Linking In to Pay it Forward by Chuck Hester and more...

Paying it Paying Forward with Chuck Hester.

In this podcast interview, we get to meet Chuck Hester. Chuck is Communications Director with iContact, an email marketing software service. Chuck considers himself a LinkedIn maven because he so willingly imparts his knowledge with others. Chuck has been active on social media for about six years now. Obviously, Chuck was an early adopter of social media, in particular of LinkedIn. He got very involved in social media when he joined iContact and became communications director and he started to use social media for PR and relationship building. Chuck’s social media strategy is all about engagement.  He is an listener through iContact user groups in LinkedIn and through Twitter which Chuck started using about two years ago. Chuck actively listens to the iContact community and responds to their needs.

Linking In to Pay it Forward

Chuck was implored to write this book by many who experienced his outreach. Has his own humbling story when he and his wife went through an economic disaster during the dot com bubble burst. Chuck lost his house and really needed. And, he got it. People reached out to him and his wife Stephanie and helped them get back on their feet. He realized that social media is a platform that allows anyone to help others, not a place to broadcast your message.

NOT Your Daddy’s Business Book

Chuck’s book is an easy read. It’s inspiring, it’s humbling and it’s full of valuable tips. If you read between the lines of Chuck’s book you find that it’s a book about living life the way it should be lived. The book typifies humility. It’s filled with treasure bits of information and lessons learned. It’s conversational and simple, yet powerful and to some, maybe even life changing. The greatest compliment you can give Chuck is that you applied some of his wisdom and got blessed for it either personally or professionally.

Building Your Brand

Chuck is all about personal and professional branding. He shares my sentiment that you should be able to find someone by searching their name on the web. We all want to deal with people, not with a logo. Chuck implores everyone to be transparent, be straight forward. When I first met Chuck, he handed me two cards. He handed me his  iContact card and his Chuck Hester card. Chuck believes in the halo effect. iContact has benefited from Chuck and Chuck has benefited by iContact. That’s the power of personal branding. Of course, if you’ve read my Marketing 2.0 book, you know I’ve devoted an entire chapter to personal branding. It’s that important.

Treat Them Like They’re Right in Front of You: Online Social Media Etiquette

In this chapter Chuck emphasizes that there is a real person behind their computer or device. Just because you’re interacting with someone on LinkedIn or another social media application is no reason to act differently. We should always be authentic in our interactions with people. In other words, we should treat people online like they’re standing right in front of you. I agree!

LinkedIn Live Raleigh

People in Chuck’s network started expressing interest in meetups about three years ago. Chuck set up the first LinkedIn Live Raleigh event in July 2007. About 50 people came together for the first event which was three hours of solid networking. He met with many people he was connected to in LinkedIn. Today, most events draw about  250 people. Each event has sponsors and door prizes. At one recent event, they raised $1900 for Soles for Souls, a local charity. Chuck has heard many great ROI stories about these events. He know there about 40 people that gotten employment or contracts from these events. One person won a $50 food card door prize. He approached Chuck to let him know that he was unemployed and that door prize allowed him to by flowers and a dinner from the grocery store for his wedding anniversary. Wow!

Take the Meeting

Chuck’s advice to doubters is to get out and meet people because people are so interconnected. The chances of something good happening are so in your favor. Social Media is one of the most amazing pay it forward platforms in history. It’s easy to find someone who needs help, or needs to buy my widget. The marketplace has no geographic or time constraint boundaries.

How to Pay it Forward

Chuck’s advice for anyone who doesn’t know how to pay it forward is this. It’s easy to return a favor. So, just go out and help someone out without any expectation that they will help you out. The blessings are plentiful. You will be repaid somehow. Just don’t expect it. Helping someone can be as simple as re-tweeting or introducing someone online. Do it often and it will become habit and you’ll want to do it over and over. Remember that no matter how small it may seem to you it could be big for someone else…

I hope you’ve been inspired by Chuck as I have been. Check out Chuck’s book, Linking in to Pay it Forward, as well as his blog or LinkedIn or on Twitter.

