Marketing Talk

When you stop and think about it, there are millions of specialists in the world of healthcare. There are your podiatrists, your pediatric doctors, ENTs, heart specialists, brain specialists, and the list goes on and on. There is a certain glistening factor about these specialists. They are called specialists, after all. They are experts in something. There are people walking this planet who know everything you could ever want to know about all of those teeny tiny bones in your foot. That’s amazing! That’s so much knowledge about one thing. It bowls you over, almost.

In the midst of all of these specialists sits a holistic doctor, an internist, a jack of all trades, master of none, one might say. She might not know every bone in the foot, but she can tell if you have a sprained ankle or a broken ankle. He might not know if you have a totally blocked sinus, but if you have a sinus infection, he’ll be all over it. These doctors know a lot of specialists and can help you build a network, an army, of specialists if that’s what you need. But they can also help you an awful lot themselves.

The marketing world is a lot like the medical world these days. There are all kinds of specialists. Social Media, PR, customer service, advertising, and most confusing to me, “marketing specialists.” There is noting wrong with these folks (I’m not calling anyone a proctologist here), but sometimes you don’t need a specialist. Sometimes, you need a more holistic approach.

An agency, if it is doing its job well, can be like that holistic doctor. While expertise is in abundance, the term “specialist” is not often used. Nor is guru or expert. An agency, though, can help you see the big picture. It can help you see how a Social Media campaign here supplemented with a heavy dose of PR tactics over there could really boost your company’s health. If you think you might need a marketing check-up, talk to an agency like ours first. Tell us how you’ve been feeling, what tactics you’ve been trying, and how they seem to be working for you. We may tell you that the specialists you’ve been seeing seem to be quacks, or we may say that you could really enhance what you are doing by exercising a couple of new options. We may say that we have a couple of other specialists in our network we’d like you to talk to.

The holistic approach of an agency does not negate the importance of all of those specialists out there. It just means that we can offer you a more broad perspective covering your entire bill of marketing health.

And hey, we won’t even take your blood! At least not the first time….

Image by luis solis. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/LuisSolis

I wish I could say that I planned, 11 weeks ago, for #30Thursday number 11 to happen on November 11th. However, there is no way I am that organized. I also did not plan, in the beginning, for #30Thursday to fall on Veterans Day. However, I am kind of glad that it worked out this way. On a day when we stop and think about people who are far from home, who are far from home because they are fighting for our right to sit on our tushes and read blog posts, it seems fitting to share knowledge. Because really, in the end, all wars are about maintaining the ability to be ourselves, right? And who we are in this instant are people who want to read, learn, and share. With that, I give you 30 fantastic posts this week, two of which relate specifically to the importance of today. Enjoy!

1. The first post for this week is by Michelle Davidson, and it’s called Marketing and Sales Must Work Together, Not Point Fingers. If you are a scholar/fan of Integrated Marketing & Communications, this post is a must-read!

2. Tom Moradpour tweeted out this post by Heidi Cohen, which compares Twitter to a cocktail party. Heidi does a great job of pointing out that a lot of people send out 3 tweets, then leave without seeing how people respond. You wouldn’t do that at a party, right? Well, let’s hope not, anyway 🙂

3. It might shock you that I’m including a post about Klout given my previously verbalized feelings about Klout. However, this post by BrightMatrix, tweeted out by my friend Quality1, is the best post on Klout I have ever seen. Check out New Metrics Are No Excuse to Continue a Pattern of Lazy Analytics: An Example Using Klout and see why Klout is just the beginning of the analysis process!

4. Amber Cleveland AND Beth Harte tweeted out this post by @ConversationAge (Valeria Maltoni) so I knew it had to be good. When you read Why PR is Misunderstood and Misapplied, you begin to see that PR and Marketing departments have a lot of work to do when it comes to defining themselves in this new age of Social Media. Well written, fascinating post!

5. Cheryl Burgess wrote a really powerful post this week about crisis management in Social Media. As it turns out, 1/3 of all global CEOs are not prepared to deal with a Social Media crisis. This should not scare you away from Social Media. Rather, it should emphasize how key it is to have a plan.

