Margie Clayman

For the last couple of years, the Cleveland Indians have had a pretty disinterested theme song.

Hey, ho, hey let’s go tribe. Then the tagline comes. “Are you in the tribe?”

To which I always respond, “Sadly, yes.”

Given the lifelong scarring the Cleveland Indians have inflicted upon me, you might understand why I am a little paranoid about other tribes, even when people I respect greatly say, “Hey, you should check this out!”

I’m also a pretty cynical person, generally speaking, so when someone says, “Hey, this is really really awesome!” my gut reaction is often, “Eh, it’s probably not THAT good. Or you have an angle.”

I tell you all of this because I am going to make a statement that overcomes both my fear of tribe-related terminology and my cynicism when it comes to positivity.

You should join the Third Tribe right now.

Why?

Oh, my word isn’t enough, I forgot. Okay, well, let me describe what I have experienced just by dipping my little tiny toe into the great big sea that is Third Tribe.

The forums

I am a big fan of forums, I must admit. I’m not really sure why, I am a ham but I have always been drawn to talking to other people in the forum setting. Make a statement, wait for responses. Even with the development of fast-moving sites like Twitter, I still like the “check back” nature of forums. So, when I logged into Third Tribe for the first time and saw about, oh, 17 different forum families, I felt a bit like a kid in a candy shop (if I had told myself when I was a kid that I would equate a lot of forums to candy one day, I would not have believed it). The forums range in topic from you asking questions of the many many thought leaders behind the project, you helping answer questions that other people post, and then tons of discussions that just add to the sense of community. You can track goals and get support, you can talk about subjects that interest you – it’s a pretty amazing amount of content (but I would like to call it conversation).

Speaking of community

I haven’t been a member for long, but I can already tell that the idea of community permeates everything on the site. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to find a lot of my Twitter community there (hint hint) so that we can converse without a 140 character limit. I get the sense that people who have been there for awhile have already begun to cross-build their relationships, whether the relationships began on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or The Third Tribe itself. It’s kind of like going to a convention and running into people you were hoping to see. Very cool, very welcoming.

And speaking of people you were hoping to see…

In addition to the folks that got the site started (Brian Clark, Darren Rouse, Sonia Simone, Chris Brogan), lots of other very knowledgeable people are there too. And guess why they’re there? To help YOU. That’s right. You.

The Seminars

I’d love to be able to tell you how great the seminars are. They certainly look great and I can’t wait to dig into them. I just haven’t even gotten there yet. I am a forum junkie. I was not lying.

Q&A Sessions

There are also q&a sessions moderated by different pairs of knowledgeable people. Even if you don’t submit a question, or even if your question doesn’t get answered, I’m pretty certain that the first time I attend one of these,  I will feel like someone shot a fire hose through my ear and into my brain. And yes, that’s something I’m looking forward to.

Yes, it costs money

It’s true, unlike blogs and Twitter and Facebook, you do have to pay to access all of this great stuff. But here are some thoughts that might smooth that over for you.

Unlike my diatribe about repurposing content, you’re not just finding regurgitated blog posts over here

You feel like information is being customized to and for you – because it is

You are essentially getting all of the benefits of a huge convention or meeting every day, with a guarantee that you will get out of it exactly what you want – while still sitting at your desk!

All of this makes it tremendously worthwhile, a strong investment in yourself and in your company, and I mean, hey..you get to talk to me over there! Now that, my friend, is priceless 🙂

If you have any questions, let me know. Meanwhile, I hope to see you over there.

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

A lot of people get excited when you talk about the idea of working for yourself or being your own boss. “Wow,” they say. “I bet that’s great! That’s so exciting and romantic. You can go wherever you want to, do whatever you want, wow. I want to do that.”

It’s true that a lot of wonderful things are tied to having your name on the door. However, before you decide to start your own business or build your own personal brand in order to build a business, there are a few things I would add to the mix. These are things I have learned just from being the daughter of people who own and run their own business. This comes from working at a place where my last name is on our door. This is not at all to dissuade you. I think the entrepreneurial spirit is fantastic, and it might even be essential during uncertain times like these. Consider this a bit of a reality nudge.

That’s YOUR name. On everything.

How much do you value your name? How much do you value all of the people in your life who share that name with you? Those thoughts are perpetually on your mind when your name is on the door. Everything that comes out of your office is a reflection of your name. It is branded as your name, just like you are. This is very beneficial when something goes well. However, this also means that if there’s a typo, it has your name on it. If a client or customer is unhappy, it has your name on it. The amount of care and loyalty you have for and to your name is exactly how much passion you will put into every single thing you do.

