Following Brands Is the Wrong Idea

May 17th, 2010 by Tim Barkow
In Social Marketing Tips

We all spend time building our followers and friends lists because we want to increase our presence with customers and it’s the only path these services leave open to us. But there’s a real limit to the number of true brand advocates we can attract and build relationships with. Everyone else on our friends list is only very occasionally interested in what we have to offer.

This is totally normal. We all have boundaries on our relationships. When I’m thinking about driving, I’m interested automotive topics. But hearing about cars when I’m gardening is an annoying distraction.

What would help is if we could flip our priorities to focus more on WHAT we’re sharing, and less on our follower counts. Because Twitter and Facebook focus so much on follower counts, it’s easy to forget that these numbers aren’t the point.

What’s important is the results you’re generating, and learning which messages and offers your customers really respond to. Sometimes, it’s insightful articles that ignites customer interest, other times it’s a well-timed coupon.

In the end, it’s what you do for your customers that really powers customer engagement.

Social Marketing: Too Intimate for Business?

March 23rd, 2010 by Tim Barkow
In Social Marketing Tips

There’s a growing number of niche businesses (doesn’t everything seem to be a niche these days?) for which traditional marketing and advertising just doesn’t work. These small businesses enjoy a global reach thanks to the Internet, but traditional media options are just too broadly or wrongly targeted to deliver the qualified audience they need.

For this group, social marketing and blogs are a breakthrough. These businesses are creating their own media (blog articles) and promoting it through SEO and social networks. And it’s working.

For a newspaper or magazine (or any media aggregator, really), this should be a heady thought: Business owners creating their own content and marketing it to consumers. In addition, businesses are getting social: conversing with customers and policing competitors’ tactics. Surprisingly, this seeming “wild West” of new media is actually a fairly safe and clean environment, even in the absence of “watchdog” journalists and media.

When you think about it, what we’re seeing today is not just the rumblings of a shift to a new media platform, but a wholesale transfer of media ownership. The Internet freed us from the tyranny of distribution (media had our audience), and now production of media is in the hands of everyone. We don’t need media companies as business-to-consumer bridges anymore. We can talk to each other directly.

While this will never completely erase the role of traditional media or marketing, I think the trend has scared the pants off every media exec across the country. Audiences still like news, stories, and entertainment, but the media business model is fundamentally, irreversibly broken. And as media companies scale back, the big question is what will our democracy lose once without the journalism that newspapers and other media provided?

I think you can ask the same question about marketing: will business discover that traditional, bundled media played an important role in mediating their relationships with consumers?

There’s a potentially dangerous gap between the intimacy of a Twitter conversation with a customer service rep and that employee’s ability to act on and solve your problem. For some companies, it’s going to be quite a challenge to empower a social marketing team to address the wide range of customer complaints and issues. Many will try and fail.

Will direct consumer-to-business conversation turn out to be too intimate for many companies? Time will tell.

Kill a feature, “Fix” a feature

January 29th, 2010 by Tim Barkow
In Startups  # leanstartup, startup

Dave McClure, of Startup Metrics for Pirates fame, often recommends the seemingly drastic step of killing features, just to see what happens. If users freak out, then that’s a valuable feature, put it back in. If not, well, you just made your product better, separating the chaff from the wheat.

Now most folk are going to be hesitant to take such a drastic step, and might be a hard sell to management or the rest of the team. Here’s an alternative I think might work:

Fix a Feature

What I mean by “fix” is that you take that feature and all of its buttons and inputs, as well as user flows, error messages and edge cases, and turn it into a sensible default.

• Profile picture? A link with their name is good enough.
• 20 different social networks to choose from? Add Facebook & Twitter, and be done.
• Multiple users per account? They can share 1 account.

Most times (and I know I do this a lot, being product-focused), we believe that customers won’t love us if we don’t build in 1,000 ways to customize the product. And each time we start down that road, we create a whole mess of wireframes, workflows, tests, and feedback that we need to work through.

