My day job has me working in politics and harnessing the power of digital media to connect with voters – when I consult and write, I think and write about how technology makes marketing better and more effective.

Like most of you – I’m always on. Always.

The growth of social networks and the proliferation of fancy devices is making it harder to have real, genuine conversations. Possibly worse, these developments are making it harder to find and identify quality content.

The irony of all this is that the communication tools that were supposed to make connectivity easier, are actually making it harder.

Quick, efficient and voluminous exchanges do not necessarily make for quality conversations. This all means that your business might be substituting a large number of connections for deep connections.

All is not lost

Social media marketing can be performed in a manner that ensures depth of conversation. Here are three steps that your business can follow to ensure it is forming deeper connections with your customers and prospects through social media.

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1. Be present

Do you instantly take a picture of a well-presented meal at a nice restaurant? Or, do you immediately check in on Foursquare or Facebook when you arrive at an event?

I’m guilty. I’m one of those people. Once, I actually caught myself watching a live event by viewing it through the screen of my Blackberry as I recorded it – it happens far too often.

Some argue that our devices and networks enhance the world around us and the events we attend.

Others disagree. Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together, writes:

Once we remove ourselves form the flow of physical, messy, untidy life — and both robotics and networked life do that — we become less willing to get out there and take a chance.

If Turkle is right, our over reliance on technologically aided communication could make us less innovative.

2. Create moments

We have been told an important way to build relationships online is to comment on something someone else said or wrote. It’s true that it helps.

It can also get out of hand. Too many comments are the mere written form of verbal diarrhea.

Instead of offering complaints, offer constructive criticism. Ben Yoskovitz, VP of Product at GoInstant, offers five steps to providing constructive criticism:

1. Plan before you do it. Have a clear plan – a path to guide your discussion.
2. Build someone up. Before telling them what they have done wrong, emphasize their positive qualities.
3. Be clear. Understanding criticism can be hard enough without having it poorly delivered.
4. Build some more. After criticizing, offer solutions and ask questions.
5. Follow up.  Constructive criticism never ends with one interaction – you need to continue your exchanges.

Even better than offering constructive criticism, write something that will make others want to comment. As I wrote a few months ago, there are five ways you can generate more comments – follow these rules and write a blog post or create a YouTube video.

Creating, like commenting, is easier than ever – work on doing more of the former.

3. Try having a real conversation

Face-to-face meetings can be the best option for dealing with tough issues. If you’re trying to decide what kind of interaction is best, here’s a pyramid to keep in mind: the least personal is email, then social network messaging, texting, a handwritten note, a phone or Skype conversation and then, the most personal, an in person conversation.

I know in-person meetings aren’t always possible – distances can be too great. You should always try to be as personal as possible. If you want to increase the depth of your conversation, start at the top of that pyramid – an in-person meeting – and work your way down to find the most practical option.

Don’t just take my word for it, here are three other reasons in-person conversations beat email:

1. Hard to grasp context. Have you ever mistaken someone’s joke for a cruel comment? Have you misunderstood someone’s tone? In-person conversations make picking up on intonations and non-verbal cues much easier.
2. Email is overly reactive. Email tends to force people to offer reactive messages that are more hostile than normal.
3. Email causes too much debate. Because context is hard to understand and because it is overly reactive, email is a great way to carry on a debate or discussion for too long. Misunderstandings can cause benign conversations to become full out arguments – it can be avoided.

Conclusion

All technology has an upside and a downside. The upside of social media marketing is well-known – it lowers the cost of customer acquisition, makes customer interaction and customer relationship management easier, and helps generate immediate customer feedback.

All marketers also need to be weary of the downside of social media marketing that this post touches on. Being aware is the first step to minimizing the negative effects – be aware and then take the three steps outlined in this post and you will form deeper connections with your customers and prospects.

Should social media slow down?

What do you think? Are you overwhelmed and over connected? How do you relax? If you’re not overwhelmed, what tips can you share to help others deal with over connected syndrome?

Photo credit: Some rights reserved by margaretshear.

There were rumors that Facebook adjusted its news feed algorithm to reduce reach of your posts in order to favor promoted posts, but this is a matter of debate. There are clearly certain factors that influence your ability to land in someone’s news feed.

3 things that determine what shows up in your news feed

There are three factors that determine what appears in your news feed. Facebook uses these three determinants because it is simply not possible to keep up with everything all of your contacts and likes are doing:

1. If you have engaged with a user’s or page’s posts in the past – the more you like and comment on a user’s past posts, the more likely it will be to show up in your feed.
2. How other people react to posts – if people frequently ignore a certain user’s post, it will be less likely to show up in your feed.
3. How you interact with certain kinds of post – if you have a habit of liking photos or videos, you will see those more often in your feed.

Facebook denies the algorithm was adjusted to benefit promoted posts, but doesn’t deny that its latest changes to the new feed algorithm have lowered the reach of some pages.

40 percent drop in reach

Social Breakers – a social media marketing company with offices in New York, London, Paris, Milan, Munich, Singapore, Sydney and São Paulo – released data showing that Facebook page reach decreased by as much as 40 to 50 percent.

Social Breakers managing global director Robin Grant writes:

As you can see from the graph above, the average post’s organic reach has clearly dropped by over 40% since the end of August, and is showing no signs of levelling off.

