Ask on G+ redefines be there before the sale
A long time ago, Chris Brogan coined the phrase “be there before the sale” with regard to social media. Google takes that yet another step further with the revelation of “Ask on Google+” to search results. Here’s the scenario: you search Google along your line of inquiry and don’t find anything super helpful. When you don’t, you see at the bottom of page 1 results a link asking if you want to ask your friends on Google+. Click it, the box appears, and you ask your network.
Think about the implications of this as a marketer. Why bother going to Page 2 of the results if you can ask your friends at the end of Page 1? The impact of this change is twofold:
1. Pages 2 and on are immediately less valuable as people are encouraged to ask their network first before changing pages.
2. If your customers have circled you on Google+, then when any of them use that link to ask their networks, you can effectively be the first to know about a product or service inquiry, before your competitors. Think about it: if a potential or current customer asks Google+ about, say, coffee, and you are a coffee roaster who they have circled, you will see their inquiry before they even get to a competitor’s website to fill out a contact form. If you’re fast on the draw, you’ll intercept that social search query and answer it, nabbing the business in the process.
So what must you do to take advantage of this latest social twist?
First, make sure you’re promoting your Google+ brand page in your standard communications. Let people know where it is on your site, in your emails, etc. Encourage people to circle you, and don’t be shy about it.
Second, provide ridiculous value on your Google+ page so that people stay connected to you and have a reason to share you with their networks as a company or person worth following.
Third, listen very carefully so that you intercept those requests faster than your competitors, then respond as quickly as possible with valuable help so that your prospective and current customers have no need to inquire elsewhere.
People are asking for your help right now. The question is, are you able to listen and respond as effectively as possible?
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
How I’m using Buffer to sync my social
A while back I said that I was testing out Buffer, and would let you know what I thought of it. For what I’m using it for, I think it’s a brilliant little app.
Here’s what I’m not using it for: phoning it in on Twitter. While it can do that and reasonably well (I used it for this purpose during the holidays), it’s still not going to deliver game-changing results for you, since a large part of social media is the social part – interacting with other people. Phoning it in and getting results requires you to have unbelievably awesome content worth sharing, and very few of us have that.
What am I using it for? Periodic reminders. What I’ve done with Buffer is create something of a chart that helps me lay out the basic reminder framework I’m using:
Each week for 4 weeks, I’m reminding people in my various audiences about my presence on other social networks. Last week, it was LinkedIn. This week, it’s Google+. The other networks will be represented, then I’ll likely start the cycle anew.
Why did I choose this method for using Buffer? These are the kinds of periodic reminders that are important to keep publishing if new people are joining your network. One look at the basic raw Twitter graph illustrates the necessity of these periodic reminders:
In 30 days, the network has grown by about 2,000 people. Assuming that each and every person knows who I am, what I do, and where else I post is sheer folly. Thus, Buffer provides me the opportunity to gently remind the new folks where else they can participate and interact with me. How did I pick the times to set my periodic updates? Crowdbooster provides a nice chart of when my existing audience is most active on Twitter:
Crowdbooster + Buffer + a set of standard updates is my current formula for success with the app.
How are you using Buffer?
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
Klout vs. PeerIndex: data challenge for the data junkies
Rather than just outright publishing my own conclusions, I’m going to try an experiment with you, my data junkie friends. We’ve talked about influence scores and reputation scoring systems like Klout in prior posts. We’re not going to rehash that here.
What I do want to pose to you is this: what’s the difference between Klout and PeerIndex, and which is a better indicator of influence, if any?
To that end, I present to you a simple data file. Here is a list of 15,737 Twitter handles scored by both Klout and Peerindex. For the most part, these are people who tweeted in the past month or more using the #Marketing hashtag at least once. In the data file you’ll find the following:
Klout score, PeerIndex score, Difference, Twitter Handle
Take a look at the file (it’s a text CSV). I did the boring part of the work, pulling all the scores. Now it’s up to you to do the juicy part and find the goodies. Mess around with it in the spreadsheet or data crunching tool of your choice. See what conclusions you come up with, then either post your conclusions in the comments or blog it on your own blog, linking back to this post so we can all find it.