6. Saw this post tweeted out by @socialanswers and it’s a good one. Written by Seth Kravitz, you definitely want to check out Social Media Is Not Just A Fad. Phew.

7. Are you blogging your heart out but seemingly not getting any reaction to your works of art? Mark Schaefer gives you ten reasons to keep on blogging. Fantastic post.

8. My friend @CelsiusMI tweeted out this amazing treasure trove of information from Mashable. Bookmark this post, called 32 New Social Media Resources You May Have Missed, by Zachary Sniderman.

9. Want a chance to participate in a study that sounds really really interesting? My friend Linda Machado tweeted about this post. Visit Tiffany Monhollon’s post, “How Does Social Media Affect Trust Between PR & Journalists?” and then participate in her study!

10. CPollittIU tweeted out this post by Kyle Placy. Social Media has become so much a part of our daily lives that a new device has been created to measure tweet levels in major cities. Placy explains more in his post called The Social Integration of Twitter.

11. Apart from the views on agencies present in this post, there is lots of food for thought in this post by Eric Brown. Give Is Content Marketing the New Advertising” a read, over at Jason Falls’ Social Media Explorer. Tweeted out by my friend @amoyal.

12. David Crouch of ten24 Web Solutions wrote a really neat post summarizing last weeks #IMCChat and also discussing influence as it applies to companies. Definitely beyond the realm of Klout here. Read Three Characteristics of Influential Companies and enjoy!

13. My friend Allen Mireles said it all when she said, “You need to read this post yesterday.” Just when I thought my #30Thursday was kinda cool, Danny Brown published 317 Ways To Succeed in Social Media. Everything in the world you could ever want to know in 1 post!

14. Hopefully Jason Mikula thinks my #30thursday title is okay, but he makes a great point about folks who use numbers in their blog headlines. Well-researched and well written!

15. My friend Cate Colgan sent me this post from Epic Thanks. Today, Veterans Day, we send our virtual respect to a veteran who is doing so much to help other veterans. A changemaker defined.

16. The amazing Lou Imbriano encourages you to look always for that new beginning. He did, and he is all the happier for it, even if not everyone can understand it.

17. One thing we don’t hear much about in this era of Social Media is how it might be making people more accountable for what they say and do. My friend Tristan Bishop ponders this in a post he wrote called “The Age of Accountability.” Voice your opinions!

18. Always wondered exactly what metrics you should look at when it comes to Social Media? Social Media Examiner tells you the 8 Social Media Metrics You Should Be Measuring! Fantastic information there.

19. Sometimes, we take for granted that our friends know we appreciate them. Beth Hoffman didn’t take that risk and used her blog to highlight a friend of mine – Molly Campbell. A beautiful post by Beth followed by a hilarious piece by Molly. What could be better?

20. My poor friend Gaga decided to generate her own real-life content to blog about. Crazy lady – wish her healing vibes as you read about why Gaga should stay in the garden – and off her feet for awhile!

21. An important topic and an insightful interview can be found if you read What Can We Do To Help The Troops in Afghanistan. On this important day, check this post out!

22. This week at pushingsocial.com, Stan tells you the new rules for winning the blog game. Is it a lot of work? You betcha. But he will help you along the way!

23. Suzanne Vara took a post by Chris Brogan about community as currency and put her own spin on it, asking whether your community is an asset, currency, or both. What do you think?

24. My friend Joe Ruiz (@SMSJoe) said I must include this post by Matt Ridings, who wrote the post over at Brass Tack Thinking. The post is called Judgment Day: Social Media and Your Front Lines, and interestingly, it treats a theme other posts this week dealt with – how to prepare for Social Media crises. More than that, though, Matt points out what few do – training for crisis management begins with your HR department and the hiring process.

25. One great thing about following Kay Whitaker and Amber Cleveland of Sterling Hope is that you gain very interesting insights into the new world of publishing. In her post Perpetual Outsider, Kay talks about how few people out there are offering book reviews for e-books only. And yet…Amazon claims that e-books are outselling print. Something askew there?

