image credit: Stallio

My social media story begins almost four years ago when I was given the assignment for a company where I was working at the time, to explore the implications of social media on businesses. While there was a fair amount of resources online, I found what I was looking for in a book that I’d read about and hunted down at my local Barnes & Noble store. The book cost almost $60 and not having a budget to purchase, I spent a few hours sitting in the cafe at the store, reading and absorbing.

I regret that today I don’t even recall the title of the book because I would have liked many times to have reached out to the authors and thank them for their work. What was clear to me that day was that social media was a must for my firm to explore on behalf of our clients and also for our own marketing communication efforts. I don’t know if I would have reached that conclusion had it not been for their superb content.

Since that day in June 2007, I’ve written hundreds of blog posts and have used a number of social media channels e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. in my work and personal life. Needless to say, I continue to learn something new every day.

I remember early on writing a post about not really getting Twitter and not understanding what all the fuss was about. A man read my post and reached out to me and told me not only why he valued Twitter for business but shared a paper he had written for a graduate class in his MBA program.  Perhaps what was most refreshing about our interaction that day was his willingness to share with me, to educate me about something he knew and felt very passionate about. He wasn’t trying to sell me anything. Wasn’t asking me to go to his company’s website. He was interacting with no strings attached.

I’ve had many experiences like this one over the years, many wonderful times interacting with people all over the U.S. and from all over the world. So, when individuals tell me that they don’t see the intrinsic value in social media, not to be too simplistic about it, I want to tell them that it’s largely about the experience of being social and the appreciation of meaningful content. How many places in our lives afford us the opportunity to meet so many new people every day and to share insights and experiences that we’re interested in and passionate about?

I’d like to welcome you in this space to share a social media experience, a contact with another person you met online who you’ve learned something meaningful from and how it changed either how you thought about something or exposed you to new resources that inspired you. One of the biggest social media faux pas we can make is to use social media to rack up the number of fans and followers. In the end, what does it really add up to?

If you don’t have one of the more memorable experiences readily at the tip of your fingertip, I encourage you to set out to truly engage with someone whose post you read this week, or whose tweet you retweeted. Tell them why you valued that content, what it did for you.  And tell us here in the comments below about the interaction.

For the record, mine was the presentation by Srinivas Rao, on the Art of Digital Storytelling which is included here. I visited Srinivas’ blog and passed along the message to him in the comments section about how his presentation served as an inspiration for this post. I noticed many other comments from people who felt the same way I do. A few hours later, Srinivas responded,

“My pleasure. Please let me know when you write the post as I’d really love to read about things. One of the reasons I chose the stories I did was to shine a light on some people who might not be as well known as the published authors that everybody has heard of.”

I believe this is social media at its best.

Try this approach and interact with people on the sites you visit. I think you’ll find the experiences will be that much more memorable. Remember, too, if you’re the content creator and are engaging with people on behalf of a company or a brand to find a way to tap into personal experiences. Don’t just rehash what everyone is talking about online, tell your story and share anecdotes from your work. And tap in to the real live examples and experiences that surround you. I’ve recently discovered the website Help a Reporter Out (HARO) and have had people who have freely shared stories about their experiences with the topics I’ve been researching. It’s made the material so much richer.  I’ve communicated multiple times with them and its been very gratifying. We can learn from one another, sometimes all we have to do is ask.

So whether you’re the content receiver or the content creator, I’d like to suggest that you pursue meaningful online experiences and express your appreciation. As Srinivas says at the conclusion of his presentation, “We’re creating history every time we publish content..go out in the world and create a masterpiece.”

What meaningful content experiences have you had? Tell us in the comments below.

image credit: Jonas Boni

When I started writing about social media in the Spring of 2007, the field was still relatively new. Many of my early blog posts explained what social media was and educated on the reasons why businesses of all sizes should create presences. Over the past four years, we’ve witnessed a huge jump in businesses who have joined in the conversations. Large companies with well-known brands jumped on board. And, slowly but surely, medium and small businesses started to follow suit.

The Super Bowl saw an unprecedented use of social media marketing this year, and the predictions about the 2011 Oscars have been split between who will take home the award and what companies will be streaming live, and posting updates to Facebook and Twitter. From the local brick and mortar businesses to the big online giants, companies have been embracing social media.

