The number of companies that maintain blogs dropped by nearly 25% from 2010 to 2011.

That’s not a very smart move.

But it’s a growing trend. According to an article in USA Today, more companies quit blogging, go with Facebook instead, the percentage of companies on Inc. magazine’s fastest growing 500 dropped from 50% in 2010 to 37% in 2011. And only 23% of Fortune 500 companies had a blog in 2011.

Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, the UMass Dartmouth professor who wrote the report, and world-class social media academic, told USA Today that blogging may not be the panacea that businesses thought it would be.

“Blogging requires more investment. You need content regularly. And you need to think about the risk of blogging, accepting comments, liability issues, defamation,” she said.

The problem is, the companies are taking their energy and efforts to Facebook instead. That’s not a dumb strategy. After all, at 800 million+ users, you have to fish where the fish are. And there’s a whole lot of fish on Facebook.

But if you’re giving up blogging, you’re giving up so much more than a little time and energy.

Blogging is Still the Smartest Strategy

Let’s assume you can get a handle on the liability and defamation issues. Let’s assume you have bloggers who understand basic journalistic rules and know not to libel people in a blog post. If you can do that, it’s still one of the best social media strategies you’re going to be adopt for your company.

Here are five reasons why your business blog is still better than a Facebook strategy.

• Blogging wins search, Facebook does not: Right now, Facebook is blocking Google. They don’t let Google index their content, which means your Facebook content will go unseen by the search giant, which owns 75% of the search engine market. And when you consider that most of the people coming to your site will be first-time visitors, they don’t even know you have a Facebook page. But your blog is constantly being indexed by Google and the other search engines, including Bing, the search engine Facebook is working with. All the blog posts you write can be indexed by Google, and found by customers. All the Facebook stuff you cannot be indexed, and therefore goes unseen.
• Facebook is finicky, your blog is not: The only people who control Facebook is Facebook. They don’t listen to what the users want, they don’t pay attention to the fact that people don’t like Timeline. Don’t like the new news feed. Didn’t like it when they dropped FBML (Facebook Markup Language), after they spent a few thousand dollars on an FBML page. Didn’t like it when they dropped Groups in favor of Pages. So you’re especially not going to be happy if they change something else with the business page you’ve spent so much time, money, and energy on. Do you really want to spend all that time, effort, and money on something that could be gone in the blink of an eye? But you own your blog. It’s your design, your content, and your effort. You’re not subject to the design whims of someone outside the organization who doesn’t give a rip about your time, money, or energy. No one will change your blog without your permission; Facebook will change itself as often as a high school kid changes his underwear.
• Your blog is still the hub, Facebook is a spoke: Your social media campaign needs a hub that you’re going to drive all your traffic to. It’s the center of the wheel, the middle of the circle, the center of the spider web. Facebook is no more than a spoke on that wheel, or thread on the web. Facebook is no more the center of a strategy any more than Twitter is. You wouldn’t rely on Twitter to be the center of your content strategy, and the same is true with Facebook.
• Blogging is still about content, Facebook is about conversations: You’ll want to present all your big ideas, all your big plans, the answers to your big questions on your blog, not your Facebook page. For one thing, Facebook doesn’t lend itself to long-form writing — people won’t show up to Facebook, hoping to read a 500 word announcement about your new product, they’ll go to your blog. For another, Facebook is not easily searchable — you won’t get people searching Facebook with a question only you can answer, and they won’t plow through nine months of posts hoping to get the answer to their questions; your blog is easily found, and you can even search within it. Facebook is not the place people go when they want information, it’s where they go when they want to interact with other people. That’s what your blog is for.
• The pendulum will swing back the other way: Eventually, businesses are going to learn that Zuckerberg and company truly doesn’t care about the user experience in interacting with businesses. Do you know who cares? The businesses! Business who truly care what experience the users have, and whether their sites are found on Google, are the ones who will design their entire social media marketing strategy around a solid blogging and content marketing strategy, not around a channel whose design they can’t control.

Are we saying to drop Facebook from your social media plans? Not at all. Facebook is a valuable tool and a great way to reach the largest online audience possible. But blogging is a great way to target people and get them to use one of the strongest marketing tools you can possibly harness, Google.

And until Google and Facebook learn to work together and get along, you’re going to have to keep a foot firmly planted in both camps.

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• 

A lot of writers suffer from writer’s block. That big mental wall that sometimes get in the way of getting any writing done. But it doesn’t have to be permanent. Only a few times have people suffered career-ending writer’s block, but when that happens, we’ve gone beyond just plain ol’ writer’s block, and are getting into some serious performance anxiety.

Here are six sure-fire methods you can use to break through your own writer’s block.