Business IS Personal.

Having your name on everything and throwing your heart and soul into everything you do makes it hard to divide the professional from the personal. Sure, maybe that person was “just” commenting on your idea. But you know what went into that idea. You know that you sacrificed time with your kids. You know that you skipped watching a movie with the rest of the family. You know that you were kind of preoccupied during the holidays because you were working on that idea. The person is just commenting on a business concept. To you, it feels like they are commenting on how you spent your life while working on that particular thing.

No One Can Care as Much as You

If your new business grows and you bring in employees, they will never be as passionate as you. They will never be as obsessive about the quality that goes into everything they do. Not unless their name also shows up on the door. No one can ever care about your name and what goes with it as much as you do. This can be hard to understand at times. It is just the nature of things.

There are no kudos

You see a lot of people tweeting about their work days. “I just wrote 17 blog posts, had 5 meetings in a row, and won 2 new clients today.” The reason you see a lot of these tweets is that a lot of people are self-employed, and when you are self-employed you don’t get kudos for going over the top or over what is expected. If you are working hard, it’s understood that you are doing so because it’s your company and your name. It’s only when you lighten the pressure that people start wondering at and about you. Nobody thanks you for choosing to eat an apple instead of an almond-filled candy bar. It’s assumed you want to be healthy. No one will thank you for working hard on behalf of your company either. And again, that’s just the way of things.

There are no vacations

A common assumption is that if you work for yourself, you get to go on vacation whenever you want. In fact, it’s hard to ever feel like you’re on vacation when your name is on the door. A lot of your traveling happens for business. Vacation type trips are tied into trade shows or meetings. Your phone doesn’t leave your side during the work day, no matter where you are. You are always ready to spring into action, whether it’s on the beach or on a boat. You must always be accessible. For some people, limiting accessibility means losing money. If you don’t work you don’t get paid, after all.

These are some of the realities my family has always dealt with since we own and run our own agency. For folks who own their personal brand, this is the daily reality. It is a perpetual balance act of excitement and fear. It is a mix of passion and trying to distance oneself to maintain a professional perspective. It’s rewarding and painful.

Many times in Social Media, you just see the fun and exciting parts of owning a business. And there is all of that. But it is a struggle too, and that part often goes unseen. Before you knock the fact that someone is going on a nice trip or has bought themselves something nice, remember that those are the good, or even the great, parts of having your name on the door. For every good thing that you can take credit for, there seems to be a shadow lurking that you must always own. Until you experience that weight, or even part of it, you’ll just have to take the word of folks like me. Having your name on the door is a great power, and with it comes great responsibility.

Last weekend, I had the immense privilege of getting to meet Stanford Smith (aka @pushingsocial) in person. One of the things we talked about was the fact that Twitter seems to be undergoing some substantial changes and perhaps some segmentation. We view ourselves as in the same niche – people who are still fairly new to the world of blogging and Twittering, but not so new that we can’t look back at how we were when we first started and see progress. We are also noticing our drive to help people who are new to this world, to let them know that we’ve been there and that there is a reason to keep on trying.

Folks like Stan, Dawn Westerberg (@DWesterberg), and many other folks I talk to and consider friends in addition to peers share with me a deep respect for people that have made this game. People like Chris Brogan, Jay Baer, Guy Kawasaki, Mari Smith, Lisa Barone, Julia Roy – all of these people made the building that we’re all working in. MarketingProfs was offering webinars on Twitter when I was still thinking, “What in the heck is the big deal about Facebook?” All of these people have taken the opportunity not just to build something, but to send out what they’ve learned and what has worked. For that, speaking for myself, I will always be eternally grateful.

Times change, and so do circumstances

I am reading Scott Stratten’s UnMarketing right now. He talks about the fact that when he was getting involved in Twitter around 2008, he started building his Twitter community first, then brought that community to his blog. I discussed that point with Stan last week. I said, “Man, if I had tried that, I would probably have given up by now.” If I hadn’t been generating blog posts to show that I really did know how to talk like a human, I don’t think the folks that followed me on Twitter during my early days would have found any value in sticking with me at all. They could read other peoples’ posts just as well as I could, and with one less click.

I haven’t heard a lot of Old West tales about what Twitter was like when it was first beginning to grow. I don’t know what the pioneer stories of today’s biggest influencers are (though I’m sure they’re out there). But I suspect that for various reasons, they did not suffer the same level of frustration in breaking through that folks like Stan, Dawn and I did. Why? Maybe in the past, people brought their reputation to Social Media instead of trying to build a reputation using Social Media. Maybe just being on a new and innovative site was enough to get you noticed. I’m not really sure. I’d love input on that.

