Archives for November 2010

So today, 2 more Tetris pieces came together. My friend Stan published a post (which ProBlogger retweeted, by the way) talking about the importance of guest posting.

As I was working on my round-up posts for this week, it occurred to me that maybe we could all try an experiment together. I’m going to publish a theme for each day next week where I do these posts, and if you want to write a post for me to highlight, well, then I’ll highlight it! It’s fun to go searching around and looking for posts on a theme, but I think it might be more fun to have a conversation extend across many different blogs each day. Kind of a group blog consisting of many blogs 🙂

So, here is the plan for next Sunday-Thursday. If you want to write a post for me to link to, or if you’ve already written a post on these topics, let me know, either in the comments, via DM, or, well, however else you know how to reach me!

Sunday (#blogchat theme): Definitions of a “successful” blogger

Monday (#MMChat theme): Was mobile as big in 2010 as you thought it would be?

Tuesday (#custserv, #leadershipchat): What are the key qualities needed to be a leader in customer service?

Wednesday (#IMCChat – integrated marketing/communications): Integrating email and Social Media – how, why, & when

Thursday (#b2bChat): Who are your B2B role models?

Sound like a plan?

If you have ideas for future themes, feel free to submit those as well. Let’s have fun sharing knowledge here, there, and everywhere.

As you might recall from last week, Tuesday nights on Twitter host #custserv and #leadershipchat. I find that there is often a way to overlap these two. After all, it takes a strong leader to create a strong customer service department, right?

I found this post that Frank Eliason wrote about his very positive experiences with The Apple Store. It’s called Apple Store Employees Create a Raving Fan. That inspired the theme for this week – a combination of leadership and excellent customer service leading to happy customers.

Tristan Bishop (@knowledgebishop) wrote about Petco’s approach to customer service. Petco leads customers to an interactive and useful community, and everyone benefits. Read this great post, which is called Nurturing Advocacy.

Jason Mikula (@mikulaja) did a great series on customer service. His first post, titled Customer Service in the Social Media Era, also focused on Apple. Interestingly, Apple often is discussed in chats for its decided quietude on the Social Media front. Hmm. Is Apple trying to lead by setting a very different example?

Ron Fink of Strategic Marketing Solutions points out that in some businesses and industries, care, or “customer service,” is a given. In this kind of industry, how can customer service still set you apart as a leader? Check out Ron’s post, “Assisted Living Marketing Should Be Driven By Strategic Care” and enjoy the different perspective the post offers!

Often in customer service discussions, we focus on what the ideal experience would be. We also often assume that online customer service will be helpful, not a hindrance. Roy Atkinson discusses the fact that while the online world can empower the customer, this empowerment does not lead to protection or safety. True leaders in customer service know how to balance the power of online speed and efficiency with human etiquette.

Image by sanja gjenero. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/lusi

This past week, my good friend Thomas Moradpour launched a blog. One of his first posts is titled Full Disclosure: I think Social Marketing is BS. The post raises some key points that I’ve seen a lot of conversations cover of late. For this Marketer Monday, I thought I’d gather for you some other posts that have argued along similar lines. Feel free to add your own post or comments to the conversation!

Jeff Wilson (@jeffthesensei) explores similar issues in his post titled Is Social Media Just a Channel? I’ve seen this question quite often, though perhaps phrased differently…Is Social Media just another tool, just another weapon, etc. An excellent post!

This post by Suzanne Vara goes into detail regarding how changes in Social Media can impact our other marketing channels. Check out 8 Tips For Embracing Change in Social Media.

Proof of how long this debate has been raging – examine this post by Jay Baer written in August 2009 (!) called 7 ways to use Social Media to build stunning brands. The first sentence begins, “Social media is perhaps the most misleading name for a marketing-related concept ever…”

Finally, rounding out my round-up for today, a fantastic post by Debra Ellis called Social Media vs. Direct Marketing: Place Your Bets Now. Like many in the Social Media space, Debra paints a picture whereby Social Media could actually work with other channels to make marketing enriched, longer-lasting, and more valuable.

Is Social Media marketing? Is Social Media Marketing the better phrase? Is Social Media something separate from “regular” marketing? Can it exist on its own?

Join the fray. I have a feeling this debate isn’t going anywhere!

Image by jolka igolka. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/coniferine

Since Sunday is #blogchat night in Twitter world, my Sunday posts are going to be geared towards blogging. A pretty big topic, but there are plenty of ways to break it into nice bite-size pieces.

The theme for this Sunday is borrowed from a fantastic post that Stan Smith (@pushingsocial) wrote called How to Spring to your Blog’s Tipping Point. Stan’s point is that instead of just assuming that blog leaders are in a stratosphere that we just can never reach, maybe we should study how they do what they do and try to emulate them. I thought that was a very common-sense position to take.

