3 methods to power social media success
I wrote the other day on Google+ that the “secret” to social media effectiveness is to give first, without expectation. Mitch Joel cites this as giver’s gain, one of the best ways to build up social currency. One of the most common questions about giver’s gain that stops people from doing it is this:
“But what do I have to give?”
The answer is straightforward: give what people need. You may not be a great content creator, you may not have a lot of experience, but you can learn content arbitrage in about 20 seconds. It goes like this: learn what your network needs, learn who has it, and connect the two.
Learn what your network needs.
There are some universal needs that everyone in the business world wants. Revenue, obviously. Press and media attention. Employment. Very few people will say, no, I don’t want more customers. Very few people will say, no, my business doesn’t need any more press. Very few people will say, no, I’m not interested in more or better career opportunities.
How do you know what your network needs? Listen to them. The people who are top of mind for me are the people who respond to me, people who talk to me, people who overcome their own shyness or hesitation and say hello at a conference. They’re the people who make a solid impression that tells me in a very short period of time who they are and what they do in an impactful way.
Your network is telling you this every day. Look on Facebook for what people are saying to you. Read what they tweet. See what they’ve edited on their LinkedIn profiles. Then start a running mental or physical list of who needs what.
Here’s a “top secret” phrase you can search for: “anyone recommend”. Look at the results for the metro Boston area:
People are asking you for your help all the time. You can easily provide it.
Learn who has it.
A 6 year old can search Google pretty easily. Answering the question of who can provide what your network needs is a matter of asking for data sources. Want to find press opportunities for your network? Subscribe to Peter Shankman’s Help A Reporter service and read through the 3 emails he sends each day that have limitless press opportunities in them. Find relevant queries for people in your network and forward the individual queries by email, and you’ve given people in your network opportunities for free earned press.
Does someone in your network need a job? Subscribe to appropriate geographic and industry feeds on Craigslist (there’s an RSS feed at the bottom of every job category). Listen on Twitter for people posting job ads. Check LinkedIn for who is hiring in your area – just go to News > Signal, and type hiring in the search box and you’ll see everyone asking for people to hire.
Who wants more business? You can be the provider of connections. Look for complementary businesses in your networks and proactively reach out and connect people. Who needs business? Learn who does what in your network and broker introductions.
The power is in your hands.
Here’s the most important lesson of all: none of these tasks require a marketing degree, a large business budget, or anything other than the ability to search intelligently. If you’re a college student looking to build a network before you graduate, if you’re someone looking for work, if you’re a sales guy or gal looking for deeper business relationships, these are all things you can do right now, today, at no cost except your time.
Social media success is waiting in front of you right now. Go get it!
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Making mountains out of molehills
Making mountains out of molehills is an old idiom that refers specifically to someone blowing an issue far out of proportion. In cognitive psychology, this is known as magnification. It’s such a common psychological phenomenon that we’ve had cultural idioms for centuries describing it, such as Shakespeare’s play, Much Ado About Nothing.
Magnification works based on a simple principle, the feedback loop. For example, someone who makes mountains out of molehills would take a bad grade on an exam and repeat the event over in his head repeatedly until it became so magnified that he leaped to the conclusion he would fail college. In this case, magnification serves a harmful outcome.
Suppose, however, you wanted to use magnification for a more productive end, such as marketing? What makes it work?
First and foremost, magnification hooks onto one or two key points that get repeated in your mind over and over again. Rarely does anyone magnify a complex thought pattern, because the thought pattern needs to be able to loop quickly in your mind.
Second, magnification has to create a derived future outcome. Rarely do we conclude that the original event is the outcome; in the example above, the bad grade wasn’t the focused outcome – failing out of college was. In order to get your mind to create a derived outcome, there has to be some element of predictive language at work. Fail an exam becomes magnified to fail out of college.
Third, magnification has to be able to synergize with itself to create a large distortion. In the case above of the bad exam grade, every repeat of the loop adds additional energy to the original negative feeling. If a situation or consequence doesn’t compound itself, you won’t magnify it in your head. Conversely, if you’re out to create a positive feeling, the feeling must amplify itself with every iteration of thought. Every time your prospective customer repeats the positive feeling, it should build on itself.
