MackCollier.com

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Heading to Boston for the B2B Forum…

The B2B Forum is this week in Boston, and since its a Marketing Profs event, I know it will be stellar. If you are still wanting to attend, make sure you register via this link and use code BLOGCHAT to get a $100 discount. Remember that you have to attend the B2B Forum to participate in the LIVE #Blogchat on Tuesday the 14th.  Now if you can’t attend and still want to follow the sessions online, you can still register for viewing the B2B Forum online, use this link and register with code BLOGCHAT, that will give you a 30% discount!

I’m really looking forward to this event, and of course the second Live #Blogchat, which will be co-hosted by Sam Fiorella from Sensei Marketing, who is the main sponsor for this Live #Blogchat.  Thanks as well to The Cooper Group, who are also sponsoring this Live #Blogchat. If you cannot attend the Live #Blogchat (Bless your heart!), then please make sure you are following @SenseiMarketing on Twitter, as Brandie will be live-tweeting the Live #Blogchat on Tuesday night, just watch the #Blogchat hashtag!

Also, on July 1st I will have a special announcement of where the NEXT Live #Blogchat will be after B2B Forum. And what till you hear the venue that will be hosting it 😉

This week’s posting schedule will go like this: On Tuesday I will have a recap of my 2-week experiment on raising my search traffic by posting more vs targeting keywords.  We’ll look at the results, what worked and what didn’t.

On Wednesday, I will have a recap of the Live #Blogchat at the B2B Forum. On Thursday, I will have a recap of the B2B Forum. On Friday I will be back home and probably sleeping most of the day 😉

If you will be in Boston this week for the B2B Forum, please let me know! I’d love to connect with you and say hi!

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Delta’s latest PR episode details the need to engage your brand advocates

Steve Woodruff started an interesting discussion at his place about the latest PR quagmire that Delta Airlines finds itself in.  Apparently, some soldiers brought 4 bags onto their flights home, and were charged for those 4th bags, as per Delta’s policy.  The soldiers were assuming that they would not have to pay for the 4th checked bag, and were upset, and made a video about it (that has since been removed).

Delta, to its credit, was quick to address the situation on its blog, and has now changed its policy to allow for a 4th free checked bag for soldiers flying in economy.  But given what a hot-button issue this is, you can see in the comments that hundreds of people are outraged and angered over this issue.

And honestly, I feel sorry for Delta, especially the people on Delta’s blogging and social media team. They handled this issue about as well as they could, but they are still getting absolutely raked over the coals in the comments to their post.

But as I read through that post and scanned the wall of angry comments, I was looking for the one thing that I never saw: Comments from Delta’s brand advocates.  There are a few comments from people that are sympathetic to Delta’s position, but they are quickly targeted by multiple commenters siding with the soldiers.

And to be fair to Delta, they can’t stay and respond to the individual commenters. That would literally take them all day, and would likely generate even more angry comments.  Because this is an issue where most people, rightly or wrongly, are going to assume that Delta is in the wrong. And if any Delta representative tries to explain their side of the situation, more angry comments will be the result.

Which is why Delta should have its advocates speaking on its behalf. But Delta can’t rely on its advocates, because it hasnt invested time in connecting with and empowering them.

For example, let’s say Zappos caught itself in a PR nightmare similar to the one Delta is in now.  If angry customers started attacking Zappos, how soon would it be before Zappos’ fans would come to the brand’s defense? Pretty darn soon, and my guess is the number of negative comments against Zappos would decrease as a result. In the Delta example, in the absence of Delta’s advocates, the volume of negative comments seems to be increasing.

So my advice to Delta, who I am sure is scratching their heads wondering what they could have done differently, is to start today connecting with your brand advocates. Find your most passionate customers, and embrace them. Then the next time you have a PR fight like this one on your hands, you won’t be going it alone.

PS: And Delta if you or any other company is wondering how in the hell you embrace and empower your advocates, here’s your roadmap.

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Social Media is not a contingency plan for having a shitty product

For the last half decade, we’ve had it beaten over our heads that ‘it’s all about the conversation’. That all a company has to do is ‘be social’, to throw up a Twitter and Facebook account, and they have passed the marketing test. Add in a company blog for extra credit.

Of course, this is utter crap. If your product sucks today, it will still suck tomorrow if you start using social media. The only difference is that more people will know about it.

