Conversation Agent

My Twitter 20 Interview on Conversation and Community

In case you missed it, I was a guest on Jay Baer's Twitter 20 interview on Twitter this week. Thank you for that, Jay. It was fun, especially since I had no idea what questions you were going to ask.

I met Jay at SxSWi when I had the opportunity to have face time with him and a group of smart professionals like Debbie Weil and John Havens of BlogTalk Radio.

We had a reunion recently at Marketing Profs B2B Forum in Boston. The Twitter appointment with 20 questions was a natural progression - although some call the medium a regression.

The ultimate presence tool, Twitter allows people to be "on air" without having to move away from the office and making a big production. Everyone can play and participate.

Some of the points that resonated - read: were retweeted - most with the audience from the dialogue were (emphasis mine):

• Companies should let go of assumptions when listening. There’s such a thing as thinking you’re too smart.

• Hire those who lean forward, who are curious and interested, who listen before they answer, who love learning.

• Brand is not the logo, it needs to permeate every aspect of business… and take into account the feedback it receives.

• Customer service is marketing. Your processes are marketing. So is your receptionist, your building, your people…

• How about a community facilitator, a content curator, and a team of conversationalists for product development/innovation?

• It’s a team effort to help the organization own its brand. Think about the words: organization, company->organism, together.

• conversation is the art of thinking together to find something new. It’s good to have new people/ideas in it + mix it up.

• Pick your tools based on your “flow” – where do you feel energy? What suits you? Leave room to explore new places every week.

• Explore, experiment, test, fail – within your abilities to stretch but not to the point of fatigue. Manage your attention.

• Good content writing has not changed – we’ve changed.

• I believe that it’s a team and not one person that defines a company and owns a brand, so here I’m part of a team.

During the interview I asked for feedback - how do you think blogging has changed? Is it now about lifestreams? Is it because there was no innovation in fragmentation that some are moving more towards aggregation and multichannel steaming of the same content? 

Steve Rubel says blogs are out of beta but bloggers should always be in beta. I agree with Louis Gray who responded to the post on FriendFeed that blogs still occupy an important role in the digital ecosystem - that of long form "how to" content and thought leadership.

What do you think? Are you finding it easier to tweet (now potentially trademarked - shall we have to resort to twit instead?) and comment on FriendFeed or Facebook? Or maybe just use a Posterous or a Tumblr account? Should we skip Web 2010 and move directly into Web 2012? What happened to Web 3.0? 

Enough to make your head spin, isn't it? What's your take on all of this? Too much?

Right Place, Right Time - Free

One of the things that you probably learned by hanging out with me here at Conversation Agent is that I tend to bring together a lot of ideas in a short space, show you how those ideas are connected, and why you need to care.

But, here's the thing, you care only if I catch you in the right frame of mind, if when you're reading this post you wrestle with the very same thoughts.

Attention and context

In other words, I have your attention - and sometimes I'm even fortunate enough to have your take in the comments - when you're already paying attention to that issue yourself. It's like buying a car, you're thinking about a particular make and model and, lo, you see it everywhere. That's because you're attuned to it, it's on your frequencies.

The mind is a very powerful instrument. It's held somewhere in the brain, the only closed system that can grow by use. What happens though is that it gets trained - we train it - to draw conclusions from partial information. We make assumptions. It's built in our genetics, too. That survival thing again and the brain's ability to compress complex stimuli and data into narrative.

We take shortcuts. Something would need to be in the right place at the right time to get us to move away from our patterns. That's why we don't do change so well, too. It's not so much that we don't want to - sometimes we do, others we have to - it's that we don't know how. We need someone to show us how.

Best practices and change

Hence the thriving industry around benchmarking research, workshops and conferences, and the gossip columns for good measure. One of the most frequently asked questions at events is give me a detailed case study - show me exactly how.