The drop identified by Social Breakers is likely Facebook adjusting its algorithm to the massive increase in the number of pages created to support businesses’ Facebook marketing efforts. The adjustments will ensure a balance between the number of posts from users and the number of posts from brands.

3 ways to adjust to Facebooks new algorithm

1. Post high-quality content

Facebook marketing, like all online marketing, depends on quality content. The recent changes made by Facebook, require an even higher level of content if you want to appear in news feeds. There are six strategies you can execute to improve your engagement:

1. Keep it short. The longer your Facebook post, the less people will engage with it. People have less patience for reading lengthy social media updates and 100 characters or fewer seem to be the ideal amount.
2. Use photos. Facebook’s official data shows that photos generate 120 percent more engagement while photo albums and videos generate 180 percent and 100 percent more, respectively.
3. Don’t shorten URLs. Buddy Media’s research shows that Facebook users prefer to click on full length URLs. The obvious explanation is that people on Facebook don’t want to be surprised and want to know where a link will take them before they click on it.
4. Know when your fans are active. If you are posting on Facebook when no one is around your posts will go unnoticed. There are lots of studies on Facebook activity and engagement peaks, but those studies don’t monitor your followers – study when they are active and don’t listen to studies that include fans other than your own.
5. Use trigger words. Certain words – like post, comment, take or submit – are more likely to generate activity. If you want people to share or like your post, you need to politely, but explicitly ask them to do so.
6. Ask questions. Facebook provides a dynamic platform on which you can illicit feedback. Place your question at the end of your post and you will see engagement increase.

2. Don’t post too frequently

A recent study suggests that Facebook posts generate likes and comments for up to three hours after they are made. The study concluded the average post’s lifetime was three hours and seven minutes while the media lifetime was two hours and 56 minutes.

This means that your Facebook updates shouldn’t be posted any closer than three hours apart.

Again, these are general rules. You need to get to know your audience. How long does it take for engagement to die down on an update you’ve posted? Is it more or less than the data reported by TechCrunch?

3. Promote your posts

This tactic is likely the least popular suggestion of the three. With so many brands on Facebook and so much content online, you may have to bite the bullet and start spending money on Facebook marketing.

There are six important things to note about Facebook advertising:

1. Leverage social proof. When setting up ads, you will have the option to “Show stories about people interacting with this Page and with my ad.” When someone likes your ad, their followers will see that they’ve engaged with your content.
2. Split testing is essential. Careful testing of your Facebook marketing is important to ensure its success. Effective testing will require you to change one variable at a time; test during the same time of day; watch the reports and gather the data; test your landing pages and ad copy; and, rotate your ads over time.
3. Focus on your desired outcome. Setting your campaign’s goals before it begins is necessary to succeed with Facebook marketing. Having your goals defined will keep you focused as your campaign proceeds.
4. There are four things to consider when designing your campaign: define your goals, know the length of the campaign, set a budget, and know your desired conversion rate.
5. You can’t advertise everything. Facebook won’t let you advertise pyramid or MLM schemes; booze, gambling, and porn; and, you cannot run ads using domain forwarding.
6. Don’t have too narrow a market. Your target market and how you focus on your target market will determine the cost of your Facebook campaign. Narrowing your focus too much will keep costs low, but eliminate too many people from your potential pool and limit the number of clicks your ads receive.

The new changes have, on average, reduced page reach. Like all things, certain pages will continue to outperform others. Following the tips outlined in this post will help you outperform your Facebook marketing competition.

Your turn

Have you noticed a drop in reach since Facebook initiated its changes? How have you adapted?

When done well, content marketing will increase your traffic and increase the number of prospects in your sales funnel. However, there are 13 regularly made content marketing mistakes that will hold you back.

1. Inconsistency

Content creation can be overwhelming. After starting out with tremendous amounts of energy and passion, too many companies burn out. This causes inconsistent content creation.

Inconsistency comes in two forms – quantity and quality. It is hard to regularly produce great content and it is also complicated to maintain a regular posting schedule.

You need to find ways to make producing high quality content on a regular basis a priority for your business.

2. Writing for the wrong audience

Too many businesses start writing content without knowing their audience. The purpose of blogging and content creation is to generate leads and sales. If you speak to the wrong audience, you will not be able to achieve this goal.

Sometimes writing for the right audience involves changing the topics you cover. Other times writing for the right audience means staying on the same topic, but using less jargon and more everyday language.

3. Using only marketers to produce content

High quality content comes from experience and insight.  The experience and insight you need to write compelling content doesn’t always exist within your marketing department. Don’t be afraid to branch out to other departments within your organization and external experts to assist your content marketing efforts.

4. Putting your concerns first

A lot of content marketing sounds too much like a commercial – that’s not what it is meant to do. Content marketing is supposed to educate and inform, not pitch. The trend is that as you educate and inform people start to think of you as an authority and that, as an authority, people will want to interact with you, consume your content, and, eventually, enter your prospect list.

5. Boring headlines

While content marketing isn’t supposed to pitch, it does need to be compelling and persuasive to grab readers’ attention. A great headline will grab attention, hold people’s interest, be clear and easy to understand, and should include keywords.

