A Simple Daily Promotion Recipe
There are innumerable ways to promote your content, from email marketing to social media to even things like billboards, but many are campaign-based, requiring significant resources to implement. For the average piece of content, such as a blog post, that isn’t tied to a specific campaign, we tend to just throw it out there and hope someone takes notice of it.
There’s a middle way between all-out promotion and complete ignorage, what I like to call my daily promotion recipe. This method is unique to me because of where I’ve chosen to focus my attention; use it to create your own methodology rather than just photocopying this, because if your network is at all different from mine, it simply won’t produce results for you.
1. Create content that doesn’t totally suck. This should be obvious, but isn’t. Ideally you do this with a blog that has an RSS feed.
2. Set up any tracking URLs you need to before you start publishing. Bit.ly links, Google Analytics tags, etc. – make sure you do this part in advance, because you’ll forget otherwise.
3. Draft any Tweets, posts, etc. in a text editor so that your witty commentary is ready to go.
4. Make sure you have an RSS to email solution set up, and set it for when you’re active on social networks. I use Feedburner and typically have my blog posts done by 9 AM most days. This gets an email out the door when you’re generating other social activity – vitally important so that people are getting your message in as many ways as practical during the same time period, to better enhance message synergy.
5. Post to your anchor social networks – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+. Whichever of these are your power bases, publish there. If you can wrap it in some form of routine publication, do so – I wrap my stuff usually in #the5.
6. Post to a content discovery network. I prefer Stumbleupon, but that’s where my base is right now. You might use Reddit, Digg, Delicious, or other networks.
7. Whenever your publication cycle is, set up an opposing diurnal message. For example, if you’re active in the mornings, consider scheduling a tweet or Facebook post for the evening crowd. If you’re active late in the day, set up something for the next morning.
This simple recipe is one you can execute in a very short period of time, probably 15 minutes or less, and it covers all the basics for ensuring that your regular, non-campaign content is getting at least some love. Adapt it to your own workflow and social networks, and see if having a regular content push on a daily basis makes a difference for site traffic and social reputation.
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Social+Email Integration from Social Fresh Charlotte
For those who weren’t able to attend, here’s what I shared at my opening keynote at Social Fresh Charlotte:
Thanks to all who said some very nice things about the talk and especially to Jason Keath for inviting me to kick off the conference.
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Gear, skill, and marketing
Over the weekend, I enjoyed leveling my new hunter in World of Warcraft and learning more about the class. It’s quite a lot of fun. One of the things that occurred to me as I was leveling, however, was that hunters, like all of the other classes in World of Warcraft have the exact same buttons to push from one hunter to the next.
That led me to the question of, well, what makes a good hunter then, if my Concussive Shot is no different than anyone else’s? The other two areas you hear about in the game besides abilities are gear and skill. Gear, of course, is the equipment that characters wear and use, like armor and weapons.
Of the two, the one you hear the most about from other players is gear:
- “I would have been so much better in that dungeon if I had better gear!”
- “I would have survived much longer in that battleground if I had better gear!”
- “I would be a top raider if I just had better gear!”
The reality is, however, that better gear doesn’t make the player significantly better after the basics are covered. Using the correct abilities at the correct times against the correct enemies is what defines the top players of the game. One popular figure in the Warcraft community, Gevlon, actually created a special team of people who had intentionally low quality gear and then went and killed the biggest, baddest enemies in the game to prove that skill matters more than gear.
What does this have to do with anything marketing related? Let’s think about this for a second. We have pretty much the same “buttons” to push in marketing, don’t we? We can tweet, post to Facebook, blog, podcast, etc. – all of the basic tactics that are common to us as digital marketers. That means that the areas where you’ll differentiate yourself are in the marketing equivalents of gear and skill – tools and strategy.
What’s the first thing you hear from marketers everywhere? You guessed it – we need more tools, better tools, what are the new tools to be using, who’s got the best tools? Marketers are asking about their gear equivalent, instead of how to become better marketers with the tools and tactics they already have.
So how do you change? How do you grow? First, recognize that both in Warcraft and in marketing, focusing on tools and tactics or gear and abilities has very rapidly diminishing returns. Once you have the basics in place, there’s not much point in chasing down minor percentage increases that come from different tools, and the costs scale exponentially.
Second, recognize that skill development is paramount after the basics. You need to be out in the field, out testing, out questing, out learning your class, out learning your market as much as possible in order to develop and grow your skills. In Warcraft, there are these target dummies in every city in the game. They do nothing except let you test your basic abilities and skills to achieve maximum results. Marketers don’t necessarily have target dummies to test on, but we can and should be testing all the time in our work to find out what’s working, what combinations of tools and tactics deliver for us.