How do you put my business in the right place at the right time? What steps do you need to take to become the go to place for "x"? How many tweets does it take to amass 10,000 followers? What should you charge to blog for someone? Where should you build a fan page - Facebook or your own Ning community? How do I write great content that makes my stuff fly off the shelves? 

And please tell me all of this personalized to me in 45 minutes, while in a panel discussion with another 4 people. Perhaps doing some homework and preparing ahead of time would help with activating the content of the session. "How to" depends also on you.

Free

There's an inter-blog conversation right now that involves four panelists, one moderator, three books and one idea. The idea of free.

I shared with you in the past that I think free is not a benefit, it's a feature. It doesn't become a benefit until it's activated by you in the right place, at the right time. Even if you go ahead and grab free, you won't benefit from it unless you do something with it.

Free has been used by marketing in direct response successfully for years. It's the offer in the campaign, the incentive to fill out the survey, pick up the phone and call, pay attention to the message in the mailer. It's an incentive with the promise of up-sell or to mitigate risk. If not free, then I will give you a money back guarantee. (Since this post is free to you, I hope you won't ask for your time back if you didn't like it when you get to the end.)

Redrawing the lines

The trick is to make it appetizing enough so that you would give it a second thought and pay attention, but not too much so that you would be a total mercenary about it and just go after the offer. That was not the point of the campaign. The point - and money - is on you picking up the phone or going to the landing page on the Web to learn more, and buy something.

It's the reverse psychology effect of getting a fine. The fine needs to be large enough that you would follow the rules, but not too little thus tempting you to eating the cost for the sake of convenience. In both cases, the tipping point is achieved and drawn from experience, from best practices.

What happens when the line start fluctuating? When your customers become more resistant to marketing messages and offers? Citizens are flush with cash but have little time to walk the extra mile so they opt for the ticket? New rules need to be drawn and implemented, from which best practices emerge. And so we go around again.

The Web changed the game

The digital age has transformed how things are made, distributed, and sold in such a way that there are no set rules anymore.

Normally these cycles take a while to work their way into the business lifespan. However, we live in a time where the very tools that were going to set us free have accelerated the pace of change not just on our time and attention, but on the nature of the very things that used to consume or employ our time and attention.

Media companies are now wrestling with this issue. Individuals are wrestling with it, too.

Chris Anderson says free is the future of a radical price, Malcolm Gladwell says it's priced to sell but doubts that free is the future, Seth Godin says Malcolm is wrong, while Mark Cuban makes the distinction between free and freely distributed. Members of the press who met me at Mediabistro Circus might enjoy Cuban's post a lot. He writes:

printed content producers should have a brand, and use their institutional knowledge, their core competencies and ability to procure, improve and market to maximize the value of their brands and the perceived value of their content. Whether its on a central website, a co produced website, in print or on a hologram in the evening sky, I should go to the NY Times because they have demonstrated to me that they have the very best articles on the subjects I am looking for.

Chris Brogan seems to agree with Mark Cuban and thinks Seth, too is right. There is one thing all of these gentlemen have in common, and that is a passion for figuring out what the right place, right time is.

In a world of free, everyone can play.

Writes Seth. And you can be successful utilizing this model, as Chris Anderson explains while disagreeing with Gladwell. So why feel so threatened? As long as you're in the right place, a the right time, you should be fine. "The Wall Street Journal has found that more than a million subscribers are quite happy to pay for the privilege of reading online," writes Gladwell. 

Except for you will need to figure out what that right place, right time is for you. Mitch Joel just joined the conversation by saying the idea of free is radical, so people are going to freak out. I think people are freaking out because they want to understand how - to get attention, and time, and funds to make things work out for themselves and their business.

Sustainable and repeatable innovation - especially if you need to reach economies of scale - is hard in an environment that changes so rapidly. If only this conversation had no merit, if you could just go back to your daily grind without paying attention to it, all would be well.

You can't. When everyone can play in a world of free, you need to figure out what makes you different. Your ability to sustain a business depends on it.

Free hugs anyone?

