How to archive your tweets permanently

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jun 24, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, Metrics, Twitter | 3 comments

A question frequently asked of me is, how do you archive your tweets? The answer is a free, open-source package called YourTwapperKeeper, from the folks who make the service of the same name. In order to use it, you must be familiar with how to install a server-side application, including setting up a database, editing a configuration file, running a MySQL script, and setting up a Twitter application using the developer’s interface. If you’re not able to do this, you may want to look for other options, but this solution is quite powerful and you can’t beat the cost.

The one thing that will trip up folks when installing is that unlike other PHP-based open-source packages, you must actually copy/paste or run the included MySQL configuration script separately. It’s a very manual install, which can be intimidating for novice developers. Follow the directions in the README file to the letter and you should be okay. If you’re not sure how to run a MySQL script, you may want to have someone else do it for you.

Once you’ve gotten the package installed, configured, and operational, you authenticate with Twitter and can begin to archive your tweets by any text string, including your username, hashtags, and more.

Here I’ve set up a couple of searches, for myself and for the recent Blue Sky Factory conference.

Once the searches pull in some results, you can do an incredible amount of slicing and dicing of the archive, excluding retweets, filtering based on users or text, looking at specific time periods, and more. Unlike regular Twitter search, you can dig back into the archives for as long as you have data collected, which can be handy for analyzing Twitter patterns over longer periods of time or in month over month/year over year periods, far more than the two weeks of history that Twitter provides.

The most powerful feature, however, is the ability to export to a variety of data formats, including XML, JSON, and CSV/Excel. This is valuable if you want to provide, say, a tweet-based event recap, or you want to do analysis of timestamps, user interactions, and networks in third party data tools.

Here’s a partial example from the Excel export. I can, for example, sort out what percentage of tweets and people are using what clients in my audience, get geographic coordinates for use in services like BatchGeo, and do time-based analysis of how tweets and retweets flow (hat tip to Gilad Lotan @gilgul for the idea).

YourTwapperKeeper isn’t for everyone. It’s decidedly unfriendly to install. In fact, for most marketers, you’ll want to have the IT guys do the heavy lifting for you entirely, but once you’ve got it up and running, you’ll wonder how you ever recorded Twitter data without it.

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Social media now directly influences search rankings

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jun 23, 2011 in Advertising, Marketing, Social media, Social networks, Strategy | 24 comments

In a recent stunning article, SEOMoz highlighted that Google’s search results are now being adjusted on a per-person basis depending on the searcher’s social connections.

If you follow me on Twitter and then search for email marketing, Blue Sky Factory will rank higher than it would if you didn’t follow me on Twitter, because I share stuff from BSF on Twitter, and Google’s algorithm assumes that because we’re connected, my voice as a social connection should be more influential to your search than some SEO’s optimizations.

Let that sink in for a moment. That’s monumental for three reasons.

1. Influencers who have large social networks are no longer just spreading word of mouth, they’re now causing search engine adjustments (at least on Google and Bing) based on what they share.

2. “#1 ranking for a keyword” on Google is less meaningful now if the #1 is displaced by social sharing influence. My #1 for a search term will be significantly different than yours because we follow different people.

3. If you’re marketing something, there’s now a direct incentive to build your network as large as possible among your prospective customers. Size matters. By connecting with them in as many social channels as possible, you’re effectively doing free retargeting advertising in organic search, since the next time they search for something related to your company’s keywords, your shared items (which presumably include your company’s digital properties) will rank higher with your prospects than if they were not connected with you.

So what should you be doing to take advantage of this amazing sea change in organic search and social media?

1. You absolutely, positively must connect with your customers and prospective customers as soon as possible. If you’ve got any kind of form on your website, asking people for their Twitter ID or Facebook name isn’t optional any more. I just recently changed the form on my site to include Twitter ID, and I’m working on Facebook form integration to be rolled out soon.

2. In tip #5 here I recommended FollowerWonk.com as a way of finding people of influence in your specific industry or niche to follow. Start typing in job titles of your prospective customers and get following; those who follow back are now effectively opting into a passive retargeting program that will show your stuff to them more prominently when they search. Likewise, get to know other influencers in your space and get your content shared, liked, or retweeted by them in order for your stuff to be seen by their audiences.

3. You have a direct disincentive to share or link to your competitors now. If you share or link to their stuff, their content placement in search results will be influenced by your connection to your prospects as well. You’re much better off citing them in a no-followed blog post on your own blog and sharing that.

4. If it’s not obvious already, make sure you’ve socially shared key pieces of content for the digital properties you want to market. Make sure you’re sharing at a minimum on Twitter and Google Buzz, as those two networks are indexed rapidly and aggressively.

5. While there’s no direct evidence that the content around a socially shared link matters, it’s still not a bad idea to give it some context, both for followers and possible contextual association. Here’s an example of two tweets:

Check out my new blog post on @blueskyfactory: http://blog.blueskyfactory.com

versus

Check out my new email marketing post on @blueskyfactory: http://blog.blueskyfactory.com

This sea change is going to have massive ripple effects throughout the social and search industries. Start making these changes effective immediately, and you’ll be ahead of the curve and your competitors (unless they read my blog too).