Certain headlines are always popular – people love “How To” and list headlines. Those aren’t the only way to grab attention. Copyblogger also says there are other foolproof headline formulas that work. For example, “Who Else Wants …?” “The Secret Of …” or “Here’s  A Quick Way To Solve …”

6. Only focusing on owned media

Owned media is, as the phrase suggests, platforms your business owns. For example, a blog or company website is a type of owned media. Too many businesses will write a great piece of content and only post it on their company website. Unless you have a highly trafficked blog, that’s not enough.

Content marketing involves guest posting and the use of third party distribution services to ensure your content is properly distributed and seen.

7. Not using a call to action

As I mentioned above, content marketing needs to inform and educate, but it also needs to be tolerably persuasive. Part of such a technique involves using a call to action whenever you are creating a great piece of content.

You may want people to take a certain action after reading your material and they may take that action without actually being asked. The chances of someone subscribing, leaving a comment or sharing your content increases exponentially if you politely ask them to do so – don’t forget your call to action.

8. Putting quantity before quality

There are a lot of companies blogging and implementing content marketing strategies. With more and more companies involved, the need to create great content is more urgent than ever. Too many companies prioritize publishing three to five times per week over publishing one great piece of content every week.

You cannot afford to make this mistake. Publishing great content once per week will make you more of an authority and will likely have a greater impact than publishing a lot of weak, useless content.

9. Not setting goals

You need to set content marketing goals before you jump in. Without such goals, you will never know if you are being successful.

It’s also a big mistake to set vague goals. You need to set specific, measurable, and data-driven goals before you jump into content marketing.

 10. Forgetting to create landing pages

Creating landing pages and offers to go along with those landing pages is a complicated process and, understandably, companies are hesitant to incorporate landing pages into their content marketing efforts. Creating a great blog post and including a call to action will have minimal impact without linking to an offer specific landing page. Having offer specific landing pages will let you make specific pitches to the right audience.

11. Forgetting about search engine optimization

Search engine optimizing is not easy and is a time consuming task. No matter how hard and involved, it is essential for online success.

You need to consider on page optimization – like using the proper keywords – and off page optimization – like using the proper meta tags and earning links from other sites.

Optimizing your content for search must be a part of your content marketing strategy or it will fail.

 12. Forgetting about the real world

If your content doesn’t consider real world events it will lack the human element necessary for success. Your content should incorporate special events, customer success stories, promotions, new product offerings, and alliances with new partners.

13. Only hitting one social network

Companies get comfortable and develop habits – we all do. However, habits can be defeating.

If you spend all of your time focusing on one social network, you can miss potential customers within your target demographic. Focusing too much on one network also leaves you vulnerable if that network starts making changes – for example, Facebook just made changes to the algorithm that decides what appears in people’s news feed.

If your content marketing strategy involves using social networks to spread your content, discover all of the networks your potential customers are on and go there. Diversifying your distribution channels will ensure you’re not left too vulnerable to such unexpected changes.

A lot of these mistakes happen because of habits and an organizational culture that develops. They can and must be overcome to ensure the success of your content marketing efforts.

What grinds your gears?

What content marketing mistakes have you seen and have driven you crazy? Have you made a mistake and wished you could have taken it back? Did it cost you? Leave a comment below and let us know.

More than half of all U.S. internet users visit YouTube every month – 58 percent to be exact – and this audience demands your attention.

Let’s begin by exploring the different advertising options.

4 kinds of YouTube advertising

In 2006, Google bought YouTube. Since 2006, Google has smartly developed its ability to cater to the needs of all sizes of business by introducing several advertising formats.

1. Homepage Redzone

This option is out of the reach for all but the largest businesses – it involves purchasing ads to appear on YouTube’s homepage. They need to be heavily branded, well produced and very creative. A more common use of this type of advertising is with global firms or to aid with the launch of new movies.

2. TrueView In-Stream

When you try to watch a YouTube video and it begins by showing a commercial – that’s TrueView In-Stream. It’s very affordable and a type of YouTube advertising that is growing in popularity, likely because of relatively minor cost.

3. TrueView In-Search

Much like AdWords campaigns that generate sponsored search results on Google’s search engine results pages, TrueView In-Search ads appear when you search for videos on YouTube.com. You select a thumbnail from the video and the video will either direct people to your brand’s YouTube channel or to the video itself – YouTube recommends the former.

4. The Google Display Network

This is a text overlay ad that will place your text-based ad on videos that play on YouTube. It’s a way to take advantage of YouTube’s network without having to get involved in video production.

Given the diversity of options available to you, is it worth your while? Should you really take the time to produce a video to air on YouTube as an ad? The answer is a resounding, “Yes!”

7 reasons YouTube advertising is essential

1. YouTube has amazing reach

YouTube reaches more than half of all internet users each and every month (58 percent to be exact). According to Nielsen, that number has increased by 50 per cent since 2010. That’s a huge audience and one you shouldn’t be willing to pass up.

2. You can target the right demographic

You’re marketing plan should tell you the demographics of your target market.

With YouTube advertising you can target your ad based on demographics and psychographics (what viewers think, believe and enjoy):

• Target by personal demographics, geography and language
• Target based on interests, topics or to people who have visited your site in the past
• Target certain keywords based on search habits

3. Cost effective

Search Engine Watch claims that the average cost of a TrueView In-Stream video is only four cents. Of course some will be more expensive that others, but it is still very cost competitive – it is extremely cost competitive when compared to traditional video marketing on television.