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Podcast interview with Joselin Mane. Joselin is a former IBMer who runs an internet marketing consultancy and a Tweetup service called Boston Tweetups. Joselin is a colorful character. You’ll enjoy meeting him in this blog post and the video links below.

I met Joselin at the Inbound Marketing Summit in Foxboro, MA in October where we connected very quickly. We both run inbound marketing agencies and we talked shop for a while and hit it off. I knew Joselin would be a great guest on my podcast show because he has so many interesting stories about Tweetups and SEO and social media marketing. Don’t limit yourself to reading this blog post. You should listen to the full podcast interview (above).

Tweetups

What is a Tweetup? The term evolved from meetups where people organized and promoted events around a topic. A Tweetup is an event that originates from people who organized it through Twitter.  A common example is when people who attend a conference get together in social settings and the event is totally organized and promoted organically through Twitter.

Why Should Marketers Consider Organizing a Tweetup?

Tweetups are very social. Most marketers can get huge value by bringing people together and engaging and networking. It’s common knowledge that we do business with people we like and trust. And, meeting face to face speeds up the relationship and trust building process.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s a B2B or B2B company, the face to face aspect of making connections is very powerful. Tweetups are all about building relationships. While a Tweetup can have a specific purpose such a cause or product announcement, it can also just be purely social. Joselin uses Eventbrite to announce, organize and offer advice on Tweetups through his Boston Tweetup service.

Joseline’s Top 3 Do’s and Don’ts for Tweetup Organizers

Do’s

1. Decide on the theme first.
2. Attend other people’s Tweetups.
3. Document everything.

Don’t’s

1. Don’t forget the human element.
2. Don’t change too many things once promotion begins.
3. Don’t neglect the details and be sure to plan ahead.

Boston Tweetup

Joselin missed an event last year and decided to research events and when he did he found nine event calendars. Joselin then consolidated them into one calendar for Boston social media and marketing events. He set up a blog and shared this calendar and started Tweeting about the calendar. Eventually Joselin’s calendar became recognized as the authority for Boston social media events.  One thing Joselin did consistently was promote other people’s events asking for nothing in return. Joselin has proved to be a thought leader in Boston through his social media event calendar.

Next Boston Tweetup December 3rd

Joselin’s website for Boston Tweetup includes a video summary of each Boston Tweetup event.  He also offers a poll for each Tweetup where people can vote on the Tweetup events and post comments. Joseline’s unselfish leadership on social media calendaring has resulted in new opportunities including attending Celtics games in box seats as well as meeting people from NBC which resulted in an assignment. Who knows, we may see Joseline one morning on NBC’s Today Show talking about his Tweetups. I wouldn’t be surprised. I also won’t be surprised to hear that his big Tweetup on December 3rd will be the biggest of the year!

Video for SEO

Joselin helps clients with SEO using best practices and a video strategy. Google is always interested in presenting recent content in its search results. He points out that videos get indexed very rapidly by search engines. But, search engines can not index the actual content in a video. Rather, they index the meta data in videos. Google has to index videos rapidly because there are so many videos being uploaded every day.  Joselin creates customized video for clients and uploads them to about 150 social media profiles. Each video is tagged and uploaded to each of these social media sites. He uses geo tagging to appeal to Google’s Universal Search features.  Joselin interviews his client and captures their value proposition in a short video and propagates it across about 150 social sites. He releases videos on dozens of video sites and on various social sites like StumbleUpon, Delicious and Twine. One entry can result in dozens of entries in search results.

SEO Has Become CSO

Joselin’s approach is an example of my sentiment that SEO is becoming CSO (content search optimization). By creating a broad content footprint that gets spread across the web very methodically marketers can create strong reach and great search results. Joselin likens this to a mall and the stores in the mall. A storefront exists inside a mall. The social sites such as Facebooks and YouTube are malls. People enter these malls and can see the content in each “mall.”

Cool Glasses

I asked Joselin about the cool glasses he wears. He said an optometrist friend of his recommended these glasses. They have no legs. Rather they use a short spring that rests on each temple. I’m sure it took a little getting used to but these glasses are very interesting. I’ve never seen anyone else wearing these glasses. They are symbolic of Joselin’s unique personality. He’s one of a kind!

