Age of Conversation Cover

Yes, I realize I used the word “Peeps” but I do believe it is Friday. So, yeah.

I have been blessed to participate in the Age of  Conversation project again this year.  Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton put a call out to authors on the topic of Social Media, and those who make the cut get a chapter in a collective book.

To make things even better, all proceeds from the project go to charity. In short, I totally get to talk about myself and all the proceeds go to a good cause. It just doesn’t get better than that.

Seriously though, if you read last year’s edition, or the one before, you know that these collections tend to be packed full of wisdom and advice from a dizzying array of experts from many perspectives you might never have thought of before.

The book officially comes out some time in April, and pre-ordering starts soon.

In this blog over the next month while I wait for the book to come out, I’ll be sharing the experience with you and telling you about the people I’m writing with.

In fact, let’s start that part right now, shall we? Meet the authors of the Age of Conversation 3, below:

Many of my local business clients say that they just don’t get social media. They tell me they just don’t understand how using social media is going to get them more business.

And the answer is simple, really. More effective exposure, faster.

To really wrap your head around this, it helps to realize that behind the search rankings, dot coms and email addresses are people. Why are people online? Because they want information, they want to be entertained, and they want to connect.

We advertise in newspapers, magazines, on radio, on television because we want to reach people who want what we’re selling. The same thing goes for the web. Nowadays, that mean using social media.

The biggest deal about social media is so big, we often don’t even see it. Sites like Facebook, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Delicious, Digg, Mixx, Twitter and all the others have one thing in common: they’ve redistributed power that used to remain in the hands of the few to the hands of the many.

When this happened, a lot of the gatekeepers between us and our potential clients and customers fell away, in a way that allows more discourse between people, without leaving sensitive private information exposed.

I can write a blog post about an aspect of what I do without revealing the secret formula that gets people to buy from me or hire me. And you can read it or provide feedback without exposing your private information. For example, if you send a Twitter link about my post, and my blog recognizes it, you can make a short comment without even telling me your email address, as you would need to do if you were to comment on my site.

And blogging and tweeting are just two types of social media you can leverage to benefit your business.

I know, for some people this is really scary.

Socializing online puts you in a weird position as a business person if you start maneuvering without quite “getting” it. You don’t want to be the guy who thought it was okay to put his link on someone else’s Facebook profile and find it removed the next day, and have potentially powerful allies blocking you because you breached some etiquette or made a mistake.

You don’t want to end up talking business too soon, yet you also don’t want to be the person who had an opportunity to promote themselves, but saw that it was okay only after their competitor beat them to it.

I got an email today from a new friend who told me he couldn’t wrap his way around social media. Like in many new social situations, he didn’t know how to act. If like him, you think you don’t “get” social media, and how it can be used for business, I think that if you’re like most people, you’re wrong.

You already get Web 2.0 and Social Media. You just don’t realize it. The very fact that you don’t want to “be that guy” means that you’ve figured out that there’s a certain etiquette to all these new tools, and that they vary from community to community.

Remember how you figured it out offline? You found someone to help you, someone who had the results you wanted that you could copy, or you worked it out through trial and error.

Luckily, online there are people who are willing to teach you the ropes, so you can skip the trial and error. Now all you need to do is find people who are where you want to be, and do what they do.

Social media isn’t as hard as you think it is.

I was asked in a survey what I would change about email, Twitter or Facebook. I can’t say whose survey because I agreed not to blog about it. But here’s the answer I gave them.

I would love email if I could view it like a forum, see at a glance what to skip and what needs priority now. I hate email and I’m working on setting up our email communications to go through Kayako.

Twitter I’d integrate with an online RSS reader like Google Reader, but with more sophisticated filtering that uses reader reactions and share to tell me what’s becoming more relevant in my topics of interest and help push them to the front, in real time.

Facebook, I would have stopped improving on right before they de-emphasized apps. They created a cottage industry then killed it, instead of improving client experience of it. Why?

If you could change Email, Twitter or Facebook, what would you do differently? I don’t mean cosmetic changes, I’m talking functionality. If you could make email, Twitter or Facebook do more — or even less — what would you do?

Everyone wants to know how I’m able to help my clients get their stories in the Buzz section of StumbleUpon, in Tweetmeme or on the front page of Digg.

