If you read my blog, there is a good chance that you have a blog yourself, or that you’ll have one someday soon.  As you know, blogging is a lot more work than you might initially think.  One of these factors is the amount of time spent on commenting: approving comments, responding to comments, and commenting on other blogs.  What if they aren’t commenting on your blog, though? Here are some reasons that might shed some light on the subject:

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1 – You’re boring. Ok, maybe boring is a strong word, but if you are just putting something very general, late (we know who won the Superbowl by now, thanks), or beaten to death, don’t expect people to jump on board.

2 – You have no call to action. Consider adding the WWSGD plugin or ask people a question to leave in the comments.

3 – You’re greedy. Virtually any chance you get to link to others, you instead link either to yourself or worse yet, Wikipedia.  Linking to someone is not only generous but extremely relevant at the right time.  Not only that, but the blogger will get a pingback and quickly come back to your site, hopefully also to thank you

4 – You’re haphazard. People like rhythm.  When people expect you to post 5 times a week, once a week, whatever – at least they know what’s coming.  If you fall off with this momentum, loss of commenters is often to follow.

5 – People don’t comment anymore, anyway. The blog reading community has fallen off in my opinion in terms of leaving quality comments, but I wouldn’t put all the blame on their shoulders.  There are so many blogs out there, sometimes it is just easier to just retweet if you like a post rather than say something dumb like “great job!” Still, there is room for commenters – you just have to give the post your best shot (or at least the best that time will allow, please don’t stop blogging for 3 months to write your master thesis blog post )  and see the commenters come in.

6 – You’re slow in responding. Even if you do respond to comments, you’re doing it days and weeks later.

7 – Worse yet, you don’t respond. For shame.  People spend time to give you their 2 cents.  The least you can do is thank them.

8 – You aren’t making it easy enough. If you don’t do so already, make sure that you are giving people an option to subscribe to comments.  Don’t bother people with unnecessary logins and captchas.

9 – You don’t comment on people’s blogs. Social media has a bit of an emotional bank account.  People will remember when you comment and comment some more.  Please understand that I am not asking you to do this in a self-serving manner (though some do this), I’m asking you to consider spending time outside your blog and really getting involved in other sites.  You may work in social media, but when did it stop being fun? If you even hesitate in answering this question, start commenting more and rediscover yourself.

10 – You haven’t found your following…yet. If you are a new blog, it is very likely it will take you at least some time to build a brand for yourself.  While the case can be made  that people still do comment on popular blogs, many of the  comments that you see on “normal” blogs are spam-like, or to  put it nicely, people that are trying to get a link out of the  deal.  Eventually, people will start talking about you and your blog – if it is of interest.

Also, if you’ve never read Liz Strauss before, she has a classic post that’s still relevant from 2006 on the subject on why readers don’t leave comments, which by the way has 422 comments

If you’ve ever spoken to me personally, you probably know by now that I’m not a big fan of ROI. (My response to Samir’s post may give you a bit more insight on some of my ROI thoughts.)

In general, I feel that ROI can be manipulated to include / exclude the projects that people want to move forward with. Issues in ROI did not start in the realm of social media – egregious hourly rates used in ABC costing and cost avoidance phantoms have plagued many.

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It’s fine to track the path to sale of social media users on your website. And that may get you a pretty straight answer to ROI. I really don’t have time to write that kind of post for you right now. Plus, I prefer to write in a stream of consciousness; that’s just how I roll.

Here’s my spin on the value of social media:

I trust a company more because they relate to me on a medium I prefer.

Let’s break that out a bit:
Trust - repeat customer, bigger ticket, repeat business, one who refers others.
More – than the other company that has no clue.
Relate – human to human contact. Please don’t make me say “representative” again on your crappy IVR.
Me – you know, that elusive demographic you’ve been coveting.
Medium I prefer – social media. And not necessarily just Twitter.

What’s your take on the great social media ROI debate? Let me know in the comments.

I’ve been on Twitter since 2007, and I’m approaching 5,000 followers. Maybe I don’t tweet enough.

When I look at some of the folks on Twitter these days, I find it incredible that some of them have 50,000, 500,000, or even over a million followers. If you aren’t famous in your own right, why are all these people following you?

The typical answer: because you are following all of them back.

Luckily, the ways of Twitter are finally starting to wise-up — people are becoming more interested in effectiveness, as we see the use of influence-measurement tools (ie Klout, Twinfluence) and Lists (though these are often misused to purposely omit people from them, but we already knew social media is a lot like high school).

At least Twitter acknowledges that friend overload has become a problem, implementing strict guidelines to the amount of followers you can add daily.

So let’s ask the question: how many followers should people really have? I would argue that it should at least in part depend on an account’s age.