Below is my interview with Joselin at the Inbound Marketing Summit in October. Enjoy…

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This blog post an updated excerpt from my book, Marketing 2.0.

Measuring results is one of my favorite topics in marketing. Since the invention of marketing (I couldn’t find that date in Wikipedia), executives have wanted to measure the effectiveness of marketing dollars against sales in order to determine their return on investment, or ROI.

The reality is that in recent years, measuring marketing results, at least at the quantitative level, has become increasing sophisticated through tools and techniques. In addition to quantitative metrics, measuring qualitative results can be just as valuable.

Social media marketing measurement is very similar to measuring other web marketing results. First I’ll review the tools you can use. Then, I’ll offer ways you can use them to measure social media marketing results.

Conventional Wisdom

Let’s start with a look at the conventional web marketing metrics tools, beginning with some free tools. You may be familiar with some or all of these tools. As obvious as they are to me, I often meet marketers who are not harnessing them to their full potential.

Google Analytics—a free web analytics service that provides website owners valuable insight into website traffic details including visitors, sources of visitor traffic, pages visited, time spent on your website, keywords driving website traffic, geographic location of visitors, conversions based on a predefined goals, and much more.

Google Webmaster Tools—another set of free and powerful tools from Google providing another level of detail in studying traffic data for your website as well as keyword click-throughs and inbound links.

Google Alerts—another free service that will alert you by email or to your RSS reader each time Google finds a relevant result for a topic you’ve set up to track.

Google Blogsearch—a free search engine subset of Google’s search engine geared to display blog posts. When you search on a phrase, Google displays recent blog posts for that phrase.

Social Media Measurement Tools

As social media marketing has exploded, so has the landscape of tools and services designed to help companies measure and optimize their results. I’ll start with a partial list of free social media measuring tools. Note most free tools offer fee-based premium versions as well.

Blogpulse—a service from Nielsen Buzzmetrics that acts as both a blog search engine and blog tracker. Bloggers can track conversations taking place about topics of interest, as well as discover where their blog ranks in relation to others covering similar topics.

Trendpedia—a free service that functions mostly as a blog search engine. Its main feature involves helping people find the most popular trends in social media across a variety of topics and tracking the trend of the topic over a three-month period in comparison to other relevant topics.

Trendrr—a free service that adds a real sense of analytical measurement through its use of trending graphs. Trendrr lets anyone track, compare, and share trends on any topic across blogs and other social media.

Technorati—a free service that functions as an Internet search engine for blogs. You can track your blog content in Technorati.

Twitter Search – Whether or not your have a Twitter account, you can use Twitter’s search engine. Marketers should search relevant keywords to learn about conversations about their brand on Twitter.

The free tools listed above are a partial list of many tools available to track your content results. I encourage you to use as many tools as practical to measure and track your social media marketing results on an ongoing basis.

Staying on Course

However, tracking the reach of your content in social media is just a part of the measuring results secret sauce. You also need to gain insights so you can measure your progress and take action. A metaphor comes to mind. Social media marketing is like flying an airplane. The sophisticated cockpit constantly calculates the extent to which the plan has shifted from its course route and makes the necessary adjustment to get the plane back on its course. In social media marketing, you must similarly be tracking and interpreting in order to know when and how much you must adjust your content strategy and your tactics to stay on course.

In addition to the free tools listed above, there is an ever-growing list of fee-based tools to measure social media results. I will only list two because these are the two we use at Find and Convert and therefore I’m most familiar with them. Again, there are many other good tools available and you should do your own homework.

HubSpot – an inbound marketing software as a service (SaaS). HubSpot allows marketers to track keyword rankings, competitor’s web marketing presence, traffic analysis, leads and lead intelligence. Recently, HubSpot added social media tracking features allowing marketers to track the impact of social media on your desired goals (such as sales leads). In the screenshot below you can see the emerging impact of social media traffic.

ScoutLabs – a social media tracking tool that allows marketers to track mentions in blogs, bookmarking sites, Twitter, photos, video and more. We like the ability to track sentiment of keywords and the ability to chart trends. Below is a short video interview with Jennifer Zeszut, CEO of ScoutLabs.

