Michael Koploy, an ERP analyst for SoftwareAdvice.com, wrote an interesting article — Adding a Pinterest-Twist to Fix Facebook Commerce — about why companies shouldn’t put a lot of effort into their Facebook pages, like setting up an ecommerce site (or as Koploy calls it, an F-commerce site — ‘F’ for Facebook).

Many experts have weighed-in on why Facebook storefronts are often unsuccessful. A large part of it simply boils down to the fact that Facebook isn’t an e-commerce site. This results in a contextual disconnect.

“Most people don’t go to Facebook wanting to purchase something,” says Josh Davis, social media strategist at ITFO Communications and blogger at LL Social. Davis believes that retailers were initially excited by the advertising potential, but are now realizing shopping-intent isn’t there.

In short, the context for F-commerce is wrong. Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru accurately likened F-commerce to “trying to sell stuff to people while they’re hanging out with their friends at the bar.”

Facebook’s core focus is clearly stated on its login page: “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.” Facebook is not about shopping. And it’s not about retailers. But Facebook is good for connecting people to each other.

Last week, we discussed why it’s a bad idea for companies to quit blogging to go with Facebook: Facebook owns the channel, you don’t. When they change their rules and their interface, you’re screwed. When you change your blog, you can decide what, where, when, and how.

But companies like Gamestop, J.C. Penny, and Nordstrom all pulled their F-commerce efforts after failing to receive any kind of pay off. And that’s just a year after investors swore up and down that F-commerce was going to put the hurt on online retail giant Amazon.com.

I hate predicting failure of new ventures, and pointing my finger and going “neener neener” at people who tried something and failed (unless they’re complete a-holes; then they deserve it). But I’m not surprised, and am rather pleased, that these companies got smart and cut their F-commerce efforts before they lost their shirts.

The big surprise they would have had — and it’s the same damn surprise that businesses who put a lot of money and effort into Facebook always get — is that one day, Facebook will decide, “we don’t want you to have X on your page any more, so we’re going to ‘improve’ the network.”

They did it with FBML in 2010 (Facebook Markup Language, which companies spent hundreds and thousands of dollars on to design these gorgeous sites). They did it with Groups, after begging organizations, companies, and loose collectives to spend all their time and effort to get people to join. And they did it with the non-Timeline iFrame pages, after people spent hundreds and thousands of dollars to recover from the whole FBML fracas.

Orangutan feet. I don't know what orangutans read for inspiration.

Facebook, like Koploy reminded us, is a place to connect. It’s a place where friends gather. We don’t hang out with our friends at the bar to buy stuff. Companies that are doing F-commerce need to pull out before they get the big F-U.

Put your money into improving the SEO of your ecommerce site, doing more social media marketing, and using Facebook for what it’s intended for: posting Instagram pictures of your feet and gag-inducing GIFs of your favorite inspirational sayings typically found inside the doors of high school lockers.

Photo credit: Abandoned storefrontColes County Tales (Flickr, Creative Commons)
Orangutan feet Macinate (Flickr, Creative Commons)

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• 

After yesterday’s post on Suggested Freelance Writing Rates — Midwest Edition, I was asked why it costs so much ($75 – $125) to write a blog post.

“It’s 350 – 450 words. How hard can it be?”

Actually, that depends. It depends on what you’re writing. If you’re writing a personal blog entry about the hamburger you enjoyed at lunch with your besties, that’s not hard at all. Takes you 15 minutes tops. But I have yet to meet anyone to hire me to ghost write their personal blog entries.

Writing corporate blog posts is a different matter. The actual wordsmithing — spinning out 350 – 450 words — is pretty straightforward. Yes, you’re paying for the writer’s expertise and skills (remember, this is a trained professional who has dedicated himself or herself to the written word), but there are other factors that go into corporate blogging. Here’s the basic process that most professional bloggers follow:

• Regular research of the client’s industry. We have to know as much as we can about your industry, reading related blogs, trade journals, and news articles.
• Interview the client. For Pro Blog Service, I interview our clients about that month’s blog posts, record the interviews, and we write the posts based on that.
• The writing. This is the act of putting the words into a word processing document.
• The editing. Any writer will tell you that the editing process is just as crucial as the actual writing. As first draft writers, most of us vary from horrible to passable. There are very, very few people who can write a great first draft. So the editing is just as difficult as putting down the actual words.
• Publishing to the blog. This includes adding photos, any outbound links, using tools for SEO like WordPress SEO and Schemas. This is the other place people have problems, because they don’t have the time to dink around with finding photos, creating links, etc.
• Promoting each blog post. You can’t just throw up a blog post and let it sit. You have to promote it to your social networks. And you have to grow those networks. A full-service professional blogger will also include that in their offerings, helping you grow your network so you can reach a bigger and more target audience

Blogging is much, much more than just spinning out the actual words, although that’s certainly the most important part of it. Without the research, the editing, and the promotion, you’re just writing in a diary about whatever randomly pops into your head.