So the question I think we have to ask ourselves now that every Tom, Dick and Harry have created social media presences, has it made a difference? Do you really care that your local bakery has a Facebook page? Or, that the Mom & Pop corner store is sending out tweets? Or that Coca-Cola has the most fans on Facebook?

As Jamie Monberg writes in a recent piece on Fast Company, Authenticity is King Because Branding Bores Everyone, “We need to stop buying and selling ideas about brands that don’t have any substance behind them and start enabling people to discover the why they should incorporate a company’s brand into their own.”

Monberg makes the case that the difference is not positioning; it’s experience. I think what he’s saying is that consumers don’t want lip service, they want and need to experience the qualities the brand is espousing.  Monberg goes on to say, “If a brand says ‘we want to be seen as X,’ the correct response from a marketer is ‘Are you actually X?’ or ‘Then go be X,’ because no amount of positioning can swing the needle if you aren’t actually delivering the experience.”

In other words, you can have the most awesome Facebook page in the world and be tweeting until the cow’s come home but if your business isn’t delivering excellence in your product development and customer service then all the greatest reasons for social media in the world won’t serve your business at all.  Sure, people will come to your Facebook page for promotions and special offers but only if they believe in your products and services. And, only after you’ve earned their trust and respect.

Coca-Cola has the most fans than any other worldwide brand, with 22,685,731. Would a person really want their friends to see that they’re a fan of Coca-Cola if the company hadn’t reached them in some significant way? Yes, they might like the product. But what else? They have to do something else to obtain and keep that many fans.

When you look at Coca-Cola’s Facebook updates you’ll see things such as these: They post updates about Coke Cheer and raising money for Boys & Girls Clubs of America. And, in another example, when people were writing on Coca-Cola’s wall about My Coke Rewards, one woman posted that she lost all of our points and doesn’t know where they are. Shortly after a customer service rep wrote “Sorry to hear that you have lost your  My Coke Reward points. Here’s a link for you to contact us.” When the woman said she couldn’t log in because she was in Canada, the rep gave her a toll-free number so a representative would be able to assist her.

Blogger Jeanne Bliss suggests that businesses ask themselves three questions:

1. Do you have agreement across your company on the stages of the customer experience–one that everyone really agrees with?
2. Do you line up shared metrics for the delivery of the important stages of the experience?
3. Do you share resource planning and strategy development among the silos for the parts of the experience where there is shared accountability for its delivery?

Jeanne Bliss says that if you answered “no” to any of the questions, then the fact is that you’re not not managing the customer experience. You are delivering a defaulted experience to your customers.

Lauren Romano offer six tips for delivering the best customer experience. She suggests that companies need to :

1. Be interested in what customers have to say
2. Don’t make false promises
3. Follow through on promises
4. Repeat back important information customers say to you
5. Refer to a person by name
6. Be persistent in finding ways to resolve it

Social media is a two way conversation. And it’s fair to say that in 2011 if customers don’t receive the type of experience they’ve come to expect from businesses, they will shout it from the rooftops on Twitter, Facebook, Yelp and countless over channels.

And, it won’t only be the company who hears about broken promises and customer disappointments. Nowadays, there’s the potential to be heard by a very large audience, one that take the message and run with it, and make their voices heard quite far.

Even though my sites are on dedicated hosting and I have spent a lot of time on optimization after I ran the test my pages would only score 75 / 100 at BEST.

This bothered me because my competitors were scoring much higher than that, and Google is now factoring in site speed to some degree so it’s more important than ever to have a quick site.

After adding W3 Total Cache and doing more optimization I raised my score 7 points to 82/100, however this was still lower than many of my competitors so I decided to dig a little deeper. I noticed that the “tweet this” button at the top of each post (you can see an example at the top of this post because I haven’t removed it on this site yet) was having a fairly dramatic impact on my sites speed so I wanted to see what would happen if I removed it.

Once I removed the tweet button from the equation my score jumped from 82/100 to 89/100 and my pages loaded 25% faster!

Going forward I’m just going to have a self hosted static Twitter button on all of my sites, so technically I’m removing Twitter but still linking out to it. Hopefully one day, when the fail whale is an endangered species the fully functioning Twitter button and widgets can return – but until then – good riddance.

Has Twitter (or other third party services) impacted your site’s performance? If so what have you done about it?

Lets look at a basic example, say you create a site about cell phones and are trying to rank on the first page of Google (above the fold) for that term. Well I think it’s pretty safe to say that this is no longer technically possible. Take a look how the results below are formatted – I’ve highlighted all paid results and results for other Google services in red.