• Carry a notebook with you at all times: I keep a little black Moleskine notebook and pen with me close at hand. Whenever I have an idea or a thought that I know I’ll want to use later, I write it down. If I have several minutes, I’ll write as much as I can about the idea that inspired me. Oftentimes, when I’m stuck for a topic or struggling with an idea, I’ll pull out the notebook and refer to what I’ve already written. Or if I’ve written enough, the material from the notebook is what I needed in the first place. I just transcribe it and clean it up.
• Write something else: Most writers I know get hung up on one particular project. They can’t write this blog post, they can’t write that article. So write something else. If you’re a professional writer, or even a persistent amateur, there’s always something else to write. So write that instead. It often gets the juices flowing, and you can break the block. When you feel it break, immediately switch over to the project you were stuck on.
• Write it in an email instead: Most writers seem to get stuck because they’re writing for posterity. They’re thinking not only of The Reader, but The Reader in 50 Years. I don’t know how many journals and notebooks I started and then trashed because I thought, “what if my grandchildren read this in 50 years” or “what if someone wants to study my writings in 100 years? What will they find?” I immediately froze up, got two entries into the journal, and then quit. I lost count of the notebooks I’ve pitched because of this.
  If this happens to you, regardless of what you’re writing, write it in an email instead. Start it out with “Dear Mom, this is something I’m working on right now.” Then write your project/article/blog post to your mom. We love our moms, and they love us. But they don’t always get what we’re working on. So write this in terms your mom will understand. Then, go back and delete the greeting, and you’ve got your piece. Stop writing for The Reader and The Future Reader. Write for yourself. And your mom. And call her once in a while, she misses you.
• Pick a different environment: I have two offices. My regular office and my favorite coffee shop. Some weeks see me in one office more than the other. And there are times that being in one place or the other is not conducive to getting work done. So I go to the other office. The change in environment is often enough to jolt me out of my stuckness. But if it doesn’t work — and I can usually feel the torpor coming on — I’ll go somewhere completely different. A different coffee shop, a friend’s office (Tip: Make sure they own the business. Don’t stop by your friend’s place inside the giant corporate building.) The new setting is usually enough to jolt me out of my complacency and get my creative juices flowing again.
• Write nonsense:I’ve never been a fan of writing exercises to get warmed up. This isn’t running. I’m not going to injure my brain if I don’t write something “creative” before I start real writing. But that doesn’t mean there’s not some validity to just writing complete and utter crap for the first 20 minutes. If you’re stuck on a particular topic, write stream-of-consciousness stuff about your subject, maybe even the piece itself. As you write, do it in an over-the-top voice and style, like Sideshow Mel from The Simpsons. As you do this, you’ll find yourself breaking through the block and starting to write some real material. But don’t delete the crap. Cut-and-paste it into another document, and then go back and read it a couple days later. You may find some nuggets worth keeping.
• Quit waiting to be inspired: Once you become a professional writer, you don’t have the luxury of having writer’s block. You also don’t have the luxury of “being inspired” or “waiting for the right moment.” Real writers don’t get inspired. Real writers plant their asses in their chairs and start writing. If the words aren’t coming, try one of the other five things I mentioned. If they still aren’t coming, put your head down, and keep writing. They’ll come to you eventually.
  Most professional writers ignore the writer’s block, because they have a job to do, and they do what they need to to get it done. There’s no such thing as an accountant’s block, where the figures just don’t add up. Or a chemist’s block, because they can’t get the formulas right. When you reach this level of writing, the words just come automatically, like breathing and eating. You may have times where your work is better, but as a professional writer, even your “good enough” should be pretty good.

What about you serious writers? How do you break through writer’s block? How do you prevent it? Has anything worked or not worked? And did any of those involve alcohol?

Update: After I wrote this post, I thought of one more method to breaking writer’s block, which I published the following day.

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• 

I don’t like Pinterest.

Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s a cool site, and I like the community it’s building, and the sharing that’s going on. I also like the back end SEO that’s happening, and what it’s doing for web traffic.

But I just don’t like it.

I’m a words guy. You know, these things you’re reading right now. They give me context. I get meaning from words that I don’t get from pictures. They express ideas and educate me. Pictures can’t do that nearly as well as words. And Pinterest, as a collection of photos, doesn’t always give me the context and meaning that I need in order to understand why you thought that particular photo was important.

As I’ve said before, a word is worth a thousand pictures. A picture of a baby has a different context and meaning for me than it does for you. Pin a picture of a baby on your board, and there could be any number of reasons why you did it. It’s your child, it’s your niece or nephew, it’s you as a baby. Whatever. Right now, it’s a picture of a baby, and I have no idea why you think it’s interesting.

