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Two Rules for Markeitng

May 14, 2009 By 1 Comment

In marketing there are only really two rules:

    1. Do something (legal).
    2. Do it better next time.

      Since only about 20% of companies have a blog, the vast majority of companies are breaking rule one.  Of the 20% that do have a blog, rule 2 is a problem, probably because it’s hard to get posts online with a full business schedule.  One key to getting long term ROI from your blog is to focus on continuous improvement.  Here are a few places you can look to improve:

      Repeat Visitors: Is the number of repeat visitors going up or is it stuck?  Repeat visits are key to building traffic, and with traffic comes leads and sales.

      Engagement: What percentage of your visitors make a comment, email you or share an article? Are they just reading or are they participating?

      Links: How often are your articles referenced by other bloggers and mentioned on social networks and forums?  Links are critical to getting traffic and higher rank on Google because they show your site is a trusted authority.

      Quality: What grade would an English professor give your posts? Are you getting straight A’s or not?

      Conversions: Are you consistently getting leads from every article you post? Is that number trending up or down?

      Topic Effectiveness: Look at how well your blog performs based on the topic you write about.  Eliminate under performers.

      What do you think the most important metrics are to help drive continuous improvement on your blog?

      Mike Seidle is currently the CTO of Virtual Payment Systems, Inc, and is a one of the founders of Professional Blog Service. Mike currently serves on Professional Blog Service’s board of directors.

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        Filed Under: Blogging, Business Blogging Content Tagged With: , ,

        Research Desk: Twitter Spam

        April 30, 2009 By Leave a Comment

        Twitter Spam has been a topic of fevered discussion for at least the past year, from a number of different writers and social media gurus.

        Before we get into the details, it’s important to note that the team at Twitter does a lot to cut back on spam. In fact, the most vile kind of tweetspams containing links to malicious code are actively discovered and removed by the twitter staff.

        What’s left is:
        Behavioral Spam – tweets that are annoying because they are part of a behavioral pattern. The best example is the dreaded direct message with a link to a get rich quick scheme. Behavioral spams annoy because of how the message is sent. A new kind of behavioral spam –– paid tweets –– are beginning to show up in the stream.

        Content Spam – tweets that are pushed out you really, really could live with out. Links to pornography, affiliate marketing tweets and so on. Content spam on twitter is annoying because of what the tweet says or links to.

        It’s also important to understand a couple of things about Twitter:

        1. The most effective way to gain followers on Twitter is celebrity. If you aren’t on the A list, then your best bet to get lots of followers is refollowing (which yields 200-400 new followers per day even with the current daily follow caps) and participating in the conversation.  Twitterazis – Don’t get upset.Refollowing is one of the most cited forms of Twitter Spam, and while it’s effective, it’s generally frowned upon.
        2. Twitter is a conversational social network. People join and engage to be a part of the conversation. Since Twitter does not set the rules on what the conversation is about like a discussion forum, nearly anything goes.
        3. Twitter makes it easy to follow and stop following people, so silencing a spammer is pretty easy until you’re following so many people you can’t track them all. This is a problem because 200-300 users is probably too many.

        Mike Seidle is currently the CTO of Virtual Payment Systems, Inc, and is a one of the founders of Professional Blog Service. Mike currently serves on Professional Blog Service’s board of directors.

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          Filed Under: All Posts, Social Networks, Twitter

          Blogs are the Center of the Universe

          April 29, 2009 By Leave a Comment

          I love social media experts. There’s one born exactly every 0.017 seconds, and they all have great opinions that prove Dirty Harry’s second most famous quote right. One piece of advice they like to give is:

          “You should not blog, at least not right away.”

          Take it from a social media practitioner (I’m not a “social media expert” that is a title for an “interactive user” who has hung out a shingle), blogs are important. In fact, blogs are the center of the social media universe. Why?

          Blogs are the root source of content for nearly everything.

          If you plan on doing anything meaningful in social media, you have to have a landing point. Preferably one you can measure and is engaging. Often times you need a place to break a story.  Other times you need somewhere you can bring together ideas.  Blogs are perfect for this.

          Mike Seidle is currently the CTO of Virtual Payment Systems, Inc, and is a one of the founders of Professional Blog Service. Mike currently serves on Professional Blog Service’s board of directors.

