MackCollier.com - Social Media Training and Consulting

Social Media is About Building Relationships

by Mack Collier

I spend a LOT of time on Twitter. For me, Twitter is an amazing tool to connect and network with other people. I know a lot of you like to use Facebook and Plus for the same reasons.

Often, we will hear that we shouldn’t be ‘wasting time’ on social media sites all day, and that we should be busy ‘getting things done’. What these people don’t understand is that being successful in using Social Media is all about building human relationships.

As I said in my previous post, last week I got to visit Bazaarvoice and present Think Like a Rockstar to approximately 75 of their employees. Additionally, this was the first time I’d presented Rockstar to a company, so I was excited about that as well. But I think it’s interesting to consider how I got to the point where I could call Bazaarvoice a client. You say it actually has taken 5 years.

In 2007, I wrote a Company Blog Checkup for Dell’s Direct2Dell blog. I gave it pretty high marks, and in the comments, both Richard Binhammer, and John Pope (who was with Dell at the time) from Dell jumped in and offered feedback, and proved that they were listening. Those comments by Dell got a relationship started with the company, and 3 years later, I was moderating the first #DellCAP event for the company!

The event lasted two days, and on the second day, Dell’s CMO joined us in the morning, who at the time was Erin Nelson, who would later accept the same position at Bazaarvoice! So that’s the connection, right? Well last week when I arrived at Bazaarvoice, Erin was telling her assistant about following me on Twitter and she said she loved my tweets because I was always tweeting about college football and giving her updates on games! So it’s not my insights into brand advocacy that Erin wanted, but the score of the Texas – Oklahoma game in the 3rd quarter

But that makes a wonderful point: Social Media is about CONNECTING with people and ESTABLISHING RELATIONSHIPS. It doesn’t matter how that is done, for example with the college football tweets, Erin is literally one of dozens of people that have told me over the last couple of years that the love my tweets about college football. Others have told me they love to watch BURN NOTICE or that they also love Dr Pepper

All of those conversations might seem like a waste of time to some people, but they are leading to real business for me, and I bet they have for many of you as well. And no, it doesn’t always happen overnight, and it often doesn’t happen when you try to ‘force’ it. It usually happens when you try to connect with other people and share with them what you have learned, and try to learn from and get to know them as well. Because Social Media is About Building Relationships.

Just like most areas of life, right?

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Tapping Into the Power of Customer Conversations With Bazaarvoice

by Mack Collier

Over the past few years I’ve discovered that two of my favorite things to do is present Think Like a Rockstar, and visit Austin, Texas. Luckily, I got to do both this week, with the added bonus of learning a lot more about an incredibly interesting tech company called Bazaarvoice. I’ve known Bazaarvoice’s CMO Erin Nelson for a couple of years now, having first met her when I worked with Dell on its first #DellCAP event while Erin was the CMO at Dell. And I’ve known BV’s Manager of Content and Social Strategy, Ian Greenleigh, for about as long. In fact, the insights that Ian provided to this post on how negative feedback online actually HELPS most brands, made the post one of the most popular ever written here.

In short, Bazaarvoice offers a suite of products to clients that do two things:

1 – Help them give their customers the ability to give feedback on products and services via reviews, ratings, etc.

2 – Helps these clients collect and interpret this feedback so that they can use it to make more informed business decisions and improve existing business processes.

Erin shares more about Bazaarvoice’s products and how they help clients in the interview at the end of this post. But I was delighted to hear the focus Bazaarvoice puts on helping clients collect information from their customers, then using that information to improve their business processes. I’ve been saying this for years (and repeated it on Wednesday while visiting BV), but the promise of social media for business lies in FEWER conversations. Meaning that the brand and its customers aren’t having two completely different conversations, but rather that both groups better understand the other, and as a result, their conversations are more similar. Which means the company can improve its marketing and communication efforts, which leads to lowered costs, and increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

While I was visiting Bazaarvoice, I was lucky enough to interview both Erin and Ian and wanted to share those with you. I think both interviews are fascinating for completely different reasons. Erin talked a bit about Bazaarvoice and its products and also offered some fascinating insights into the feedback customers leave online (for example, she explains why 4-star reviews are typically more valuable for a company than 5-star), and also talks about how brands can use the information gained from its customers online to make more informed business decisions.