“But you can read the description and board title to figure out the context,” you’re saying.

That’s right, I can read the description and title — made up of words — to figure out the context. Without your words, that’s just a picture of a baby.

Why did you think this was interesting? Where did you see this? What’s the story behind it? Is that you when you were 14 months old? Is that your nephew about to dump a bowl of cereal on the floor?

You have 500 characters to explain this all to me, but most comments I read are usually “too funny,” “WANT!”, or “that’s a deal breaker, ladies!” so I have no idea what was so interesting about the chicken sleeping in the kayak converted into a hammock.

Basically, if you’re not putting words with your photos, I have no idea what’s so important about what you just pinned, so I don’t click it, follow it, look at it, or pay a lick of attention to it.

It would be nice if Pinterest could include the websites where the photos were pinned from, or let you highlight important text to include with your pin. It would be great if people would put more than one or two words describing the photo. It’s not that hard, is it? Answer the question, “I like this because it _________” and tell everyone why that particular item caught your eye.

(For the record, writing “grapes” under a picture of grapes is not helpful. I can see they’re grapes.)

Like I said, it’s not that I think Pinterest is a bad thing. It’s a cool site, and I use it occasionally to share pictures of stuff I want (making it the most expensive Christmas list manager ever created), interesting ideas I’ve found, or funny photos and captions that made me laugh.

But as someone who thinks in words more than pictures, I need Pinterest and its users to give me a little context about what I’m seeing. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of pictures of food, clothes, and last night’s Oscars fashion.

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• 

I’ve gotten burned by being a little too optimistic and open at times, especially now that I’ve been in the social media marketing business. I share the good stuff with people, and while for the most part, it pays me back in the end, there have been a couple times where I got ripped off.

Not just taken advantage of. I’ve had revenue-generating ideas stolen because I shared them too early in a negotiation process.

When I first moved to Indianapolis, I was working with a friend, Darrin, at his marketing company, and we were pitching a possible new client. As part of our pitch, I suggested that the owner start a new off-shoot company to hire entry-level employees and train them in his methods. This would end up being a feeder company for experienced employees, rather than have to scramble around at hiring time. Sort of like a minor league baseball team feeding into a major league one.

It was a pretty good idea, even if I do say so myself. And I was proud of the suggestion, because the owner also seemed to like the idea, and I thought it was going to help us get the marketing contract.

Unfortunately, he never hired us. He never gave us a reason. He just took our proposal, and never returned our call, and was always “busy” when we called him. (My business partner, Paul, calls this the “Indiana No.”)

Fast forward to four years later, when I see the business owner in the newspaper for the brilliant idea “he had” for starting a smaller company for entry-level employees who later moved up to his company. It ended up being very successful company for him too.

How much did Darrin and I get for our idea?

$0.00

Not having learned our lesson that time, a few weeks later, we made another pitch to a local restaurant, including six ideas we wanted to execute for them, and one idea for a radio commercial. After submitting our official proposal, they said they weren’t interested, and kept the proposal.

A few months later when I went in to the restaurant, I saw that they were using five of our six ideas, and had used our radio commercial idea for a guest appearance on a local radio station.

How much did Darrin and I get for these ideas?

$0.00

Painful Lessons Learned

The lesson my friend and I learned in all of this? Give away the good stuff, but don’t give away the secret sauce.

It’s a shame too, because I fully believe in the Chris Brogan model of give away the good stuff. I don’t want to give away a nickel’s worth of free stuff to sell $100 worth of ideas. I want to give away hundreds of dollars of ideas to sell thousands.

Our point was to give away some interesting ideas in the hopes that we would get hired to actually do them and get paid for it.

Did we get hired? No. Should we have gotten the contract just because we rattled off a few good ideas? Probably not.

But it seems to me that when someone pitches you an idea, and you don’t hire that person, you also should not be allowed to steal their ideas, especially when you didn’t hire anyone else to do it either. At the very least, it’s unethical, and the people who do it are skeevy.

So I’m torn. What should I do in the future?

Should I selfishly hold on to my “secret sauce” and only share the information that anyone can find in a book? I do that now when people want to “pick my brain” in exchange for buying me lunch.

Or should I give away any idea that I come up with for a potential new client in the hopes of signing them?

On the one hand, demonstrating some of our ideas could help us win a contract. On the other hand, the people we work with are smart enough to execute an idea just based on a basic two sentence explanation. If we tell them they need milk, they’ll figure out where to find a cow.

If you’re an entrepreneur, marketer, or salesperson, what do you do? Do you trust people and “share hundreds to earn thousands?” Or do you play things close to the vest and give those ideas away only when you’ve got a signed contract in hand? How would you play it?

