Blinders
January 14, 2010
I don’t normally write my blog entries aimed for other social media professionals. After all, there’s a lot of knowledge out there – I aim to distill things to my audience, which I know is more executive and marketing related but not necessarily in the digital space. If a fellow SMP gets value, awesome, and I welcome you – but my reader base generally isn’t you.
But this post, I’m going to address you, fellow Social Media Professionals, and hopefully give value to my typical reader.
Take Off The Blinders.
I’m noticing some things falling through the cracks – people hyping different things as if it were the second coming of Steve Jobs, but at the end of the day, not producing desired results. It’s almost as if many SMPs out there have decided that social media can do no wrong, and that THE way to do it is the way they and their techno-elite friends do it (by the way, I’m one of those technophiles, for sure).
But your target market, unless you’re selling tech to early adopters, probably has no idea what FriendFeed is. I explain Foursquare at least once a week. The value isn’t evident. There’s a reason way more people use Farmville than Twitter.
Non-techies get the point of Farmville, even though it’s much more complicated of an interface.
Because it’s not about the interface, it’s about the value proposition.
More people see value in having a fake farm than Tweeting.
Think about this.
Done? Next.
It Seems The Internet and Social Marketing Pros Have A Problem.
I recently saw a post that was all about how “Lands’ End isn’t visible.” Blinders completely. As of this writing Land’s End has 250,000+ Facebook fans and quite honestly a different demographic than Zappos, with 29k or so. Yah. 29k. On Facebook, at least, Lands’ End has almost NINE TIMES more fans than Zappos.
It just isn’t the social media elite demographic, highlighted out of the valley, so it was missed. But it was still in the minds of people. It’s humming along selling stuff. It’s popular. Obviously, raw fan numbers are not your only metric of success, but a lot of people have been missing the boat.
Seem as if we as a group don’t use it or it’s not OUR work flow or in our frame of “cool” visibility, we (royal we) denigrate and talk about how others “don’t get it” or it’s a “poor choice.”
You know what? I know success on the oft-maligned MySpace in certain situations.
I’ve worked with blogs who get tens of thousands of unique visitors but few comments – but high conversions. Most of the time, readers in non-SM circles call blog posts “articles.” I’ve seen it time and time and time again.
I know people who get 5,000+ word diatribes from other “experts,” but, although their blog isn’t designed to my aesthetic taste, it works for them apparently and gets them business. Bravo to her. I’m not her target market anyway. If I were, it’d be designed differently.
One of the biggest indie musicians’ sites is the definition of basic – but because he covers so many bases contentwise that countless zoom-bang flash sites do not, including showcasing his awesome – it helped him get relatively huge and make a real career sans label.
Or the pervasive myth that content has to be short at all times – sure, short content is great – but why are the biggest podcasts around long-form, sometimes easily exceeding an hour long? Because they’re good. It takes skill to be good for a whole hour or longer, regularly. And that’s why the previous example is making millions of dollars and in this next linked case have plenty of listeners and a loyal following.
A Parting Thought
I’ve always been fascinated behind the real reasons and incentives why things happen, as opposed to the hype of them. Many times, while one hand is dealing the cards, the other is distracting you from the real “magic” that’s happening.
What are the non-sexy methods that you find that work? What about newer tools and techniques that you’ve found make it happen for your strategy?
How To Cheat Twitter And Get More Followers – Game The System
December 27, 2009
I’m going to save you at least $20-$200 today. I’m going to tell you the “secret” that so many websites with extremely long copy and bogus “complete online marketing strategies” will charge you for, with, shall we say, notes.
Many, but not all, of the “Social Media Experts” (see an interesting post that’s all the buzz by Mashable on the fact there’s over 15,000 of them) as well as other online pitch people will have tens of thousands of followers – and yet Tweet inane crap and rarely if ever conversate – or they use this technique, stop it once they’ve hit critical mass (5k, 10k followers), then play dumb and change their stripes.
We don’t use this procedure, have not used this, but I’ve seen it done and we’ve been asked by former clients to do it. To be clear, if we can’t set them on the right path, we fire them at that point. This is what many social media agencies assign to their interns to do, or you can do at home yourself.
Here’s how to get your useless Twitter followers:
Step 1: Follow People, 30-50 At A Time
Start following lots of people. But only so many in a day – 30, 40, 50, depending on how finnicky Twitter’s spam bots are – and then wait for a day or three. Many times, you can use keywords to semi-focus yourself (though they rarely work well because of context) or use the cover of the #FollowFriday or one of the top trending hashtags for this. Sometimes, people push it and go into the hundreds – I’ve seen it work, but to Twitters’ credit, they’re getting better at stopping this.
