The Importance of Consistency in Social Media

Consistency has two arms. 

First is consistency of message, second is consistency of updates.

Consistency of Message

Consistency of message is sometimes referred to as “having a niche” but I find that “having a niche” means that you potentially lose a lot of your value. Let me share this example:  When I moved to Atlanta I had a hard time finding work. I’d left a job as a business analyst in the power company where I lived before, and I’d specialized in process measurements and metrics. So when I couldn’t find that type of work, I started working in a coffee shop. 

The day after I was hired, my resume was forgotten. Any skills I possessed that weren’t directly related to making coffee, serving customers, and managing my team were not relevant. I still had those skills, but they weren’t needed, and so customers and senior managers alike assumed I didn’t have them. Employers and clients will reduce you to as few dimensions as they need or can utilize, you don't need to do that for them. And next time you get coffee at a coffee shop, ask the barista what degree they’re working on, or what job they’d prefer to be doing? Barista is at the top of the employment food chain for precisely zero people.

That’s niche writing. If you focus so much on being an expert in one field, people will assume you have little or no knowledge of other areas.

And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you’re an economist, write about the economy. Just know that expanding your readership outside of economists depends on being able to talk about other things to engage those other people.

Consistency of Updates

The other part of consistency is posting regular updates. I'm not talking frequency here -- you can consistently post updates every monday, or every lunchtime. Eventually your audience will expect to see an update at your usual time. What I mean is that if you post every Monday lunchtime, do it every Monday lunchtime.  

Having said that, if you only share information once a week, you’re going to have a hard time creating a reputation as an expert in your field. If you post on the hour every hour, you’re probably outsourcing your messaging to other individuals or to technology.

I used to use Hootsuite to schedule tweets to get posted when I was asleep. I just wanted to stay visible. But here’s the thing about that. Twitter is a giant ongoing conversation about everything. Using tweet-scheduling is like putting a dummy in your seat at a conference. It’ll look like you’re there but you won’t learn or contribute anything.

My advice is that if you’re going to schedule anything, schedule your impersonal self-serving stuff. That will leave you free to make everything else that you tweet something personal and memorable.

Scheduling Tweets Can Go Wrong

There’s another problem with scheduling tweets – you have to remember what you’ve scheduled. You’ll only hurt your credibility if your scheduled tweet refers to something that changed between when you scheduled it and when it posted. For example here’s a hypothetical situation. You write a blog about government, and had scheduled a tweet to go out on May 1^st, 2011. The tweet said “It’s time to release your long-form birth certificate Mr. President.” Unfortunately for you, you forgot that you’d written that tweet, and it went out as planned. And made you look like an idiot, because President Obama released his long form birth certificate on April 27^th. 

If you're scheduling, you have to also make sure you're reviewing for accuracy, and if you're doing that, you might as well live-tweet, right?

What you're trying to do is pull off a high-wire juggling act. Tweet enough, but not too much. Tweet stuff that celebrates other people, but don't for get your own web site. Have a schedule but don't be too predictable. It takes time, and it takes patience, and more than anything it takes a lot practice and a lot of learning from mistakes.

Why Do You Care If People Unfollow You?

I'm on Twitter. I don't auto-follow. I don't care of you follow me. I don't care if you unfollow me. Here's why...

A couple of months ago I started using an app called Qwitter. It purported to let me know which followers had stopped following me, and what the last update they received from me was. The idea, as I understood it, was to see if a particular kind of message turned people off.

After using it for a month, and seeing it update itself only a couple of times, despite a revolving door of followers and unfollowers, I quit Qwitter.

And I found that whether I can see who unfollows me or not makes, and I can't overstate this enough, no difference at all to how I engage with the people I follow and who follow me. In that month I came to the realization that people will follow me, some will find I'm not their particular flavor of social network, and then stop following. Or they'd stick around because I was tweeting and retweeting things that make sense to them. And that's the audience I want. I'm not about to change to try to win back people who don't like how I tweet. I'm going to continue being myself for the people who understand and appreciate me.

The other thing I realized is that there are a lot, and I mean A LOT, of autofollowing bots. They're the ones with 12,000 followers, and 4 tweets (like the picture below). If they follow you and you you don't follow them back, they unfollow you. So who gives a crap about them? Not me!

Who the heck would you follow this guy?

I have, and I much prefer it this way, a small-ish group of people whose tweets I look for, respond to, and retweet. If they introduce me (by retweeting or #FF) to other great people, I'll follow them. If they don't follow me back that's not a big deal, I don't expect it. When your follower-base grows by reciprocal follower agreement, it's not an engaged network, it's you making your stream fair game for spambots.

But Dunc, what about my Klout score?
What about it? Does it mean more to you than having engaged followers who'll make you smarter? If it does, disregard everything I've ever said about social media and be prepared for all the real people who follow you to abandon you. Just like high school, you'll be judged by who your friends are.

