MackCollier.com

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How Paper.li is Flipping the Role of a Brand Ambassador Program to Focus on Its Fans

KellyTweetLast Wednesday during #Rockstarchat we were joined by Paper.li’s Marketing Directory, Kelly Hungerford.  Kelly was joining the chat to talk about Paper.li’s Brand Ambassador program, which the company launched a few months ago.  Kelly talked about the program, how it was formed, and what the brand’s goals for the initiative were.

What struck me most from our chat was the focus of Paper.li’s brand ambassador program: The goal is to put the spotlight on the brand’s fans.  This is an interesting disconnect from most brand ambassador programs, where the main goal is to create a way to organize some of the brand’s biggest fans so they can better promote the brand.  Paper.li appears to have flipped this model, using the program to promote its fans, with the secondary goal being promotion of the brand itself.

Kelly told us that over the last couple of years, that Paper.li began to identify publishers that were independently helping others better use Paper.li.  So Kelly decided that a brand ambassador program would be a good way to bring together and acknowledge some of its community members that were going out of their way to help others.

So basically Paper.li is rewarding the behavior it wants to encourage.  As Paper.li promotes its brand ambassadors, that helps validate their love of the brand, and gives them more incentive to promote the brand to other people.  So Paper.li’s brand ambassador program is driving additional promotion of the brand, even though that’s not the primary objective.

KellyTweet2Another interesting aspect of Paper.li’s brand ambassador program is that members get early access to new product features and releases.  Kelly said this was a perk that members specifically asked for.  The benefit to the members is obvious and goes back to the idea of giving your fans ‘special access’ and helps them feel like the rock stars (because they are).

But giving brand ambassadors early access to new product features has two huge benefit for Paper.li.  First, it allows Paper.li’s power users to give the brand valuable feedback on the features.  This is done before being released to tbe public, so its possible the brand can still make changes based on feedback from its brand ambassadors.

The second key benefit for Paper.li is that when the new features are officially rolled out, the brand ambassadors will already be familiar with the features and how to use them.  So the brand ambassadors can become teachers and help teach other Paper.li members how to use the new features!  Again, this becomes a promotional tool for the brand, because when Paper.li rolls out new features, it immediately has its biggest fans telling other Paper.li users why these features are so awesome.

So ironically, by flipping the focus of its brand ambassador program to focus on spotlighting its fans, Paper.li has created a powerful promotional tool.  I think this is a very brave move by a brand to give its fans so much control over the direction of such a program.  But I think that willingness to embrace its fans came from how Kelly and team made great efforts to personally connect with its fans.  This lead to them having a better understanding of its fans and what they wanted from their relationship with the brand.  This is why many brands don’t launch a program such as this, because they don’t understand their fans and what motivates them.  As such, they fear ceding control of a program such as this.

So by creating direct benefits for its biggest fans, this program is indirectly creating big benefits for Paper.li!  If you want to view the transcript from last week’s #rockstarchat (which had a TON of key takeaways) then click here(click Transcript on the left).

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#Blogchat Topic For Sunday Aug 4th – Keeping Your Sh*t Straight on Your Blog!

UPDATE: Here’s the transcript!

You know those posts I write from time to time where I show you how I’ve screwed up something here in the hopes that you won’t repeat my mistakes? Yeah, we’re about to have another episode in that series…

So this has been a rough year for this blog.  In February the blog was hacked, and it took me about 3 months to finally get rid of all the gremlins, with the help of Sucuri.  Apparently, I had let hackers get access to this blog because I hadn’t kept my plugins and WordPress updated quickly enough.  Typically I would wait a week or two till I had several plugins that needed to be updated, then update them all at once.  BIG mistake, as I learned the hard way.  Often, one of the main reasons that a plugin updates is to address an existing vulnerability!  So always update your plugins as soon as possible!

Anyway, one of the things I did from Feb-May when we were dealing with the malware is I went apeshit getting security plugins.  Anything that promised to restrict this or block that, I got it.  At once time I think I had like 5 different security plugins.