4. Better than TV ads

YouTube is more effective than television advertising for 15 second ad spots and equally as effective for the more traditional 30 second ad spot. However, considering both YouTube and traditional video ads are equally effective in terms of recall, YouTube becomes the clear winner because of its low cost.

5. Combine for maximum impact

If you have the budget for both YouTube ads and television ads, an Ipsos study commissioned by YouTube says you are lucky.

According to the study:

People who watched both YouTube and TV ads showed a 2X increase in brand recall than the people who only saw TV ads.

6. Word of mouth

Small businesses can generate powerful word of mouth buzz by using YouTube advertising. Small businesses, especially local small businesses, aren’t expected to produce video ads. If you can produce your ad, you can get it on YouTube and marketing it to a certain geography. Then you can spread word about the ad through your social networks and the local media – it might just become a story in and of itself.

7. Easy to share

While not all forms of YouTube advertising are shareable, one option is – TrueValue In-Search. This form of YouTube Advertising sends people to your YouTube channel or to a particular video. Once they get to your desired destination, they are one click away from sharing your video and only a few clicks away from embedding your video on their site.

One of the essential elements of great content is that it’s easy to share. The value of content marketing comes from it spreading throughout your followers’ social networks. This type of YouTube advertising makes sharing amazingly simple.

Conclusion

YouTube is a medium that is growing at an amazing pace and its growth will continue. The company has outlined aggressive growth strategies that will mean its viewership will continue to increase. This means you cannot afford to ignore YouTube advertising.

There are many ways to get involved in advertising on YouTube, this article outlined four different ways. Regardless of what method you choose, this post showed seven clear benefits of jumping in.

Share your thoughts

Have you tried your hand at YouTube advertising? What worked and what didn’t work? What were your results? Do you think it lives up to its promise?

Featured image credit: Some rights reserved by jsawkins

Infographic design by Emily Caufield.

Who would argue? We know charisma can help motivate and persuade – two core functions of marketing in the social web.

The German sociologist and philosopher Max Weber said charisma is:

[A] certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader … How the quality in question would be ultimately judged from an ethical, aesthetic, or other such point of view is naturally indifferent for the purpose of definition.

It’s not enough for me to tell you to go be charismatic. I might as well tell you to go fly. There are some steps you can take to make yourself more charismatic.

1. Be focused on others

Social media marketing effectiveness depends on context. It’s contextual because what works for one group of followers won’t on the other and what works on Twitter might not work on Facebook or LinkedIn.

By focusing on others, you will better understand and relate to their needs and wants.

The more you relate to your followers on a human level, the better off you are. Whatever your politics, you can take a lesson from Bill Clinton. Blogger Mark Hughes described an encounter with Clinton:

When you are talking to him, you feel like he doesn’t care about anything or anybody else around but you. He makes you feel like the most important person in the room, an assessment I’ve heard many people make about him and it’s absolutely true. He seems utterly genuinely friendly and will remember you if he’s ever met you before.

Too often on social media channels, brands and individuals simply blast messages to their followers. They forget that social media is a two way channel for communication and, instead, treat it as though it is a new channel for mass communication. This is how to make sure your social media marketing efforts fail.

The first part of ensuring you are capable of this two way communication is to listen to your network.

There are 10 steps you can follow to make sure you listen closely to your network:

1. Define an objective. You need to know what you are monitoring and why you are monitoring that particular outcome. Setting goals is key to ensure the effective and efficient use of your resources.
2. Know where you will monitor. As much as you would like to, you can’t be everywhere and you can’t pick every battle. Learn where your target market or constituency communicates and congregates online and listen into those communities and networks.
3. Pick your keywords. Social media monitoring tracks certain keywords. You should monitor your company name, your brand names and the names of your company’s senior executives.
4. Be selective. If you have a large network, you will have a lot of messages to sort through – some of these messages will be more valuable than others. Triage the worthwhile messages and analyze them once they reach a critical mass.
5. Develop a plan. You need to plan to handle emergencies and crisis situations that arise online. Your social media marketing plan should also allow for routine engagement with your followers.
6. You need a team. With the rate at which social media conversations move, you cannot go it alone. Have a team of people with the relevant expertise close by or easily accessible if you need to answer a question that comes your way.
7. Don’t jump right in. Don’t start running your mouth off if you’re new to a network. Listen first, get a sense of the community’s rules, and then get involved in the conversation.
8. Handle outbound and inbound conversations differently. Outbound conversations are those messages you instigate and send out into the social web, they can’t be broadcast messages featuring promos and free trials – make the information educational and informative. Inbound conversations are those that are instigated by another person and are directed at you – you can share promotional material if the contact is a warm prospect.
9. Build relationships with thought leaders. As you listen carefully, you’ll be able to identify the thought leaders in your network and sphere of influence. Communicate with them, build relationships with them and they will help magnify the reach of your messages.
10. Select the right tools. If you decide to focus on Twitter, pick a social media monitoring tool best suited for that channel.

2. Be extroverted

You need to put yourself out there. Put yourself out there to engage the people in your network and those within the reach of your sphere of influence.

To engage your followers, you can:

• Respond to customer questions and complaints
• Share customer success stories and testimonials
• Tweet links to content you’ve created
• Post photos on Instagram
• Set up a Google Plus Hangout
• Set up a Facebook poll
• Premier new TV spots on YouTube

3. Be a skilled communicator

Effective communication is at the core of a successful social media marketing campaign. You need to listen and you need to engage, but you also must be able to carry a conversation.

