Marketing Talk

I found an article from Slate Magazine this week that really caught my attention. The title is rather much an attention grabber – it’s called The End of the Echo Chamber. Well, it caught my attention, anyway.

For a long time, it seems, people have been complaining about the online echo chamber effect. Wikipedia has talked about this phenomenon. So has the New York Times. A lot of bloggers I know have also lamented the echo chamber effect, especially when it comes to a major (read popular) blogger saying something that then gets massively shared across the internet, whether the information is good or not.

The theory behind the echo chamber is pretty logical. When you have strong ties to a person online, a person who tends to visit the same sites, read the same stuff, etc., you tend to share a lot of what they write. They also tend to share a lot of what you write. As you meet more people like you, you all tend to start echoing each other, and as time goes by, you start to get a bit like a clique. People who disagree with you are viewed with suspicion or may be categorized as “the haters.” In short, a lot of negativity can result from the echo chamber effect online.

That is, if the echo chamber actually exists.

This article that I read, written by Farhad Manjoo, summarizes a study conducted by Eytan Bakshy soley on Facebook. Bakshy studied how information is shared on Facebook, maneuvering EdgeRank results with Facebook’s permission. After analyzing the behavior of some 250 million people, Bakshy came up with a surprising result. People are actually highly influenced by those with whom they share weak ties, not strong ties. People you have weak ties to are more likely to share information that you might not have found otherwise. Therefore, Facebook proves that there is no echo chamber.

To put it another way, if you see a link in your Facebook feed from a weak tie, you are just as likely to share it as a link from someone you’ve known for 30 years. Therefore, your world really isn’t shrinking online, it’s growing because of an exposure to new people and new information.

Or, as the study suggests:

We found that information shared by a person’s weak ties is unlikely to be shared at a later point in time independently of those friends. Therefore, seeing content from a weak tie leads to a nearly tenfold increase in the likelihood that a person will share a link. In contrast, seeing information shared by a strong tie in News Feed makes people just six times as likely to share. In short, weak ties have the greatest potential to expose their friends to information that they would not have otherwise discovered.

I’ve got problems with this concept

So, first things first. The author of the Slate article notes that because Facebook is promoting the study, and because Facebook gave Bakshy permission to do the study, the online network is probably pretty pumped that they come out smelling like roses. “We are opening your world. It’s the open graph, only, like, it’s your life!” Biased studies should always raise the eyebrows, vulcan style.

However, I have another problem with this concept, too. As I engage in Triberr and as I subscribe to more and more blogs, the same concepts and the same ideas are appearing again and again. Whether or not these people influence each other, something is influencing people in the online world to write about the same stuff. Maybe it’s a desire for traffic – how many articles about SOPA and PIPA did you see this week? Maybe it’s to show up well in Google searches – the number of posts about Pinterest over the last few weeks is pretty stunning. Or maybe it is just to try to get on the radar of a popular blogger. With Chris Brogan and Guy Kawasaki highly promoting Google Plus, is it really a surprise that a lot of people are out there writing about the same thing?

Methinks not.

Furthermore, and I haven’t read the entire study so I don’t know if it is addressed in there, but at least in the article, there doesn’t seem to be a differentiation between some important things like how you got to “friend” those weak ties on Facebook or the types of information people were sharing in their news feeds. For example, let’s say I share a lot of stuff from a person who would be  a “weak tie.” The stuff they post is a lot of funny pictures and videos that amuse me. Is that really widening my world and preventing the echo chamber? I might share stuff from a person I have strong ties to that is about our friendship and not about similar views. I might comment on items that I *have* seen all over the place.

To put it succinctly, it seems to me like there are too many variables to actually be able to state that 1 + 1 = 2. What is this “information” we are speaking of?

What do you think of this study? Do you think it’s just out there to prove Facebook is really awesome, or do you think there really is no echo chamber in the online world?

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/digitaljourney/5573215501 via Creative Commons

 

For the next half a year, or 26 weeks, as it were, we’re going to be talking about various marketing myths that I’ve seen floating around the online world for the last year. I’m going to be honest. My sincere hope is that this series will help make these myths die. I’m not a cruel person, but sometimes one has to be harsh.

