MackCollier.com

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Hobbies, Deeper Learning and the One Thing You May Not Know About Scott Monty

If I asked you about Scott Monty, you’d probably offer up that he’s the Global Head of Social Media for Ford.  Everyone knows that. But did you also know that Scott is a huge Sherlock Holmes fan and has one of the best hobby blogs I’ve ever seen, The Baker Street Blog?

Last night during #Blogchat while we were discussing creating more advanced content on our blogs, a few of you correctly pointed out that people that run hobby blogs are extremely passionate about their hobbies.  They have the desire to find that more advanced content, because they have a passion to learn more about their hobby.

For example, I am a huge fan of the classic tv sitcom MASH.  I have a friend that is as well, but he takes it to another level.  What he does is collect autographs from the cast members.  And not just the main characters like Hawkeye and Frank Burns, he especially goes after the actors that only appeared in one or two episodes.  The more obscure the better.  He spends hours hunting down names and addresses, and knows all the autograph sites and MASH sites to find this information (started by people that are just as passionate as he is).

Our passion drives us to learn more about the topics we are passionate about.

Not only does it drive us to learn more about the topics we are passionate about, it drives is to connect with others that know more than we do.  We are constantly driven to learn more about the topics we are passionate about, and we want to connect with others that share our passion and we want to discuss that passion with others.  Because as Kathy Sierra puts it ‘people with a passion for something will not STFU!’

So how do you focus on the topics that your audience is passionate about?  Let’s say you blog about….blogging.  Most people I know are not passionate about blogging as a tool, they are passionate about what the tool allows them to do.  For example, maybe they are blogging to improve their chances of getting a job.  Maybe they are blogging to share their passion for their favorite brand.  Maybe they are blogging to connect with other people that are dealing with an extremely rare disease.  Whatever their area of passion is, it typically is not about the blog as a tool, but what the blog allows them to do.

One final thought on passion: Learning feeds passion.  As we learn more about a topic, we feel we are getting better at that topic.  Maybe we start studying the Civil War.  First we learn the causes of the war.  Then we move on and learn about the major battles, the major generals.  Before you know it we are dissecting whether or not Robert E Lee’s battleplan at Gettysburg didn’t work because it was a terrible plan, or because it was a great plan that was poorly executed due to the incompetence of his generals.

So as a blogger, if you can help you audience learn more about a topic they love, they will not only become more passionate about it, they will become more passionate about you.

PS: Just as I was finishing this post, Kelly left this comment on yesterday’s post – “I believe inspiration is a large part of the education process, regardless if it is beginning or advanced level.  I look to be inspired and even when I’m just starting out on my new journey I look to mentors who can help solve my problems or answer questions now, as well as inspire me in the future. I want to grow with them.”

Double PS: Here’s an oldie but a goodie from Kathy on creating more engaging content for your audience.

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Creating Advanced Content and the Role of Deeper Discussions on Blogs

If you think about it, one of the fastest ways to truly establish thought leadership with a blog is to continuously create high-level content around a subject.  Yet very few blogs do that, and the ones that offer high level content on a frequent basis typically have a very infrequent posting schedule.

Does that mean that most people are simply incapable of creating more advanced content?  I say no, and offer two reasons why most bloggers aren’t creating more advanced content:

1 – Saying ‘Here’s What I Think’ can be scary.  When you write more advanced content, you are often ceding the role of expert and acknowledging to your readers that you don’t have all the answers.  That can be very scary for some people.

2 – More advanced content typically gets less engagement.  THIS is the biggest reason I believe why most of the content we see in this space is 101-level, and not 301 or 401 level.  In general, basic content gets shared, more advanced content gets mulled over.  And just like the blogger can get skittish about admitting that they don’t have all the answers, so can the reader when they go to leave a comment.

 

So at the end of the day, how do we as bloggers create more advanced content on our blogs?  That’s the topic I want to discuss tonight at #Blogchat (8pm Central time, Sunday night).  But before we chat about it tonight, I want to offer one example of how we can do that on our blogs, and it ties back to a method I actually use during #Blogchat:

Create more advanced content by first creating deeper discussions. 

First, if you’ll notice the majority of the topics we cover at #Blogchat are more 101-level.  There’s a reason for this, as stated above, 101-level content lowers the participation barrier.  When the topic level is 101-level, it’s easy for more people to feel like they are an expert, and thus they feel more comfortable joining the discussion.