Now please understand that listening to your customers and monitoring what they are saying via social media is hugely important. But the quickest way to honk off your customers is to tell them ‘we’re listening’, and then prove to them that you are not.  You can’t simply monitor what your customers are saying, you need to apply their feedback and act on it.  You need to start a discussion with them.  You need to create a continuous feedback loop, so what your customers are saying about your product is understood internally at your company, and your company’s response is sent back to your customers.

The goal isn’t just to ‘be social’, it should be to establish connections with your customers that help you improve your existing products and business processes. For example, last year Dell had its first #DellCAP event in Austin.  This was where Dell brought in 30 customers that were actively using social media tools to discuss Dell and its products and services. Dell talked to these customers about several core areas of its business, as well as its products. Dell then took that feedback, and acted on it. A perfect example is its Facebook Tag Team app. One of the main feedback points that Dell customers gave during #DellCAP was that they would like a way to see how other customers are using Dell products. For example, if a Dell customer views himself as a hardcore gamer, he understands that fellow gamers will want Dell products that perform differently than a Dell customer that wants a PC to turn her home business.  So the Tag Team app was created with this feedback in mind. Here’s what Lionel Menchaca said when it was introduced:

Back when we invited customers to Dell for CAP Days, one of the clear requests we heard from customers regarding Dell.com is that we need to make it easier for them to find the system or accessories that will meet a specific set of needs.

Besides the request from CAP Days attendees, there’s  any number of studies that show most customers trust the opinions of their friends and family a heck of a lot more than what a company tells them. Here’s one of my favorite Hugh McLeod cartoons which illustrates that point beautifully.

How do we make it easier for customer to find the system they need based on how they plan to use it and augment that with content that’s written by our customers instead of us? The Tag Team app is our first attempt to bring those things together. We know a lot of our customers use Dell.com to research what kind of machine is right for them. That usually means starting with a product, browsing the product page, then digging into ratings and reviews from other customers.  With Tag Team, you can start by thinking about how you will use the machine and find the reviews from customers who are using reviews for that same thing.

 

Dell went beyond simply listening to the feedback its customers were giving, and actually used that feedback to improve its offerings based on its customers recommendations.  This is the difference between taking a crappy product and making it social, versus leveraging social media to improve your product.

Extra credit: Listening to your customers and then ACTING on their recommendations increases brand advocacy. Nothing impresses a customer more to tell them that you are listening, and to then prove that you are.

If you want to start using social media to actually improve your products and services, here’s some tips to get you started:

1 – Start monitoring what your customers are saying online. You should already be doing this, but if not, make sure you start ASAP.

2 – Make sure that information and feedback from Step 1 is collected and distributed internally within your company.  Marketing, PR, Product Design/Development, Customer Service, etc.

3 – Incorporate customer feedback as applicable. Just because one customer in Idaho says you should change a product feature does NOT mean you should spend millions of dollars to change your existing manufacturing process to accommodate one customers’s wish. But if thousands of customers are saying the same thing and many are saying they won’t buy your product as a result of this feature, then maybe its in your best interest to make the change.

4 – When changes are made based on customer feedback communicate that back to your customers. This will not only increase customer satisfaction once they see you are actually acting on their feedback, it will greatly increase the volume of feedback you get. And getting more feedback means the quality of that feedback improves. It becomes easier to distinguish between issues that are marginally important to your customers, versus ones that are affecting the majority, as illustrated in Step 3.

 

But make sure you push for Step 2, getting the feedback you collect via social media monitoring, distributed to relevant departments in your company or organization. That should get the ball rolling and help your customer move from being one that simply listens to social media conversations, to one that acts on them.

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Fans, Friends, Followers, and the Reason Why None of it Matters

I’ve tried to stay off the soapbox for the most part here the past two years, but the first blog post from Kathy Sierra in 4 years has got my mind racing.

I’ve been blogging for 6 years now, and the blogging and social media spaces have gone through a lot of changes in that time. One significant change I’ve noticed is how we define who the ‘authority figures’ are in this space. In 2005, if you wanted to know who the top bloggers or the ‘A-Listers’ were, you asked around.  Robert Scoble, Jeff Jarvis, Hugh MacLeod, Kathy Sierra, Seth Godin and Jason Calcanis were some of the names you heard over and over again.  All people that were moving the needle, that were legitimate ‘thought leaders’.

Then, rankings aspects began to enter into the picture. Technorati started tracking the number of incoming links a blog had (later called the site’s Authority).  That changed the A-List a bit, as now a site’s ability to gain incoming links became more prized.