There will always be exceptions to the rule (i.e. celebrities, top name brands, and one of a kind accounts like @shitmydadsays), but how many followers should a typical user of the service actually accumulate over time? How many people should they attempt to follow back?

If you haven’t heard me say it before, let me say it now: Although PPC is cutting edge marketing that is quickly becoming more and more mainstream, its roots lie in one of the oldest forms of marketing: direct marketing.  We know this through credit card offers, infomercials, and any other piece of marketing material that passes before you and asks you to “order today”, “apply online”, “operators are standing by, so call now”.

There is a reason why Billy Mays always told you to call now.  There is a reason why credit card offers tell you to apply online or call to speak to a representative.  These calls to action are best practices, and they hold true with paid search ads that you see on Google, Yahoo and Bing.

It shouldn’t surprise me when search engines use their own direct marketing to achieve goals, but it did surprise me when I opened an envelope that was sent from Google only to see it was an ad for enterprise level Google Apps.  It contained a letter explaining the benefits of using Google Apps, and a calculator to show how much you could save a year by switching to Google Apps, based on the number of employees you have.  The approach was intriguing, but in all honesty my initial reaction was “What?!  Google is sending junk mail?!”  Why would a company that makes billions by building a system that allows for ultra-targeting suddenly go to broadcast junk mail from segmented lists?

I’m not questioning the marketing prowess of the Google Apps team, in fact I think they probably have excellent reasons for pursuing this tactic.  However, I suspect this is an internal beta to see if Google can successfully mine their database of hundreds of millions of people to develop targeted lists for more generalized forms of marketing to feature in AdWords.  Consider for a moment the information that Google knows about its users on a query-by-query basis:

• Search History: Google knows what you search for in the past and can combine that history to make assumptions about your hobbies, interests, likes, dislikes, and other personal detail.
• Physical Location: Google knows your physical location by city and/or state based on your IP address (unless you use AOL, who masks everyone behind a single IP address).  If you use a Google Lattitude, then Google knows exactly where you are within a couple feet.
• Previous Sales History: If you use Google Wallet and Checkout, then Google knows what you buy and where you buy it from.  It also means Google has your credit card number on file, which also means Google has your billing/shipping address.  Even if you don’t use Google wallet/checkout, but you do use Gmail, then perhaps your emailed receipts will find their way into your profile with this same information.

The list goes on and on of what Google knows about you when you use their services, but the point is Google can use the information it knows about its users to build some highly targeted and segmented lists that would be of significant benefit to direct mail marketers.  It is not too much of an intellectual leap to assume that Google can build a tool in AdWords that advertisers can use that enlists the help of Google Apps and other services to make direct mail creative, and then pay Google to print and ship the direct mail to your chosen segment of recipients, and then use Google Analytics to track the performance of the campaigns.  To test this theory, I went to the featured URL and looked at the address bar to see if any Google Analytics tracking was added.  Sure enough, the URL auto-filled Google Analytics tracking that looks like this:

utm_medium=dm&utm_source=en-dm-na-us-tco_adw_q110&utm_campaign=us-tco

Let’s break this down piece-by-piece:

• UTM is Urchin Tracking, aka Google Analytics.
• Medium usually refers to the marketing medium, whether it be PPC, display ads, YouTube rollovers, etc.  The fact that it equals “DM” (utm_medium=dm) should be easy enough to assume that DM stands for Direct Mail.
• The Source information includes “EN”, which for Google usually means the language abbreviation for English.  NA-US probably refers to a North American campaign focused on the United States. As for “adw-q110″, there is no way to be certain, but my assumption is that is internal speak for which list my name came from.
• The campaign is what the Google Analytics user is calling the individual marketing campaign.  For example, if Best Buy was having a sale and had 30 display ads all featuring the sale, then those 30 ads would probably have the same campaign tags to monitor performance of the sale.

So let’s assume Google is testing a direct mail campaign that uses their knowledge of people to build mailing lists.  How would this be done?  How would names and addresses be segmented, categorized, and broken down in a way that adds value to marketers?  After all, Google has always targeted people by search query mapped back to bidded keywords in an auction system, which is a lot different than segmentation analysis.  So how could they include demographic segments and teach advertisers how to select them?  Simple! They would use Facebook as a benchmark.

