, it’s important to know that fans consider themselves to be owners of your brand.  They consider your brand to be their brand, which is a big reason why they love your brand.

This also means that they will act in what they perceive to be the best interests of your brand.  They will actively promote it to others.  They will bring what they feel are potential problems to your attention (and be happy to help you fix the problem).

The bottom line with your fans is that they are the good guys.  They literally want to work on your behalf to help your brand, so instead of keeping them at arm’s distance, you should work with them and make sure to thank them.  Early and often.

 

So here’s your plan for changing your marketing and your mindset:

1 – Focus on creating content that creates value for your current and potential customers/donors/visitors/partners.  If your content creates value for others then they will use it and share it.  Which means more exposure and opportunities for you.

2 – Don’t ignore your fans, view them as your partners.  They want what’s best for you, so connect with them and give them the attention and respect they deserve.

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The Creative Process: How We Write Our Blog Posts is Tonight’s #Blogchat Topic!

CoffeeCupPad

Here’s the transcript from tonight’s #Blogchat, click Transcript on the left.

Hey y’all!  Tonight (Nov. 11-2013) our #Blogchat topic is The Creative Process!  #Blogchat is sponsored this month by Pencils.com, please check out their selection of writing and drawing tools as well as their blog and please follow them on Twitter.

I think tonight’s topic will be incredibly useful and it will definitely be one where you’ll want to be favoriting a lot of tweets as we’ll all be sharing some of our favorite tips, tools and tricks on how we create our blog posts.  Here’s what we’ll cover:

8:00-8:30PM Central – The Creative Process.  Here we’ll talk about how we actually write our blog posts.  Where do we start, do we write the headline first, or last?  How do we flesh out our post ideas?

8:30-8:45PM Central – What digital tools do you use to help in writing blog posts?  Are there apps or sites that help you collect information or save ideas for posts?

8:45-9:00PM Central – What analog tools do you use to help in writing blog posts?  Do you take notes the old-fashioned way, with pen and pad?  If you write your posts out, do you prefer to use pens or pencils?

 

It should be a great discussion tonight so please join us starting at 8pm Central!

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Skype’s Focus on The Bigger Idea (It’s Not the Technology, It’s What The Technology Allows You to Do)

In Think Like a Rock Star I talk about the four ways that rock stars create fans and one of these ways is be tapping into The Bigger Idea behind their music.  Instead of focusing strictly on themselves, rock stars focus on bigger ideas and themes that resonate with fans.

Brands can do this by focusing less on its product and more on how and why customers are using its product.  What are they trying to accomplish, and what does the product allow them to do?

A perfect example of this is Skype’s new video Born Friends, embedded here:

This video already has close to a million views in its first week up.  It resonates with us because it tells a human story, not a product story.  The key to creating marketing that resonates with customers is to focus on how the customer will use the product and why they would use the product.  This video doesn’t focus on Skype, it focuses on an amazing friendship that Skype helped make possible.

Many brands can’t make a video like this because many brands can’t see letting its product take a backseat to its customers.  The reality is, your product is already secondary to your customer, so you might as well embrace it and give your customers the spotlight they deserve.

Hat tip to Ann Handley whose amazing post on the video inspired this post.

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Here’s Why Your Loyalty Program Isn’t Working

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A loyalty program is a marketing tactic designed by a company to promote and encourage future purchases from customers.  A very simple example of this is punch cards that many retailers offer.  A local fast food chain offers a punch card and every time you buy a lunch buffet, you get a punch.  When your card has 10 punches, then you get a free buffet.  Effectively, you buy 10 meals to get an 11th one free.

Unfortunately, these type of programs don’t build loyalty to the brand, they build loyalty to the offer.

Here’s why:  what the company views as a reward, the customer views as a purchase incentive.  While the company views each punch of the card as a reward, the customer knows that the reward is actually the free meal that comes after the card has 10 punches.  The customer sees that each punch is an incentive, and each punch brings the customer closer to filling the card, which also makes them more likely to want to eat more meals at this retailer in order to complete the card.

But what happens to that customer’s loyalty level when the card is full?  Then they get their free meal, and a new card.  In other words, they now have to start over.  Which effectively means the customer’s loyalty level toward the offer resets as well, to a much lower level.

