Amy Schmittauer is the Founder & Face of Savvy Sexy Social. She is a “social media frenzy” working in social relations consulting, blogging, and, of course, vlogging about life on her YouTube channel. Connect with her on Twitter.

If there’s anything I’ve learned throughout this crazy ride of working in digital marketing, it’s that reading all the blog posts ever written, staying up-to-date on all the latest news, and watching all the how-to YouTube videos you can find is still not enough. There’s no doubt that all the information you need to learn about the Wild West world of social media is available online. But do you really “get it”? How do you bring all of those tangents of information in to one great feeling of understanding?

Just like with anything else, it’s when the conversation is taken offline that things come full circle. And when it comes to getting educated on how you can grow your business and attract positive (while properly handling negative) attention through social media, there’s nothing quite like the experience of an in-person conference with the brilliant minds of digital unloading all of their tips to attendees. Not to mention the killer networking. Oh the people you’ll meet and the connections you’ll make. It’s unlike any tweet you’ll ever receive.

This list is of some of the best conferences still to come in 2012 that are offering amazing speakers in the business and social media marketing industries. Whether you want to help your own business succeed or contribute to your work at a larger corporation, there is a gathering here that you will find well worth your dime and time.

Ohio Growth Summit

May 24, 2012, Columbus, Ohio

Who knew Columbus would be such a hot spot this year for great business and marketing advice? Ohio Growth Summit is held by the Ohio Small Business Development Center at Columbus State Community College and I’m really excited not only for this great extension of the great work they do for my hometown, but also because I have the opportunity to work with them for this year’s event. With past speakers including Guy Kawasaki, Chris Brogan, Nick Warnock, Carrie Wilkerson, and of course, Jay Baer just last year along with co-author Amber Naslund, this intimate, small business-focused, development and marketing conference is definitely a contender with all the bigger events across the country. This May, Gini Dietrich of Spin Sucks will be the main keynote, along with a morning session with Paul Evans of Impact Living. More information, including what to expect from workshop sessions, are available on the OGS website.

BlogWorld Expo East

June 5-7, 2012, New York, NY

BlogWorld Expo quotes itself as “the first and only industry-wide, trade show and media event for all new media”. With all the content and amazing speakers they consistently have to offer every year, it’s so true. As a matter of fact, it was only last year that BWE introduced an Eastern version of the conference. With great demand for the top-notch minds in blogging, social, and multimedia, they decided to double up their yearly conference to serve a larger audience of businesses and content creators. Excited to see Jay’s name listed as a speaker for the event in June, along with more (blogger) household names like Robert Scoble, Scott Stratten, Peter Shankman, Chris Garrett, Jason Falls, and many more. Learn more on the BlogWorld Expo website.

Small Giants International Summit

June 28-July 1, 2012, San Francisco, CA

Another pretty new but very successful event is the Small Giants International Summit. The first conference kicked off last year in Konstanz, Germany. Started by SmallGiants.org, this Summit brings together the most excited and passionate of the small business world. A great opportunity to network with like-minded professionals and address some of the hard-hitting issues that are presented with running a business. Being able to work out those ideas with others, especially owners who conduct business in different countries is great for improving upon problem-solving skills and network growth. The 2012 event is in the U.S. this year, in San Francisco, and the keynote speaker is Chip Conley. To learn more about Small Giants International Summit, check out the conference page.

Explore Minneapolis

August 16-17, 2012, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Social Media Explorer founder Jason Falls is holding another great Explore event, this time in the Twin Cities. Jay Baer joins the event to help businesses “push the thinking” for a more prominent online presence and goal-driven social marketing plan. Additional speakers include Kipp Bodnar of Hubspot, Jeff Rohrs of ExactTarget, Neil Patel of Kissmetrics, Nichole Kelly of Full Frontal ROI, and more. Stay tuned to the website for the full agenda to come and watch the #GoToExplore Twitter hashtag before, during, and after the events to see what attendees in other cities are saying.

Content Marketing World

September 4-6, 2012, Columbus, Ohio

Content Marketing World kicked off it’s first event last year in Cleveland with more than 600 marketing professionals in attendance, and it’s already set the bar as one of the best events to network with those in content marketing. Jay was a speaker last year, participating in a few different sessions, along with many great names in the industry. Speakers slated for this September (this time in my hometown of Columbus) include Sam Sebastian from Google, Inc., Mitch Joel from Six Pixels of Separation, and Marcus Sheridan of The Sales Lion. To see the rest of the impressive lineup for September’s event, visit the Content Marketing World website, and for a limited time, use the code CONVINCECONVERT at checkout to save $100 on your ticket! (expires 5/31)

Social Fresh Conference

September 27-28, 2012, San Diego, CA

Social Fresh Conference was started by the popular social media for business blog, Social Fresh. Obviously the focus of this event is helping businesses conduct an effective online presence for both brand awareness and customer service. Therefore, a lot of different types attend this event including social media thought leaders, marketers, and business owners. This conference is known to be one that is extremely popular with its attendees, especially in regards to networking. There’s a lot of opportunity to learn from not only their great speaker lineup, but from other talented attendees about what they’re applying to their online marketing that’s been successful for them. Learn more about the next event coming up in San Diego on the Social Fresh website.

Do you have any events to add to the list? Leave a comment below!

About the Amy Schmittauer:

Sheena Navigates the Market in Nebaj, Guatemala

A former product engineer for WL Gore & Associates, Brad is an expert telemark skier, mountain biker, mechanic, cook, humorist, and explorer. I got to know Brad and his wife Sheena when I lived in Flagstaff, AZ (where they’re from). I met Brad and helped him with some Web strategy when he took an interest in sustainable energy (as a hobby) and taught himself C++ and a bunch of other programming languages to build a company called Sunwind Solutions that would automagically figure out the best solar or wind equipment for your home, based on a massive database that mapped wind and sunshine patterns against GPS data. Exactly the same way I spend my free time, if you swap “drinking tequila” for the “teaching yourself how to program” parts.

Not content with their baseline level of intrigue, Brad and Sheena decided to quit their jobs, buy a VW van, and spend three years driving across the world. This is no hippie quest, it’s a methodical embrace of a new life that simultaneously requires extensive planning, yet none whatsoever.

Their VW van is named “Nacho” and Brad is documenting their adventures with terrific blog posts and photos at Drive Nacho Drive. Brad is a gifted travel writer in the mold of  Tim Cahill (my second favorite travel author, and founder of Outside Magazine). Instead of posting a couple times a week, Brad could have instead held off and released a killer, long-form tome when the trip ended.

But Brad Van Orden thinks small. And so should you.

Charles Dickens Was a Hell of a Content Marketer

Serializing your work used to be the standard practice. Dickens published every one of his novels in a serial form, experimenting with weekly and monthly episodic fiction. It made his work cheaper (in the short run) and thus more accessible. Publishers loved it too, because they could include ads in each part. In short, it worked.

Somewhere, we got away from this notion and started to embrace a “bigger is better” philosophy with regard to publishing (and now content marketing). We need to swing the pendulum back the other way, and start atomizing our content (hat tip to Todd Defren for coining that).

Deconstructing Your Big Idea

When I talk about atomizing your content, I’m not advocating more ideas, or even a tremendous amount of additional work. What I’m imploring you to do is take your big idea and turn it into several smaller ideas. You have to disavow yourself of the natural inclination to create the “mother of all” whatever, and instead embrace the propagation of a larger number of less massive (but still meaningful) content executions.

My friends (and clients) at ExactTarget have a fine example of thinking small in their Subscribers, Fans, and Followers content. This is a very large research project that uncovered many important behaviors and data points related to social media and email marketing. Instead of releasing it as an omnibus study, they deconstructed it into 14 separate parts and released a new piece every few weeks, increasing overall impact considerably. See the whole series here.

The 6 Benefits of Thinking Small

Atomizing your content in this way has six advantages over the “mother of all” approach:

1. Atomized Content is More Searchable

When you break your content into multiple pieces you get more bait in the water to attract your most important customer….Google. Producing disparate pieces of content gives you the opportunity to emphasize a wider number of search terms, cross-link your content, acquire more inbound links, and increase your total number of ranked pages.

2. Atomized Content is More Findable

This is especially valid when you repurpose and reimagine your content while also atomizing it. What will get more exposure for your company, a blog post or a blog post + a podcast? How about a Slideshare presentation or a Slideshare presentation + a blog post? Every presentation you make should be at least one blog post, and each blog post you write is the untapped nucleus for a presentation. This findability principle is the reason we have full written transcripts of every video interview and every Social Pros episode here on Convince & Convert.

3. Atomized Content Gets Consumed More

In a world where 140 characters equals a fully-formed thought, what will get consumed more – a 90-second video, or a 32-page eBook? Typically, it’s the former. Face it, Johnny Don’t Read. Every trend in social media and content marketing is toward brevity and showing rather than telling. YouTube. Pinterest. Socialcam. Viddy. Instagram. Tumblr. Infographics. Will I still write this blog in two years? Will anyone still read posts as long as this one?

This is why even though I’ve delayed my next book project, when I get ready to jump back in, I’ll be working on a short, small, easy to digest book. Seth Godin has this trend nailed with his Domino Project.

4. Atomized Content Gets Spread More

The potential virality of smaller content supersedes larger content in almost every case. This is partially related to consumption, as we are more likely to recommend via tweet, share, +1, buffer, email forward, etc. something we have actually read or watched. But it’s also just a factor of mathematics. If you have one terrific eBook it will definitely be shared. But if you take that same eBook and release it in 8 parts, the collective shares for those components will be higher – and given the inclusion of sharing behaviors in search results, this also impacts #1 above.

5. Atomized Content Gains More Mind Share

One of the big successes of the ExactTarget project is media coverage. Thousands of blog posts and media mentions have been made of the Subscribers, Fans, Followers research. It’s very good information, and packaged well. But the fact that there have been 14 possible bites of the media apple instead of one makes a big difference. Thinking small gives you more opportunities to create and sustain mindshare among media, prospective customers, and even current customers.

6. Atomized Content Generates More Leads

One of the often overlooked benefits of thinking small in content marketing is that each time you deconstruct or reimagine your content, you have another opportunity to include calls-to-action. Remember, you’re in the behavior business not the eyeballs business. An 8-piece series gives you 800% more calls-to-action than a “mother of all” program. Further, when your content is smaller, your call-to-action competes against fewer words, pictures, and other content elements, which could provide additional attention and conversion (your results may vary).