UPDATE: A really interesting conversation on the same topic at TechDirt with Mike Masnick. [hat tip to Taylor Davidson].

Social Media Program Lifecycle

Or as Gianluca Arnesano calls it, the only slide you need to know. I translated the word campaign as program, because I do really believe that it's a cycle with a long tail that probably nearly doesn't wear off or go to zero. This is the work of Italian agency Frozen Frogs born out of the work the agency has been doing with consumer goods companies. 

It's a brilliant rendition of the dynamics of attention, something Gianluca has been working with for a number of years.In this graphic, which he explains in the PDF offered at the post, he distinguishes between the actions of the company and/or agency, which are designed to create higher, artificial buzz, and the reactions of the public involved. You can see in the graphic, how those generate lower buzz, yet genuine (here we say authentic) engagement.

This seems to be the week of engagement, the newest marketing and social media buzzword. Are your activities buzz worthy? Let's take a look.

On the higher-buzz, false engagement type-A activities, we have things like:

• blogger dinners - you need to understand that a sit down dinner with great food is a major social element of the Italian culture
• social aperitifs - that's my second favored activity, a glass of good wine and great company
• buzz paradise - I'd be curious to learn more on this one
• spamming 2.0 - this is awesome that an agency (and a company) would admit its own heavy tactics
• product sampling - for some categories or products there is still no equally engaging substitute for the tactile experience of driving, or tasting, or touching the item itself
• Facebook apps
• Videos

There is some doping of the engagement levels in this phase. Customers do not really live the product here - the environment and context created around the promotion is artificial. This is the phase where the agency and/or company are and need to be highly active. Pumping content out, cross promoting on different platforms, and involving networks and respective influentials.

On the lower buzz, genuine engagement type-B side of the graph, we have various discovery moments by real customers who:

• discover the company and the product itself
• find new product uses
• uncover potential defects and malfunctions
• call customer support
• send in complaints
• write spontaneous reviews
• ask for advice on forums and boards

In this phase, customer engagement becomes real immersion. This is the right moment for the company to capitalize on the feedback received during the first phase. A and B are the critical phases of the project.

What's important?

Launch and SEO effect are part of a continuum, they're not isolated moments. People are important - what they think, do, and say in the long tail has repercussions for your business. The social media lifecycle has a feedback loop, which is where new marketing comes in. Some questions for you:

• What cultural barriers in your company will prevent you from listening to and talking with your customers on the B side of the graph?
• How will search evolution affect what you do on the A side?
• How will you use what you learn to develop better products and services?
• How will you sustain and nurture that engagement on your side of the conversation?
• What transformation will your company be willing to undergo to sustain communication and relationships over the long haul?

Your turn. What questions do you have?

Are *You* Truly Engaged?

It was a comment from Zoë and a title of a blog post from Chris Brogan that made me ask the question. Twitter can be tiring and pointless noise, and social media can be a bunch of chores, if the intent does not match the intention. If your involvement is not engagement, then what happens to the outcomes?

As Zoë put it so well, when we approach these tools with intention and honesty, they fuel fulfilling outcomes. But when we approach them out of boredom or restlessness, we remain unfulfilled. And so we do and so do companies that are thinking about joining the social media bandwagon. Yes, there is a bandwagon effect in social media.

To find true engagement, we need to first deliver engagement ourselves. It turns out that social media is but a reflection of life, just like public relations, marketing, and everything else with them - we get out of it what we put in. Fulfilling the list of chores is not going to make you better, it's not going to make you kick ass, it's not even going to take you to the top, or help you change the world - by itself.

To get to your engagement there are many things you don't need. You don't need to follow someone else's rules. You don't need to be a guru or an expert to be worth spending time with. You don't need lofty definitions or titles, either. Among all the things you don't need is also the list of chores. As Chris Guillebeau writes, you most certainly don't need other people's permission.

