When it comes to social media, stop trying to “work the room”
May 11th
By Contributing {grow} Columnist Srinivas Rao
When I look at social media I don’t see a way to lower your cost of marketing, increase ROI, or grow your brand. What I see is access to a global networking of inspiring people.
You see, the benefits of blogging, tweeting, and social media extend far beyond the walls of your business and the depths of your pockets. When you take the approach of making friends instead of followers, the world opens up to you in a way that you never imagined possible.
A few weeks ago, I sold everything I owned and left the U.S. to move to Costa Rica with some pairs of shorts, t-shirts, a surfboard, a laptop and a camera. That’s it. I think you’ll see why concentrating on “friends” instead of “followers” has helped my journey in immeasurable ways:
A Couch to Sleep On
I recently had a chat with John Falchetto, one of my favorite new bloggers on the rise. It’s coincidental that I found an expat life coach just in time for my relocation to Costa Rica. In my chat with John he told me something that really struck me. He talked about the importance of connecting with people who are not your clients. I’m not one of John’s clients and he’s not one of mine. So you might be thinking, why connect? Because we’re interested in each other as people.
I’ve been struggling to figure out where I’m to stay during Blogworld since I’ll be in New York City for 10 days and I’m on a tight budget. A few days ago John offered me a pull-out couch in his room. So now I have a place to sleep. But I didn’t connect with John because he had a couch for me. It was because I like his story and I think what he’s up to is interesting.
A Second Family
Adjusting to life in another country can be a challenge. For me the whole expat experience has had its share of ups and downs and there are days when I feel like living the dream is more like living a nightmare. Fortunately, I’ve had somebody like Mark Harai to help ease my transition to my new life. If you spend even a few days at his house, you’ll quickly find yourself with a second family. There’s never a dull moment in his household with four kids, and his wife will make sure you are well fed. How did I find my second family? It all started because of our conversations on Twitter. What’s even more interesting is that it has actually resulted in us doing business together even though it was not our original intention.
A Suit for Blogworld
When I found I’d be speaking at Blogworld, I realized I didn’t have a suit. Just shorts, remember? When I wrote about this in a recent post, Dino Dogan offered to send me a suit so that I wouldn’t have to buy one and bring one back to Costa Rica. I don’t know how, or if, we’ll ever do business together and neither does he. But you can be sure that when I have the opportunity to return such a favor, I’ll do it no questions asked.
Conversation for Sake of Conversation
When I recently spoke with Dino, he told me one of the smartest things I’ve ever heard. He said the key to success on the social web is to completely eliminate self interest.
It seems counter-intuitive that in the process of trying to grow your blog or brand that you would eliminate self interest. But based on my experience it seems to work quite well. We get caught up in metrics, measurements, ROI, and more that we often forget about conversation for the sake of conversation. I’ll go so far as to argue that some of the greatest value is created through casual conversations.
This is where trust is created, relationships are built, and friendships are formed. It’s never about what you can get. It’s about what you can give.
The human ability to detect insincerity is amplified on the social web. When we stop trying to “work the room,” we tend to get the world handed us on a silver platter. What’s been your experience?
Srinivas Rao is a contributing writer to {grow}. You can read more of his original writing at The Skool of Life blog or listen to his podcast at BlogcastFM. Follow him on Twitter at @skooloflife
Social Slam recap: Lessons from 430 house guests
Apr 18th
I had an incredible experience last week that had quite an impact on me.
I founded and helped host (along with Social Media Club Knoxville) a social media conference called Social Slam with more than 400 attendees from 17 states and Canada. It is probably the biggest social-media-related experience of my life so I wanted to share some lessons learned. (And here is fun and lively round-up of the event from Journalist Jack Lail).
Ship it. Seth Godin writes a lot about just “shipping the product.” That was definitely the approach we took on this event. We didn’t it have it all thought out from the beginning. We had a vision for a world-class conference that was affordable and inclusive, and we just went for it. This was a bit out of my box — putting my brand on the line with such public risk.
Although the event had sold out weeks in advance, and the planning was smooth, I really could not conceptualize what was about to happen until I walked into the convention center hall and saw a room filled with 430 chairs. Here is what I said out loud: ”Holy shit.” What if this sucked? Suddenly I felt the weight of 430 house guests — many of them close friends — on my shoulders. All it would take was one messed-up wi-fi connection, one last-minute speaker illness, or a million different possibilities that were out of my control to turn anticipation into angst … or even disaster. It was a scary feeling. But as Seth says, sometimes you just have to start and push fear aside. In this case, it worked.
