Three Truths For Marketers About Social Networks

Okay, marketers, here are three truths about social networks, because it's clear that some of you have no clue.

• People use them because they're a convenient way to engage with other individuals. If it was inconvenient, nobody would do it.
• You can't ask someone else to be your voice and still be credible.
• Real influencers can't be bought, and they'll laugh at you if you try.

I try not to be negative in my life. I'm not a huge proponent of all that hippy "putting positive energy out there" stuff, but if I have to put energy out there all the time I may as well try to make is work for me.

But sometimes it's hard to not just want to pull my hair out and yell at respected organizations, who should know better, putting meaningless crap in their white papers.

It turns out that when marketers author a white paper, they take good research carried out by the likes of Pew, Forrester, and Nielsen, and turn it into really good fertilizer. Here's a few examples of statements in real white papers which illustrate the points up at the top of this post.

 1. Lies, damn lies, and advertising.

"...people who are heavy users of sites like Facebook and Twitter actually use email more than casual social network users do."

Okay, I can believe that.

"Why is this? Social media sites like Facebook [send an email] whenever someone comments on something you post..."

Uh...wait, what? Let me get this straight -- people who use Facebook use email more because they receive more email...from Facebook? Please wait one second while my head explodes...

So the reason for the heavier volume of inbound email isn't from interacting more with email...it's from interacting more...with Facebook.

What I think the white paper author probably meant to say is that social network users typically live their lives in a generally-more-electronically-connected way. They're more likely to send an email than pick up the phone. Or that --  wait for it -- spending more time sat in front of your computer makes you more likely to use email no matter what Web sites you're looking at.

2. The Milli Vanilli Method

"75% [of marketers] plan on increasing their activities [on Facebook.]" While "73% of marketers will increase their activities on Twitter." 71 percent of LinkedIn marketers, and 75 percent of blog marketers also plan to increase their activities on those platforms.

Sadly, less obviously in the same report, it was noted that 10 percent of marketers surveyed said that they'd be outsourcing content creation.

So here's what bugs me about this...they still don't get it. Its marketers being full of crap. Again. And it makes me furious. Outsourcing social network content creation is the Milli Vanilli method. Why would you ever give someone from outside your company direct access to your most important and viral customer service point of contact? If you want your customers to get to know who you are, isn't being yourself a good place to start?

3. You scratch my back, I...er...I got nothin'.

"We do some data minig to identify [influencers]. These are people you'd want to target with special campaigns/offers and proactive communications."

Now, I'm not the brightest bulb in the box, but if you have 20,000 Twitter followers, and you get a special targeted message or (better yet) free stuff from an organization that has a product that you haven't expressed some kind of interest in, aren't you likely to ponder "Why am I receiving these messages from this company that just started following me?"

Most companies don't realize that the other side of this "free marketing" sword is twice as sharp, and uncontrollable by the marketer. For example, if they happen to come across as a jerk by getting offended that you're not reciprocating by alerting your followers, they can expect that you'll call them out. Publicly. To your 20,000 followers.

So marketers, I get that you have to find ways to monetize social space for your company, I really do. I mean, it's what I do, too. But at least be honest with your audience -- they're not stupid. Making false connections, continuing to support outsourcing social media content creation, and sleazing up to thought-leaders is only going to show you up for what you are: a salesman, hopelessly applying old  closing techniques to a new world order you don't understand.

So be more than that. For me. Do it for you. Get yourself waist-deep in Twitter and really connect with people. Don't talk about what you're selling; just listen to what matters to your new friends...then help them achieve it.

Six Secrets of Successful Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing. Chances are you hate receiving it - and why? Because at any given moment you don't want what they're selling. And the rest of the time, the writing is so loaded with sales speak that you stop reading after the second sentence and drop the email in your spam folder.

But your own email marketing is important to you. You can use it to send people to your Web site, or to let them know about a new product launch (or a recall if you're very unlucky), or even just stay in touch with them.