Tell stories, be entertaining, share your thoughts and find common ground with your audience. While some people are naturally gifted and have these skills, they can be learned, practiced, and improved.

As Forbes blogger Jason Rosenthal wrote:

A fundamental shift is taking place in the way people – and businesses – are using social media. No longer is it enough just to transmit the mundane details of everyday life … Businesses are turning to these social communities to engage in a two-way dialogue in an effort to expand their brand identity to a broader market and inspire consumers to take action.

4. Be empathetic

You can focus on others, listen to others and engage with others, but still not be charismatic. Your social media marketing needs to communicate empathy to be truly charismatic.

You need to genuinely care about the success of your customers and your concern needs to be clearly communicated.

You can tweet out your customer’s success stories, post photos of successful customers on Facebook or publish a monthly case study featuring one of your clients.

Many believe that charisma is a natural gift. They think you either have it or you don’t. They are wrong.

What is clear: the four tips outlined above will help make your social media marketing more charismatic and, therefore, more successful.

Your turn

What characteristics do you find charismatic? Can those characteristics be used to improve your social media marketing campaigns? What social media campaigns have you found particularly charismatic?

This post will explore why comments are beneficial and ways to increase the number of comments you receive.

Benefits of blog comments

According to eConsultancy, the number one reason companies embark on a content marketing campaign is to increase engagement. There is good reason to identify increased engagement as the main purpose behind content marketing: when people are more engaged you benefit from greater brand awareness, higher levels of trust, and people perceive your brand as more likeable.

A blog is a self-contained online community where like-minded people gather, read, learn, and share. People follow and subscribe to blogs because they want to learn from the content, from the author, and from the community.

There are five ways blog comments are different from comments received on other social networks:

1. More blog comments shows your readers and visitors that you’ve developed an self-contained online community
2. Blog comments are more likely to help you achieve businesses related goals than comments received on social networks
3. The more comments you receive, the more attractive your blog and brand become
4. Comments and exchanges with blog commenters show you have credibility and establish you as an authority
5. The more people engage with your blog, the easier it becomes to attract people to guest post for you

There are three specific ways in which blog comments make your website stronger.

1. Engagement

As noted above, the top concern of businesses engaging in content marketing is to increase engagement with their audience. Comments and your responses to those comments clearly increase engagement and this will help to achieve this goal.

2. Content

People will comment on your blog post for many reasons – they may want to expand on your post or may want to present contrary points. Either way, you are receiving more information on a subject that is clearly of interest to your readers. More comments will give you more angles for future post.

Another benefit is that search engines love fresh content. Each comment increases the freshness of your site and pleases the search gods.

3. Keywords

People will likely use the keywords that you used in your post when writing their comments. This produces more keyword-rich content for your site and, again, helps improve your search engine optimization. The better your SEO, the more traffic you’ll generate.

How to pull comments out of your readers

Your blog needs to make people feel welcome and comfortable if you want them to leave comments. Here are some proven tips and tricks.

1. Ask for comments

Calls to action are an important part of any content marketing campaign. You can’t assume people know what actions you want them to take – tell them what actions they should take.

It’s best to use a customized blog comment statement at the end of each blog post. Using the same comment call to action on each post will get boring and your regular readers will see it for what it is – laziness.

Have a look at the bottom of this post from Social Media Examiner. It’s a great example of how you can use a call to action to generate comments.

2. Make commenters feel appreciated

I said it earlier in this post and I will say it again: a blog is a community. You need to foster and build a sense of community.

Part of this process is showing you appreciate people’s efforts to read and comment on your posts. The best way to show appreciation is by responding to comments that are left for you. Read the comment, look for the most intelligent part of the comment and leave a reply commenting on it.

This will pay huge dividends in the long run.

3. Tap into emotion

Try to tap into people’s anger about a certain topic or tickle their funny bone with a gag. People love to laugh – tap into this urge shared by many.

4. Have a comment policy

Your blog, like any community, needs to have rules for what is and is not acceptable. Setting commenting rules will help create a comfortable and safe environment in which people can participate.

Your commenting policy will depend greatly on your audience – taking the time to get to know them is essential and it is also the reason your comment policy should not be written in stone. Here are several factors to consider when creating your policy:

• Will you edit comments for spelling and grammar mistakes?
• Will you allow self-promotion?
• How much debate are you willing to accept?
• How will you define a negative comment and will you allow negative comments?

There are many great policies that currently exist and the Social Media DIY Workshop provides some excellent examples.

5. Welcome debate

If you blog you need to know that people will disagree with you and they won’t always be respectful. The problem a lot of bloggers face is that you need to do more than merely tolerate contrary opinion, you need to invite it.

When you enter into debates and discussions with contrary commenters, you will find that it makes you a better writer and will improve the arguments you put forth in future blog posts.

Your turn

Let us know what you think. Do you have a blog comment policy? Let us see it. Have you tried these tactics to increase the number of comments you get? How have they worked?

YouTube, like many platforms, has witnessed a massive increase in mobile traffic. In 2001, the number of mobile views of YouTube videos more than tripled.

YouTube’s audience is significant, but the damage to your company and brand can also be enormous and costly if you rush onto the platform. To avoid rushing in and making a costly mistake, here are a series of tips to ensure you get the biggest bang for your YouTube marketing buck.