Be an Amoeba

Remember learning about cell division in school? A single-celled organism becomes two, then four, then eight? The next time you’re brainstorming a content marketing execution for your company, think like an amoeba. How can you take your big idea and make it two, or four, or eight? That’s Thinking Small. Go do it.

About the Jay Baer: Jay Baer is a hype-free social media strategist & speaker, tequila guy, and co-author of The NOW Revolution. Jay is the founder of http://convinceandconvert.com and host of the Social Pros podcast.

Listen Now

Click the play button to listen here:

Download the audio file:

http://socialpros.podbean.com/mf/web/ic763t/SocialProsEpisode15.mp3

The RSS feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/socialprospodcast
Find us on iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/convince-convert-blog-social/id499844469

Please Support Our Sponsors

Huge thanks to data-driven social media management software company Argyle Social for their presenting sponsorship, as well as Infusionsoft, Janrain, and Jim Kukral at DigitalBookLaunch. We use Argyle Social for our social engagement; we use Infusionsoft for our email; Janrain is our crackerjack social integration company, and Jim is our guest host for the podcast (and a smart guy). Also

Social Pros Transcript For Your Reading Enjoyment, Thanks to Speechpad for the Transcription

Jay: Yes, indeed. That was a new introduction on the Social Pros podcast. We’re stepping it up here a little bit in episode 15. I am Jay Baer joined by my trusty sidekick, Eric Boggs from Argyle Social. Eric, how are you, my friend?

Eric: I’m doing just fine, Jay.

Jay: Glad to hear it. Amazing guest on the show today. Actually, sitting here with me in an undisclosed hotel room in New Orleans, Louisiana, Marcus Sheridan, The Sales Lion. He will be joining us in just a second on the show. He’s going to blow us away. We should’ve gotten a bigger hotel room.

Eric: So Marcus spoke at a conference, evidently, that a couple Argylers attended. And one of them sent me a text saying, “Do you know this guy, Marcus Sheridan? He is blowing the room away.”

Jay: That is his MO. In fact, one of the tweets this morning was, “Who needs bloody marys when you have The Sales Lion”. He is the antidote to what ails you in New Orleans.

Eric: Awesome.

Jay: So I want to just quick shout out to our fantastic sponsors here on Social Pros. Of course, Argyle Social, Eric’s company, data driven, social media management software. Our friend, Jim Kukral from DigitalBookLaunch.com. Infusionsoft, who we use for all of our email stylings. And a new sponsor joining the podcast this week, our friends at Janrain, who do social sign-in and a bunch of other like magical voodoo. We’ll talk more about them in a week or two.

Eric: Yeah, good guys at Janrain. I know a guy named Jamie Beckland that I guess went to work there from working at an agency.

Jay: Yes.

Eric: Good folks.

Jay: Yeah, great. Jamie’s super-smart. We should have him on the show sometime. He used to be at Whitehorse. Really smart guy,

Eric: Yep.

Jay’s Thought of the Week

Jay: So here’s my rant of the week. I actually wrote a blog post about it. And I was so mobilized by this, I wrote a post on Saturday and used it to ignore my in-laws, which is probably a bad call long term. But you know, it is what is.

Eric: Also a bad call to publicly acknowledge that you ignore your in-laws on a public podcast.

Jay: Yeah, I don’t know if they’re Social Pros listeners. They probably are now. Tristan, edit that out.

Eric: Yeah, cut that. Cut. I was with my in-laws in D.C. all weekend, so I feel your pain, Jay.

Jay: Did you write blog posts while they were there?

Eric: No, I didn’t.

Jay: You’re a suckup.

Eric: Yeah, I just keep my mouth shut.

Pinterest 101

Jay: So the premise of this post is that we spend a lot of time in social and in content marketing talking about eyeballs and how much traffic do we have and how many visitors do we have and how many unique visitors do we have and all this. And at the end of the day, that is a crappy metric. It is perhaps the most overrated metric in the history of math, because just because somebody shows up at your site doesn’t mean they do anything on your site that is inherently of value.

The reason I got on this soapbox initially is that there’s been a lot of reporting lately – in fact, I think we even talked about it here on the podcast a few weeks ago – about Pinterest’s power as a referring source, that Pinterest is sending more traffic than Facebook. Pinterest is sending more traffic from Twitter. The original source of that, I think – as you pointed out, Eric, or Tom Webster did – was a ShareThis study, which doesn’t necessarily mean everybody. It just means people who use ShareThis. But beyond that, my question is who cares? So what if Pinterest does send more traffic equivalently than Facebook to your site? Does that mean that people from Pinterest actually buy things from you? Does it mean they fill out a lead form? Does it mean they sign up for an email newsletter? Or does it mean that they look at one pretty picture, never to return again? And unless you know the answer to that question, you are fooling yourself. You do not understand how digital marketing works.

Traffic is actually an expense, not a benefit. You can break it down, right, but ultimately when you figure out your server costs, your amortized design costs, what it requires you to create content, etc., every person who comes to your site actually costs you money, doesn’t make you money unless you’re selling advertising. In that case, it’s a different story.

Eric: I think I’ve used this gimmick before, but I’m going to use it again. Here comes the audible sigh, Jay. Yes, you are preaching to the choir. Yes, marketers are lazy. Clicks are the easy thing, and it’s often the easy way out in terms of justifying existence and justifying resources invested. You know, it’s something that we have been railing about at Argyle since the very beginning, and I imagine it’s something we’ll be railing about forever and ever and ever. As it relates to our listeners in social, this is sort of just a phenomenon that has existed with online advertising and email marketing that is now just being translated to social, which is sort of this inability to get over the hump in terms of mapping channel inputs to onsite outputs. And there are definitely some technology challenges around that, some of which we are working very hard to address at Argyle in terms of making these things possible. But it’s not rocket science, especially as it related to Pinterest. Mapping Pinterest referrals to onsite conversions is as simple as a custom report in Google Analytics. I would imagine everyone listening to this broadcast has Google Analytics on their website, and maybe a lot of these people even ask themselves whether or not Pinterest is moving the needle for their business. So what we’re asking people to do, it’s not impossible. And to me, that’s what’s the most frustrating bit about this kind of stuff.

Jay: I agree. But you know what’s weird about it? I don’t know that it’s always laziness. Sometimes I really believe that people think that traffic and visitors is, in fact, a reliable metric, that that has inherent value. Actually, there are a lot of comments on my blog post about people saying, “Oh, no. Traffic is good because that traffic will eventually create email subscriptions.” To which I say, “Nuh-uh. Not necessarily.”

Eric: Traffic is potentially a leading indicator. I will agree that it is potentially a leading indicator. But you can segment traffic in the same way that you can segment everything else. So traffic from Pinterest may not have the same value as traffic from LinkedIn or paid search or organic search.

Jay: Yeah, and I don’t have enough Pinterest traffic on my blog, although we have a Pinterest account, of course. I don’t have enough Pinterest referalls to really do much with it from an analytical perspective. But my hypothesis, and maybe there’ll be somebody who listens to the podcast who can comment on this on the blog post, my hypothesis is that Pinterest traffic will behave more like search traffic rather than social traffic because Pinterest, in my estimation, is more about discovery than it is about social sharing. It’s more about finding new things as opposed to voting for things that you already know about.

Eric: Yep.

Jay: So to me, I think Pinterest is more like Google than it is like Facebook. I could be wrong, but that’s how I see it.

Eric: I don’t disagree. You ready for some stat of the week?

Jay: I am. What is the social media stat of the week?

Eric: You did it again. That was good. I tease you for the ridiculous stat of the week intro. I guess I could…

Jay: We’re also supposed to do Angry Birds sounds this episode because I was going to do [makes sounds]. That’s the best I can do.

Eric’s Social Media Stat of the Week: Email Opens on Smart Phones and Tablets Have Grown by 82% in the Last Year

Eric: All right. Stat of the week comes from Return Path, which is an email marketing data company. They’ve been around for a while. I think they’re probably, gee, it’s probably 10 or 15 years old. So these guys have been in the business for a long time. They track broad email marketing data behavior from vendors to publishers to email recipients. They released a great report about email consumption and the big takeaway from this is that email opens on smart phones and tablets grew by 82 percent in the past year. So mobile devices are on track to be the dominant email platform over desktops and laptops by the end of this year. There’s a long report. We can link it up. The takeaway here is that marketers aren’t ready for this. Very few marketers are optimizing their email content for consumption on iPhones and iPads and mobile devices.

Jay: No question, especially if you’re in B2B, where you have smart phone penetration that’s upwards of 80 percent in most cases. If your content is not mobile friendly, that’s the first thing you should do. Quit talking about Facebook and Pinterest, and actually make your existing content available, not to mention your email, available on an iPhone and a BlackBerry and a Windows mobile device and any other flavor that you have. It’s just insane, but I understand how we got here. Because you’re right, we’ve been talking about mobile for a long time. Like we were talking about mobile’s going to be dominant, the preeminence of mobile. We were talking about that when I was a kid, and now I have kids. But now it feels like all of a sudden like, oh now it actually is true. It’s like the boy who cried mobile. Every year it’s like, “Mobile’s going to take over. Mobile’s going to take over.” And after you hear that eight years in a row, you’re like whatevs. And now all of a sudden, mobile is taking over, and I think people got caught flat-footed because they’re like, “Yeah, I’ve heard this story before.” But now, ultimately, it’s true.

Eric: Well the funny thing to me is people kind of got hung up on apps with the iPhone App Store gold rush. And now there’s this realization that, “Oh, you mean my website, not an iPhone app or a Droid app. Oh, I get it now.” You know, our website, I think, it’s written completely HTML5. There are parts of it that probably look wonky on an iPhone, but the main bits of ArgyleSocial.com are going to look really good on your iPad and your iPhone. And it’s not easy to do, especially if you’re invested in a custom website and really trying to do something kind of fancy pants. So this issue, I think, is a little different than what we were talking about with mapping traffic all the way to conversion. Mobilfying your online experience can be expensive and it can be time consuming, so it’s something that people should probably start sooner rather than later.

Jay: Yeah, and it’s certainly easier to do in a major construction project as opposed to slapdash after the fact, unless you have WordPress or something like that. So next time you do a website redesign is the time to go through and make sure it’s mobile friendly.

Eric: And next time you do website, a massive redesign, if the person that you’re working with doesn’t suggest a mobile optimized version, fire that person and find another person.

Jay: Yeah, get somebody else. Exactly. Yeah, I’m going to start a company that creates apps to help customers find your app. It’s just going to be a super-meta business.