A successful email marketing campaign hinges on the idea that, and I can't say this loud enough, you have to know what you want your customer to hear. You don't have to know what you want to say, not when you're in the planning stage of the campaign, but you have to know what you want your reader to take away.

Since most people don't read more than a few sentences, you need to get the most engaging stuff out at the top. You need to give your customer a...

Reason to Keep Reading
At the start of this blog, I posed a question. I gave you a reason to read some more, even if it was only to disagree with my answer. You've seen this attention capturing technique before -- just think of any commercial with a voice over: "Does your aching back keep you up at night?" "Are rodents ruining your lawn?" "Can a new set of tires give you better gas mileage?"
They work. They grab our attention, but to keep it, you need to be skilled at...

Telling a Good Story
Aesop and the Grimm brothers are great examples of how to tell a compelling story -- they have a beginning, a middle, an end, and usually some kind of lesson. Goldilocks, Hansel and Gretel, the Hare and the Tortoise, Little Red Riding Hood, the Three Little Pigs -- they all have lessons that are the point of the story. The story is just window-dressing for the message.

You can tell a story about two customers, one who used your company's product, and one who used a cheaper alternative. Over the life of a project, the guy who used the cheaper alternative had to replace and/or repair his inferior product a few times, which ratcheted up the cost of the project and caused it to over-run. His company's reputation took a costly hit, and his projected profit was slashed due to delays caused by the cheaper alternative.

The customer who put his money in your better quality product may have paid a higher price up-front, but his project came in ahead of schedule, and his customers intend to recommend him to other potential customers. As a bonus, the customer who bought your product for their project will tell people at his Chamber of Commerce about your product, and how it helped him realize a bigger profit than he had expected.

If you have testimonials that can provide actual numerical comparisons, or statistics to show how much money or time users can save that's even better. A big red splash saying "SAVE 30%" is good, but...meaningless. Is that 30 percent on what you charged last year? Is this a sale? Show your customers the many advantages you offer compared to your competitors.

You shouldn't lie in your stories, but if your customers sometimes experience extraordinary results, it's okay if your message includes...

Claims of Extraordinary Results
...so long as you say they they're not typical if they're not typical.

In the story above, I claim that use of your product caused:

• the project to come in ahead of schedule
• positive word of mouth from your customer to other potential customers
• larger project profit margins than were forecast

Are those typical results? Probably not, but you can bet that one or two of them are a consistent outcome for most of your customers. In most marketing campaigns, results and testimonials are not based on single-user experiences, but on the combined experience of multiple users, spliced together to tell a good story.

The point of all this is to interest and excite the reader so that they click, call, or email you. And if you don't tell them to do it, they probably won't. So you have to include a...

Call to Action
For your no-obligation 30-day free trial....
Call today to save 25%
Refer a friend and save 20% on your next order.
Join our mailing list to receive great deals in the future.

The entire purpose of marketing is to make people want to take that action. Usually you want that action to be a sales transaction, but in the age of digital marketing simply capturing name and contact information is valuable. Being able to deliver marketing materials electronically to your contact list reduces marketing costs substantially, so whatever else your call to action is, it MUST include a way to capture that information.

At any given time, most people will not be in the market for your product, and most won't even open the email. Those are not the people you're writing for. You have to...

Know who you're writing for
You're writing for the 3 percent who are thinking about making a buying decision now, or soon. You're writing for the 10 percent who are considering this kind of investment in the future.

If you write for the 70 percent who won't even open your email, you've failed. I know a guy in sales who lives by one simple rule: fish where the fish are. You probably wouldn't email movie stars to try to get endorsements for your product, but you might be able to get local radio hosts or tv news anchors to do it. you have limited resources - both time and money - so invest it wisely. When it comes to that 70 percent, don't write them off, but don't write to try to persuade them.

Email marketing campaigns will always fail, though, if you fail to track your results and tweak as you go. For that reason, don't think of sending the first email without having...