The simple fact is that most people, especially regular participants of #Blogchat, are completely capable of engaging in and contributing to more advanced conversations.  But many people don’t believe they are, and I think it’s the job of the host (whether on Twitter or a blog) to bring out deeper thoughts from participants.  This is something I don’t do very well.

So I will save the rest for tonight at #Blogchat, but if you will be joining us (thank you!), please be thinking about ways that we all can create more advanced content.  And at the same time, how can we create more advanced discussions around our content?

See y’all at 8pm Central!

Pic via Flickr user Appalachian Encounters

PS:  If you want to leave comments here now, please do and we can carry the conversation over to #blogchat when it starts tonight!

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You Build Loyalty and Create Fans With Rewards

It’s the timing and context of the reward that’s crucial.

If you walk into Best Buy and the door greeter smiles and hands you a coupon for 20% off any purchase over $100 during your visit, that’s not a reward.  It’s an incentive to make a purchase.  While that coupon might increase the chance that you will make a purchase during that trip to Best Buy, in the grand scheme of things it’s probably not going to make you more loyal to the chain.

If you walk into your favorite antique mall and the owner greets you and says “BTW, do you still need that final glass to complete your Pepsi collection from 1975?  Because we just bought a large collection of glassware and I found it and put it aside to ask you about the next time you came in.  Here you go!”  That’s a true reward because it comes as a result of previous purchases and isn’t directly tied to a future purchase.

Above that, this type of reward communicates appreciation to the customer for their business.  That builds loyalty because the business is literally saying Thank You.

The Best Buy example communicates a desire to have you buy something.   So even though you are getting a coupon, you understand that Best Buy is acting in its best interest.  And yes, the antique shop owner is also acting in their best interest by giving you the Pepsi glass you need, because they could sell that to someone else.  So it is worth money to the owner, but the owner also understands the value that you place on this item.  It’s the final glass you need to complete a collection that you’ve been assembling for 10 years!

So if you are wanting to offer rewards that also build loyalty, focus on ways to reward existing behavior versus trying to incentivize new behavior.

Now, what about loyalty punch cards?  You’ve probably seen these at restaurants, coffee shops and the like.  Buy 5/10 meals, get one free.  Is that what we mean by building loyalty by rewarding after the purchase?

No, because even though the reward comes after the purchase, there’s an incentive to make the next purchase.  So really, punch cards like this are building loyalty to the offer, not the brand.  For example, let’s say it’s your lunch hour and you are about to run to Subway, when you remember that you have a Pizza Hut lunch buffet punch card, and that with one more punch you card will be full and you’ll get a free meal.  That will probably swing your lunch decision to Pizza Hut, but what happens next week when your Pizza Hut punch card is empty?  Will there still be the same level of incentive to start a new punch card, or will you then decide to go to Subway for lunch?

Remember, the timing and context of the reward is crucial to building loyalty.  It determines if you are saying ‘Thank you!’ for existing behavior, or attempting to create new behavior.

Also, when a business shows you that they appreciate your business, it validates your loyalty to them.  It makes you feel better about supporting them, and it does become an incentive to make an additional purchase.

But the incentive doesn’t come from the brand, it comes from you.  We all want to support the brands that we feel appreciate us and act in our best interests, as well as their own.  There’s a feeling of ‘well they did something for me, now I want to do something for them!’

You don’t get that with coupons and incentives, because we understand that the brand is offering these to entice sales.  Which means its motivation lies in its own best interests.

You build loyalty by offering the reward after and independently of the purchase.  Not by offering it before and tying it to a purchase.

PS: In the above picture the incentive is obvious but the reward might not be.  On June 13th, 2010, Taylor Swift held a special free autograph signing for her fans in Nashville.  She started signing at 8am in the morning, and finally stopped at 10:30PM that night.  This was one of the many ways that Taylor says Thank You to her fans for their existing behavior.   And it’s one of the many reasons why they love her.

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My Posts Have An Average Lifespan of 2-3 Days on Twitter

I was digging through this blog’s stats this morning in Google Analytics, and I noticed something interesting.  As I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago, one of my goals for 2013 is to blog more often.  A big reason why is because I want to increase the traffic here, and so far in January traffic is up a bit, and that’s to be expected from a more frequent posting pattern.

So what I want to do as the traffic increases is understand which traffic sources are driving that increase.  One of them is Twitter, which is by far the social site that sends me the most referral traffic.  I started looking at the individual posts in 2013 that have received the most traffic from Twitter, and I noticed something:  They received almost all of their referral traffic from Twitter in the first 2-3 days, then almost nothing.

