Author: Dan Blank

With Social Media, All Businesses are Small Businesses

Did you have a local community store growing up? The grocer, coffee shop, newstand or diner? A place where you knew who ran the shop, they knew you, and you built a relationship one small conversation at a time.

Well, all businesses can now build this type of relationship with their customers, regardless of location, product or industry. One Tweet at a time. One comment at a time. One post at a time.

Business now have the ability to listen to what their customers are interested in, what bugs them, and engage in small conversations. What’s more, you don’t just get to see how they interact with your brand, but with your competitors, with their friends, and their entire network.

But sure, this is a lot of work. It’s not enough to ‘monitor’ your customers on social media, you have to constantly work to build real relationships, and be constantly watching your customers’ preferences and behaviors.

A few months back I was picking up lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant that I go to regularly. The owner is always behind the counter, a man in his late 50s. On that day, he was on the phone with the cable company talking about when they can fix his TV at home. He laughed when they asked him if they could stop by when he gets off work – he said, “You mean at 11:30 at night?” It was noon when this conversation took place, and he had clearly been there for awhile already. It was his store, and he worked it every hour it was open. It’s not that he didn’t have staff – there are many other employees around, and its a fairly large space, at least 25 tables, plus a healthy take-out business. But when his store is open, he is there, connecting with his customers.

Social media gives all businesses this kind of access to their customers – 24/7. Is it work? No, it’s an opportunity, to listen, to help, to grow your business. With social media, all businesses are small businesses.

Thanks!

-Dan

Social Media is About Quality, Not Quantity.

There are many ways companies talk about their customers online: users, followers and page views are three that come to mind. Sure, these phrases are convenient sometimes, but when considering your online strategy, they can be dangerous terms.

Social media is about quality, not quantity. And yet, when we move our businesses online via blogging, social media, video, etc – people often default to the most basic ways of measuring their success. It’s all about the numbers, and more is better.

And that’s just silly.

If you are a niche publication, do you want 20,000 people delivering 30,000 page views to your website, or just the 1,000 who care passionately about your industry, and spend their budgets with the brands that you cover? You know, the people who will actually sign up for your newsletter, comment on your articles, email you with follow up questions, attend events that you do, and are shaping the industry that you love.

Sometimes, to feel professional and like adults, we talk about those who read our stuff as “users” or “page views.”

But do you have an amazing conversation with a “user,” a “page view,” or a “follower?” No, you don’t. Is this how a business is built? Is this how a community is created? One ‘user’ at a time? Nope. That’s how FAILING businesses are created. There is a difference between a group of people standing around next to each other, and a community.

When building your brand online, consider ways to segment your audience. Who are your tightest connections – reaching out to you again and again, engaging with you, sharing what you do?

What segment of your ‘traffic’ is a mistake – people who came to your website via Google by accident and left after 3 seconds? They aren’t a part of your community. Those page views don’t count.

This is how web stats lie – not because of the numbers themselves, but in how we use them. Web analytics can be powerful tools, if used properly – but often not by focusing on basic metrics about quantity.

Twitter follower counts are misleading. Do you know how many of your followers are spammers, people who follow 40,000 other people or who haven’t logged on in more than a year?

Do you know who are your most valuable Twitter followers? Do you know why?

The goal is not to view web stats to increase the quantity, but rather, decrease it. Find ways to segment and segment until you are left with a core group of people who care desperately about the things you do. This applies to your Twitter followers, to web analytics, to the many ways you measure performance online.

Then, focus intently on those PEOPLE. Engage with them – the targeted few, not the masses who never really cared about you and what you represent. Consider how even if you identify 300 core people who follow you on Twitter and love what you do – that even they might break out into 6 distinct communities, and that you may serve each one differently.

When you walk into a restaurant, do you want to be treated like a ‘user.’ Or do you want to be treated like a valuable customer – someone who wants to have a great connection with what is being offered. Do you want to be just another number on their daily ledger, or do you want to be Norm from Cheers – where everybody knows your name?

Thanks!

-Dan

Why “Best Practices” Lead to Mediocre Results

Best practices are often used to try to reduce the risk of failure. But oftentimes, these strategies are things that worked well six months ago, and have since been embraced my many others. For something to be a “best practice,” it often means it has been tried so often, by so many people, that you are late to the game. That they value you will eek out of it will be meager and hard fought.

Best practices can also mean that you are focusing on the wrong end of things – seeing the results other people had, but not understanding the core mission and values that lead to those results.

An easy example is Zappos. They get accolades for their customer service, and teach other companies how to do it. They are sharing as much as they can about how their company operates. They give away their secrets!

They have whittled down what they are into a series of lessons, of courses, of practices. And yet, how many Zappos-like companies do you see out there? Few.

Why? Because managers go to Zappos based on the end-result, and are looking for “best practices” that fit into their current systems and culture. They want that one missing puzzle piece, not an entirely new puzzle to start with.

Zappos’ training is not challenging because it is a complicated system, but because it requires companies to rethink how they operate, how they view employees, how they view customers, how they view products, how they view communication, how they view the company’s mission & values, and how they view marketing.

And that is likely WAY too much for most people to handle. So instead, they look for simple, tactical “best practices.” And they get a TINY percentage of the value that the best practice delivers, and that value is always shrinking even further.

I see this again and again in social media. Instead of people thinking INTENTLY about their customers and how to serve them, they look for tactics on how to increase followers or ‘grow their conversion.’

So they move from flavor of the week to flavor of the week of jargon, tactics, and strategies. And they are often too slow and too late to create any meaningful value.

