Simple pleasures
I woke up this morning to delightfully crisp autumn air blowing through my window. The cool air, evoking memories of apple cider, brilliant leaves, photo walks, and Halloween, heralds in one of my favorite seasons.
Amazing and astonishing that something as simple as the right air temperature at the right time of year can have such a powerful effect on us.
Think back over your life for a few moments. What triggers of wonderful memories do you have stored in your head? How easy is it for you to get to them?
Here’s your task for the day. Go find one of the triggers you have control over (smell of bacon or coffee in the kitchen, taste of a food that brings back a rush of memories) and use it today to change your emotional and mental state. Then, after realizing how easy it is to change states, start making a catalog of those triggers so that you can take greater and greater control over the happiness you experience out of each day.
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Creating conditions for serendipity
I often say that serendipity is a wonderful gift and a terrible strategy. Serendipity is the encouragement of spontaneity, such as running into a friend, fan, or follower at a conference and finding out there’s a business opportunity there.
By its very nature, it is unreliable and unpredictable. Making serendipity part of your marketing plan is a disaster waiting to happen because of its disconnected, nearly random nature. That said, just because it’s not reliable doesn’t mean it’s not valuable – quite the contrary. Some of the most valuable friendships and business partnerships you can achieve are through serendipity.
How do you, then, encourage serendipity? Think of it like a forest fire. Forest fires need lots of fuel, ideal climate conditions, and a spark to set them off. There are relatively few forest fires in the Sahara desert. (yes, technically there are none because it’s a desert biome and not a forest by definition) There are relatively few forest fires in the Atlantic ocean. That’s a silly example, but it reinforces the point.
Lots of fuel
Forest fires don’t burn well without something to burn. A sparse forest offers few chances for flames to jump from area to area. Conversely, a forest with lots of tinder, lots of kindling, and lots of wood to burn for a long time will sustain a great fire. Think about that when it comes to the content you’re creating. A thousand tweets alone are akin to dry leaves everywhere. They’ll make a bright, big flame for a minute or so, but then they’re gone and without anything else, there’s no fire. Conversely, a massive blog without any other smaller bits of content will certainly burn for a long time, but it’s going to take forever for it to catch fire.
Equally important, all of the tinder and wood in the forest in a single big pile will certainly make for a big bonfire, but if you’re trying to catch the serendipity of sparks, having things spread out a little more will make it more likely that something will catch alight. To that effect, if you have a network of friends or coworkers, make sure they’re blogging and using social networks as well, and not just on the company website, but on their own properties as well.
Ideal climate conditions
Forest fires don’t generally spread well when it’s pouring rain. Some of the things you do in social networks likewise create “rainy” weather, dampening the conditions for sparks to catch fire, such as setting your networks’ privacy settings to friends only or not making use of public subscription mechanisms. If you’re concerned about privacy, set up a private social network identity for friends and family that is locked down so you can safely share photos of the kids, etc. in relative privacy, then have a public-facing identity separately that can be socially visible.
Some things to check:
- Are your publicly-facing Facebook updates marked for the general public?
- Are your Google+ posts marked for the general public?
- Are your Tweets unrestricted?
- Do you allow Facebook subscriptions?
- Do you have a Facebook fan page?
- Are your LinkedIn updates public? If automated, are they pulling from your other public feeds?
Sparks
The last thing a raging wildfire needs to get started are sparks, whether from lightning or a careless match tossed in the woods. In the discussion of social serendipity, the sparks are within the people in your network itself, piles of flint and steel. Are you building your networks for the present or the future? Are you aiming for the short term or the very long view? Because of its unpredictable nature, serendipity almost demands a long view, a long-term plan for growing a network. Put as many people as practical in it now and in the days ahead, but don’t worry about being too selective. Today’s intern is tomorrow’s marketing director, and may be the spark that lights a giant fire.
Sparks don’t happen in a vacuum, though. A pile of flint and steel that’s at rest does nothing. No sparks are created. It’s only when they’re moving together, bouncing off each other, that sparks are created. A large social network that never interacts with you or itself does nothing. You have to be the one stirring up the flint and steel, engaging, talking, sharing, so that the individual pieces of flint and steel move around and create a chance for sparks to fly.
Wait for the fire
The last part is hardest. You’ve got the fuel. You’ve got the right climate. You’re milling around, seeing the sparks start to fly. Keep creating fuel. Keep the air dry and the winds blowing. Keep engaging and conversing, making sparks. Then bide your time for one to catch. It’s not easy and it’s not immediate, which is why serendipity is a poor strategy. But when the fire does catch, if you’ve done everything else right, you’ll have an impressive blaze that will last for some time.
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How to value social media audiences
What’s the value of a Facebook fan? A Twitter follower? Suppose you wanted to get an apples-to-apples comparison of the value of different audience members. How would you go about getting that information? Here’s one method that might work for you based in Google’s Multichannel Funnel analytics.
To get started, first make sure you have goals and goal values set up for your site. If you don’t have these established, nothing else is going to matter much, so make sure they’re working first.