Ian heads up Social and Content Strategy for Bazaarvoice, so he has a job that a lot of us would want I asked Ian to walk us through ‘A Day in the Life’, and he also tells us the very unique approach he took in getting his current position, after applying for and not getting the same job! If you are interested in becoming a Social Media Manager, you’ll definitely want to listen to our chat.

Both interviews are linked below, just click the link and it will open in a new tab for you and start playing. I was very happy to spend some time with Bazaarvoice this week, and look forward to returning to see them in April for their annual Social Summit!

Interview with Erin at Bazaarvoice

Interview with Ian at Bazaarvoice

Disclosure: Bazaarvoice paid me for my trip and to present Think Like a Rockstar, but did not pay for this post.

This was one of the first things I saw when I arrived at Bazaarvoice, so I knew it was going to be a great trip!

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IBM Study: CMOs Look to Focus on Social Media, Connecting With Brand Advocates

by Mack Collier

Not sure how I missed this, but a couple of months ago IBM released the results of a survey it did of 1,700 Chief Marketing Officers about the future of marketing, specifically the next 3-5 years. One of the questions asked was what technology CMOs plan to increase their use of over the next 3-5 years. The top three answers were:

Social Media
Customer Analytics
CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

Another question asked of the CMOs was what were their priorities for managing the shift toward digital technologies. The number one priority according to the CMOs is enhancing customer loyalty/advocacy.

The beauty of social media is that it allows smart companies to better understand their customers. Now, companies can simply monitor the conversation happening around their brand, and gain great insights into who their customers are, and what they want. This leads to greater understanding of their customers, which leads to more effective and efficient marketing. Which leads to an increase in customer advocacy, and loyalty.

Smart companies are already investing in aggressively monitoring and mining online conversations around their brand, and as a result, they are finding that participating in a conversation changes that conversation. Rockstars have always understood this, and have actively embraced their fans, and have gone out of their way to connect with them. Which is a big reason why Rockstars have fans, and companies have customers.

Finally, it seems that companies are beginning to understand the importance of understanding and connecting with their brand advocates. And in case you’re still not convinced…

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Sunday’s #Blogchat Topic: How to Amplify Your Blog’s Visibility

by Mack Collier

Thanks to Rosie Taylor for suggesting this week’s #Blogchat topic on our Facebook page.

We all want to know what we can do to make our blog more visible and build awareness for it. I think when we look at this, we need to consider what we can do on our blog, and what we can do off our blog. And I don’t want to steal anyone’s thunder, but I wanted to offer some ideas for each, and hopefully this will get you thinking as we get ready for tonight’s discussion.

What you can do on your blog to build visibility:

How can you create compelling content? What type of content is more likely to attract attention?
How can you engage with readers via comments?
How can you draw awareness to other blogs as a way to draw attention to your own?
What about bring in other bloggers to write guest posts?

What you can do off your blog to build visibility:

Are you actively commenting on your space’s more popular sites and blogs?
Are you actively commenting on your reader’s blogs?
Can you write guest posts for other bloggers?

Those are just some quick ideas. As a primer for tonight’s #Blogchat discussion, what are some other ways you can build your blog’s visibility? What has worked for you?

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IKEA Fans Ask For a Sleepover So the Company Gives Them One

by Mack Collier

Over 100,000 IKEA fans took to Facebook to create a page called “I Wanna Have a Sleepover in IKEA“, and the brand granted that wish to 100 lucky members, sending them to their signature warehouse in Essex in the UK. The fans were given the royal treatment, including snacks, massages, sleep advice from an expert, and goodie bags. A strict Pajamas-Only dress code was enforced, but unfortunately it seems that few pillow fights broke out.

This goes to the heart of something I talk about in Think Like a Rockstar: Create Something Amazing For the People That Love You. IKEA was smart enough to see that their fans had self-organized into this group, so all they had to do was find 100 lucky fans, and make the group’s dream come true.