1. Create compelling videos

First things first, you don’t need to create a viral video to be successful. The same rules apply to creating compelling videos as apply to creating a captivating blog post. You need to create a video that addresses the needs and concerns of your audience.

2. Connect

Your YouTube account, like your other social media accounts, is a satellite and its purpose is to link back to your website. Always link back to your website, you should do so in the video or in the text description at the very least. You can also use your video to connect by ending the video with a call to action telling people to contact you through your website or to email you.

3. Make your video searchable

You need to make it easy for people to find your videos through YouTube’s search engine and through other major search engines, like Google and Yahoo!. There are three things you can do to make it easier to find your video:

• Include keywords in the title of your video
• Always include a full URL in your description and have a thorough, keyword rich video description.
• Use related keywords in your video’s tags

While these aren’t silver bullets, they can potentially help you leapfrog your competition in search results.

4. Get involved in the community

YouTube marketing is like all other forms of social media marketing – you need to be active and involved in the community to be successful. Marketing success will depend on how willing you are to comment and share the work of others.

5. Brand your channel

It is a common assumption that you need to launch a brand channel or become a YouTube partner to brand your presence on YouTube.

There are three ways you can brand your YouTube channel without paying:

• You can create a branded YouTube channel and have the colors match those of your brand.
• Have your channel set to Player View instead of Grid View to highlight your latest video in a large screen
• Create playlists to highlight your best and related content

6. Brand your videos

Branding your channel is important, but you also need to brand your videos. Have your logo appear in each video, have constant color schemes and maintain a consistent voice. YouTube marketing will help you sell products, but it will also help you build brand recognition.

7. Add annotations

Annotations can be added to your videos to enable clickable calls to action. These will appear along the top of your video for a certain amount of time. You can use these to create links to other videos, send people to your blog or send viewers to a newsletter signup form.

8. Use only the necessary resources

YouTube videos don’t have to be expensive to be effective.  In fact, the New York Times recently ran a story titled On YouTube Amateur is the New Pro. Be polished, but not too polished. Communicate an effective message, but don’t make your message too long.

9. Post bulletins

Posting a bulletin involves sending an update to your channel’s subscribers. Pushing your note to your followers’ homepage will help bring more traffic to your video.

10. Don’t waste an opportunity to create

You don’t need a special occasion to create a YouTube video. You can create videos for special occasions, but you can also create how-to and training videos to share with your network.

11. Don’t shy away from YouTube ads

YouTube marketing can also be helped with paid ads. People search for YouTube videos like they search for general web content – they do so using keywords. Like Google’s AdWords, you can bid on keywords and have your video appear as a sponsored search result.

12. Be sociable

If you are taking a crack at YouTube marketing, you likely have a presence on other social networks. If you do, leverage your other networks to maximize the views you can get for your YouTube video.

You can increase the number of shares your video gets using several tactics:

• Create a blog post to support a new video
• Post your video to Facebook
• Send a tweet out to your followers providing the link to your video

13. Take advantage of YouTube Insights

YouTube Insights, like Google Analytics and Facebook Insights, provides valuable feedback on your YouTube marketing performance.

Identify the videos you’ve posted with the most views and the most comments and see if patterns arise. If you notice a pattern, like a particularly popular topic, focus on that a bit more and your network will reward you.

Conclusion

Create compelling videos that are easy to find. Connect with other YouTube members and share your videos with your network through your blog and other social media accounts. The 13 steps outlined above will help your YouTube marketing demolish your competition.

Businesses are using Twitter for good reason:

• There are nearly 140 million active Twitter users
• People send 340 million tweets per day
• 34 percent of marketers have generated leads through Twitter
• 20 percent of marketers have closed a deal using Twitter

When you develop a following on Twitter, you gain access to a select group of prospects who have chosen to connect with you. Sending messages to these users, several times a day, is a great way to communicate with a willing public.

If nothing else, Twitter is an important brand building tool. You can maximize the potential positive impact it can have on your brand as well as make it easier to generate leads and close says by better leveraging Twitter.

The benefits of Twitter are not solely limited to your immediate network. Effective Twitter marketing can generate buzz and increase electronic word of mouth marketing when your followers decide to retweet one of your messages.

Retweets are the way a Twitter user takes your message and passes it along to their followers. There are two main benefits of retweets:

1. Your messages gets to more people
2. A retweet serves as an endorsement because the person who retweeted your message believed it was important enough to pass along

The basics of retweets

There are three kinds of retweets:

• Basic retweet. When your message is passed along and unedited.
• Quoted. When someone retweets your message, but adds their comment before the “RT” in their message.
• Modified tweet. Sometimes people want to retweet your message, but can’t do so while remaining within the 140 character limit. People can retweet your message after cutting words and adding abbreviations – these messages are marked with a MT (modified tweet) instead of a RT.

A retweet is always an endorsement and always broadens the reach of your original message.

There are, however, different reasons people will retweet your original message. Some people are retweeting simply because they like your message, agree with you and want to spread the word. Others are looking to build their personal brands and believe that their efforts are strengthened by attaching themselves to your message.

No matter the kind of retweet and no matter the reason for the retweet, a retweeted message can spread throughout extended social networks very quickly. This is the power of Twitter marketing.

Given the power of Twitter marketing ultimately rests in your ability to have your message retweeted, we need to know what elements a make a tweet retweetable.

