It's All About the Conversation

Recently, I created a blog strategy for a client that I thought was really pretty good.  Maybe a bit aggressive, but after reading Justin Kownacki’s post on “What I’ve Learned From Blogging Weekly Instead of Daily,” I thought that this strategy was pretty close to getting the sort of website traffic that I thought was needed to really make a difference.

It’s really pretty simple, as most things should be, and I know I don’t follow it myself, but as my parents told me several times, “Do as I say, not as I do.”  Let me know what you think or if you’ve created similar strategies.

Your Blog should have a purpose and strategy behind it to make sure that it works and doesn’t get blog rot.

Here are a couple questions to consider:

1. Why are we doing this?
   • because it’s fun?
   • to find business?
   • to show off our thought leadership?
   • increase customer engagement?
   • PR for media, news, social networking and other bloggers?
   • Improve search engine optimization?
   • Provide a way to disseminate information?
   • Recognize and promote employees, clients, partners, projects, etc.?
2. How will we know it’s successful. What metrics are we setting for ourselves?  Can we put numbers to this?
   • Analytics, increased traffic, time, pages, etc
   • Comments on blogs
   • Links to blog postings
   • Increased leads
   • SEO
   • Social Media mentions.

1. Purpose of the blog. The blog should show that you are a collection of experts that are not only knowledgeable in your respective fields, but excited about learning and sharing what you see, know, experience and demonstrate in your key business areas of expertise.

2. Solve a problem or identify a solved problem. This is somewhat related to number 1. Part of your strategy should be solving a problem, or another way to think about this is responding to issues from clients or to just find a way to be useful and relevant – with examples.

3. Be the Subject Matter Experts (SME). This will help determine your content strategy and help build your brand. Demonstrate what you’ve done and how it’s improved our success or our clients’ success.  Wave your own flag a bit.

4. Optimize our content for SEO. Do a bit more work to get the right titles and keywords for the post.  Find keywords that support the blog and the post.

5. Be honest, encourage 2 way conversations. Create content that is open and honest and is truly trying to offer solutions.  Give of yourselves without needing anything in return accept happy readers.

6. Monitor the world. Create searches on keyword or clients to watch what people are saying in the world.  Re-tweet, create a post about it or tell your client.  If there’s a client you’re trying to land, monitor what’s being said about them to find a way to respond. See Number 3 “Be the SME.”.

Some bullets on process:

• Address a business need
• Participate in other industry specific blogs, LinkedIn answers, business.com answers.  Guest post both ways whenever possible.
• Encourage online reviews of your work
• Be strategic not trendy
• Focus on long-term engagement, not a short term hit.
• Social media is NOT an experiment.  It is a proven, strategic, integrated part of your website.
• Test, Measure, Optimize, Repeat.
• Frequency: 1 major article per week, several supporting per week – create a schedule and trade off.
• Social connections.  Connect the blog to pre-determined set of social media outlets.  Don’t do all of them, but go deep in the ones we do.
• Take into account customers, competition, your Unique Value Proposition.

Just as we’re building more and more Facebook apps (stay tuned, they’re pretty cool) it seems more users are bailing on Facebook and committing Facebook Suicide, if they can find the link. So, in case your curious, here’s a link to more info about this.

How do I delete my Facebook account?

For a couple years now I’ve been feeling the need to not promote building traditional websites anymore, but instead to help clients be part of the conversation around their product and let that lead them to what they need to do online. Back when we started building websites more than 13 years ago, they were a very static thing. Difficult to build, modify and add on to, and yet, the thing everybody wanted and needed to help market themselves. So how’d that work out? Pretty well for a while, until 2001 when people finally realized a sock puppet couldn’t sell dog food very well.

Their motto? “Pets.com, because pets can’t drive.” Well, they can’t buy online either…

Where am I going with this? Well, today I saw a twitter feed from @LenKendall that went to a website  from DigitalBuzz.com with stats for website trends for large brands and then stats for the social media websites.  Company website stats are falling while social media stats are rising… quickly.

The author, Aden Hepburn, suggests two main reasons.  First, that people are spending all their time on social networks and getting the info they need there, and that they’re getting info via RSS feeds and from the very same social networks to which the brands are pushing information.

This doesn’t really mean that the big brands are getting less and less popular, but that they are and need to be pushing more content into Social Media to be successful.  And sure enough, many of them are.

And while the Pets.com sock puppet was funny for a while, it didn’t yet capture the social media in a way that was meaningful and profitable (according to Wikipedia, they were “selling merchandise for approximately one-third the price it paid to obtain the products.”)

So, according to DigitalBuzz.com:

The fact is, agencies and brands will need to work out how to deliver the relevant content, branding and experiences they are currently achieving on their own websites, into highly competitive social networks, feeds, apps and widgets, where every “campaign” or “offer” has to be groundbreaking just to get noticed… and then there was tracking…!