In order to build loyalty to the brand you need to offer rewards that come after the purchase but are not dependent on a particular purchase.  And it helps if the reward is unexpected.

For example, let’s say that you ate lunch at the same fast food chain in the above example, but you didn’t have a punch card.  In fact, let’s say you ate there 3 times over the next 2 weeks.  On the 4th visit when you went to pay for the meal the owner says ‘This one’s on the house, thanks for your business!’  That reward was totally unexpected and it helps build loyalty to the brand.  Which means your chances of  eating there more often just increased.

So if you want to create more loyal customers, here’s your cheat sheet:

1 – Don’t offer incentives.  Incentives don’t increase loyalty to the brand they increase loyalty to the offer to which they are attached.

2 – Offer rewards after the purchase that the customer does not expect.  The customer views this as your brand showing its appreciation for the customer’s business.

3 – Recognize the people that are helping to build your business and say thank you.  These people don’t need incentives because they are already loyal to your brand.  Say ‘Thank you!’ (and mean it) and you’ll create more loyal customers.

 

PS: Kathy has a fabulous comment on this topic from earlier this year, it’s worth a read as well.

Pic via Flickr user steve_lodefink

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Four Ways Your Advocates and Fans Are Saving Your Brand Money Right Now

EvangelistsFirst, consider your typical brand advocate.  This person is going out of their way to sing your praises to other customers.  They view themselves as owners of your brand, so they are acting in what they perceive to be the brand’s best interests.  Here’s four examples of how your brand advocates are saving you money:

1 – Brand advocates lower your marketing costs.  Marketing communications are utilized to generate sales, typically via acquiring new customers.  But brand advocates do that for you.  Brand advocates are spending every day promoting your brand to other customers, and encouraging them to buy from your brand.  And given that it costs your brand 6-7 more to acquire one new customer than it does to retain an existing one, the marketing cost savings add up quickly.

2 – Brand advocates lower your customer service costs.  As brand advocates interact with other customers, they are also answering their questions and helping them with any issues or problems they have.  Additionally, brand advocates create content that can help solve questions or problems that other customers have.  Every problem that another customer solves for a brand saves your brand the time it would have taken to work with that customer individually to help them.  And since time is money…

3 – Brand advocates can help you diffuse or avoid a social media crisis.  This is a critical benefit that your fans provide that most brands miss.  If your fans encounter people attacking your brand, they will defend it.  This greatly decreases the chance of other people ‘piling on’ and it also tends to ‘scare off’ the people that launched the attack.  Think of your advocates as having a guard dog in your yard.  If someone comes into your yard starting trouble, they will start barking and scare them off!

4 – Brand advocates lower your market research costs.  Advocates proactively connect with your brand,  They look for reasons to reach out to your brand, and often they do so while providing feedback.  They tell you what they like and dislike about your brand.  Remember that advocates view themselves as the owners of your brand, so if they see something ‘wrong’ with your brand, they will notify you of that problem.  Of course, since they love your brand they will also offer a solution to the issue and want to work with you to make that solution become reality.

 

Why working directly with your brand advocates makes sense

Take all of these benefits that your advocates provide for you naturally.  Now if you had a program in place to work directly with your fans, you accelerate each of these benefits.  And since we are discussing cost-savings, then you increase the amount of money your brand saves by working with its fans.  So the effort can easily pay for itself!

Here’s a few examples of how brands are working directly with their fans to see big benefits:

Pitney Bowes set up a user forum were its users provide customer service directly to other customers.  PB has tracked that every 5 visits to a forum question averts one customer service call, which PB places an internal value of $10 on.  You can do the math, but this is a huge cost-savings to the brand, that only happened because Pitney Bowes created a forum that allows its fans to more effectively help each other (see point #2 above).

Paper.li has set up a program where its members are given advance access to new features that the publishing platform will be rolling out.  The advantage here is that when Paper.li makes these new features available to everyone, its fans can go out and help other members realize the potential of the new features and why they make Paper.li better.  So this generates a marketing cost savings (point #1) as well as a customer support benefit.