9 things to consider when tweeting

Here are nine proven tactics to substantially increase the odds of your message being retweeted.

1. Size matters: be brief

Each Twitter message can only be 140 characters and you need to consider that whenever someone retweets your message your username and “RT” is added to the message. Keep your tweets as short as possible and people will be more likely to share your messages because they don’t have to modify or edit the original tweet. Also, it will give people room at add their opinion and people like being able to add a personal touch.

2. Grab attention and get people reading your message

Using attention grabbing language early on in your tweet to hook the reader. Earning attention quickly is essential because there are hundreds of millions of tweets sent every day. Including attention getting language is a tradeoff because you are giving up a few characters of your company’s originally message, but its a tradeoff that’s worth making.

3. Ask for a retweet

Believe it or not, politely asking for people to retweet your message works – it’s like a call to action in copywriting. Simply add, “Please RT” to the end of your message and you will see an increase in the number of times it is passed along. The important thing to remember with this tactic is that you can’t use it too often – only go to this well when needed and when it is a very important message from your company.

4. Be human

People like interacting and like knowing there is a personality behind the Twitter account they are following. A common mistake is for the person controlling the account to let his or her personality come through. Instead, develop your brand’s personality by using humour (where appropriate), provide some history lessons about your brand or even try sending out some inspiration quotes from people within your company.

5. Share your accomplishments

You are tweeting to send out good news messages on behalf of your brand. If your company achieves something remarkable, let people know about it. When you show your company is successful, customers want to justify their affiliation with you to their friends and followers and will retweet your message to communicate that. To communicate your success, you can craft a message yourself or retweet the message of one of your followers who speaks highly of you.

6. Provide relevant information

People are on Twitter because they want to stay up to date on the latest news. For this reason, educating your followers is essential. If your tweet is more informational and less promotional, you improve your chances of getting retweeted.

7. Offer deals

I know number six said not to be too promotional, but it’s okay to offer special deals to your Twitter followers from time-to-time. Tweeting out a deal available to all will get easily retweeted and make more people follow you so they can catch future specials.

8. Engage, engage, engage

A great way to engage your followers by being topical and timely. Write your tweets with an eye to current events and holidays.

Another way to engage in a topical manner – try attaching your brand to relevant social causes. By sending out messages attached to a social cause, you also humanize your brand.

9. Tease

Don’t forget to drop hints about an important, upcoming announcement from your business.

If you really want to maximize the rate at which your messages get retweeted, try combining the nine tactics outlined above. Using these tactics above will help you write effective and powerful messages that will grow awareness of your brand and the size of your following on Twitter. Use the nine tactics outlined above and your business will benefit.

Blog competition is expanding into many markets, from traditional technology markets to consumer-facing industries, like HVAC installers and card dealerships.

There are a lot of gurus that lay out rules. These rules don’t begin to explain many instances where businesses come to blogging after their competitors already have an established online platform.

I call these latecomers ‘dethroners’

Key elements of business blogging

A business blog is a platform through which you publish useful, informational and educational content to connect with their target market. The trouble when you establish a new blog is your blog’s ability to rank well in search engines is tied to how popular it is.

This is the Catch-22 faced by new bloggers.

Attracting users

The more people reading your blog, the more attractive it is and the faster it grows. For your blog, this means the more people reading and subscribing to it, the more people that will want to read and subscribe to it.

A quality blog can help your company grow its market share and have an even greater effect on demand for your product than its price.

If you aren’t the first from your market to develop a blog you have two ways to quickly attract readers from your competitor:

1. Incentivize users to read and subscribe
2. Differentiate through technology

Attracting complementors

Complementors are people who work to build new solutions, products, tools or create content for your blog.

The most successful blogs recognize the importance of complementors early on and take steps to attract them.

The most common form complementors take are individuals who create tools, conduct training, and creation documentation or content.

Overcoming your competitors

If you’re looking to overcome and dethrone a competitor’s established blog, the first common approach is to use superior technology to defeat your competition. If you are able to find technology and tools to more effectively grow your subscriber list, like WordPress plug-ins, than start using those tools.

The second approach is called platform envelopment. With this strategy, your new blog gets the support of a larger, more developed, but slightly related blog. Bundling the offerings of a new blog with those of an older, more established one will bring more credibility to the new blog and will make it easier to grow your audience.

4 lessons from Apple, Google and Facebook on how to dethrone a competitor

1. Find a small segment of a larger market and start building from there

How can you dethrone a powerful, established blog? The process starts by focusing on small segments or market niches within the larger market you are trying to compete in. By focusing on a smaller market niche, your audience will have more in common with one another than the readers of a larger blog with a wider focus.

When readers in this smaller niche engage with one another through your blog, their shared needs and experiences will have an exponential impact on the rate at which your blog grows its readership.They key to success with this market micro-niche approach to blogging is examining all of the niches within the larger market and identifying a group of customers with the most in common who are being served the least by your major competitor.

Blogs looking to use the strategy can take a lesson from Apple’s launch of the first iPhone. When the first iPhone was launched, smartphones were pricey, high-end products. The established competitor in the market was Blackberry and its devices were tailored toward business users. Apple noted the lack of a high-end smartphone for the consumer market.

Facebook also used a similar approach when dethroning past competitors MySpace and Friendster. Facebook started by focusing on small segments of tight-knit alumni communities. The social network famously spread from school to school until it had millions and millions of users.