If you want an army of self-serving sales zombie-followers like @davidjankovic, be my guest. Knock yourself out. Get a killer Klout score. Just know it's fake. And if you're more interested in how things look than how things really are, then that's a conversation you should maybe have with a therapist.

If what you want is a list of followers whose tweets you actually can't wait to read and share, whose information, advice and conversation actually makes your day better, here's a simple way to do it:

Engage, retweet, celebrate successes in your network, use hashtags, and #followfriday every week. Add followers and keep posting and retweeting information that captures the imagination of your network.

Easy, no?

Do I want you to follow me? Absolutely, if I can introduce you to interesting people; or if you know people who'll interest me, I really want to follow you. But will I follow you because you followed me? No. But I will follow you because you're interesting.

And that's how it should be.

An Inconvenient Truth About Marketing

Marketing is about making your audience do (buy) something they weren’t already going to do. 

I know, it’s unpleasant. You don’t like the idea of sales, but here’s the thing: without sales, there’s no revenue to pay for your fancy marketing, so if your marketing isn’t persuading someone to buy something, or give you a level of brand recognition that beats your rivals, you’re not doing your job.

Sorry, you’re just not. And I hate that as much as you do. We’d all like to live in a world where marketing campaigns are allowed to be funny and cute and clever and that the sales take care of themselves, but it doesn’t happen. Not often, anyway.

Remember Old Spice’s  Emmy-winning “The man your man could smell like” campaign that premiered at the 2010 Superbowl? 

The Wieden + Kennedy ad agency that created it embarked on an aggressive social media campaign that saw Old Spice’s sales increase by 95 percent between March and June 2010. A success by any measure. But if you examine that growth over the previous year (June 2009 – June 2010) Old Spice’s campaign only increased sales by 8 percent – much more modest, but still successful.

But was it the ad campaign or the accompanying price reduction that caused the short-term spike in sales? Maybe both? Will the answer really matter if, when those bottles of Old Spice run out, those customers choose to continue to smell like a man, man? 

Anthony Weiner to Advertise Twitter

Rep. Anthony Weiner, of the Weinergate scandal June 2011, will not, in fact, as far as I am aware, be doing any kind of advertising or marketing for Twitter. That's just nonsense.

ANTHONY WEINER HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS, AND HE IS NOT, AS FAR AS I AM AWARE, GOING TO BE DOING ANYTHING WITH TWITTER.

What this is, though, is a test of the nature of something "going viral"

So please, the link you clicked to get here...retweet it, I'll be posting results when the activity dies down.

Thanks for playing, and to reiterate:

ANTHONY WEINER HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS, AND HE IS NOT, AS FAR AS I AM AWARE, GOING TO BE DOING ANYTHING WITH TWITTER.

Customer Service Stories

I was dining in a restaurant in Atlanta, recently. It was a restaurant that my girlfriend had dined at many times, though not recently, and she was excited to be going back. We were seated promptly, asked for our drink order, which arrived quickly, and we made our meal selections. So far nothing out of the ordinary compared to millions of dining experiences all over the world every day. The food came, and while mine was excellent, my girlfriend, who had ordered a dish she'd eaten and enjoyed at this place dozens of times, was less than impressed. Something had changed in the recipe, or there was a new chef, and the quality was not what she expected.

The server approached the table at that moment when I'd just shoveled a giant helping of rice into my face, and asked "How is everything?"

And this is where the experience differs from most of those around the world.

Those three words almost always prompt a positive response from diners. Not this time. I explained (while my girlfriend cringed) that my food was great, but the other meal, not as good as expected.

And this is what separates good customer service from the rest: the wait staff asked whether the food tasted "off" or if it was poorly prepared or if there was something else. It was something else, it just didn't meet the expectations the restaurant had set on dozens of previous visits. They offered to re-make the dish, and if that wasn't something we wanted, to simply order something different -- either way, they wouldn't be charging us for her meal.

Compare that to service I routinely experience from my cable company following an outage. Their standard response for service recover is that "we'll credit your account for the days you didn't have service." Really? That's customer care? Not charging me for a service they didn't provide? That isn't actually customer care. I don't expect to be billed for not receiving a service EVER. But that's as far as my cable company goes without prompting. Most of the time, the CSR on the phone can't see that not charging me for not providing service isn't actually doing anything to make it up to me. I'm not saying that I expect a bunch of free stuff, but some recognition that there was a service failing would be nice.

If you fail to provide the service or customer care I expect and it affects my enjoyment of the product or service you provide, my expectation is that your customer recovery policy will be overwhelmingly over-the-top.

Take Sony for example. I am a PlayStation Network subscriber. When their servers were hacked recently, and customer information put at risk, Sony shut down the PlayStation Network. For weeks. I have a Netflix account I use through PSN, and since I couldn't go online with my PlayStation, I couldn't watch any Netflix movies.