If you’re thinking about blogging, more power to you! Please do. It’s an important part of social media marketing. But just remember that it takes about 1 – 2 hours worth of work to come up with a single blog post. That’s why you either need to hire it done, or allow for that much time in your schedule.

In future posts, I’ll be talking about what makes a good writer, and why, even though we all learned how to write in school, those skills are not enough to make an effective writer.

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• 

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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• 

Cody Miller is Pro Blog Service’s intern. He’s also a musician, and a budding social media user. So we asked him to write a blog post for musicians on how/what/where to use social media to promote themselves.

Is music more than just a hobby but a lifestyle for you? Does your band deserve to be recognized and appreciated? Not sure where to begin?

There are thousands of social media sites you can use to upload content that can help shine some light on your band. You probably know them, but these are the three best sites to get your stuff on NOW.

1. Twitter

Truthfully I myself don’t get on Twitter often but I certainly recognize the power behind it. Twitter is wildly popular and it’s a great way for you interact with other people-possibly even to a local promoter.

There are local band competitions being promoted on Twitter. You can interact with other bands who are building their own name. And you can talk with your fans for free. Promote songs and other content that you want people to see. This is the easiest way to promote, communicate, and get your name out there, because Twitter is so easy to use.

2. Facebook

The social media giant is another perfect place to share your musical content AND get feedback to use to your advantage. It’s a great place to meet promoters and start your group’s band/fan page. Upload videos, post concert dates and send invitations to fans and friends, and share information and behind-the-scenes news with everyone.

Best of all, because everyone is using it, you’re going to find most of your fans already on here. You don’t have to convince them to use old and failing tools like MySpace.

3. YouTube

You may or not be aware of it, but nearly EVERYONE uses YouTube. It’s the second largest search engine in the country, and one of the largest sites for mobile phone traffic, so people are just as likely to go there to look for you as they are Google. So here is a HUGE opportunity for your band to post videos you’ve created to promote your band. (In other words, your fans can watch your videos on their iPhones and Androids.)

Create a YouTube channel and upload all your videos on it. Grab the link, and share it as an update on your page. Record a show and upload it so fans can check out your newest work and newcomers can see what they’re missing.

4. uStream

uStream.com is a live video feed network. If you have the equipment — digital camera hooked up to a laptop running on fast wifi — you can stream an entire concert or show live. Have someone techy running the setup, and have them operate the camera like a regular TV camera so people can watch the show, even if they’re halfway around the world. Promote the show on Twitter and Facebook, and when the show’s finished, upload it to YouTube.

There are a lot more tools you can be using as a musician or band to promote yourself, but these are a good place for you to start until you get comfortable with them.

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• 

This whole “employers asking for job candidate Facebook passwords” thing is complete bullshit.

Not only is it an infringement of personal privacy, it’s unconscionable that they would make a person’s private life part of that hiring decision.

In some cases, employers are even asking current employees for their Facebook passwords as a condition of their continued employment. It was bad enough when they required employees to friend someone from the company, now they’re demanding total access to the things you wanted to keep hidden from everyone but close family.

That’s not to say that a person who is wildly inappropriate or shows poor decision making skills should still be hired — if you’re stupid enough to post your half-nude keg stand photos for the entire world to see, maybe you don’t deserve that job as a kindergarten teacher — but if you’re smart enough to keep it private, or better yet, not to put yourself in that situation in the first place, then employers shouldn’t be snooping around.

Employers are free to Google a potential candidate to see what they can find, for the same reason. If you put your stuff online online, you should be willing to stand behind it. And if you wish you had never put it out there, there are ways to hide it. Or at least make sure it’s not seen by people who think a YouTube video montage of you yelling at children and puppies makes you a horrible person.