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            Filed Under: All Posts, Blog ROI, Blogging, Business Blogging Content, Social Media, Social Networks, Twitter Tagged With: , , ,

            Best Practices… AREN’T

            April 22, 2009 By 1 Comment

            Recently, I read a book called “Be Unreasonable” which made a point that resonated with me. The author, Paul Lemberg, decries the age old reliance on “best practices” and convinced me, as the title of this post states, that best practices… aren’t.

            How’s that?

            Think about it… “Best Practice is an idea that asserts that there is a technique, method, process, activity, incentive or reward that is more effective at delivering a particular outcome than any other technique, method, process, etc.” (from Wiktionary)

            Best practices for any given business are assumed to work in other similar businesses. While this may be true (or not) the danger is, once best practices are adopted, innovation stops, testing takes a back seat, and “ant mentality” begins.

            As we all know, ants like to follow each other. We always assume that the ant at the front of the line knows where he is going. However, as I was catching a dose of NPR the other day I heard scientists had stumbled upon an entire colony of ants who were following each other in one giant circle. In a matter of days the entire ant colony starves to death.

            It occurred to me that relying on so called best practices can lead a company in a similar situation.

            Not only can you get caught erroneously following another company’s lead, but relying on a set of best practices might “trick” you into permanently following your old semi-successful (or unsuccessful) self… all the while thinking you are on your way to the top.

            Instead of Best Practices

            No, I am not about to give you a set of best practices for avoiding best practices. Rather, I’ll tell you what works for us.

            We test new ideas, track returns and keep the operating manual light.

            For example, the world of social marketing is full of well intentioned purists who think a Facebook profile set up solely for the purpose of marketing is an outrageous social faux pas, or at the very least… NOT Best Practice. Personally, I think we will begin to see more and more successful “engineered” Facebook marketing campaigns that are entertaining or compelling enough to be acceptable to the general audience. If we relied on conventional best practices, we would not test our intuition, and, miss out on a great innovative success story for a client.

            Bottom line is… If you have joined the bandwagon that is social marketing, don’t let ANYONE strap you down to a set of guidelines or a list of tasks. There are no rules that are hard and fast correct for every person. Learn from what’s worked for others but create your own path.

            Mike Seidle is currently the CTO of Virtual Payment Systems, Inc, and is a one of the founders of Professional Blog Service. Mike currently serves on Professional Blog Service’s board of directors.

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              Filed Under: Blogging, Opinion, ProBlogService, Social Media, Social Networks Tagged With: , , , ,

              Research Desk: Thousands of Twitter Follwers Quickly

              April 21, 2009 By Leave a Comment
              Results of refollowing

              Image via CrunchBase

              Ok, so you’ve unfollowed that guy who sent you the get 16,000 friends in 30 days direct message. Think he’s gone for good? Probably not. See getting lots of followers on Twitter really isn’t that tough (or for that matter, LinkedIn, MySpace or Facebook).  Collecting friends is simply a behavior – much like an insect doing a mating ritual or mining gold for your World of Warcraft game.

              It’s simply all about repeating a successful behavior over and over and over and over again.  On Twitter this behavior is called refollowing, and it is very common, especially when people decide, for whatever reason, having 36,000 followers might be useful.

              Refollowing growth compared to normal growth.

              Refollowing growth compared to normal growth.

              Refollowing is also one of the biggest Twitter annoyances – we polled 95 people to find out what behaviors they considered spam, and refollowing far was the most commonly cited annoyance. That said, refollowing works – it’s the perfect behavior for getting friends. It works for building large profiles. It works for building out targeted friend lists (more on that later). There are three reasons it works:

              1. Somewhere between 18-22% of the poeple you follow will follow you back. Of remaining 82-78% if you follow them again, about 16-20% will follow you back… and so on.
              2. There’s no way to tell if someone has followed you before. Add to that Twitter’s occasional glitches, and people are quick to follow people that may have “fell off” their following list.  The only way Twitter gives you to stop refollowing is to block the other party.
              3. You don’t have a lot of options to build big friend lists if you are not already a celebrity (I suppose having 36,000 followers would make you feel like a celeb, though).

              There are many ways to implement refollowing.  You can do so manually, you can use tools like Mr. Tweet.  You can do what I did to test refollowing and use an iOpus iMacro to automate following and a tool like Twitter Karma to automate unfollowing (if you are not doing refollowing, TwitterKarma is a great way to clean out people who you follow, who are not following you).

              Here is how refollowing works – in three different versions.

              Here’s How Refollowing Works (For Follower List Building)

              1. I follow a whole bunch of people.
              2. Wait
              3. About 20% will follow me back.
              4. Unfollow the ones that don’t follow back.
              5. Start the process over.