Tracking metrics
Listrak have a great white paper about tracking metrics for digital marketers. You should read it, but here are the highlights:

Delivery Rate: How many of your emails actually reach their intended recipient, and how many are delivered to a spam folder? How many are bounced by ISPs?

Unsubscribe and Abuse Report Rates: How many opt-in emails do you get tired of, and instead of unsubscribing you simply flag that sender as spam? If enough people do this to your email, it can cause problems like getting your domain black-listed by ISPs. If your subject line looks spammy, most subscribers will delete your email without looking at it. If you're communicating too often, and not adding value to your subscribers' business, you'll find your readership shrinking as your audience unsubscribes. And that's just bad for your marketing efforts.

Open Rate and Read Rate: Open rate is a misleading name -- if you use an email client like Outlook or Entourage and have a preview pane, any email that appears in that pane will be listed as "opened." Even if you glance at it and then delete it. Read rate is a more meaningful measure, since it tracks emails that were "open" for a more than a few seconds.

Click-thru Rate: It's what it says it is. Did your reader click on the call to action? If they do this, your message worked.

Goal Conversion Rate: Once your reader clicks the call to action and is directed to your Web site, how many actually buy something, download something, interact with your Website in a way that is meaningful for your company?

Being successful with your email marketing isn't about luck, it's about writing compelling copy that persuades people to take action. It's not magic, and it's not really all that complicated. By paying attention to what you say and who you're talking to, you can increase engagement with your audience and convert your email list into a powerful tool for increasing revenues and growing your brand.

Get Your GooglePlus Vanity URL

I've seen a lot of information out there about getting a Google+ vanity URL, and how Google needs to get on the stick with that piece of updating right quick.

Well, for all of you out there who own a domain, I have a solution. I own the domain www.swaymaker.com - it's a nice domain, and hosts a Wordpress copy of this blog. For now.

Here's what you do...you go to whatever dashboard your domain vendor provides you with. If you have a GoDaddy domain, or one of several other domain vendors, you'll have free subdomains. GoDaddy give you 90 of them.

So I set up http://plus.swaymaker.com and then go to my G+ profile page and copy the URL. It's https://plus.google.com/100074993095416326109/posts so I can see why people want vanity URLs. Then I point the forwarding for plus.swaymaker.com at the Google+ profile page and...that's it.

Wait for the change to go through your vendor's system and you can now happily point people to plus.yourdomain.com -- sure, it's going to go crazy when Google do allow vanity URLs, but this will work for now.

Five Lessons Every Business Can Learn From...Fight Club

I am Jack's self-aware sense of irony.

Yes, this is a blog post about how to make your business more successful, inspired by the movie, (and Chuck Palahniuk's book it was based on) about destroying corporations. The first rule of this post is you talk about this post. The second rule of this post is...you talk about this post.

If you haven't seen the movie or read the book, dig yourself out from under that rock, come out of the cave, and rent the DVD. If you're really fancy, rent the Blu-Ray.

If you're in your office right now, or on your schmanzy smartphone in an office supply store, go on over to the Avery mailing labels and check out the 1 1/2 inch labels (Avery Catalog #8293) or click this link - that's the street address for the Paper Street Soap Company. Now laugh as we find the business wisdom in the words of Tyler Durden and The Narrator (who we shall call Jack.)

Everything's a copy of a copy of a copy
Your product or service is probably not unique. And I'm not using "unique" in the hackneyed way it's being used in the 21st century. I don't mean that your product isn't interesting. I mean it's probably not the only one of its kind on the market. Whatever you're selling, chances are someone else is selling it, too. Or they tried in the past and failed.

Take all the Groupon copycats. Not an original idea, but there's a new one springing up every other week, even though the model is demonstrably unprofitable.

