“Poor Mack Collier. That Amy Africa person has him cornered in that mini-room. I’m sure he wants to get away from her but how can he? He’s so polite and well-mannered –“
I tried to stop listening and focus on something — anything else — while words like “aggressive”, “bully”, “witch with a b-” and so on constantly interrupted my thoughts.
The three women — two of whom I know and one of whom I don’t (although it didn’t seem to impact her from making vicious comments about me) — kept on yapping….
Diabolical thoughts of making a loud entrance and dramatic exit from the ladies powder room danced through my brain but alas, my respect for Mack, who was probably waiting outside wondering what in the heck (hey, he’s from Alabama — they say heck down there) was taking me so long, prevented me from making a scene. (And let’s face it, even if I didn’t utter ONE word, it would have been a kitty litter dust-up….)
As I waited not-so-patiently for them to leave, I distracted myself with some of the things that Mack Collier and I had discussed that morning.
Anyone who knows me, knows I’ve had just about enough of social media and the players — many of whom who give new meaning to “the ego grows in the depths of isolation” and most of whom are mean girls (or even worse, mean boys posing as mean girls.)
However, Mack is different. (And no, not just because he’s a Southerner and says things like “damned skippy” which I find amusing for some reason.) He’s a gentleman in every sense of the word; he bends over backwards to help everyone who asks him (even though most of those I’ve witnessed don’t deserve it); he’s gracious and humble as all get out, and most important, he’s not like all the other snake oil salesmen, crawling around the wild world of inbound marketing. (In other words, he actually knows something.)
If it wasn’t for the VERY FEW folks like Mack, I would have given up my QLOG on Day #2 and Twitter on Minute #3. I still hold that most companies get more than enough traffic — and frankly don’t need any more, they just need to figure out a way to convert that traffic to sales — but since the majority of marketers seem to be more interested in creating their own paparazzi (in other words, wasting time on Time-Suck, er, Twitter) than actually selling to people who have actual propensity to buy their products/services, I’ve been forced to learn a little bit about it. (And when I say little, I’m talking teensy-tiny here. Social media will forever be outside my wheelhouse, no matter how many whippersnappers or Bathroom Bimbelinas like the girls above, accuse me of being an old dog unwilling to learn new clicks, er, tricks.)
So, what exactly have I learned from Mack? Here are the top seven things. (Please note, Mack speaks with an accent — not a twang but a touch of social media-ese — so I’ve had to translate these seven sure-fire tips into, well, English.)
1. Not every company should be doing social media but EVERY company should be doing social media MONITORING. Even if you choose not to (or don’t have the time to devote to) spurring and spawning the conversation about your products or services, it’s going to take place. Therefore, you need to develop tools and techniques to make you a better listener. (Icicles are forming in Hell as we speak because I said that.)
2. The idea that content is king in blogging is total BS. Often times folks believe that if they develop a blog, with solid content, people will flock to it. So NOT the case. Mack believes that if you want people to read your blog, you need to work the system — Twitter, Facebook, posting comments on other people’s blogs and so on. From my personal experience, this is a lot of work — however, if you don’t want to put it in the sweat equity, you are going to need to pay for advertising on StumbleUpon, Izea, and HARO or by buying keywords, relevant banner ads, etc. (By the way, this post and the discussion afterwards are worth reading: http://moblogsmoproblems.blogspot.com/2009/06/idea-that-content-is-king-in-blogging.html.)
3. It really is a case of quality over quantity. As much as it’s tempting to buy 1,000 Facebook Friends for only $29.95, I never do it. (Bad example as I don’t even use Facebook but you get the idea.)
My dear friend, Lois Geller, follows over 4,000 people on Twitter and she’s constantly hammering people who follow none. “Don’t you want to learn?” she’ll say in that sweet, sing-song voice of hers. If I follow 4,000 people will I make more money on Twitter? What about if I follow 10,000 — will that be an exponential increase? Probably not. (Two dozen of the people who follow me do so because of their belief in the “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” saying. I also have thirteen dogs and seven babies. Even if my friend’s kid is going to do business with us, it’s not going to be for at least seventeen years.) I could go on but you get the point.
The number of people who follow you doesn’t guarantee that you will make any money there or anywhere else for that matter either.
Not to mention… if you need to talk to the decision maker to get a sale and the people who follow you are not, well, there just might be a lot of time-wasting, tire-kicking going on.