In short, It’s all about the Conversation.  Are you being part of it?

What does your online conversation look like? Is it a passive, one-way conversation with your website sitting there, hoping someone will come and see what you have to offer? (Is that *really* a conversation?)  Or is it an active, 2-way conversation, with regular messages to your audience with available feedback options from them to you?

How do you measure communication?

Communication is successful when it happens both ways, with input from different directions. If it doesn’t, it tends to be more of a lecture and that’s certainly not as good as it could be.  How engaged are you when you have no input to offer?  Probably not very and then both parties lose.

The anecdote.

Several years ago in college, I had a discussion based class that was designed to have a group of 6 of us discuss a topic. Well, it was a topic that I was pretty fired up about (don’t remember what it was now, though) as was a friend of mine named Josh.

He and I immediately got into it and spent the entire time discussing, arguing and jabbering on and on. By the end, we felt great! We had covered every possible angle under the sun and waited smugly for our A grade. We were a bit surprised when we found out that all 6 of us got an F.

The reason.

Well, we were quite disappointed and when we asked why, we were told it was because there was no conversation or participation from all 6. We excluded everyone else and they didn’t try to participate.  We were all at fault. So while we thought we were doing great, it was really not a conversation, it was the two of us going at it and not letting anyone else in to participate.

The message.

The message here is that your conversation needs to be with everyone and allow everyone a chance to participate, whether it’s good or bad.  And participation could mean just about anything.  Here’s a partial list of how a good conversation could be measured from a user’s perspective. A user might:

1. leave a response on your blog (please do!)
2. sign up for your newsletter
3. make a purchase
4. download a file
5. bookmark your site
6. forward your email
7. tell a friend about you
8. recommend your product or service

The best response?

There is no single way that these happen in the conversation.  They happen in many different ways, but the goal is to allow it to happen easily and naturally.  For instance, if you’re selling something online, the obvious response you’d like to see is a purchase.  Short of that, most any sort of feedback is welcome especially that user telling someone else about you, or some combination of all of the above.  Maybe a purchase, a review, a tweet, a bookmark for later and then they tell their friends at dinner.  Sounds like that would be a home run.

WOMM

Word of Mouth Marketing is a pretty big deal.  How many times do you want to buy soemthing and ask for a recommendation from family or friends first?  These are people you trust and the ones you share with.  There’s a study from bizreport.com that shows face to face WOMM is much more important than digital WOMM (twitter, blogs, etc…)

According to a new Mintel report, 34% of US consumers have purchased something based on a real-life recommendation from family or friends. A quarter made a purchase based on a partner or spouse’s recommendation.However, only 5% said they purchased a product or service based on the recommendation of a blogger or a chat room.

“It’s interesting to find that as much time as we spend online, we still prefer a personal recommendation from someone we know and trust,” said Chris Haack, senior analyst at Mintel. “Young adults are somewhat more likely to turn to the Internet for advice and referrals, but even they listen to their peers first.”

So, next time you see something you like, pick up the phone and call your friends about.

AP photo

According to today’s Advertising Age, AT&T is embroiled in some potential controversy around American Idol and how many text votes it might have encouraged Kris Allen fans to send.

According to a New York Times story citing the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, employees for AT&T distributed phones to folks at two finale parties organized by fans of Kris Allen, the Arkansas singer who was crowned this year’s “Idol” winner. The phones allowed Mr. Allen’s supporters to text their votes for their native idol, while the AT&T employees reportedly also gave free text-messaging lessons, including how to send multiple texts with the press of a single button, a practice known as power texting. (According to the show’s website: “The producers reserve the right to remove any identified ‘power dialing’ votes. Note that this applies to both toll-free and text-messaging votes.”)

Now, they’re not telling how many of the almost 100 million votes cast were for each of them, so we don’t know by how much he won.   But, what’s pretty interesting is the actual number of votes cast via text message this year.

AT&T, the No. 2 U.S. carrier, struck a sponsorship deal with “American Idol” in 2003 that allowed only users of its cellphones to cast votes via text message. Since then the volume of text votes related to the show, including sweepstakes and trivia, has jumped. This year the carrier processed 178 million “American Idol”-related text messages, vs. last year’s 78 million.

178 million text messages in 2009.  That’s 35,600,000 per month (including May), or about 1.7 million text message per day just about American Idol.  Now we know why the cell phone companies, don’t include text messaging in their “unlimited data” plans (something else that really bugs me because, after all, text messages are data).

Anyway, back to the point.  Anyone business that can drive that much text traffic, not to mention all the search and web traffic, is definitely in the “unstoppable” category and is a wave to ride.

A short while ago I mentioned that I found on Google’s site that they’re adding 10 hours of video per minute.  While impressive numbers, it’s actually mich higher, about twice as high…  According to Mashable, YouTube is getting 20 hours of video uploaded per minute!   There are 1440 minutes in a day, and that means that there are 28,800 hours of video uploaded per day!!  It makes me wonder how many people they hire just to install hardware.

