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.

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.

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.