But as far as I’m concerned, Facebook is like your house with a giant picture window. You would never parade naked in front of the open window, but you have some things that you do that you would prefer to keep private and personal. Those are the things you keep in your desk, in a closet, or under the bed.

Yet, employers asking for Facebook passwords are basically asking for the key to your house so they can root through your drawers, read your diary, flip through family photo albums, look at your bank and credit card statements. They want to see what they can find, to determine whether they should hire you in the first place, or let you keep your job. They don’t have any reason for this search. They don’t think there’s anything incriminating to find, or have any evidence that you’ve done anything wrong. They just want to see if there is.

You would never let the police put a speed tracking device on your car to tell them when you speed. You wouldn’t let them come into your house uninvited for a quick peek. Why would you give employers the open opportunity to waltz in whenever they’d like, to see if there’s anything they maybe ought to be concerned about?

Don’t give me this “if you haven’t done anything wrong, you should have nothing to fear” bullshit either. I haven’t done anything wrong, and yet I’m not going to let anyone into my life, house, or Facebook account to snoop around in the hopes they can find something incriminating.

I’ll admit that there may be some sensitive jobs that require a background check. But the thoroughness of this type of probing make Facebook snooping look like a quick drive-by glance through your front window at 30 miles an hour.

I have not met a single individual who supports this. At least no one who is facing the fear and desperation of unemployment, or the desire to keep their job. Nor anyone whose job it is to professionally argue that Facebook snooping should be allowed. If anyone thinks it’s okay to give your employer unfettered access into your personal life in order to get/keep your job, let me know.

But if you, as an employer, are going to snoop around my personal Facebook account, then by all means, let me snoop around yours. Give me your password, and I’ll poke and prod at my leisure. Maybe I won’t find anything salacious, but do you really want someone poking around to see all your private messages and the photos that you marked “friends only?”

We still have a relatively fragile economy, and people have been unemployed for months, or face a devastating financial loss because of new unemployment. For employers to dangle the golden carrot of survival in front of a candidate in exchange for the ability to snoop into a person’s private life are slimy, underhanded, and extremely unethical. There is no earthly reason, short of working for a federal agency where you’re allowed to carry a gun or know state secrets, that employers should be allowed to become electronic voyeurs into someone’s non-work life.

Companies that do so face the threat of lawsuits from disqualified job candidates, loss of corporate Facebook accounts, and possible legal action as Congress and several states seek to make this against the law.

Photo credit: Tony Fischer Photography (Flickr)

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• 

Social media has played a big part in the success of Decoder Ring Theatre, a Canadian radio theater troupe that produces audio plays reminiscent of old-time radio. Their two mainstay characters, Red Panda and Black Jack Justice live in Toronto (Red Panda during WWII, and Black Jack a few years after). Decoder Ring Theatre also produced six of my radio plays last summer.

I interviewed Decoder Ring founder and leader Gregg Taylor, and asked him about how social media has played a success in what they’ve done, and what their strategy has been over the years. These are his answers.

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

1) How much of your success do you attribute to your own social media networks vs. sheer doggedness and word of mouth?

I kind of lump our social media presence under the broad heading of “sheer doggedness and word of mouth”, so it’s hard for me to seperate the two! Really, Facebook and Twitter have evolved into ways for us to be a part of the daily lives of those listeners who want that kind of relationship.

I started both pages at the specific requests of listeners, and I do try and keep the content on each a little different, for the benefit of those who follow both pages and also our fan boards at audiodramatalk.com.

Yes, I certainly do let our corner of Facebook and Twitter know when a new episode goes up, or a new book comes out, because let’s be honest, everyone loses track of these things sometimes, even when you’re as predictable as we are (new episodes on the 1st & 15th of every month, year-round!).

But I do want our social media presence to be just that… social. Facebook offers those listeners a chance to react not just with me, but with each other, to discuss what they like and what they don’t (and of course, in the process, have us appear in the timelines of their friends)… Twitter started out as a little more “behind the scenes/this is what I’m working on right this second”, and still is that kind of sneak-peek for those interested, though by extension it also has become a “welcome to my brain”… again, it’s like the DVD extras for the really big fans. I think we pick up some new listeners that way, but for me, it’s about the enhanced experience, being a part of the extended Decoder Ring family.

2) Are you seeing a lot of traffic coming in from outside referrals (i.e. Twitter, Facebook), as opposed to repeat listeners? Where do they come from?