What you do need is clarity in what you want and awareness of who you are. Then believe passionately in both as you step off the map, recognizing that they - you - will change over time with experience. We're human beings, we're fragile, sometimes insecure, and yet incredibly resilient and enduring as we defy the most incredible circumstances often with the strength of an idea whose time has come.

For markets to be true conversations, we need to have people who are truly engaged in the experience. Yesterday we talked about mapping the customer journey. Do we have an idea of what our own journey is? This is a question not just for individuals, organizations, too can lose their way.

Applying good advice blindly to your own situation will not do you any good if you don't have an appreciation for your own context and a desire to engage with it yourself. This is the main reason why you often hear that you have to be immersed in social media and experience it in first hand to know what it's about. You do. But don't approach it as one more checklist of things to do.

"Social" is the ultimate disintermediation mechanism, sometimes so real and amazingly unfiltered, at other times seemingly too much and confusing. Where things may not seem to be what they really are. Are you who you really are immersed in it? Did you publish a list to be generous or to be seen as expert? Are you collecting people like you did with baseball cards - to observe them from a distance - or because you really want to meet them, be with them?

This is all yours to decide. And it's a decision that will determine the kind of engagement you will have as you move into the execution phase. In social media, you are the product. Is the product good enough to mass market, or does it market itself? This is applicable to professional endeavors, too, in case you were wondering. What is the experience of you?

True engagement begins at home - inside - and travels to the corners of the world.

[images from Wiredset and Australia Post campaign]

3 Steps to Mapping the Customer Journey

I've been reading David Lee King's book Designing the Digital Experience [courtesy of David himself] and I can tell you that many corporate Web masters could learn a thing or two about designing sites from the users' point of view. If you define the digital and customer experience from the point of view of the buyer, not the seller, there are several consideration to make.

Even as marketers understand the ideas of customer journey and persona, the hard part is translating that information into truly executing on the customer experience - digital or otherwise - when we're not there. The challenge is a real one. As King himself exemplifies in chapter 11, airlines are the most challenged when it comes to understanding the customer journey.

Mapping the customer journey means visualizing how customers interact with you and your business across multiple channels and touch points at each stage of their involvement with your service. You've probably also heard about the term "moment of truth". It was introduced by Jan Carlzon, former president of Scandinavian Airlines, in his book in 1986.

Any time a customer comes into contact with any aspect of a business is an opportunity to form an impression. Those impressions become part of the experience customers have of your business and products. Any one of those touch points could be your customer's home page - and that may be the only landing page they'd interact with. That's why you need to be consistently good throughout your site - and service.

David talks about three great advantages to mapping a customer's journey:

1. identifying points of interaction - think in terms of timing, frequency, key messages communicated, media used at each stage
2. gaining insights into customer needs - from how the customer feels during the experience
3. revealing customer focus - who's at the center of your processes, you or the customer?

What are then the steps to mapping a customer's journey?

(1.) Connect the dots between internal preparedness and external needs - the moment of truth in this step is literally overcoming communications barriers, internal bureaucracy, disbelief, and misconception stalls. When you do that, you're taking your business from a position of unattractiveness, to one of interest in figuring out the points of interaction and staying focused on customer needs.

(2.) Integrate what you say with what you do - integration is not a great tactic only for your content. It works beautifully when it crosses over the realm of action. The moment of truth in integration is not just achieving the objectives you set with your strategy, but also how you get there. How are all of the messages you're sending out in each medium integrating with the feedback you receive in that medium, for example? What are you learning and feeding back into the process?

(3.) Innovate at each touch point - whenever you offer a customer something, do you think through the implications of delivering it to them, or them getting it however they find it easiest? What process or tool have you not updated for a long time and needs revisiting, for example? The moment of truth in this one is if your innovation is you-centered, in other words easy for you, or customer-centric, something that will make their experience better.

Blogging has evolved a great deal since I started this blog, and of all tools out there, WordPress has been innovating the most around customer needs - offering fresh and clean layouts and tool integration ahead of others.