              Here’s How the Amateur Spammers Do It

              1. I follow a whole bunch of people.
              2. Wait
              3. About 20% will follow me back.  Send an automatic direct message to sell super risky get rich quick scheme.
              4. Unfollow the ones that don’t follow back.
              5. Start the process over.

              Here’s How the Professional Spammers Do It

              1. Get a big follower list.
              2. Unfollow your followers.
              3. Follow them again.
              4. About 38% will refollow you.
              5. Send auto direct message for new affiliate offer.
              6. Refollow the remaing 62% and repeat steps 7 and 8 as needed.

              Ok, So Can Refollowing be Stopped?
              It would be hard to stop refollowing without breaking Twitter.               At the end of March, Twitter did do a few things to slow refollowing down. First, they implemented a cap that only allows you to follow 2000 people until 1800 people follow you. Then you can follow about 200 more people than follow you. The caps result is slowing the maximum rate you can grow an account by refollowing to about 400 people per day.

              Now the question is, what legitimate use to you have for 36,000 followers? Hmm.  And that leads us to our next research desk topic: Twitter Spam.

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              Mike Seidle is currently the CTO of Virtual Payment Systems, Inc, and is a one of the founders of Professional Blog Service. Mike currently serves on Professional Blog Service’s board of directors.

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                Filed Under: All Posts, Research Desk, Twitter Tagged With: , ,

                Connect, Converse and Share – 3 Steps to Internet Marketing Success

                April 17, 2009 By 4 Comments

                If you’re planning on using social media to attract sales leads, you have to know how to use it. You could spend months dissecting the subject and poring over Internet Marketing books and .pdfs or you could refine it down to 3 basic steps (use your best William Shatner imitation for these):

                Connect. Converse. Share.

                Connect

                The first step with any social media strategy is going to be collecting and connecting. You want to start by attracting prospects, potential customers and contacts and essentially building that base. This one is pretty obvious. You can’t converse or share unless you have someone to converse and share with.

                Here’s an example: I run a business and I have a lot of connections. Over the last 15 years, I’ve built up even more online. About a year ago, I connected with a fellow named Doug. I didn’t know him, he just found me on Twitter and started following me. I thought, “okay, Hi Doug,” followed him back and left it at that. We connected.

                Converse

                The second part is conversing and this is really going to depend on the medium. The tone of conversation on LinkedIn, for example, is drastically different than the tone on Twitter.

                So, find a way to talk to this audience that’s both appropriate and engaging. And remember, the verb here is “converse,” not “speak.” Social media is a two-way street.

                And what about Doug? Well, a week later, Doug replied to one of my posts with a great question. I retweeted it, responded and we started talking. It turns out that Doug’s a pretty cool guy. And so, we conversed.

                Share

                Doug was asking about blogging for business, so I referred him to an article on my blog. What do you know? I have some expertise to share.

                Let’s say you’re a musician. What should you be doing with social media? Sharing your music. Now, let’s say you’re an accountant, what should you be doing? Sharing your accounting expertise. The point being, you don’t have to be a rock star to share your talents. If you have experience in a field, then start blogging about it and start sharing it. (As an added bonus, the more you share, the more you’ll learn, and the more of an expert you’ll become.)

                Sharing is really linked into conversing and it’s also a great way to reach out and attract more connections. Why? Because those connections want your expertise or talent. In the end, this creates a nice feedback loop.

                Today, Doug’s both a friend and a client. Not everyone you connect with, converse with or share with is going to become a customer, obviously. But Doug is one of several clients who “found” me this way. So, yes, lead generation and sales can be done online, but you need a strategy

                And it doesn’t get much simpler than: Connect. Converse. Share.

                Mike Seidle is currently the CTO of Virtual Payment Systems, Inc, and is a one of the founders of Professional Blog Service. Mike currently serves on Professional Blog Service’s board of directors.

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                  Filed Under: Blogging, Lead Generation, Social Media, Social Networks Tagged With: , , , ,

                  Three Different Kinds of Online Communities

                  April 13, 2009 By 2 Comments

                  Something hit me several weeks ago as I was preparing to speak to the Women Business Owners of Michiana. There is an easy way to understand social media sites without getting technical and using a lot of buzzwords like “microblog.” Social media sites fall into three simple categories:

                  Connection Centric

                  Sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace all focus on who you know. The goal is to connect with friends and business contacts. Conversations happen because members of these sites have common interests or histories.