Photo credit:

• No Burglars sign: Johnny Grim (Flickr)
• Pile of $100 bills: 401K (Flickr

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• 

I’m always amazed — and irritated — at my colleagues who are blogging every day. I’ve tried that. I did it for a whole year once on my humor blog. By month four, I was regretting my choice. By month seven, I hated my blog. And by month 10, I longed for the sweet, sweet release of a sledgehammer to my monitor.

But I stuck it out. I made it the whole 12 months. And I saw a great increase in traffic. So much so that it is now about 80% less than what it once was, now that I’m publishing once a week. But I gained enough regular readers that publishing day (Friday) is the same level it was when I was doing the daily thing. That is, my regulars keep showing up and they keep reading. They just don’t keep coming back every day.

Yeah, you'll feel like this around the 9th month

But if you want to blog on a daily basis, here are the 10 steps I took to make sure I made it all 365 days. (And remember, “daily” means “every day,” including Sundays. Be sure to take that into account.)

1. Write certain evergreen posts that can be used anytime. Plug those in when you just can’t write that day from sickness, vacation, other plans.
2. Write all posts the day before. That gives you an extra 24 hours cushion for that time you missed a post.
3. Be prepared to use videos and photos. YouTube is a veritable cornucopia of blogging topics. Do a quick search, embed the video (when it’s permitted of course), write a few sentences of commentary, and voila!
   • Do the same thing with photos.
   • Depending on your blog platform, you may be able to email your posts in. Snap an interesting picture with your smartphone, attach it to an email, tap in a few sentences, and email it to your blog. You can always go back in later and expand it and clean it up, but at least you have the beginnings of the post.
   • (Note: Most blog platforms publish the emailed content as soon as you send it, so that won’t work to save ideas for later. Use Evernote for that.)
4. Carry around a notebook and write down ideas as you get them. Nothing is worse than an escaped idea. And if you can start sketching out notes at the same time, do it. Even go so far as to make an outline. Think about the outline on your way to and from work. Then, when you sit down at your computer, the thing is already written. You just need to type it out.
5. Go for brevity. Remember, a blog post is not a 750 word column. A post can be 400, 300, even 200 words. You don’t want to make a regular habit of writing short pithy 100 word posts, but you can slip them in once in a while.
6. Break up longer posts. Got a top 10 list of something? Turn it into two top fives. A couple months later, take each item from that top 10 list and expand on it for an additional post.
7. Set a regularly scheduled topic for certain days of the week. For example, on my humor blog Sundays were always videos, Wednesdays were always reprints of old humor columns.
8. Find other outlets in your industry that are about your chosen topic. Pull from them for inspiration. Since I wrote about some of the stuff that stupid people did, I got a lot of inspiration and ideas from Fark.com. (And let me just say, the British Town Councils are ripe for the picking for a satirical humorist.)
9. Schedule your blogging time. Make it the same time every day. If you don’t, you’ll have to…
10. …get up earlier or stay up later. This is like pro athlete training. You have to do it every day and you have to make sacrifices. That means missing sleep on one end of the day or the other, especially if you were screwing around and didn’t get it done when you should have. A few days like this, and you’ll learn to stay on schedule.

Your daily blogging goal will not succeed unless and until you commit to doing it. I don’t mean, “yeah, it sounds like a good idea,” but then it’s broken like a New Year’s resolution, by late morning on the second day. I mean, you absolutely say you’re going to do it, come hell or high water. (And then the theme to Rocky starts playing, and you find yourself dancing around at the top of your courthouse steps with a bunch of computer nerds yelling and cheering around you.)

When I made that commitment, it meant a lot of bleary-eyed posts that were written at 1:30 am and had to be polished up the following morning. It meant a lot of scrambling around to find new post ideas, and rehashing a lot of old topics. And sometimes it meant putting up some less-than-worthy posts and ideas just so I could keep going.

All in all, I’m glad I did it. I had a sense of accomplishment when I was done. It got me noticed by a lot of people, and got my name out to some new people. And I find myself being drawn back to it. This blog post marks the third business day in a row that I’ve written something on this particular blog, after being sporadic from time to time.

Will I keep it up? I don’t know. Do I have enough to say that I can keep up the momentum? Definitely. Do I have the time? That’s a tough one. I have clients to take care of.

I do know that I’m skipping weekends.

Photo credit: Kit Oates (Flickr)

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• 

The discussion and desire for an irony/sarcasm mark is one that has been making the Twitter rounds lately, and I may have accidentally stumbled upon the answer.

It seems the backward question mark, also called the rhetorical question mark or percontation point, has been the historic favorite, having been proposed by English printer Henry Denham back in 1580.