When customers start to balk about needing more freedom — when they’re annoyed they can’t do something they really need to do — you’ve just validated a need, and learned something about how your customers work.

How to Drive Visitors to Action with Wordpress

January 29th, 2010 by Tim Barkow
In Social Marketing Tips  # marketing, socialmarketing, wordpress

This is a strange post to be writing, since I’m going to tell you how to create a very rudimentary facsimile of our upcoming social marketing manager using only your Wordpress blog. I think our upcoming product is much more powerful, so I’m not that worried. Anyway, let’s get on with it!

The nature of blogs, syndication and search has created an environment in which your bounce rate (the number of people who visit only one page on your site) is probably very high. So how do you lure visitors into exploring more of your site, signing up for your newsletter, or buying products?

You could try banner ads, but hardly anyone clicks on (or sees) them. You could write another blog post, but those get buried amongst all the others. The truth is, there’s not much in the way tools for adding marketing messages to websites.

Marketing messages are unique: you want them to be persistent during their lifespan, following your visitors everywhere, and then you want them to disappear, to be replaced with the next offer.

Here’s a simple method for adding a customizable HTML message to all your blog posts that you can use to drive visitors to action.

How to Drive Your Visitors to Action with Wordpress

Requirements:

• One self-hosted Wordpress blog. This might work on Wordpress.com sites, too, I don’t know.
• A theme with a functions file (functions.php).
• Decent knowledge of Wordpress will help — a lot.

Register a new dynamic sidebar

Under the Appearance menu, click on Editor. Select the Theme Functions file (functions.php). Add a new dynamic sidebar with a unique name, I used “Action” in the example below.

if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array(
'name' => 'Action',
'before_widget' => '<div class="action">',
'after_widget' => '</div>',
'before_title' => '<h4>',
'after_title' => '</h4>',
));

Paste the new dynamic sidebar into your posts template

Now, find your posts template. It could be Main Index Template (index.php) or Single Post (single.php), or something else. Basically, we’re looking for the template file displays individual posts. Into this file, paste the following code after the post div (usually <div class=”post”>). Make sure the name (“Action”) of your dynamic sidebar is the same as what you entered in the Theme Functions file above.

<?php if(is_single()): ?>
<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar('Post Action Message') ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php endif; ?>

Note: You’ll notice that the first and last lines of code above check to make sure that we’re on a single post page before displaying our “Action” sidebar. If you’re pasting this code on the Single Post (single.php) template, these lines (1st, 4th) aren’t necessary.

So what’d we just do? We added a new dynamic sidebar element to our theme, placed after every post. In Wordpress, dynamic sidebars can be filled with widgets, little bundles of cool functionality. Usually, these contain many widgets and appear in a column next to your blog posts, but we’ve got special plans.

Add an action message

Now, click on the Widgets link, under the Appearance menu. You should see a large list of widgets in the middle of the page, and a list of sidebars on the right. Find your new “Action” sidebar and open it. Drag a “Text” widget from the middle of the page over the body of the “Action” sidebar. You’ve got it right when a black dashed box appears.

Once you’ve added the text widget, open it and add whatever message you want. You can include HTML links, too.

Add some styling

Lastly, you’re going to want to add some style to your action messages. You can paste this into your style sheet as a starting point. Customize it to blend in.

.action {
margin:20px 0;
font-size:16px;
line-height:150%;
border:2px dotted #a90;
background-color:#ffd;
padding:15px 10px;
}
.action h4 { font-weight:bold;}

Ta-da! We’re done

As you can see right below this post, that’s what you get. The message is easily editable via Wordpress to contain whatever text and/or links you want, so you can drive visitors to sign up for a newsletter, follow you on twitter, etc., and you can style it however you like.

Obviously, we’ve got a lot more great features in our soon-to-launch social marketing manager, but I wanted to give you a taste of what adding action-oriented marketing content to your posts can do to improve your site and your business. Hopefully, this will help you squeeze every last drop of value from your hard-earned Google juice.

