Marketing Talk

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

Tuesday there are two great chats, #CustServ (which focuses on customer service) and #Leadershipchat, which…wait for it…focuses on leadership!

Here are some posts that I think offer interesting food for thought tied to these two topics. Feel free to add your own!

Customer Service

This post by David Van Toor focuses on the 5 Cs of the Customer Experience. Interestingly, the concept of the 5cs has also been discussed at length in the Integrated Marketing Chat. Can you guess why?

Marsha Collier tweeted out this post by Joseph Michelli, which reviews the Right Now Harris Interactive Customer Experience report. The post is called What you don’t know will hurt! Some very interesting insights there about what customers would pay extra for these days.

Some companies are using Klout to determine if they should respond to your customer service concern. In Kiss my Klout, Charity Hisle points out just a few problems with this approach.

Leadership

This piece by Kate Nasser, who I actually know from several different chats, is spectacular. The post treats moving from a peer to a boss and all of the complexities involved in that transition. Given our current economic environment, I would imagine this post could help a lot of people. Positions are being filled from within, not from without.

Last week we discussed vulnerability in leadership. This post by Lisa Petrilli, called Getting to the Heart of Vulnerability in Leadership, beautifully offers her personal views on the issue.

To be an effective leader (or marketer, or anything), knowing how to talk effectively to your audience is key. Suzanne Vara writes about this in a brand new post called Are You Talking To Your Audience Effectively?

Hope you enjoy these Tuesday musings and morsels!

Image by Chris Greene. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/christgr

Every Monday on Twitter, you see a hashtag for #MM or #MMChat. This stands for “Marketer Monday.” The morsels below have to do with different facets of marketing in general. Hope you enjoy! Let me know of any great marketing morsels you’ve found!

I really enjoyed this post by Heidi Cohen the first time I read it. “Listening is the New Black” summarizes her understanding of Chris Brogan’s speech at DMA in October 2010. It’s particularly apropos today because Mr. Brogan will be hosting #MMChat tonight! (@ 8 PM EST!)

Since tonight’s topic will be the role of influencers in cause marketing, I thought I’d also hearken back to one of the most amazing posts I’ve ever read – Jeff Wilson’s The Great Influence Debate

Elaine Fogel wrote an interesting post about cause marketing a few days ago. She notes, in her post for the MarketingProfs blog, that men care just as much as women do about cause marketing. The current Movember movement is a great example!

My friend Stephane wrote a really really interesting post on green marketing a few days back. This is going to become an increasingly important topic for companies and marketers in the months and years to come.

This post by Tristan Bishop (@knowledgebishop) on renewable documentation is a nice partner for Stephane’s post!

A morsel from me awhile back on affiliate marketing. It stirred up quite a conversation. Have your thoughts changed since then? As you can see, I decided to stray away from affiliate marketing for now.

Those are my morsels for you today. Hope you enjoy!

image by Dominik Gwarek. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/kikashi

Over the last couple of weeks, I have witnessed some behavior online that has really made me rub my eyes in disbelief. Considering that I primarily use Social Media for professional reasons, and thus am mostly surrounded by people who are using it for the same reasons, my expectations are pretty high. I think maybe people just need to be reminded of a few things.

1. Social Media is called Social Media because part of the idea is to be social. Being social often involves mixing it up with other people. Even though you cannot see them, hear them, or touch them, all of your comments and tweets and likes and dislikes are pinging other human beings. Unless you are pinging bots. They probably don’t care how you treat them, and it’ll only come back to bite us when they take over the world. Be nice.

2. People work really hard, and what you see online is probably just a small portion of all of the work going on. Therefore, tearing someone’s work to shreds and saying “It’s not personal” will not always work, because it will feel pretty personal to that person.

3. Negativity tends to be negative. Even if it has a justifiable point, many people define negativity as being negative. Negative makes me sad. Don’t make me sad.

4. Bashing someone for bashing someone still means you are bashing someone.

5. Fighting publicly on a Social Media platform makes any and all parties involved look bad, no matter what the scenario. Take it to the dark alley of direct messages, email communications, or a Starbucks.

6. Social Media makes your flaws visible, but it also highlights what’s good in your existence. Take a look at the whole picture of what you have going on. Hint: If you have time to be on Social Media, you’re probably doing at least okay in life.

7. People don’t live in your head. All people can go by is the words flashing on their screens. Is your meaning clear without context?

8. Envy, impatience, hyper-snarkiness, and other modes of operation similar to those listed reflect poorly on you.

9. Sharing is a really good thing. Stealing is a really bad thing. Make sure you know the fine line that separates the two.

10. Whenever you feel you are about to get in a spat with someone, it might be a good idea instead to tweet something like, “Help the poor people of Haiti fight cholera,” or, “Can we help the children of Rwanda?” There’s more to life than Blogs and Twitter. Shocking, dreadfully shocking, but true.

Did I miss anything?

I’ve finally figured out the secret. I know now how everyone can end up a Social Media superstar. Are you ready?

Use YOUR brain.

I think that because some people have made such big names for themselves in this space, the temptation is to say, “Well, I’m going to do what they say worked for them, exactly how they did it, because it clearly *did* work for them.” There’s nothing wrong with leaders in this space offering that advice. There’s nothing wrong with reading it and even absorbing it. But you can’t just take it at face value, and I worry that a lot of people are. I am concerned that people read posts as if they were accepting a success-shaped cookie cutter. Social Media is not so simple. There cannot be only one way to do things. Social Media is powered by people, and what do you know about people? We’re all so remarkably different. Our goals are different. Our personalities are different. Our approaches are different. Our companies are different.

Here are some questions that I ask myself when I read a post by someone I admire in this field. These questions help me customize the primary nugget of advice for my own purposes.

1. Does this person’s goal set resemble mine in any way? They are expressing what has helped them achieve their goals, so that’s important. If they have very different goals, I analyze what they are saying and see if I can use the knowledge there to reach my own goals.

2. How long has this person been in this space? They may be pulling on experiences from 2-3 years ago. Twitter and the Blogosphere, from what I understand, have evolved a great deal in that time. What can I use given my own experience in this space?

3. What is the main point this person is trying to make? Do I agree with that? If I do, then the mechanics don’t really matter. I have a prize that I’m shooting for. If I don’t, then I can analyze the mechanics and see if there is something there I could learn from anyway.

If you choose any leader in Social Media, and you look at his or her story, you will see that they approached the huge canvas of Social Media, chose a corner, and painted whatever they wanted to. Then they got really good at it, and then they started to tell the rest of the canvas about it. The key is not to learn how they approach any one facet of what they do. The key is to look at the big picture. How did they find the success that equates to the success you want to have?

Use YOUR brain. Don’t try to be “the next so and so.” They’ve already done that. Take what they have learned and what others have learned, apply it to your own unique situation, and become the very first YOU. If that is your goal, then nothing else matters. Until that is your goal, you will be driving yourself crazy because everything will matter. It really is all about you…in the best way possible.

Image by Paul Brunskill. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/bigdodaddy