Listenership has been solid and steady. It’s often hard to tell where it comes from, in a way… when you’re just starting out and you get an extra 80 downloads it’s like “Holy Hanna, look at that spike!”. It has to be a pretty big event for it to really register as an abberation in our patterns these days. Well, big by our standards anyway. I think we’re getting to be big enough now to really properly understand just how tiny we are… we’re comparing ourselves to outfits with gobs of money and wondering just what we’d have to do to make an impact. There have been some serious spikes.

Roger Ebert gave us a shout-out a year or two ago, and that was nice. He tweets a LOT though. I’ve followed him on and off, and there’s no way you can check out everything he mentions unless you have a powerful amount of time on your hands. Still, I have a lot of respect for him and for him to think we were worthy of a mention was exciting.

I guess the biggest single event in terms on new listenership was when we unexpectedly got profiled by the BBC’s technology program last year… just a little piece, but it played all weekend on BBC and around the world on the world service. That was large. Our UK numbers passed Canada immediately and never looked back, which is pretty surprising, considering that the Red Panda Adventures is pretty much the only pulp hero universe in which you’ll hear about the Dieppe Raid, or have a cameo by WLM King, our wartime PM.

I guess what’s great about our listenership is that once we have someone hooked, they tend to stay with us forever, and they get that wonderful evangelical zeal that folks on the internet so often have when promoting things that they love to everyone they know. That’s what really makes us go.

3) What’s your biggest source of listeners?

America. I know that’s not exactly what you’re asking, but I think I ran on a bit in the last question. We have listeners all over the US, but seem to have some super-concentrated pockets in Washington State, in Southern California, in Texas and New York and in Iowa. Lots of Iowans. Don’t seem to have a lot in the Boston area, though. I keep shouting-out to my beloved Patriots and I rarely get a holler back. It is just possible that the crossover audience between NFL football and on-line old-time-radio-style mystery and superhero adventure programs isn’t as great as I imagine it must be. Still, never hurts. Go Pats.

4) You were recently in a radio theatre voting contest. When I last looked a few weeks ago, you were 3 – 4 TIMES ahead of the entire pack, if you had combined all their scores. How did you spread the word about that?

Yeah, I try not to do that stuff too much. I did mobilize our social media folks/fanboards to push for the Podcast Award in 2010, mostly because I was sick and tired of not winning it. Then we won it and it really changed absolutely nothing. Nice to win, made no impact on our audience. In all fairness, I’m not sure “Cultural/Arts” is really a high impact category for a lot of people. I’m sure it carries more weight in other divisions. Actually, come to think of it they never even sent us an award, or certificate or anything. Still, like I say, it was exciting to win, and I bugged people quite a bit about that. But I don’t like to do it too often.

The New Radio Theater contest was different because rather than competing for a non-existent trophy, it’s a cash prize, and I’d love to be able to give a little scratch to some of the folks who have worked so hard on the shows over the years. Really, I think the contest was devised to get people excited about either writing a script for their broadcast radio program New Radio Theater or allowing them to play something already created. It doesn’t take a prize to get me up for that, I love a little radio play wherever I can get it (Can I give a little shout out to Midnight Audio Theatre on Central Ohio’s NPR station WCBE 90.5, now playing Black Jack Justice? - Oh-me-oh, oh-my-oh, Columbus, Ohio! Thank you)

5) Did you end up winning?

Well, it actually runs until January 31st, and I’m writing this on Jan 26th, so I don’t know. (After the 31st, Decoder Ring’s play “The Albatross” ran away with online voting at 1,013 votes.)

Voting is only one part of the process. There are 6 official judges, and the on-line voting counts as a 7th judge. Who can tell? Maybe winning the popular vote in a landslide will actually work against us.

There are also some folks in the audio theatre world that don’t like what we do because we’re old-school. We’re telling stories set in the era when radio was king, but we’re not doing that because it makes us more or less marketable, we’re doing it because these are the stories we want to tell. You have to love what you do, or you can’t expect anyone else to.

We focus on the story and the characters, rather than sound effects, because those are the stories I want to write and we want to create. And also to hear. I think that love comes through in the work, and I think it’s why we have the audience that we do. In any event, there are some great shows in the running, and the judges are some very, very qualified people, I’ll respect their decision whatever it is.

6) Did you feel even a little guilty for exercising your social networks for this contest, almost like you had a social media cheat code?