2. Leverage existing networks

Explore your competitor’s social networks – find out the networks they have a presence on and find out which networks it is managing poorly. These insights can give you an ‘in.’

If you find your target market or niche likes Facebook, but your competitor’s Facebook page is lagging – take advantage. Buy some Facebook ads, follow the Facebook Fan Page marketing best practices, and you will reap the benefits.

3. Spot emerging trends

Producing a superior product or delivering a the highest quality service have always been the cornerstones of a sustainable competitive advantage. Companies who have successfully dethroned competitors have done so by being able to spot emerging issues – they are able to service their target market’s needs today and understand what they will need tomorrow.

By preemptively addressing arising concerns, the your blog can start to create a unique value proposition that not even the established and dominant market players can offer.

Apple’s iPhone originally predicted several changes in the smartphone market and designed its original offering to meet needs and demands that were yet widely known or understood – for example, it developed a touch screen and had larger keys. Google did something similar when it launched Gmail in 2004 – it offered larger amounts of storage than Yahoo! and Hotmail.

4. Make attracting complementors as easy as possible

There are three ways to attract and recruit complementors:

1. Offer technical support
2. Working with them
3. By clearly establishing rules and expectations

The most common approach to complementors in blogging is the guest post. Up and coming bloggers will turn to other blogs with the goal of establishing a link between the two and using one another’s blogs to drive traffic.

Next steps

Bloggers will always face fast-paced marketing challenges because the blogging’s barriers to entry are so low. If you are able to enter a market late and use these steps to dethrone an established competitor, you will find yourself the industry leader.

Once you become the dominant blogger in your field, fending off competition is a continual challenge. Maintaining your dominance requires paying careful and close attention to the needs of your readers and your complementors.

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Your various marketing campaigns reach customers at different points and through different mediums over the course of the consumer lifecycle – websites, social networks, mobile devices, television, and print are just some examples

Viewing your SEO campaigns within this broad context and factoring these multiple channels in your return on investment calculations will make your measurement efforts much more effective.

The number of channels you need to track changes with every new social network and technological innovation – this makes deciding what to track and how to track it one of the hardest parts of search marketing.

4 benefits of multi-channel attribution

People browse across different channels before they decide to become a prospect or customer. Each channel impacts their decision to become a prospect or customer.

Here are two examples:

• Someone might hear about your product or brand in a newspaper story or on a blog. Instead of clicking on a link that brings that person from the blog to your website, they could perform a search in Google or Bing!. This search brings them to you.
• More people are also searching out Facebook fan pages to “like” your corporate page because they saw it mentioned in a television or print ad.

More people are using more channels to find your brand and to decide whether they will become a customer. Measuring multi-channel attribution has four benefits:

1. Gain a better understanding of the relationship between various channels and how to better use each channel in your overall marketing plan.
2. Get a better understanding of the contribution each channel makes to purchasing decisions – whether offline or online.
3. Improved management of SEO campaign as you gain a better understanding of which keywords are converting.
4. Simply put: it can maximize your ROI.

End of last-click

Last-click attribution does not start measuring what influences consumer behaviour until late in the sales funnel. Multi-channel models understand that SEO marketing conversions are a function of a series of clicks, clicks that occurred throughout the sales funnel, and happen over a number of days or weeks.

By not tracking the earlier clicks, last-click attribution can’t truly measure your marketing campaigns ROI. On average, there are 2.79 interactions before conversion. When we ignore the 2.79 interactions in favor of the final interaction, things like SEO are undervalued.

Though measuring multi-channel attribution is necessary, it can be complicated. You need to consider:

• How to measure impressions and clicks
• The difference between clicks in different channels
• The difference between clicks early in the funnel and those late in the funnel

Without addressing these questions and measuring interactions across many channels, there can be a significant number of inaccuracies. Last-click measurement is too oversimplified.

These inaccuracies and this kind of oversimplification could lead to missing opportunities for investment in other media and channels that would see an overall improvement in your marketing campaign’s ROI.

3 parts of an effective multi-channel model

1. Strategy

You need to develop a well-planned multi-channel attribution strategy to succeed. Without first knowing what your goals are, you won’t know what to measure and you will never know if you are succeeding.

Developing a strategy begins with an exhaustive analysis of where you are as a marketing department and business.

2. Not all interactions are equally important

Each interaction a customer or potential customer has with your company and its message has a unique value. Certain interactions – like viewing a television spot, a long visit to your website or a visit to your store – are more valuable than an AdWords click or Facebook ad impression.

3. Weight individual factors

To effectively measure multi-channel attribution you need to gather all of your business’s touch points with customers, both online and offline media. There are four pieces of information you need to gather from each channel:

• Average order
  Conversions
  Clicks
  Impressions

From the digital ether to bricks and mortar

An increasing number of customers use data gathered digitally to inform decisions made in physical locations – it’s a growing trend. If you run a bricks and mortar style operation, you need to find ways to link ephemeral online metrics with bricks and mortar actions.

A great way to do this is through post-purchase surveys. Collect email addresses from customers at the point of sale. Reach out to them with a short survey to get more information on their buying behaviour.

By acknowledging your customers become customers because of multiple interactions through various forms of media, you admit that you need to change the way you measure your market efforts’ effectiveness.

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