Let’s examine a case of magnification done really well: the marketing around Apple’s iPad. First, it’s a simple campaign: a magical device at an unbelievable price. There are only two hooks to grab onto, so the marketing of it is kept simple.
Second, it creates a derived future outcome. The key there is how we treat the word magical. Everyone’s interpretation of magic is different, but the general future outcomes are relatively similar: things just happen. Thus, if you view the iPad as magical, you can create outcomes in your mind that are specific to you but are aligned with the idea of magic.
Compare that to how many Android tablets are marketed, emphasizing faster graphics or dual-core processors, and it’s quite clear that much of the Android tablet marketing can’t help you create a future outcome in your head. Old sales professionals will recognize this clearly as marketing the benefit vs. the feature. This takes benefit a step further and emphasizes open-ended future benefits beyond something very specific.
Third, repeating that derived future outcome in your head synergizes with itself. Every time you imagine the magical outcomes you could create (if only you owned the product), you amplify and build it up. You add new positive outcomes or grow the ones already in your mind. The appeal of magic inspires you to want to repeat the message in your mind again – who doesn’t want the easy, magical solution? Again, if you emphasize a specific feature or benefit, you close off the mind from wanting to go back and explore other related outcomes.
Take your own marketing messages and examine them for simplicity, derived future outcomes, and repetition synergy, then rework your messages so that they are more likely to be made into mountains by your prospective and current customers.
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Why we love the Big Bad
We love the Big Bad. This is, of course, a reference to the arch-villain in any story. Blizzard Entertainment calls them the Box Cover Villains. The Lich King. Deathwing. Sauron in Lord of the Rings. Emperor Palpatine in Star Wars. Hitler and Osama Bin Laden in real life. We love the Big Bad, because facing the big bad and fighting him, in the words of Emperor Palpatine, gives us focus, makes us stronger.
Here’s the problem with the Big Bad: they’re exceedingly rare. This is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because you don’t want world-destroying people or creatures to manifest themselves ever very often. It’s a curse because we’re always on the lookout for the Big Bad. Why is this a curse? Because most of our problems aren’t Big Bads that you can rally against.
The temperature of the oceans, for example, has gone up fairly significantly over the past 100 years from a variety of distributed causes, such as carbon in the atmosphere, depletion of important layers of the atmosphere, and generally unsustainable living. There’s a named Big Bad – climate crisis – but it’s so amorphous and unfocused that it’s hard to rally against, and in some ways, we, the “heroes”, are the villains behind it.
We want there to be a Big Bad in the economy, and to be sure, there are some people who are decidedly not team players, but the ultimate problem is that as a society, as a whole, we borrowed and continue to borrow more than we can afford to borrow. That’s the heart of the problem, and there’s no villain you can pin that to, save the one in the mirror.
In the world of business, we love Big Bads as much as we do at the movie theater. Who’s our top competitor? What’s our top competing product or service? How can we rally the troops to ever increasing productivity by making someone else the villain? As with general society, the Big Bad is exceedingly rare. The cause of our ills in the marketing department isn’t a mustachioed competing CMO, but our own incompetence at designing a marketing campaign or executing an ad campaign.
The challenge before us as marketers and citizens is to realize that most of the problems we face don’t have Big Bads. There’s no Box Cover Villain making you terrible at social media. There’s no Box Cover Villain that’s causing our government to make poor choices (though arguably you could put all of Congress on one video game box…) or us as voters to pick raving lunatics to run the country.
The uncomfortable reality is that a significant portion of the time, if we must have a Box Cover Villain, then it’s our collective picture we have to put there. Our challenge to “win” against this particular Box Cover Villain is to be awake enough, aware enough, alert enough, and alive enough to change our own actions that ultimately make us the villains as well as the heroes.
The question is: are we ready to take those steps? Are we ready to make those hard choices?
As Sir Thomas the paladin says, if it wasn’t hard, it wouldn’t be heroic.
Think today through the choices you make that contribute to your being either the villain or the hero of our world’s story.
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5 Google Currents tips to power your personal brand
Much ado has been made of Google’s new offering, Currents, which is a Flipboard-like mobile app that presents you the news. What’s not been made mention as much is how powerful this app is for consolidating your personal brand as a publisher and blogger. You can do much more than just publish your blog through it.