No way, baby. We have an audience. That’s what everyone putting themselves out there on the Internet hopes for first, and most never find. We’ve developed a group of people who are passionate about the work that we create, that want to be involved and to help where they can, and we’ve developed networks that allow us to reach out to some of those most passionate people directly.

We’d be fools not to use it. It would be like wanting to fail. We can’t influence how the judges will vote, but if you put something out there that’s in our power to effect, by golly we’re going to go out there with our small but hardy band of internet ruffians and get it done.

7) How have you gotten most of your social media connections?

 We promote them on the website, and periodically give them an audio plug in the programs themselves, for those 50% or so of our listeners who get the programs from a podcatcher like iTunes and probably never visit the site directly. It gives our champions one more way to try and convert their friends to our cause.

8) Are they listeners who found you on social media, or are they people who found you on social media and started listening?

 I think both. It’s a bit of a longer shot on Twitter… “Hmmm… this guy seems to share my love for the wisdom of @GoddamnBatman, maybe I’ll listen to his radio show…”, but it happens.

9) How would you incorporate your social networks into a Decoder Ring production or promotion?

We have done a number of “live tweet recording days” from the studio, with various members of our ensemble popping on with comments throughout the seasion. Those were pretty fun. A lot of tweets in a short time though, and I try not to take up too much real estate on anyone’s feed.

10) What advice would you give to radio theatre and live theatre troupes who want to start using social media for their own promotions?

 Do it, but be yourself. You can’t just be out trolling for listeners/customers. You have to be giving something of yourself in the process, and it can be hard to keep up. I still haven’t gone near Google+…. really, I just haven’t had the time. I need to see some evidence that it’s going to stick before I can carve off another piece of myself for that!

11) Have you ever thought about video taping a show and editing it together for a YouTube promotion? Sort of a behind the scenes look at a Decoder Ring show? Better yet, how about uStreaming a taping one night? (I’d watch that one in a heartbeat.)

Yep. We’ve thought about it. It hasn’t happened for a few reasons (a) We run about a year ahead of releases, so it’s spoiler city (b) Making good video is a lot more time/trouble/expense than making good audio and (c) It can be a pretty big distraction when we’re already trying to get a lot done in a short time. Someday!

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• 

Too many times, people misquote Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule regarding being an expert.

“Malcolm Gladwell said you have to have 10,000 hours in a subject to be an expert,” they will often state. The problem is, they’re repeating a misquote from someone else who has never read the book.

The 10,000 hour rule is from Gladwell’s book, Outliers: The Story of Success (affiliate link), which if you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it.

The problem is, Gladwell never said you needed 10,000 hours to be an expert, you need 10,000 hours to be a phenom. To be so freakishly awesome, to be such a standout among your peers, that sometimes your first name is enough to tell people who you are: Peyton. Tiger. Venus. Kobe. Oprah.

But in the meantime, here’s what Malcolm Gladwell said about the 10,000 hour rule and being an outlier:

“In fact, by the age of twenty, the elite performers (violinists) had each totaled ten thousand hours of practice.” — p. 38

“The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert—in anything,” writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin. — p. 40

“To become a chess grandmaster also seems to take about ten years. (Only the legendary Bobby Fisher got to that elite level in less than that amount of time: it took him nine years.) And what’s ten years? Well, it’s roughly how long it takes to put in ten thousand hours of hard practice. Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.” — p. 41

So who is Gladwell talking about? Is he talking about the people who are merely “pretty good” or “very good” in their field? Is he talking about the Carson Palmer’s of the world? (Palmer is the QB for the Oakland Raiders. He’s good, but he’s no Peyton Manning.) Is he talking about the people who know enough about their subject to perform at a master’s level?

No, he’s talking about those surprising success stories who stand head and shoulders above the elite performers in their industry. That one guy who is way better than the 31 other “best quarterbacks in the country.” That one woman who fearsomely dominates all other female tennis players in the world.

“This is a book about outliers, about men and women who do things that are out of the ordinary. Over the course of the chapters ahead, I’m going to introduce you to one kind of outlier after another: to geniuses, business tycoons, rock stars, and software programmers. — p. 17

So, let me reiterate: an expert is someone who has a level of mastery about a special skill or knowledge in a particular field. They are not the freakishly good. The world class. The first-name-only celebrities. Those are the “outliers.” The “experts” are everyone else.