So on Wednesday, July 23st I noticed that traffic fell about 30% over the previous day.  Now this isn’t a huge deal and happens from time to time.  I was traveling then from Y’all Connect and hadn’t been posting as much over the last few days, so I assumed that was the reason for the decline in traffic.  I should have dug into Google Analytics at this point to figure out what the problem was, but I just assumed there wasn’t a problem.

Then the next day on Thursday the 24th, traffic fell another 20%, then another 20% on Friday.  Something was definitely wrong.

On Friday the 25th I finally dug into Google Analytics and found the problem.  My search traffic was falling like a rock:

SearchTrafficBadSearchSearch traffic on Monday, July the 22nd was 543 visitors, but by Saturday, July 26th that number had fallen to a lowly 34 visitors.

What the hell happened?

It seems that one of those many security plugins I had added that I wanted to block and restrict everything was actually blocking Google from crawling my site!  During #Blogchat on July 21st, a few members had mentioned the advantages of creating a Sitemap for your blog, and how that would help you with search.  So I did that on Sunday night via a plugin, and apparently, that somehow triggered the security plugin to start blocking Google from crawling the site (I am assuming here, this started happening almost immediately after I added the Sitemap).

I discovered this by going into my Google Webmaster Tools dashboard and I discovered the crawl errors (BTW you should set up an account for your site as well.  It might seem like overkill but it’s worth it).  I also started digging into my crawl stats and realized that while there was a huge spike in errors right after I added the Sitemap, that there had been a smaller amount that had consistently been there for months.  Apparently, since I had started adding all those security plugins.

Sooooo….what I did was I started disabling plugins one by one and attempting to ‘Fetch as Google’ after each one.  After disabling the first security plugin, suddenly the crawl errors disappeared!  I did this on Saturday, July 27th.  I immediately noticed that search traffic began to bounce back.  By last Friday (Aug 2nd), search traffic was all the way up to 471 visitors for the day, the most search visitors ever for here on a Friday.  I saw good search traffic yesterday as well, and I am hoping this continues from here out!

But the point to all of this is that:

1 – You need to be careful about adding plugins.  Sometimes they can actually hurt your blog’s performance, so you need to understand exactly what they are doing.  It’s tempting to just add a bunch of plugins to get access to cool new features, but they can sometimes cause more problems than they fix.  And if you do add them make sure you keep them updated.

2 – Keep a close eye on your blog’s traffic and understand why changes are happening.  If you don’t have it already, add Google Analytics to your blog.  This will help you understand the traffic on your blog and track changes.

So tonight at #Blogchat we are going to discuss how to keep your blog clean and less cluttered.  I am a digital packrat (and real-life one too), but I have learned the hard way this year to streamline everything as much as possible.  You can follow #Blogchat tonight on Twitter starting at 8pm Central!  And here’s the transcript so go ahead and save this for later!

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Don’t Worry When People Leave You…

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

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

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

I have two goals for this newsletter:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Learn How Paper.li Created its Brand Ambassador Program Today at #Rockstarchat!

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UPDATE: Here’s the transcript from this chat!

I’m thrilled to announce that Paper.li’s Marketing Director Kelly Hungerford will be joining #Rockstarchat today at 1pm Central on Twitter to discuss how the brand created and launched its brand ambassador program!  This is a great opportunity to learn from Paper.li because I know so many of you work or brands that either have or are considering launching such a program.  Kelly will help you understand how the process has gone for Paper.li, and will be happy to answer any questions you might have.

Here’s the points we’ll cover:

1 – What prompted Paper.li to want to launch a brand ambassador program?

2 – What are Paper.li’s goals for the program?

3 – How are members selected?  Is there a cap or can anyone join?

4 – How does Paper.li measure if the program is working?  What metrics do you track?

5 – What have been some of your A-Ha! moments from launching this program?

 

And if you would like to get a bit more background on Paper.li’s brand ambassador program, check out this guest post that Kelly wrote here a few months ago.

So if you want to join in on the fun, check out the #Rockstarchat happening on Twitter today at 1pm Central!  You can follow the tweets here(Click the All tab at the top to see all the tweets), and here’s the transcript!

BTW, if you subscribe to my Think Like a Rock Star newsletter then you got a heads-up about this yesterday.  Click here if you want to subscribe!