How long can they lose so much money?  $470,000,000 this year alone.

I agree that You Tube is one of the strongest online communities, if not THE strongest, but somehow, they’ll need to figure out the monetization problems.  No business can run with losses that continue for too long.

That said, taking advantage of You Tube’s channels for all of your company video is a pretty good way to broadcast yourself.

A week ago, I twittered about the “Twitter Quitters,” people who signed up for Twitter and left within a month.   It’s an interesting study, but here’s a follow up from VentureBeat that says that their study is probably wrong for a variety of reasons:

Their report states that 40 percent of users fail to return to Twitter in the month immediately after they join. It says nothing about the second, third, or fourth months after they join.

For example, if I join Twitter in January but don’t tweet until March I would be considered a “Twitter quitter” in Nielsen’s report. This behavior is common on immature social networks where new users who join don’t yet have any friends or followers.

It also turns out that a large portion — over 20 percent — of the people who fail to return the next month never once updated their status. It seems unfair to penalize Twitter for users who sign up and never tweet. After all, one could just as easily pretend they never signed up and the retention rate would increase by 50 percent in April alone, from 40 percent to 60 percent.

These are good points and I would agree with them. In fact, I signed up for Twitter, and then didn’t use it for some time.  I think there’re are plenty of people who sign up because there’s so much buzz about it but don’t know what to do with it…  I know i have a bunch of followers and followees that haven’t twittered yet, but I’m not counting them out.  Eventually, they’ll have something good to say – at least I hope so, as some of them have lots to say and good products to tell the world about.

Tomorrow I’m going to talk to a couple of them to tell them how they can use Twitter better…

I’m always looking for how people are truly making money by using Twitter, not just by spamming their followers with network marketing schemes, but by truly getting sign ups, or selling a product or service.  I don’t believe the perfect model has been found yet.  I have a few ideas, but maybe I’ll save them for a paying client…

I was listening to Jimmy Buffett Live in Hawaii in my car when I heard the news.  The only word that came to mind was “AWESOME!”

Jimmy is a brand unto himself.  So are Parrotheads.  And now, he’s taken the stadium naming rights away from Corporate America and into the social, entertainment, fun world.  Too bad this is only for one year, and that it’s supposed to end by the Superbowl, but, I expect it will live on forever and this will always be Landshark Stadium as Jimmy Buffett turns corporate branding on it’s ear.

Many of the articles say that one of the primary reasons is to get more people to football games.  I didn’t actually think that declining attendance to football games was a problem, but I bet this will work in terms of making them more fun.  You know he’ll be at many games and I expect he’ll play a lot too.  It’s the next step in the Margaritaville world.

Read one of the articles here.

See a short AP video here:

AWESOME!

Recently I’ve had several friends tell me that they’re not using facebook as much as they used to or anymore.   My brother keeps talking about “facebook suicide,” a term I first heard from him.  Basically it means he would unfriend everyone or just turn his account off and walk away.  He hasn’t done that yet, but I do have another friend who did.  In both cases, they just got too tired of “acquaintances” wanting to be their friends, and the endless stream of useless application and requests from friends.  How many food fights and mafia wars can you be in!?

I also have slowed down my facebook access, checking only once every couple or few days instead of several times a day.  I have to say, the novelty has worn off.  That said, I have been in closer contact with a few friends that I probably wouldn’t have made otherwise.

As  business application, I don’t believe it’s nearly as effective as others.  But it is in the top 4 popular social media applications, which are: Twitter, blogs LinkedIn, and facebook (according to Social Media Marketing Industry Report at WhitePaperSource.com)

Anyway, back to facebook suicide…  According to the April 27 issue of Advertising Age, we’re not alone.  It explains why nearly a third of social networkers are frustrated and why social network marketers have to work harder and be much more transparent.

How to Get the Most Out of Social Networks and Not Annoy Users – by Emma Hall

Nearly a third of social networkers say they are fed up with the constant requests to join groups and try new applications, according to research by the Internet Advertising Bureau in the U.K. That means marketers will need to work harder and keep innovating if they want to harness the consumer power of social networks and persuade people to join their sponsored sites or pages.

When asked “What do you dislike about social networks?” by far the highest response, at 31%, was that there are too many invites to install applications, followed by 16% who said “when advertising isn’t relevant to me.” Slightly more than 5% complained about messages from brands and another 5% actually lamented the addictiveness of social networks. About 12% said they had no complaints. The research showed that 7% of respondents sign up to find out about brands.

I’ve also recently noticed that I’ve been “unfriended” by at least 2 friends and I don’t know why.  But, I suspect it also has to do with people trimming their friend lists to make a tighter circle of close friends (that maybe won’t throw food at them).

Oh, and please share this on facebook!