The reverse question mark, or irony mark, is used to denote irony and sarcasm.

It’s an odd coincidence — but NOT ironic — that a 430-year-old mark may just find its usage in the 21st century, thanks to modern technology.

The problem is that twitterers and emailers have had a hard time denoting sarcasm, irony, and eye rollable statements. We’ve tried the :-| and the </sarcasm> marks, but every extra character takes up valuable space in a 140 character tweet.

So in our quest to show that we’re being snarky and sarcastic, social media people have been looking for a way to show their sarcasm in as few keystrokes as possible, which is why the irony mark can solve a lot of problems.

Unfortunately, it’s not that easy to get to at the moment.

If you’re a Mac user, there’s no easy way to do it. The best way to get it is to open up the Characters box (usually command-option-T). Then search for character 061f. When it comes up, insert it or copy and paste it.

If you’re a Windows user, I believe you can type the mark this way:

1. Press and hold down the Alt key.
2. Press the + (plus) key on the numeric keypad.
3. Type one of these:
   • 2E2E
   • 61F
   • 061F

(Windows users, if this doesn’t work, please let me know. I haven’t done Windows for about 4 years, and I don’t remember how to enter Unicode.)

If you’re a Linux user, I didn’t think you guys got humor, so I don’t know if it’s even available to you. (Kidding! Just kidding! Some of my best friends are Linux users.)

Or you can just copy it here and save it somewhere else, like an Evernote document.

؟

I understand that the SarcMark is making its way into use, but unfortunately, as a Mac user, I can’t use it. Right now, it’s a Windows-only app that lets you use the SarcMark with a few keystrokes. The SarcMark looks sort of like the @ symbol, but with a period instead of the letter ‘a’ inside.

I also prefer Denham’s backward question mark because it’s historic. It’s over 430 years old, even though it was never widely used. Because of its longevity, it’s the one that many “we need an irony mark” proponents are already suggesting.

This may help people understand what irony truly is. It’s not an “odd coincidence” or “misfortune.” And it’s certainly not rain on my f—ing wedding day! Irony is when a statement conveys the opposite meaning of what you said.

So — according to Dictionary.com — if I say “that’s nice” when you tell me you got a flat tire, that’s irony. It’s not irony when you got a flat tire going to lunch.

And now, thanks to the irony mark, when I tweet you and say “that’s nice؟” you’ll know what I really meant.

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• 

We tend to be pretty passive-aggressive as a society. And social media seems to have made it worse, in some ways. Social media has made it possible for us to point out bad behavior, and we’ll often do it to a complete stranger, but we won’t do it to our friends.

I did a short (unscientific) survey last month to find out whether people would call out bad behavior on the part of strangers versus friends. I wasn’t surprised by some of the results, partly because most of the people I know are pretty nice people and not prone to being online jerks. But mostly because many respondents are from the Midwest, and we’re annoyingly nice about a lot of things.

Summary

Basically what I found is, we are more likely to forgive friends, but we will stick it to a complete stranger.

• If we are wronged by a friend, we’ll point it out privately rather than call it out.
• 40% of us will hang a stranger out to dry publicly; nearly all of us will tell someone else about it.
• Only a very few people will say or do nothing, either about a friend or a stranger’s bad behavior.

The Survey

This was a four question survey, with a series of answers that asks about responses that range from very direct (and rather jerky) to very passive (being a doormat).

For example, question #1 asked: When a friend — who uses social media — wrongs me in some way, I am more likely to:

1. Call them out BY NAME on a social network. “I can’t believe @edeckers stood me up for our meeting this morning.”
2. Point out my annoyance, but don’t mention their name. “Got stood up for a 7:30 am meeting.”
3. Send them a private message pointing out the problem. “Did you forget we had a meeting this morning?”
4. Absolutely nothing.

The Results

So would you @reply someone or set your Facebook status to call them out by name? Or would you passive-aggressively point out to the whole world that some unnamed jerkface missed your morning meeting?

I wasn’t that surprised by the results. Most people are nice enough to keep our gripes private, and to not air our grievances in public, and the numbers bore this out. Out of 107 responses to Question 1:

• 80 people (74.7%) said they would email their friend privately to point out their problems.
• 12 people (11.2%) would call out the incident, but not name the person.
• 11 people (10.2%) would do absolutely nothing at all.
• 4 people (3%) would call that person out by name.

I was intrigued that the number of people who would do absolutely nothing to tell the other person what they had done was nearly the same as the number of people who would point out the bad behavior but not name any names.