Now to be sure, this was a BIG expense for IKEA. Even if all 100 selected fans were local, they had to outfit the store, bring in experts, plus all the goodies, manhours, etc. But when you Google ‘IKEA Facebook Sleepover 100 Essex’ you find almost 90,000 entries covering this event. That is a LOT of free publicity for IKEA, and almost all of it is positive. I’m not sure what IKEA would say the PR value of 90,000 positive articles and posts is, but I’d guess it’s probably more than what they spent on this event.

And yes, you may argue that ‘Well IKEA can do this because their customers are the Cult of IKEA!‘ Maybe one reason why IKEA has such devoted fans is BECAUSE of events like this?

Feed subscribers please click here to watch the video in the post.

HT – PSFK.

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A No-Nonsense Guide to Finding the ROI of Your Business Blog

by Mack Collier

We often make our social media efforts much harder than they have to be. For example, if your company has a blog, how do you know if it’s successful?

Oops.

Finding the value of your blogging efforts is one of the biggest issues companies face when it comes to social media. Now finding the ‘value’ is not the same as calculating ROI, but when a company asks ‘What’s the ROI of our blog?’ they usually mean ‘What’s the value?’ because unless you have access to their financials, you can’t give them an accurate ROI figure. But we’ll look at both.

First, you need to start with a solid strategy for your blogging efforts. This is the biggest mistake most blogging companies make, and without a solid strategy, you make it MUCH harder to accurately measure the success of your blogging efforts. I am working with a client now that has a business blog, and is having difficulty seeing how their blog is making ‘the needle move’. In this case, that needle that they want to move is called ‘sales’. I bet many of you are wanting your blog to move the same needle at your company.

So if we think about it, we need to use the blog as a tool to either do 1 of 2 things:

1 – Generate sales directly

2 – Move the visitor closer to a sale, via on the company website, on the phone, by carrier-pigeon, whatever.

The great thing is, now that we know how to use the blog, we can begin to craft our strategy to reach those goals. And in doing so, we can begin to measure certain metrics that will help us determine the success of our blogging efforts.

For example, let’s say I make software that helps automate a company’s social media efforts (I don’t and have no desire to, just an example). On my blog, I would probably want to focus the content to discuss how companies can improve their social media efforts, and especially the role that automation can play in that success, since I am selling a product that does just that.

Let’s also assume that I am not selling my software package on my blog, but rather on my site. So then my blog’s biggest goal becomes sending qualified leads to my website. Then once they reach the website, I need to convert them into a sale. One way to do this is to put Calls To Action in my blog posts.

For example, let’s say I write a post entitled ’5 Ways Automation Can Save Your Company’s Social Media Strategy’. This post is designed to educate the reader on the value of automating some of their social media efforts. If I do my job well, the post should open the reader’s eyes to the value of automation, and I could end the post with a Call to Action. Such as a link to my website, inviting them to check out my software package.

Then I can track how many people read that blog post, and clicked my Call to Action link, and visited the page on my website for that software package. Then I can go to the website side, and see what people did once they reached that product page on my site. Did they leave without doing anything? Did they signup for a free trial? Or did they purchase the product right there on the page?

All of this means I can now track and measure metrics associated with my goals. If I did this with every post, I might notice the following:

1 – If I write a post with a Call to Action sending visitors to my website and the software package page, an average of 50 visitors will click the CTA in the post and arrive on the website’s product page.

2 – Of those 50 visitors, 10 will signup for a free trial. I also know from past tracking that for every 10 signups I will generate one sale of the software package.

3 – Of those 50 visitors, 1 will purchase the software package directly on the website page.

So, I know that for every 50 visitors I send to the website from a CTA in a blog post, that it will result (on average) in 10 free trial signups (which average converting into 1 sale) and 1 direct sale. So for every 50 visitors I average 2 sales. Which means that if every post with a CTA averages 50 visitors sent to the website, then every post also averages 2 sales.