So, here, in alphabetical order, are our topics for the next 26 Mondays. I hope you are looking forward to this as much as I am! It should create some spirited conversations!

1. Agencies are bad news

2. Blogging will work as long as you’re awesome

3. Community makes the world go round

4. Danger lies in not trying everything

5. E-Newsletters are easy to create and send

6. Failure is sexy

7. Glorification of others is the way to your dreams

8. Having a plan is lame

9. Integrated marketing means using Facebook AND Twitter

10. Just doing it yourself works best

11. Killing all non-social media tactics is advisable

12. Logos and Brands are synonymous

13. Marketing is just talking to people

14. Nothing should be off-limits on a corporate blog

15. Opens are the best way to measure email marketing success

16. People who like you will buy from you

17. Quit advertising. It doesn’t work.

18. ROI relates to your mother

19. Social media marketing is about engagement

20. Twitter can work for any business

21. Understanding marketing is no longer necessary

22. Very few obstacles lie in the way of content marketing

23. Websites are a piece of cake

24. X plus your time equals X

25. Your priorities are right on target

26. Zebras could do social media marketing

 

So there you have it. Are you psyched? The bloodbath will begin Monday the 23rd of January. Stay tuned!

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/54470160@N08/5076429087/ via Creative Commons

This thought has come up in about three different places over the last 24 hours or so, so I figured maybe I should talk to you about it in one place and get it out of my system.

Let me begin by painting for you a rather dire picture (yay!). Are you ready?

It’s one year from now, and your company is having to close and deadbolt the doors. The company is bankrupt. Your heart is broken and your mind is confused. How did this happen? You took in the advice that everyone gave you. You did everything the right way. You worked hard. You tried new things, some of which failed and some of which succeeded beyond your wildest dreams. You used social media the way all of the most expert practitioners told you to use it. You had tons of fans. You had tons of “likes” on your Facebook page. You, the head of your company, were extremely well-respected, maybe even admired, in the online world. In the words of King Theoden from Lord of the Rings, “How did it come to this?”

The answer is staring you in the face. Why is your business closing? You ran out of money. What were you not tracking while you did everything right in the online world?

If you said money just now, you are spot on.

The biggest lie is that social media is free

I still remember when social media as a marketing tool really started to take off. At the time, I was working as a media buyer at our family’s marketing firm, and already the chatter had begun about how this was going to change everything. It wasn’t just the power of this new suite of tools. It was the fact that they were all free. Instantaneously, all agencies, all other forms of marketing, and pretty much everything else were consigned to death. We don’t need you now. We’ve got the Tweeter thing. And it’s free.

Except, as we now know, social media is not really free, just like having a receptionist to answer your phone isn’t free. Having someone to monitor your inbox for you is not free (unless your family has really been brainwashed by you). Somehow, in all of the excitement created by the onslaught of these new tools, we forgot a very simple and basic business concept.

Time = Money

Let’s say that again. Time equals money. You pay people for their time. People pay you for their time. If you are spending time tweeting, it’s still time. If you are spending your time writing a blog post, it’s still time you are spending on the clock. If you are paying someone and they are doing that stuff for you as a social media manager, social media director, or community manager, you are still paying them for your time.

The platforms you use online may be free. Social Media – it’s not free.

I’d like to pay you everything I have. Keep the change.

Now, let’s talk about another pretty basic business principle that seems to have fallen by the wayside. Expenditures matter. You need a way to make sure that what you are spending does not exceed what you are taking in. Centuries of business have proven that this is a good path to follow. It is generally considered best practice to make more money than you are spending (I know, tell that to the US government).

Have you ever tried to sell someone your Twitter followers your business has accrued? How much money have you been offered for the fans of your Facebook page? What about comments on your blog? Ever had any offers to buy those? Did that ever work?

My guess is probably not.