Don’t forget: Send us a note on Twitter @heyindieinc if you’re interested in being part of our early beta. If you made a 2010 resolution to get serious about social marketing, improve your conversions, grow your social presence, and increase your ROI, then HeyIndie can help.

5 Ways to ID Your Minimum Viable Product

January 26th, 2010 by Tim Barkow
In Startups  # leanstartup, mvp

I thought I’d try to outline some thoughts on this tweet I saw this morning.

@startupSQUARE: Someone Please Write a Blog Post about Minimum Viable Strategy http://blog.startupsquare.com/customer-development/someone-please-write-a-blog-post-about-minimum-viable-strategy/ #leanstartup #entrepreneur

Here’s a few key ideas:

#1: Pivot for continual, incremental improvement
If you’re afraid to pivot, then either you haven’t found the right idea yet, or you’re a glutton for punishment. Your loyalty isn’t to one specific idea, your loyalty is to making the world a better place. Keep poking until you find your customers’ pain point, then solve it.

In my experience, finding MVP has been very difficult, because I’m a product guy, a tinker. I look at technologies and tools and imagine what I could do with them. This leads to a lot of cool ideas with very little business potential. In fact, HeyIndie started out with one of these ideas. Thankfully, through some very basic customer development, we figured out there was no business there. But the knowledge we acquired was instrumental in our pivot, which changed not only the product features but the market focus as well. That’s a lot of change, but it only appeared after we came up with the new product idea, and we were so excited about it, we didn’t care about losing the original idea.

#2: Do something valuable for a large number of customers & do it often
This is my version of business model 101, but it’s super important. In order to have any chance at growing into a real business, your solution must have a high value, for a large number of customers, and it should occur as often as possible. At least two of those numbers should be big. If they’re all “ehh”, then it’s going to be hard to get paying customers. There’s always exceptions, of course, but you’d better be a ninja if you expect to pull it off.

For our original idea, we could argue a large, growing number of customers, but our value proposition was variable to weak, and it occurred infrequently. Not a good mix, especially online, where everyone is accustomed to getting things for free.

#3: Learn and validate your ideas via customer interviews
There’s one way to learn about a customer segment. Go talk to them. They are the only ones know what’s happening today, and what they need to move forward. There is no one else. No journalist or analyst can give you this information. You have to get it yourself.

I am a product guy, as I mentioned, so I don’t naturally tend to phone calls, interviews, etc. So, I hired a friend to help out. I can’t pretend we’re following Steve’s advice to the letter, but we’re getting in front of real customers and learning a lot of valuable and subtle insights into what they need to be successful. And it feels great to be able to inform your product strategy with that knowledge, knowing it can help your future customers kick ass.

#4: Plan to charge for your product
This one’s controversial in some circles, but the key word is “plan”. You will find that “free” or “paid” greatly affects your decision-making process and priorities. Whether you end up actually charging or not, adopting a “paid” mentality keeps you more focused on adding value.

I like focusing on a paid product, since I think it keeps the product focused. If you’re gonna charge, you need a clear value proposition, which counter-intuitively requires a smaller feature set (more features muddies the core value). We haven’t bothered to add a subscription module yet, because we don’t need it for alpha testing, which we plan on using to define our pricing strategy. We need real customers using our product in real situations to gauge our true value first.

#5 Get close to the money
Maybe this one’s obvious, but the further away from the money you are, the more difficult it’s going to be to get some of it.

Our new product is a tool for social marketing that improves your ROI. It also includes some basic analytics that can help prove it’s worth the cost. After interviewing several potential customers, we shifted our focus to an area we knew had value: we can help you sell more product — now that’s close to the money.

Iterate, iterate, iterate
In sum, I think finding MVP is all about iteration. Just assume you’re going to get it wrong the first time, but plant your flag anyway. You have to start somewhere, and it’s inevitable that customer interviews will lead you in new and surprising directions. That’s what everyone means by “fail fast”: no matter how good you are today, you should always be striving to be better tomorrow.