26. My friend @knowledgebishop tweeted out this amazing post by Ty Sullivan, which appeared over at FohBoh. When it comes to customer service, it all comes back to a Beatles Song: Let It Be. Such an interesting and detailed take on the Beatles and customer service, all in one post 🙂

27. Wise wise words from my friend Maya Paveza this week. Expectations Help Avoid Discomfort, and by the way, discomfort can be really uncomfortable!

28. Dawn Westerberg offers advice that would make John Jantsch proud. In her post called Prime the Pump of Your Referral Engine, Dawn notes that if someone is not a good match for you, lead them in the direction of someone who could help them. They’ll appreciate it and you, and that kind of buzz is good to spread!

29. Remember when Pay-Per-Click ads were all the rage? Shannon Suetos, guest posting over at ConvinceandConvert.com, wonders if Twitter Advertising is a threat to PPC. It might be the end to banner ads as well.

30. Finally, rounding out the week, I include Chris Brogan’s post called Absorb Emulate and Innovate. Where does emulation end and stealing begin? Give it a read!

When I was a little kid, I took piano lessons. Oddly enough, one of my first favorite movies was Amadeus, and I felt certain that with enough piano lessons, I could play Mozart pieces and thoroughly enjoy myself forever and ever. If you’ve ever taken lessons on a musical instrument, you perhaps have experienced the odd sensation of stepping outside yourself. Your hands are flying across the keyboard or the strings and you think to yourself, “Huh. Weird. That’s me doing that.” Whenever I would have that sensation, the almost inevitable result was that I would mess up whatever I was playing.

I’m going to tell you a secret now. Are you ready?

I’m kinda feeling like that experience is happening in regards to this blog right here.

It all started with a tweet

A few days ago, I saw a tweet in my stream that led me to a post. And the post was titled in an almost verbatim way as a post I have yet to publish here. Same topic. Extraordinarily similar wording. At first I wasn’t all that bothered. “Oh, well, statistically it’s amazing this hasn’t happened before,” I told myself. But that didn’t really make me feel better. Because you see, that just made me realize that I’m blogging about things that tons, thousands, hundreds of thousands of people are blogging about. There are probably countless posts similar to mine.

It’s true that I feel comfortable in my own voice here. It’s true that I work hard on this blog. It’s true that I enjoy it.

But am I really offering something important here?

Late to the party

As bloggers go, I’m pretty darned new to this world. There are all kinds of niches that have masters of the blog artform established as if in stone. Bloggers can turn to Brian Clark and Darren Rouse. Social Media types can turn to Chris Brogan and Jason Falls. Marketing types can turn to Seth Godin and Beth Harte.

Am I really going to catch up with folks like that? I think not.

So is the alternative to blog in the chicken coop, where everyone is trying to get into the same arena as those influential bloggers? What value is that to you as a reader?

The Roller Coaster (baby baby)

One thing I’m pretty sure super experienced bloggers don’t worry about is the roller coaster of being a new blogger in this very full, very competitive space. It’s pretty tough, I have to say. And while I have learned a lot, I still have a lot more to learn. Right at this moment, I’m feeling like I’m in a giant crowd of people, and all of us are talking about the same things, at the same time, but in different ways. Is that useful?

Has this post been written already?

Perhaps the second most common question I see about blogging, right along with “how often should I blog?” is “How often should I promote my blog? On this point there is a fair amount of disagreement, so I will just tell you my approach, and then you can tell me if yours is similar, or why you do things differently.

Here is my “strategy” in a nutshell.

1. Publish blog

2. Copy a link with maybe a bit of description (since you have the room) to Facebook – I have tried importing the notes before but the importing time frame is so unreliable and irritating that I just do it manually

3. Copy link to a URL shortener, post to Twitter

And that’s it.

Usually, I can tell right away if the blog is going to get traction or not. If people start commenting or retweeting in the first hour or so, then I know that I’ve hit on something that people are finding helpful. If I hear crickets, then I know that my post is probably not hitting people in a big way.

Sometimes, if I feel like the subject matter really could help people, or if it seems like Twitter is having a bit of a slow day (it does happen), I will tweet out a second link later in the day. Very rarely.