I’m taking Stan at his word and I’m going to work on the assumption that looking at how other people approach blogging really can help you. So here are some words of wisdom I have found helpful. I hope you do too.

Suzanne Vara writes about 3 blogging basics, especially for small businesses.

In the end, as Dawn Westerberg points out in her post Back to the Basics, blogging is writing, and writing needs to be compelling. Good advice here!

I found this post by Mack Collier back in mid-July, a little after I really started dedicating myself full-time to the blogging and Twitter thing. Mack’s advice would be enough on its own, but in this post, called This is why you don’t bury your blog’s gold, Mack even uses charts to back up his opinion. A simple way to keep traffic to your blog on the up and up!

At SterlingHope, writers are encouraged to blog because it helps them write better. A blog as a tool that extends beyond marketing – now that’s an example worth looking into, wouldn’t you say?

This post by Sean Platt, published at CopyBlogger, was one of the most amazing posts I’ve read all year, and it happens to offer great advice at the same time, so I have to include it here. Please check out The Eminem Guide to Becoming a Writing and Marketing Machine.

Who did I miss? Add your Blog leader advice right here!

Image by Gareth Weeks. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/garwee

Back in May, when Social Media was something I was still getting used to, something pretty spectacular happened. I had seen a post by Chris Brogan about using the buffalo (in other words, using as many pieces and parts of a thing as you can), and I thought it would be interesting to tie the essence of his post to something from my world – integrated marketing. So, I wrote a post called Linking the Tactics. Using the Buffalo. A little later in the day, I started noticing that 7 new people were following me on Twitter. Given that I had about 57 total followers, this was quite unusual. I finally figured out that Chris Brogan had retweeted my post. I got a couple of really nice comments on my post (which was two more than I had gotten on most posts I’d written up to that point).

“Wow,” I thought. “I’ve finally made it.”

Something interesting happened though. I wrote another post, and once again I didn’t get any comments. I tweeted and once again, there weren’t any people who seemed to want to respond to me.

In short, I had been given some fish, but I still didn’t know how to catch fish for myself.

If someone’s carrying you, you don’t know if you can walk

If I sound unappreciative, that is  not at all my intent. When someone you respect, someone who has forged a name for themselves in this space, recognizes something you have said or done, it’s a great honor. And yes, the probability of your name being seen by people who may not have seen your name otherwise – pretty high.

That being said, do I think people should aim for being tweeted to or retweeted by influencers in the Social Media space? No.

The thing is, when you get new followers or lots of traffic because an influential person takes notice of you, what you are really seeing is a reflection of the influential person’s power and community. People will click the link. They might read your post. However, most people will not feel obligated to comment on a post that they are seeing because of an influential person, at least from what I have seen in my experience and the experience of others. Your community is not often going to grow a lot from these experiences.

To grow your community, you need to be the core of the engagement. People need to react to you because they want to on their own. That is what will inspire them to come back, and that is what will inspire you to go back to other peoples’ blogs or twitter streams.

Influencers and Community Building

So let’s throw all of the influential people away because we clearly don’t need them! Yeahhhh!!!

No. That’s not going to work either. In fact, influential people can be keys to helping build community in the way I discussed in part one of this series. Here’s how.

Visit their communities: One thing we all know about the big names in the Social Media space – they tend to get lots of comments on their blog posts, and many actually take the time to try to respond. A community exists there, and it’s free to join. I have had some great conversations by replying to other commenters while visiting someone’s blog. Of course it’s nice to comment on the post too, but interact with other people who are there. And don’t just send people links to your blog posts. Just talk. Discuss. Engage.

Pass on what you learn: The people who have made it big in this space did so through hard work and innovation. Fortunately for new people like me, they are generally willing to pass on a lot of information that they have gathered over the years. Pass on this information as you learn it, not to try to attract that person’s attention, but to become a slightly more accessible resource for people in your community. Add your own spin to it. Your own “sauce,” if you will. Don’t steal. Always credit. But serve as a conduit between your community and the people you learn from.

Take recommendations to heart: If an influential person does tweet out someone’s post, even (or especially) if you don’t know that person, give their blog a visit. Leave a comment. If he or she is being presented to the influential person’s community, you can take a bet that the content is going to be pretty good on a regular basis. Influential people didn’t get to where they are because they recommended a lot of spam bots. Their reputation depends on introducing good people to their existing community. You are receiving trails of breadcrumbs that lead to great people. Engage!