Today at Fast Company Expert blog we're talking about moments of truth in service. What are your moments of truth? How do you integrate what you learn from customers into your business? Are your value propositions something customers would pay for?

[chart courtesy of at-one service innovation]

P&L of New (local) Media

What happens when your local paper goes online only? It loses most of its staff, that's one outcome. I picked up the information from Fred Wilson's blog where a really good discussion around aggregating, curating, and publishing new media is under way. The P&L chart does make a fair argument for staff reductions. Yes, readers did point out that the $5-15 RPM is rather high.

The pitch to make such publication possible is from Outside.in, a three-year-old company that has just rolled out a new tool to (supposedly) make pulling extra content created by local bloggers, Twitterers and lots of people who don’t even think of themselves as content creators, like people who post real estate listings, easier for local publishers, which could be a newspaper site but doesn’t have to be. 

And if there aren't any local bloggers and twitterers? The discussion at Fred Wilson's blog included so many examples, that I thought you might enjoy taking a stroll through them:

• Toronto City blog from Freshdaily
• Wikicity - over 22K U.S. towns
• Seattle PI and Seattle Post Globe
• Village Voice
• Milwaukee, WI - using Outside.in for Publishers

Given that many media companies are still milking the print cash cow to subsidize the online version, figuring out what's next for online profitability seems to be a tall order. But print is not dead, and probably will not be for a long time.

I was intrigued by a comment in the discussion made by Joshua Karp about how online is about exploration and print is for consumption. Reading the printed word is a physical, tactile experience. It is not the same as reading something on a 22 inch monitor, or on a 2 by 3 inch glass screen sitting in the palm of your hand. That's the same observation Tim McHale made when we had our conversation on new media.

What's interesting about Karp's project is that The Printed Blog was written up in the New York Times and in more than 200 major media publications around the world, on US and national radio, TV, on thousands of blogs - guess this counts as +1. In case you're wondering, they distribute in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and LA.

Maybe The Huffington Post is planning a glossy magazine of its best content. I know for sure that media properties like Fortune would do well if they offered special editions of their archives as souvenirs, or posters of their board of directors' photographs - something I enjoy a lot (recently, they published a fun photo of Twitter's BOD's).

Karp shares The Printed Blog financial model in the comments to Wilson's post (republished with permission):

10 pages, 18 "small" ad spots per page, $30.00 per ad spot: equals 180 "small" ad spots per edition inventory and a potential $5,400.00 in revenue - each edition equals 1,000 copies in a single location. Publish 5 times per week, and total potential weekly revenue is $27,000 per location. Assume you can only sell 70% of inventory, and our weekly revenue per location is $18,900.00.

We've sold a LOT of ads at that rate, and could fill each edition.

In terms of costs, each issue (10 pages) costs $1.00 to print; this equates to $5,000.00 per week.
Each issue requires two people to hand it out each day, at $100.00 per person; this equates to $1,000 per week.

We pay bloggers / photographers a rate equal to 20% of the ad revenue that appears on the same page as their content, with avg. 3 blog posts and 3 photographs, that's 6 pieces of content per page, 60 per issue, 300 per week (5 issues per week). Twenty percent of $18,900.00 (weekly revenue) is $3,780.00, divided between 300 pieces of content, that equals $12.60 each (ask a blogger how much money they earn for EACH posting, and it's less than $12.60 - and, with TPB, you would get this amount for EACH edition you appear in; if a blogger appears in 10 editions, they would earn $126.00 for that one post.)

We pay an ad sales person (community relations person) to walk the community each day to learn what is going on and to sell ads; a college student at $125 / day is $625.00 per week.

Overhead costs are editorial and layout, but each editor and graphic designer can handle 5 editions per day. If an editor costs (burdened) $65,000 and a graphic designer costs (burdened) $55,000, their weekly cost per edition is $250.00 and $212.00, respectively.