When things go wrong. – Of course things went wrong. There were plenty of last minute kinks to our plans but as long as we could keep the kinks under the covers it all looked perfect to participants. When you get down to the wire, you just have to overcome and get it done. There was huge value in being able to make decisions on-the-spot without having to get approval from a company or committee.
An event of this size took hundreds of hours of volunteer work to handle everything from logistics to stuffing 400 gift bags!
Empowering others. The logistics and planning for an event like this is daunting. Thankfully we had an outstanding team of volunteers led by the awesome Nicole Denton and Brenna DeLeo of the Knoxville Social Media Club. From my corporate days I learned to delegate and empower but of course it’s a little riskier in a volunteer situation. Surrounding yourself with reliable and trust-worthy partners is essential in a venture like this.
Social giveth and social taketh – People flew in from all over the country based solely on word of mouth from the social web. Our advertising budget was zero. So in that respect, social media was very generous. As you would expect, people were tweeting like mad all day but a few characters who were not even attending the event hijacked the conference hashtag for their own “comedic” agenda. Who knows why? A sad and strange way to get attention I guess? It hurt because dozens of people had sacrificed countless hours to make this event shine for our city. But it was a good experience for me because I caught a glimpse of what companies must go through when they have to watch helplessly as somebody terrorizes their brand and their hard work. But it only lasted briefly and the tweets from the people actually attending the event were awesome. From this, I have a better appreciation of the peril of having no control of your brand on the social web.
The emotion of connection. This event was a celebration on many levels but it was also a homecoming for the {grow} community. Dozens of people who are loyal readers — and who I have never previously met — came to enjoy the event. If you have read this blog for awhile, you may remember a post I wrote about Jenn Whinnem, one of my first Twitter friends. Jenn flew in from Connecticut and when I first saw her walk through the door, there were tears in my eyes. This scene was repeated many times as friend after friend came into town to join the celebration. I was surprised at how emotional this was for me. Don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t build real relationships through the social web. For most people, the networking was just as valuable as the conference content.
Author, blogger and consultant Jay Baer was a keynote speaker for the inaugural Social Slam.
The power of passion. Every speaker, panelist, moderator and worker volunteered their time and even paid their own way to present because they believed in what we were trying to accomplish — create an inclusive showcase for diverse and fresh perspectives on social media marketing. I cannot even describe how humbled I feel and indebted to these good and generous people. Yes, there is a lot of crap on the social web. But you also have the choice to surround yourself with bright lights. Here are some of the lights in my tribe that made Social Slam rock:
- Jay Baer
- Jeremy Floyd
- Anne Deeter Gallaher
- Glen Gilmore
- Amy Howell
- Jen Kane
- CK Kerley
- Billy Mitchell
- Chad Parizman
- Trey Pennington
- Shane Rhyne
- Ryan Sauers
- Jayme Soulati
- Jeremy Victor
- Tom Webster
- Brian Winter
- Deb Weinstein
Was it a success? We’re still collecting feedback, but many people commented that it was the best social media conference they have attended anywhere. We had many out of town guests who were impressed with our beautiful city of Knoxville. I’m proud that I was able to highlight deserving speakers and successfully lead this inaugural event — my primary goal. On a personal level, it was extremely rewarding to achieve something like this. It will take some time to assess what this meant for my career.
What’s next? Well, we got this ball rolling now! We’ve announced the next event for April 27, 2012 so if you missed it, mark you calendars for a truly amazing and inspirational event. And if you attended this year … well, you ain’t seen nothing yet!
Mobile Marketing — Old School! (video)
Feb 25th
This is a fun and fascinating case study. How do you use social media when your business keeps moving around from street to street? This shows how the Good Food Truck of Atlanta, GA is building a movement of passionate fans … even when they’re literally mobile!
Many thanks to Glenn Taylor and the wonderful folks from MLT Creative for piecing this together for me!
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Six ideas to get your blog out of the fog
Mar 6th
65 comments
We have an extraordinary opportunity today! Thanks to Christina Pappas, a blogger with Zmags.com, we’re going to dissect her blog as a case study! Christina came to me with this familiar question:
I joined my company in September of 2010 and one of my “missions” was to start and maintain a consistent blogging schedule. I am posting regularly (at least 1x per day) and am sticking to themes that my audience would relate to. But I cannot reach two goals: getting subscribers and getting comments. We have 2,500 customers and only 170 blog subscribers. Why such a big disconnect? Why am I creating great content for no results?