Measuring Quantitative Results
There are many factors you can measure in your social media strategy. First, make sure you have clearly defined goals. Otherwise your metrics will not be meaningful and you won’t be able to measure success. Here are some quantitative metrics you can measure.

Subscribers – watch the subscriber count to your blog(s) and newsletter grow.

Followers – watch the number of followers on Twitter or Facebook grow as well any groups or communities your create.

Mentions – track the mentions of your brand and relevant keywords to learn about conversations and decide which conversations you should engage.

Sentiment – track the sentiment of your keywords to determine what (if any) changes you should consider in your content strategy and in the tactics you use. A negative trend on a topic may give you cause to back away from that topic or to change your approach to it.

Inbound Links – links are the currency of the web. Track the number of links you’re building and where they are coming from.

Comments – study the comments being made on your blog or your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Comments could give you reason to engage or add more content on a topic of high interest.

Connections – one of the greatest and measurable factors in social media marketing is the new doors that can open up. New connections can result in speaking opportunities, media interviews, guest blog or publication articles, key introductions and new sales opportunities.

Brand Equity – all businesses should care about brand equity. It’s not limited to large companies. Using any combination of tools described above you should study the trends in your brand. Is your company name a growing keyword driver of traffic to your website? If the trends are positive, correlate that to your sales results. If you have employees with a strong social media presence include them in your brand equity study. The relationship between your employees and your brand is tied more tightly than ever before. Take Mike Volpe as an example. His blogging, speaking, podcasting and overall content creation on the web has a positive impact on HubSpot, his employer. And, btw, both Mike Volpe (the brand) and HubSpot (the brand) benefit from his efforts.

It Takes Work!
If you’re thinking, man this sounds like a lot of work, you’re not only right, you’re onto something big! Measuring results properly is not just hard work. It’s time consuming. So, where are you going to get all this time? By eliminating non-performing marketing activities! Measure all your marketing activities. If you have losers in your marketing mix (assuming you’ve been at it more than six months) scale them back or eliminate them. Many marketers report cutting back on marketing activities such as direct mail and tradeshows after measuring success in their social media strategy. BTW, attending a tradeshow can be just as effective as exhibiting at a tradeshow at a fraction of the cost. While you’re at the tradeshow you should be posting to Twitter about the people you’re meeting and the content you’re enjoying, taking pictures and shooting video interviews with industry people and posting all this content on the web to keep building your footprint on the web. Of course when you tag this content you’ll create links and build more brand equity. And, you can measure that…

To measure your social media marketing results keep at it and measure. Keep at it. Measure. Keep at it. Measure.

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Developing a Social Media Marketing Strategy
When I devoted an entire chapter in my book, Marketing 2.0, to developing a social media marketing strategy, my intent was to inspire marketers. In other words, I want marketers to avoid making the most common mistake, which is the mindset that you need a Twitter or Facebook strategy. You don’t. You need a social media marketing strategy!

Consider assembling the marketing team and your CEO and asking these questions:
•    Why do we think we need a social media strategy?
•    What is our objective?
•    What will the costs be?
•    What are the staffing requirements?
•    What are the risks?
•    What are the opportunities?
•    What are our competitors doing in social media?

Old School Meets New School
While Marketing 2.0 is a new-school marketing paradigm, there is no substitute for old-school research to gain valuable insights before you develop your social media strategy. Begin with research about your customers, target customers, competitors, resellers and influencers. Take no less than a few days (at a minimum) to study the landscape in your industry. Conduct searches in Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube for the names of the CEOs of any company in your industry that is relevant. Include your competitors, your suppliers, and any other relevant company, including analysts and publications. This research should provide valuable insight into where your customers and relevant community are spending time on the social web. You’ll learn what they’re talking about and what groups exist by topic or by company. You’ll learn what your competition is doing or not doing. Eventually, you will gain valuable insight that will drive your social media strategy.

Why Do We Think We Need a Social Media Strategy?
This question is somewhat akin to asking, what business are we in? When you consider why you need a social media strategy, you should take some time and revisit this question about your core business.  A social media strategy serves one simple purpose; it enables your company to engage in authentic conversations with your community so you can improve your ability to attract, retain and serve your customers.