Here’s the number of Twitter referrals for the most popular post so far this month, ‘Done’ is Better Than ‘Perfect’ When it Comes to Blogging, which was published on Jan 1st:

As you can see, good for 3 days, then traffic volume falls off a cliff.

Here’s the traffic pattern for the 3rd most popular post (#2 was one that I linked to for multiple days as a #blogchat topic and it skewed the results a bit I think), which was The Biggest Mistake Companies Make When Engaging Their Fans Via Social Media published on Jan 8th:

Same pattern, traffic for 3 days, then it dies.  There was a bump back on the 14th, and that was the same day the post was listed as a link on a New York Times article and a few people RTed the post on Twitter, I am assuming after they found it via the NYT link.

Finally, here’s the 4th most popular post, Should You Remove the Dates From Your Blog Posts?, on Jan 14th:

Two days, then flatline.

There’s a few takeaways I have from this:

1 – These stats suggest that when we are on Twitter, links have a very short window to get our attention.  I don’t think that’s a huge revelation.

2 – If we want to leverage Twitter as a platform to draw attention to our writings, then it pays to focus on fewer topics versus more.  If we are only paying attention in short bursts on Twitter, then it helps if you are consistently giving us the same or similar topics to look at.

3 – Since our attention spans are so short, it means we can cover the same topics repeatedly.  This is where I think you can really leverage Twitter as a channel to drive big referral traffic back to your blog.  By blogging frequently, and by frequently blogging about the same or similar topics.  Notice from the above graphs that the 3 posts were published on the 1st, the 8th and the 14th.  Pretty spread out, but what if those same posts were published three days in a row?  The spike in traffic from each would overlap and by the 2nd and 3rd days, referral traffic as a whole from Twitter would be pretty high.

4 – If you plan on having Twitter be a driver of traffic to your blog, you probably need to publish a new post at least every 2-3 days.  If we assume that the average blog post has a lifespan of 2-3 days on Twitter, publishing a new blog post every month isn’t going to do much for your referral traffic from the site.

So that’s something to think about.  I think for me what I would like to see happen is to find a way to not only extend that average lifespan to say 3-4 days, but to also chain together posts that bring in higher amounts of referral traffic from Twitter on a more regular basis.

I would also be interested in hearing what the rest of you are seeing with the referral traffic from Twitter to your posts.  Are you seeing most of your traffic coming in the first 2-3 days as well?  Do you see a longer range?  Shorter?

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Fans Create Cash

Last month Jackie wrote a post on her blog with a pretty significant business nugget that I think a lot of people missed:

“Dell has been using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure customer advocacy for the last three years. According to Bobbi Dangerfield, Dell’s VP of Commercial Sales Operations, the company is now able to show that improvements in NPS score directly tie to revenue growth”

Net Promoter Score is a system that attempts to ‘score’ your customer base and tell you if they are fans or detractors.  A score of -100 indicates that all your customers are detractors, while a score of +100 indicates all your customers are fans. Now NPS isn’t perfect and does have its detractors.  But what this means is that as the percentage of Dell’s customers that promote the brand increases, the company’s revenue also grows.

Fans create cash.

How many times have I said here and elsewhere don’t focus on the tools, focus on the connections that the tools help facilitate.  Understanding Twitter is meaningless if you don’t understand how and why your customers are using it.

Understanding your customers trumps understanding marketing/communication channels.  Understanding your fans is even more important.  Here’s what we do know about fans:

1 – They will look for opportunities to promote you

2 – They assume ownership of your brand and will act in what they perceive to be your brand’s best interests

3 – They have high/extremely high levels of loyalty to your brand, which means they spend more than the average customer that has little to no brand loyalty

4 – Their opinions about your brand is more reliable to the average customer than your brand’s advertising.

5 – When they encounter a problem with your brand (bad customer service, defective product or low quality) they will look for ways to bring this to your attention so you can correct the problem.

 

Let’s look at each of these individually:

Fans will look for opportunities to promote you

You know when you find an amazing blog post that really resonated with you?  You just have to run to Twitter and Facebook and share it with your friends, right?  Why is that?  Because you found value in the post, and want to share that value with others.  Your brand’s fans have the same mentality, they believe that your brand is simply better than other brands, and by extension they feel that if their friends buy your brand, they will also be better.  This is why your fans will go out of their way to promote your brand, because they love your brand and they love their friends.