Good luck! I’ll post my own conclusions separately after I’ve heard from you.
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
Be your own social media customer
If you want a viable long-term social media strategy, there’s one that is nearly foolproof: be your own customer. This has been phrased in many, many ways, such as eat your own dog food, etc., and for good reason: it’s true. Despite being true, however, we rarely do it.
More important, we have to expand this idea from just the product or service that you’re marketing to everything that you’re doing with your social media marketing. Think of your marketing as a service unto itself, a service that adds value to the salable goods or services you’re promoting. In that light, is your social media marketing a valuable service?
Ask yourself this: how often do you go back to check your own blog for something you wrote previously? One could argue that this is just a symptom of a variety of attention deficit issues, but it’s also a sign that you’ve stored valuable information on your blog. If you never go back to reference your own blog for yourself, it might not be valuable enough.
The same is true for your social media channels. I store links and URLs on my Facebook page in order to archive them somewhere for reference when I publish my weekly newsletter. I am my own customer – I go there to remember what I published. How often do you check your posts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Google+? Never? Your content in social media might not be valuable.
Much has been made of influence scores and retweet/share metrics, but the simplest metric of all is to look at your own behavior. If you never go back to look at your own stuff, if you find no value in what you publish, chances are that no one else does, either. Start repairing your social media marketing by publishing things that are of value to you, and you’ll automatically be publishing things that are of value to others.
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
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!
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
Social media riff-raff
Yesterday during the Social Media Plus LinkedIn session, this bit of advice was shared by the speaker and retweeted by the audience:
When I poked back at this chain of thought:
…a couple of the folks clarified a bit:
If LinkedIn or other social networks imposed an actual cost on the number of connections you were permitted to have, then I think this viewpoint might have some validity, but unless your connections are flat out spammers, then there’s no harm in keeping people in your network who aren’t exactly on target for your audience.
Allow me to illustrate some of the riff-raff in my network. Knowing me, knowing who I am and what I do, these people would probably have been culled years ago if I took the above advice.
Here we have this guy:
And this guy:
Remove them from my LinkedIn network right away, right? After all, an applications engineer and an assistant athletic director should be worthless to me as a marketing professional, yes? Not so fast. The applications engineer in 2005? That’s now Chris Brogan.
And the assistant athletic director and freelance writer? That’s now the Social Media Plus conference keynote speaker, Jason Falls.
My counter-advice to the idea of culling the riff-raff from your network is this: look at your social network like a nearly risk-free investment. You can place wild bets on all of the people asking to connect with you, and if you build relationships with them over time, some of them are not going to pan out and some of them are going to be superstars. Some, like the gentlemen above, will completely transcend what their original base of expertise was entirely – but you won’t know that today.
Here’s an analogy to close this topic out: if you planted a field full of corn seeds today, you would be a fool to immediately declare the field a loss tomorrow if none of it had turned into fully grown crops overnight. Likewise, just because your LinkedIn network isn’t full of superstars today, don’t declare it a loss and start culling the riff-raff. Have time, have patience, and work on building the relationships today that will turn into powerful friendships and business partnerships in the weeks and months to come.
If you enjoyed this, please click here and share it with your network!
Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn? If so, please subscribe right now!
Click here to read my blog on Google Currents on your mobile!
Marketing White Belt |
Watch me speak:
Attend virtually! |
I recommend: for Twitter audience building. |
Book Me to Speak
Got an event coming up? Learn why you should book me to speak!
• Download my 2012 speaking kit
•Book me to speak now!
Get Marketing White Belt
Grab my new book, Marketing White Belt: Basics for the Digital Marketer, and get better at marketing right now!
Blog Delivery
Things I recommend:
I recommend:
for Wordpress themes like this one.
I recommend:
for Twitter audience building.