Monthly Archives: May 2009

I always seem to have to defend my opinion of Social Media, because people think I don’t think it works for marketing. That’s because, withstanding some exceptions, social media isn’t very good for marketing. It’s great for public relations and customer service, but for marketing… it just isn’t there yet.

Think about the people who go on Facebook. They go there to talk to friends or view videos or just to generally screw around. They did not show up with the intent of buying something from anyone. People who go on search engines, however, are looking for something very specific – and if what they’re looking for are concert tickets or printer ink cartridges, then you can be pretty sure they’re people looking to buy something.

So while social media does represent a massive audience, it doesn’t necessarily represent a mass of consumers – not right at that moment, anyway.

That’s where the PR angle comes in. If you create a Facebook Page or a Twitter account for your company, you can gather a fair number of people who are interested either in you or what you sell. They may be people you can get to buy something later, but right now they’re just declairing their fandom. You can also use it to speak out on negative press about you or your industry, or call out some news story that’s relevant to what you do.

But it’s important to remember none of this will sell for you, though – not directly, anyway. Getting a single conversion out of 1000 visits to your site can be pretty good for social media – depending on what it is you want them to do when they get to your site. If you’re just getting form sign ups, that can be pretty easy – and hopefully, the people filling it out are actually serious potential customers. But if you’re Twittering about your Six Sigma training, and hoping to get someone who reads it to click on over and purchase a $40,000 class for their employees… While I have no research to back it up, I don’t think you’ll get that to happen even if  a girl jumps out of the computer screen onto that hiring manager’s lap. 

Don’t make the mistake of thinking social media marketing is free, either – the site’s are free, the profiles are free, but the time invested in it can get expensive. In order to really use it so that other Twits or Facebook residents or whomever know you’re serious about it, requires a bare minimum of 15 minutes per day per profile. If you neglect it, your users will forget about you, or decide you’re just trying to spam them. (Gaining back that trust will take even more work then you had to do before you started.) 

So social media marketing will require you to dedicate yourself to it, each day, provide value to your fans and followers so they stay wtih you, and not expect a direct return on your efforts. If you run some kind of special coupon code that you only use on Twitter, great – but that’s really just tracking. Social media didn’t get you the sale, the coupon did. (Though Twitter is a great place for coupon codes!) Also early adopters like Zappos and Dell do well with this, but that train left about a year and a half ago – now every company is on Twitter or Facebook it seems, and we the users of both aren’t as impressed by this as we used to be.

My point is this: Be realistic when you decide you’re going to go on social media to promote your brand and business. Don’t do it because it’s neat and all the kids are doing it. Do it because you know it will help people remember you when the do use a search engine to find what you sell. Use it because that one angry guy your customer service department couldn’t defuse also has 30,000 followers and when he bashes you it means something. 

But don’t bet your farm on your profiles!

This is my second post in what will be a long term committment to my blog. 

This is the week that, for most bloggers interested in establishing their voice, everything seems clear and perfect. So many thoughts to share! So much advice! 

Thankfully I’ve done this twice before, so I’m ready for what happens next week: Abandonment.

I read one statistic from PC Magazine a while back that most bloggers who start writing end up abandoning their blogs after three months. And that was back when the number of blogs (at least according to Technorati) was down at a paultry 71 million or so. There are now 200 million registered blogs, with %66 of them not having been posted to in over two months.

Why? Well, writing a blog takes time. It’s not easy to dream this stuff up, and for most people just sitting and typing out thoughts for others to read is no thrill ride. (It is for me, but I’m weird.) Also, there are now a lot more vehicles for getting heard that don’t require anywhere near as much time – most people would rather Twitter or post messages to Facebook or upload pictures to Flickr than sit down and hammer out a few well thought out paragraphs.

Besides, just writing a blog isn’t enough – you also need to go out and promote it, get involved with other bloggers, build links… why do that when you can scare up a mighty Twitter following and fire off links to them?

While social media sites are great for finding people immediately and talking to them about what they’re already into, it is no replacement for a platform dedicated to what you have to say – namely a blog, but also any webpage content you post to your site. A blog gives your other social media marketing an anchor. The instant and direct messaging of social media is brilliant, but if you want to have them come back to your site and invest in you and your products, you’d better have something for them when they get there other than a lead generation form.

To be honest with you, writing a blog isn’t that hard. Which is very presumptuous of me, since you could have just read all of the above and said, “It must not be – you suck at this!”

Blogging requires a bit of time each day, yes – but it’s really about discipline and having something to share. When you think about your own business, you know it better than anyone else does – and a lot of useful information for people who could become your clients. 

The hard part will be getting others to read your blog. When you launch yours, be sure to put aside time to the kind of promotion that should go into any website. Link building is good, but taking part in the conversations happening on other blogs is even better. Also share your blog feed in as many spaces as you can find, and on occaision, share a post on you social media profiles. (But don’t overdo that – nothing’s quite the same kind of annoying as a Twitter feed that is nothing but links to your blog post.)

So that’s two posts down. If I live another 30 years, that means I only have another 10,950 posts to go. Fun!

I found that I need to keep blogging about search and social.

I did this quite a bit at my last job, but seeing as how that’s not an option anymore, I’ve decided to get back to it on my own. There are certain advantages in this – for starters, I won’t have to pussyfoot around opinions that may not be what was agreed upon at the agency.

The great disadvantage, of course, is that there isn’t any pay involved in maintaining this blog, but so it goes.

And as long as I’m writing self consciously, I may as well admit that I miss the work blog – the way it was, anyway. The first incarnation of the blog was a sort of free information service, with opinion – the way it really should be. Posts were short, easily read, and took issue with the community around it – namely, on line marketing, public relations, marketing… in short, our business.

Once the site was renovated, that sort of fell away. A lot of that had to do with getting people to write posts for it that never really wanted to. At first, I have to admit, I was happy about that – up to that point a predominant number of those posts were written by me – and not because I was a nacisist, but because I was charged with making sure the blog got material. If I didn’t write it, who would? I did what I could to incentivize writing for it, but that never entirely panned out. 

So when the new blog was created, people were tasked with writing for it. (I tried that too, but was never really good at cracking the whip.) The blog became more of a marketing platform than a repository of useful news and information. The last post I created for it was an attempt to get back to writing something fun, something others would read. Now that I’m no longer there, though, I have a feeling those kinds of posts are gone. The lead post up now is titled, “Why Consumers Love Advertising,” which is an hilariously untrue statement.

(While the author is actually a great guy I loved working with, I’m not going to post a link to it. Frankly, my social profiles were the biggest referers of traffic to the site, and since I’m not getting paid to anymore, I’d rather not send any more link love their way.)

In order to write a successful business blog, one has to consider that while your objective is to get a new customer, the person you’re reaching out to may not be entirely interested in being sold to. Your post should have something that makes them want to read – helpful news, tips, or just something about the industry that’s in some way entertaining. A hard sell on a blog is about as obnoxious as a cross country bus ride sitting next to an insurance salesman, but easier to move away from.

And you’ll get no sales from that.

Tom Hung over at PR Blogger wrote a great piece on the 5 things you should be doing if you want a successful blog, and I strongly recommend you read what he has to say – I would have, but since he’s already done it so well…