Whew. But by rolling up our sleeves and creating a solid strategy AND aggressively tracking our blog and website analytics, we can now accurately judge the success of our company’s blogging efforts. When the boss asks if our blog is working, we can confidently state that “Yes, every post we write with a sales-oriented call-to-action sends 50 visitors to the company website, and on average 2 of those visitors ultimately convert into a sale.

Now in order to calculate the ROI of your blog, all we need to know is 2 things:

1 – The amount of profit your company makes from each sale of your software package. And total number of sales generated from your blog in the reporting period. Let’s say this was $5,200 for the last quarter.

2 – The total amount of expense of your blogging efforts. Include all associated costs such as hosting, design, and writing costs. Let’s say this was $3,600 for the last quarter.

The ROI calculation would be ($5,200 – $3,600) / $3,600. Which would equal $1,600 / $3,600, which would equal an ROI of 44%! Not bad!

But the upshot of ALL of this is, you need to start out figuring out exactly what you want to accomplish, then develop a strategy to help you reach those goals. When you have that strategy in place THEN you can determine which metrics to measure and that will help you determine what value your blogging effort is creating for your business, as well as your blogging ROI.

1 – Create the strategy

2 – Decide on the tactics you will use to help you execute that strategy

3 – Measure metrics associated with those tactics

4 – Determine the business value of those metrics

Now, back to work!

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Stop Lying to Yourself, Your Problem Isn’t Figuring Out What to Write About…

by Mack Collier

…it’s actually writing the damn post.

You don’t need ideas, open Google Reader or join #Blogchat. You’ll have enough ideas to write posts for the next year.

The problem is, when you actually WRITE the post, then it’s real. Then you are dangerously close to publishing it. Which means suddenly everyone will see it, and read it, and judge it.

And yet, you are often the harshest judge of your own work. Too often, you assume that your post isn’t worthy of the reader, before they have a chance to dismiss it. So it stays in your Draft folder, mocking you.

You can’t ‘sell’ until you ‘ship’.

Stop assuming that you know better than your reader does. Write the damn post. Then if it bombs, you can figure out why, and make the next post better as a result. Stop writing with a perfect filter.

And if you haven’t figure it out, when I say ‘you’ need to just write the damn post, I mean *I* do

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Are Brands Finally Waking Up to the Potential of Sponsored Content?

by Mack Collier

Around this time last year, and mostly on a lark, I left a post here asking for sponsors for a Live #Blogchat at SXSW. Honestly, I didn’t expect to get any responses, but within 15 minutes of publishing my post I started receiving offers, and within an hour, my friends at 1680PR were on as the Main Sponsor of the first-ever Live #Blogchat. That would be the first of 7 Live #Blogchats held in 2011, and I’m planning on announcing the first Live #Blogchat for 2012 in just a few days.

What was really interesting was what happened next. As soon as I arrived in Austin for SXSW, everyone had 2 questions for me. The first was ‘So how does a Live #Blogchat work?’, and the second was ‘So who is 1680PR?’ Answering the first question paved the way for my getting more Live #Blogchats throughout the year. In fact, I met Joe Pulizzi at the Houston airport flying INTO Austin for SXSW, told him about the Live #Blogchat, and that began the conversation that would eventually lead to me doing a Live #Blogchat at the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame to kick off Content Marketing World.

But what was really cool was to see how everyone was interested in learning more about 1680PR. To me, this is how sponsored content should work. By joining my friends at Dell in sponsoring the first ever Live #Blogchat, Ken and the team at 1680PR were doing two things:

1 – They were helping to facilitate an event that had value to the #Blogchat community

2 – They were becoming RELEVANT to that same community in the process

I got to spend a lot of time with Ken during SXSW, and he got to meet a lot of the people I know in this space, and they got to know him. To this day, during #Blogchat on Twitter I will see Ken jump in and immediately some of the people he met during SXSW will chime in and say hi! I had so many of my friends pull me aside during SXSW and tell me how much they liked Ken, and was glad 1680PR had helped sponsor the Live #Blogchat.