If you have ever played with a Facebook ad, you know you can target people by gender, age, relationship status, page affiliations, etc.  Imagine an Adwords system that does something similar.  Google could even add its own twist to the process by requiring advertisers to bid on how much they’re willing to pay on a conversion basis to use the various portions of the list.  The more relevant your list is to your target audience, the more you’re willing to pay to speak to those potential customers.  The process may look something like this:

1. The advertiser logs into Adwords and creates a new campaign called Direct Mail.
2. The campaign wizard walks the advertiser through targeting mail recipients based on any demographic information known by Google, possibly including sites visited (i.e. news/blog junkie would go to Huffington Post and/or NYTimes.com, while tech enthusiasts would be on TechCrunch, C|Net, and others)
3. The advertiser uploads any graphics or other creative that pertain to the advertiser’s business, and determines their cost per conversion.
4. The advertiser is then shown several templates from Google Docs, and the advertiser picks the ideal layout
5. AdWords shows several top-performing PPC ads based on click rates.  The advertiser writes additional copy based on best performing PPC ads
6. Google offers a specialized landing page created by Google’s Page Optimizer for interested parties to visit, and the advertiser customizes it to fit with the rest of her site
7. Campaign data is uploaded into Google Analytics
8. The advertiser sets postage delivery times and establishes her CPA bid against other advertisers wanting to target a similar audience
9. Google’s systems automatically call up names and addresses based on the advertiser’s chosen segments, prints and labels the mail, and delivers to the post office for delivery.

Since the advertiser is only choosing list segments, Google will never actually share the names and addresses of its users with the advertisers, ensuring the privacy barrier is never broken.  Performance is tracked via Google Analytics, and assuming the recipient converts into a customer, the name/billing information is absorbed into normal sales activity of the advertiser, making it impossible to know which purchasers reacted to the direct mail campaign via Google.

Now I could be making a big deal out of nothing.  After all, this thought process stemmed all from me receiving a single letter in the mail from Google promoting a single product.  However, I highly doubt it will be my last.

The point of this article is not to scare you about what Google knows about you or other users.  They recognize that people take privacy very seriously, and even created their privacy dashboard.  If you’re more interested in the 3rd party review of Google information, SEOMoz has a great resource that walks you through everything that Google can capture about a user, and how it does so.

You have probably seen them numerous times while doing searches: The little sub-links below the main link on Google SERPs.  Those are called SiteLinks, and now Google has a beta in place that lets you include SiteLinks in your ads that reach top position.  Here’s how it works:

In the campaign settings you need to turn on the option of allowing SiteLinks.  A little drop down box will appear that allows you to enter text and destination URLs for several text links. Once active, any keyword that qualifies for top positioning on a regular basis will begin displaying the SiteLinks.  A click on any of the links is charged the same CPC as without the SiteLinks.  From initial testing I have found the CTR to be upwards to 20% higher than the same ad without SiteLinks, so it definitely grabs people’s attention.  The higher CTR typically will help your quality score, and assuming you can continue to keep that top position, your average CPC will actually go down.

The links can be changed anytime, but can only be assigned at the campaign level.  If there are ads that you specifically don’t want SiteLinks included on, then you must duplicate the campaign and have a version running with and without them active.  The ads that you do not wish to have SiteLinks enabled must live in the campaign where the feature has not been activated.

PPCHero suggests using links for seasonal products or a direct link to a contact page.  These are great ideas, but there are plenty of more options.  If you have a complicated conversion structure similar to a travel site, then consider adding links to various parts of your conversion funnel to see what can work when the initial pages are bypassed.

This is still in beta, so you may not have access to it quite yet.  If you really want to try it, call the Google customer service line and ask if you can be included.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but either way it gives you a chance to try out a great feature that you may not have otherwise known about.

App-stur-ba-tion (noun) – The overabundance of applications that don’t fulfill any new, meaningful purpose.

Lately, I’ve seen several of the social media thought leadership embracing personal iPhone applications that turn out to be  nothing more than their own blogs.  While at first this seemed like a really cool idea to me (think: wow, I really should get that and recommend others do the same), the more I thought about it, the more I realized just how inane having such an application really is.

Let’s face it — while many out there have very good advice and tips, why does it make sense for individual bloggers to have an iPhone app? What new features does such an app bring to the table that aren’t already present on the blog in question or its associated RSS feed?

Unless you’re a site that’s publishing many times a day, I see no valid reason for the implementation of such an app.  Even if you’re Techcrunch or Mashable, it’s probably better to just optimize your blog itself for the iPhone’s layout. After all, who really wants to download an application for every blog they are a frequent reader of? Viewing a site in Safari should serve just as well and keeps your iPhone from being cluttered or overburdened by excessive downloads.

(Image: textually.org)

While in a bookstore with my mother, we spied the business section and decided to check out the non-virtual competition that my father faced. Although we saw no texts on social media marketing, we did see some new, crisp books on do-it-yourself accounting. Wanting to show me what it’s like in the big bad world of money management, mom and I sat down to flip through the pages.

Immediately, the page we flipped to contained a business card advertising for a local accountant.  It seemed to defeat the point of the book altogether and I wondered why anyone would do that.