Lean Startup Update: January '10 Edition

January 22nd, 2010 by Tim Barkow
In Startups  # leanstartup, marketing, socialmarketing, startup

Here at HeyIndie HQ, we’ve been following the principles of lean startup development, as outlined by Steve Blank, Eric Ries, and Sean Ellis. I don’t think we’re following to the letter, but you do your best when bootstrapping. I feel good about getting out of the office to meet with potential customers on a regular basis, and being really focused when it comes to our feature set.

So far, we’re learning a lot about how our customers work: what their needs and pain points are. There’s a lot more to customer interviews, of course, but we’re not quite there yet. In addition, being bootstrapped means we’re still working on other projects, and sometimes, progress can be slow. But extra time can also be your friend, allowing ideas to ferment and the best ones to bubble up to the top.

At the center of all this, we want to build a great product. Something that’s clearly useful and fun to use. Riffing off Andrew Chen’s post, Minimum Desirable Product, I can see where we are mixing and matching strategies to suit our situation. We are very focused on design and user experience, for example, since that’s our core competency. This is a bit dangerous, because we’re reacting to our own tendencies, not the market, but again, if possible, you always want to make the best impression possible. It’s a balancing act.

We’ve been working on this product for about 4 months now, 3 if you don’t count December, which was pretty much a wash given the holidays (again, bootstrapping has its minuses). But I feel like we’ve been focused on our initial product vision and getting to alpha testing.

So, what haven’t we done?

• No payment processing. It’s definitely our goal to launch as a subscription service. But we have to make it through an invite-only alpha first, and we don’t need to charge anyone for that. We have a couple possible subscription management vendors in mind, both with simple RESTful interfaces, so integrating payments when we need to will be a snap.
• No “fun” features: We have some great ideas to give the service some extra “kick” in the fun pants. But those are complicated feature sets that we don’t fully understand yet.
• No advanced analytics: We’re collecting a lot more data than we’re displaying right now. But we know we don’t want to be Google Analytics, so we want to be very strategic about adding new stats.
• No mobile support: We’re going to need this at some point, but until we gather some data, we won’t know how important this feature really is. Better to wait and see.
• No platforms: It would be easy to get caught up in building plugins and interfaces, but we’re going to wait until we know who our customers are.

Great ActionBar Background Images

January 7th, 2010 by Tim Barkow
In How To  # background images, design, How To, messagebar

Creating a great background image for your ActionBar will help it stand out while still complementing your website design. But there are a few principles to consider when creating your own background image. Read the rest of this entry »

Create Great Email Header Images

January 6th, 2010 by Tim Barkow
In How To

You’ve probably already taken a look at our guide to Great ActionBar Backgrounds, and if so, you’ll be happy to know that creating great email header images is just as easy.

Below you’ll see the image we’re using in our emails. It’s a simple 500 pixel wide by 100 pixel high PNG-formatted image. It contains our branding and a little bling. That’s really all you need. If you choose not to add an email header image, it will be replaced with a hyperlink to your website, using your site name as the link text.

Here’s what the image looks like in a shared email (screenshot from Gmail). The text at top (“Tim Barkow says”) is the sender’s message. The text in the dashed box is the message, with a link back to your site. The About text below is your site description (change this via the Site Settings menu link).

Here’s another example email.

That’s all there is to it. Adding an email header image adds extra punch to your shared emails, but be assured that even without an image, these messages will outperform simple text emails every time.

Lean Startups Launch with Nothing

October 14th, 2009 by Tim Barkow
In Startups

Just read this nice little article on TechCrunch by Seth Sternberg, founder of instant messaging startup Meebo.

His basic point is to partner up with people who can get your product out the door, ASAP.

Right now, we’re busy duct taping our initial product together, with a really minimum set of features. In fact, it’s killing me that we can’t show it off just yet, but we’re only a few weeks into actual development (part-time), so that’s probably to be expected.

I will say this: we had a working prototype last week, and though it was broken in places, it did clearly demonstrate the basic concept (it worked — mostly). And, damn, if it wasn’t exciting. When you see an idea roughed out and it delivers — even a tiny bit — on what you’ve promised, well, that’s pretty exciting. I can’t wait to use it myself.