So Begin Your Social Media Strategy by Listening!
On one hand, it’s obvious why we should be listening. It’s the same reason we should be reading industry news—to stay informed. But remember that News 1.0 came at you from only one direction. The people whose job it was to deliver the news wrote it, and you read it. That’s where it ended. In News 2.0, we are empowered to participate in the story. When you listen to the comments made by people who react to a news story, you are listening to your market in real time.

If your top competitors are actively producing content in social media, your risk may be greater if you choose not to. Your absence from online conversations may damage your brand. In short, competitive pressures may influence your decision to become a content producer.

What is Our Objective?
You’ve done your research, and you’ve identified why you need a social media strategy. Now, it’s time to clearly define your objectives. Your objectives should fall into one of these categories:
•    Competitive differentiation
•    Market share growth
•    Expansion of your brand

Competitive Differentiation
A competitive differentiation strategy requires you to increase your visibility on the social web in your market segment through online content commenting and new content creation. Identify the best sources of web-based content in your industry, including vertical industry media and associations. Task a member of your staff to monitor the content and the conversations in these online communities. Identify the subject matter experts in your organization who can get engaged in the conversations in these online communities or contribute new content. Consider a blog strategy if you have the staff to devote to it. Find a voice for your organization that can become a consistent voice in your market, delivering a consistent message on specific topics. Allow this voice to be active and free with ideas and valuable insights into the things about which the people in your industry care. Remember, this is not a direct sales strategy, though your management team may view it this way. Your differentiation goal is to allow the market to see how you think, how you serve, how you listen, how you respond, and generally how you add value to your market. Talking about your products in ways that interest your community is advisable. Shouting to them about features is not. Your goal is to make it easy for others to learn how your organization is different from your competitors.

Market Share Growth
In setting out to grow your market share, you must be committed to proper staffing and producing diversified content on the social web. You must do proper planning and be willing to experiment, even if it means taking risk and failing some along the way. The objective is to attract more of your community to your organization. To do this, you need a bigger footprint on the web. If your differentiation strategy was primarily based on a blog, you may need to expand your strategy. You might commit to producing videos. Groups are available in social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook and can offer very easy ways to expand your reach. Similarly, you may find groups in industry-specific social sites where your staff can participate. This requires commitment, which carries with it some staffing implications. But this can be accomplished by adjusting your staffing requirements, cutting nonperforming marketing activities and reallocating staff resources to producing more social media content.

Brand Expansion
To expand your brand using social media requires a big commitment and carries some risk. The content strategy is the key to success in brand expansion! You’ll need to decide which social media platforms to use, who will create the content, and who will be the public face of your content. Presumably you’ve done your homework to find the audience you want to reach, and you’re committed to producing the content that will reach them. You’ll need to experiment to find the right mix of content and platforms to reach your desired audience. You may find that some content is more effective than others in expanding your brand. You’ll need to take some risk and measure results along the way to determine the effectiveness of expanding your brand through social media.

Let Your Content Go
The reality is that most businesses have more content than we know what to do with. We have white papers, news releases, websites, newsletters, and countless internal documents, not to mention the brilliant but often undeveloped content residing in between our ears. The power of social media marketing lies in letting it all go. Share your content with the world. So if you have good content for your community, share it, promote it, but most of all, just let it go.

Ready, Aim, Fire
Do your homework. Set your goals. Set your content strategy. Assemble the team. Cut non-performing activities to make room for a social media strategy. Then, get started. You’ll make some mistakes. But, with good planning you’ll make fewer and less costly mistakes and you’ll accelerate your results.

I’ll write a blog post soon about how to measure social media marketing results…

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Billie Ginther: Marketing Manager and PR Optimizer

The two pillars of social media marketing are delivering excellent content to your intended audience and building great relationships. A crucial aspect of building upon these pillars is how you share your content with others. An effective content strategy has to include a well-thought-out bookmarking strategy to propagate your content.