Eric: There’s an app for that.

Special Guest: Marcus Sheridan, The Sales Lion

Jay: There is. There is. Well, I am excited about our guest today, who has been sitting here patiently. This is the longest I’ve ever heard him be quiet. It is Marcus Sheridan, The Sales Lion. He and I are both speaking at the Counselors Academy PRSA Conference here in beautiful New Orleans, Louisiana. He gave a rousing keynote – he gives no other kind – this morning to a bunch of PR firm owners. Mr. Sheridan, thank you for being on Social Pros.

Marcus Sheridan, The Sales Lion @thesaleslion

Marcus: Hey man, it’s a pleasure. But how do you hear somebody being quiet? That’s what I’m trying to figure out in my head right now, man.

Jay: It’s Vulcan.

Marcus: Okay. I got it.

Jay: It’s sort of a Vulcan skill.

Marcus: I’m feeling it.

Eric: I’ve heard you being quiet, Marcus. You’ve done a really good job.

Jay: So Marcus, in the unusual chance that somebody listening to Social Pros is not familiar with the now legendary Marcus Sheridan story, do you want to summarize your career in 60 seconds with regards to your background as a purveyor of swimming pools, etc.?

Marcus: Yeah, super quick story. Thanks, Jay. 2001 I started a swimming pool company with two other guys. And then in 2008 when the economy crashed, we were going to crash with it. We didn’t have any money for marketing. We had to maintain a lot of sales. We did about 75 in-ground fiberglass pool installations a year at that time. And so without having any money and going basically on the brink of bankruptcy, I was looking around and discovered this whole thing called inbound and content marketing. That’s when we decided to start a blog, and we really embraced the whole concept of let’s just be teachers. So we answered every single question on our blog that we had ever heard from a consumer. Within a year, we had the number one trafficked swimming pool website in the world. It really increased visitors, but more so, to what you were talking about earlier, it increased leads and ultimately customers. It saved our business, and we did it by cutting down drastically all of our advertising dollars.

About a year after we did this, I started another blog called The Sales Lion, and it teaches everything that I’ve ever done, all my ingredients to my secret sauce. It’s been a great ride, and now I teach other businesses how to embrace the power and the vision that is content, which I feel is the greatest sales tool in the world.

Jay: So you were sort of the swimming pool version of Gary Vaynerchuk, where he built his wine business just telling people what he thought about wine and creating tons of free content. You did the same thing in the swimming pool industry.

Marcus: You know, it’s really funny because when people hear me speak, the first time I ever spoke somewhere big, a bunch of people kept saying to me, “You’re like the Gary V of the swimming pool industry,” because we have a similar funky style. We’re really off the cuff and use wacky words and stuff. We come from these industries like how did that happen, type of stuff. But yeah, it’s similar to Gary, and I like Gary a lot. So I take that as a complement. But yeah, and for me it’s great because whenever I hear people talk about marketing, I can relate to it because I’ve been in the trenches. I still own the company, and I just have two business partners that run it. But for me now, it’s a playground where I can experiment all day long with content.

Jay: And you are a big proponent of HubSpot. I know you use HubSpot software. That’s kind of one of the backbones of the things that you use, and you’re familiar with that software. We talk a lot on this show about the difference between the wizard and the wand, and that right now, we’re in a weird space in content and social where a lot of companies believe that the software is their salvation. How do you feel about that?

Marcus: HubSpot has never saved any business. HubSpot certainly didn’t save me. HubSpot is as good as the person that’s swinging the hammer, because that’s really what HubSpot is. It’s a hammer that is effective when used properly. Unfortunately, just like anything else, you can take a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. Same thing with HubSpot. This is the thing about HubSpot. Ultimately its greatest value is the fact that I can sit here and say that because I’ve been blogging and I can track the leads that I have gotten specifically from my blog, my blog has made me over $2 million in sales. That’s why I like HubSpot, because we’re constantly having this ROI mystic debate thing going on, which drives me nuts. Usually we’re debating ROI because most people don’t have proper analytics. I know you use Infusionsoft and I know you have analytics there, too, because we want to be able to track the stuff that we’re doing. Just like somebody came to me today and said, “Yo, Marcus, is PPC good?” I’m like, “PPC is good if you’re making money with it. But if you’re not tracking it, you won’t know that. So the first thing is are you tracking your PPC? Can you tell me how many customers you’ve actually gotten from PPC?” If not, we’ve got to change something up here really, really soon because we have a major break in our ability to close that loop. And everybody’s got to be able to close that loop, man.

Jay: Yeah, and that is the nice thing about that particular platform is that you can get end-to-end analytics.

Marcus: Huge for me, man.

Jay: A lot of times I feel like the challenge for people who believe in the ROI of social and content and believe that ROI is possible is that unless you come out of a analytics background, the way Eric does and the way I do, you’ve got to be your own middleman a lot of times.

Marcus: Yeah, and here’s the thing that people have got to understand about Google. Google tells us traffic, but Google doesn’t tell us names of people.

Eric: So we’ve been working on some content at Argyle about two types of marketers – oceanographers and fishermen. Some marketers are oceanographers that track ocean currents and tidal patterns and things of that nature and other marketers don’t really care about. They care about the fish that they’re trying to catch. You just sort of said exactly that, Marcus, in that Google Analytics is going to tell you how much the water’s rising and falling, but it’s not going to tell you if the big fish is in your neck of the woods or not.

Marcus: Oh, you’re so right. There’s a magic behind writing a blog article and being able to say definitively I know this one article in the last two years has made me at least $150,000 in sales. Until companies catch that vision and they’re starting to use some type of software that allows them to do that, I think content marketing in social media is going to get a bad name, because I can sit here right now and say how much money I have made, minimum, that I’ve been able to track because I can’t track it unless somebody’s filled out the form. But once they have filled out a form, then I can track everything from that point on. And I can sit here and say from the swimming pool perspective or from The Sales Lion or anything else like that, I can say, okay, PPC has made me this much. Organic search has made me this. In fact, breaking down organic, this blog article has made me this because this keyword is what it ranks for and thus I know it goes back to that particular blog article on and on Facebook, Twitter. All those things, I can say how much money they’ve made my particular company at a minimum, because what we can’t track is phone calls to the office. That’s the one thing we can’t really track and say, okay, they called me…

Jay: Well, you could. You could put a phone number on there.

Marcus: Right. The problem is… yes, you can. That’s a very good point. Most companies don’t do that, and that is the other way to deal with that, Jay. But most don’t do that. And sometimes when we ask them on the phone, “How’d you hear about us,” they give us the wrong information.

Eric: Yeah, I don’t know.

Marcus: Yeah. They say the radio and I haven’t been on the radio in eight years. You know what I mean?

Jay: Right, right. Precisely. I’m glad you mentioned keywords. You are very straightforward about creating content that answers customer questions and sort of giving away what you know and things of that nature. Basically, taking the sum total of your expertise and giving it away for free one post at a time has been very successful. How much do you think about high efficacy search terms and SEO and rankings before you create posts?

Marcus: I do think about it, but I think about it in this: Has somebody ever asked me the question? Okay, that’s about the extent of it. And as soon as I know that they’ve asked me the question, then I know that merits being a title to a blog post. Because if somebody’s asked you the question, a thousand people have searched that very same question online. It used to be 10 years ago when we were figuring out search, Jay, it was “pools”. And then five years into it, we might have typed in “fiberglass pools,” and now we type in stuff like “what is the best type of fiberglass swimming pool if you live in Virginia”, right. So we’ve learned how to search differently. And so all I did, my only strategy-and for the first two years, I never used a keyword suggestion tool, because I very, very passionately feel that if we are great listeners, our customers are the best keyword tool that we could every possible use.

Here’s the thing. If people are asking you the question in your business and that answer is not on your website, I think you’re very, very flawed because we have been trained by Google that if we go to a site and we’re searching for something, Jay, and it ain’t there, we’re gone, dude. If I’ve got a question I can’t find, I’m gone. And basically, it’s almost like the teacher that’s not calling on the student in class that keeps raising his hand. It’s crazy to me that we see that everywhere. So SEO works well when you are specifically answering specific questions the way that your specific consumers ask those things. Not like we think them, not with our silly acronyms, but exactly like they say them. Then I think, honestly, I think we make SEO out to be much more of a science than it is. I think truly giving those great specific answers is the only long-term solution to every single Google update from now until the end of time.

Jay: Well and they’ve certainly said that their direction, and the last two or three updates have pushed them this way, is that search needs to be conversational. It used to be you have to do search for Google and, by the way, also for people. But Google has very much moved in the direction of rewarding natural language and rewarding natural content, which I think is a boon for everybody. Eric, you’d agree, I presume?

Eric: Yes, indeed.

Marcus: Well, I see this all the time and people get on me like I’m talking Matrix language, but I feel like Google is going to be smarter that humans in terms of creating search quality, content quality down the road. Now I don’t know how they’re going to do it. But my feeling is that they are going to be able to do that, and so when I write, that’s the only thing I think about. I’m not thinking about all these other things that we see so many SEOs or content marketers think about. Because I think, although it might work for the next six months or it might work for the next six years, there’s going to be a day when that junk I was doing that wasn’t really legitimate, it’s going to come back and bite me. Just like we see all the time these companies freaking out. It’s just like with the recent update and you saw all these people that had been using these link building tools that were supposedly white hat. I mean, come on people. I mean, if it’s a link building tool, automatically it’s black.

Jay: By definition, not white.

Marcus: Yes. It’s black. Let’s call a spade a spade here.

Jay: Well, let me ask you this. Being an old school sort of SEO myself and Eric has done a lot of online direct marketing as well, what would you say to people who posit the notion that Google and the nature of search is going to wane in importance and our relationships will bridge that gap? So that eventually, let’s fast forward three years, Google drives a heck of a lot less traffic than it ever did and Facebook now drives a heck of a lot more because instead of asking Google who’s the best builder of swimming pools in Virginia for fiberglass, we’re going to ask our friends.

Marcus: I don’t think that’s going to happen, personally. Here’s what I see. This is just me, and I’m going to write about this here soon. I see a future of two types of search engines. I see a search engine that is social driven like Google and where it’s going, and I see somebody else that’s going to come up and be old Google, which is not going to be so social, which is going to be purely just great content based on the algorithm. That might sound very unromantic. But see, it bugs me. I’m the type of guy, I actually don’t want to see what all my friends are choosing when I do searches.

Jay: You don’t want +1 s.