Sh! Social Media Success Secrets!

You can’t sell access or ranking in any of these social media sites,and buying votes is a tactic that doesn’t bear up, strategically.

What I am able to do is coach my clients on how to use social media, how to build their online and offline networks, how to be authentically influential and how to create content that their desired audience finds compelling.

That way, when their content is naturally discovered or promoted, or on the sites that allow it, submitted by them, they don’t make it to the pre-popularity stage, only to be taken out of contention for the site.

What I do in that regard is no secret.

How is it done? That seems to be the big deal. Greater minds than mine have attempted and failed.

My answer is that it’s not just what you know. It’s not just who you know.

It’s whether you can get those pivotal people, that critical network, and the user base at the site in question to move the way you want them to — and that’s whether or not you’re talking about social media sites, or just life in general.

I approach social media the way I approach most areas of success in my life. I use strategies that magnify the tactics everyone else is using exponentially. While everyone else is looking at their next move in Checkers, I’m thinking about my next game of Chess.

In the Social Media Success Package, I’ll teach you how to do with 100 — 1000 people what other people can’t seem to manage even with 100, 000 friends, followers, or connections.

Because it’s not about the number of followers. It’s nice to have several thousand or even a hundred thousand people following you for show.

But it’s really about what you can get people to do, and why. Can you get your content in places that it will be discovered? Can you write content so compelling that people can’t help but share it and save it? Can you do this over and over again, consistently?

And can you build yourself a fan base, an alliance or a network that willingly supports your endeavors without having to rely solely on collecting and trading favors?

It’s really about how you add so much value to the discussion that the right people want to return it to you.

It’s not enough just to have influence but it IS a huge component to social media success.

Since strategies and tactics go hand in hand, included in this package is a quick guide to how you can get duplicate my method of getting 27,000 StumbleUpon users to a site in one week. To highlight that, for the next 24 hours, I’m going to cut the price of this package by $20 — until 3:33 pm tomorrow, you can get it for just $47 $27.

You can get a sample of the document directly from here until this time tomorrow.

After that, you’ll have to sign up to my newsletter to get a free peek.

Look in the upper right hand corner for the download link.

It boils down to this.

No matter who you are, it seems comparatively easy to get 100 people to do the same thing, to go in the same direction.

By comparison, especially if you’re new to online marketing, it seems much more difficult to get 10,000 people to do the same thing.

You may find yourself wondering if you even KNOW 10,000 people or if you have that kind of reach.

With the Mini-Viral Success Formula, the pressure is off. At the same time, you’ll find that once you get the hang of generating 100 unique visitors, 250 doesn’t seem that hard. And eventually you’ll come to realize that you can get to 10,000 visitors by repeating what you did to get 100 visitors, 100 times.

Instead of trying to gain 10,000 followers in Twitter during your first week out, you learn how to get the same results with only 100 or 1000 followers. By the time you actually get to ten thousand connections, they’ll be as effective as the next person’s 100,000.

Creating a series of small successes is also a much more sustainable model than attempting to recreate the conditions which must exist for one massive viral campaign to be successful. Aiming to get to the Buzz page in StumbleUpon several times a week is easier than attempting to get on the front page of Digg every month, and the rate of success rate is much higher.

How much does it matter to you whether you get 40,000 visitors in one day, if they aren’t the type to buy, click or subscribe? If you can get 40,000 visitors in two weeks, and convert them at one percent, isn’t that better? For most business people, creating a series of mini-campaigns is better for business because it takes less time, and involves more profit.

You have an existing business, and you want to make, say $10,000 a month with it, with an average $100 sale. About 100 sales. For easy math we’ll say between follow-up and first time visitors, 2 percent of the people who visit your site end up becoming buyers by the end of the month.

So to get to your goal, you need 5000 targeted visitors a month — not to the site, to the sales pages. To make it even harder, we’ll pretend that only half of the visitors to the site will even look at a sales page by the end of the month, though if we set up our sites, email newsletters, and blogging strategy correctly, we know that’s not true.

Which means that regardless of how often they come back, we need to have 10,000 unique visitors a month. Let’s round that up to 334 unique visitors a day.

Where can we come up with 334 unique visitors a day, starting from zero?

One place is the Mini-Viral Success Formula.