4. You need to think about the people you are trying to reach. I got my ass kicked with my Are Crazy Women Better in Bed? post. A lot of my readers weren’t happy. People thought it was “over the top” and “too brash — EVEN for me.” Personally, I think its the best post on conversion I’ve ever written but the truth is that my readers were right — it wasn’t written for them. (And yes, I will dedicate a post about why I wrote it when the dust has all settled.) Do I regret writing it? No. Because it served exactly the purpose I wanted it to serve. With that said, if I had known that people were going to be so offended, I may have done what I needed to do some other way. (More about that in #7.)
5. Just because it’s easy to get a blog doesn’t mean it’s easy to maintain it. Yes, I learned this firsthand from wanting to stop mine after say, the THIRD post. (The allure of having one was far more exciting than actually posting on one, that’s for sure.) Mack’s been blogging for over four years and he’s learned a lot along the way — if you want your blog to be successful, it needs to be visually appealing (this is for certain as people see things in pictures, not in text, online); you’ve got to allow your users to comment on it AND you need to respond (I completely blew this on my first couple of posts and now everyone just sends me e-mails, which are nice but miss the whole community-aspect I want); you need to post frequently so your users have a pattern (this is something I am still working on); and above all, you need to create value. Honestly, I usually find all this value-talk a bit too-crunchy-granola-let’s-all-hold-hands-and-sing-kumbaya for my tastes. However, the way Mack explains it actually is a concept that I understand because I often watch our clients struggle with it. Blogging about your products one-by-one is interesting to nobody — not even the merchandisers who selected them. Blogging about how you can solve a problem or help someone become a better something is very interesting. Probably why Kodak’s blog helps you become a better photographer instead of just blogging about their cameras. (More about why your blog sucks can be found here: http://moblogsmoproblems.blogspot.com/2009/04/five-reasons-why-your-company-blog.html)
6. You will fail. Despite what many so-called social media experts will tell you, there is no magic formula for this stuff. What works for you might not work for me and vice-versa. In one of Mack’s posts, he says that he’s made a lot of mistakes along the way and that what he did when he first started blogging wasn’t exactly like what he’s doing today. He goes on to cite Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk about children and creativity. Children “make a go of it even if they aren’t sure what the right way is.” As we grow older, we become fearful of being wrong which Mack thinks is “mostly right.” (More on that and a link to Robinson’s talk are found here: http://moblogsmoproblems.blogspot.com/2009/05/you-will-fail-at-social-media.html.) I’ve been at this less than two months and I have made more mistakes than I can count. You get up, dust yourself off and get back in the saddle again.
7. You need to talk about what your readers want you to talk about, not what you want to talk about. Ok, so this is my biggest struggle and perhaps one that I will never conquer. Over half of the people who write me say something rage-inducing like “I love your tips on conversion, now can you please tell me how to take advantage of Twitter?” No. I cannot. I suck at Twitter, I barely use it and I have ZERO expertise where Twitter is concerned. Zero. Zip. None. Nada.
I don’t care how much money you want to throw at me (and the offers have been very generous), I am not going to give you advice on something I know nothing about. I got into this space when NOBODY had an e-mail account and still thought the fax machine was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I have been here through the days when you called someone after you sent them an e-mail to “just make sure they received it” because you didn’t really trust that wacky-cyberspace-thing and I am living through the “how do we make our message work on mobile devices?” age.
Don’t get me wrong — I don’t think social media is ALL a fad — but I also see a life beyond Google. (In 1999, Yahoo was the closest thing to God you could get. Yes, I said Yahoo. NOT Google.)
You need to do what’s best for your business. For you, it might mean building a Facebook fan page or it might mean, improving your lead-form-from-Hell. It may even mean doing both.
But whatever you do, pick your battles. There are some people and some things that are just not worthy of a fight. No matter how much you want to pounce on them.
P.S. If social media is YOUR battle — the war you want to wage — do yourself a favor, contact Mack and ask him about his down-and-dirty social media audit (it’s unbelievably inexpensive and worth every penny.) I don’t get any money from recommending him (so please spare me your e-mails and/or sales pitches) but I adore the guy because he drinks Dr. Pepper, NOT Kool-Aid where social media is concerned. Unlike his counterparts that think social media is the free world’s way to salvation, Mack has a clear idea of what works and what doesn’t and he’ll be more than happy to tell you.
P.P.S. Those social media folks are terrible (read: SUCK, BITE and BLOW) at selling themselves. Mack is a consultant and makes his money off his knowledge, experience and expertise. Please write him only if you are serious and have purchasing authority. If you write him for free advice that you think you are too good or know better than to use, you will have to deal with me. And trust me when I say, I am not from Alabama. I grew up in Vermont. We learn to tip cows five days after we learn to walk.