The Red Cross avoided a potential disaster of a social media crisis a few years ago when an employee made a mistake and accidentally tweeted a personal tweet from the Red Cross account!  But since The Red Cross does such a great job of engaging its fans on Twitter and quickly addressed the situation, it turned out to be a big positive for the brand.

 

If you’d like to create a formal program to work with your fans, check out this post on creating a brand ambassador program.  Want more help?  Then check out Think Like a Rock Star.

Not sure if it pays to connect with your fans?  Try this very simple experiment:  For the next five people that tweet something positive about your brand on Twitter, reply to them and tweet the following: “Thank you so much, we really appreciate that!”

Now track the responses you get to those 5 tweets.  The responses you get were generated by you responding to your fans.  It’s that simple to do, and even if you only have 1 response, if you do that every time then you’ve just increased positive tweets about your brand by at least 20%.

Love the people that love you.  It really does pay off.

 

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How One Country Increased Tourism to Record Levels By Embracing UGC

I’m not a huge fan of crowd-sourcing marketing content or campaigns.  The reason is because typically such campaigns attract an audience that has little or no loyalty to the brand, but instead wants to win a prize.

But I love the campaign that the Philippines conducted last year to drive interest in tourism.  The pacific island country launched an app called More Fun in the Philippines.  The app lets you overlay the slogan More Fun in the Philippines over a picture you take, but let’s you add an explanation of why ‘It’s More Fun in the Philippines’.  Here’s a few examples:

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Once the pictures are taken and your caption added, they can be shared on Facebook, Twitter or as you see above, on a blog.  What I love about this crowd-sourcing effort is because it puts the content in the hands of people that have a passion for the brand.  This is key, because the people that will be interested in participating in this campaign are proud Filipinos that want to showcase the Philippines and let the rest of the world see their country as they do.

The Philippines took the content created by its citizens and used submissions on its website as well as in advertising.

Phillipines

“In a very real sense it’s a people power campaign because you can’t imagine how spontaneous this has all been. There’s this latent love of country that we have been able to unleash” explains Ramon Jimenez, Secretary of Tourism for the Philippines.

This campaign was incredibly popular, in fact the hashtag #morefuninthephilippines became the top trending topic on Twitter and visitors to the Philippines increased by 16% during the campaign, to record levels.

So if you want to do a similar crowd-sourcing campaign, keep in mind who you are appealing to and what their motivation is for creating content about your brand.  You want to put the content creation in the hands of people that have a natural affinity and loyalty to your brand, not those that are only encouraged to participate in order to win a prize.  Or worse, people that want to participate in order to mock your brand.

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How Bloggers Can Protect Themselves Online: Tonight’s #Blogchat Topic With Kerry Gorgone!

Kerry

Here’s the transcript of tonight’s #Blogchat, click Transcript on the left!

Tonight (Nov. 3rd, 2013) we’ll be tackling a couple of legal areas of blogging that have always been requested at #Blogchat.  The one and only Kerry Gorgone will be joining us to discuss blogger disclosure rules as well as how to protect our work, especially if its stolen.  Tonight’s #Blogchat is sponsored by Pencils.com, please follow them on Twitter and check out their blog!

To prep for tonight’s topic, there’s two posts by Kerry that I want you to read and BOTH are bookmark-worthy.  Seriously you will want to save both of these posts and if you work for a blogging company you’ll want to share them with your team internally.

The first is a post on disclosure rules that Kerry wrote on her blog.  This covers exactly what you need to disclose when working with companies and how to do so.

The second is a guest post that Kerry wrote for us here on Friday covering how to protect your works online.  Please read both and make sure you are following Kerry on Twitter!

Here’s the schedule for tonight’s chat:

8:00 pm-8:30pm Central – How to Protect Your Content Online.  This for everyone that’s wondered what their options are when they see someone has published their post without the blogger’s permission, or is using a photo without permission, etc.

8:30 pm-9:00pm Central – Blogger disclosure rules.  If you are taking sponsors or working with companies, how do you disclose that relationship via social media?  Do you always have to?  Kerry will explain all!

 

I think this might be the most informative #Blogchat ever so make SURE you get your list of questions together for Kerry.  I’ll be posting the transcript here after #Blogchat so you can have that as well.

And make SURE you have turned your clocks back so you arrive on time.  See y’all tonight!