A flash of lightning
Have you ever had a glimpse of the greater you?
Maybe you reacted in an emergency with greater speed, confidence, or strength than you thought possible.
Maybe one day you were forced by a sense of needing to pause, only to be confronted with an amazing sunset or the perfect evening breeze.
Maybe in a rare crisis something woke up inside you, compelling you to lead, to take charge.
Maybe in a stressful situation you reached inside yourself and found more will to win than you ever knew was there.
Some of these moments may be recent. Some of them may be years or even decades ago, but they were so profound that you can’t forget about them. They recur in dreams and memories, dates and places etched in your mind as firmly as if they were carved in granite.
I remember one moment in the spring of 1999 in my little apartment in Allston, Massachusetts. It wasn’t the best or worst apartment, but it did have a nice front room that faced the morning sun. At that moment, laying on my futon couch, the sun washing in the windows created a moment that was pure magic. I felt completely free of everything, a part of the light and the light a part of me. I don’t remember how long I was in that space. It could have been a moment or an hour. But it was a moment when I learned that true peace lived inside of me, if I had the ability to quiet everything and find it. It was a moment of perfect beauty.
These moments in your life are not accidental. They are not random. Above all else, they are not exceptions to the rule. They reflect the times when circumstances, energy, and our will align to let us tap into our fullest power, our fullest potential. They are the moments of living proof that we can be far more than we think, that life can be far more wonderful and rich than we usually see.
The wonderful secret is this: they’re happening all around you, every day, like flashes of lightning briefly showing the world around you in the dark. These moments of clarity aren’t isolated instances or lucky chances in life because they’re not supposed to be. They are how your life should be the majority of your days. All that you need to do – and it’s simple, but certainly not easy – is look for them.
Take a deep breath, pause for the moment, and ask yourself this: of what is around me right now, what can I truly enjoy? Of what is around me right now, what can I truly act on? Of what is around me, what must I remove from my life?
Do this inventory as many times per day as you can remember, and before long, your life will be composed of these moments, strung together like jewels in a necklace.
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3 Powerful Business Lessons from World of Warcraft Inscription
For those that don't play, one of the most lucrative "industries" in World of Warcraft is a profession called inscription, in which you make glyphs, little pieces of paper with magical runes on them that enhance player abilities. These magical sticky notes can be sold and traded in the in-game economy.
There are 3 items I want to highlight that teach 3 different lessons.
Bleached Jawbone. This is a peculiar little relic that you pick up from a vendor in the Twilight Highlands. It's needed to make a highly-sought item for players who enjoy player vs. player combat. Unlike most inscription supplies, you must be a certain level of character in order to obtain it, and it's located outside of a major city. There are two market opportunities with this item:
1. You have to go out of your way to get it. People will pay a premium for convenience. In your own marketing, what things do your customers need that they have to go out of their way for, and can you offer the convenience of those items at your business?
2. You have to be a certain level to get it. In many cases, people who are leveling up their professions need this item, but because they haven't reached the character level they need to be in order to buy it, it's inaccessible except on the in-game marketplace. As a result, you can charge a premium for it - lack of skill or advancement in your customers creates a niche. What products or services can you offer to people who haven't reached a certain skill set yet? If you're selling marketing services, for example, can you offer advanced search engine optimization tools to people who are ready to make use of the tools but can't yet obtain them?
Glyph of Deadly Throw. One of the interesting things about the inscription profession is that you don't learn all of the products you can make at once. You have to do daily "research" to discover new glyphs you're capable of making, and if you don't do your research, you don't have new products or services to offer.
This glyph, which is used by rogues, was one I just learned last night. What's powerful about this is that your average, lazy player isn't going to remember or be diligent about their inscription research, and so the number of players who can offer a full suite of products to the market will be surprisingly low, a tiny minority of players in the game. There will be glyphs that only a handful of players can actually make, ensuring a near-monopoly on those niche markets.
The logical extension to the real world marketplace is obvious: those who continue to research, innovate, and find little niches will be far more profitable and face less competition than those who settle for the same majority of products and services that everyone else settles for. Everyone starts from the same basic tools, especially in niches like social media. Everyone can tweet. Everyone can make a page on Facebook. None of these things will create a profitable niche for you. Only through actual research will you create the innovation that will drive your profits.
Glyph of Death and Decay. In my inventory management software, I can see that another player has listed this glyph for 10 gold, whereas I listed at a fallback price of 197 gold. At first glance this seems like an incredibly bad move on my part. Here's why this isn't.
First, I know that the cost of materials to make this particular glyph is about 15 gold. I've told my software never to sell for less than the price of materials, because that's a guaranteed way to go broke.