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You Want to Have a Fan-Centric Brand

KathyQuoteI wanted to talk in very broad strokes today about why it pays to have a fan-centric brand.  And what I mean by that is a brand that places a premium on connecting more closely with its most passionate customers.

But before we get into this post, I want to start with a very simple and profound truth: When your brand participates in a conversation it changes that conversation.  Think about the online (and offline) conversation that your customers are having about and around your brand.  When you take an active role in that conversation, it changes.  When you interact with your customers and they with you, both groups have a higher level of understanding of the other’s POV.  This is why it floors me to see so many companies that are scared to death of engaging with their customers online.  Yes. it can be scary if you’ve never done so, but the opportunities are enormous.

This is why cultivating more interaction with your customers is so important:  Because interaction leads to understanding.  And without understanding there cannot be trust.  Think about the people that you trust.  Can you think of anyone that you trust even though you don’t understand who they are or what they stand for and believe in?  I bet you can’t, I know I can’t.

You want more interaction with your customers because that can lead to trust.  And without trust, you cannot have advocacy.

Then the process is: Interactions > Understanding > Trust > Advocacy

So then the starting point is to focus on having more interactions and engagement with your customers.  Social media helps with this as it gives you a constant way to monitor online conversations and respond.

But it has to be your focus to want to engage your customers.  Which is why I laid out this process because that level of engagement is the starting point for cultivating advocates/fans.

Now, if we are saying that you need to engage with your customers in order to eventually create advocates, then how do you explain the fact that Apple has such devoted fans?

This was truly the beauty of Steve Jobs and why he was such a visionary CEO.  Jobs had the ability to understand today, what products customers would want tomorrow.  For example, roll back the clock to 1999 or so when Napster was about to forever change the music industry.  Many artists, such as Metallica, saw Napster and peer to peer file-sharing as a huge threat to their business and a lost of income.  Jobs understood that Napster had changed our behavior, and as a result, we wouldn’t want to buy $17.99 CDs anymore just to get the 2-3 songs we wanted to hear.  We wanted a way to buy songs individually.

Enter iTunes.  And of course, we needed a way to store all these digital files and take them with us.

Enter the iPod.  Where the music industry saw the threat posed by file-sharing, Jobs saw the opportunity, and capitalized on it.  Because Jobs was the rare visionary CEO that had an uncanny understanding of his customers and what they wanted.

When did everyone decide that they wanted a smartphone with a scrolling interface? 2 seconds after they saw Jobs debut it on the iPhone in 2007.  Jobs understood Apple’s customers and what they wanted in his products.  Which is why his customers trusted Apple to create the products they wanted, and this is why the brand had such devoted advocates.

The odds are that your brand does not have a visionary CEO like Jobs.  So you do need to interact with your customers so they can understand you, and vice versa.  But that just means you have one extra step to take to create a truly fan-centric brand.

Oh and PS: Guess who’s blogging again? 😉

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Five Tips For Sharing Content Like a Pro on Twitter

TweetI’ve blogged before about how sharing content on Twitter can drive big traffic back to your blog.  It’s also a great way to network with others, and to find and share content that makes you and your network smarter.  I am a big believer in sharing content on Twitter and here’s five of my best tips:

1 – Share content from sources that people trust, and identify those sources.  I am constantly looking to see what CopyBlogger, Spin Sucks and Convince and Convert are writing because I know they consistently produce good content that helps other people solve their content marketing and social media problems.  I also let people know that the share is coming from these sites, because that makes them more likely to click the link.

2 – Tell people why they should click the link.  This one is sometimes tough with just 140 characters, but if at all possible I like to add why the link is worth clicking on.  A personal endorsement along with a link drives more clicks.

3 – Identify the author of the article or post.  You want to do this to let others know who wrote this awesome piece, but to also ping the author to let them know you are sharing their content.  Add via @username to your tweet.  BTW that also makes it more likely that this person will want to share YOUR content (Pro Tip).

4 – Participate in the conversations around the content you share.  Many people miss this but sharing content on Twitter is a GREAT way to network with others.  I purposely try to schedule most of the links I share with HootSuite ahead of time so I can be on Twitter and interact with people that comment on the links I share.

