Check out the graph on the left. The curves represent different ideas and different starting points. If you start with 10,000 fans and have an idea that on average nets .8 new people per generation, that means that 10,000 people will pass it on to 8000 people, and then 6400 people, etc. That’s yellow on the graph. Pretty soon, it dies out.
On the other hand, if you start with 100 people (99% less!) and the idea is twice as good (1.5 net passalong) it doesn’t take long before you overtake the other plan. (the green). That’s not even including the compounding of new people getting you people.
But wait! If your idea is just a little more viral, a 1.7 passalong, wow, huge results. Infinity, here we come. That’s the purple (of course.)
We have analyzed data for 13 countries, for business buyers, and even for voters. My colleagues and I have done profiles for over a hundred clients, profiling Walmart shoppers, non-profit donors, and doctors. In all that time, only one thing has been bugging me: there was no place for Twitter. We fixed that today:
I like free content as much as anyone else on the web … but this is perhaps a price too high to pay.
. . .
. . .
Note: you can minimize the ad – I understand. But by default it wasn’t. This is definitely interruption marketing.
(I was going to link to this permission marketing story as well, but there’s a 10-second interstitial ad.) I guess I did link to it after all … but consider yourself warned.)
1. A day-long workshop that engages 10-40 people (employees and stakeholders in a client organization) in a learning and brainstorming process that helps participants develop a stronger understanding of social media tools and strategies.
2. A workshop report summarizing the long list of ideas generated by the workshop (typically 50-100 ideas).
3. An options document presenting 3-6 options for social media projects. These options typically synthesize the ideas prioritized workshop participants, distilling and enhancing each option into a summary concept that our team thinks has strong potential.
This is an apocryphal quote – and I can’t find the source – but I’ve heard Alexandra Samuel talk about the default state of a social media marketing campaign being “fail” … mostly because it ain’t easy.
But why?
I recently read a great list by Darren Houle at Communicopia. In brief, he lists 5 reasons for social media marketing failure:
Lack of organizational buy-in to company culture
Lack of organizational tie-in to company goals
Short-term objectives
Lack of planning for the inevitable sticky situations that will arise
Quitting after the first failure … “we tried that, it didn’t work”
The reality is the same one facing those who want to get rich quick, become famous quick, become an instant expert, or go from 90-pound weakling to 240-pound Schwarzenegger: it does occasionally happen, but only fools plan on it.
Social media marketing campaigns that are successful over the long term arise out of a company culture, mission, and vision that is conducive to openness, creativity, responsiveness, humor, and change. This takes time. This takes effort. It’s not as easy has hiring an SEO firm and writing a check.
The biggest clue
Successful social media marketing campaigns aren’t campaigns at all. What do I mean?
I’m simply saying that they’re not episodic, they’re not short-term, and they’re not something that you can pick and one day and throw away another day … like a magazine ad or a TV spot.
Successful social media marketing, like all great marketing, tells a story that draws in an authentic way on the larger, longer story of a company or organization. It’s a chapter in a book, an act in a play. There was one before, there’ll be one after.
The biggest question – as in all marketing – becomes: is your organization’s story worth listening to?
Well in the wake of the Ashton Kutcher 1 million followers on Twitter event, BusinessWeek is making a big deal about celebrities powering social networks.
Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr win big when celebrities participate; no wonder they’re wooing famous users.
While it’s self-evident that fans follow stars … it’s also obvious that many joiners are also quitters. I was wondering if the masses of extra users that flood on to an online service are major contributors to social network drop-out.
Currently, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent.
Turns out the Ashton Kutcher effect is NOT related to the poor Twitter retention numbers. As Nielsen discovered by tracking users during and after the Oprah experiment,
For most of the past 12 months, pre-Oprah, Twitter has languished below 30 percent retention.
In fact, Ashton Kutcher and Oprah are contributing to social media stickiness and enhancing retention.
Alas and alack! What are we social media aficionados to do?
Apparently our passions are curbing our potential – heavy Facebook use translates into a grade level drop at the college level.
We knew that, though. After all, if you’re taking your attention away from your studies, or work, something is going to suffer.