Fans assume ownership of your brand and act in what they believe to be its best interests 

This honestly scares many brands because they don’t like the idea of having fans out there speaking on the brand’s behalf unchecked.  But this concern is easily overcome by simply connecting with your brand’s fans.  Communicate to them and give them instruction on how to represent your brand.  Your fans want you to connect with them and give them a sense of direction.

Your fans have high levels of brand loyalty and spend more

Your fans support your brand with their wallet.  They buy your products, and then they try to convince other customers to do the same thing.  This is exactly why rock stars don’t focus the majority of their time and marketing on their new customers, they focus their attention on their fans.  Because rocks stars have always understood that their ability to bring in new customers tomorrow, depends on how well they connect with their biggest fans, today.

Your fan’s opinion is more reliable to the average customer than your brand’s advertising

This ties in with the previous point.  Fans spend more, and they also refer business to your brand.  Your fans promote you and that carries more weight with the average customer than your advertising and marketing efforts.  This is another reason why rock stars connect with their fan because they understand that their fans drive new business for the rock star.  Brands are mostly counting on acquiring new customers via overpriced advertising.  Super Bowl spots have already sold out at $4M a pop for a 30-second spot.  All for the hope that each brand’s spot will be the hit of the night and go viral and draw millions of views.  Creating buzz is the name of the game.

Yet for a tiny fraction of that amount, each brand could create and launch a robust brand ambassador program that would provide sustained revenue, improved customer satisfaction, and lower marketing costs for years to come.

When your fans encounter a problem with your brand, they will bring it to your attention to you can fix it

Want to know the difference between a detractor and a fan?  A detractor will say ‘Your brand sucks!’  A fan will say ‘Your brand sucks, here’s how I think we can work together to fix it’.  Your fans assume ownership of your brand, and thusly have a vested interest in seeing it succeed.  They will actively look for problems with your brand, because they want to bring it to your attention so it can be corrected.

 

So what’s stopping your brand from connecting with its fans and seeing real business growth as a result like Dell has?  And if you need a plan for how to get started embracing and empowering your fans to grow your business, here it is.

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How to Think Like Zuck: a Q&A With Ekaterina Walter

As most of you know, I’ve been working on Think Like a Rock Star with McGraw-Hill since last May.  But over the last few months I’ve been closely following the progression of Ekaterina Walter’s book Think Like Zuck, since Ekaterina is not only a good friend, but she’s also with McGraw-Hill.  I wanted to do a Q&A with Ekaterina, since her book goes on sale today and as you can see, it’s already getting rave reviews on Amazon.  Here’s what Ekaterina had to say about the book and why you will enjoy it:

Mack: Think Like Zuck is about the five secrets behind the success of Facebook, including Passion, Purpose, People, Product and Partnerships.  Did you order those 5 Ps in terms of perceived importance, and if you didn’t, which of the 5 Ps would you say is most important for the average business to have in order to be successful?

Ekaterina:  “Think Like Zuck” is an analogy/philosophy of a leader who follows his/her passion, leads with purpose, builds great teams, and strives for continued excellence in his/her product (or services). It is a mentality that drives great leaders to building successful business and the approach they use to doing so.

To me the five are not separable. You see, when you are passionate about, you want to imagine, to create, to build. Passion fuels your purpose. And your purpose defines what product/service you want to offer and what business you want to build. But one can’t build a successful product (or business) alone, one needs a strong team of people who believe in the same vision to help execute on that purpose (and that is where strong partnerships come along as well).

 

Mack: One of the interesting tidbits for me came in the Product chapter where you told the story of how when Facebook rolled out News Feed in 2006, that it was immediately slammed by most users.  Can you talk about what that episode meant to the future of Facebook and also how Facebook employees viewed Zuckerberg as a result?

Ekaterina: A lot of people internally debated with him whether this was the right decision or not. He persisted. And just like with the decision of expanding beyond colleges before that and becoming a platform later, he was right. I think these key decisions solidified everyone’s belief in Mark’s vision.

The reason the NewsFeed wasn’t welcomed right away by users is because of the privacy concerns. Zuckerberg tends to be ahead of his time on his belief in radical transparency. He saw the usage on the network jump exponentially right after the NewsFeed was introduced, so he didn’t respond right away because he watched numbers, not people. It was a mistake to not respond right away with the revised privacy settings, a mistake the company made several times. I don’t think the company ever fully recovered from that. But the reality is that now we cannot imagine our lives without NewsFeed and the ability for others to serve us their news in our stream vs. going to each person’s page individually and checking out what they were up to (that seems so archaic now).