Marcus: I log out on specific searches. I see the day when we have two types of search engines, and I think what, in many ways, is Google’s greatest advance right now could be their biggest downfall for inviting a potential second party-which we don’t have a two-party system right now in search. I think we will have a two-party system for general search engines, because Yahoo and Bing don’t count to me. They haven’t made enough ground.

Eric: So Marcus, there is a company called DuckDuckGo, kind of like Duck Duck Goose, but DuckDuckGo. And they just raised a ton of money from Union Square Ventures, and their entire premise is we don’t track you. It’s a high quality search engine you don’t login to. There’s no bubble of sort of tailored results for you. It’s just old school Google.

Marcus: That’s really cool Eric. And I’m glad you bring that up because, honestly, that’s how I like to roll online when I’m researching. Not everybody’s like that. If I really want to know what my friends think, then I am going to go to Facebook. I am. But there’s always going to be certain things, I think-in my opinion-that we don’t do so socially online. Like I have articles on swimming pools that have been read hundreds of thousands of times, but they’ve been tweeted twice and liked once or twice. It’s like people look at them, and they think just based on those share numbers that the articles stink and they’ve made me hundreds of thousands of dollars because…

Jay: You need to go back and get the old school hit counter on the bottom.

Marcus: Yeah, right. Hit counter on the bottom. Classic.

Jay: That’s social proof 1.0, baby.

Marcus: It’s different for everybody. I’m not saying social’s not important. But for certain industries, I don’t think it’s a huge metric.

Jay: In certain categories, crowds are not wise. Other than you, the number of friends that I have who could tell me anything about swimming pools numbers one -you and one other guy. So I could ask all the people I know on Facebook, and I’m going to get not a lot of good information back.

Marcus: Because we don’t practice buying pools until we actually own a pool, right? So most people, they don’t have anything to say about it and we’re not exactly bragging to our friends, I just spent 50K on a pool. So we don’t tweet it out, “Yo, I just dropped 50 grand but I own a swimming pool now.” Most people, unless we’re a professional athlete trying to show our crib, we just don’t do it that way, and that’s why it’s not a very social industry yet. It’s more of a search industry, old school style. And I think there’s always going to be a place for that. But honestly, I’m saying all this stuff, dude. Three weeks from now, I could change my mind because that’s how fast we’re developing, and I think we’re all idiots, kind of.

Jay: You’re going to shut your blog down. You’re going to have a Lion Pinterest board and that’s it. Just different lions, that’s it.

Marcus: Oh man. Going off about that whole traffic thing you were talking about earlier. I’m like Pinterest has become way worse than StumbleUpon in terms of, you know, I have friends that hate it when they get stumbled because it just means that they got a huge…

Jay: A bunch of traffic they can’t convert?

Marcus: …that they can’t convert and drives them crazy and it kills like all their bounce rates and stuff like that. Pinterest, in a lot of ways, potentially does that. Not that I don’t see the value for it, but it’s clearly not the end all. And the quality right today of the Pinterest visitors, so far for many companies, hasn’t been that strong. I mean, let’s just be real. It might be at some point, not right now.

Jay: Awesome. Eric, any questions from you, or are we going to Social Pros shout outs?

Eric: No, man. I’m interested to hear what Marcus reads.

Jay: Social Pros shout outs.

Eric: Shout outs.

Jay: From Mr. Marcus Sheridan. Go.

Social Pros Shoutout

Marcus: Okay. I’m just going to mention two for you that nobody’s ever heard of probably.

Eric: Google and Pinterest.

Marcus: Yeah, Google, who clearly love me now, right? Okay, this is outside of the box. There is a company called Block Imaging. All right. And I don’t even have the URL. Just type in Block Imaging blog. They sell refurbished medical imaging equipment. Here’s what’s special about this company. They have about 70 employees, and 40 of those employees are active on their blog. So they have a true culture of blogging within the company. I think that’s beautiful. And they’re Block Imaging – I know about them, they’re one of my clients. But I think they’re so amazing and I love their story. And to me, they get this whole idea of what it is a culture of content marketing.

There’s another one that most people probably haven’t heard of. I think he’s a big up and comer and his name is Ryan Hanley. He comes from the insurance industry. He is passionate. He is a great guy and he is now starting to talk about marketing. So kind of like Gary V of wine, he is a passionate guy from the insurance industry.

Jay: He’s the Marcus Sheridan of insurance.

Marcus: In some ways, yeah, he is. I think he’s a great young guy, and I think he’s going to be big time because he has the passion to carry the day.

Jay: Awesome. Good shout outs.

Marcus: Thank you.

Jay: Thank you very much for being here. Good stuff. Awesome. That’ll do it for Social Pros. Who do we have next week, Eric Boggs?

Eric: Next week on Social Pros, Maria from Marketo.

Jay: Oh, fantastic. Our friend, Maria from Marketo. That’s going to be great. Talk about content marketing, they’re all about the content marketing over there. Thanks as always to our sponsors, Eric’s company Argyle Social, data-driven social media management software used by none other than me, Jay Baer. Our friends at Infusionsoft, Jim Kukral from DigitalBookLaunch.com, and a big Social Pros welcome to our new sponsor Janrain, social sign-in and a bunch of other wizardry. That’s it for this week. We’ll see you next time.

About the Jay Baer: Jay Baer is a hype-free social media strategist & speaker, tequila guy, and co-author of The NOW Revolution. Jay is the founder of http://convinceandconvert.com and host of the Social Pros podcast.

Daniel Lemin is Strategy & Analytics Lead at

Agency owners, take note: your traditional team structure – the one that divides your agency into “digital”, “account management” and “creative,” among others – may be restraining capacity to innovate and expand your client capabilities.

We work with a lot of agencies and have come to recognize the challenges that leaders are facing in today’s hyper-competitive market. There are smaller agencies that have specialized knowledge in one content area or social technology. There are larger agencies that have built labyrinthine digital teams with varying capabilities, making it hard to assess one agency’s true stripes over another. It’s mind-boggling how much has changed in the agency business in the last 5-10 years and we know how hard it is compete. There are no easy solutions to any of the business challenges and it can feel like you throw good money after bad by chasing new technologies as a service offering.

What is the T-Shaped Agency?

We have been talking this year about a concept – borrowed from the early years of digital agency business models – we call the T-Shaped Agency. This is a framework for agency owners and leaders to consider as they look to invest in staff education on new technologies, package that expertise into concise service offerings that clients will understand and don’t feel filled with hype and jargon, and – get this – actually deliver on the work in a profitable and consistent manner.

How Does the T-Shaped Agency Work?

T-Shaped Agency Architecture

The T-Shaped Agency concept is effective when there is recognition by agency owners that their traditional model of building, pricing and delivering a service to clients is misaligned with the need for rapid and articulate innovation in their client work. Let me build a metaphor for you to frame this concept.

Think of an agency as a software package, like Microsoft Office. Clients like to purchase an Office Suite; they know they will need word processing, spreadsheets, presentation software and possibly some other add-ons that make a packaged suite very enticing as a model. It’s fairly expensive to purchase all of this software and not every employee will want or need it, but it provides an easy solution for work productivity. Over time, the need for new features in that software changes and, slowly, the software manufacturer pushes out updates to the software which requires installation and deployment by IT teams and certainly does not put critical new features in the hands of employees quickly. It’s a slow model that does not evolve quickly.

Contrast that with newer open-source web-based software services like OpenOffice. These platforms – also available as a software suite, similar to Microsoft Office – provide immediate access to new features and fast deployment of updates without a lengthy installation process. Because it’s based on open-source software, it can take advantage of a community of knowledge – some of which may be very specialized – and new features can emerge rapidly that will be useful to a large number of its customers. This is similar to the T-Shaped Agency model that we’re describing here.

Agencies are filled with vast amounts of intelligence, and while employees may have line-item duties for specific skills – like creative, web development, account management – they may also have a knowledge of a specific technology that no other employee can match. Perhaps they are a weekend warrior on HTML5 development, or a passionate video producer looking for an outlet for their creative talents. The point is these skills exist within an agency and it’s difficult to put a description on them as a service offering; to say you have a video SEO product or a WordPress guru is a bit too specific for most agency engagements. But, clients crave those skills. So you have to adapt your ability to identify who those content experts are and allow them some lateral freedom to put their skills to use. Employees love it because they feel that they’re being valued for the unique insights they have about a specific topic. Clients love it because they feel the agency “gets it” and is able to deliver consistent innovative ideas and actually get them done. Of course, many scenarios will require an agency to look beyond its own walls for specific expertise, but having an internal champion of that technology, platform or concept will still be a valuable asset.

Deploying the T-Shaped Structure

How do you go about deploying this structure? It does not have to be a watershed moment. You can start informally surveying employees and asking them what areas interest them. For some, providing a small time or training allowance to bolster their existing knowledge of a topic will be a great incentive. For others, just the chance to show off their talent and contribute to the agency’s success is enough. You can expand the concept by crafting incentives for participation and, slowly, you’ll begin to see a natural evolution in how your teams are thinking about innovation for their clients. Clients will begin to notice too, and they’ll begin to see that your agency is evolving out of the Microsoft Office mindset and adapting an open approach to innovation.

Are you using the T-Shaped Agency structure in your business?

About the Daniel Lemin:

Jessica Malnik is a PR/marketing coordinator, social media specialist, videographer and an avid blogger. Visit her blog for social media, technology, public relations and marketing ramblings.

What are the defining characteristics of a community? It’s a topic I’ve been pondering more and more lately. Is it about geography, common interests, socio-economic similarities, or similar viewpoints? The list goes on and on.

To get to this point, it becomes necessary to define what a community is. According to dictionary.com, a community is

a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived itself as distinct insome respect from the larger society within which it exists.

As community managers, it’s our job to manage a brand’s online (and offline) presence. It’s a daunting task that requires us to assume a leadership role, channel the company’s voice, create buzz and drive engagement on and offline to achieve specific goals/outcomes. It’s fairly natural to assume that as the leader, you are building and growing a “community.” After all, there’s X amount of likers, followers, subscribers, doers’, doubters, troublemakers and everything in between, who are communicating in the group. However with most brand pages, this environment is actually fostering a false sense of community.

Most Facebook brand pages aren’t actually online communities. They are just glorified marketing channels. Some are done very well, others not so much. Here’s five reasons to explain this seemingly subtle distinction.