Second, I know my market. The market for this particular glyph churns very frequently, which means the money-losing seller will have their product bought, leaving only mine left unsold. I know this particular seller doesn't play very often, so the risk of getting undercut by him is fairly low. When the next buyer who wants this enhancement for their character checks the marketplace, mine is the only item left for sale, and I get to earn 197 gold instead of losing money.
There are two lessons in this particular item. First, know what your costs are (including time) so that you avoid selling at a loss. Second, if you know your market well, if you know how your customers and prospective customers buy your goods and when in the business cycle you can obtain a lock on their business, you don't have to compete on price; you can simply sell at whatever the market will bear.
The business lessons of these 3 items may seem basic, but as with all basics, they can be incredibly powerful if you master them.
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Ask your burning question instead
I was administering a webinar with a panel of experts recently and as I went through the registration data, I took note of the questions asked of the panelists in advance. There were a number of questions that could have been answered in four or five seconds with Google to the satisfaction of the querants.
What a wasted opportunity!
I want to share with you some advice I received from one of my teachers, Stephen K. Hayes:
When in the presence of a master teacher, pick one burning question to which you must have the answer and ask that. There's a strong possibility you'll only get one shot, so make it count.
This is as true in marketing as it is on the floor of the dojo. Take some time when you register for an event, a conference, or class to think of questions for the teachers, experts, presenters, etc. that you really and truly need answers to, answers you haven't gotten anywhere else. Write up a list of questions for yourself, Google all of them, and then note the ones where Google simply couldn't help you. From that list, then pick the one question that you believe will absolutely, positively change your business, your habits, your practice, etc., the one question that you mentally scream, "If only I had the answer, everything would be better!". Then ask that question to your teacher.
Here's another indicator that you've got a question that's worth asking as your one shot. If you're asking for a diagnosis, chances are you're not going to get a very satisfying answer. It's almost impossible for anyone to effectively assess what's right or wrong with a marketing program in a short amount of time. If you're asking how someone would solve a problem you're encountering (bonus if you can explain what you've already tried in a very tight, compact way), you'll probably get a much better answer.
For example, someone recently asked me, "Hey, can you take a look at my blog and tell me why I'm not getting any traffic?" There are a billion different answers here, and in the scope of this question, none of them are going to move the needle for the querant. If they had asked the question differently, such as, "My blog isn't getting enough traffic. I've done all the basic SEO work, installed the right plugins, listed and verified my sitemaps, set up PPC, and done all of the things you recommended in posts X, Y, and Z on your blog. I'm not competing for an overly generic term. My traffic sources indicate that almost no traffic is coming from search, but Webmaster tools isn't showing any errors. What things haven't I thought of?"
Once you've boiled down your burning question to the one question that will make the most difference to you or your business, ask that of the expert, the teacher, the presenter. Like my teacher said, you may only get one shot. There's a very good chance they'll be delighted to hear something different than the same 5 questions over and over again and give you real feedback that can move the needle for you.
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Which is moving the needle more, Twitter or Google+?
Google+ has been out for about a month, and has made quite a splash. With 20 million users in just a month, it’s become the darling of many a social media expert. But how much does it actually move the needle? How much influence does G+ really carry? Should you change your social media strategies? After studying how it tracks timestamps, I wanted to do a side by side comparison of G+ and Twitter to see how they stacked up and where the juice really was.
Initially, I looked in my Google Analytics. G+ was clearly winning the referring sites war at first glance, which is a claim many folks have made:
However, there’s a problem here. See it? Referring sites is 34% of my traffic, 31,069 visits in total. Google+ is less than 10% of site traffic. It’s not running away with an overall large portion of site traffic. There’s a second problem which becomes more clear here:
Because it has no API and no third party software, Google+ traffic is highly concentrated through just one source. Twitter, on the other hand, has third party apps all over the place, plus multiple, different traffic streams. Consolidating all of that and trying to attribute it would be a pain in the neck. What would you do to get the real answer?
Testing and Methodology
Being a nerd, I decided to test it as best as I could. Existing link tracking tools like bit.ly don’t give you side by side analysis over a period of time at a granular level, so I ended up having to write my own link tracker. Very simple switch/case setup in PHP that created a timestamped text logfile of clicks.
Bear in mind, at the time of the test, my Twitter network was 38,000 followers and my Google+ network was about 5,000. Take that into account when you see the results.