You see, most people are banking on this huge response from social media and the rest of their traffic generation projects. And if they miss the mark, they go home with nothing.

But what they don’t know is that, it’s fairly easy to get several low to medium viral success programs working. And this is usually how the huge viral effect is achieved, over time.

No one expects to prepare a perfect dinner their first time cooking, on their quest to become a great chef. But you expect your 50th meal to be better than your 2nd, though hopefully not as good as your 1000th. And over time, more and more that you cook for may enjoy your food.

And if it gets, in practice, from good to spectacular, people will start coming back for more.

Then they start bringing their friends. And one day your preparing your 1000th feast, and it seems like you’re suddenly famous for your signature dish. But actually it’s just been building so slowly and naturally that it feels like forever.

This is what you want to do with social media, in particular with blogging. That’s the Mini-Viral Success Formula — it’s a plan to build several small successes in a way that builds momentum towards the goal of continually becoming a mini-sensation.

The goal, after all, with a business blog isn’t to become famous. It’s to make money. Most of us would rather have our 100 monthly customers than 10,000 visitors than turn into 100 leads. And that’s what the system is designed for — to help you make money with your blog, to turn your browsers into customers.

This is where the change in strategy should be — this is the kind of thinking that can revive the state of blogging, never mind social media. This is why the connection is so important, and forming real relationship beginnings that mature offline.

Social media to amass hundreds and thousand followers as an end in itself, with the hopes of making a quick buck is for people who are building fan clubs, not businesses. They’re for movie and media stars, not business people.

Of course, you may yet end up with several hundred thousand subscribers, followers or monthly web visitors after a few months or years.

And if you lay out a good strategy now, it may well be worth it.

Really soon, we’ll talk about the shortcuts you can safely use in social media and blogging.

Last week, we were talking about one of the reasons business blogging growth is slowing.

Part of the reason growth is slowing is that the instant fame model of blogging is proving to be hollow. You can’t be an instant success blogger. It just doesn’t happen.

It may look like this blogger was an overnight success or that company got instant social media attention. But there’s always a huge amount of work coupled with a huge amount of work behind it.

And yet. There is a way that business blogging can greatly enhance your visibility day after day, if you’re willing to forgo the Hyper-Viral model.

What if I told you that there is a way to get the same overall effects and the same amount of traffic as being on the front page of Digg, with better results? Would you want to know how to do that?

What if you saw the results over a couple of weeks or months, instead of days — BUT you could make it keep happening over and over again with a regularity that you just can’t guarantee with Digg?

Some people are saying yes, what’s the difference when I get the traffic and publicity as long as I get it? Especially if I can repeat it?

But some people are thinking, no, I want a big burst of success.

So I’ll present another part of the reality. Let’s say you have a choice between these two scenarios.

I can get you on front page result with Digg, and in time and labor, it would cost you $4000, but I could only pull it off once a year. In that one time, you still have to pay me whether you’re on the page for five minutes or 15 hours. And I can’t sell you votes or any of that stuff — you have to do the work involved, and know that after many, many times, it will eventually happen, but not be sure when, and not really be able to control it.

OR.

I can get you the same amount of traffic, the same amount of links, from the same number of weeks or months of work but over the time you’ll be working.

In other words, that traffic will be spread out over several weeks or months, starting in a few weeks.

Your internal time and labor costs are around $1000., then there’s $2000 in set up and fees. BUT. Once you learn how to do it this one time, you can do it over and again, as often as you like.

Now. It’s front page of Digg, one time shot, take whatever results you get for $4000. Or spend $3000 and get the same results, but over, say, a month’s time, then repeat that result as many times as you like for free after that.

Option Two looks better now, doesn’t it? In the days to come, we’ll be talking about letting go of that shortcut mentality of getting one quick Digg front page vs spreading your traffic — and risk — out over multiple social media properties, including your own blog.

On Twitter the other day, someone asked me why I don’t put my site in my Twitter profile.

1– I don’t want the focus to be on my site from my profile. When people meet me via Twitter, I want them to interact with me before going to my sites.

2– I want the focus to be on their site and whether I can help them, not me and how great I think I am.

3– Being semi-retired, I cherry pick my clients.

It used to be that I had to work with everyone who asked for my help, HAD to because if not I was gonna go broke.

Now I work on cases that fascinate me, with people I like, at prices that make sense for both of us.