OK, let’s start digging into the problem! What do you do when your blog is in the fog?
I’m a data guy so first let’s look at the some numbers. Here are the page views of the blog B.C. (Before Christina) and A.C. (After Christina):
There are two obvious trends we can observe. Christina has had a dramatic impact on this blog, and something really weird happened in December to cause a big drop.
What happened over the holidays? The company has no idea. I have seen that kind of crazy data from Feedburner before but usually Google Analytics is pretty solid. Any opinions?
Let’s look at the blog itself.
The blog design is clean, attractive, and easy to navigate. The content is relevant, timely and well-written. The headlines are strong and Christina generally punctuates her text with sub-headings and graphics to capture attention and add visual appeal. Overall, this is a strong blog.
How is Christina promoting the blog? In a conversation with me she reported that she is:
The company has also retained an outside company to try to advise her on ideas to drive more readership and comments. The consultant recommends she take two steps:
1) Cut the number of posts she is writing from five to two and spend the extra time promoting the blog.
2) Create specific industry-specific customer “personas” and tailor posts to each persona over a period of time.
OK, the blog doctor is IN DA HOUSE! (Where is my theme music?) What should Christina do?
1) Exercise patience — First, let’s put this in perspective. Christina has increased page views on the blog by more than 100 percent and subscriptions by 28 percent in four months. Take a bow, young lady! Building a company blog is painstaking work. Be patient and tell your management not to panic. It will be OK. You’re on the right track. If you’re still stalled six months from now we can review, but for now, let’s stay the course … with a few tweaks!
2) Goals and strategy — Everything starts with strategy. All we know is that the goal is to increase comments and readership … but why? Goals should reflect the target behavior you are trying to change or influence. So I have to ask — why is getting a comment a goal? How does that move the needle for your company?
Getting comments on a company blog is extremely difficult. For example, GE has one of the best B2B blogs in the world, with dozens of people contributing to it. They get about two comments a month. So I think you need to seriously re-evaluate whether “comments” is a realistic and desirable goal. The engagement may be taking place outside of the blog.
Remember that there are many important business benefits of blogging even if you have very few comments. Don’t overlook SEO benefits, PR opportunities and other valuable benefits of your content.
3) Where are your customers? As I look at your blog, there is very little that has to do with direct customers here. Where are the articles about your customers? Case studies? Successes? Best practices? Pictures?
When I was a young PR guy, my boss made me work the midnight shift at our plant for two weeks. Why? Because I was writing a newsletter, those were my “customers,” and I had to understand them. I think Christina should follow some sales people around on calls for a week, maybe two. If that’s not practical, talk to them on the phone. Find out what the customers love, what they hate. What do the WANT to read about? What questions do they have? Answer them in blog posts. Just asking your customers about the blog will make them INTERESTED in your blog!
One of the best way to get customers to engaged is to feature them IN your blog. Make your blog a customer celebration.
4) Where are your employees? Don’t overlook the opportunity to get employees engaged and excited about your blog. Feature them too. Also, it’s time for Christina to ask for their help. There is this issue called social validation that I discuss at length in a post called Building Social Media Momentum. In short, customers are more likely to join in on engagement and comments if they see they’re not all alone on your blog. Ask your fellow employees to support you and “prime the pump” with tweets and comments.
5) Where are you? There are two conditions that usually drive comments on corporate blogs 1) involving customers and 2) having a single, strong personality write the blog. Christina is doing a good job with the content but is not putting much of her personality into it. I recommend putting Christina’s picture out there on the blog some place. Let people know who is behind the blog. That should make a difference with engagement!
6) Where’s the sizzle? The blog has the beef but it needs a little sizzle. What can Zmags do to shake it up and grab attention? How about a contest? A blog-only special? Video? Humor? A celebrity guest blogger that your customers would recognize?
Now, about those consultants. The quality of the company blog is solid. Christina seems to be handling the 4-5 posts a week easily but dropping back to 3-4 would not hurt much. Personally I would scrap the persona idea at this stage. Just talk to your customers. Get to know them. That’s a lot more fun and effective than following a script.
Well, that’s my take on it. What does the community think? What would you do if you were Christina? What did I miss?
Many thanks to Christina Pappas and the management of Zmags for allowing me to dissect their blog with no strings attached. Christina submitted this question through MLT Creative’s blogging seminar.