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The new thing

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jun 22, 2011 in Advertising, Awakening, Marketing | 14 comments

Are you bored in social media?

Are you bored of reading the same stuff each and every day on every blog and Twitter feed?

I see this daily. I see lots of authors, lots of marketing practitioners who feel stagnant, who feel as though they’re not making progress, not getting the results they want, not going anywhere with their efforts or careers. Some express it as a sort of desperation, chasing after every new thing that appears on Mashable. Others express it as a bitter cynicism, saying that everything is the same old thing.

Here’s the funny part: the new thing is right in front of you, right now. You see, what’s new isn’t what’s on the pages of Mashable or Techcrunch. What’s new is what you haven’t tried yet. Foursquare is old hat? Not until you’ve tried it, tested it, and seen whether it makes a difference for your company or not. Twitter is yesterday’s news? Not until you’ve made some part of it work for you, generate some verifiable, repeatable result.

A hammer is nothing new. Hammers have been around for millennia. Yet amazingly, we still manage to build plenty of new, awesome things with hammers every day. There are a finite number of ways to use a hammer intelligently, yet new stuff comes from their use all the time.

Here’s a quick challenge to see whether you’re ready for the new thing right in front of you. Today, go to any one of your social networks that has a data export capability and hit the Export button. Open the resulting file in your spreadsheet software of choice and go data dredging, as Tom Webster says. Data dredging is a poor practice for developing actionable metrics or proving anything, but it’s a great practice for expressing curiosity and trying to look at things in a new way. See what’s in there, see what you can make it tell you, see what stuff you never knew about. Then use that dredged up data to give you some new ideas.

For example, I dredged up my Twitter followers numbers, mentions and retweets, email list subscriptions, and Google Analytics new visitors numbers, and I’m just playing around mashing them together with the correlation function, just playing mix and match, to see what it tells me. So far, I’ve been really surprised by some of what I’ve found (but that’s another blog post). Does that mean I go and change how I use social media? No. But it means I have a whole new series of questions to ask, ideas to investigate, and experiments to try. Something as old as email or a Twitter account is brand new again, and I’m excited to get new answers to new questions, even if they’re about “old” tools.

The new thing is waiting there in front of you. Will you reach out and grab it?

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Anatomy of a book launch

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jun 21, 2011 in Advertising, Books, Marketing, Strategy | 4 comments

On Monday, June 13, I launched my new book, Marketing White Belt: Basics for Digital Marketers, with a series of campaigns. I thought I’d share what was done and what the net effects were.

Obviously, first I had to write and publish the book. I went with the Kindle and Nook platforms because very little was required in terms of technical overhead. ePub and Mobi formats are little more than XHTML documents. Michelle Wolverton, my editor, did the compilation in just a weekend of my writing and transformed it into eBook format ready to go. I loaded it up, set pricing and royalties, and the platform was ready to go.

First rule of any kind of product launch: have a plan B. I set up redirects on my short URL, cspenn.com, for Amazon, Barnes & Noble, the site, etc. so that I could move stuff around as quickly as possible. More on this in a bit. I created a dedicated landing page and copy for the book launch, along with a special edition of my newsletter.

I’ve long believed that marketing techniques work better together, in synergy, than just by one channel along or channel-by-channel sequentially. A very long time ago in Internet years, I was part of a campaign launched by Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff called Bum Rush the Charts, which was an experiment to game the iTunes algorithm and put a Black Lab song (Mine Again) as far up the charts as possible. The lessons from that experiment informed a lot of this book launch. Amazon uses a similar algorithm as iTunes to determine its charts, so I would replicate Bum Rush’s mechanics for the launch.

To that end, I set up a timed launch of:

• The blog post
• Email newsletter
• Social outreach

The blog post and newsletter were fairly simple to schedule and time. I created the landing page for the book several weeks in advance of the launch to ensure it got indexed by search engines, even if there was no book to buy quite yet.

I chose the time using Blue Sky Factory’s BlueView subscriber data, which gives me an idea of where my subscribers, my existing base, are located. That data got exported into BatchGeo.com, which I used to map out the subscribers for a visualization. While many are American, a significant number are also in Western Europe (especially the UK), so I picked noon Eastern time as it would be 9 AM pacific, lunch on the east coast, and 5 PM in the UK.

The materials were ready, the time was set.

What was going to be interesting was the social outreach. Using TweetAdder and some custom software I wrote myself, I took all of my followers on Twitter and scored them all using Klout, which took a bit of doing since there are 34,000 of them. Of those 34,000, I set up two data sets – the “friends and family” list of folks I’d reach out to who would gladly support the launch, and then the folks that Klout thought were influential. Different sets of people got different shortened URLs to track at least some level of action.