                  Conversation Centric

                  Places like Twitter, Identi.ca and even old school discussion forums and mailing lists are where the community is all about the conversation. People connect for one simple reason: they want to talk about what is being talked about.

                  Sharing Centric

                  Sites where you share talent or expertise like Flickr, YouTube, Scribd and SlideShare. Sharing centric networks let you share what you do or what you know and the networking and conversation happens because of what you share.

                  What drives success on each of these kinds of networks is directly related to the the category they fall in:

                  Connection Centric: Quantity and quality of your contacts drive network growth. Want to get the little 500 icon on LinkedIn? Invite more people with common ground to connect.
                  Conversation Centric: Quality and quantity of your contribution to the conversation drive network growth. Growing your followers on Twitter is easy: just tweet more often about things that people like.
                  Sharing Centric: Again, quality and quantity of what you share drives your network’s growth. Want more followers on Digg? Either post more interesting links or post more often.

                  Mike Seidle is currently the CTO of Virtual Payment Systems, Inc, and is a one of the founders of Professional Blog Service. Mike currently serves on Professional Blog Service’s board of directors.

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                    Filed Under: Social Media, Social Networks, Tools Tagged With: ,

                    More on Twitter Clickthrough Rates: Auto Direct Messages

                    April 3, 2009 By Leave a Comment

                    Ok, so why is Twitter hot? I’ll steer clear of the social media, viral, swarm theory stuff and share one reason.  Twitter is hot is Twitter clickthrough rates are through the roof high.  High clicktrhough rates indicate that people are Earlier this year, we released a report on an experiment we did at Professional Blog Service where we determined that Twitter clickthrough rates were about four percent (actually, almost exactly 4%). 

                    Now the next big question: Why do people send automatic Direct Messages (DMs) in Twitter?

                    Note to Social Media Experts: I’m not trying to say doing auto DMs is a good thing or a bad thing.  I’m just presenting some facts.  As Jack Welch once said, “Know the facts and act on them.”

                    Another note to Social Media Experts: When I see a lot of experts say something is a rule, that immedietly makes me want to go do a little research as much of the advice that self-professed social media experts put out should be tagged fish story, urban myth or sea story (these should never be believe unless accompanied with photographic evidence)  (BTW, the sea story link is an incredible story with actual photos about an aviator who landed an Intruder attack plane on a carrier with his navigator half ejected). 

                    Here’s the story:  Auto DMs get on average a  3.772% clickthrough rate, too.  I’ll post the data and some pretty charts and graphs in a follow up to this post, but in short, we tested auto dms with four Twitter profiles and found that there was very little variation between profiles in clickthrough rate.

                    Ok, so what does it mean? 
                    If I make 10,000 new followers, 372 of them will click on whatever link I send them in an automatic thanks for following me message.  The funny part is when you use a URL shortner like bit.ly, people don’t even have any idea what you are having them click on. 

                    Ok, so what else does it mean?
                    If you aren’t building a presence on Twitter for your key people, brands and company, you are waiting for your ship at the airport.  More this l

                    Mike Seidle is currently the CTO of Virtual Payment Systems, Inc, and is a one of the founders of Professional Blog Service. Mike currently serves on Professional Blog Service’s board of directors.

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                      Top 5 Presentation Blunders

                      March 31, 2009 By 4 Comments

                      Just imagine your audience naked. Practice in front of the mirror. Don’t wear brand new shoes on presentation day.

                      Sound familiar? We’ve all heard our profs and bosses utter these classic bits of advice on public speaking. Even if they do have our best interests at heart, no gem of advice—or mirror or comfortable shoes—can prepare us for the unexpected. And the unexpected is bound to happen when it’s least convenient…say, in front of all the company’s VPs or during that six-figure project pitch.

                      Recently, I asked LinkedIn LinkingIndiana members about the worst presentation blunders they’d witnessed. We’ve all experienced some public speaking catastrophes, no matter which side of the mic we’re on. The stories that make us laugh or cringe (mostly cringe). We can use these stories to stay just ahead of the unexpected curve.

                      5. Was that supposed to be funny? Ken S. advised hiring a comedian to present the keynote address at a company’s formal awards banquet. Instead of letting everyone in on the joke, the company president made no mention of the jester’s real intent, leaving his audience wondering whether they should laugh or start implementing his bizarre business advice on Monday. Ken S. said the company spent the next week trying to explain the gaffe to 600 employees. The moral: Tell people who the speaker is. Don’t keep big surprises when you don’t need to.