Add up all of those costs and you get $10,867.00 per week. That leaves $8,033.00 PER WEEK per location for other overhead. Yearly location revenue is $982,800.00, yearly costs are $565,084.00, and $417,716.00 remains for executives, technology, and marketing - and this is per location, representing 1,000 copies.

In Chicago, where we are based, the Tribune's circulation is somewhere around 400,000 per day. If The Printed Blog could circulate 150,000 (which can be supported by ads - there are 150 neighborhoods where I can easily distribute 1,000 copies AND there are local / regional / national advertiser interests to earn $18,900.00 per week), could we make, pure profit, of $1,000.00 per week? I EASILY think we can - that equates to PROFIT of $150,000 per week, or $7,800,000.00 per year, in Chicago ALONE.

It might be expensive, but if you look at the only newspapers that are doing well, they are community newspapers, i.e. the model above.

If you think new media is just about being online, you're wrong. I think new media is about finding new ways to package content that meet customers' demands for it where they are and for what they do. RSS is pull online and there are tools that will help journalists pull paper stories in the medium, but there is still a case for offline pull.

In both cases, I'm wondering what the new role of public relations professionals and agencies is. In  guest post here, Christine Needles wondered about that, too. If marketers are to be in the content creation business, and I know we are, then is public relations going to help out? Would PR professionals become community content curators?

What are your thoughts / ideas?

[image of Scrooge McDuck: The Expert by Carl Barks]

Has Web 2.0 Made You Happier? [part II]

 

The messages and threads in social media and networks have been pretty intense in the last week or so. I thought it appropriate to bring back a really good conversation we had last year about happiness.

________

Have all the social bookmarking services brought you closer to great content, or has it just added to your workload?

Are your online relationships as productive or satisfying as your real ones? And if the answer here is "yes," do you have many real relationships?

Has Web 2.0 empowered your customer service people -- or just thinned out traditional marketing and personnel budgets?

Are email, Twitter, and IM services helping you to communicate better -- or just flooding you with noise?

There's a lot great about new web tools. But unless we master them -- and not the other way around -- Web 2.0 will be remembered as just another fad.

What works for you in Web 2.0 -- and what doesn't?

_______

When we had this conversation, there were amazing responses. A few pearls of wisdom from the previous discussion:

Luis Sandoval - Web 2.0 has always been promising, don't get me wrong. The expansion of ideas is great, but there seems to be more emphasis now on be the "It" thing that users are left behind to deal with the confusing aspects of adapting.

Ricardo Bueno - There are only so many hours in the day and your blog is a resource that's available 24/7. When you think about it, it's a unique resource that way. I like it for that reason but I also don't let it eliminate the personal aspect of my marketing (I still like to meet face-to-face).

Je' Maverick - I really love this post, and thank you for raising the questions. Does it add noise? Yes. Is this noise enriching? No. It has arrested my focus. Web 2.0 as we know it has only delivered a lot of extra task management quandaries to me. I would prefer to shift my focus back to delivering content. I can only say that it is not marketing - it is advertising.

Jens KH - does it make you happier? yes, it does.

because it tears down - or at least fundamentally challenges - some old parameters of identity construction, which in simple words are build on "the others" versus "you (and your buddies)".

the web as we can experience it today shows us that we are the others and that the others are us.

orientation within the new web - and amongst all of its players - puts more of an emphasis on similarities to ourselves (which make us come back to a site) rather than on dissimilarities (which do not attract us and which for us in consequence make a certain web offer disappear forever in the infinite space of the internet).

so - and this is terribly important - we consciously build our identity on similarities=love=acceptance rather than on "you are different from me because you look different, you speak different, you are not me and THEREFORE i am me" (this is basic sociology on identity building).

the new web globally challenges this. not only does it challenge these modalities of identity building - it qualifies them as belonging to a time past.

the new equation goes: i am because you are.
- i am me because you are like me.
this is a tremendous difference.
and, yes, it makes us - and everybody - fundamentally more happy.

