Twitter favorites power tips

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Feb 8, 2012 in Advertising, Marketing, Technology | 2 comments

When I first started working with Blue Sky Factory, I noticed something peculiar about the company’s Twitter favorites. It wasn’t actual favorite tweets at all – it was instead a collection of praise the company had received online. This was the brainchild of DJ Waldow, the community manager, and what started effectively as a content management system (because Twitter doesn’t provide search outside of a 2 week window) has become one of my favorite sales and marketing tools.

Here’s why this is powerful. In many ways, it’s just like recommendations on LinkedIn: a public set of testimonials and endorsements that other people have given you. What makes it more powerful to me than LinkedIn is that it’s a pile of tweets: very short, very compact praise that you can easily aggregate and show to any prospective customer. They can see for themselves just how many people think highly of your company (or you), and do so quickly through a very fast scan. For individual sales people and marketers, you can favorite any tweet you want, so if you don’t want to leverage a company’s entire collection of positive tweets, you can always favorite just a subset and showcase those.

Want to kick it up a notch? Take the raw text of your Twitter favorites page, clean it up a bit, and feed it to Wordle. (the process for preparing text for Wordle is outlined in this blog post)

Now you’ve got an idea of what words people are consistently using to praise you or your organization. Start using those words in your marketing materials instead of your standard marketing-speak, because what other people say about you now will resonate with the experience prospective customers should have with you.

Kick it up another notch! Using the SimplePie PHP library, add your Twitter favorites to your blog and suddenly you’ve got a curated feed of nice things people have said about you or your company available right on your website:

You’ve earned the praise already. Take these powerful methods of aggregating it and displaying it so that it can work for you to land new business, reassure and reinforce your value to existing business, and help grow your business reputation even more.

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Performance Based Social Media at Social Fresh East

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Feb 7, 2012 in Advertising, Conferences, Marketing, Presentations | 0 comments

I have the pleasure of speaking to the Social Fresh East crowd today. For those interested, here’s the slides that I’m speaking about.

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I recommend: for Twitter audience building.

Build your base to build your momentum

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Feb 7, 2012 in Advertising, Marketing, Strategy | 0 comments

One of the most important lessons I teach to my students in the social media course I teach is that it’s vitally important to build your social base. We have so many platforms on which to market that if we try to be everywhere all the time, we’ll effectively not be anywhere. This is especially true if you are budget or resource constrained and trying to make social media work for you.

How do you choose a social base? Look around at all of the social networks and figure out which one you are most comfortable working in. For some people, the way Facebook works is ideal for them. They love how Facebook’s community management features work. For some people, the way Twitter works is ideal for them. For some, it’s LinkedIn, for others it’s Google+.

The one criterion I would strongly recommend is that you pick a network that offers federated identity. These are the networks that have login capabilities on other sites – Sign in with Twitter, Sign in with Facebook, Sign in with Google, etc.

Set up an outpost on each, but then pick the one you like the most and devote most of your resources to building it up. Participate on others as needed or required, but give your energy to one to help it grow.

Why? Because the federated identity platforms allow you to move your network from place to place. Here’s an example. I hadn’t used Stumbleupon in ages, and last year I decided I’d go back and see what was still happening. It turns out that my account had been so inactive that it had been purged from their system, so I had to start fresh.

When I logged into Stumbleupon and created my profile, I was asked if I wanted to find friends from another network. I connected with Twitter and within minutes, I had built a Stumbleupon network of nearly 1,200 people. Now I could make use of that network without having to arduously build it up too.

As these networks get ever larger and more popular, your ability to be successful with them will be partly dependent on the solid base you have that you can direct and manage well. Build your base, build your momentum.

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Watch me speak: Attend virtually!

I recommend: for Twitter audience building.

When was the last time you were your customer?

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Feb 6, 2012 in Advertising, Marketing | 1 comment

When was the last time you were your customer?

You say you’ve got social media strategy. You say you’ve got great service. You say you’re customer-focused, customer-centric, and the customer is always right.

When was the last time you tested it out?

If you manage business for more than a sole proprietorship, then give your business a service test. Set up a list of a few tasks and go test out your sales and service teams. Call them up anonymously or set up a fake email account and try your internal processes out. If you work at a small business where you’d be recognized on the phone, have a friend do it for you.

“Press 1 if you would prefer to talk to a machine.”

Back in the day when I helped to run a call center, I’d have old college friends give the team a series of calls with a list of 3 tasks to accomplish:

1. Call in with a question. The correct answer the representative should give you is X. Score them 1-5 based on how close they get it right.

2. Call in requesting an application for the product. Write down the questions the representative asks you to ensure you’re qualified. At a minimum, they should ask you these 3 questions. Score them 5 points for each question they ask.

3. Email in requesting an application. A representative should respond and try to get you on the phone. Time how long it takes between your initial email and a response from a representative. Start with 30 points and deduct one point per every 5 minutes you wait. Scores can go negative!

At the end, they’d total up the number of points and email it to me. They’d call in at different times, different days, sometimes calling in and hanging up if they’d already talked to that person recently. Based on that, we’d know who was doing their jobs more or less well. Most important, we didn’t need to rely on guesswork to assess how we were doing.

Setting up a system like this isn’t difficult at all. It requires some thought about what tasks you value the most to be measured, and it does require having some friends willing to do it (or alternately, paying strangers to do it), but beyond that, it’s just a matter of having the testing pool go out and test your team.

Go out and be your customer. See if the experience you have matches what you expect your customers to have, and then make corrections as appropriate.

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Your name is your title

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Feb 3, 2012 in Advertising, Awakening, Marketing, Ninjutsu, On ko chi shin | 2 comments

Social media expert?
Marketing guru?
PR wizard?

One of the most common questions asked in the discussion about personal titles and marketing superlatives is, if we shouldn’t call ourselves experts or gurus or ninja, what should we call ourselves?

In the martial arts, there’s one title that exists at the top of the hierarchy that eclipses all others that we can look to for inspiration: the concept of meijin.

Literally, meijin means “named person”. In the context of titles, a meijin is someone who is so well-known and so respected that their name is their title. They don’t need any other title, and their name is in fact a category of its own. For example, one well-known “name as title” person is Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris needs absolutely no title – his name is his title.

Look around the digital marketing space. Does Chris Brogan need a title? Not really, no. Does Avinash Kaushik? Does Gary Vaynerchuk? Does Seth Godin? These are people whose names are their titles. Look in your own industry, your own vertical. Whose name needs no explanation?

How do you become regarded as a meijin? The answer is as simple as it is difficult: by being the absolute best at what you do until your name is synonymous with that area of expertise.

What if you need to put something else on your business cards until you’re recognized by name? Luckily, we talked about that back in October when we discussed stacking heuristics.

One final caution: avoid at all costs billing yourself as someone else. Aspiring to be the next Steve Jobs or the next Bill Gates pigeonholes your reputation as being a shadow of someone else, at best a copy, at worst a pale imitation. Even more dangerously, it confines your own mind in a prison of someone else’s thinking. Oscar Wilde said it best – be yourself, because everyone else is already taken.

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Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!

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

Watch me speak: Attend virtually!

I recommend: for Twitter audience building.