P.P.P.S. You can reach Mack at mack.collier at gmail.com (Yes, the “at” should be @ but I don’t want to make it easy for the spammers who seem to be so obsessed with me to get his address.) His site is www.mackcollier.com. He also has another site called the Viral Garden. You can find that here: http://moblogsmoproblems.blogspot.com/. If you want to follow him on Twitter, he’s @mackcollier.
Amy, Amy, Amy:
Looks like we all owe a debt to Mack Collier, if he’s one of the few keeping you from giving up the Qlog. We’d miss your substantive, well-informed and personality-infused essays — which, by the way, give lie to your claim that “content is king in blogging is total BS.”
From my misanthropic perch, I’ve seen a lot of companies rush into blogging, Tweeting, Facebook and MySpace pages, and a whole host of other social mediums for a simple (and unfortunate) reason: Someone at a given company with hire/fire power thinks the company needs to be partaking of ‘em.
The result, more often than not, is a foray into social media that is either abandoned (a sin in relationship marketing) or which degenerates into banality — also a sin, but given the amount of noise to signal in social media, seemingly a lesser sin. Alas.
Former Washington Post columnist Bob Levey (no relationship — and we pronounce the names differently) has a sweatshirt which, on the front, reads “Anyone can be a columnist” and on the back says “For about three weeks.” Exit strategies are one of the most overlooked aspects of marketing campaigns — and with social channels being so easy to abandon, transitioning what followers one can get should be part of the initial, not the last-minute, thinking.
Mack is correct in that social monitoring is essential. Generation Y, and successive generations, are being trained to expect that organizations will listen to them. And these generations will punish organizations that don’t, either by returning the favor or being ignored, or by allowing unfortunate stories — justified or not — go unchallenged or unresolved.
As for content’s role: I do get what you’re saying about it not being enough. Brilliant content which is not actively touted will die on the vine, and the rules for promoting it are being written in light pencil, erased and re-written on an almost daily basis. But heavily promoted content which is uninspired ain’t doing one’s readership any favors, either.
The answer, by my lights, is twofold. Really great social media content starts out with more than just snark: It works ideas, adds a little analysis (it’s called a calculator, folks: learn to use it) and presents fresh information on old ideas. It also helps if the content provider has an obsessed mind, and genuinely believes the world turns on his or her subject matter.
And then there are ways to promoted it which are specific to the channel — namely, going out and offering opinions on other blogs and demonstrating your chops. And that’s before we get into speaking gigs, book deals and the like.
Case in point: There’s was an academic blog called Political Arithmetik which fed right into my obsession of electoral politics. The political bent of the author probably ain’t mine, but he is fairly even-handed in his analyses.
During the 2008 campaign season, I found his crunching-and-commentary riveting. His musings, rather than offering snarky comments on various candidate hair styles, offered very real information worth chewing on. And he was presenting data I hadn’t seen anywhere else — except in the Washington Post article where I originally found the reference to his site.
(The author doesn’t seem to be updating the blog of late, which is fine — midterm electoral season won’t start up for in earnest another nine months or so.)
Twitter is another story. Like you, I’ve done little more than dip my big toe in the Tweet stream. It’s a question of time, or time sucking. A good chunk of what’s out there is either snark or updates on lunch — and that’s true even of business Tweets. The very real value proposition a good, juicy blog offers (when one can find a good, juicy blog) is, on Twitter, diluted by the numerous accounts of turkey sandwiches being consumed. I can come up with snark on my own.
And marketers are making the classic mistake on Twitter they initially do with all new media: They don’t realize a new media requires a new approach. One hundred forty characters isn’t a lot of room to demonstrate a value proposition: It’s enough for a headline and a tease. Or an aphorism. Or something which leads to a more-thought out pitch.
So why not ignore it completely? Because once marketers — especially creative copywriter types — figure out how to use it, it could well become another, viable channel with its own set of rules. A Tweet directing consumers to a free-for-all online focus group, or a VERY limited time offer (think offer durations that last minutes, as opposed to days), are two such examples.
For the right brand — one which lends itself to an audience that loves puzzles — a Tweet could contain a cryptogram which incorporates a pun or funny message. Nantucket Nectars puts amusing facts on the inside of its bottle caps: Scramble up one of those, blast one out every day (or week — let the subscribers decide) and you’ve got brand affinity for a very engaging campaign. Stressed at work? Here’s your five-minute distraction from Nantucket Nectars!
Aside to Nantucket Nectars: I’ll be sending you a bill, payable in pineapple orange banana or pomegranate cherry juice, shortly.
Final note: Amy, don’t consider the “Are Crazy Women Better In Bed” post a failure. The information in it was damned good — you just overshadowed it. It’s a mistake I’ve made, too.