5 – Share your own stuff.   Self-promotion?  Oh the horrors!  Relax, if you are sharing useful content then you have every right to share some of your own stuff as well.  In fact, this is one of the biggest benefits from sharing OTHER people’s awesome stuff, it drives more clicks to YOUR content when you share links.  I’ve tested this but when I am sharing other people’s content and THEN share a link to my latest post, it drives more traffic here versus only sharing my post.  Try it for yourself and see what happens!

BONUS: Share content from the people that share your content.  Look for ways to put the spotlight on the people that are promoting you and your content.  Remember, reward the behavior you want to encourage.  Besides, saying ‘Thank you!’ is the right thing to do.

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Race your winners, stable your losers

SocialGraph“Own Your Network”

I heard that phrase several times this week in Birmingham at Y’all Connect.  It’s something I have been thinking a lot about recently.

Are we stretching ourselves too thin when it comes to social media, and are we spending too much time trying to cultivate new networks instead of maximizing the potential of our existing networks?

For example, I keep hearing that I need to be on Google Plus.  That I need to build a network there.  The obvious problem is, that takes time and energy.  Which also means that the time I take to build a new network on Plus is going to mean less time I spend on cultivating my established network on Twitter.

Networks are like gardens, they need to be cultivated and tended to.  One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to try to plant too many gardens.

We are always being told that we need to ‘be everywhere’ when it comes to social media.  I disagree.  I think you need to pick fewer social media sites to be active on.  But if you are active there, you need to be all-in.

For the next week, I am going to focus on my network on Twitter.  I won’t be on Plus, I won’t be on Facebook.  You will find me on Twitter or here (or possibly commenting on another blog), and that’s it.

Where will you be spending your time next week?

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Make Your WordPress Blog Mobile With WPTouch

I’ve written about how much I love WPTouch before, but I wanted to sing the plugin’s praises again here.  WPTouch optimizes your blog for viewing on mobile devices such as smartphones.  Those of us that use our smartphones to read blogs know how terrible it is to try to read a blog that hasn’t been optimized for mobile.

Case in point:  I love the big, bold picture of Katy Perry that went with the last post here.  A great picture really makes a post pop.  But here’s what this blog looks like on my iPhone without using the WPTouch plugin:

photo

That’s pretty much the actual size of what you’d be viewing.  It’s impossible to read with the type that small, so you’ll either start pinching and zooming, or leave (probably leave).  Either way, you won’t be impressed with how my blog looks on your phone.

Now here’s how this same post looks on my iPhone with the WPTouch plugin:

 photo (1)

Sigh…isn’t that a thing of beauty?  All of the sidebar and header crap that you don’t need is stripped out, and it’s only the post.  Just gawgeous.  Seriously, you do not realize how awful a blog that hasn’t been optimized for mobile looks, until you add this plugin.

Now, how important is making sure your blog is optimized for viewing on smartphones? I was curious as to this blog’s mobile traffic, so I checked.  So far this year, here’s the percentage of each month’s traffic that’s come here via smartphones:

January – 14%

February – 13%

March – 13%

April – 12%

May – 15%

June – 16%

July – 17%

As you can see, it’s slowly increasing.  Check your own blog’s traffic and see what you find.  BTW those stats are coming from Google Analytics, and don’t include tablets.

But adding WPTouch is a very simple way to instantly make your WordPress blog look ahhhmazing on smartphones.  There is a caveat that it doesn’t play nicely with some themes, but you can always download it and try it out.  The premium version is supposed to solve most of the theme-related issues.  Even if WPTouch can’t work for you, check your blog’s stats and see how your mobile visits is trending.  If you are seeing an increase in mobile visitors like I am, it might be time to go ahead and invest in a solution to make your blog mobile-friendly.

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Give Up Control to Get Control

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“I just said we gotta do this, this is at the heart of the brand.  We’ve got a real problem in losing control of our ability to talk to friends.” – Former Maker’s Mark CEO Bill Samuels Jr. on how he pitched the idea of launching a brand ambassador program to his Board of Directors.