4– When you can get traffic on demand, you no longer see everything as an opportunity to get more traffic. That sounds like horseshit to some people, so let me try an analogy.

Have you ever noticed that money isn’t as urgent a concern to your rich friends? It’s because they’ve solved the problem of money in their lives. They have other things to focus on.

It doesn’t mean they don’t care about money.

It means that now that they know how to get it, and what to do with it, it’s just a tool.

They don’t feel urgent or desperate about it any longer. If they lost all their money, they’d be able to get it all back in a couple of years– because they understand money.

Just look at how many times Trump’s companies have been bankrupt. He always bounces back, because he understand how to get money.

Asking me why I’m not using the same traffic techniques every one else is using is like asking why Hugh Hefner doesn’t have a profile on eHarmony. Hugh Hefner is like, 147 years old and has three young girlfriends.

Who know about each other.

So yeah, even though he probably knows how to get more women — if he doesn’t need them, what’s the point of internet dating?

That’s how I feel about web traffic and marketing and leaving my site link in every possible corner.

I unofficially launched this site on Wednesday night. It’s Sunday. It already gets 100 visitors a day and I have yet to promote it.

That’s more visitors than the majority of commercial sites get after years of being live.

I can get visitors any time I want. Twice this week I’ve had it happen totally by accident, to this site. Traffic? Is not my problem.

Okay, so when I want people to visit my site from Twitter, what do I do?

I tweet a link. To compelling content that I believe my audience will want to read. I try not to have a good ratio of conversation to random thoughts to retweets and link tweets.

By engaging with the people who follow me on Twitter, I’m much more likely to inspire them to action when I tweet.

An example, The first post I made on the day I unofficially launched this site was retweeted 7 times.

Now if it was on post I’d made after years of being online, I’d be expecting a combined comment plus tweet total of 70 or so, after a bit of promotion.

7 tweets with no promotion other than sharing the link is okay by me.

Just wait until I start showing off.

In the meantime, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put your link in your Twitter profile. But if you do, just think about why you’re doing it, and what effect it has.

Want to lease space in your client’s minds, by leveraging the time they spend on the web?

Then it’s time to wake up.

To continue from our last discussion on this topic, the thing to wake up from is this dream of hyper-viral-marketing through the combination of blogs and social media.

Most people never will never be on the front page of DIgg. Most people don’t need to be on the front page of Digg, despite the links and traffic it can generate. Most popular sites have never been, and aren’t actively seeking that as a strategy.

That’s because they know that for a business to thrive, while you do need those links, you can generate them elsewhere. And while you do need visitors coming to your site, you need the type that convert. It’s not that DIgg traffic never does, it’s that there are more cost-efficient solutions, not to mention time-efficient ones for the majority of websites.

And yet the dream of a mega-viral accident is often the selling point of building a blog.

It goes like this.

Jack hears about this cool site called Digg. He’s new to the Web, and doesn’t get how these things work — all the better for him on one hand. On the other, it’s that much easier to get caught up in the hype, if the whole internet used to be hype to you. You find yourself questioning all of your beliefs about marketing, when you see how easy it is to start blogging.

That is, if you’re like Jack.

So you put together the fact that most Joe Schmoes who end up on Digg got there from blogging. Mostly people who’ve been blogging for a while. So you start blogging. And you start submitting.

After all, how often does the regular person or tiny company get featured coverage on sites like Digg or Mixx without a blog?

And even if they never achieve that objective, there are many avenues for blogs to have a series of mini-viral events, such as being retweeted on Twitter, or shared on Facebook enough to get one of the prized homepage-sidebar spots.

There are few for static sites. None for offline companies that aren’t somehow plugged into the sharing network.

And so that balance is coveted by Jack. But Jack can’t get there, and because he started blogging to get on Digg, he stops.

Few achieve the dream — which IS attainable by the way. It’s a long shot but it’s not impossible. The main secret is that anyone can get on the front page of Digg — very few people can STAY there.

Back to our discussion.

The fact that it’s getting harder to achieve viral success could be another reason why blog growth is slowing. If one can’t get one’s blog link retweeted 10 — 100 times a day, it feels like blogging is pointless. It looks so easy to get people to retweet you, from the outside looking in, so you feel like a loser if you can’t do it on your first try.