So, your company has been paying someone x number of dollars a year for 2-3 years, let’s say, to run your social media marketing. They are reporting to you that they are engaging really really well with people. They have gotten 60,000 Twitter followers and your Facebook page is up to 5,000 fans. You’ve been really excited about this, but your company is now having to let that person, and everyone else, go. Why? None of those happy shiny metrics were actually putting money in your pocket, right? You were paying that person money and they were giving you multi-colored air in return. That’s not the lifeblood of most businesses. It’s all about the benjamins, as some wise philosopher once said.

Now, had you been aware of this, your situation could have been salvaged. You could have started asking questions like, “OK, but how many of our Twitter followers are buying from us?” “How many leads can we nurture that have their foundation in our Facebook presence so that we can turn those into sales?”

If you weren’t getting any buyers from these channels, if you weren’t making any sales, or only a small percentage of sales as compared to what you were paying your social media maven/jedi/expert/guru, you could have saved your company, just like King Theoden could have saved his people if he hadn’t let Grima Wormtongue and Saruman ruin his mind.

Hey, we all have problems.

There are Gandalfs out there you should listen to

Theoden King was saved in the end, to a large extent, by Gandalf the Wizard. Your company can be saved too, because there are some wizards out there that are telling you how to prevent this kind of catastrophe.

Talk to Marcus Sheridan about how to make sure your blog is helping you drive sales, for example.

Or talk to Olivier Blanchard about how to measure ROI (for social media or other marketing efforts) or read his book (not an affiliate link) if you really want to jump into this.

Let these wizards point you in the right direction. There’s no reason for you to keep losing money on your social media efforts, and there’s every opportunity, in fact, to improve your performance and thus grow. But more Twitter followers and blog comments is not the way.

Think about it?

First Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/runran/4094527770/ via Creative Commons

Second Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/williamcromar/5000421162/ via Creative Commons

 

One of my most favorite stand-up comedians is Eddie Izzard. He is deliciously irreverent while also emanating a sense of real intelligence, which is a combination I am particularly fond of. In his perhaps most famous show, Dress to Kill, Izzard talks about the European melting pot. He notes that when the European Union came together, the British were rather…slow to take part. Part of the problem was that the British simply didn’t want to learn everyone else’s language. They didn’t feel they should have to be able to speak French, German, Italian, and all other languages just to conduct business. Izzard quotes an imaginary British person saying, “There’s no way a person can hold more than 2 languages in their head at a time!”

To which Izzard retorts, “Then again, the Dutch speak about 6 languages and are also always high.”

This segment of his show was always amusing to me, but now that I am in the online world, it actually resonates a lot more. Over my year or so doing this blogging tweeting Facebooking thing, I’ve encountered tons of people for whom English is not their first language, and yet they write exceedingly awesome blog posts in English, predominantly tweet in English, predominantly update their Facebook pages in English, and converse in English at conferences.

Now, I, on the other hand, cannot return this favor in the least. For a very brief time I could speak decent Hebrew. For a semi-brief time I was semi-fluent in Spanish. Never did get a grasp on that whole Subjunctive tense though. And now that’s all gone pretty much. I didn’t feel I “needed” to take a foreign language in college, so I did not.

I really regret that now.

“But everyone speaks English”

I think that this is symptomatic of a really serious problem us Americans have with the world at large, and let’s face it…when you’re advised to pretend you’re Canadian so the rest of the world likes you better, you’ve gotta be getting that message. America is a powerful country, but we are also one of the youngest countries in the world…still. And even if it’s true that English is the “language to know” (which I don’t happen to think is true), why is not a priority for Americans to learn how to talk in other languages? Why is not expected that I should be able to talk to someone in French, German, Spanish, or Italian? At least a little bit. At least past “Hello” and “Thank you.”

Why is it just a one-way street?

It’s not just about language

Of course, just looking at the linguistic angle of this is not adequate. I’m encountering people from all sorts of cultures that I have no familiarity with whatsoever. I am entirely clueless as to what life is like in Malaysia or the Philippines or Australia or Norway. I have no idea how those cultures differ from my own, and thus I have no idea how what I might say innocently could be misconstrued as deeply offensive. I have no real understanding of faiths that have not directly touched my life. If we are really engaging in social media, isn’t this stuff pretty important? If you have the chance to engage with the entire world, why limit your perspective to just those things with which you are familiar?