My point is, it doesn’t take 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become an expert. It takes less than that. Don’t get me wrong, you have to know a lot about your field. You have to have spent thousands of hours doing it. But that’s not the 10,000 hour rule.

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• 

There are days I just want to shout at somebody for all the misinformation I hear about social media. I hear all these myths and bad information being passed around the business community, because some know-nothing shyster tried to sell a business owner on social media, and cocked it up so badly, the poor guy is going to just stick with the Yellow Pages and door hangers for the next 10 years.

Here are four social media myths that, if I hear someone mention them with a straight face, I’m going to throw something heavy.

1. You can’t measure the ROI of social media.

This has got to be the biggest pile of BS I come across. And to make matters worse, I hear it from so-called professionals in this industry, who apparently have no clue that this is even possible. Olivier Blanchard just recently ranted about a recent South by Southwest panel where the audience was treated to these little nuggets of stupidity:

• There’s no ROI for measuring ROI – it’s just too difficult.
• You can’t put love and trust into a chart. Why? Because love and trust defies logical reasoning.
• Social doesn’t always need to be quantified. Its not a spreadsheet metric only – trust, relationships, advocacy.

If you’re doing social media for your anarcho-syndicalist commune, then sure, you can’t measure trust, love, or that warm squishy feeling you get when you hand someone a fistful of daisies. But if you’re doing social media for a business that gives you money, then you’d damn well better measure it. Your boss is not going to want to hear about trust and love when she asks you to justify why she just spent $30,000 on your social media campaign. How are you going to demonstrate that the $120,000 your company made was a direct result of your efforts? If your job is on the line, you’ll figure it out.

There are plenty of tools for accurately measuring this kind of thing, the least of which is Google Analytics. It’s free, fairly easy to use, and there are big books you can use to learn how to use it. There are also books about measuring social media ROI, with real formulas and techniques and everything. And I can guarantee that not one jot of ink is spent discussing how to measure trust, love, or warm squishy feelings.

Granted, asking about the ROI of social media before you ever start on a campaign is a bad question to ask, but once the campaign is up and rolling, you’d better be measuring how well you’re doing, or you’re going to be out of a job three months after you launched this thing.

Read these blog posts about how, why, and how easy it is to social media ROI:

You Don’t Get Social Media ROI Yet? C’mon, Man!
50 Things That You’re Not Measuring for ROI, But Should
Fast Company Doesn’t Know You Can Calculate Social Media ROI
Measuring Social Media vs. Traditional Media

2. Social media can replace everything

Social media is just another tool in the marketer’s toolbox. It’s not a tool that can replace everything marketers have been using for the last 100 years. As much as the hipsters like to say newspapers are dead, TV is dead, radio is dead, and any other medium that’s more than five years old is dead, those things are still viable strategies.

As long as there are people who don’t have computers or smartphones, we’ll need TV and radio advertising. As long as there are people who don’t use computers and tablets, we’ll need newspapers and magazines. There are two very large groups of people who don’t use computers, smartphones, and tablets: the poor and the elderly.

In fact, because of these two very large populations, we will still need books and libraries, print publications, the Yellow Pages, broadcast television, and FM and AM radio. Not everyone has a satellite dish, a smartphone, satellite radio, and a laptop with broadband. We need to quit making the assumption that everyone in this country does.

As long as these media channels exist, there will be a need for that type of marketing. Until then, social media is completely ineffective for those two very large populations.

3. More impressions = good, fewer impressions = bad

Marketers who still believe their TV commercials are being seen by hundreds of thousands of people hate social media. They look at the social media stats and freak out when they see that only a few thousand people came to their sites and bought anything.

What they don’t realize is that they’re really seeing the actual size of their audience. They’re getting a real glimpse of what their true customer base looks like, and not the hyperinflated numbers from advertising salespeople.

Want to do a test? Launch a TV commercial, and set up a special URL specifically for that commercial. If you sell hammers for ABC Hammers, get the domain ABCHammersonTV.com, run it only on your commercial, and see how many people actually come to it. Use your commercials to drive web traffic, and then count the results. Those are the people who were inspired enough by your commercial to gather more information. Did it cause them to buy a hammer? We don’t know. But we can measure (there’s that word again) how many people that commercial drove to the website.

Want to quantify it some more? Let them download a 10% off coupon, redeemable within the next 21 days. Then count how many people redeemed the coupon. It’s not a completely accurate measurement, but you do know how effective your commercial was in driving traffic, how effective your website was in driving coupon downloads, and how effective the coupon was in driving sales.