I am in love with this quote right now.

Often when a business considers launching a brand ambassador program or even a fan-engagement strategy on a smaller scale, one of the key worries is a loss of control.  Companies fear giving more control over to their customers and letting these customers have any significant amount of say and control over the path that the program takes.

These companies can only see that they will be losing control.  They can’t see what they will be gaining.

In my book Think Like a Rock Star, I’ve included several case studies from where rock stars gave their fans control of a message, idea, program.  What do rock stars like The Donnas, Katy Perry and Jewel understand about their customers that your company does not?  Why would they give away control so freely to their fans and actually look for the opportunity to do so?

Because rock stars understand that when you give control to your fans, you get back their trust.

When you give up control, you gain trust.  And people advocate for brands and people that they trust.

In the Maker’s Mark example, the brand had always prided itself on having a one-to-one relationship with its most passionate customers.  Maker’s Mark truly embodied the rock star mindset of embracing your fans.  But as the brand grew beyond just a small Kentucky brand into a national brand, it meant that its network of fans became national as well.  So the founders realized that the brand had lost control of its ability to connect directly with its biggest fans.

The solution?  A brand ambassador program.  With a brand ambassador program, Maker’s Mark had a vehicle that let the brand connect directly with its biggest fans (its brand advocates), and by extension, it could then connect with all the customers that the brand ambassadors came in contact with.  By creating this program and giving up some control to its members, Maker’s Mark regained control of its ability to connect direct with its fans.  It regained the ability to connect with its fans that it lost when the brand went national.

Maker’s Mark understands what most rock stars do: That if you embrace your biggest fans, you will gain their loyalty, and their trust.  And they will work for you to help build your brand.

Sometimes it’s worth it to give up something small, to get something bigger in return.

Pic via Flickr user LunchBoxStudios

PS: Every week we discuss how your brand can create more passionate fans in the Think Like a Rock Star newsletter.  Click here to signup for free.

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The Beginner’s Guide to Understanding Blogging SEO

UPDATE: Here’s tonight’s #Blogchat transcript! (Click ‘Transcript’ on the left to view).

Well this is a topic I can definitely blog about, since I am no SEO expert!  We will also be discussing this topic tonight (Sunday, July 21st 2013) at #Blogchat on Twitter.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.  Effectively, what you are doing is ‘helping’ search engines understand what topics you are writing about.

A great way to do this is to use keywords and phrases that tie back to your topic, in your blog post itself.  For example, notice that the phrase ‘Blogging SEO’ appears in this post’s title, as well as throughout the post itself.  By placing this phrase in the title and in the post itself, I am helping Google and other search engines to recognize what this post is about.

So when someone searches for a term related to blogging SEO, or blogs and SEO, this post will likely do better in search results as a result of me using those specific words.  This is why you’ll see bloggers often write their blog post titles in the form of a question.  Such as ‘So what’s the best way to use Twitter?’  Because if someone does a Google search for the term ‘What’s the best way to use Twitter?’ that post will rank higher in search results for that exact term!

So if you are just getting started trying to optimize your blog posts for search, think about which keywords you are using with every post.  And then focus on using those keywords in three locations:

1 – The post title.  Notice that for this post ‘Blogging SEO’ is in the title.  So if someone searches for ‘Blogging SEO’, that will help this post rank higher in the results.

2 – The post itself.  I have repeated the term ‘Blogging SEO’ several times in this post.  That further helps to impress on Google and other search engines that this post is about blogging SEO, and should be higher in the search results.

3 – The post’s URL.  This is a tip that a lot of blogger’s miss.  Notice that the URL for this post is https://mackcollier.com/blogging-seo  The keywords ‘blogging SEO’ are literally part of the post’s URL!  That also helps Google identify that this post is about Blogging SEO.

 

So those are some beginner tips for optimizing your blog content for search, and you’ll get a ton more tips tonight during #Blogchat, starting at 8pm Central time.

Finally, I know that #Blogchat has been hammered by a few spammers lately, so I have embedded the tweets here, and most of the spam tweets should be deleted from here.  So if you want please follow along with #Blogchat here!