When more people read blogs often, we were all more in touch with the fact that success is not instant. We often climbed the two year journey of becoming an overnight online success together. So we saw the pains it took. We were both in the audience and behind the curtain, as either fans of a blog or as bloggers ourselves.

This was part of the magic of blogging.

If you’re paying attention, you can see why these heights of coverage are increasingly difficult to attain. Much of it goes back to the Laws of Media, particularly in being copied and shared. Those are the things we need to be successful in Social Media, as well. It’s not just the fact that we have to catch the eye of the person who is adapting to streaming content.

It’s in forgetting these laws, because we’re not reading blogs and other resources as deeply. Based on just two of the laws in Kelly’s presentation which we talked about in the previous post, it becomes clear why the pace of blogging and promoting via social media is increasingly difficult to sustain.

First, the elements that can’t be copied are few, and getting fewer. There was the first blog post about business blogging, then the first blog dedicated solely to it.

Now there are thousands of each. The ones that stand out do because they’re doing something special that is well marketed to a large audience that wants to read about it.

Second, being both shareable and uncopyable is a delicate balance.

To be shareable though, at the same time as you maintain this marketable specialness, you have to make your work portable, but still own-able by you or at least traceable to you– that’s if you intend for content to ultimately market you.

They have to at least be able to copy the whole if not the parts– perhaps by embedding the video but not being able to change it. They need to be able to reference it, if not rip it — if it’s an article in your blog there at least has to be a link to be copied and passed around.

So how do you write this mystical, magical blog post every day, at least while you’re launching — that will always be the thing everyone wants to talk about, read or share?

You can’t.

It was hard enough before you had to compete with Facebook and Twitter for eyeballs.

That is so much the where and why of blogs for business are dying — the airy seduction of possible mega-viral stardom is no longer just outside our grasp, it seems like it’s on another planet.

You have to be remarkable, full time, to even be seen. And if you have no other new media strategy, being seen is all there is. As little as a year ago, to have that kind of exposure, it was enough to be first, best or on-and-off “pretty good”.

Trying to keep up the pace of performing at your peak on a daily basis is exhausting.

Unless it’s your full time gig, how will you pay bills and blog? People who are able to do this are writing, researching and commenting all the time, every day, some even have rotating staff whose only job is to write, or to follow RSS feeds to get scoops.

Rarely is it the entrepreneur anymore.

Because when you as a business person are able to create this shareable special-ness, one of three things happens.

No one cares.… or it seems that way because you were so busy creating, you couldn’t market, making it an exercise in speaking into the wind… or…

Everyone cares… and now you have a scaling problem of time, cost, resources, or knowledge.

Who is going to write more of this brilliance?

Who is going to pay for all this bandwidth?

How can manage the growth that occurs from becoming popular?

How does this popularity translate into money?

Even if you’re prepared for it, it’s no picnic.

In the final scenario, if neither of those two extremes happens, you may have a medium lukewarm caring that barely puts you ahead of where you are.

If you’re mainly blogging as an entry into search results, that’s not much of a big deal. Of course, blogging will then always give you this lukewarm reward. Just make sure you’re still writing above the level that will get you subscribers, links and sales or you’re spinning your wheels.

Of course, if that’s all you wanted out of blogging, you probably wouldn’t be reading this.

Because then business blogging becomes this thing you have to do because your competitors do it and you don’t want to lose market share in the search engines. You know that’s the easiest in if you have the right strategy, but the question becomes how to implement it in a fresh, new way.

So what IS the right New Media strategy for Business if it’s not just about paving an entry into search engines?

That’s the question we’ll answer next.

There used to be four distinct reasons that people would ask me to help them with blogging.

1– A person had an idea or a story and wanted to be heard. It isn’t always about money or business — see the political blogger, and the personal blog.

2– A person wanted to make extra money blogging. This doesn’t happen as much, at least not on a full-time income level. But to some, even $5 — 20 a day is a huge help.

3– A person, (especially an entrepreneur) or a larger company wanted more visibility. If you want to be seen, and to have multiple opportunities to be seen again, you blog, and you keep blogging.

4– Better search engine results or traffic. I would get a letter from someone who had X amount of traffic that would bring them Y conversions. And all they wanted was more of each.