No, it’s not the couple million viewers you were told would see your commercial on Monday Night Football, but it’s a better picture of who liked the commercial enough to take action. There’s still no mechanism to show you how many of those commercial viewers were in the bathroom. And there’s no way of knowing whether people went to the store and bought your hammer because of that commercial.

So if you keep thinking more impressions means success and few impressions means failure, you’re going to be in for a big shock.

4. The ‘I’ in ROI stands for influence, integration, intent/should be Return On Engagement

This is the hippie tree-hugging bullshit that Jason Falls and I wrote No Bullshit Social Media against. Social media is not

I get so tired of the Return On Influence/Return On Engagement whinging from the social media purist crowd. Yes, you want people to like you. Yes, you want people to trust you. Yes, you want people to be your raving fans.

But do you know what you really want from them?

Money! Being liked and being trusted are all fine and good, but it doesn’t mean a thing if they’re not buying from you. I’ve had plenty of potential customers who trusted me, but until I had a check in my hand, they did not contribute to my bottom line.

 
Social media marketing is all about marketing. It’s a business tool. And to be a business tool, it has to make money. And to show your boss that it’s making money, you have to measure it. You may even have to show that it’s as good as, or better than, the traditional marketing tools you’re competing with. (Of course, you should be measuring the performance of all your traditional marketing tools too. You’re doing that, aren’t you?)

Until people quit spouting all this nonsensical crap about what social media can and can’t do, it’s going to be slow going for businesses to adopt it. Hopefully the “professionals” who keep spreading misinformation like these four myths will eventually stop doing what they’re doing and go back to bartending, and let the real professionals clean up the mess they’ve left.

Photo credit: Oli R (Flickr)

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Google Panda has been the bane or boon of every serious blogger and SEO professional, provided they can remember the difference between bane and boon (bane = bad; boon = good). While most regular bloggers and web people were unaffected, it was the power SEO users (and spammers) who were greatly affected by the changes. Many of the professionals saw their analytics and search engine rankings plummet after Panda was introduced.

Several days ago, Google’s newest algorithm update, 3.3 (codename: goddammit so much!), has given us 40 new changes for the month, ranging from improved local search results to improving SafeSearch results to tweaking the Turkish weather results.

Some of the major developments that affect us as bloggers — Turkish weather results notwithstanding — are:

• Improvements to freshness: We’ve applied new signals which help us surface fresh content in our results even more quickly than before.
• Consolidation of signals for spiking topics: We use a number of signals to detect when a new topic is spiking in popularity. This change consolidates some of the signals so we can rely on signals we can compute in realtime, rather than signals that need to be processed offline. This eliminates redundancy in our systems and helps to ensure we can continue to detect spiking topics as quickly as possible.
• Improved local results: We launched a new system to find results from a user’s city more reliably. Now we’re better able to detect when both queries and documents are local to the user.
• Link evaluation: We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.

(Note: these are just four of the 40. I borrowed their descriptions, and you will have to look through the entire list to find them. The one on Link Evaluation is near the bottom.)

Some basic implications I can see right off the bat:

• Freshness = regular updates. Once a week is barely going to be enough to move the needle. You may need to publish 2 – 3 times a week.
• Spiking topics means if you can stay on top of, and write about, trends the day they happen, that would help you be a big part of the conversation. Read David Meerman Scott’s ebook Newsjacking (affiliate link) for more information on how to that.
• If you have any kind of local focus, start writing about your city and naming it when you can. Taht tells Google your content is locally specific.
• Don’t knock yourself out on linking strategies. It’s important, but it’s a whooooole lot less important than it was two years ago.

This last improvement is what has a lot of people worried. We don’t know what exactly the link analysis was (Google never tells), whether it affects backlinks by shutting them down completely, turns of title tags within links, or whether they’re going to send a flaming bag of dog poo to your house if your anchor text and <H1> title tag don’t match. But you can be sure that a lot of SEO pros will be checking it out.

Tomorrow we’ll discuss five ways these four changes will (or should) affect your blog.

Photo credit: jlantzy (Flickr)

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Professional athletes may have one of the easiest times in their personal branding, but they need to take advantage of it, if they want to leverage their name, their skills, and the draw that comes from being on a pro team.