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Is this conference worth it?
One of the most common questions asked of conference organizers goes something like this:
“How do I justify this conference? Why should I attend it?”
This was asked of me recently about PodCamp Boston:
The short answer is: there is no justification. None. A conference by itself is just a gathering of people, and while it would be amazing to deliver everything to everyone, the reality is that a conference is more like a mirror than anything else. What do I mean?
There’s a story Stephen K. Hayes tells that in the innermost shrine of the Togakure village temple, there’s a source of enlightenment and power like no other. Every year, the priests of the temple conduct exotic rituals to honor this holy power, and aspirants come from around the world to catch a glimpse at it. When the pilgrims are all assembled before it, the doors are opened and the power is revealed: a simple round mirror, reflecting that we are our own sources of power.
The question about conference justification is the wrong one. It’s too vague. The better question is, do you have a burning question you need answers to, and if you do, does this event move you closer to answering it or further away? If you don’t have a burning question, the blunt and honest truth is that you should expect to get nothing out of a conference or any other event. On the other hand, once you have a burning question you need an answer to, figuring out whether the speakers and attendees of an event are likely to help you move forward towards an answer will be relatively straightforward.
What burning questions are you currently seeking answers to at conferences?
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Influence and the Ninja Long View
If there’s one thing the jonin (heads of ninja families) had in spades, it was the long view, the perspective that spanned more than just now or the next battle, but the next decade or two. The most successful jonin leaders made decisions that might have seemed counterintuitive or foolish in the short term but paid substantial rewards in the very long term. In one of Stephen K. Hayes’ groundbreaking works on the topic, he mentioned that jonin leaders would often try to get field agents into positions of power decades in advance so that they would be ideally placed and free of any suspicion when needs arose.
This is exactly the opposite of most models of influence today. Today, we look for Klout scores or follower counts to tell us who is influential in the here and now. Today, we try to recruit for marketing campaigns in the moment, hitting our mailing lists as furiously as possible, all the while wishing we could spam just this once.
Understandably, our circumstances dictate this to a degree. Shareholders demand quarterly profits or they sell off the stock and the board of directors cleans house. Companies hire and fire with the mercurial temperament of a 6 year old having a tantrum as soon as profits slip. Having a mindset that is only in the here and now, in the “just survive another day”, is perfectly understandable, but can be disastrous for you in the long term, because you’ll never have the power or capability to grow beyond your current circumstances.
Let me give you an example of where influence and the short term falls down. If this were a biography of someone that you were considering to include in a marketing campaign, would you use them?
Chances are, your average marketing specialist seeking the biggest influencers would pass this person by. Boring. Uninteresting. No influence. Low Klout score or non-existent Klout score. If you would have made the same choice, you would have missed out on this:
Yes, that’s Chris Brogan, from right around the first PodCamp and today. If you take the long view, building out a network for the very long term, there’s a good chance that some of the people who are nobodies today will be chart toppers down the road. The thing is, you can’t accurately predict this because change happens so dramatically and so rapidly now.
Here’s a second example. This past week I threw a free webinar on social media job search. In terms of influence, job seekers are probably at the bottom of the pile because they have none of what most marketers want in the short term. But if what I shared is helpful and allows some of those folks to get jobs, then do I have seeds planted for the long term? You bet.
Do you need to be paying attention to what we call influence now in the short term, with outreach campaigns and their like? Of course. But alongside the short term, in order to be seeding your success for the future, you need to embrace and begin taking the long view, too. Here are a couple of things you can and should be doing to build for the long term:
1. When networking online for the long term, ignore influence measures entirely. As long as someone is in the same field as you, accept them into your network and treat them civilly and professionally. You don’t have to be their best friend or drinking buddy, but you shouldn’t be a jackass either. Today’s intern is tomorrow’s marketing director.
2. Build up your database and mailing list. I don’t do a personal newsletter purely for the entertainment value. I do it to stay in touch with people and stay present of mind, and I’m always working on building and growing it every day. It’s an incredible long term asset and after 5 years of constantly growing it, it’s at a size where I can make it useful. The plan for the next 5 years? Keep on growing it.
Neither of these long term actions should in any way impede the short term work that you have to do now to keep the lights on. Include it into your marketing rotation until it’s second nature and when a need arises years down the road, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how powerful you can be in addressing it. That’s the ninja long view.
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