When I’m in public, and someone does something annoying, I am more likely to:

Friends vs. Strangers

Question #2 was about whether people would point out something annoying that someone else did, but not to them: When I’m in public, and someone does something annoying, I am more likely to:

1. Point out their bad behavior on a social network, including pictures or video. “Check out this jerkwad being an ass to his wife.”
2. Point out their bad behavior, but give them their anonymity. “Some guy next to me is being an ass to his wife.”
3. Email a friend privately and relay the story to them.
4. Absolutely nothing.

The results were a little more dramatic this time compared to what people would say to their friends. Out of 106 responses (someone missed this one):

• 57 people (53.8%) said they would email a friend privately to tell them about the stranger’s behavior.
• 32 people (30.2%) said they would call out this stranger’s behavior, and include pictures or videos
• 11 people (10.3%) would call out the behavior, but not include any identifying information.
• 6 people (5.7%) would do absolutely nothing.

Observations

This is the stuff that intrigues me, and really makes me wish I had paid better attention in stats class in grad school. Because there are some interesting correlations between what we consider acceptable behavior toward friends versus complete strangers.

• Most people (nearly 75%) will tell friends privately about their own bad behavior, but 40.5% of these people will publicly call out bad behavior from a stranger.
• Compare that to 3% of people who would call out a friend by name on Twitter or Facebook. This tells me that most people are nice, and a few can be rather cut-throat and nasty.
• Surprisingly, more people — 30.2% vs. 10.3% — will point an accusing finger at a stranger by including evidence of their bad behavior than will give them anonymity.
• 94.3% of people will tell someone about a stranger’s bad behavior, whether it’s publicly or via email.
• The number of people who would point out bad behavior but protect the person’s identity in either situation is nearly the same: 10.3% will talk about a stranger versus 11.2% who will call out, but not identify, friends (11 people vs. 12 people).
• The percentage of people who will do nothing when a friend wrongs them versus a stranger nearly doubled — 10.2% versus 5.7% respectively, or 11 versus 6 people.

Conclusion

So what does all of this mean? Are we people with a strong sense of moral outrage who will point out the failings of other people, but only when they’re not anyone we know? And do we hold back out of fear of retribution or respect for our friends’ feelings? Or do we have an overwhelming sense of schadenfreude, but refrain from doing it at inappropriate moments?

What about you? What do you think? What conclusions can you draw from this study? What do you think this tells us about ourselves, as it relates to social media?

The rest of the questions:

Question #3: When I am having an argument with a friend or family member, I will start/continue the discussion on a social network.

• Yes (2 people)
• No (105 people)

Question #4: Which social network do you use the most?

• Twitter (51 people)
• Facebook (50)
• LinkedIn (5)
• Google+ (1)
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Author : Erik Deckers  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Copyright Year : 2011  •  Headline : Calling Out Bad Behavior via Social Media  •  Keywords : social media, bad behavior, survey, study, Twitter, Facebook  • 

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Let’s say you work for a large country music festival in Prince Edward Island, Canada, and you want to quantify the value of your social network so you can get sponsors for it. Okay, this may only apply to one of you in the entire world, but the ideas are transferable to anyone who wants [...]

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]]> Quantify the Value of Social Media for a Music or Arts Festival

Let’s say you work for a large country music festival in Prince Edward Island, Canada, and you want to quantify the value of your social network so you can get sponsors for it.

Okay, this may only apply to one of you in the entire world, but the ideas are transferable to anyone who wants to determine the value of their social network, so you can sell it to sponsors and advertisers.

Kim Doyle (@Kim_Doyle) works for the Cavendish Beach Music Festival, which is held every July. I emailed a response to her and then figured it would make a good blog post, especially since I love going to music and art festivals, and am hoping one of them will arrange an onsite consulting gig at the festival. (I’m just sayin’.)

What is the Value of a Social Network?

Basically, the statement you want to be able to make to your sponsors is “our network will have X value to you.”



Pemberton Music Festival

This is a little tough for a new network, because it has no “value,” since it’s still unproven. But an established network has more value, because you know how big it can get, you’ve already seen what it can do, and you’ve been delivering clicks and eyeballs to your other social properties.

We can’t say for certain what value the network will be until AFTER the festival happens. Next year, you can demonstrate last year’s numbers. And if you’ve been doing it for a few years, you can show growth. But it’s hard to say, our network will deliver X visitors.

That’s because you need to be able to trace the interactions and transactions from your network to the sponsor’s properties, and they need to trace what happens from there. But if they’re not doing any monitoring or measuring themselves, then they have no idea what those visitors are worth. You can only show them raw numbers, but it’s up to them to demonstrate the value.

Measuring the Social Media Traffic

1) Show them how you can track all the visitors to your website, all the members of your social network, and measure the amount of time they spend interacting with the site and with each other.