1. Fans and likers usually don’t just like a page based on common interests (or other community defining characteristics)

Most Facebook fans didn’t decide to “like” a brand’s page because they wanted to be part of an online community. In fact, the two most common reasons to like a brand are if you are a current customer or to receive discounts and/or freebies, according to a study by research firm, Chadwick Martin Bailey. The next most popular reasons are to show support for a brand, to learn more information and to get exclusive content. Couple that with the fact, that more than 75% of Facebook users who like a brand, like fewer than 10 brands total, and you wind up with stiff competition for eyeballs and page “likes.”

2. The vast majority of fans don’t participate on Facebook pages.

One of the biggest misunderstandings about Facebook is the assumption that once a person “likes” your page, they are going to keep coming back for more. A “like” on a page doesn’t guarantee that they will ever come back to that page and participate or even read any updates. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. According to an AdAge article, only one percent of fans on the biggest brand pages actually engage with the brand at all.

3. It’s a one-sided conversation

Going right alongside that, the few fans that stay actively involved on the page often don’t feel inclined to post updates or comment. Most of them are just casual observers or lurkers. This leads to a one-sided conversation led by the brand, or frankly no conversation at all. 82% of brand pages are updated less than five times a month, according to a recent study by Recommend.ly.

4. Numbers still matter.

Many brands are still very interested in the numbers game. No matter how many times a community manager, specialist or strategist vouches for quality over quantity, there’s always going to be push back to expand the messaging to a larger audience. Brands will often do whatever it takes to get more. Many of these tactics are counterintuitive to the core community-building strategies.

5. Gimmicks, expensive apps and games drive a lot of the action

So, how do brands up their numbers? Often times, they create gimmicks, such as games, contests, other fancy Facebook apps and pump hefty media budgets into Facebook ads/sponsored story campaigns. Some of these apps are quite effective. Yet, all they are doing is creating a false sense of community to help a brand spread their message further.

All of these are marketing tactics that are “forced upon” anyone, who expresses interest in the brand. It’s not a natural progression in a community sense. In a true community, members stumble into the group and then start talking with one another, usually naturally and without any real incentives.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing that brands are more likely to market instead of build community on Facebook. When done right, marketing on Facebook can be quite effective. That’s evident from Fortune 50 companies all the way down to mom and pop shops. After all, it’s all about creating an overall marketing strategy that understands your core business goals, and then using the most effective channels and tactics to achieve them. Facebook is one of the popular channels to spread awareness, get people talking about you and your products, increase conversions, drive offline actions (like event attendance) and even increase sales. However, if you’re trying to build a community around your brand through Facebook, it might be time to reconsider those strategies.

Is your brand page a community or a one-sided marketing channel?

About the Jessica Malnik:

Late in the third quarter it's Pinterest 17, Facebook 13.

The most overrated social media metric is traffic from social outposts.

This blog post is symptomatic of this problem, although there have been hundreds (thousands?) like it. Here’s the highlight:

With only 1% of Facebook’s user count, Pinterest sends 13% of the traffic that Facebook does.

Pinterest has spawned a new way of consuming and searching information, and may be the poster child for the coming image-centric social Web that will make written blogs like mine look quaintly Amish by 2014. But to make the case that Pinterest should be a big part of your marketing arsenal because it proportionally sends more traffic to your website than Facebook or Twitter is patently ridiculous.

Don’t Forget This:

You are in the behavior business, not the eyeballs business.

The Social Media Metrics That Matter

When determining the value of your social media efforts, and certainly when calculating your ROI, you must focus on behavior, not aggregation. Almost always, numbers that count steadily upward (like number of fans, number of visitors, etc.) are inferior to ratios and percentages that measure behavior.

Knowing that Pinterest sends a ton of traffic to your site should CREATE questions in your company, not answer them.

• Do your visitors from Pinterest engage in desirable, profitable behaviors at a ratio equal to or better than Twitter or Facebook?
• Do they buy? Disproportionately so? Higher average order?
• Do they fill out lead forms? Disproportionately so? Better conversion rate?
• Do they look at high-value Web pages like product lists, pricing, customer testimonials? Disproportionately so?
• Do they subscribe to email updates? Disproportionately so? Better open and click-through rates downstream?
• Do they ever return to the site? Disproportionately so?

See more goodness at Some E Cards

Those are data points that are easily determined with web analytics and goal funnels, but are different for every company. All of these are vastly more important than the number of website visitors from Pinterest.

Is Pinterest More Like Google Than Facebook?

My hypothesis is that visitors from Pinterest will behave more like search-referred visitors, rather than visitors from Facebook and Twitter. This is because Pinterest (like Google) is about discovery, whereas the people who click links in Facebook and Twitter are often already familiar with the company in question.

I don’t know for sure, because even though I’m moderately active on Pinterest, I don’t see a ton of traffic from it because I almost always pin other people’s stuff rather than my own. We also use Pinterest as the curation hub for our daily One Social Thing email update. I don’t get enough Pinterest traffic to test the theory. I’d love to see someone with access to more analytics data tackle it.

Perhaps Pinterest isn’t the new Facebook, but the new Google? The same way that YouTube revolutionized video search, and Slideshare revolutionized presentation search, is Pinterest revolutionizing image search?

Maybe that’s the story, I’m not sure. But I definitely know that the story is NOT that Pinterest sends a bunch of traffic to your site. To that revelation I say “who cares”?

(Note: After this post ran, loyal reader Juan Barnett (@DCAutoGeek) created this awesome graphic. Enjoy!

About the Jay Baer: Jay Baer is a hype-free social media strategist & speaker, tequila guy, and co-author of The NOW Revolution. Jay is the founder of http://convinceandconvert.com and host of the Social Pros podcast.

Listen Now

Click the play button to listen here:

Download the audio file:

http://socialpros.podbean.com/mf/web/c6kekp/SocialProsEpisode14.mp3

The RSS feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/socialprospodcast

Find us on iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/convince-convert-blog-social/id499844469

Please Support Our Sponsors

Huge thanks to data-driven social media management software company Argyle Social for their presenting sponsorship, as well as Infusionsoft and Jim Kukral at DigitalBookLaunch. We use Argyle Social for our social engagement; we use Infusionsoft for our email; and Jim is our guest host for the podcast and a smart guy).

Social Pros Transcript For Your Reading Enjoyment, Thanks to Speechpad for the Transcription

Eric: Good afternoon or good night, depending on where and when you’re listening. My name is Eric Boggs, and welcome to Social Pros podcast, episode #14. Joining us today is the uncanny Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer, who probably requires no introduction to our listeners. Also pitch-hitting for Jay Baer is the venerable Jim Kukral of digitalbooklaunch.com.

Jim’s been a guest host with us before, and he’ll be chiming in shortly. Before we get going, special thanks to our sponsors, which includes my company, Argyle Social, developers of data driven social media marketing software; Infusionsoft, developers of email marketing automation software; and Jim. Jim Kukral of Digital Book Launch. Jim, while I’m thanking you as a sponsor, I guess it’s a good time to welcome you into the call.

Jim: Thank you. Please, go ahead and spell venerable.

Eric: Hey, man. This is not a spelling bee.

Jim: Oh.

Eric: I lost a spelling bee in sixth grade because I misspelled Petunia, and that still sticks with me.

Jim: Now I’ve got to go look it up.

Eric: Normally we kick these shows off with Jay ranting about something. That is sort of a sacred thing for Jay. I’m too tired and not really in a ranting mood, so we’re going to skip right ahead to our special guest, Mr. Jason Falls, whom doesn’t require an introduction, but I will begin with an anecdote. The first time I ever met Jason was actually on a Skype call just like this. 30 seconds into the call, he made an incredibly offensive joke, and I’ve loved him ever since.

Special Guest: Jason Falls, Social Media Explorer

Jason Falls, Social Media Explorer @jasonfalls

Jason: Now you’ve got to repeat the joke, I don’t even remember what it was.

Eric: No. I think this is the second or third time I’ve actually introduced you in front of a crowd, Jason, and I’m not going to repeat the joke. Sorry.

Jason: OK. That’s fine. I’m glad Jay starts off with a rant because that’s not beneath me. I would be more than happy to wax poetic on whatever you’d like me to rant on today.

Eric: Well, you have the floor. If you want to rant, we’ll just sit here and listen.

Jason: Well, we could. The thing that’s hot on my mind right now is what I blogged about today on Social Media Explorer, which is the problems with social profiling. It sparked a little bit of a discussion and debate because I think I probably, as I sometimes and want to do, took the point that I was trying to make a little further than I probably really meant to, or should have. That’s kind of one of the things I try to do is poke people so that they think a little differently and deeper about these issues. Jeremiah Owyang wrote a really nice post last week on what social profiling will do, how it will work in the real world. So, services like Klout and Kred that put a number to your social influence.

He was basically saying, with augmented reality and the technology that’s available today, we’re already seeing companies who are saying, OK. The customer in the back of the line has a Klout score of 75, the customer in the middle of the line has a Klout score of 17. We’re going to let the customer with 75 skip the line, because they’re more impactful online. I kind of went off on this post a little bit. It’s not a rant post. It’s actually well thought out, I think anyway, or at least most people have told me today that they thought it was well thought out. My position on Klout and other measurement services like that, that try to measure influence, it has always been that they are just one way of looking at the data. I’m not saying Klout is good, bad, or indifferent. I like a lot of what Klout has to offer, but services like Klout factor in six, eight, 10 data points, and put together an algorithm that scores them and ranks them, and so on and so forth, and gives you a number. Klout currently, I think, takes in, I don’t know, six, eight social networks.

Eric: Yep.

Jason: …and tries to give you a score of how influential you are on social networking. That’s just one way of looking at the data of influence. I’m going to pick on Klout specifically, just a little bit here because that’s the one that everybody sort of seems to talk about. They’re the market leader.

Eric: It’s by far the biggest, and has raised the most money.

Jason: Absolutely. Joe Fernandez, I’ve talked to him about this, he’s their CEO, several times. I like Joe, and I think Joe understands where I’m coming from. I don’t think he disagrees with me. I’m probably a little bit more passionately skeptical about what they’re doing than he is, obviously. What you have to understand about Klout, and services like Klout, is Klout is limited to reaching residents on social networks online. It’s further only limited to a handful of them. It does not measure offline influence. It doesn’t measure your influence through email, through word-of-mouth marketing, through publishing, whether that be online or offline. It doesn’t factor in the influence that your company brings with it, behind your name, the name recognition of you or your company, and so on.