For me, as I’ve mentioned before, getting my blog going, getting my Twitter account going – was and remains tough. It’s 24/7 hard work. It’s endless time, and for many MONTHS, that’s months with a capital MONTHS, it was beyond discouraging.

The New World

For the pioneers who first settled Plymouth, the tasks that were ahead were daunting. As those people came to see their grandchildren and maybe their great-grandchildren in that new world, the ease with which some tasks were completed must have been astonishing. At the same time, though, those young generations knew that they would never be the ones who had risked everything to sail to the other side of the world. They had not reached out and then killed Native Americans (well, sorry, but that’s our history). They had not actually made a settlement where once there had been nothing. As much as they accomplished, they were always building on what those who had come before had done. Did that mean their progress wasn’t as valuable?

No matter how long I work on this, there will always be a crowd of people who have been working on it longer. No matter how good I get at this, there will always be people who were miles ahead of me when I was just getting started. So it is with most things in life, but because Social Media is so young and yet is changing so rapidly, I think this could have interesting ramifications for both the pioneers and the new generations.

While I note that fact, I also note that there are people who are starting Twitter right now, today. They might look at their 37 followers compared to my followers or Stan’s or Dawn’s and just think, “Man, this game is fixed. I can never get there.” They may not realize that we felt that exact same level of frustration and even despair!

A new path off to the side

When the folks that Stan and Dawn and I look up to and respect got started, there was not another Twitter generation that they were trying to network with. They were the ones getting it started. Now, for the first time, there are people who want to actually put the words and work of all of those folks into practice by helping people who are newer still. This is not to say that folks like Chris Brogan, Ann Handley, Jay Baer, and so many others are not helpful. I can honestly tell you that without support from those folks and more, I also would have given up many many months ago.

For me, in my own experience, I feel that I am in a place that hasn’t existed before in the use of Social Media. I am not one of the pioneers. I am around when the pioneers are still strong and awesome, but also maybe seemingly out of reach to some of the new folks coming up now. I feel like maybe I can help people who are struggling or who are trying to get started because I can point to the experts while also relating my own experience, which may be a bit more accessible to a newer crowd. I am still a student. I am not an expert. I am not in the crowd of people who are up in the highest room of the tallest tower.

I don’t think there will ever come a time when someone will get 1,000 hits to their blog because I mention one of their posts. I don’t think there will come a time when I mention a website and the site’s server goes down. I’m not sure folks coming up with me, now, can ever achieve the kind of pull and influence that the leaders in this space have now. Or if we do, it will be through a very different pathway. But I do think that the opportunity before me right now is exciting, if folks are open to it. To be able to talk with sympathy and memory about getting started in this space, where there are real experts and thousands of people who call themselves experts for no apparent reason…that gets me psyched, man.

I don’t think there can be a new wave of influencers like we have now. But if I can do for others what those people have done for me, even remotely – I will be among the more content people in the world. That is what I am hoping to accomplish in this space.

1st Image by Justyna Furmanczyk. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/just4you

2nd Image by Christian Johnson. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/xianstudio

Categorize under, “Things I wish I would have known six months ago.”

I am in a bit of a pickle. You see, for a long time, up to about a month ago I guess, I was a staunch defender of Blogger. And really, I’m not going to start bad-mouthing it now. I think if you are blogging for fun, there are still a lot of features Blogger offers that are really nifty, including the draft.blogger customized backgrounds that I took advantage of. However, there are a few things I have noticed since coming on over to WordPress, and I thought it only fair to share my experience.

Design

I would say the design features in terms of aesthetics are about the same. However, while Blogger has some very pretty designs, WordPress seems more interested in functionality. Designs are divided more based on number of columns or customizable headers more than “animals,” “food” etc.

Extras (Widgets)

Blogger offers a lot of widgets, but some of them kind of make me scratch my head. One nice thing about Blogger that I never took advantage of was the Google Reader feature (Blogger is owned by Google). However, I started noticing that blogging experts like Mack Collier were talking about the value of having “5 most popular posts” easily accessible. That’s something you can’t do in Blogger so far as I know, but WordPress makes it easy. I also enjoy the WordPress categorization capabilities.