 

Mack: You no doubt spent a ton of time researching Zuckerberg in writing Think Like Zuck.  What’s the one thing you learned about Mark that surprised you the most?

Ekaterina: You mean besides the fact that he is a romantic and that he designed his wife’s ring? I was personally touched to see that side of him…

What I admire about Mark is his dedication to his purpose and long-term vision. He is very strategic in his approach to growing the company and building the product. Everything that he does supports one thing that he is really focused on – connecting people around the globe and making the world more open and transparent. Wall Street, and sometimes the users, tend to see (and criticize) things that are right under their nose, but what we sometimes tend to forget is that a lot of times we  are not only investing in the company’s P&L, but in the vision and strategic acumen of a leader. Jeff Bezos is one example of a leader who, just like Zuck, didn’t make any excuses about his decisions, he was very clear about his path and he persisted no matter the criticism. When he launched reviews on his site, people questioned his own knowledge of business. Now almost every business has reviews on their sites. And with all of the ups and downs Amazon stock continues to steadily climb.

 

Mack: Finally, of the 5 Ps in your book, what’s the 1 P that Zuckerberg gets right, that you think most leaders and CEOs miss?

Ekaterina: Culture. He built a solid culture that can sustain the growth of the business and support constant innovation. The way of the hack is very deeply ingrained inside the company. Company’s slogans are: “done is better than perfect” and “this journey is only 1% finished” and that is because Facebook employees never rest on their laurels, they stay focused and keep shipping.

There are a lot of other elements of the culture that I talk about in my book that help create this solid foundation of success. And the fact is: not every company can establish a culture that supports the mission of a business in such an effective way.  But that always was and will always remain a critical ingredient of long-term success.

 

Thanks to Ekaterina for giving us some insights into the book Think Like Zuck.  And for full disclaimer, Ekaterina was nice enough to send me a review copy of the book, and I really enjoyed it.  It is packed with business case studies and even has a few human interest stories splashed in.  It made the book much more enjoyable to me, and a quicker read.  Check it out, I think you will enjoy it even if you aren’t a Facebook fan boy, and I’m definitely not. But I do appreciate Zuckerberg a bit more as an entrepreneur  and a person, after reading Ekaterina’s book!

PS: Think Like Zuck goes on sale TODAY on Amazon, you can buy it here.

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Should You Remove the Dates From Your Blog Posts?

There are many common topics discussed during #blogchat, and one of the most popular is whether or not bloggers should include dates in their posts.

Now as you can see, I do not include dates on my posts(although the date does show up in search results).  I honestly cannot remember WHY I removed them, but I do know that I wouldn’t have done so unless there was some logic behind the move that made sense to me.  My hunch is that a certain SEO-savvy friend explained that it would help my search results, but I really don’t remember.

The topic came up again last night, and again there wasn’t a consensus answer.  Some people again said they hate when bloggers don’t include dates because they want to know how ‘old’ the content is.  A few were like me that they believed there was an SEO benefit, but no one could explain what that benefit was.

So I decided enough was enough, and took to Google to see if I could find a definitive answer on whether or not bloggers should include dates on their posts.

Sadly, I could not.  But I did find some interesting fodder both for and against having dates on posts.

The case for having dates on posts

First, I found several bloggers that lamented that they felt removing posts was akin to hiding something.  Commenters routinely agreed, and ironically, I found a post from Shel Holtz that lamented the fact that he shared a link on Twitter only to later discover that the post he shared was actually 5 years old.  I thought this was ironic because….

The case for removing dates from posts

…Shel’s post linked to a post that Jim Connolly did (which I found before reading Shel’s post) where Jim actually experimented with removing dates from his posts to see what, if anything, would happen.

Jim found that his comments and number of shares via social media sites significantly increased when he removed the dates from his posts.  Further, Jim added what I think is a very salient thought concerning dates on posts:

It appears that the date then acts as a filter, with each person having a different threshold.  So, some people may not bother reading a post that’s more than a week old, others may have a 6 month threshold, whilst others will be fine with posts that are years old.  If the date is not there, it seems more people start reading the posts and then make their mind up, based on the value of the content rather than the date it was published.

This is what has always worried me because to many people reading and sharing blog posts, newer is better.