I make a point in the post, it doesn’t measure whether or not you’re connected to the Mafia. There’s so many different areas of influence that come into our lives that it doesn’t measure. We need to understand that going in. Which is why, I hear stories like that of Sam Fiorella, who was profiled in a piece in Wired Magazine, and also in Mark Schaefer‘s new book, “Return on Influence“. About how he lost out on a potential job at a marketing agency because his Klout score wasn’t high enough for the person that was actually filtering and hiring that position. When I hear stories like that, it makes me just slap my forehead. The data that you’re looking at for a Klout score or services like it, is so limited that there’s no way you could draw massive conclusions about a person, like whether or not they’re qualified for a job, based on that particular number. Go ahead.

Jim: It blows me away though, man. It just absolutely blows me away that someone would make that, sorry to interrupt you, but that someone would actually make that distinction. I come from the Internet marketing aspect of all of this stuff, and social media is a small part of what I do. At the end of the day, it’s about results, not scores and stuff. Klout is the Alexa ranking of social media. You know? Let’s be honest, if non-geeky Internet people don’t know what Alexa ranking is, it’s this metric system that is only quantified by this tool bar at .0001% of the world has. People walk around saying, “Hey, I’ve got a high Alexa score.” It’s like, “Yeah? Big deal.” It means nothing. This is the same exact thing I see here. I can’t believe people are doing that.

Jason: Yeah. It really is sad that there are, and actually Sam, in the comments today, actually came in and commented a little bit, and there are other companies that are doing it. He found a job posting, I think somewhere online, that one of the requirements was, Klout score will be factored into our decision. Which, I don’t necessarily think that factoring Klout score into the decision is altogether bad. I just hope you’re not basing the majority of the decision, or even a large part of the decision on that. It’s one piece of data.

Jim: Where’s that coming from? I’ve got to be honest, I teach social media for University of San Francisco. Where are these people who are creating these RFP’s getting that from? I can’t imagine that somebody taught them to do that.

Jason: Well, I think it’s just the fact that Klout, to Joe and his team’s credit, have done a very good job of sort of infiltrating the mainstream mindset. They have been written about and talked about in places like Fast Company and Wired, and so on and so forth. So, people who are not sort of in the echo-chamber, as it were, where we have a tendency to play and read blogs, and so on and so forth. They hear Klout and think, oh if you have a high Klout score, you are influential, because they see little mentions of Klout in very brief snippets. They would see a quick story on CNN that mentions, oh the Klout is doing this, and it measures your influence. If you have a high Klout score, you could get perks from American Airlines, or whatever, and they think, oh high Klout means that person is better. They don’t actually think, they don’t actually take the time. Again, it’s not just marketers and business owners, it’s everyone in the whole world right now. We are all looking for the easy button. We will not take the time to sit down and read the entire email, or click through and try to find out what is exactly behind this Klout score thing. We just take the media snippet and say, “oh high Klout means this person is more important, therefore I’m going to judge people based on their Klout score.”

Eric: I want to chime in briefly with a devil’s advocate position.

Jason: OK.

Eric: If people thought about credit scores the way they thought about Klout scores, we would have anarchy on our hands.

Jason: Yes.

Eric: So, do you think this is a tempest in a teapot? A minute ago you said Klout’s sort of mainstream appeal. I would argue that their mainstream appeal is the mainstream of a very, very small, and very, very nerdy online marketing segment of the actual mainstream.

Jason: Well, I think you’re right, but I also think when I say mainstream appeal, I think outside of that sort of nerdy echo-chamber. I think that they’ve done such a good job of getting publicity beyond the technology world, beyond the blogs that we read and the world that we sort of commiserate with other in. I don’t know that my mother-in-law right now, really knows what Klout is, but I bet my brother-in-law does, and he doesn’t read Tech Crunch and he’s not on Twitter, etc., etc. He probably knows what Klout is because he reads Wired and Fast Company, and so on and so forth.

Eric: Sure.

Jason: So, he sees that and goes, oh well if I enhance my online footprint through my Facebook or my LinkedIn connections, or whatever, I could get a higher Klout score and I might be able to get a deal from Netflix or whatever as a result.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: So, I think they’ve infiltrated a market that was it really smart to infiltrate quite frankly, from a market standpoint.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: They’re getting a lot of clout with a C, in areas where they need to, in order to have a mainstream push. Which the people who are investing in them obviously like to see, because they don’t just want to be relevant to the tech sector.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: I do think, to your question, this is a tempest in a teapot to a degree. Where I think I took my blog post today, sort of over the line a little bit, was that I likened social profiling of basically hearkening back to Jeremiah’s post. Where a clerk at a store can actually look through the viewfinder of their iPhone and through augmented reality a year or two from now and see everyone’s Klout score appearing above their head as they shop in the person’s store, I sort of likened that to racial profiling.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: I basically say in the piece that if we are going to allow technology overlays to help us judge people based on their appearance, which is what this is.

Then I think we are inviting the legal system to tear us apart. We are inviting Congress to say, “You can’t do that.” Because every time in the history of the United States when we have had some sort of system set up to judge people based on how they look, Congress has come in and said, ”This is not right.” Quite frankly, rightfully so, they’ve come in and said, “You can’t do this. This is not fair. This is not right and this is not accurate, and Civil Rights laws apply here.” I think we could be, potentially, now I don’t think we are necessarily, but we could potentially be opening a can of worms here, that invites the legal system and Congress into our business.

Eric: I’ll tell you. If there ever was an inopportune time for online marketers to open yet another can of worms with Congress, it’s now. With all of the ending cookie legislation happening in the European Union and the beginnings of that starting to bubble up in the United States Congress, we don’t need more. We need less attention around online marketing.

Jim: They’re already in it. I’m on the affiliate side, and they’re in with Amazon and all of that stuff. They’ve got laws passed in states and they’re going for the gusto, man. Jason’s right. When you start opening that door, eventually. They’re looking for any possible crack in that door, so they can stick their foot in, because at the end of the day the government wants the money. They want a piece of everything that goes on in the Internet, and they’re not getting that.

Eric: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. This is turning into the conspiracy theory episode of Social Pros. I want to keep pushing a little bit, Jason, and I think someone brought this up in one of the comments on your post. Marketers do segmentation and targeting based on things much more, either much better or much worse depending on your perspective, than an inaccurate social score. For example, when I was accepted into graduate school, evidently that showed up somewhere in my credit report or something. Even today, a couple years after graduation, I still get three credit card solicitations in the mail every single day. It’s because I have an advanced degree. That’s very personal, very private information that all of these credit agencies have access to, and of course all of these marketers have access to through God knows what sort of back channels exist. I’m sure it would be horrifying if we knew the whole story. So, is this not just a logical progression, this online influence, or is it really as sinister as you think?

Jason: Well, I think it’s a logical progression. I don’t think there’s a whole lot of sinister intent here, but keep in mind that anytime you put something in the hands of human beings, someone’s going to screw it up. Human beings are infinitely fallible, and there’s always someone out there with ulterior motives. While, yes I know, and this is again just an idea. I may be completely wrong here. I hope I am. But yes, marketers are currently using segmentation and targeting based on your income, your education, your lifestyle, and even your race quite frankly.

Eric: Yep.

Jason: And age, and so on and so forth. So marketers are using that information to segment and treat you differently than other prospective customers. What I think Klout and services like it do, social profiling. If it opens the door for legislators and government to come in and say, “Wait a minute. We don’t like the fact that you’re playing favorites here.” I think online influence metrics like Klout could open the door for the government to come in and do a full-scale war against marketing and say, ”You can’t use this at all for anything. You cannot racially profile, period. You cannot profile by age, period, whether it’s online or offline.”

I don’t know that that’s necessarily the wrong course of action for a government to take, quite frankly.

Eric: Yeah.

Jim: Hot dang. This is interesting.

Jason: I’m telling you the next 10 years are going to be really, really challenging for not just Internet marketers, but marketers.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: …because this whole world of social media is new. Which means, the government, the courts, and legislation and what not, they’re always about 10 years behind the new waves.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: OK? So the clue train was about 12 years ago, so social media marketing really sort of reached its initial implementations online about maybe 10 years ago, nine years ago. So now the courts are starting to catch up. We saw the court case, I think it was in Seattle or maybe in Portland, Portland I believe it was, earlier this year of the blogger who did not want to reveal the source.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: Because they thought they should be protected like journalists. Unfortunately the young lady thought she didn’t need representation in a court of law and lost the case. We’re starting to see the courts get a hold of some of these hot button issues that cross and blur those lines in the legal world. I think online influence scoring is going to be one of those things that some Congress person somewhere is going to see that they have a 21 Klout score, and their opponent has a 54, and they’re going to lose their shit over it.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: They’re going to enact some legislation that says, “This is inappropriate profiling.” Then, all of a sudden, if you think SOPA was a mess. Oh my God.

Eric: Oh, yeah.

Jason: Wait until some of these online marketing metrics and tactics, and what not even in the affiliate world, watch Congress get a hold of those and really investigate and understand what happens.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: They will go ape nut crazy trying to legislate what we’re doing online.

Eric: Yeah. No one kills the golden goose more quickly than a marketer. I think you are exactly correct when you say that this is a natural progression, that quite honestly could be very powerful. If you talk to a lot of marketing academics, or people that have been in this business for a while, they have this really interesting perspective around marketing-as-service.

Jason: Yeah.

Eric: Really, marketing can be a service. I’m interested in buying a new car, for example. It might actually be useful for me to get targeted ads about specific new cars based on my personal information, my family’s information. Marketing through that lens can be viewed as a service. The reality is that most marketers aren’t that good.

Jason: That’s right.

Eric: You give them more data, you’re basically just giving them more rope to hang themselves.

Jason: That’s true. I think the other main problem, especially in the online marketing world, and Jim I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Is I think that what we’ve done, what websites, and marketers, and companies have done over the years, especially with Google, it makes more sense for Google to track your user behavior online so that they can present more relevant search results to you. I get that, we get that, we understand that from a marketing perspective. However, the mainstream general public doesn’t get that. They don’t understand that Google might be watching them. I don’t think Google or any other website service out there has ever done a very good job of letting people opt out.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: They give them that option, but it’s always hidden on some 27th click-through in their settings. Now the Facebook privacy kerfuffles have sort of brought that to light for a lot of people. I bet you never thought you would hear the word kerfuffle on this show.

Eric: I’m pretty sure it’s been used before, but we did use venerable earlier.

Jason: That’s true.

Eric: …for some of you said.