Sharing

My friend Lisa asked me why I made the move to WordPress after so much agonizing. I told her, “Well, Stan over at PushingSocial said, “Darn it Margie, switch over to WordPress. It’s a pain in the butt to share your posts from Blogger.” As it happens, Blogger does not offer a URL shortener, so you are making people work if they want to share your post. I have two different ways to share my posts (hint hint) over here, including a brand new Twitter button that WordPress launched shortly before my arrival (thank you for the welcome!).

Analytics

This is the real clincher. I was living and dying by my Google Analytics reports for awhile. And that in itself is worth mentioning. Blogger does not have an installed analytics system in place. You have to get your own Analytics code and place it in the blog code. Not impossible, but kind of tricky. Anyway, the numbers were driving me nuts. My report would say that I had 0 visitors on days when I would get the most comments. The more compliments I got, the more my  bounce rate went up. When my bounce rate would go down, the time spent on the site would decrease to under a minute.

None of these problems plague me here in WordPress. You get a blog trackers automatically when you sign up for a WordPress blog, which is nice. Now, being a skeptic, I’m not 100% sure the numbers I get here on WordPress can be trusted either. However, the numbers are much more shiny than they were over in my Blogger world. So sue me, I like positive feedback.

If I wasn’t doing my Social Media work here, I probably would have stayed on Blogger. It really is quite serviceable and there’s a lot to like. However, if you are just getting started, I have to recommend WordPress over Blogger. It just might save you some heartache.

When I first started using Twitter and my blog, I was concentrating, as most new folks do, on how to push my stuff out. Even though that isn’t a best practice, it’s also hard to avoid when you’re new. You need to show that you have something to say other than “Earn millions of dollars while working from home,” right? Eventually, though, I started to see the error of my ways, and I wanted to start pushing other peoples’ stuff out there too. I realized that the only way I could do that effectively was if I started reading other peoples’ blogs.

So, I started making a concerted effort to read a few blogs a day. I chose about 4-5. And I would gravitate towards those same blogs every day.

After awhile, I realized that wasn’t really the spirit I want to bring to Social Media either. It wasn’t that I got tired of those 4-5 blogs. It was just that I started engaging with a lot more people who had a lot of good things to say, and I didn’t even know if they had blogs. I wondered if lots of other people had the same experience as me. After all, there is only so much time in a day.

That’s why I started the idea of #30Thursday. There are a few key facets to the idea which are kind of hard to get across in 140 characters, so I thought I would expand a bit on them here.

Introduce other bloggers to people who read my blog

Not only do I get to read a lot more blogs now, but I also have the privilege of introducing you to people whom you might not know via any other Social Media site. I am introducing you via a brain-to-brain handshake (woah, that now seems way too creepy of an analogy but I’ll stick with it).

Help your blog get exposure

If you feel like people aren’t seeing your blog posts (which can be a common and very discouraging sentiment), #30Thursday can help get you out there a bit. Not saying that I have a whole ton of pull, but if you’re listed, you’ll have a fair amount of eyes seeing the title and content of one of your blog posts. I want to take this one step further, however, and talk about…

You starting your own #30Thursday Posts

My ultimate goal is for other people to do exactly what I am doing. Take recommendations of posts to include in a “top 30 of the week” post. There are a few reasons for this.

1. It will help you read a lot more blogs, which will enrich your Social Media experience

2. It will introduce you to new people

3. It will show that you are a legitimate human being who isn’t out there just trying to get more followers

4. It epitomizes the idea of promoting other people first (I believe very strongly in this)

5. As a side benefit, if you are starting out, it will help familiarize people with your own blog

A Blog Book Club

Ultimately, my vision is for #30Thursday to become an expansive book club. With #30Thursday posts appearing at the hash tag every Thursday, there could be hundreds of blogs being shared, commented on, retweeted, etc. Think about it…if just 9 other people, in addition to me, started doing this, that would be 300 blogs shared in one day. Would that not be amazing? Would that not give you enough fodder for your own blog posts for the next 5 years, every week? Would that not introduce you to some amazing people that might be beyond your sphere in Twitter? I sure hope so.

The rules

People who have submitted recommendations to me tend to ask, “Do you think this will be of interest,” or “does this qualify?” Really, anything that you think is well written and worth sharing qualifies. I have been able to take everyones’ submissions thus far because I haven’t gotten more than 30 recommendations – I supplement with posts that I read that affect me in a major way. If I start getting a lot more submissions, it will just be the first 30 I get. I do read every post I get so that I can offer a brief preview when I post a link. If you just post 30 links, you’re not really doing much more than broadcasting, right?

I have not contacted people to let them know they’re on the list. I thought it would be fun to kind of surprise people. I’m kind of jostling that around in my head a bit. Let me know what you think would be more effective.