Here’s an example, which blog post would you rather read:

1 – Ten Steps to Launching a Social Media Strategy For a Global Brand, dated March 27th, 2010

2 – Ten Steps to Launching a Social Media Strategy For a Global Brand, dated January 14th, 2013

Easy choice, right?  Newer is the clear winner.

Unless…what if that post from 2010 was written by Scott Monty, head of Social Media at Ford, and the post from today was written by an anonymous marketing intern at an anonymous marketing agency, that simply googled ‘launching a social media strategy for global brand’ and mish-mashed several older posts together (including Scott’s).

Two sides to the date/no date coin 

On the one hand, many people want to know how old a post is when they read it, to find out if the information is dated.  On the other hand, and this goes back to Jim’s findings, many people that see an older date on a post will automatically assume the information is dated, even if it isn’t.

At the end of the day, you as a blogger should ultimately do what you feel is best for your blog, and its readers, when it comes to adding or deleting the date from your blog post.  What works for me may not work for you, and vice-versa.

But I will offer this piece of advice:  If you are on the fence about either adding or deleting dates from your posts, then you should do exactly what Jim did, you should TEST to see what changes.  If you are using dates, remove them for the next 2 weeks and see what, if anything, changes.  If you aren’t using them, put them back and see what changes.

The problem that many bloggers have is that we don’t test things enough on our own.  We want someone else to always tell us what does and does not work.  Sometimes, we need to move the puzzle pieces for ourselves and see what happens.

What do you think?  Do you prefer to read blog posts with dates, or without?  Which would make you less likely to share a post, a post with no date, or a post with a date from 2009?

 

UPDATE: Based on the excellent comments from y’all as well as the desire to practice what I preach, I’ve decided to add dates back to the posts here for the rest of the month.  At that point I will report any perceived changes up or down in both search traffic and referral traffic from social sites.

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The Case For Adding ‘Easter Eggs’ to Your Blog Posts

Yesterday C.C. Chapman wrote a fabulous post on why we need ‘next level’ conferences.  Please check it out, and there are a TON of amazing comments, I am still going through them all.  I did want to take a slightly different take on this issue because as I’ve seen in the past, when someone raises a ‘someone needs to do this’ post like this, typically most people read that as ‘someone else‘.  Not knocking C.C.’s post at all, it’s a great discussion starter, but human nature being what it is, most people will wait for someone else to make that move.

So instead of making it about ‘someone else’, I started thinking about how individuals as content creators and speakers can take our content to the ‘next level’.  I think the best speakers and content creators like C.C. are already doing this.  Most of the audiences we write and speak for are interested in more 101-level content.  But not everyone, some people are wanting more, and some of those people started out at the 101-level, but thanks to our content, they are now at a more advanced stage.

Which brings me to the topic of adding ‘easter eggs’ to our blog posts.  If you are a gamer, you are familiar with the concept of an easter egg.  It’s a small addition to a game that really isn’t required to complete the game, and will typically go un-noticed by the ‘casual’ gamer.  It’s typically hidden, so it’s a type of reward for the gamers that are willing to do more exploring and to look everywhere.

Here’s an example.  In the game Batman: Arkham City, if you go to a certain place in the game at a certain time and do a certain thing, you are rewarded with a cameo appearance from Killer Croc:

Now I am going to corrupt the gamer’s definition of an ‘easter egg’ here a bit when I talk about adding them to your blog posts.  To a gamer, an easter egg is a reward in the sense that it’s cool and fun, but it doesn’t typically make them a better gamer or better at the game they are playing.  What I’m suggesting is what if you add ‘easter eggs’ to your blog posts that did make your more advanced readers better?

For example, my audience here is like most social media blogs, typically made up of people looking for 101-level social media help.  So while I want to cater to that audience, an example of adding an easter egg might be to add a tip to the post that the 101-level reader isn’t ready for, but that the 201-level reader is looking for.  How many times have you read a blog post and seen the author add a ‘Pro Tip’?  This is the same basic idea, add more advanced content or tips to ‘reward’ the more advanced readers.

To be honest, this is something I probably don’t do a very good job with.  I tend to forget about what happens to the readers that are ready for more advanced content because of my posts.  Recently on #Blogchat we talked about the idea of creating Topic Buckets to help blog more often and to give structure to the content you create.

Maybe to add another layer to that, we should consider adding 201 level content as well?