For instance, I had a friend today followed by a fishing company serving Texas (even though they live in Michigan). Beyond the geographic irrelevance, the last place I think this woman would be is in a bass fishing competition. I’ve never even seen her tweet about fishing.
This is just numbers for numbers sake – not actual engagement, not what actually drives sales. But the numbers sound cool to a culture of people who are used to buying big audiences.
Step 2: Unfollow The Ungrateful Saps Who Didn’t Follow You Back
If the people you’ve followed have not followed you back, unfollow them and find some more useless people. If someone unfollows you, promptly unfollow them.
Why useless? You’re playing a silly popularity game and not building any relationships. Relationships drive the sale in social media.
On a technical note, the unfollowing of the people who unfollow you keeps your balance of following/followers good in the eyes of the Twitter Gods.
The culture of “it’s rude to not follow back” I personally believe was created by these folks. I feel no obligation to follow you back, just like you should feel none to follow me unless you’re interested in what I have to say. It’s not rude. You’re not a bad person. I may just not find your tweets that interesting (whatever “interesting” is to ME).
Step 2a: Auto-DM Your New-Found “Friends” (Optional Jerk Move)
DM your new “friends,” thanking them for their follow with a link to click your junk (fan on a fan page, subscribe to blog, etc)
I haven’t mentioned it on here before, but having been involved in forums, online and digital media now for ten years, I HATE AUTO DMs. There’s few things that are more of a red flag than someone who gives you an automatic DM thanking you that they don’t get this space; if they got it, they’d realize that a thank-you DM (usually with a pitch to click some junk) is the last thing the mainstream Twitter user wants to see and is many times a turn-off. For real users of Twitter (non-marketing types who’d actually buy from you), that DM can appear in their text message stream and feels like crossing the personal line.
For Extra Punch: Set Up Your Own Personal Echo Chamber
Get yourself twenty or thirty (as few as ten will do) other faux Twitter handles, and Retweet/Reply yourself along with some other filler content to make it look like your links are important when people search you. It helps fool those “influencer” systems that rate Twitter users based on how often they’re referred to or linked to. Of course, only do the razzle dazzle until which point you might get a fire started – then promptly stop.
That’s just smarmy and part of the reason why so many normal users of social networks hate marketing types. If you saw the amount of comments around people who refuse to follow marketers – there’s a reason. And this easily implementable charade is one of them.
Summary
So there you go. There’s more finesse and technique possible, but that’s the basic outline. There’s services who will do all of this or parts of it for you either automatically via a script, or with a smarmy army of low-paid workers depending on your budget. To be fair, Twitter’s trying to stop this stuff – but the reality is, there’s so much monetary incentive they’re never going to plug all the holes.
In an upcoming post, I’m going to talk about some strategies on how to do it the right way. I’m looking forward to talking about happier things!
It’s Only Stealing From Yourself
November 6, 2009
I felt highly motivated to say something, after I’ve had numerous friends come to me and tell me there’s a problem going on in our Detroit social media community. I’ve made a generic example below of how it’s gone down the 9 or 10 times it’s happened recently with the most common themes as told to me.
Apparently, many people think it’s okay to repost, word-for-word, other’s posts. Sometimes, with no credit, or credit buried so that it is hidden and not obvious to the reader. I’m going to try to be positive and say that it’s because they don’t know better, but I also know some of the folks are too savvy in this lot (or portray themselves to be) that if they really didn’t know they shouldn’t be charging people for their services.
Let me repeat this, because I talk to people every week who think that “if it’s on the internet, it’s free and okay to use” – legally, and I believe ethically, just because content is on the internet and free to access does not mean you have the right to use it without permission in your own work or as your own work. There is a lot of examples that back this up.
When blogging about someone else’s post or sharing it along, an excerpt is what’s appropriate if you do not have permission, and with or without permission, you should have the author’s full name and link to the website (as well as other things like their Twitter if public) at the top of the piece to not mislead readers.
Want more proof of misleading readers? In some cases, there’s comments under the post referring to site/blog author, people who the original writer doesn’t know, praising the blog/site author for writing the post, or “that’s why you’re such a great writer, *blog site author, not post author name here*”
Even better, if you have permission, make them an author in your blogging system and even have the author tags be created properly. Otherwise, it’s very likely (from experience) that Google will put the work under your name – which may be what you’re trying to do anyway. And why I’m writing this terse post.
If you’re committing this mistake, either:
- You don’t know better (that’s okay, especially if you’re new at this)
- Are playing like you don’t know better to scam the Google page rank and/or
- Trying to pass off work as your own to be a thought leader off the work of others true thought leading (see this post by Justin Kownacki on THAT subject which is more well put together than anything I could write).