Search engine traffic is an excellent fall-back reason to keep blogging. I’ve always maintained that it shouldn’t be the only reason one blogs, but that it also doesn’t make sense to ignore its powers in that area.

Did you notice it?

The one over-arching reason is exposure.

And who can blame them. Who hasn’t dreamed of being the star of a story picked up by Digg, or Mashable or the Associated Press? I’ve been lucky enough to choreograph or witness all three circumstances in my career, and as long as success isn’t expected overnight, it is attainable.

But more often than not, following success, I’m left in the irritating position of having to say “I told you so.”

Don’t get me wrong, being on the front page of Digg, or at the top of Tweetmeme, getting thousands of visitors from Reddit, your server rocked by StumbleUpon, and especially being written up on Mashable is every bit of an exhilarating feeling as you think. It doesn’t matter whether you’re just submitting someone else’s story, in the background orchestrating exposure, or part of the team being covered, it’s fantastic.

For a little while.

When the ride is over, it’s back to reality. You can scream “again! again!” as many times as you like, but you learn that it’s the convergence of the story, the timing and the barometer of Rome’s mob that determines if and when you’ll be on top again.

Most bloggers never make it. And yet, the majority of the bloggers I talk to are blogging because they were sold that dream at some point.

“Become a blogger, and you’ll get on Digg and then your problems are over!”

Not so fast cupcake.

One of the things that struck me when listening to Kevin Kelly’s talk about the next 5000 days of the web (thanks @salemonz), is his summary of the Laws of Media.

In this presentation on the next 5000 days of the Web, given in December 2007, Kelly said:

And so one of the consequences of that, I believe, is that where we have this sort of spectrum of media right now — TV, film, video — that basically becomes one media platform. And while there’s many differences in some senses, they will share more and more in common with each other.

So that the laws of media, such as: the fact that copies have no value. The value’s in the uncopiable things. The immediacy, the authentication, the personalization — the media wants to be liquid; the reason why things are free is so that you can manipulate them, not so that they are “free” as in “beer,” but “free” as in “freedom.”

And the network effects rule — meaning that the more you have, the more you get.

The first fax machine — the person who bought the first fax machine was an idiot, because there was nobody to fax to. But here she became an evangelist, recruiting others to get the fax machines because it made their purchase more valuable. Those are the effects that we’re going to see. Attention is the currency.

As you can see, I’ve emphasized about the idea that the copy is not valuable, and that the value is in the uncopyable.

This is the ultimate doom or boom of the ebook, the magic or mess of article marketing, the victory or vacuousness of video and the evolution or extinction of the blog.

Because the ultimate raspy gasp of the blog echoes here: the easiest way for you to get attention is by producing ideas and concepts that other people will share.

Then you want people to unite around the ideas that come from that share — that’s how thought leadership can turn into profit, by using your brilliance as an anchor for creating your Tribe.

It is then, therefore essential that you create original enough discourse that in both style (what you said, how you understand and convey it) and in formats (a link, an embed) that are easily traced back to you. The most surefire way to do that is to inject your essence, which can’t truly be copied.

There may be nothing new under the sun, but perhaps no one can say it the way you do, or make it as understandable, or duplicate your complex perspective.

And so we want to be both copied and share, for fame, for profit, for fun, for recognition.

If they copy but don’t share, they may throw the “you” part of it out. Great for contributing to society, not so much for any business that is uplifted from having one’s innovation recognized.

If they share, you can’t always track the sharing, but if it’s shared in a complete format, do you really care?

Especially if you know that this is where you can really see a return in value, you probably won’t. it’s more important that 500k people saw your YouTube video than being able to name each person, when they saw it and whether it was a Tuesday. So you “share to gain”, as Kelly says in the same presentation. Much better situation for you, whether you can track it or not.

So much so that so for many, blogging becomes a game of wanting to share something as close to uncopyable as possible that is also extraordinarily shareable.

We want the hyper-viral effect without having our intellectual property ripped off.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to strike that balance?

We’re going to talk about that next, and take a closer look at the mega-viral or hyper-viral model — that’s really a pipe dream — in social media.

As to the question in the title?

Yes, I think the hype of mega-viral success has killed the very valuable reality of what is a quite impressive set of tools between blogging and social media. Can we revive it?

Bear with me for a few more posts. I have an answer for that too.