Chris Baskind - Web 2.0 would be awesome if it actually worked. ;-)

Derrick Kwa - I think Web 2.0 doesn't necessarily bring about deeper relationships. But what it allows is a broader range of relationships. Without Web 2.0, for example, I would never have been able to connect with you. The value comes in that it breaks down practically all barriers for connecting with others.

Jon Burg - Happiness is a state of mind. Web 2.0 cannot make anyone happier. People can and should be happy because of who they are, despite any hardships and frustrations they endure in their lives.[...] Personally, I enjoy web 2.0. It has been a pleasure getting to know the greater community, to share ideas, to learn, to experience the wonder that is mass personal and social communication.

________

What about you? Has Web 2.0 made you happier?

[image of moments before sunrise by slack12]

Page 2

Google started it. Social media, especially with tools like FriendFeed, magnified it - page one is the place to be. The top of page one is especially the place to be. Those few days when Conversation Agent was at number five on AdAge Power150 many checked out this blog from that list. From number 16? Not so much.

Go on Twitter and you probably check only the first screen. Same conversation with the updates on LinkedIn and Facebook. History is something we studied in school, we live very much in the here and now with social media. Something that did not start with social, it started with news media. Social has one thing that makes this different - relationships.

With relationships we go way back. So much so that in those tools where the ability to have conversation is built in, older thoughts, chats, links or images that you share may pop back up again to the top. They have a chance to be new once more or new to you. The conversation is alive in digital format. Any one participant can activate it by commenting, bookmarking, and sharing. This should give you some thoughts on having a team vs. a Lone Ranger approach online (and in life).

So if your Web strategy is to refresh content on a continuous basis, remember that the archives play an important role in the great scheme of things. This blog, for example, has 888 posts and when I search for my name, the list of posts that comes up with the URL represents older posts that had quite a bit of traffic coming into them.

Notice also what ranks high in search. Does this give you ideas on the importance of integrating certain tools in your marketing communications strategy? I don't usually visit my blog from my own search. Way back, when the search button in my blog was not pulling up the posts I wanted to find for reference I occasionally used Google search.

When I was more active with comment on other blogs instead of FriendFeed, there were posts from other, high ranking, blogs with my comments that came up with a search on my name - page one high. What happens beyond page one? What happens if there are no comments?

Comments depend on many things.

For you to get more than a few, timing is a factor. Context matters. If everyone is thinking and talking about something and you happen to come by at the right time and place on that topic, your post, article, Web page - properly circulated - gets attention. Chances are that properly circulated means filtered in by your friends and connections.

Back to the Web pages, because I know that today search engine optimization (SEO) is becoming such a buzzword, even as much as "social media me this", "social media me that". I'd like an SEO strategy with a side of SEM, please. Such narrow focus may get you the same results a successful Digg gets you - an injection of traffic that comes over for a one moment stand. When it's all over, nobody may even remember your name. 

What makes people come back is the same set of ideas that make no difference if you're on page one or page two - valuable content and connections. Those pages then get more traffic because more people find them useful and share them. They become page one for your site. With social tags, they may become evergreen for some topics on Delicious. Also StumbleUpon and Reddit have a long tail on traffic to your site vs. Digg.

With distributed conversations, participation, a culture of sharing and linking, do we know anymore what page one is? Is it ok to be on page 2?

[images of my Google name page one and page 2 or side A and B]

How to Write an Email that Stands Out

Especially in a crowded inbox.

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a presentation about using social media for career management and development to a group of professionals who took the time to come out and connect on a Saturday morning.

We had really good participation and many asked questions throughout the presentation, which makes it interesting and engaging for everyone in the room. A true conversation.

Several attendees followed ups to have more conversations and with LinkedIn invitations, which I usually accept only after a face to face conversation.

Right after the presentation, one person provided such wonderful feedback  that I almost wished I was still logged on to ask her if she'd be willing to share it on LinkedIn for everyone to see - feedback is welcome at any time.