I pulled the top 140 by score after weeding out obvious wastes of time (as much as I’d like to think @barackobama would retweet me, the chances of it were near zero, so out he went), and created a separate landing page explaining what I was doing. The morning of the launch, I sent them all direct messages asking for their assistance.

Here’s the funny part: no one over a Klout score of 80 responded. There are just as many robots and PR folks running the top end of the Klout spectrum as there are at the bottom in the 0-20 bracket. Who responded? Folks with scores in the 65-75 range, real humans who were around, interested, and happy to help. As an aside, if you’re targeting “influencers”, you may want to skip the 80+ bracket.

How many folks out of those 140 responded? About 37, and they were very kind.

The launch kicked off on Monday exactly as timed, and the first set of tweets all hit the airwaves within a 5 minute bracket. As I suspected, the immediate onslaught of traffic destroyed my website immediately, dropping it like a hot potato. Remember earlier I mentioned plan B? Plan B was to change the 301 redirects I had given out to people to go directly to Amazon, thus averting a predicted problem. I was able to redirect the massive onslaught of traffic in less than 10 seconds and not lose any potential sales.

How did the launch go? Tweetreach calculated the effective reach of the campaign at close to 750,000 views/impressions/eyeballs, which was nice for the top of the funnel. The newsletter hit its usual metrics of about 10% open, 2% click, with a lot of action in the first few minutes.

But the real results? I cracked the top 10 of all marketing books on Amazon, hitting both the bestseller and hot new releases lists within 4 hours, beating out all but a few competitors like Malcolm Gladwell, Guy Kawasaki, and David Meerman Scott. At the end of the day, it’s all about sales, or the outreach meant nothing. Happily, everything clicked:

Bestseller on Amazon!

The stats at their peak.

That’s not bad for a book that’s completely self published with no support from a publisher or marketing agency at all, and it continues to sell well a week after the launch.

To summarize: marketing channels work better when you put them together. Email, social, blog, everything. Algorithms can be gamed to some degree. Have a backup plan.

I’d like to thank everyone who participated in the book launch for your support. It meant a lot and it clearly moved the needle.

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Informer vs. performer

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jun 20, 2011 in Conferences, Education, Speaking | 3 comments

Ever look on a conference session list and see a presenter listed whose talk you’ve seen before? I certainly have, and depending on who it is, I’ll either go for a “repeat” session or skip them and see someone else. What makes the difference? Whether the presenter is an informer or performer.

I’ve talked to some presenters who believe that constantly changing your presentations is bad, the sign of an inexperienced presenter. If the goal is performance in the sense of performance art, then they are absolutely right. The goal is for the show to be as smooth, as flawless as possible. These folks have their shows timed perfectly, and it’s an art to watch and enjoy. Tom Hopkins is a great example of the performer as speaker – he can recite his presentations literally word for word from his books, which is no small accomplishment since his books are hundreds of pages long. That said, if you as a member of the audience got the message the first time, chances are you don’t need to see the show again unless you enjoy it for the performance that it is. Every subsequent performance will be a literal re-run.

I’ve talked to some presenters who believe that every speaking opportunity should be unique, with content tailored to what the audience is there to learn. If the goal is education, teaching, and sharing of knowledge, then they are absolutely right. The goal is for the education to be as thorough and as current as possible. The informer’s presentations will be rough around the edges. There will be stumbles as the presenter sees data they just slotted in the night before from the latest research study, or odd pauses as ideas hit them literally right on stage. There’s less polish, but you can go see the teacher at every single conference they’re at and get new ideas, new information, new perspectives, and new stuff to test.

Which is better? It depends on what you value. I value learning first and foremost at conferences. I’ve been in some sessions in which the presenter was awful but the data was valuable, and I was there principally to learn, so I got what I came for. I’ve been in some sessions in which the presenter was marvelous and I was incredibly entertained. That said, I walked away with nothing new from the presenter, so I didn’t get what I came for. If you’re a conference organizer choosing a keynote speaker, you may well value the polished, perfectly timed, perfectly nuanced performer for your center stage spotlight because they’re a known quantity and a reliable performer.

Can you have the best of both worlds, a presenter who is both a performer and an informer? Yes, you can, but such teachers are rare masters, true experts who have incredible expertise in their areas such that new information and new ideas are seamlessly integrated into their decades of existing knowledge and ability. Go watch someone like Stephen K. Hayes teach martial arts and you’ll see decades of experience and new learning all at the same time. What’s truly incredible about teachers like this is that they can present in such a way that everyone, veterans and newbies, walks away having learned something.

I’d imagine at the end of the day, most speakers who want to be on stage for a living aspire to be both informer and performer, masters of knowledge and delivery equally. I know I certainly do, and in a few decades, I hope to be able to do both flawlessly.

What about you? Which do you value more? Which do you enjoy more? Does this reflect who you choose to see at conferences?

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Marketing White Belt Basics for Digital Marketers is now on Amazon & B&N

Watch me speak: Attend virtually!

I recommend: for Twitter audience building.