Remember that influential people are people: Someone who has 500,000 followers or 2 million gazillion Facebook friends may seem inaccessible a lot of the time, and sometimes this far away feeling can lead to unkind comments or impatience from people who perceive that “big names” are too distant, pompous, egotistical, or whatever else. On the other side are people who will try to name drop or do other things that would not be thought sensible in relation to other perhaps less well-known people. How you choose to engage with the “big names” in Social Media tells your community a lot about you. If you only ever name drop, will they feel that you’re interested in engaging with them? If you show impatience or get into fights a lot, will your community find you credible when you talk about respect?

It is and isn’t about you

During #mmchat, when Chris Brogan co-hosted, we talked about cause marketing and how getting just a big name wasn’t really going to help. You need to get people on your team who really want to be there and who believe fully in your cause.

Your Social Media community is the same way. People who have a lot of influence in Social Media can point you in the right direction and provide opportunities for you to meet a lot of great new people, but the decision to engage – that has to be from things you say and do to other people. Your community will consist, in the end, of people who don’t need to see a tweet from anyone but you to act. In a community, you are the influencer, and you are influenced. And that is the heart of Social Media to me.

Image Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/barunpatro

A few months ago, I was engaged in studying cloud computing. I thought the whole concept was pretty interesting. I wrote a post in mid-June about how I thought cloud computing as a concept could translate into the social web. I hypothesized that eventually we would all have a central hub where we would write our posts, our e-newsletters, our status updates, and we’d just select which communities we’d want that information to reach.My thinking was focused on sending information out.

I think my focus was misguided, however. I don’t think that Social Media can sustain or maintain itself if we are all out here sharing information. Listen to all of the noise. See all of the competition. We are all standing in front of a wall that is basically consistent all the way down. Sometimes the wall shifts here and there so that we are talking to different parts, but generally, we all have the same targets in our sights. Those targets are our audience. Those targets are also us. Those targets are people who write blogs, who comment on our blogs, who tweet out our posts, and whose posts we tweet out.

Do we all need to talk to the same wall?

I know that a lot of content in this Social Media world concentrates on community. I’ve certainly talked about community a lot here. But does community mean that we all need to create our own community?

The way I see it, there are huge portions of the wall that have been stamped and stenciled by very large real estate owners. These real estate owners have huge blog communities, huge followings on Twitter, the maximum number of Facebook fans. And all of those people, those subscribers and twitter followers and facebook fans – they are all people who you and I and countless others want to reach too.  We are the audience as well as the authors. And I’m just wondering – does that make sense?

No Man is an Island

If Social Media is a sea, then all of these individual blogs and Twitter accounts and “presences” are islands floating along. In order for someone to gather all of the resources they could want, they have to jump from island to island to island. It’s time consuming. It’s tiring. It takes away from time that could be dedicated to building one’s own island. We don’t get along this way in real life, for the most part. We emphasize putting as much information as possible about a topic into one single place. If you are trying to open a bank account with a bank, you don’t have to go to 7 different branches. If you are trying to buy a television at a store, they aren’t going to make you go to 6 other stores to gather all of the information you want.

Moreover, we don’t live this way as people. When you decide it’s time to move, do you start to build your own house and then your own town, or do you move to a community that is already in place?

Why can’t we do that in Social Media?

It takes a community to make a community

If you were to skim through the people I follow and ask me how I met them, the following would be my answers: I met him through that chat. I met her because we did at least one chat together 3-4 nights a week. I met that person because we started conversing over on Chris Brogan’s blog. I met that person from Blogchat.

I have begun to build a community, but it is really not unique to me. I have visited other communities that already existed. I’ve delivered some delicious tuna casserole, introduced myself, and I’ve been invited in. My connections with multiple people have built bridges, for me, between several different communities that exist independently from each other.

I’m starting to think that maybe, just maybe, for people like me who are newer to the Social Media world, that this is the better way to go. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t blog or have your own Twitter account. I’m just saying, why try to create your own town when there are already all of these established communities where houses are for sale? I’m saying that the heart of social media is perhaps not content creation or context creation. I’m saying the heart of social media might be evolving into community adoption – mixing it up with people who are regular commenters on a blog or regular participants in certain (or countless) chats.

How does this work?

What if we let go of the concept of possessing or owning our ideas and content? What if we let go of the notion that our content is furniture and our blog is our house, so all of our content has to be there?  Instead of writing a blog on a subject that someone has already blogged about, what if we wrote a meaty, lengthy, thoughtful comment that maybe in the past could have been a blog post, but now it is a submission to a community? We could still generate our own content too, but what if our central hub was everything external to our blog, and our blogs were just spokes on our wheels? What if our community was a cross-section of many other communities, with us as the bridge between them? We would no longer be islands. Our readers, our target audience members, would no longer have to jump from one person’s blog to another. Everyone’s thoughts on that specific subject would be gathered in one place, discussed in one place, ready for evaluation and analysis.

What do you think? Does this make sense?

Image by Gabriella Fabbri. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/duchesssa