Before you invest your life savings and your future in your business you should investigate your product thoroughly. Try to argue all the reasons that your business is a bad idea. Really. Make it stand outside your house for three days with no food or water, with you insulting it every few hours. If it's still there after three days, it's probably either impervious to logic, or a great idea.

So, you have a great idea. Now you have to market it. It's important that you realize that there's probably no new ways to market your product. Sure, you read "Guerilla Marketing," and you know how to invest your marketing dollars. You may even have read Olivier Blanchard's excellent "Social Media ROI" and you have an idea of how to measure your digital marketing campaigns. But your campaign is something we've seen before. Your hook is something we've seen before, and maybe we've even rejected it.

So how do you get your foot in the door? You accept that you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. Accept that all business ideas are based on an need not met by someone else's idea. All marketing is based on bringing awareness to that need and how your product can fulfill it.

And now I suppose you want an answer to this prickly quandary. I can't tell you how to be original, but what I can say is this: for all of us, there is comfort in the familiar. As consumers, we don't want the challenge of understanding and assimilating a new idea. Give it to us straight, and if your message is perceived as honest, and your product meets a need that we have, we'll probably buy. It's really that simple.

On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
In his book, "Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure," Economist Andrew Harford shares a stunning statistic: of the top 100 companies in the world in 1912, over half had gone out of business by 1995. Harford says, "What happens when we look at survival rates in young, dynamic industries? The answer is that failure rates are even higher."

The truth is that what we consume and how it's delivered changes, sometimes rapidly. In 1970, this was the most advanced portable music player.

It's a record player in a suitcase. You can use it as an airline carry-on. But only just.

Ten years later, the portable music player of choice was this.

It plays tapes. Ask a grown-up what "cassette tapes" are.

And now it's this.

It's smaller than a credit card, and holds your parents' entire collection of records and cassettes.

Try buying either of the first two today.

And while 40 years might seem like a long time, consider that once we figured out how to fly, it took a scant 66 years to put a man on the moon. In 2077 I'll be dead. Probably. But I know a breakthrough that happened today will be not only commonplace, but probably obsolete, by then.

There's a reason that the US Marine Corps has the mantra "Adapt, Improvise, Overcome." It works.

All businesses eventually fall prey to technical or cultural obsolescence, or a competitor that can run leaner. The companies that survive recessions and depressions know how to evolve their business model, they don't buy into a long-term vendor contract when the market for that vendor's product is peaking, and they understand the value of their human capital.

It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything
When you're a kid, playing on the monkey bars, it's only scary to fall the first time. Before we fall off we're cautious, maybe even fearful. But when you hit the playground floor that first time, when you dust yourself off and realize that it wasn't so bad, you figure out where you screwed up and why you fell...and you devise better, more successful ways to negotiate the monkey bars.

If you talk to serial entrepreneurs who've secured angel or VC funding on more than one occasion, you'll find a common story. They failed in their first business ventures. They lost a ton of money for their investors, but their investors didn't hesitate to give them more money the next time they came knocking.

Why, when an entrepreneur's business fails, do investors want to risk more money? It's simple really: investors do not invest in businesses. They invest in people.

If you have one good idea, it's a fair bet that you'll have another. Entrepreneurship takes a certain personality, like being a professional poker player. Entrepreneurs and pro poker players share a trait: they never stop learning. Every experience makes them better at what they do, more successful, far less likely to fail in the future.

Entrepreneurs who can't take theit failures and turn them into something that makes them better are going to fail. Again and again. Investors look for people who can negotiate the monkey bars better next time.

No fear, no distractions -- let that which does not matter truly slide
There's a single-mindedness you need to develop as an entrepreneur. The Paper Street Soap Company works like a bee hive, and your business needs to adopt some of that mentality. Some of it, not all of it. If you adopt it all, your employees will never innovate, they'll just wait around for your next instruction.

Goal-setting is one of the most important things you can do as a leader. If your team can see the end-game, the finished product, they can help find innovative ways to execute your plans. Daily re-focusing on the goal will reduce distractions. If your employees know how their work contributes to the final product, they'll be more diligent, more innovative, and more engaged.