Here’s the best part of the article:
If you use Facebook, you are probably driven by the inane status updates that spew out of your friends across your pages. The joy of a muffin, the pictures of a party where everyone got drunk and dressed up like a slutty leprechaun, and the obligatory question that hopes to solicit a comment because you want to make sure someone in your network is reading your pathetic attempts at making the minutiae of your existence seem interesting. It is the equivalent of Vogon poetry, odes to green putty found in one’s arm putty.
To understand the Vogon poetry bit, you’d have to read some Douglas Adams. But anyone can enjoy the “pathetic attempts at making the minutiae of your existence seem interesting.” Love it!
Well, Billy Bob (it’s difficult to take anyone with who retains that moniker as an adult seriously) had a bit of a trantrum on camera during an interview with Jian Ghomeshi, host of the CBC radio show Q. Ghomeshi mentioned – horror of horrors – that BB had a previous career in acting. BB’s response was to reprise Joaquin Phoenix’s disastrous Letterman appearance, answering “I don’t know” to questions as obvious as how long the band has been together, and going on a long monologue about a toy building magazine he read as a child when asked what his musical preferences were.
Watch the whole trainwreck interview here:
After bad-mouthing Canadian audiences – and just clearly being a petulant jerk during the interview – Billy Bob was booed at his first Canadian show.
Now, he’s pulled out of all the remaining Canadian dates:
Billy Bob Thornton — who hit a sour note during a disastrous CBC radio interview Wednesday — has cancelled his band’s remaining Canadian shows.
Whatever the impact of those shows, and whatever the impact of BB’s performance on Canadian fans and audiences … the bigger impact is probably south of the border, where the YouTube video is also getting major attention. Many of the comments on the Q blog are obviously from Americans. The YouTube video already has almost 1.2 million views.
Way to go, Billy. Life is lived in public these days … and a moment’s bad temper can color people’s impressions of you for a long time.
I hate gossip rags at the checkout counter, and my opinion is no different when the medium is a blog. But I love this post on 8 things bloggers can learn from Perez Hilton by Marko Saric.
The fact is, Perez Hilton is a fantastic success story. According to Saric, here’s how he got there:
Find a topic there is an audience for
Find a topic you have passion for
Be consistent
Be unique
Do not censor yourself
Be provocative
Experiment with the blog monetization
Expand your blog
More details and expansion of each of those points in the original post – if you’re a blogger, I recommend you read them.
A couple of provisos:
Be careful about the no censorship rule
If your blog is not where you make your money, be careful. It can have a backlash with colleagues, your boss, organization, or family. My advice: don’t write anything you don’t want even one person you care about knowing. That includes your boss!
Be careful about being provocative
If you’re writing a trashy celebrity blog, maybe that’s a good rule. It’s probably not quite as good an idea, however, if you’re writing a legal blog, a business blog, or diplomatic blog. Sure, you want to be interesting. But it’s never a good idea to go out of your way to insult, disparage, or denigrate others. And picking fights simply in an attempt to be interesting is juvenile and likely to backfire.
Being careful may not be the way to create exceptional art. But it does have some advantages in building relationships and getting things done.
Facebook continues to grow at a torrid rate. Reunion.com is growing almost as fast. Ning, Tagged, and Multiply are also all growing at over 100% annually.
However, Twitter is the runaway winner in unbelievable growth rates. While it’s growing from a smaller base, and therefore it’s easier to get a higher multiple, a growth rate of almost 1400% annually is just astounding.
Just got pitched to get and review a new book by Jorge Olsen, interestingly titled An Unselfish Guide to Self-Promotion. Since I’m already an expert in selfish self-promotion, I signed up immediately.
Seriously … I think … I love reading and books, and who doesn’t want to know how to promote who they are and what they do better? There’s probably something I can learn from this.
This is a getting to be a more and more common story …
My wife just came back from her work, where a co-worker who was off “sick” was busted for actually spending the week in Cancun. Naturally, it was discovered because she was posting on Facebook the entire time. Now as a result of her duplicity, she’s out of a job.
Somehow people still seem to think that they can separate various facets of their lives. What we’re actually seeing, for good or ill, is that work/life/career/leisure and everything else is getting mixed up in one big bowl. And, courtesy of Google, data that is somewhere … quickly becomes data that is everywhere.
You would think by now people would start to have realized this …
Measuring the results of social media marketing efforts has been challenging to say the least.