Next, go to Google Analytics and set up custom conversion segments for each of the channels you want to track. This follows the identical syntax for setting up social media segments in regular analytics, which you can find in this post. In this example, I’ve set up conversion segments for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
With the basic segments set up, you should now see your channel values for the individual networks and conversion overall.
It’s time to bust out your spreadsheet. Set up columns for each of the values that Google shows you – channel, assist value, last interaction value, and a summary column. Then, if you’re using the standard 30 day timeframe that Google Analytics uses, measure the average audience count on each of the channels you have over the past 30 days. For example, if you had on average 5,000 followers on Twitter in the past 30 days, use that.
Create 3 columns after the total, audience value per total, per assist, and per last touch, and set up simple division between the audience column and the dollar value columns:
This gives you a dollar value per audience member for the total, for the assist, and for the last touch. From here, start thinking about questions you need to ask and cases you need to test. For example, in the above chart, Facebook is bringing half the value per audience member of Twitter. Why is this? Is it something I’m doing with Twitter that I’m not doing with Facebook? Have I got a better, more targeted audience on Twitter? This is a case worth investigating – are there practices I could be doing on Facebook that would drive more value, or different pools of audience to fish in?
Another question that leaps out is that Twitter has a relatively low assist value, meaning it doesn’t push people into conversions, as strongly as it provides last touch value. Should I be doing something different on Twitter to improve assist value, and what can I do to improve assist value without cannibalizing from last touch value?
There’s an important warning I have to give here: none of the above data are answers. None of the above data tells you conclusively that you have the right audience, right offer, and right content. None of the above data should make you immediately change your marketing practices. The above data simply tells you what’s happening now and is the starting point for asking new questions. It is by no means an endpoint for leaping to conclusions.
By setting up apples to apples comparisons of the value of various audiences, you’ll end up in a better place, a better position to ask questions about where you’re finding your audiences and how they’re working for you. Try this out and see what new questions you can ask about your social media efforts.
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How to set up a social media split test
A split test is any situation in which you want to measure the effect of your content. Services such as Bit.ly, Argyle Social, and many other shorteners provide you with nearly everything you need to conduct an effective, statistically valid test. Let’s look at how you might deploy one using Twitter.
First, design your links. We’re going to use my blog’s Twitter welcome page as an example. I need to have four different tweetable links that track separately. I’ll start by feeding the welcome page to Google’s URL builder to ensure correct GA tracking.
This first tweet will be tagged dmwelcome1. I’ll set up four of these URLs:
- http://www.christopherspenn.com/welcome-aboard/?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=dmwelcome1
- http://www.christopherspenn.com/welcome-aboard/?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=dmwelcome2
- http://www.christopherspenn.com/welcome-aboard/?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=dmwelcome3
- http://www.christopherspenn.com/welcome-aboard/?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=dmwelcome4
Next, let’s feed each to Bit.ly so that we get a nice clean link for tweeting.
For this experiment, I’m going to set up a series of four direct messages on Twitter. You don’t have to use automatically sent direct messages. This methodology works for Facebook pages, public tweets, Google+ posts – anywhere that you want to test the same destination content with different hooks to try to bring in new eyeballs. I am using auto-DMs mainly because I can get a fair number of responses very quickly. Think outside the box!
Here’s the four tweets I’ll load up:
- Thanks for following me. If you’d like to get to know me better, visit: http://bit.ly/cpdm-1
- Thanks for following me. If you’d like to learn more about me, visit: http://bit.ly/cpdm-2
- Thanks for following! Get to know me better here: http://bit.ly/cpdm-3
- Thanks for following me. Learn more about me here: http://bit.ly/cpdm-4
Now we’re ready to test out this four way split. Obviously, you can substitute any content you like, such as calls to action to sales and other things of interest. We’ll load each of the tweets into TweetAdder:
And we’ll dispatch 200 tweets (Twitter wisely imposes a hard limit of 250 DMs a day).
Now we watch and wait as the test goes out, looking at two things:
- Which of the four tweets was most appealing to people as measured by clickthroughs using Bit.ly?
- Which of the four tweets was most in sync with my site’s content as measured by Google Analytics conversions to newsletter subscribers?
Setting up your own four way, eight way, or however many way test using these freely available tools is just as straightforward. One suggestion I’d offer is to add in a fifth message, a control, that you tweet out in public and compare it to see how private versus public messages works for your audience.
Take this recipe, this methodology, and apply it to your own marketing to see how impactful it is.
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Marketing White Belt |
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I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
Fear less
I watched a young girl in the park tonight try to ride her bike. It was clear that she was having trouble getting started, afraid to fall, afraid to get hurt. Stop, start. Stop, start. Cry a little. Worry. After about seven tries, she set resolve, bit her lip, put both feet on the pedals, and soared.
She beat her fear. It was still there, but she kept going, kept trying, and endured it to set herself free, hair blowing in the wind as she pedaled past everyone.
Would that we all had her courage, not to be fearless, but to know we can beat our fears and fear less. When we can, when we do, we soar as well.
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I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
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