And I’m not so sure it’s a mistake entirely without redeeming value. There’s something to be said for getting tongues wagging on your behalf. And yeah, you can refine your qlogging technique to insure your points really do hit the marks you’re aiming for. But — as you point out — kids go full-steam into new adventures, make mistakes or scrape their knees, and then get up and start running again.
“From my misanthropic perch, I’ve seen a lot of companies rush into blogging, Tweeting, Facebook and MySpace pages, and a whole host of other social mediums for a simple (and unfortunate) reason: Someone at a given company with hire/fire power thinks the company needs to be partaking of ‘em.
The result, more often than not, is a foray into social media that is either abandoned (a sin in relationship marketing) or which degenerates into banality – also a sin, but given the amount of noise to signal in social media, seemingly a lesser sin. Alas. ”
Richard this is so right. So many companies are wanting to start using social media based on hype, not on having actually examined their company & marketplace and deciding that these tools can best help them reach their business goals. I was at a recent event and talked to two companies that both said they wanted to launch a blog. I asked them both ‘Why’. The first said ‘well we wanted to start one’. The second said ‘because we want to use the blog to establish our company as a leader in our industry, and as a way to better connect with our customers’. The second company had actually done some homework and had an understanding of what they could accomplish with a blog, the first company was simply buying into the hype.
Mack:
What did the second company say when you asked ’em HOW they planned to accomplish these lofty goals?
Mack and Richard — I’m not sure if you two know each other but the fact that you’re both commenting here makes me feel like I am hosting a G10 meeting. Seriously. VERY cool.
Marianna — I’m afraid to tell you that I can only have one Southerner post here at a time. We are using a FREE trial of the translation software we use to convert your language into English and it only allows one post per day. I suppose I could upgrade, just for you. Seriously, thank you for posting. Not sure if you know this but Richard used to have a column called the Loose Cannon in Direct Magazine. It was unequivocally one of the best things ever written in the direct marketing world and was responsible for at least 10 points of my blood pressure. Needless to say, your cannon analogy was perfect, especially here.
Hey y’all! I’m glad to know Southern charm works elsewhere. Isn’t it cool to speak in the northernmost parts of America and have the audience say “could you repeat that” just so they can hear you say “nine” or “right” just one more time? But I digress.
Mack, I LOVED your last comment… I can’t help getting a little crazy about it in most of my presentations: “Social media is just that – it’s a media, the channel that carries your (hopefully) perfect message to (hopefully) your perfect client.” And then we start talking about ALL the ways that could go awry. I dunno, like if you aren’t even aiming the cannon (aka social media) at your target audience in the first place by using a terrible message – or if the audience didn’t show up to receive the message or worse, if you know nothing about your customers in the first place and think the tools alone deliver results? At the end of the day, media are all still media. Some of them are just more social than others… Keep up the great work, both of you.
Posted at 11:55 pm on July 07, 2009 by
Marianna I think inbetween the people that are too excited about social media, and the hucksters, that the space gets a bad rap.
I will say this, I think this space is MUCH smarter than it was 2-3 years ago. Then, all companies were complete idiots, and the devil. If ANY company launched any type of social media effort, 1,000 bloggers immediately ripped it to shreds. Then I think some of those bloggers got to actually work on the other side of the fence, and started to see the space from the company’s point of view. Attitudes have softened and bloggers and others in the social media space are now much more supportive of companies that are getting their feet wet in this space.
I think in another 2-3 years that we won’t see social media being championed as a ‘stand alone’ set of tools like they are now, but I think companies will begin to integrate what works about social media into other areas of their marketing and business.
“My dear friend, Lois Geller, follows over 4,000 people on Twitter and she’s constantly hammering people who follow none. “Don’t you want to learn?” she’ll say in that sweet, sing-song voice of hers.”
Hmmm, Amy, you never told me I had a sing-song voice!
I would much rather have a misanthropic perch, like Richard Levey…whatever that is. Mack Collier sounds amazing with his audit, but I dare not call him with my “sing-song” voice, and maybe not enough money in the old wallet.
I am thankful he’s saved the QLOG as it makes us all laugh so hard…the members of the Amy Africa Fan Club. I thought MIchael would bust with the black knowing they are black write-up there.
And, of course I’ve framed, Are Crazy Women Better In Bed? Because of course, you know there’s lunacy in genes.
Lois I am from Alabama, everything is cheaper here 😉 I will DM you my price and my email. But it’s pretty reasonable, and the great thing about the audit is it saves time and money as you know exactly what you need to do moving forward. Check your Twitter DMs 😉