What Is Being Done: The Diagram
So below, I’ve diagrammed what’s been happening. Note that without any author mention, with just a very small, not plain link, it looks like the author of the blog wrote the piece and that is NOT the case, especially compared to the gigantic author info box which is commonly on the right side. It misleads the reader into thinking that it’s the blog owner’s work, when it is not. And people know how to click links – if you do a paragraph or a few lines, then link to the other blog at the end, they can figure that out. If you’re really paranoid about not letting them off the site, target the link to a new window (even though I’m not a huge fan of it, I get why it would it be done) could be an option.
We’re Better Than This, Detroit.
Although this is a bigger problem geographically, we in our growing Detroit social media community need to not do it, and not do it to each other. All the examples I’m thinking about are local. They either don’t know better – and quickly fix – or they feel like they could make a few more adsense cents or improve their brand or standing by stealing other’s works.
If we’re going to grow as a community – and prove the naysayers wrong about us – we need to respect each other first.
Stop Whining About Google Mail
September 24, 2009
Seriously? The blogosphere and Twitterverse (and whatever other celestial body references we can make for social media sites) are obsessed and “freaked out” by a second Gmail outage in a short time.
I think it’s an indication of people who’ve never worked for a large company or within an IT infrastructure. As usual, those who grew up getting everything for free, and then complaining if it doesn’t work.
First, some facts. It wasn’t a wide spread outage this time – I had some slowness with contacts, for instance. Second, it’s painfully obvious that most of these people have no experience spending hours a week where email doesn’t work, or having at least one outage a month. And at VERY large companies who’s IT staff supposedly is a crack team. Even more hilarious, the regular outages at IT firms I know about. Stuff breaks.
I have personal experience working at 1000+ person organizations where mail is out for mornings or afternoons at least a few times a year.
Meet Elmer FUD
But here’s the real FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) behind all of this – there’s a lot of IT people who do not want Google Mail or apps to succeed in the business marketplace, because it threatens their jobs.
There’s a saying – “You can’t convince a man of something that’s against his wallet.” And it’s true. Many in-house IT people (of which many are on social networks) are petrified of the mass outsourcing of core functions because in their view, it’s their job. Not to mention the purchasing folks who have spent thousands on office, Exchange servers, et all. You can be for darn sure those who have skin in the game are waiting to pounce on everything Google could perceived as doing as a misstep.
Not saying GMail is the perfect answer for everything – but it’s good, and those paying the relatively paltry fee to get Google Apps for business are getting pretty good service. And for the cost/benefit, even if it’s as reliable as your in-house mail service, it can be way cheaper and you’re not dealing with the headaches. And there’s other options too – Gmail is not the only player by far – but housing all this infrastructure in your company is a recipe for expensive disaster.
What are your thoughts? I’m a proponent of the cloud in some cases – it’s served us very, very well. But I’d love to hear your perspective.
This Post Sucks!
August 12, 2009
Guest-written by Beverly Cornell – Check her out at her Global Business Blog – Follow On Twitter
Where are all the Social Media women in Detroit.. or anywhere for that matter?
I don’t want to write this post – really, I shouldn’t have to write this post. However, I’ve read an article this morning that confirms what I’ve known for 2 years, or really most of my life.
After all, women are around 50% of social media users.
I am not a mommy blogger or social media blogger – I blog about an unpopular topic, especially in Detroit (an historically union town) globalization. I know, it’s a niche, and reading my Twitter DM’s many think I should be tarred and feathered for living in and encouraging a global world.
I accept that I talk about the elephant in the room so I’m not as popular as others. But why do I feel frustrated that more women aren’t present and accounted for? Even better, why are women not leading the way? Are there not the invites from the social media conferences? Are women not branding themselves to get noticed? What does it take to get noticed?
Historically speaking, aren’t we the gender that supposedly “gets” relationships, the very basis for social media? Oh I know there many wonderful women in this space – to name a few, Amber Naslund, Ann Handley, Katie Paine, Shannon Paul – but where are the social media femme rock stars, especially in Detroit? Do we need a social media Lilith Fair?
To be clear, I don’t usually spend a lot of my time in women’s only groups. I think it is great to support each other and I do some mentoring but I enjoy spending time at the table where all decision makers not just women hang out. And to be really honest, I like men. I like their straightforward no nonsense approach to business and often times find myself the only woman present and for that I am actually quite grateful. My offline business relationships with men are respectful, engaging and insightful. I feel welcome at the party!
I know that women have long battled the conservative boys club in this automotive town – so is social media equality too much of a cultural shift? Are we just not ready for the stage? Or is the world not ready for us?
Is there a place at the table for educated career driven women who understand social media and use it and have some modicum of success in the space.. but aren’t “in” social media?
After all.. I’m so excited to be in this space. Sometimes I feel like the kid in the back of the room with their hand up, saying, “Pick me! Pick me!”