Maybe it’s just me

Maybe this is more a personal failure on my part. Maybe other Americans don’t have these problems. But I do most certainly feel that it is a failure on my part at the very least. The more I am exposed to people who can talk, at any given time, in 3-4 different languages, the more I feel that my role as a citizen of the new world is not being fulfilled properly and adequately. That really bothers me.

What do you think? If you’re not from America originally, do you find Americans generally ignorant of your country and culture? If you are native to America, do you feel as troubled as me about our inability to converse as readily with different people speaking in different tongues?

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fatguyinalittlecoat/5310405113/ via Creative Commons

For as long as I have been blogging, I have been terrible at subscribing to peoples’ blogs. I had a lot of concerns about it. For example, would I just go to those sites and never find anybody new? Would I get so far behind that I would just do what so many have done and delete the whole mess?

It was quite an interior battle. However, today the stalemate broke. I decided I am just plain tired of missing blog posts, or coming in so late that I am comment number 7 million. By that time, there are too many comments to read every single one and yet you kind of have to so you don’t become “that person” who repeats what has already been said 7 times. It bums me out. Therefore, I proclaimed today “National Subscribe to Blogs Day” and I became the first (so far as I know) to celebrate.

In the process of going through the online world and finding blog posts I wanted to subscribe to, I encountered a lot of roadblocks in my way. I wanted to share those with you so that you can make sure people find it really easy to subscribe to your blog posts. I mean, I was out there with the PURPOSE of subscribing. Many people will only opt to describe after they’ve read a post of yours they like.

With that said, here are some important things to look out for.

1. Hard to find or hard to identify subscribe buttons

I know the temptation on your blog sites is to get really creative with design, but there are some things that should probably remain really boring and plain. Your subscribe button falls into that category. I should not have to guess where the button is. I should not have to look for it either, because…I probably won’t. Have it out there. Be loud, be proud.

2. Technology that doesn’t work

On a lot of blogs that I tried to subscribe to, the RSS button took me to an XML code page that was worthless for my cause. This happened in Chrome but not in Safari. However, in Safari, the only way to subscribe via email was to use a program already on your computer (for me, Mac Mail). I was using my Gmail account. I lost patience and did not subscribe to those sites. It was taking too much time to figure out. Test your subscription options yourself and make sure they are working the way you want them to.

3. An email icon that takes me to your contact page

On a few websites, the icons are a little confusing/misleading. On some sites, the email icon is a subscribe button. On others, it stands for “Email me.” On some sites the RSS button is just for readers while on others it also offers the email option. Don’t make your potential subscribers guess what they should click on. Gently guide them to the promised land of subscriber happiness.

4. Buried buttons

Related to point number one, but a surprising number of sites had subscribe options that were buried way down under the page. To me, this is a higher priority than the people who have “liked” you on Facebook. The people who engage with you on your blog and who are willing to read your ramblings whenever you write them are pure gold. Move those buttons up, up, up.

5. Invite people to subscribe, but don’t be pushy

One thing I don’t do enough is making the ask. When I was working on my engagement series last year, I made a point of mentioning now and then that you could subscribe to keep up with the series. Guess what? My number of subscribers increased by about 100%.  When I stopped making those reminders, my number of subscribers stopped growing as fast. Not much of a mystery, right?

With that being said, I’m not a huge fan of the 20-sentence-long invite to subscribe that some folks have at the bottom of every post. I suppose it makes sense, but it drives me nuts. Be gentle with me. I’m fragile.

Have you checked out your blog site as if you were a visitor and not, well, you? Have you clicked your subscribe buttons to make sure they are working? Are your subscribe options super easy to find?

What other important things are there to look out for when it comes to building your subscriber list?

Oh, and by the way, if you want to subscribe to my posts, the subscribe buttons are right over there, in the upper right-hand corner

 

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