However, unless sportscasters on ESPN are talking about you going first or second in the draft, you’ve got an uphill battle to fight.

I was recently working with a young pro athlete who is still in the early stages of his career, and is starting to build his personal brand in the community. That’s smart. This is the right time to do it, and he’s starting at just the right time. But like most young athletes, you don’t have your own publicist or agent who can take care of these things for you. Or you have a team publicist who can lend you a hand, but you’ll end up doing most of this yourself.

These are the first five steps any new professional athlete, regardless of sport, team, or league, should take to grow their own personal brand.

1. Get a photo of you in action.

Whether it’s you on the court, the field, the track, or wherever — practicing or playing — get a photo of you “at the office.” You already want to be known for your particular sport, so make sure you make it part of your personal brand by making it your avatar on all your social networks. If you’re playing on a team, ask your team publicist for one. If you don’t have one, hire a professional photographer to help you out.

Make sure you get a good shot that lets people know it’s you — your uniform number, your face, or if you’re a race car driver, your car. (And frankly, if you can get a shot with you and your team’s marquis player in it — assuming that’s not already you — that’s even better.)

Speedy Dan Clarke

2. Be active on Twitter

Dan Clarke (@SpeedyDanClarke is an open wheel (IndyCar) and NASCAR truck racer in Indianapolis. He is constantly using Twitter to talk with fans who are following him (and who he’s following back), and to promote the different events where he’ll be driving. Whether it’s a race, a test, or even a course he’s trying out, Dan keeps his fans abreast of what he’s up to. The upside of this is that if he can continue to build his network of fans, he’s more likely to win sponsors so he has a ride this year, because he can show them his legions of loyal fans. Just like a book publisher who is interested in self-published authors who have already sold a lot of books, a sponsor would be interested in an athlete who can bring a lot of fans along with him or her.

3. Set up a Facebook PAGE

Not a profile. A profile is your personal page. That’s how you’re going to talk to family and friends. But you’ll want to keep your fans a healthy distance away, so set your Facebook profile to a pseudonym (e.g. use your first name and your mom’s maiden name) so only your friends can find you.

Your Facebook page is like a public profile, where you can interact with fans, but they can’t see the stuff you’re talking about with family. Be sure to communicate with your fans on a regular basis, so they can feel like you’re involved with them, but they’re not personally involved.

4. Establish a Wikipedia page.

As an athlete, you’re more likely to get a Wikipedia page accepted by the editors of Wikipedia than non-athletes will. Ask your team publicist to help you start it. Be sure they understand the rules of Wikipedia before you start the page: completely objective language. The copy needs to be written like a real encyclopedia. That means “really boring.” In other words, they can’t sound like the player profiles in the program.

5. Start a blog

A lot of people roll their eyes at this, because they hate writing, but a blog may be one of the most important personal branding tools you have. You need a blog as a place for people to find more information about you. Remember, you’re in this not only so you can become famous, but so sponsors can find you. So people who want to pay you a few thousand dollars to speak to their group can find you. So fans who want to learn more can find you.

Your best bet — hire a social media consultant for help on this — is to do the following:

1. Buy your name as a domain name from GoDaddy or Domains.com. If you can’t get your name, get your name and your uniform number: DallasClark44.com, for example.
2. Set up a free blog at WordPress.com. Better yet, get your social media person to set up a WordPress blog on an external server. (If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, just tell your social media person, “Erik says I need a self-hosted WordPress blog.” If they don’t know what that is, they’re not the ones to help you. Find someone who knows how to create WordPress blogs.
3. Point your domain at your WordPress blog. Put this domain on your card (see #6) and on any information you share with people. Remember, you want to drive traffic here — Twitter, your Facebook page, and any other networks are all used to drive traffic here.
4. Pick up the book Corporate Blogging For Dummies, and start writing about things in your professional life: training, practice, games/matches. Be sure to include photos and videos.

6. Create a Player Card

Some teams do this for their players who make a lot of public appearances. They create player cards that look like Topps baseball cards, which they sign and hand out to kids whenever they appear in public. If you’re not in one of those leagues, consider creating your own player card. Hire a graphic designer, hand them a few baseball cards, and ask them to recreate that. Put your social media properties on the back with your stats and very short bio.

While your card is not going to be a collector’s item that is as eagerly sought as a Johnny Bench rookie card, it’s going to be something that helps people remember who you are, and even how to get ahold of you later.

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