For example, the idea with Topic Buckets was that if you could come up with say 4 main subjects you wanted to cover on your blog, then if you could write one post a week for each bucket, then you’ve written 4 posts a week!  But what if you also added a learning context to those buckets, and said that 3 of your weekly posts would be 101-level, and one would be 201 level?

I will have to noodle on this for a while, in the meanwhile, what do you think about this idea of adding ‘easter eggs’ to blog posts, or even writing more advanced posts on occasion?

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Why Brands Should Sponsor TweetChats or Engage, and Be Prepared to Wow Yourself

Note from Mack: This is a Guest Post from Paper.li’s Community Manager, Kelly Hungerford.  This post is technically part of Paper.li’s sponsorship of #Blogchat last month, and I told Kelly to treat it as an opportunity to talk about why Paper.Li is awesome and to showcase the service.  So what does Kelly do?  She uses it as a chance to showcase #Blogchat instead 😉  But more importantly, Kelly used this post to try to help other brands that are considering sponsoring a Twitter chat or participating in them.  And I think that speaks to the heart of the Paper.li brand, it’s all about creating content that has value for others.  

Have you ever planned a marketing campaign expecting one outcome, and then been completely blown away by the unexpected? That’s what happened to us when we sponsored #Blogchat last month.

One of my goals moving into 2013 was to create more participative marketing experiences with our community. I thought Tweet Chats would be a great place to start. I wanted to participate with our publishers as well as the community “around” Paper.li in order to better understand the wants and needs of everyone involved in the Paper.li experience; readers of papers, site owners, content creators, the people sharing the content and, of course, our publishers.

So mid 2012 I begin researching the possibility of Tweet Chats to include in our marketing strategy. These are notes I took down as to how I thought a chat could help us:

  • Budget: affordable way to attend a (virtual) events, keeping connected to the US when you live overseas
  • Community: build awareness, trust and long lasting relationships
  • Variety: provide an diversified group of users (great way to validate user personas!)
  • Research: data collection: about the service, users, features

So why #Blogchat? 

1. Because it was the right fit for Paper.li. The Paper.li community is comprised of all types or bloggers; experienced bloggers, beginning bloggers and “would like to be” bloggers. Blogging is one of our most popular topics when it comes to sharing content via Paper.li and papers on the newsstand are made from shared blog content.

2. I had done my homework and knew that #Blogchat community was home to people who loved Paper.li, hated Paper.li and have never tried Paper.li. That’s a great place to start if you want to build relationships.

3. I’ve been a fan of Mack and enjoy learning from him and respect him as an marketing and community building authority. I knew that this sponsorship would be a win-win-win for everyone involved.

 

What was our goal? 
1. Awareness: To be present, not push product but be present

2. Build trust: Let community know were there to help and we’re there for the long-term relationship

So did it work? Yes. 

Our #Blogchat experience exceed our expectations and here were two examples that took me by surprise:

Participation: because our largest user base is located in the US, I *assumed* that this sponsorship would really only interest our US community. I couldn’t have been more wrong. We had Paper.li community members from Sweden, Germany Switzerland, and Italy waking up at 3:00am to join our chats. What does this say about your most loyal customers? They will defy all logic and rational thinking to participate in something amazing if you give them the chance. (Mack covers this in his book Think Like a Rock Star and I was ecstatic to experience it myself.)

Community engagement: within the month of December, I received more than 200 emails and tweets requesting help and offering feedback. Out of the 200, I personally helped over 50 people revive old papers, create new ones and fine tune via skype, twitter, email and hangouts.

 

If I think of that in terms of investment, in a matter of 5 hours a month, I received the same amount of qualified leads as I would attending a conference.  This was also information I could share with our product marketing and development teams and well as customer support. I attribute these numbers to the fact that selling was not one of our goals!

 

How else did Paper.li benefit?

  • as a Brand it was the opportunity to learn first hand what the community thought about our service
  • as a Marketer it was a new way to generate interest and leads
  • as a Product Manager, it was opportunity to understand what is needed to evolve the product
  • as a Social Media Manager, it was the opportunity to refine skills and better understand which channels and tools the community is using
  • as a Customer Care representative it was the opportunity to meet the community and interact without a ticket, issue, or bug between us and provide a service on demand
  • as a member of PR, it was the opportunity to be involved in the conversation where it was happening
  • as a Community Manager it was the opportunity to interact with awesome people, strengthen relationships community and build new bridges

Would I recommend sponsoring #Blogchat to another brand? Absolutely. And if #Blogchat isn’t the right fit for your community, find a Chat that is. Even if that means getting up at 3am in the morning to attend!