Also during SXSW, I got to talk to my friend Tom Martin about how he was providing sponsored content at TalkingWithTom.com. What Tom did was go around the country interviewing some of the top thought leaders in the social media marketing space, and once a week he would post a new video interview he had done with them. And Emma sponsored the site. It was a smart move by Emma, because they got to have their brand associated with all these smart people, but they also made possible the creation of this site, which created value for others.

Tom and I have spent the last year discussing the idea of sponsored content. But not just that, but the idea of how companies could benefit more from partnering with content creators that have an established community versus simply connecting with influencers.

For example, if a brand contacts an influencer about promoting their product, the influencer may be willing to promote the product if they are properly compensated, maybe with money, or maybe with a free product.

But if a brand contacts me about sponsoring #Blogchat, my first question is ‘Will this sponsorship create value for the #Blogchat community?’ This is an important distinction, because whereas the influencer’s motivation might be in receiving the free product, my motivation is in getting money from the #Blogchat sponsorship, but also in seeing how that sponsorship can be leveraged to create more value for the #Blogchat community.

For example, I’ve begun talking to a select few brands about having them be the long-term sponsor for #Blogchat. I’m doing this for two reasons:

1 – It will give me a new source of income

2 – The income generated from the sponsorship will allow me to devote more time to building the #Blogchat brand and providing more value to its community. Which will grow the #Blogchat community, ultimately providing even more value to the sponsor.

I really think you will begin to see more brands moving toward working with content creators to sponsor their content. In fact, I’ve been talking to several other Twitter Chat hosts over the last several weeks, and many of them had either recently brought on sponsors to their Twitter chats, or were being approached by major brands about sponsorship opportunities.

I also think it makes more sense for the audience, because the content creator has a more vested interest in vetting the sponsors and making sure that bringing them on will provide more value to their readership/audience. Tom also shared with me a Business Week article on how Expedia is teaming up with bloggers to promote their site. I thought this ending passage was interesting:

Both company and bloggers say they aren’t concerned that readers may be turned off by commercial relationships between the travel agent and writers. Kim Mance, a Brooklyn, N.Y., video blogger and co-founder of Galavanting, a site aimed at female adventure travelers, says disclosure is important for readers but bloggers need to retain the mission and voice that garnered an audience in the first place. “Bloggers will miserably fail and lose their audience if they piss them off,” Mance says.

Bloggers say they’re ready to deliver travel tales and potential new Expedia customers—so long as they are compensated with exposure and cash. “I’ve spent five years traveling and building up an expertise and a following,” says Sherry Ott, a blogger from South Dakota who was among the Expedia visitors in Seattle. “I want to be able to be paid for my knowledge and for access into my audience.”

This speaks to why I think sponsored content makes so much sense. Bloggers, for example, that have built up a following, are smart enough to know that if they bring on a sponsor, and their content suffers as a result, that they will lose that following. So naturally, they only want to bring on sponsors that will bring VALUE to their following, because they want to GROW that following. Which means they can get MORE sponsors.

It really does seem like a win-win when properly executed. BTW if your company would like to talk to me about sponsoring #Blogchat on Twitter for either 3 or 6 months, please email me. Since it is a 3-6 month sponsorship, it will be a bit more, but the benefits will be greater as well versus simply sponsoring one week.

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How Much Does Social Media Cost Companies in 2012?

January 3, 2012

Two years ago I wrote a post entitled So How Much Will a Social Media Strategy Cost, which was designed to give businesses and organizations an idea of how much they should expect to pay consultants and agencies for basic social media marketing services. As you might expect, that post was insanely popular, so I [...]

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10 of My Favorite Reader Comments From 2011

December 30, 2011

It seems that every blogger is doing a ‘Best of 2011′ list on their blogs, and almost all of these posts are a list of their 5 or 10 most popular posts for the year. For me, that seems like too much horn-tootin’, and if I’m gonna do that, y’all are coming along for the [...]

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A No-Nonsense Guide to SEO and Content Creation for Bloggers

December 27, 2011

Two of the most common complaints I hear from bloggers, especially during #Blogchat is: 1 – I wish I could figure out how to post more often and create more content 2 – I wish I better understood SEO and how to optimize my posts for search I’m going to show you a ‘trick’ that [...]

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