What your employees do need, and this will come from your leadership, is a belief that the work they are doing has value.

If you allow yourself to be distracted by trivia, rather than the tasks that help you achieve your goals, your employees won't know where to focus their energies, and that will drive up costs, reduce productivity, and can lead to your final product being a costly experiment in how not to address a need.

This does not belong to us, we are not special
When fight clubs and Project Mayhem start appearing in many cities -- Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, New York, Jack demands to know what's going on -- and Tyler tells him "This does not belong to us."

When anything "goes viral," the creator has ownership of the original idea co-opted by others who will replicate it, expand on it, mutate it, and evolve it into something new or different.

Here's a technical definition: what you want, ideally, is to spawn an Internet meme. For example, "The first rule of fight club is you don't talk about fight club. The second rule..." That's a meme. It's out there, in our consciousness, unaltered from its original form.

When something "goes viral" it gets altered, people make their own versions, and those versions sink into our consciousness. You want an example?

In the summer of 2010, a video of a guy on a hike surfaced. He saw a "double rainbow" and raved about how wonderful it was. It was a huge youtube hit. It went viral, and was promptly co-opted by people who edited it, autotuned it, and performed it as a dramatic reading. They all went viral.

Do you remember the name of the "Double Rainbow" guy? Or the name of the guy that was interviewed for the news about a "Bedroom Intruder?" No. You know the viral video but not the source material. While it's great to get your message out in front of millions of youtube visitors, if it's being watered down, changed, mocked, or parodied, nobody will remember that it's your message.

You want to be remembered? Focus less on "how can I go viral" and more on "how can I make this memorable?"

Goal Setting - Smart Business Goals

I've talked a little bit about how important goals are as a starting point to achieving anything in business, because goals drive activity, and activity without goals is just busy-work and a waste of money. Knowing what you want to achieve allows you to create strategy, and strategy is where you determine how to achieve those goals.

But how do you set goals in the first place?

There's an easy acronym for you: SMART. Your goals have to be SMART. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time Sensitive. SMART.

Specific
Your goals have to achieve something, and that achievement must be very specific. You want to improve call center response times, or transactions per day, or unique visitors per day to your Web site.

Measurable
That's a good start, but there must be a finish line -- improve call center response times by 20 percent, increase transactions per day from 1,200 to 1,450, increase unique Web site visitors from 8,500 to 11,000. Setting interim mileposts is important, too. It will make sure you're on track to reach the goals you've set, and give you opportunities to correct tactics that aren't effective.

Achievable
If your goal is to improve Web site unique visitors per day from 8,500 to 85,000 in the next quarter, you're probably aiming too high. If you want to increase to 9,100, you're probably aiming too low. Ideally your goals should be stretching, but achievable. Most of us operate at about 85 percent of what we could achieve in a day. And that's nothing to be sneezed at. But if your business runs at the same efficiency, you can set your sights on that 8,500 visitors being stretched to 10,000. If you reach 10,000 that's great -- your next goal can be more stretching.

Realistic
Every goal has three key elements: scope, resources, and quality of finished product. If circumstances mean that you need to reduce the number of employees assigned to the task, while maintaining the quality of the finished work in the same amount of time...you're probably going to have to reduce the scope of the work. If you demand better quality product with the same scope, you'll likely need to also add resources (which may be allowing additional time.) It's not a hard concept when you get used to it.

I say all this to illustrate that there are limits to what you can achieve with finite resources. And you do have finite resources. So your goals have to be stretching, but must be realistically achievable with the resources available to you.

Time Sensitive
Goals are pointless if you don't have a finish line. You want to add 1,000 subscribers to your blog? Well, just keep going forever, you'll get there eventually. You want to reduce your energy costs by 10 percent? Simple, just wait for your provider to reduce their charges by 10 percent. And you can wait and wait.