The methodology was simple: Tweet and G+ all 10 links at nearly the same time and see what got clicked on. I loaded up yesterday’s #the5 in it, creating 10 different URLs and allocating 5 to Twitter, 5 to Google+. That way I could track not only clicks on my own stuff, but clicks on other people’s stuff too. I measured over a 24 hour period.
Test Results
So, which is moving the needle? Here’s the clickthrough results over a 24 hour period:
Twitter accrued a total of 1,042 clicks on the 5 links combined. Google+ got 158. Google+ got 15.2% of the clicks that Twitter did at 13.2% of the network size, so if you adjust the results, Google+ is about as good as Twitter at delivering clickthrough. If my Google+ network grows to the same size as Twitter, I would expect to see roughly the same results.
What’s interesting to me, however, is that the curve shapes for the results are very different. Twitter takes off like a rocket ship and then gracefully continues to deliver clicks throughout the day and night. Google+ packs the vast majority of its clicks in the first couple of hours and then the attention just vanishes.
Initial Conclusions
A few items are worth noting:
1. Don’t blindly trust Google Analytics. Even though it looks like Google+ is delivering more traffic than Twitter at first glance, you have to dig into the data a lot more to see what’s really going on.
2. Twitter delivers more attention for longer than Google+ for this experiment. The reason why? I suspect it has to do with format. Twitter is a short-form social network, which means that scrolling back or catching up after a few hours away is relatively easy, especially if you don’t follow a ton of people. By contrast, Google+ is a long-form social network, so scrolling back a few hours can mean pages and pages of content. This also means that timing with Google+ is tighter if you need to generate attention. Based on my charts, if I wanted to sustain attention on a topic for a longer period of time, I’d have to repost more on G+ than on Twitter.
3. Google+’s performance, relative to network size, is in line with Twitter. This means that for me, I need to be participating in both places. One is not significantly better than the other, and growing both are a priority for my audience.
4. Test! Test, test, test. Do not blindly trust my results. I’ve built up a very focused network of a certain online persona, and I guarantee that your audience is significantly different than mine. What has worked here for me, what results I have gotten here for me is likely to be very different than what you’d get as a result.
If you’d like to do some peer review, here’s the URL text file of the 24 hour results as a plain text CSV file. The time codes are UNIX time stamps in order to make charting easier. You can slice and dice any way you like.
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Circles of amplification
Last week on Marketing Over Coffee, I mentioned something I’m doing with Google+ called a circle of amplification. Let’s talk briefly about what that is.
(photo of the Nexus, the ultimate circle, in World of Warcraft)
The circle of amplification – and it’s really called that – is a list I keep of people who have shared my content. This group of folks are different than everyone else on Google+ because they’ve done something, taken a measurable action, to support what I do. They’ve reshared a piece of content. This group of people is extremely important to me, because without them, the ideas that I have to share don’t spread.
Why track amplifiers?
Beyond the obvious (they share stuff), amplifiers are the heart and soul of your base. They form the core of the people who support you, and when it comes time to promote something heavily (as I did with my book at launch), they will be on the front lines of people who get the word out. If I don’t have a way of quickly identifying them and reaching out to them, then I’m relying solely on luck when it’s crunch time, and that’s not a healthy place to be.
How do you track amplifiers?
For the moment, it’s a manual process. I’m sure that as APIs and toolsets become available, it will get easier, but for now, I do it by hand for a couple of minutes a day. Here’s how:
Find the shares at the bottom of every Google+ post, click the dialog box open, and then either alt-click the names into new tabs or hover over them and add them to a circle of amplifiers.
Why not track +1?
Google +1 inside of G+ tracks +1 on posts, not on pages on your site. It’s not nearly as valuable (you’ll notice G+ +1′s are not reflected in Google Analytics or Webmaster tools), and frankly it’s too easy. Sharing requires at least 2 clicks, if not a few words of color added to the shared item. +1 is too much like Facebook Like, which doesn’t really indicate any level of commitment. You could sneeze and accidentally +1 or Like something.
So I have amplifiers circled. Now what?
You’ve laid down some solid groundwork. For now, simply stay in touch. Share valuable content. Thank your amplifiers from time to time. Give them the best of your best so that they have continued incentive to share your stuff.
I plan on copying an idea from my newsletter in the future, as soon as I have analytical data to support it, highlighting members of the circle for their contributions and level of engagement.
What if I’m not using Google+?
This concept applies equally to Twitter via lists and even Facebook, though it’s a lot messier there than it is on Twitter or Google+. For Twitter, just add people to lists as they retweet you. For Facebook, you’ll need to friend your sharers on a personal account, which means you can have a maximum of 5,000 amplifiers.
What other circles do you create and maintain on social networks to track and reward people who support you?
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