This strategy came about as part of my overall approach to Social Media. I am not here to get enough traffic to crash my site every day. I’m not here to get 75 comments, come hell or high water (pardon the expression). I am here to try to help people. If a post isn’t resonating, then I simply have missed the mark. I do not get mournful about this – sometimes posts hit people different ways at different times. I, like my Twitter stream, move on.

There are lots of people who think this is kind of a silly way to go about things. There are different time zones you need to account for (around the world, mind you). Plus Twitter is a constantly moving target. Your tweets are like little twigs on a river – they float on by and people may or may not catch them the first time around. I don’t really worry about that either. The way I figure it, I am promoting my blog posts every day because I am posting a new blog every day. If you come here and read my first post, maybe you’ll see what else I’ve been up to.

Now of course, I must note that if you are not posting every day, your promotion rules would change. If I was posting, say, 3 times a week, I would tweet out the same post 1-2 times on the days in between posts. I would jog the times to try to hit different crowds. But I would still not tweet out the post dozens of times.

I would toss out there that if you want to tweet a link to your own post several times throughout the day, make sure you are doing even more promoting of other people while you’re at it.

Other ways to promote blog posts

There are a couple of other ways I promote blog posts. If someone asks a question that I know I cover specifically in a blog post, I will put it out there. For example, recently my friend Lauren Gray expressed some concerns about migrating her blog site from wordpress.com to wordpress.org. I sent her a link to the presentation I did about that very issue because I thought (and hoped) it might help her out. Since I am developing content with the intent of helping other people, this is a great scenario for me, where I can really feel like I’m being at least semi-useful.

Occasionally, I might tweet a relevant post during a chat for the same reason. If someone brings up a topic I just wrote about, I might say something like, “FYI, I wrote about this earlier this week if you want to take a look.” The same can be done on LinkedIn. I am cautious about doing this because I think too many links away from a chat can be distracting, plus not many people will move away from a fast-moving chat to read a blog post.

Finally, when I comment on peoples’ blogs, I fill in the “website” part of the form with this blog site’s URL. I very very very seldom link to a specific blog post, though I might mention a blog post I had done on a similar topic. If someone likes a comment I have made and they want to learn more about me, the link is accessible without me shoving it down everyone’s throats.

Things that bug me

There are a couple of things people do to promote their blogs that I personally find kind of annoying.

Auto-tweet the same post over and over again: There are a couple of people on my Twitter stream who have been tweeting out the same blog posts for months. There are a few problems with this in my opinion First, it gives the impression that you have nothing new to say. Second, if the post you are tweeting isn’t hitting people the right way, then you are going to decrease the amount of interest every time the tweet goes out. Third, it makes people start to wonder if you actually remember you have those auto tweets turned on.

Blog-droppers: You know how some people are name droppers? Like, literally, they could be connected with anyone famous who has ever lived. Elivs probably looked at their mother. The first cave man to paint a picture in a cave was their great great great great great (etc) grandfather (twice removed). Well, there are some folks who drop their blog posts in the same way. If you talk about chicken, they will link you to a post they did about food. If you mention cockroaches, they will link you to a post. I believe that if you are truly useful, people will figure it out. If you have doubts about whether they will find you useful, you may want to rethink your strategy.

So that’s my take on promoting blog posts. What’s yours?

It seems like a lot of people find it very easy to badmouth agencies, or the concept of “the agency.” I am not really sure why this is. I suppose enough people have had enough bad experiences that it has kind of morphed into an acceptable view of things. Maybe it’s misdirected fury at the “advertising game,” which makes many feel squeamish. Anyway, pretty much on a daily basis I find myself defending agencies. It makes me mad.

Just like with any group of people, there are agencies that are bad. They give bad advice. They cut and run. They don’t listen. They are irresponsible with money and or information. But let me tell you a little bit about our agency. Because when you say you don’t like agencies, you’re saying you don’t like where I work. You’re saying you don’t like what I and my family sacrifice many things and much time for. I think you should know what you are really talking about.

Our agency can be trusted with any information. Our clients know that they can send us any information and it will not leave our office walls.