Jason: The Facebook thing has brought that to light for a lot of people, but I still think the average website user, the average web user, social networking user, etc., etc., doesn’t get it. You have to make it really, really easy for them to understand, and then you have to hold their hand and walk them through it for them to understand, wait a minute. We’re tracking what you’re doing, and because of that we’re able to present more relevant advertisements, and offers, and content to you. Are you OK with that?

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: Most people don’t realize that Google and Facebook, and other websites are doing that. I think when the government realizes that web companies have not been as apparent and forth-coming as they should have been, to give people the option to opt-in rather than opt-out, then I think we’re going to be in a whole world of trouble too.

Eric: Yeah.

Jim: You’re right. People don’t know. Here’s the other truth is, they really don’t care. Until it affects them in a way that’s negative, in terms of spam or some type of interruption. The truth is that, as an internet marketer you learn people just don’t want to be interrupted and they don’t want to have stuff given to them that’s not relevant. That’s where good marketing comes in, when you can deliver relevant, high quality content or ads or whatever to a person that needs or wants that. That’s my definition of doing good marketing. If I use the re-targeting ad, that one across three websites to give you an ad because I knew you were looking at Chevy Tahoes, then I think that’s fine.

Eric: Yeah.

Jim: The line comes when all of a sudden now I have your email address that I didn’t get. Obviously I’m spamming you. The other thing is Google Plus was invented specifically for the fact that Google didn’t have Facebook’s data. Facebook knew if you liked Coca-Cola and everything else in the world, and they can run targeted ads to you. Google said, “Wow, we have to have that. We can’t scrape that from Facebook.”

Eric: Yeah.

Jim: So that’s why they invented it. You’re exactly right, Jason. The future of search, as according to Matt Cutts and Google, is social recommendations. You are going to get results based upon what your friends in your circles that you’re connected with have shared. I see it every single day now. That’s why I always say, everybody’s got to have that Google Plus account.

Eric: Let’s change gears, but this is good stuff. It’ll be interesting to get Jay’s take. We might have to do a recap of this to get Jay’s two cents in the next episode. Jason, tell us a little bit about the conferences that you’ve got going on. I was at Explore Nashville. It was great. I know you’ve got some other ones coming up this year.

Jason: Yeah. We’ve tried to take a stab at giving people a different option in the sort of social media digital marketing conference out there. Our events are called Explore. We had Explore Nashville a couple weeks ago. We’ve got Explore Minneapolis coming up in Minnesota on August 16th and 17th. (editor’s note: Jay will be speaking) Then, we’ll be in Irvine, California in October, and then Portland, Oregon in November. Basically what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to push the thinking. That’s the challenge that I’ve given the speakers. That we don’t want to talk about the same stuff over and over again. We want to challenge marketers and business owners, and marketing decision makers out there, to not only produce better digital marketing and more meaningful digital marketing, but do it in more creative ways. Measure it more infinitely so that you can be able to optimize and tweak and be better at what you’re doing, trying to connect those audiences with your message and/or your product. I think we’ve started to strike a cord. A couple of the pieces of feedback that we’ve gotten from participants and sponsors alike is, this is a different event. It sounds different, it looks different, and we walk away from here feeling a little bit more energized than we have in a conference for a while. We know that conferences and events, there’s a ton of them out there. We know we’ve got a lot of competition, but we think we’re doing something a little neat and a little different. Pushing the thinking both from a speaker standpoint, so we’re challenging them to be better as speakers, and from an audience standpoint. People are walking away from the event I think thinking about digital marketing a little differently.

Eric: I’ve always been curious about the business behind the conference world.

Jason: Sure.

Eric: Are you sort of throwing darts at the United States, picking these cities, or do you have anchor sponsors or anchor clients there? Are you strategically targeting Nashville and Minneapolis?

Jason: Honestly, what my philosophy has been in picking locations is I want to make social media and digital marketing expertise more accessible to people. Not that there’s not perfectly good experts and agencies and what not in all of these towns, because there are. I mean, hell, Minneapolis, they’ve got just a ton of smart people there.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: Lee Odden and Arik Hanson, and so on and so forth. Albert Maruggi, I’m sure somebody’s going to yell at me for not mentioning him. What I wanted to do, is I wanted to go to cities where national conferences either aren’t or aren’t stopping, or they’re underserved by sort of the national touring speakers, if you will.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: Obviously, the bigger the market, the more of an audience you have to choose from. So we started out in Dallas, we are doing Minneapolis, but instead of doing L.A., we thought, hey let’s go to the O.C. Let’s go down to Irvine because there’s a lot of companies there, there’s a lot of marketers there. But they often get told, well if you want to go to a conference like this, you have to come to L.A.

So we’re just going to go to Irvine.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: It was really just trying to find cities that had a nice population base certainly, had some nice brands certainly. But we felt may be a little underserved by the type of content that we’re delivering.

Eric: Cool.

Jim: Hey, Jason. I’ve got a question. Who’s the show for? Is it executives?

Is it for small business owners? Who’s the best target?

Jason: The best target is going to be the medium to large business marketing decision maker. That could be the CEO, it could be the CMO, it could be the Director of Marketing. We don’t usually use the term marketing decision maker in our literature because that’s kind of one of those sort of amorphous terms that you can apply in different situations. It’s the person who’s going to make decisions on your marketing, whether it’s how we’re going to strategically go to market, whether it’s what kind of tools we’re going to select and purchase to use. The person who’s going to make that call from a direction and a budgetary standpoint is, I think, who our ideal sweet spot person is. However, probably about 25 to 30% of our audience is made up of that person.

Then, we also certainly have a number of small businesses, a number of business owners, a number of community manager, social media manager, director types, aand then, sort of the gambit of the marketing professionals. So, your Directors of Marketing, maybe your Public Relations Director. There’s obviously going to be some agency and PR firm folks in the room, but it’s anyone who is involved with high-level decision making for marketing, PR, and communications campaigns, particularly in the digital world. We’ve had everyone from 101 nubes who have no clue what we’re talking about, who have walked away saying, “Man, I learned so much. I don’t understand it all, but I at least have, my brain is firing.”

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: Some of our speakers walk away from our events saying, “Man, I learned a ton today.” So, we’re pushing the envelope on even the expert level thinking. To a degree. I wouldn’t say that Jim Kukral is going to come to this thing and walk away with a whole new cadre of knowledge, but at the same time I think he’ll get some stuff out of it.

Jim: Well, I can’t wait to come. How come we didn’t start that other conference we hatched at dinner in Washington?

Jason: Oh, yeah. Was it the booze conference?

Jim: Drunkly.

Jason: What was it called?

Jim: Drunkly.

Jason: Drunkly. That’s right. We’re going to do a conference called Drunkly and it we’ll just get together and drink. Which is what most conferences end up being.

Eric: I was going to say that I’m pretty sure that’s why most people go to conferences. So, Jason I really appreciate you taking the time to be on the show. Well, one last question. We like to wrap things up asking our guests for a Social Pro’s shout out. Off the top of your head, give us two or three people you’re reading, books you’re reading, things that are making you think online.

Social Pros Shout Outs

Jason: Ooh, that’s good. OK. I’ve got to start out with Roger Dooley, who wrote a book and has a blog called “Brainfluence:100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Customers with Neuromarketing”. So, he gets into how your brain works, and why you make decisions, or why consumers make decisions, and how marketers can capitalize on that. I don’t read books very quickly. I read a chapter and then put it down for a week, and then come back and read another chapter. I’m working my way through Brainfluence right now, and I think it’s just flat awesome. Roger’s really, really smart.

I also am falling in love with another book that I’m piece mailing my reading of, “Small Town Rules”, which is by Barry Moltz and Becky McCray. I’m from a small town in Eastern Kentucky. A lot of what I’ve been preaching over the last few years on how you can take sort of that small town approach to just being a genuine member of the community. They’ve taken those ideas, not from me necessarily, because Becky lives in a small town too, and they’ve put it into a book. I think they’re subtitle is something along the lines of how brands and businesses can prosper in today’s economy, where you can have those sort of small town ethics and approach business. The principles in this book are like things my mom taught me growing up.

Eric: Yeah.

Jason: I’ve fallen in love with that book, and I just think it’s awesome. So I think those two books are the two big shout outs for me. That’s where my brain is right now.

Eric: Awesome. Very cool Thanks for sharing.

Jason: No. No problem.

Eric: We’ll wrap it up with that. Jim Kukral, thank you very much for guest hosting.

Jim: Thank you.

Eric: Jason Falls, thank you very much for being the super special, all star guest.

Jason: I’m super special in the short bus way, though. Right?

Eric: Exactly. Exactly. Next week our guest is Marcus Sheridan, also known as The Sales Lion. I’ve never met Marcus but look forward to doing the show with him. Special thanks to our sponsors, Jim Kukral, who was on the show today, Infusionsoft, and my beloved company, Argyle Social. Thanks, guys for tuning in and we’ll talk to you again soon.

About the Jay Baer: Jay Baer is a hype-free social media strategist & speaker, tequila guy, and co-author of The NOW Revolution. Jay is the founder of http://convinceandconvert.com and host of the Social Pros podcast.

Guest post by @Lisa Loeffler, Research & Analysis Lead at Convince & Convert. She is also founder and principal of Genuine Media, a marketing agency that helps clients build their individual and brand reputation through social media.

You can’t always see it and many don’t talk about it, but hunger is a daily, global struggle.

To support the anti-hunger movement Walmart, the Walmart Foundation, and some of the nation’s largest food companies like General Mills, ConAgra Foods, Kraft Foods and Kellogg Company launched an integrated marketing campaign to help raise food donations during spring when food bank supplies dwindle, and need surges.

YouTube video highlighting the Fight Hunger Campaign

Using social media as a central component to promote the program, Walmart customers were invited to visit Walmart’s Facebook Contest page to vote for one of 200 communities hardest hit by unemployment.

The community that tallied the most votes was awarded $1 million to help fight hunger. The next 20 communities each received $50,000 for hunger relief.

After a visitor voted they could view what towns were leading and how many votes they had, in real time.

The contest spurred several food banks across the US to create public relations campaigns and they encouraged residents in their areas to vote to increase their chances of winning.

There was a lot of media coverage at the local level, like this contest article in a Youngstown, OH newspaper.

Walmart Hunger Relief Leaderboard (at time of writing on 4/28)

Supporters also took to Twitter to help promote their favorite town. Here’s a sample of Youngstown contest supporters:

Along with video and Facebook, Walmart integrated its Fight Hunger campaign throughout its stores with signage that drove people to visit Facebook and vote for their community. This is excellent, as too often social media isn’t supported in three dimensions.