So that’s pretty much it. I hope that this clarifies some of the questions that were popping up out there.

Weekly Pictures

By the way, I’d like to take this opportunity to announce that I will also be accepting one picture a week to go with the #30Thursday post. My stockhouse that I use doesn’t have a whole lot of exciting things to say about “30.” If you want to use the artistic side of your brain, just let me know. Try to keep it under 1mb, make sure you have rights to it, etc.

Clear as mud? 🙂

In prehistoric times, our homo-sapien ancestors would herd animals that were generally edible towards a cliff’s edge. It required a lot of planning and a lot of organization, and all of that without Excel or Google Docs. Ultimately, our ancestors would lead a big herd of animals to a well-known cliff’s edge. The animals had a lot of momentum, and they had all been grouped together, so it was easy for them to go right where they were being led. Right over the cliff’s edge.

Thousands of years later, we are still trying to herd things. Some of us are herding animals still, but those of us in marketing are doing something kind of weird. We’re trying to herd other people using online tools. We are doing a lot of planning. We are doing a lot of organizing. We are gathering people together, and we’re hoping that we guide them right to our website. And uh, well, then it gets to be a bit more like the prehistoric saga. We guide people to our site from Facebook or from our blog and then they just kind of disappear, right over the cliff’s edge.

Social Media can be a lead generator, but that is not the ROI

If you are trying to prove to your company that the ROI on your Social Media campaign is good, showing the number of fans and followers you have is not the answer. Showing the number of retweets isn’t it. Showing the amount of interaction you have on your Facebook page won’t do the trick. Even looking at a Google Analytics report and showing that you have a lot of clicks to your site from Facebook won’t be convincing. Why? Here are some questions you might field before you get through your presentation.

– Are those clicks people, spiders, or some other kind of bot?

– What did they do after they clicked to that page?

– Can we follow up with them?

– Did we make a sale because of any of those clicks?

– How much time did you spend inspiring these clicks to our website?

Catch them in your web, don’t drive them over the edge

Collecting leads is really important, whether they are coming from an ad, Social Media, a press release, or anything else. But if you think about the word lead, you begin to understand why that’s not enough. A “lead” is a possible lead for YOU to get a sale, right? Now, one nice thing about getting leads from Social Media is that you can get a face, a name, and other information pretty easily. If someone likes a video you post, for example, you know that one of the views of that video was that person (or at least there’s a pretty good chance that they liked it after watching it. Some people are chronic likers, which is a topic for another more psychological post).

So the real question is what to do after you get that person to like a post or you find that people are clicking to your website. How do you get them stuck in your spider’s web of seductive selling? First things first, you need to know that they are approaching. Measurement is a growing topic in marketing and with good reason. You can’t talk to a person and nurture them into your sales cycle if you don’t know they’re there. You only know they’re there if you are monitoring what you have going on.

Once you note that people are clicking or are engaging with you the way you want, you need to know how to continue to guide them to the point where they are ready to buy. This is a delicate dance, and sad to say, it’s kind of like the dating process. If you don’t offer enough, er, information, you might find that your lead runs away and goes right into the arms of someone more helpful. On the other hand, if you are too pushy or too “selly,” you might end up with the same result. Converting a lead into a sale and thus creating measurable ROI from any campaign, Social Media or otherwise, is a process of give and take. And it’s a process that needs to be happening with multiple people at any given time. Just like our ancestors didn’t try to hunt one woolly mammoth at a time, we can’t really afford to work on converting one lead at a time.

“Social Media is all about ROI”

I see statements like this a lot, and I always get concerned. First, as I discussed in my previous post, the “ROI” claim is made based on the perception that Social Media is cheap or free. We know that this is in fact not the case, so the idea that one sale would blow your ROI chart into the next century is false logic.

The statement also indicates a confusion between “lead” and “sale.” ROI is a measure of sales against investment. A lead is a hope.

If a lot of people skip the step of developing a Social Media plan, even more skip the step of planning what to do if the campaign actually works. This is going to be problematic when marketers who are gung-ho on the ROI of Social Media are suddenly asked to account for their immense amounts of excitement and satisfaction about follower numbers.

Don’t let your leads fall over the cliff into a big pile of lost opportunity. Keep them close to you. Give them reasons to come back after they’ve clicked that first time. Make them feel comfortable. That is the true path to happiness in the marketing world.

1st Image by Ole Jørgen Bratland & Gisele Jaquenod.http://www.sxc.hu/profile/picaland

2nd Image Credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/bluemoonX