                      4. Your presentation got me all choked up. Gilles D. remembered a highly competitive interview process when one job candidate took a big gulp from his mug, choked, and then showered the hiring panel’s thousand-dollar suits with a mouthful of coffee spray. After a stunned moment, the panel just asked the next candidate to begin, abandoning Mr. Coffee to leave without a word.The moral: Take only small sips. Drink only water. Better yet, don’t drink anything.

                      3. No hablo Maltese? Rebecca M. was new in her supervisor job when she went out on a limb to get approval for an expensive training video. During her first presentation of the video to the senior team, the lights dimmed, the screen flickered, and then…none of the actors spoke in English. Rebecca says the only valuable information her audience took from the presentation was a long chat about which language it was.The moral: Screen your video before you buy it. Screen it again before you show it.

                      2. Do as I say, not as I do. IT issues are the playground of Murphy’s Law when it comes to presentations, but maybe a faulty LCD connection would have benefited Tom A. He remembers setting up to do some training for internal regional staff when a file he’d left open on his laptop flashed clearly onto the screen. The document his colleagues saw was his recently updated résumé.The moral: Spend 30 minutes going over your computer and making it presentation-ready –- close everything, put desktop files into a folder.

                      1. Getting intimate with your audience. It may sound like the urban legend of the conference circuit, but the response from a number of LinkedIn witnesses brings truth to the stories. I’ll flesh this one out with three simple words: wireless mic, bathroom.The moral: Remove your mic before you head to the bathroom.

                      The lessons here are pretty clear: be prepared and always remember to remove your mic. The real benefit of these stories is the connection they’ve fostered among the two dozen LinkedIn users who’ve responded.

                      Thanks to an off-the-wall question, we now have something in common: we like to laugh at others’ misfortune.

                      Or more accurately, we like to laugh at our own more.

                      Many of us pointed the finger at our own personal presentation gaffes. What links us is a common experience, but not one that we’d be likely to find on each other’s résumés or professional histories. By asking an off-topic question, we open ourselves to new groups. We can make genuine connections and grow our network by going beyond the standard, expected inquiries.

                      This idea is something I’ll keep in mind next time I’m in front of a group—whether we’re live and in person at that conference hall or swimming in a sea of social network profiles.

                      Anybody out there know how to break in a pair of new shoes before my presentation on Friday?

                      Mike Seidle is currently the CTO of Virtual Payment Systems, Inc, and is a one of the founders of Professional Blog Service. Mike currently serves on Professional Blog Service’s board of directors.

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                        Filed Under: Opinion, Presentations Tagged With: , , ,

                        Social Media: What You Say Matters

                        March 23, 2009 By 1 Comment
                        Be Careful What You Tweet
                        Be Careful What You Tweet

                        Be Careful What You Tweet

                        It’s interesting how many people think that what they say in the big conversation either is or should be exempt from consideration when big decisions are being made – like the decision to hire you or contract your firm. Setting aside politics for a moment, simple emotional outbursts like this have great impact:

                        Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.

                        To see what happened to this poor twitterer, there’s more to the story here: How to Tweet Your Way Out of a Job « I’m Not Actually a Geek

                        Or take what happened to this poor FedEx employee from Ketchum who decided to trash Memphis on Twitter when he got to town. This poor guy got crucified and he didn’t even say the word Memphis:

                        True confession but I’m in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say “I would die if I had to live here!”

                        The result was everyone in this poor guy’s chain of command was told about the incident and how little they appreciated it. (there’s so much more to the story – Be Careful What You Post)

                        So, if people are that fickle about fairly harmless statements, what happens when you say something a little more emotionally charged?  Ask this 19-year-old resident of Athens Tennessee who found himself charged with inciting to riot for an emotional outburst on MySpace (Top Stories: MySpace.Com Death Threats – www.newschannel9.com).

                        The moral of the story is that you have to remember that no matter if it’s Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or a local Ning group that what you say is recorded forever and very public. That freedom of speech thing does not protect others from using what you say to make decisions, especially the ones that affect you personally the most.

                        Mike Seidle is currently the CTO of Virtual Payment Systems, Inc, and is a one of the founders of Professional Blog Service. Mike currently serves on Professional Blog Service’s board of directors.

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                          Author :  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Headline : Social Media: What You Say Matters  •  Keywords : socialmedia, Twitter  • 
                          Filed Under: Social Media, Social Networks Tagged With: ,
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