You’ll do this through Google Analytics (# of visitors, time on site, # of pages visited), Klout score (especially your influence and reach), Facebook analytics, and Bitly (# of links clicked).

Include links on your blog (“Please visit our sponsors who make this possible. The more you visit, the more they support us.“), and count the number of times people click those links. Post links to their sites via Twitter (“we want to thank Floaty Bits Bottled Water for supporting Cavendish Beach Music. Visit them here.”)

If you can show those numbers, you can show sponsors what you can deliver. If this is a new venture, start measuring the size of your network, plot its growth, and see if you can start driving traffic to your site in order to show potential.

2) Show them the demographics of who they will be reaching. If you can know a few demographics of the people who come to your festival, you can show sponsors why you’re going to reach them better than traditional mass media.

For example, if a big part of your audience falls within Generation Y, you can find articles and studies that show a lot of Generation Y doesn’t watch TV, they Tivo it and skip commercials, or they watch a lot of YouTube videos on their mobile phones. So create promotional videos, put them on YouTube with a sponsor’s logo in the bottom right corner just like on TV.

See how many different ways you can drive traffic to the video, and measure each channel to see what drove the most traffic (use different Bitly links per source, 1 for Twitter, 1 for Facebook, 1 for the blog, etc.) Measuring that traffic will give a sponsor an idea of the kind of traffic you’ll be able to drive for them.

3) Remind them that they are going to be reaching a niche audience in a way that no one else can: they will reach a large group of people who are passionate about your festival and that music/art. But unlike the festival-only sponsors, they’ll be reaching them long before and long after the festival ends.

And not in the “your logo will be on the t-shirt” way of reaching them.

But if you’re sending out tweets that point to videos with a sponsor’s logo on it, and those fans watch the videos to see who will be playing, or to see a recap of the last festival, those sponsors get more exposure than the ones who were only visible during the festival itself. And any links from the YouTube page to the sponsor’s page can have a major positive impact on their search engine placement.

Consider doing a daily/nightly recap of the festival each day. Treat it like a little newscast where a “reporter” is on scene (film it with a high-def digital camera, not a mobile phone), interviewing artists and fans, showing a few seconds of the artist playing, and then putting it all into a YouTube video (complete with sponsor logo). Tweet that out a few times the next day, let people access it via QR code, and put it on Facebook for the fans who couldn’t make it, and count the traffic there too.

These are just a few ways music and arts festivals can find a sponsor specifically for their social media marketing and social networking efforts. These kinds of affinity groups can be a marketing goldmine for marketers because they’re reaching a dedicated niche audience who has an affinity for that festival, and are more inclined to support people who support something they love.

Photo credit: theburied.life

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Author : Erik Deckers  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Copyright Year : 2011  •  Headline : Quantify the Value of Social Media for a Music or Arts Festival  •  Keywords : social network, social media marketing, music festival, arts festival  • 

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]]> http://problogservice.com/2011/10/20/quantify-the-value-of-social-media-for-music-arts-festival/feed/ 2 http://problogservice.com/2011/09/13/a-humor-writing-secret-let-people-make-the-connection/ http://problogservice.com/2011/09/13/a-humor-writing-secret-let-people-make-the-connection/#comments Tue, 13 Sep 2011 17:00:45 +0000 Erik Deckers http://problogservice.com/?p=4165

A Humor Writing Secret – Let People Make the Connection

People say humor writing is hard. It’s not that hard. Not if you know the formula. Yes, there are actually steps you can follow to write humor. (Now, writing humor well is another topic entirely. For that, you’ll need years of practice spent studying humor and language.) Humor is based on a number of different [...]

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]]> A Humor Writing Secret – Let People Make the Connection

People say humor writing is hard. It’s not that hard. Not if you know the formula.

Yes, there are actually steps you can follow to write humor.

(Now, writing humor well is another topic entirely. For that, you’ll need years of practice spent studying humor and language.)

Humor is based on a number of different things that all have to happen at the same time, chief among them is letting people make the connection in their own brains (there’s also Recognition and Surprise, but we’ll discuss those later). If the reader can make that connection on there own, something is funny. If they don’t make it, because they’re unfamiliar with the topic, the joke dies, and you lose the laugh.

This is why you should never explain jokes or repeat them. The connection, and the surprise that comes with it, are gone, and so is the opportunity to laugh.

Here’s an example:



If you watch Family Guy, you’ll get this, and it should have made you at least chuckle. If you don’t, you don’t know who this is, and you’ll never get the joke.