What did Sony do when they brought their network back online? Two free game downloads for the PS3, two for the PlayStation Personal system, a month of free access to PlayStation Plus (which allows free and discounted game and add-on downloads), or 60 days for existing Plus subscribers, and 100 free virtual items for PlayStation Home users (which is some kind of a virtual world, like the Sims).

The value of that stuff added together is about $100. That is how to exceed expectations.

So ask yourself, what kind of care do you give your customers? Have you ever turned a customer's frown upside-down, and then some? Do you know what it takes to turn a complaining customer into an evangelist for your company?

Do Something About It

I didn't know Emmett Stallings, his wife Wendy, or their son, Quinn.

In fact, until an hour ago when a friend posted a link to the TeamEmmett Web site, I didn't even know their names. Emmett, who was diagnosed with cancer in February 2010, and Wendy blogged about treatment, fears, their faith, and, early this morning, Wendy announced the Emmett had died.

In reading this heartbreaking account of the day-to-day fears, anxieties, humor, and small victories of Emmett and his family, I found myself feeling hopeful that if I'm ever in Emmett or Wendy's position, I would have even half their courage.

A few days ago Wendy wrote:
I spend the day watching Emmett breathe as he sleeps, medicating him when needed, getting him drinks or helping him to the bathroom when he is awake.  And I wonder things like, did I need  to get that medicine refilled or what am I going to do with ten sleeves of gauze?  When we got home from the hospital, Emmett saw the cases of medical food he had ordered about two weeks ago, and he apologized because, he said, “it looks like we’re not going to need that.”  It breaks my heart that everything in our lives, is a deafening reminder of impending change.

So please, head to the TeamEmmett site, read the blog and make a donation to either the Stallings family, or the TeamEmmett charity. Or make a donation to any cancer charity. But do something if you can.

This post was not about business. It was about what you're in the business of protecting. It was about why you go to work: family.

The UnReader

People who know me well would not say I'm what you'd call "a reader."

I read blogs, Web sites, magazines, and all sorts of other stuff online...but it takes something special for me to get through a whole book, let alone review and recommend one on my blog.

So with that in mind, you'll appreciate that if I get through a 250 page book in a weekend, well it must be something extraordinary.

UnMarketing by Scott Stratten is such a book. You can buy it here , but don't worry about clicking this link right now, I'm going to put it at the bottom, too, by which time when you'll be completely in love with it. Just like I am.

UnMarketing covers customer/audience engagement using real life examples: from why a Vegas janitor changed Stratten's perception of the hotel he was staying in, to everything social media, trust and experience gaps, why Zappos are among the best in the customer engagement business, and finally to why networking events are evil. You're going to get a little of everything you need to begin UnMarketing yourself or your business.

Scott Stratten doesn't fancy-up his words to sound smart. He is smart, and that's what makes his writing smart. And funny.

I bought it for Kindle, and the clickable footnotes are a hoot. For example:

gets you the footnote:

See what I mean?

For most of us, when we buy a book that we hope will contribute to our education, we're secretly also hoping that it turns out to be a worthless piece of junk that doesn't teach us anything we don't already know. In part because that allows us to feel smart about knowing as much as a published author, and also furious, because they don't know more than we do and they got a book deal.

Stratten's conversational style might trick you into thinking that he's not delivering anything you don't already know. But if you write off the content because of the style, you're definitely not going to be smarter when you put the book down. Pay attention to the tips Stratten delivers and you'll be well on your way to building your own UnMarketing social media presence.

You'll read "Look what gets shared on Facebook or retweeted on Twitter. It’s not ads or pitches. It’s knowledge. It’s stuff that makes people say “awesome” and they need to tell others about it." But you knew that, right? What you probably don't know is how to apply that information to your own business in a way that's meaningful to your audience. But that's what Stratten gives us next.

Sometimes, Stratten evokes memories of one of my favorite Bill Hicks bits, sometimes he builds your confidence in your own efforts, and  and sometimes he delivers knock-out advice for how to not be a self-serving marketing douchebag (my words, though it wouldn't surprise me if he'd used them at some point.)



As I devoured UnMarketing over the holiday weekend (much to the dismay of my girlfriend, who had to contend with monosyllabic responses to half-heard questions) I found myself saying things like "Damn right!" and "That's what I said in my blog!" and "Well crap, that makes sense. How did I not think of that already." Which is not how I generally read. But it is how I generally have epiphanies, and Straten's book is full of opportunities for those.

You should read this book if you or your job has anything to do with marketing, social media, customer acquisition or retention, or customer service (and all jobs have something to do with customer service), or anything at all to do with dealing with anyone as a representative of your business. Pretty much you should read this book if you do anything that involves interacting with another human being, ever.

And you should click here to go to UnMarketing and buy the old-fashioned paper-based edition of the book, or the one for the new-fangled Kindle, or even as an audio-book.