The campaign’s food manufacturer partners also created custom packaging on some of their products to also promote the program in Walmart stores and neighborhood markets.

Drum roll….. And the winner of Walmart’s Fight Hunger Contest with more than 98,000 votes was Youngstown-Warren, Ohio. The rest of the winners and the story.

Congratulations to Youngstown, OH for showing how a small town with a population of 73,000 can come together and out-vote large urban centers with millions of people, and win for their cause.

Want to support your local food bank? Visit Feeding America for more information. http://feedingamerica.org/foodbank-results.aspx

Social Media for Social Good – A Bright Future

Today’s technology and social media advancements around fundraising have leveled the field. While it’s brought accessibility to a wider pool of donors for the nonprofits that want to leverage it, it has also put philanthropy and social responsibility for corporate giants, like Walmart, under a larger microscope.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a global philanthropy or a small nonprofit at the local level. If you understand, utilize and capitalize on the power of social media for social good you have the ability to get in front of thousands, and perhaps millions of people like never before.

This great social (media) shift is helping corporate giants with philanthropic ambitions become more human and allows the local nonprofit to become more accessible.

How has social media helped make your small- or mid-sized nonprofit more public and accessible? If you’re a large corporation how are you leveraging social media to showcase your corporate social responsibility?

About the Lisa Loeffler:

Ian Greenleigh (@be3d) is a social media and content strategist. He’s writing a book titled The Social Side Door: How Social Media Has Rewritten the Rules of Access and Influence, and he works at Bazaarvoice in Austin, TX.

Social side doors are avenues of access and influence made possible by society’s adoption of social media. It has never been easier to avoid the gatekeepers and engage with decision makers in meaningful ways. It no longer makes sense to compete for attention by traditional means alone, or to stand in line for a chance to be heard. Social side doors are all around you. Here are five ways to open them.

1. Get there early.

Early adopters are given unique access to others. New tools and platforms tend to be more open and barrier-free, encouraging reciprocal communication. The basis of this engagement is shared interest in the medium; it has little to do with the status one has before she enters the new circle. New communications technologies tend to be democratic, access is open, and attention is earned. As more users arrive, some abuse the privilege, and access is constricted.  Think about all the technologies and personnel we use to block unwanted access by phone (including voicemail, DND and executive assistants). The circle grows; ease of access diminishes—so get there early!

2. Show up in unexpected places.

Even the best marketing emails, resumes and cold calls are given short shrift today, and it has more to do with the medium than the message. We’re trained to ignore these expected approaches.

Standing out through social is about making oneself known in an entirely different context. I learned just how effective this was when I took out a Facebook ad and targeted decision-makers at the company I currently work for, Bazaarvoice. My resume had been passed on by recruiters, but my ad caught the attention of a senior marketing exec that happened to be browsing Facebook and I soon had the job. Another effective tactic is to find out where the people you’re trying to get in front of go to learn, and who influences them. Leave thoughtful comments on these blogs, build relationships with their influencers, and eventually submit a guest post. If you do this well, you’ll be demonstrating your expertise as you build visibility—the killer combo of influence and access.

3. Write Rocket Content.

It never makes sense to focus only on the decision maker. They’re the ones with the highest barriers to access, and they’re quickest to say “no thanks” to outside approaches. That’s why you need to write kick-ass content that helps others in their decision ecosystem sell for you. The right content is irresistibly shareable, makes the person sharing it look great to those above them, influences at every rung of the ladder, and ultimately convinces those at the top to take you seriously as a vendor, job seeker, or whatever you’re going for. What I wrote in 2010 is still true, but let’s give it a social update: “If you can’t easily imagine your readers emailing [or tweeting, sharing, LinkedIn messaging, Chattering, Yammering] what you’re writing to their bosses, it’s probably not rocket content.”

4. Be three-dimensional.

“I’ll be interested if you’ll be interesting,” read a poster at this year’s SXSWi. People have more than one dimension, but they often choose just one boring, incomplete version of themselves to show the world. Social side doors open when your online presence truly conveys who you are—not just your area expertise and authority, but also your personality and values.

We like to do business with (and hire) people we genuinely like. Each touch point should convey some of who you are. When I was in sales, I found that people were far more interested in what I had to say after we had interacted through more than one medium. If we had tweeted, for example, they would reply to my emails more often, or pick up the phone when I called. When people associate the “from” line in an email or the name on their caller ID with someone they’ve had pleasant, authentic interactions with across social channels, that feeling cascades into other mediums and areas of conversation (like what you’re selling or why they should hire you).

5. Understand ego capital.

Normal people like to be praised and recognized, and that’s good news for you. Ego capital is, “anything that we feel will help us look better in front of others.”

Two things happen when ego capital is properly “served.” First, the subjects of your positive coverage tend to make themselves more accessible to you. If they know that you ask great interview questions that position them as an expert, you’ll have an easier time reengaging with them later. Second, they are extremely likely to share content that makes them look good, and they’ll often link to it as well.

The perfect person to reach out to is someone that is a highly-regarded authority on a subject with a large following of people in your target space. The most effective ways to leverage ego capital are quote requests and interviews. After all, who doesn’t want to have third-parties featuring them as experts in their respective field? And if it were you, wouldn’t you share it? (Perhaps you’d add #humblebrag to it, but you’d still share it, right?)

But ego capital can absolutely be abused. Always make sure you’re developing content that will actually be enriched by an expert quote or interview, and that it will still stand on its own if your request isn’t met. And don’t treat it like a numbers game, racking up as many expert quotes as you can cram into a blog post. Be selective with your ego capital, treat people with respect, and see what it does for you.

These are just a few of the ways to use the changing social landscape to build access and influence. What social side doors have you found in your life?

About the Ian Greenleigh:

Social media and the rise of self-serve content requires that we actually attempt to fulfill the decades-old promise of 1:1 marketing – winning hearts and minds a few at a time with unprecedented relevancy and transparency and humanization and speed. And that takes time.

Flickr Photo by Doc_Brown

Social media and content marketing are not inexpensive, they’re just different expensive. Even adorned with the latest and greatest social media management softwareand automation and workflow and APIs and the entire chorus line of digital marketing shiny objects, actual human beings in your company need to be at those controls. And that’s where the problem starts.

The Social Media People Problem

Executives as a rule do not fully perceive the labor required to excel at content marketing and social media. They overestimate the role of the wand, and underestimate the role of the wizard. Social media management software companies, et al. buy expensive ads in trade publications, sponsor conferences, and publish regular research to get on executive radar screens. Their marketing facilitates the belief that social media success is a byproduct of software. Of course there is no voice of the other side in the marketplace, no ads or sponsorships for the “yeah, but what about the human capital that needs to pilot this craft?” perspective.

This is why one of the most common questions I hear at speaking engagements and in corporate conference rooms is “how can we do this well with limited resources?” I’ve even heard on more than a handful of occasions the conversational shoulder shrug of “we can get software approved, but we can’t add headcount.”

(note: in fact, this was one of the questions I was asked on a very interesting 25 Content Marketing Challenges Webinar I did last week with Joe Chernov from Eloqua and Chris Baggott from Compendium. Check it out below, it’s very meaty.)

You’re Asking the Wrong Question

If this is your reality – executives won’t give you the labor you need to execute what you want to tackle in social media and content marketing, then trying to figure out how to do more with less is 100% the wrong approach.

I’m not saying there aren’t efficiencies to be gained. There may be, and co-opting your customers, employees, and business partners into creating and spreading your message for you remains an underutilized tactic in most organizations. But ultimately, understaffing in social and content is like mononucleosis – it may not kill you, but it will make you feel exceptionally crappy for a long, long time. In this age where bespoke messaging and uber-responsiveness is the coin of the realm, a lack of sufficient front lines personnel is like going into battle without any armor.

So what you need to be asking isn’t “how do we squeeze blood from a stone?” but “how do we get more stones?”

It’s Not Their Fault, It’s Yours

When I make this argument, I often hear something along the lines of “Our executive team doesn’t really understand or appreciate what we’re doing in social media. Certainly not enough so to give us more people.” If that’s the case – and often it is – it is your responsibility to educate and illuminate.

Is it the executives’ fault that they don’t understand the potential impact? No, it’s your fault Mr. or Ms. Social Media Manager, Content Manager, Community Manager, Marketing Director, or similar. Everything they read is designed to convince them they do not need to invest in more people. You alone are the counterbalance.

You Argue for People by Ignoring the People

It is perhaps ironic, but the way to effectively argue for more people is not to demonstrate how much time social media and content marketing requires, creating a fancy utilization chart that illustrates that you are 2 FTEs short of being able to cover what you need to cover. That never works, because executives have no frame of reference or objective measure to determine whether the hours you are estimating as necessary are in fact being utilized efficiently. You say it takes 4 hours per day to effectively monitor the Facebook page. How are executives supposed to react to that? They know as much about what it actually takes to monitor a Facebook page as they do about what it  takes to shoe a horse or flush a radiator.

So even when confronted with your stunning charts, it boils down to whether or not they believe YOU. Given that many of you waging these internal arguments have not been in your position very long, you often have not yet accumulated the executive-layer trust and goodwill that allows you to be successful in this type of “Jill says we need more bodies, so we do” scenario.

The Argumentative Power of Math

This is why it is so critically important that you map your social media and content marketing programs back to business results that drive top line and/or bottom line dollars. Is the company making money, saving money or both due to the efforts of you and your team?

When I ran my prior digital marketing agency, I often used this line in new business pitches:

If every dollar you spend with me brings back at least $1.01 you don’t have a budget. Your budget is how fast can you borrow money.

If you need more people on your team, it is your responsibility is to prove to your executive team that each dollar they spend will bring back at least $1.01.

Here’s how to guarantee you’ll lose that argument:

• A report that shows growth of Facebook likes
• A report that shows growth of social media mentions
• A report that shows total number of Twitter impressions
• A report that shows number of blog comments

Remember, executives do not care about being good at social media or content marketing. They care about being good at business. That requires you to report instead on how you drive customer behavior that yields financial outcomes.

Leads, sales, repeat purchases, referrals, email sign-ups, redemptions, foot traffic. All of these are behavior metrics, not aggregation metrics. And all of these can be tracked back to social media and content marketing, IF you make the effort to do so.

You want more people on your team? Show them the money.

About the Jay Baer: Jay Baer is a hype-free social media strategist & speaker, tequila guy, and co-author of The NOW Revolution. Jay is the founder of http://convinceandconvert.com and host of the Social Pros podcast.