 

PS from Mack:  And if you want more information on sponsoring #Blogchat, click here.  And if you are a Twitter chat host or a blogger and you have the chance to work with Paper.li please JUMP at the chance!  They are amazing people, and Kelly is the best of the best 😉  And yes, she got up every Monday morning at 3am Switzerland time to attend and participate #Blogchat each Sunday in December!

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The Biggest Mistake Companies Make When Engaging Their Fans Via Social Media

A few years ago I was attending a conference, and the keynote was the CMO for an extremely large brand talking about how they used social media.  At one point he said ‘What we love about social media is that it gives us a way to help our customers tell our story’.  There was much smiling and head nodding in the audience, but my jaw was on the ground.

Sadly, many companies are starting to realize the ‘power’ of connecting with their fans, especially via social media tools.  And like this CMO, they are attracted to connecting with their fans because they view their fans as an exciting new promotional channel to spread that brand’s message.

Sigh.

Let me clear the air for you: The greatest value of your fans is not as a promotional channel, but as a feedback channel.

This seems counter-intuitive, after all aren’t your fans actively promoting your brand already?  And aren’t we all on the same page that a positive endorsement from a customer about a brand is more credible than an advertisement from that same brand?

Yes and yes.  Your fans are actively promoting your brand, and doing a better job of it than you ever will.  Why?  Because your fans have direct contact with your current and potential customers.

Your fans are the passionate customers that are in the grocery store isles and the department stores, encouraging other customers to try your brand’s products.  But they are also there to hear feedback from those customers.

For example, let’s say your brand is Tide.  One of your fans is in Target and sees a customer looking at different washing detergents.  She tells the customer that they should try Tide.  Think about what the customer’s response might be:

1 – ‘Well I’ve tried Tide before, and I don’t really like it as much as Joy because…’

2 – ‘Hmmm….well the water where I live is extremely hard, would that affect it?’

3 – ‘Yes I’ve tried Tide and I love how it…’

As soon as your fan engages with the customer, they are getting incredibly valuable feedback from that customer not only about the customer herself, but about the product and how she uses it.

Think about if you had an army of just 100 fans that you worked with, and each one had say 50 encounters like this a month with other customers.  That’s 5,000 opportunities per month to get valuable feedback from current and potential customers of your brand.

The best part?  Your fans will still be promoting your product to other customers, but they’ll also be collecting incredibly valuable feedback from other customers.  Once you begin collecting that feedback regularly, you can begin to spot trends in the feedback you receive, and then make changes to your marketing as a result.  Which makes your marketing more effectively and lowers marketing costs.

Now ideally, you should have a formal program in place to stay connected with your brand’s fans, and you can coach them on how to better collect feedback from customers they encounter.  And Think Like a Rock Star goes into exactly how to do all of this.  But if you don’t have a program or Brand Ambassador effort in place, there’s several quick and easy ways to collect feedback from your customers.

One example is by checking Amazon reviews.  You can do this for your product, as well as for your competitors.  I actually did this for my book.

Think Like a Rock Star isn’t technically a social media book.  I actually walk readers through how to engage with their fans in both an online and offline setting, but a good portion of the book does deal with connecting with your fans via social media tools.  And since I knew a lot of people would compare it to other social media marketing books, I carefully studied the Amazon reviews of the most popular social media marketing books.

But I wasn’t focused on the 4 and 5-star reviews.  I was far more interested in the 1 and 2-star reviews, in other words, what were people complaining about with these books?  After checking reviews for a few dozen books, the most comment complaint I found was something along the lines of ‘The author spends a lot of time telling us ‘why’ to use social media, but not a lot of time telling us ‘how’ to do what he suggests’.  I saw this same complaint over and over again.  So as a result of this feedback, I decided to alter the proposed flow of my book and incorporate detailed how-tos into every chapter.  Basically I made myself commit to giving a ‘how-to’ for every ‘why-to’.  And while this created a lot of headaches while writing the book, it kept me honest and it forced me to carefully explain to readers HOW to do everything I was talking about.  The end result is that the book will be much more valuable to readers.

That’s just a simple example, but you hopefully get the idea.  If you are a brand that’s getting excited about connecting with your fans to help them ‘tell your story’, don’t forget that the value they can give you as a feedback channel can be far greater.

At the end of the day, your fans are far too special to simply hold a megaphone for you.