1. It Is All About Them
Focus on your target audience. Joe Pulizzi, CEO of Junta42, a content vendor and project matching service preaches that delivering consistent editorial-quality content means that you must think less like a marketer and more like a publisher. This means your content should not be a thinly-veiled company brochure but must be consistent editorial-quality content that addresses your audience’s needs, offers value, and helps begin a relationship that may eventually make them customers and friends.

2.    Quality over Quantity
There are hundreds of bookmarking sites, such as Delicious, Digg, Diigo, Mixx, Propeller, Technorati, Newsvine and Twine, that reach broad audiences. However, bookmarking sites like Smallbusinessbrief, Sphinn, Kirtsy and Slashdot are tailored to more specialized audiences. Research and choose bookmarking sites that are relevant to your audience. A specialized bookmarking site with a smaller audience that is interested in your content may have more value than a mega-site where your content may not be as easily found or read. In most cases, six well-chosen bookmarking sites will generate more engagement than 24 randomly chosen ones.

3.    Content Propagation Means Sharing
Social media content propagation is more than just submitting your content to a variety of bookmarking sites. Effective content propagation requires being social. When you sign up for a bookmarking website, complete your profile, add friends that may already be members, and participate so that you build a network within the site. Most important, submit and vote up other people’s content that you find meaningful, interesting or funny. Don’t confine your participation to promoting only your content. Comment on articles, tweet and micro-blog about the content contributed by others.

4.    Bookmark What Is Meaningful
Be sure the content you submit is relevant to the community within the bookmarking site. Submitting “How to Toilet Train Your Cat” may be wildly popular in an animal or pet community within Digg, but it might get you deactivated in a SEO bookmarking website like SlashDot. Some bookmarking sites like Newsvine will deactivate you in a heartbeat if your content contains any self-promotion or advertising. Learn the boundaries of the bookmarking websites and stay within them.

5.    Don’t Be a Manipulative Cad
The objective of any good bookmarking website is to create communities that share valuable content organically. The more an article is read, commented on, voted, forwarded, emailed and shared, the more authority that content acquires. Sharing, voting and commenting are good. Setting up multiple profiles so that you can vote up your submissions is a black hat tactic and will get you deactivated.

6.    Anything Worth Doing…Is Worth Doing Well
Content propagation is time consuming. As long as you are generating high quality content, the results will justify your time. While automated bookmarking software can speed up the process,  I have not yet found a program that works well on all platforms or allows for sharing, commenting or any of the other aspects of being…social. Investing the time to participate the old-fashioned way yields the best results. That is not to say that you should not use the tools that are at hand. Using the bookmarking or share widget found on many blog sites helps build authority for the author of the article. Helping others gain authority on great content is another powerful way to build relationships on the web.

7.    Tag…You’re It
Be sure to tag your articles when submitting to bookmarking websites. Tags are keywords that help your audience find your content when they conduct a search within the bookmarking website. Tags need to be keywords your audience uses, not your company’s jargon. Think like a member of your intended audience and use tags that will help them find your content.

8.    Patience Is a Virtue…but  Devising a System Can Speed Up the Process
We work with many clients on their social media strategy and our browsers are often opened to dozens of URLs. Too often my browser does not automatically log me in when using the share widget feature within various blog sites. Setting up a separate login on your computer startup for your bookmarking project can save you time and simplify propagating your content. Set up your browser’s automatic login feature and only use the additional computer login for bookmarking. This small step will cut the time you spend bookmarking content.

9. Measure Results
Which articles resonate with your readers? Track your content, visitor traffic, traffic sources, content reach, clicks, sentiment and voice through Google Analytics as well as other marketing software systems, such as HubSpot and ScoutLabs. Discover which content has the most value to your audience and refine your content strategy accordingly.

10. Knowledge Is an Ongoing Learning Experience
Every bookmarking website has its own social network, rules and procedures. Learn the strengths and idiosyncrasies of each one.  And do not be afraid to make mistakes…it will eventually improve your bookmarking results. If you get deactivated from a bookmarking website, find out why, reread the rules and contact the website to get re-instated. And, of course, don’t do the same thing again!

Developing and taking the time to effectively implement a content propagation strategy that broadens your footprint on the web takes time but the results are well worth the investment.

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