So for you Family Guy viewers, why was it funny? Because a few things all happened at the same time:

1. You recognized the character Bruce from Family Guy. You know what his catchphrase, and you know how he sounds. (Recognition)
2. You read the text, and seeing “Oh no” triggered his voice in your head. (Connection)
3. As you read the rest of the text, you realized you did exactly what it says. (Surprise)

If those three things happened — all at once, mind you — the joke scores and you laughed. But if you didn’t recognize Bruce, or you don’t know what he sounds like, or you’ve already seen this before, there’s no laugh.

To make a joke score, whether you’re telling it or writing it, you need to let people make a connection in their own minds.

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Author : Erik Deckers  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Copyright Year : 2011  •  Headline : A Humor Writing Secret - Let People Make the Connection  •  Keywords : humor writing, Family guy, humor, psychology  • 

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]]> http://problogservice.com/2011/09/13/a-humor-writing-secret-let-people-make-the-connection/feed/ 1 http://problogservice.com/2011/09/12/use-the-words-other-people-use-not-the-ones-you-use/ http://problogservice.com/2011/09/12/use-the-words-other-people-use-not-the-ones-you-use/#comments Mon, 12 Sep 2011 12:00:35 +0000 Erik Deckers http://problogservice.com/?p=4157

Copywriters, Use the Words Other People Use, Not the Ones You Use

Do you know what audio theater is? Does it make you think of something to do with speakers at a movie theater? Or maybe it’s a subset of home theater equipment. Or maybe you’re supposed to go to a play and shut your eyes. It’s none of those. It’s what we used to call radio [...]

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]]> Copywriters, Use the Words Other People Use, Not the Ones You Use

Do you know what audio theater is? Does it make you think of something to do with speakers at a movie theater? Or maybe it’s a subset of home theater equipment. Or maybe you’re supposed to go to a play and shut your eyes.

It’s none of those. It’s what we used to call radio theater. (Or radio theatre, if you’re Canadian or British. Or a snooty purist.)



Cast of Decoder Ring Theatre, an audio theatre company in Toronto.

You know what radio theater is, right? Remember when Ralph and Randy sat in front of the big giant radio and listened to Little Orphan Annie? We all know what that is, even the people who only hear about it from their grandparents.

But the people who actually do radio theater want to call it “audio theater” instead. Why? Because people don’t listen to the plays on the radio anymore, they listen to them on CD players, iPods, computers, car stereos, etc.

So in order to be more accurate, they changed the name of the art form to more accurately reflect what it is that they produce.

And lost out on a large portion of their potential audience.

There are still plenty of people who used to listen to radio theater with money to spend, but they don’t spend it on the entertainment form from their childhoods because they don’t know it’s called “audio theater” now. Companies like Decoder Ring Theatre have worked hard to overcome this hurdle by being one of the most progressive and dedicated audio theatre troupes I’ve ever seen, embracing social media and Internet marketing, as well as podcasting. (Full disclosure: Decoder Ring Theatre produced and aired six of my Slick Bracer radio plays this summer.) But a lot of other companies have only seen a fraction of this success, and I believe it’s primarily because of this language disconnect between what is “correct” and what is “best.”

How many times have companies harmed their marketing efforts by insisting people call a term by what they want to call it, not what the customers want to call it? How many times have government agencies lost the respect and credibility they worked for, because someone who knows nothing about public communication insisted the agency use the accurate term, not the best term? How many news programs get laughed at because they try to change the commonly accepted term to something that better suits their political biases?

• An agricultural equipment company I know calls its products by the term they want to use, rather than the more common term their customer uses. This is evidenced by the 1,200 Google searches for their term, and the 20,000+ searches for the common term. While they may rank well for their chosen term, they don’t rank at all for the term their potential customers are using nearly 8 times more often.
• When the H1N1 epidemic flu first started, the public was calling it “swine flu,” but the media managed — with a lot of work — to get people to start calling it H1N1, because it was harming the pork industry. But the government agencies wanted to call it the human flu, and flu pandemic. Regardless of what they wanted to call it, the media ignored them
• Fox News’ insistence on calling suicide bombers “homicide bombers,” as per the Bush White House, made them a laughing stalk among journalists and news watchers.

If you’re not sure whether people are using your terms or theirs, go to Google’s Keyword Tool and put in your term and any industry terms you can think of. See which terms have the most global (worldwide) searches and the most local (US) searches. The ones that win are the ones most people are using, and the ones you should be focusing on.

Update: Deleted “Audio” from “Decoder Ring Audio Theatre” above, because despite being a loyal listener for 5 years, and now a contributor, I still can’t get their name right.

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Author : Erik Deckers  •  Content Location : Indianapolis, IN  •  Copyright Year : 2011  •  Headline : Copywriters, Use the Words Other People Use, Not the Ones You Use  •  Keywords : writing, copywriting, language, search marketing, internet marketing  • 

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