Five or six years ago, when I was helping start-ups put blogging campaigns together to kindle the development of user communities, I didn’t really have a clear idea how to measure ROI. About the only things we measured were visits and sales … which wasn’t too bad, but was only a very small part of the story. And based on our unsophisticated set-up (plus lack of Google Analytics) we really had no clue what the connection between visits and sales exactly was.
Today there are plenty of other ways to measure social media marketing results. Here are just a few, starting with quantitative measures:
YouTube views & subscribers
If you’re doing anything on YouTube, the obvious measures are:
How many times your videos have been viewed
How many people have subscribed to your channel (you did create a channel, right?)
A less obvious measure is the number of comments on your videos. While you’re checking that, be sure to get a sense of the overall tenor of the comments: are they positive, negative, or lukewarm?
Del.icio.us bookmarks of your page
If you’re creating valuable content – and you’re sharing it properly with the world, and have sprinkled some magic pixie dust on it – you’re going to get some attention. A good measure of how valuable the content is is whether people care enough about it to bookmark it and share it on Delicious or other social bookmarking sites. If the answer is zero … reconsider your content, approach, or both.
Number of references on Digg
Along the same lines as Delicious … if people care about your content, they’ll save it and promote it on Digg, StumbleUpon, and other similar sites.
Search engine rank
This is probably the most obvious ranking measure, period, and it correlates strongly with your ability to do something interesting enough and remarkable enough for people to actually want to link to it. But it’s not just the obvious search on your name … while you’re checking your search engine rank, you want to look at …
Name – how you rank for your company name and brand names
Good keywords – how you rank for keywords that you think people will use to find services like yours … for example … hawaii flights for Hawaiian Airlines
Bad keywords – how you rank for bad keywords, ones you don’t want to be associated with your company … such as worst airline ever, or lemon, if you’re a car manufacturer
Website metrics
Is traffic to your website going up? And/or, are you getting higher quality traffic that stays longer, looks at more, and converts better? You can use Google Analytics for free, or other stats packages. Some of the metrics you want to be tracking are:
Unique visits
Return visits
Frequency of visits per user
Time spent on site
Number of pages visited per visitor
Leads generated (total, and per visitor)
Sales (total, and per visitor)
Note: if you’re not actually selling something, substitute whatever it is you want users to do … your conversion goals … for “sales.”
RSS subscribers
How many people think your material is good enough to want more, on a regular basis. These people will subscribe to your RSS feed, or your email list to be updated when a new post comes out. Note: Feedburner is a good service for this.
Engagement
When you post on your blog, or on whatever service you use, how many comments are you getting?
Followers on Twitter
You are on Twitter, right? Does anybody care? Find out by starting to track:
Number of RTs – how many are re-tweeting your posts?
Number of DMs – how many are interested enough to direct message you?
Followers – as mentioned above, how many followers you have
Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, etc.
How many people have friended you on social networks? If you’ve started groups, how many people have joined? Of the people that have friended you or joined your group, how many are actively engaged – listening and talking?
More qualitative ….
That’s a fairly quantitative list, but there are some qualitative questions to ask as well.
Are we seen as experts in our industry?
Do we get mentioned/cited when people are talking about our industry?
What is the quality of interaction we’re seeing in all the above places?
In the final analysis …
… there is no final analysis. Social media marketing, is, after all, marketing. As such, there is very rarely a one-to-one correlation between input and output.
The reality, however, is that your ability to connect with clients depends on your online footprint, and the quality of your online presence. Are you findable online? Are you where your clients are, online? And if they search for you, do you have both a big enough and targeted enough Google footprint that they can easily find you?
Your online success, and increasingly your business success, relies on the answers to those questions.
Early in 2008 Robert Hruzek invented Blogapalooza – a way to celebrate bloggers’ best posts of the year.
This January he did it again. I don’t have a clue how he managed, but Robert Hruzek was able to get 128 posts from 128 different bloggers live over a couple of weeks in early January.
Here’s a much-belated post on all of those posts, and all of those bloggers …
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
I'm a software exec who cares about UX and UI, scours web & social media, lives in Canada, plays hockey, uses a Mac (mostly). Oh, and I blog and speak at conferences.
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