This methodology also SHUNS the idea of iteration, that you need to constantly evolve to improve your products and services and better serve your customers. Companies look for the one right solution, when really, it is best to constantly measure and iterate.

It is a corporate hallucination to think that one system will work perfectly, and continue to do so time and time again. And millions of dollars are wasted justifying such systems, changing again only as a measure of last resort.

If you are shooting for best practices, you will likely experience a faint shadow of the results of the people you are emulating.

Do you make toothpaste? Stop going to toothpaste manufacturer conferences, and start talking to your customers about their behaviors, experiences, joys and needs. Because the trends you jump on that other toothpaste manufacturers are jumping on will result in you being 2% different than the competition, meaning that in the end, it will all come down to price in the mind of your customer.

I’m sure Crest and Colgate each have convincing Powerpoint presentations expressing why THEIR brand is unique and powerful. But at the end of the day, we all just buy the one that’s on sale. Because, you know, its just toothpaste.

But for shoes – I buy from Zappos. Because they are somehow about something more than just shoes. They are about “delivering happiness” as their CEO’s book is titled.

For Zappos, best practices weren’t a starting point, best practices were the vapour trail left in their wake for others to pick up and wonder at.

Thanks!

-Dan

Lifetime Learning: Did Your Education Stop at Age 21?

I was wandering around Princeton University on Sunday and bumped into their graduation & reunion ceremonies.  I spent the day surrounded by current and former students – it was a day filled with moments:

  • Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, gave the commencement address, sharing a story about how he left a very good job to chase the internet sensation.
  • At one point, I sat in an outdoor area, next to a table with four graduates who were catching up on the past few years of their lives – kids, debt, job search, relocation, stress and the like.
  • I sat next to a man in his 70s at lunch, wearing his Princeton outfit, back in town for the reunion. He was with his grandson, chatting up the bartender over a lunchtime beer. His grandson explained to him what a Mimosa was.
  • I walked past recent graduates leaving the ceremony, stripping off their gowns and caps, a faraway look in their eyes as they rushed to meetup with friends and family.

These moments had me considering how we learn, how we grow. The first 21 years of our lives are about structured learning – we go to school, we memorize facts, we are posed with challenges and tests, as we move up the ladder from pre-school to college graduation.

And then what?

How do we learn from there? In many ways, I suppose: we learn through our everyday lives, unstructured learning, experience, our jobs, via those we meet, and by reading, playing and creating.

This works well for some. Not so well for others. For some, it’s easy to back into a safe corner, surrounded by the same dozen people, the same job, the same town, the same experiences day in and day out. It’s easy to treat new ideas as foreign, new people as ‘other.’ At some point, life becomes more about reinforcement & validation of what we already know, not openness to new experience, and a thirst for new ideas, new ways, new communities.

I have found social media to be a powerful learning tool – connecting not just to information, but to communities, to individuals. And I am fascinated with how we can take this a step further – how we can continue learning throughout our lives, assigning goals, and working together to meet them. I’ve been studying models for online classrooms, and how individuals can come together to teach, learn and grow.

This summer I will be launching an online class of my own, one geared towards writers, and how they can build an engaged online fanbase.

Thanks!

-Dan

Everything is Content

One of the biggest challenges new bloggers face is coming up with ideas for content. There are plenty of great systems to help, such as mindmapping, editorial calendars and the like. But today, I want to talk about how content is all around us – all you need to do is harness it.

When I look at great bloggers, it is clear that blogging is embedded in the fabric of their being. They are living their blog. Ideas aren’t external things that they have to go find, every moment of their day is a potential blog post, and they are gardeners, slowly growing ideas, shaping the landscape and harvesting the best bits.

Let’s take an easy example, Fred Wilson’s blog avc.com. His blog is his life and his life is his blog. When he talks about why he likes the iPad, he tells a story about how his family uses it. When he wants to talk about metrics, he shares the Google Analytics data from his own blog. When he goes to an event, he finds topics from the conversation on stage. When he can’t keep up with email, he writes a post about it.

Fred doesn’t sit at home every day and blog. He is very active in his career, traveling, spending time with his wife and three kids, and with his hobbies. And yet, he posts some REALLY great blog posts every single day. It should be noted that while he isn’t a writer by trade, he has become an incredible communicator.

If that wasn’t enough, Fred updates his Tumblr with little updates every day as well. And yes, he Tweets too.

Fred is a great example of ‘everything is content.’ He lives his passion, and his blog fuels it even further. He has become a very well known commentator in the tech & startup world – based not just on his expertise and experience, but his ability to share and communicate via these online platforms.

For about six weeks now, I’ve been blogging every weekday. Prior to that, I had only been blogging once a week. What I have found is that blog posts are all around me, and that all I need to do is be open to them. To my great surprise, it hasn’t been a struggle to come up with ideas or find the time to write. In fact, I think my spelling has even improved because I am writing so much.

We all spend our day thinking about things: interactions we have, what we are working on, what happened at the food store, and on and on and one. Why not channel these thoughts into something constructive.

When you create a blog, you are sharing a part of yourself. This goes beyond ‘content marketing,’ this is about self expression, this is about sharing your expertise and passion.

When I talk to a colleague, several blog posts can come out of the conversation because I am learning so much about what people are doing, what inspires them, what concerns them. Sure, I may end up only writing about one of the ten concepts we discussed, and I may tie it together with something I read three weeks ago, but still – it’s content. When something doesn’t work – that’s content. When something succeeds – that’s content. Everything is content. Your role as a blogger is to find the best bits and share them in the most compelling manner.

Thanks!

-Dan