Later, around late 2006/early 2007, we all discovered Facebook, and that added a new layer to defining the A-List: Number of friends.  As a result, the A-List changed a bit more.

Then around 2008 or so, Twitter really started to gain steam. Which, you guessed it, meant that Followers now became a new way to define who the ‘A-Listers’ were.

What I’ve noticed is that how we define who the thought leaders are in this space has changed dramatically. In 2005, we figured out who the experts and A-Listers were by listening to each other.  The A-Listers were the ones that got talked about the most, and linked to the most, and who were on the most blogrolls.  There wasn’t really a way to ‘rank’ them, we just knew who was creating great and valuable content, and those were the people that we listened to, and whose opinions we valued and trusted.

Now, the rules for defining authority have changed. Yes, good content still matters. But so does your number of Facebook friends, your number of Twitter followers, and your Klout score.

The problem is, your number of friends, followers and your Klout score can be gamed.  Let’s be honest, I would be seen as a greater authority in the social media space by many people if I had 50,000 followers instead of my current 25K.  And we also know that all I’d have to do to hit 50K, is follow another 25K people.  That would be gaming the system.

A very unfortunate side-affect of using rankings such as friends and followers to determining authority is that the ability to teach isn’t as important as it once was.  Let’s revisit that list of A-Lister from 2005:   Robert Scoble, Jeff Jarvis, Hugh MacLeod, Kathy Sierra, Seth Godin and Jason Calcanis.  All teachers. But today, it seems that more of the supposed leaders want to tweet about how you should ‘be awesome’ instead of teaching us how to be awesome.

We don’t need another ranking board. We don’t need to know who has the most followers, or fans, or the highest stock price on Empire Avenue. We don’t need to know how to get more RTs or how to get on more lists.  And we sure as hell don’t need to deal with the grief of thinking we aren’t smart or influential if we don’t have X number of any of the above metrics.

We don’t need to see tweets telling us to ‘be awesome’, we need more teachers that will roll up their sleeves and teach us how. And if someone can’t do that, then do they really deserve to be viewed as authorities?

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You need a company blog because the customer (thinks he) is always right

This morning I was making myself a Belgian waffle. I know from past experiences that if I put too much batter in the maker, that it will run out the sides, and when I open the maker, the batter will stick to both sides, and I’ll have a ruined waffle on my hands, and a mess to clean up.

Again, I know this.  But I went ahead this morning and added too much batter, it ran out the sides, and sure enough, I had a ruined waffle on my hands.  As I was cleaning up the mess, I caught myself thinking ‘This thing sucks’.

It wasn’t the waffle-maker’s fault that the waffle was ruined, it was my fault. But like a lot of people would do in a similar situation, I tried to pass the blame to the product, instead of admitting it was my fault.  Completely irrational, but who ever accused humans of being rational creatures? 🙂

I decided to check, and the waffle-maker (Black and Decker) does have a blog.  But the blog doesn’t allow comments. If your company decides to turn off comments then you have to realize that you are effectively limiting yourself to only being found via search engines.  And yes, I understand that many companies don’t want to allow comments because they don’t want to deal with negative feedback from customers. But as studies have proven, negative feedback is usually good for your company, if you handle it correctly.

Don’t view your blog as being a marketing tool, but more as being a customer service tool. A place where you can help me solve problems with your products, or get more information. A company blog is an especially wonderful place to help me with problems that *I* create, such as the above episode with my waffle maker.  Black and Decker could use its existing blog to write a post on 5 Steps to Creating the Perfect Belgian Waffle, and make one of those steps be ‘Don’t put too much batter in the maker!’  Then if the blog turned on comments, I could have left one saying that I used the blog’s tips, and created a perfect Belgian waffle, and am happy with my Black and Decker Belgian waffle maker!

So if your company has a blog, keep these content creation tips in mind:

1 – Don’t create product-centric content, create customer-centric content. Think about how your customers will use your products, and why. For example, a post from Black and Decker touting the production advantages and benefits of its waffle-maker is almost meaningless to me, since I already own it. But if B&D writes a post on how to create the perfect Belgian Waffle, that helps their existing AND potential customers, because the content is customer-centric.

2 – View your company blog as a customer service tool more than a marketing tool. The blog isn’t a place to sell your products, it’s a place to sell the products benefits, and connect with your customers. If you’ll open up comments and use the blog as a place to address customer concerns, you’ll find that your customers will not only become more loyal, they will promote you to others. Which, ironically, becomes far more effective marketing than anything you could do via a blog post!