But as a lean startup, we’re just as concerned with finding our customers, so while we’re working on the product, I’ve put together some background on what the company is all about, and a short presentation about what we’re trying to do, and we’re searching for people to talk to. Even though we don’t even have a product anyone can sign up for.

Now taking your ‘baby’ out and discussing it publicly this early is really hard. Sternberg recounts the advice he gives startups, that they’d better get to launch ASAP because 10 other people had the same idea at the same time, and whoever executes to market first is probably going to win.

Now, your natural inclination is to get secretive when you realize you’ve got competition, but what Sternberg actually said is that the race has already started. You don’t see Usain Bolt wearing a skirt so nobody can see how his legs move. Nobody’s secretive during the race. If the race has begun, it’s too late for that. If people seem secretive it’s probably because they’re busy.

The nice thing about sharing your idea with people is that they’re generally interested in what you’re doing. They’re probably friends or acquaintances, so they’ll probably be very supportive and offer criticisms constructively. The truth is that people aren’t sitting around waiting to steal your ideas. And even if they did, you’d both end up with two completely different products.

What I’ve found so far from my research and talking to people is that we’ve got an interesting idea, and that it’s going to be challenging to get people to pay for it (what else is new?). But more importantly, I’m learning about potential customers and what makes them tick. And hopefully, we’ll be able to turn that knowledge into a compelling sales proposition.

It’s still early, but I think we’re creating more value having conversations and sharing our ideas, than blindly building a product we don’t know if anyone really wants.

What Your Disclosure Policy Says About You

September 20th, 2009 by Tim Barkow
In Social Marketing Tips

It was probably inevitable that the issue of disclosures on online reviews would rear its head. With the FTC issuing recommendations this fall and bloggers uniting to head off any controversy, we realized early on that addressing the issue of disclosure would need to be part of our solution. But understanding the issues is a bit more complicated than it seems.

The advent of personal publishing, and frankly, Google Adsense, has obliterated the line between personal and professional publishing. While it’s convenient to fall back on notions of trust and professionalism provided by traditional journalism, the genie’s out of the bottle and we’re probably better served by embracing the future, as messy as it is, and trying to make some sense of it.

The truth is, all of this only matters if you care about your audience. It used to be that building an audience was the foundation of any media business model. That’s not so true today, where a site can rely solely on Google searches or automatically generated Amazon affiliate stores to catch unsuspecting visitors and generate revenues. These types of sites clog up Google search results and create reader confusion, so it’s doubly important that you address this issue if you’re trying to build up a valuable audience for the long haul.

The First Rule
The first rule of thumb is simple: disclose any relationship you have with a manufacturer or seller. This is about maintaining reader trust. When someone reads one of your reviews, they are demonstrating that they need this information. It’s important to them. If they find out later that you were paid, they will feel deceived. You absolutely want to avoid this, as it’s eroding the trust you’ve built up.

• If you’ve been paid for the article, disclose it
• If you received free product for the article, disclose it and whether you are giving it back or not
• If you have an ongoing relationship with the manufacturer, disclose it

The surprising thing is, your readers will likely appreciate it. Disclosures build trust.

The Second Rule
The second rule is much harder: Sometimes, when you have an obvious conflict of interest, you really shouldn’t write about it. This one’s tough since it’s subjective: you need to ask yourself, are your readers going to react negatively to this article, enough that it’s not worth it?

What defines a conflict of interest? Mostly your audience. If you pay attention to reader comments, these things will be pretty obvious. On the low end of the scale, always posting about your work colleagues’ projects could be considered brown-nosing for the boss. On the high end, if you’re getting paid by a company (directly or indirectly), but fail to mention it, readers will probably feel manipulated. A lot of times, a conflict of interest emerges after several posts. Readers will notice and you’ll have to decide what to do about it.

The Third Rule
Sadly, the third rule is that you can ignore all the rules. These rules only matter if you care about building trust with your audience. And sometimes, your audience might not care that much either way. It’s a judgment call.