And that is why this note I received a few days later really made me stop and read carefully. Notice how much care and interest the author took in writing it so that it would not come across as promotional or self serving in any way.  Yet it carries the message across even by making it about the presentation and the morning and not the writer.

Memorable? You bet. [republished with permission]

Subject: Thank you for the dynamic presentation on Saturday, 6/13 @ Villanova

Thank you for a most engaging presentation this past Saturday. It was my inaugural event with the group, and a great introduction. I'm sure you can appreciate my lack of desire to dress up and travel over 30 miles on a Saturday - perhaps you felt the same. I'm glad I made the effort.

In typical business format, this e-mail would have encompassed just two short paragraphs. However, since you admitted that you write long blogs, and your style is conversational – yes, I found your web site, read some postings and subscribed to the blog – I feel confident that my ramblings are appropriate. Please read on.

While I listened intently during your presentation, I also absorbed a lot of external elements surrounding the brand of you. Allow me to qualify this statement. I’ve spent the bulk of my career in retail, and training and development, and over the years I’ve honed my ability to look at the details to understand the brand. If I visit a retail establishment, I watch what is happening and what isn’t; if I attend a training session or meeting, I sit near the back and observe what people do and when they do it. Interestingly, at Saturday’s presentation, I was 2 rows from the back.

With that said, here are three observations about the brand of you that I jotted down, along with my comments:

• No nonsense, with a smile – you provide information with a grain of salt, and expect that people will adapt it to their own process. In my Mother’s terms, ‘get over it, and if you can’t, go under!”
• Humorous PowerPoint – you don’t take yourself too seriously. Interestingly, this is a great way to put people at ease.
• Extensive speaking – you used the PowerPoint slides as a framework and provided a lot of content behind each slide. AKA, you didn’t read the slides- a presentation nightmare!

I fancy myself a bit of a writer, and have, over the past few months, turned that skill to crafting resumes and cover letters for peers. I share this because I agonized over the crafting of this e-mail to you, the Conversation Agent. I am certain that perfection is a self-imposed internal madness. Fortunately, I’ve adjusted well to it…and made it to the end of this note.

Thanks again for an inspiring presentation. I really do appreciate your message and delivery. The session was one of my best Saturday mornings to date.

Brian P. Corcoran

The mentions about his career and experience are contextual to the intent of the email, which was to provide feedback to me. I was sold. This is how you write a marketing communications piece, a pitch letter, any outreach communication that will make an impression.

It wasn't so much the words that were contained in the note - as beautifully flowing as it is. I did admire the syntax and brevity. What I remembered most though was how I felt about it. Because he provided context with the story.

He started with the payoff - this is good news. Framed his state of mind with a very brief history of his conflict - a Saturday, new to the group, did not know what to expect - to resolution. He's done his homework and is matching the style to mine as observed so far. Then the longer description that sets the stage for providing the feedback. Not taking himself too seriously, either he wraps where he started.

Here are some things to think about when you write an email to connect:

• do you have a goal? I'm asking this because sometimes the email I get is just a bland pitch, and there is no clear call to action.
• what do you want the recipient to do? That would be the call to action.
• how are you going to relate to them? This is the part where people read the blog or learn about the other not just so that they can propose appropriate content, although that works well, but so they can also get the tone right. Relating is key to get to the next one.
• how will your email make them feel? This moves you from just another unknown entity in an inbox to a person who's paid attention. This is not the touchy feeling part, it's the value part, the meaning part.
• where are you going to fit in? Notice how he weaved in his experience as a proof point or qualifier for his remarks.

I believe him when he writes he agonized over writing the email.

I write a lot every day - for the Web, emails, letters, blog posts, articles - and getting the tone right is what makes a piece of communication connect with its intended audience. Tone is as important as content. How you say something is as if not more important than what you say - as a speaker and writer.

What would you have done to connect with a speaker you learned from? Have you written an email that hit the sweet spot in connecting you to someone? What can you teach us about your success? Have you been on the receiving end of a well crafted and relevant email? What made you read on and reply?

___________

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