3 – Your blog should supplement your existing content, not replace it. A big reason why you don’t want to include a lot of product-centric posts on your blog is because all that information should already be on your website. Your customers will come to the blog to get more specific information on how to use your products, or to get in touch with you about an issue they are having.  For example, if I had no idea why my waffle maker was ruining my waffles, I would have searched to see if Black and Decker had a blog, before I searched for the company’s website.  Because I know that I have a better chance of finding information that would solve my issue on the company blog versus the company website.  You need to understand this as well, and give your customers the information they are looking for, in the place where they are looking for it.

Just curious, but when you have a problem with a product, are you more likely to go to the company website or blog to look for help?

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Reminder: The Marketing Profs B2B Forum is just 10 days away!

We are just 10 days away from one of my favorite marketing conferences, the Marketing Profs B2B Forum in Boston! As you know, there will be a LIVE #Blogchat as part of this year’s B2B Forum, and it will be held on June the 14th, at the end of the 1st day of the event.

Also, Marketing Profs and I are pleased to announce that the Live #Blogchat will be sponsored by Sensei Marketing! You are probably familiar with Sam Fiorella and Brandie McCallum who are both part of the Sensei Marketing team, and both are very active on Twitter.  The topic of the Live #Blogchat will be Managing your blogging strategy, how to figure out how the pieces all fit together, and Sam will be co-hosting the discussion with me!  We are thrilled to have Sensei Marketing sponsoring the Live #Blogchat at the B2B Forum and if you’ll be attending you’ll love meeting and connecting with their team!

Also, I wanted to remind you that if you want to participate in the Live #Blogchat at the B2B Forum you can only do so by attending the B2B Forum!  And luckily, Marketing Profs has worked out a discount code for us, just register at this link and use code BLOGCHAT.  That will get you a $100 discount!

Now, if you can’t join us in-person, you can still view the event online.  You can register for the B2B Forum Online here, and use code BLOGCHAT to get a 30% discount! Now please understand that the Live #Blogchat will NOT be part of the B2B Forum Online.  It will give you online access to the sessions during the day, but not for the Live #Blogchat.  Again, the only way to participate in the Live #Blogchat is by attending the event on-site.

I do hope you can join us either online or at the event, as the Marketing Profs conferences truly are among the best you can attend, and you’ll get far more business value than the cost of attendance!  And if you will be attending, please leave a comment so we can start connecting now before the event!

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Online Influence Is More Than Just Social Media Activity

I logged into Klout this morning, and was greeted by this pop-up ‘warning’.  It tells me that my Klout score is dropping, and that I can raise it by sharing more content, and engaging with my network.

Klout adds this explanation for what its score means: “The Klout Score is the measurement of your overall online influence.”

So Klout tells me that it measures online influence, but that in order to increase my score, I should increase my social media activity?  Then doesn’t that mean it’s measuring my activity instead of my influence?

Likewise, Empire Avenue also explains that your score there is dependent on your level of social media activity: “When you join Empire Avenue, you can connect your Social Networking accounts, and we’ll score activity and engagement in each account and give you a virtual share price.”

Essentially, Klout and Empire Avenue are measuring your level of social media activity, not your level of online influence.

Simply sharing more content and engaging with my network isn’t going to make me more influential over them.  In fact if it’s not the type of content and engagement that they are looking for, my influence over them will fall, not rise as I become more active.

Also note that both Klout and Empire Avenue are encouraging you to participate with their site.  EA includes activity on the site as part of your score, and Klout is already encouraging you to give +K to other members, and I’m betting they will come up with other ways to reward you for interacting more with other Klout members.  Which is smart of both sites to do, but it doesn’t help either of them more effectively measure my perceived online influence.

What do you think?  What role does social media activity play in online influence?  Does one lead to the other?

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TNT’s Falling Skies is using Twitter, but what about a Twitter chat?

A couple of days ago on Twitter I noticed that TNT was promoting its account for the upcoming TV series Falling Skies.  The series has a Twitter account, but a report from Tweet Stats shows the account has less than 50 tweets and has NEVER left a reply on Twitter.  So basically, Falling Skies is using Twitter as a promotional channel for the show, and pushing out updates, interviews with stars, etc.