You will notice that first page of results has 3 paid results at the top, some of which are now showing sub links which expands this area even further down the page. After the paid results there are two non paid results (for the official site and wikipedia page, which are going to be impossible to outrank for the most part) followed by links from other Google services.

The good news is that so far this is only for major keywords and brand names. Long tail keywords don’t seem to take as much of a hit from Google spamming its own services. However some longer keywords are starting to display the Local Results map which tends to push results 4 – 10 down below the fold of the page and results in a pretty drastic decrease in clicks.

There is no doubt that this has been causing an increased amount of frustration for many site owners. Believe it or not, some good may come out of this situation.

For one thing, it’s becoming much harder for someone with a site or online service that offers little or no value to get traffic because of the shifting focus to social media. The only way many of these sites and services have been able to stay in the game this long is through Google search and their days of getting decent traffic from that are fairly numbered. These sites won’t spread virally and usually don’t do well with Facebook or Twitter.

For those of you who are getting in the game now it’s more important than ever to create quality content, and build a community around your site or service that will allow you to thrive with social media. Search traffic will be around for a long time, but soon there will be much less of it to go around for those who aren’t willing to pay for it.

• Having multiple writers allows me to increase the content of my sites at 2 – 5x the rate that I could when writing articles myself (depending on how many writers I hire). More content and more frequent updates equals more traffic which leads to more revenue.
• I now have more time to spend on marketing and promotion. Many successful bloggers will tell you that when first starting a new site, 70% or more of your time should be spent on marketing and promotion.

Many people decide not to hire writers because they worry about the quality of the writing. My philosophy has always been that if I can do it myself, I can probably hire someone to do it better than I can, for less than the cost of my time. The trick is to give the people that work for you all of your expectations up front, and not to settle with anything less than what you outlined initially. If the writer ends up writing on the wrong topic, make them rewrite it. If the article isn’t formatted correctly, make them reformat it etc.. There are always going to be bad hires out there but most people do just fine with clear instructions.

I think the main reason I held off on hiring writers at first was that I thought that it would cut into my profits and I didn’t want to take that initial plunge when I should have been thinking of it as an investment.

When I finally did the research, writers ended up being much cheaper than I first imagined ($4 – $10 per article depending on the topic). I finally decided to take the plunge and list a job on the Problogger job board, which I still use to fill my writing positions to this day.

Posting a job on the Problogger job board is $50 for a 30 day listing. During this 30 day period I average around 100 applications but it really depends on your blogs topic. Out of those 100 applications, around 70 of them will usually have decent writing skills and are qualified for the position. Out of the 70 that are qualified, 50 or so will be willing to work within my price range. I then select around 10 random applications from those that are qualified and request a test article to weed out any bad writers that may have gotten through.

Here is an example of my “help wanted” ad:

Many people don’t put the compensation in the initial job listing, which I believe to be a mistake. I’ve found that it’s good to give people a general idea of what your willing to pay. This way your time isn’t wasted with people who are still stuck in the golden era of newspapers and try to charge something astronomical like $150 a blog post.. trust me they’re still out there.

The results of the ad:

The reason I always talk about having multiple writers is that a single writer with a high workload seems to get burnt out fairly quickly. It’s better to keep the workload on the light side and divide the work up between two or three people. This way if someone quits, your operation isn’t at a standstill while you try to find a replacement.

The fact is that people will end up getting burnt out eventually and you’ll have to replace them, that’s just how it works. Over the last two years I’ve replaced my entire staff two or three times over, generally people are looking to at this job as something that’s part time and short term. Make sure to save all of the other applications so that you don’t have to go back and post another job listing 3 months from now when you need to bring someone new on board.

If you have WordPress you want to start by create a new account for each of your writers under the “Users” tab in the back-end. Make sure to assign their account Editor permissions. This will allow them to login to the WordPress back-end and post new articles etc.. but they can’t go into my site settings or screw around with anything that could bring the site down.

I offer Net 15 payments via Paypal, meaning that I send out payments to all of my writers at once every 15 days, or around the 1st and 15th of every month. For awhile I was paying different people at different times and it became way to much to handle and keep track of.

If there is anything I missed I’ll be sure to add it in when I think of it. If you have any questions be sure to leave a comment below!