Our agency requires authorization to do anything on our clients’ behalf. We do this so that there is never any question about how we are using our clients’ investment in us.

Our agency puts our heart and soul into spec work, knowing that at times it might result in a new relationship, while at other times the work may go elsewhere.

Our agency cares about our clients as people. We mourn with them. We celebrate with them. We are human beings.

Our agency builds relationships with vendors so that we can provide the most holistic services possible, creating a “one stop shop” for our clients.

Our agency never rests on our laurels. We don’t call ourselves “the experts” or “the gurus.” Rather, we are always learning, and we are always trying to pass on what we learn so that it can most  benefit our clients.

Our agency believes that service, good service, comes first.

When you say, “I’m not a fan of agencies” or “Oh, stupid agencies,” you are talking about our agency, too. There are probably many other agencies who, like us, believe that this is a service business where the customer’s trust is a treasure and where the customer’s success is the only thing that can make an agency successful.

I am proud of what I do. I am proud of the quality that our agency has come to represent for close to sixty years now. I am proud of my family for making that happen.

Do some agencies deserve a bad rap? I’m sure they do. But if you can’t narrow it down to specifics, I’d ask you to pause before painting with a big broad brush of bashing.

I see this question come up almost every week during blogchat. Throughout the week, a lot of people also ask me why I blog every day, and is that something that everyone should do.

The easiest answer to give is that whatever you choose to do, you should try to be consistent. Create an expectation with your readership. I think one of the best things that could happen to a blogger would be for a reader to say, “Aw, you usually have your blog up by this time. Where is it?” If you don’t blog every day, create a general day and time so that your readership can come to expect a blog. If you do things right, they and you will look forward to that consistent “date.”

The answer really goes beyond this matter of consistency though and extends to the kind of blog you want to have. Ask yourself what you want to give you readers, and ask what you are hoping to get out of the experience. Once I found my voice for blogging, I knew that I wanted my blog to be a place of conversation about things having to do with marketing (and sometimes loosely related things like life and the world). I seldom get into details because that’s not generally how I talk. I’m not a big stats person, I’m not a big reader of case studies, so that’s not the kind of thing I talk about here. This means that it’s easier for me to post a blog a day. It’s easy for me to talk every day, and this is just writing some of my thoughts down in a way that I hope you find interesting.

Now I’ll tell you a secret. I am horribly jealous of the posts that Stanford Smith (@pushingsocial), Suzanne Vara, and Brian Solis write. Their posts are so intuitively helpful, and you can just see the work that went into the crafting of the posts. And yes, their posts really are works of art. If I was trying to write posts like that, there is no way I’d be able to blog as often as I do. However, my mission does not necessitate such posts, and besides, those folks do that kind of post better than I ever could.

Another good idea to factor in when deciding how often you want to blog is the time that you are willing to invest not just in the blogging, but also in the response to comments (and if you say, “Oh, that’s easy, I don’t get any comments,” don’t worry. That will change). All told, it takes me about half an hour to write one of my blog posts. Since I like to blog once a day, I know that every week, I will be investing close to 4 hours in writing my own blogs. Now, the #30Thursday posts I do actually take several hours throughout the week so that needs to get added in for my particular scenario. You need to look at your schedule and see what you can maintain on a weekly basis – again coming back to the consistency thing.

Now there are a few tricks in this regard. For example, I tend to write most of my blog posts for the week over the weekend because I simply don’t have the time to write that much during the week. I edit the posts so that they will publish at 6 AM, which enables me to post them to Facebook and Twitter before I go to work. Some people even automate the publishing to Facebook and Twitter so that they don’t have to touch it at all. You can also gauge things by your work cycle. If every other week your work levels shift, you could write more during the light week so that you can store up for the heavy week.

So to recap, here are some questions I would throw right back at you if you are debating how often you should blog:

1. What kind of experience are you hoping to create for your readers?

2. What kinds of blog posts will you need to write to create that experience?

3. What would be a sustainable level that would enable consistency of output?

4. How much time are you comfortable investing into your blog?

5. What would make the experience most enjoyable for you?

I hope that helps!

Image by Hilde Vanstraelen. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/biewoef