This is why I think Twitter Chats would be perfect for a television show.  Create a chat that brings together fans of a show, in order to generate interest.  And ironically, TNT has a history of using Twitter Chats to promote its shows, as they did with Saving Grace two years ago.   All they would have to do is have a fan run the chat, and go from there.  I did a quick Google search and found a fan that has already started a podcast for Falling Skies, so someone like this would be perfect to host a Twitter Chat for the same show.

This really seems more effective than promoted tweets or accounts because you are tapping into activities that fans are engaging in anyway.  Fans are going to be on Twitter talking about the show, an organized chat simply makes this process EASIER for the fans.  So by creating the chat you are not only building a channel to create buzz for Falling Skies, you are also making it easier for fans of the series to engage in EXISTING behavior.  That’s the key, you aren’t asking fans to do something that they weren’t already doing, and you are going to make it easier for them.

And when you consider that #Blogchat generates up to 5,000 tweets and a few million impressions in an hour, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect similar or even higher numbers from a #FallingSkiesChat.  I am sure TNT could organize this chat for far less than what they are paying Twitter for promoted tweets.  In fact, a show poster signed by the cast might be enough of an enticement to a fan of the series to moderate a chat on Twitter.

The point is, there are a ton of opportunities on Twitter for companies, especially media presences, to leverage Twitter chats to promote their offerings.  Don’t just view promoted tweets and accounts as your only options.  That’s very old-school ‘push’ mentality.   Have you seen any other examples of movies or television shows leveraging Twitter chats besides Saving Grace?  Which ones worked, in your opinion?

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Wait, my blog’s search traffic is down, what happened?

Welcome to another edition of ‘What can we learn about our own blog from watching Mack obsess over his?’

Ok, as most of you know, in January I decided to ramp up my posting schedule.  Since this blog’s launch 2 years ago (BTW Happy Birthday!) up till January of this year, I had kept to a pretty consistent schedule of 1-2 posts a week.  Sometimes I’d have a bit more, sometimes a bit less.

But if mid January, I decided to really boost my posting here.  I went from 1-2 posts a week, to 4-6.  I immediately saw a huge spike in traffic, and along with it, search traffic.  Now to be fair, search traffic here was already increasing at a steady pace, but as soon as I started posting more in mid January, the gain increased.  Here’s a graph of my weekly search traffic over the life of the blog:

The X marks the spot at which I started posting more often in January, and as you can see, the last 6 weeks or so has been sideways.  Also note the slow and steady growth, but it seemed to kick up an extra notch right after the X.

Now this graph bugs me, because I want to understand why search traffic has flattened over the past 6 weeks.  I did some checking and thinking and I’ve come up with two possibilities:

1 – I haven’t been posting as much. Every week since April the 10th, I have posted a consistent 4 posts a week here.  The next week is when search traffic started going sideways.  The three weeks prior to that, I posted 5-6 posts each week.  That’s one possibility.

2 – I haven’t been focusing as much on specific search keywords and phrases.  I honestly think this is it more than posting schedule.  From Jan through March I really tried to focus on specific keywords and phrases not only in my post title, but in the post as well.  And it really worked, I got excellent search rankings usually within a few hours for whatever search keyword/phrase I had targeted.

So here is the (very) inexact method I have come up with to test to see which is the cause of my flatlining search traffic.

This week, I will post 5 posts here.  This one is the second for this week, so there will likely be a new one here on Wednesday through Friday as well.

Next week, I will go back to posting 4 new posts here, but each one will be search optimized with a particular search keyword/phrase in the title and the post.

Then in a couple of weeks, I’ll report back and share the results with you.  My guess is that 4 search-optimized posts will produce more search traffic next week, than 5 non-optimized posts will this week.

And no, this isn’t a perfect test, and it won’t definitively prove anything.  This is more about me wanting to get a better understanding of how my blog works, and what impacts search results.  That way when I am at a conference and someone asks me a question about search traffic, I can give them my own experiences, instead of just regurgitating what some other blogger wrote 😉

If you obsess over your search traffic as well, what have you discovered that impacts it?  Do you think posting more often or spending more time optimizing for search will help me?

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Nettwerk CEO Terry McBride on Customer Co-Creation and Embracing Your Fans

I wanted to share this talk from Nettwerk CEO Terry McBride with you, as it has some pretty interesting branding and marketing takeaways that apply not just to the music industry. Pay close attention to Terry’s thought on how you can’t litigate or legislate customer behavior, but should instead understand it because that’s where the monetization opportunities lie. His example of how Spotify is decreasing peer-to-peer file sharing rates in Europe perfectly illustrates this point.