If you don't put a time limit on your goals, you're not going to be pressed into action. They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and it's true. Many procrastinators confess to doing their best work right at deadline. The truth is that deadlines lead to innovation.

Changing processes to be more efficient, finding new ways to increase customer satisfaction, or turn more eyeballs to your Web site all require out-of-the-box thinking. And out of the box thinking, for most of us, requires the desperation induced by a rapidly-approaching deadline.

Why Social Media Marketing Starts With Strategy

Let's say that you want to figure out what people are saying about your company. Why? Why are your customers’ opinions important enough to spend your company's time and money on listening to them, not to mention take resources away from other tasks that might be revenue-generating?

You might say something like:

• You've heard it's good to listen to what your customers are saying online
• You think your competitors could be doing it
• You don't want to get left behind

Those are the reasons you'll probably be tempted to use, but none of them can be related to your business activities, and therefore they can’t be related to anything that helps your company stay in business.

To properly formulate the case for social listening, you have to tie it to a business goal. If you are assigning a resource to this activity (and you will be) it will incur an expense. You should be able to show where that expense will be offset, either by:

• generating revenue
• reducing costs
• positively supporting your brand identity

So change the question.

How can social listening activities support these goals?

To break that down further, you need to look at your company’s overall strategy for each of those items, and determine if social listening is a tool that will help you to be successful.  Will it help you be more successful than the next-best alternative?

It could be that your social listening will, in the end, support more than one -- it might reduce the cost of your customer care function while building positive word-of-mouth about your brand.

Would you buy an expensive power-tool and then try to find projects around your home that you’d need to use it for? Or would you figure out that you have a project to complete and then decide if an expensive power-tool is the right tool for the job?

You can’t know if social listening will support your goals if you don’t have goals. The goals come first. Then strategy, then tactics and tools.

Goal: Reduce calls to the call center by 25 percent in the next 12 months.

Strategy: Provide alternative ways for customers to address their issues before they feel the need to call the call center.

Tactics: How-to guides on the Web site; Tip of the Day emails; How-to videos on the Web site; mail information to registered customers; post links to how-to guides on social media Web sites; monitor calls the call center and activity on social networks to determine which issues are the most frustrating for customers.

Some tactics will likely be more successful than others, and you can probably determine whether a specific tactic will be the right one for your company before you spend a lot of money on it. Tip of the Day emails, for example, have a very low open-rate; which is to say that less than about 20 percent of recipients will open the first one, and that number will dwindle with each new email. Unless you’re offering deals, like Groupon, diminishing returns on bulk emails is a fact of life. Mailing information using the Postal Service has an even lower success rate.

How-to videos can be costly, and may involve a re-design of your Web site or content management system, which is also true of text-based tutorials. However, as part of a longer-term strategy, the cost of these activities might represent good value in the long run.

For more immediate results, you might start by assigning someone to monitor Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks, and to provide answers to the questions posed on the company’s Facebook Wall or for any questions directed at your Twitter name or hashtagged with your company name. The significant drawback of this solution is that it means your employee might have to give the same information to dozens, or even hundreds, of customers with the same problem.
So maybe the most effective tactics to achieve the goal would be some hybrid of:

• standard information that can be referenced quickly and easily distributed, like a Frequently Asked Questions section on your Web site, and
•  someone monitoring call-types and social media conversations to determine which questions need to be answered by one-to-one interaction, and which can be directed to the FAQs page you’ve created.

You can probably see that, in this example, the social media activity is one of a number of natural solutions to help the company achieve its goal. If you try to reverse-engineer a goal from social media activity you’ll probably be wildly successful. The trouble is, you won’t have achieved very much, you won’t have learned anything about how to create social media marketing to achieve a goal, and so your success will be unrepeatable.

If you want to run social media marketing campaigns, you must learn how to use the various platforms and applications as tools to achieve goals, and not to adapt goals to justify your activities in social space.