Here’s a few power tips I’ve found that might prove helpful.
1. Unless you’re someone who already has a recognizable logo, use your head for your edition icon – literally. It instantly draws recognition and action in the mass of Currents icons.
2. Turn on and set up your Google Analytics. Currents shows up in your Analytics as a pathed page, so go to Content > Site Content > Pages and filter for the /currents path. You’ll see exactly what people are viewing and using in it.
3. Bring in your social! Did you know you can include Google+, Facebook, and Twitter feeds? You can. Look for the RSS feeds for each service and then use Publisher to bring them in as social feeds. For example, I wired up Google+, Facebook (page), and my #the5 tweets. Important: if you use the feed selection, you will be required to verify ownership, which you can’t. If you use the social updates selection, it won’t force ownership verification.
Facebook RSS Feed
The Social Feed option
Power tip: Twitter still has RSS feeds, but they’re hidden. Premium content subscribers to my newsletter should hit the back issues and grab the tutorial for installing these manually. I’ll re-publish that tutorial this week, so if you’re not subscribed as a premium member, now might be the time.
4. 302 redirect Google’s ugly URL. No one wants to try to remember that. I redirected mine through cspenn.com/currents for easy sharing. This puts handles on it that you can easily carry around.
5. Make it obvious on your site. Currents will display it in Search, but to make sure people are getting the right edition, promote it on your site and in your social outlets with the direct link.
Of course, this wouldn’t be a marketing post if I didn’t pimp it. Please subscribe to my Google Currents edition.
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How to improve marketing ROI
Let’s talk a bit about improving marketing ROI today. How do you improve your marketing ROI? First and foremost, decide whether the outcome you want to measure is financial. A non-financial outcome, by definition, has no ROI because ROI is a financial formula. For example, if your goal is to get elected to political office, the outcome is either you are or are not elected. Unless you count bribes and “favors” as your actual outcome, you cannot by definition measure election to office with an ROI calculation. You can determine how much you spent to achieve that result, but that’s it.
So, assuming that our outcome is financial in nature, what comes next? Let’s go back to the Line of Sight Digital Marketing formula.
We know that net profit comes from margin times volume. To improve ROI, we can either move the margin lever up or the volume lever up.
There are two ways to move the volume lever up. We can either convert more people (increase action) or grow audience. There’s a catch with growing audience: without more investment of resources, you plateau fairly quickly with audience growth. You can invest more time or money to grow audience, but you have to watch your numbers like a hawk so that increased spending on audience growth doesn’t actually reduce your ROI.
The place you can move the needle much more is action. When you look at the numbers surrounding action, from clickthrough rates on emails to conversions on your website, you’re often looking at single or low double digits. We may say that a Twitter DM campaign has a highly successful conversion rate of 4%, but when you think about that, you’re effectively saying 96/100 people aren’t buying. An email campaign might have an open rate of 10%, but that’s saying 90/100 people never laid eyes on your email. There’s a tremendous amount of growth there, and is probably the first place you should look for moving the lever up on the volume side.
There are two ways to move the margin lever up. We can either increase income or reduce expenses. There’s a catch here as well! Imagine a rubber band holding these two levers together. Pull income up hard enough and the expense lever eventually comes with it. Logically, this makes sense – if you make some kind of good or service, you eventually need to hire more people to help you produce it if you want to grow your business beyond your capability to do it all yourself.
The converse is also true. Drag the expense lever down hard enough, and the income lever comes with it. You can only cut so far in expenses before you reduce your ability to create income. Logically, this also makes sense – fire everyone and you’re out of business.
As a marketer, there’s a good chance you will have little ability to change the pricing of your products and services. There’s a good chance you will have little ability to change what your company spends on salary, benefits, and other large expenses as well. Thus, if you have a directive to increase your marketing ROI, focusing on the margin side of the house is likely going to be a long and difficult uphill battle. Make changes where you can for easy increases in income or decreases in expenses, but then turn your attention back to conversion and audience growth, as these should be your domains.
Improving your marketing ROI means measuring your margin and volume, plus the subsequent subcategories. Keep an eye on your key performance indicators and attaining improved ROI should be within your reach!
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