Then, it occurred to me that some people don’t know how to use the Internet.

So, they resort to using shady advertising tactics that probably don’t get them very far. Much like spam.  This whole situation is a perfect example of real life spam.  In our emails, we have a special box for messages like this: The Spam Box.  Thanks to this wonderful device, it is easy for us to ignore the pleas of the desperate ersatz-guerrilla-marketing puveyors of panacea.  We need never check it and, after a month or two, it all gets deleted. And on television: commercials and/or infomercials: each aimed at getting your attention and doing their best to subtly say, “Hey, you need this! Buy it!”

But, you really can’t blame the people who make up these advertisements.  I mean, if you knew that millions of people sat in front of a plastic, black square for hours at a time, wouldn’t you try to manipulate them?

But out in the big bad world of retail commerce, we non-cyborgs don’t come installed with scanners to tell us which books are a mine pit of obnoxious and pitiful advertising, unless you count my eyes which lit on the nearest trash can on our way out the door.

I’ve been on the fence with comment systems for a while.  The list is numerous: Sezwho, Intense Debate, Disqus, Chat Catcher (well that’s just part of Wordpress I suppose),  Haloscan (for the old schoolers) and many more.

Today, I’ve decided on Echo by JS-Kit.  I’ve been watching it in the wild, most recently on 1938media.  I too, share Loren’s frustration with the social web – it becomes a lot to manage your conversations across all platforms.  Plus, it sucks when everyone is talking about your site off of your site.  Social profiles are great and enabling – however, it’s important to note that it still isn’t your site.

We’ll still be kicking the tires on Echo for the next few days, though early indications are that it’s a keeper.

For years one has been able to select keywords and have an ad live within mere minutes.  It is what fueled the search marketer’s obsession within instant gratification, knowing that one can start a test and take a lunch break, often to return to the results waiting in the interface.  Organic search has not been ast efficient.  Data needed to be crawled and indexed before it could show up in search results, and that often took days, weeks, or even months.  Now we live in a world where people expect instant gratification from their search results.  Twitter Search became a pulse of real-time feelings from everyday people about almost any given subject, and the professional search engines quickly took note.  Now the big three of Google, Yahoo, and Bing show real-time search results from all over the web, or at least Tweets from big names.

So how does one take advantage of this new realm of real-time search?  Simple, engage in real-time advertising with current content updates on your site.  If you want to blog on a popular topic, or a topic you know will soon become very popular (perhaps a professional golfer’s recent PR disaster), then you can create the campaign in Google/Yahoo before you even write your content.  Here’s how to do it:

• Start a draft of the blog post or page so you have a known URL, or use a URL you know you will be establishing as your URL for the content.  This will be your destination URL for ads.
• Select the main keywords that surround your topic and write a quick ad saying the latest news and information can be found on your site, and then set the campaign status to pause.  Be sure to make the default URL the home page of your site.
• Finalize your content and publish
• Change your destination URL to your content’s page and set your campaign to active. The traffic will start flowing in as little as 15 minutes.

You may be wondering why bother setting up the campaign before writing the content instead of the other way around.  The answer is two words: Editorial Review.  The campaign doesn’t need to be active to trigger an editorial review, so the time it takes you to write and finalize your content should be enough time for your new campaign to get past any editorial checks by the search engines.  The editorial review does need a live and active page, which is why we set the ad to the home page and then change it later.  This means as soon as you’re ready to buy traffic, the engines are ready to sell it to you without any holdups.

The experienced search marketer may say that the URL change will kick off another editorial review, which is correct.  However, that review will be done as the campaign is live, and will only be shut down if the ad doesn’t link to a functioning page.

Another method of engaging in real-time PPC is to buy and pause keywords that you expect you may need later.  The New York Times does this with the published names of Hurricanes for the following season, so if that hurricane becomes a news maker, they can drive traffic to the article instantly.

The advantage is you can get a leg-up on your competition who may need to wait until their updated pages get indexed.  You may have to wait for that too, but incorporating these tactics will allow you to catch some of the initial swell of traffic that always occurs when a story breaks.

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What a year it has been for StumbleUpon.

First, having it break away from eBay (who’s been on a divestiture streak as it is, also recently spinning off Skype) and be repurchased by the original founders seems to be paying off.  Since then, we’ve seen:

• A new UI (in beta for a while and rolled out fully as of yesterday)
• Su.pr,  a url shortner that also allows you to schedule posts as well as excellent analytics

The latest SU innovation is the addition of new topics.  While this may not sound like much, it actually makes all the difference.  Let me explain.

Let’s say you were at your local library and you wanted to find books about cooking.  But wait … there is no cooking section! So, you have to go to a more generalized/unrelated section of the library (dining out? hobbies? food?) to find what you’re looking for.

And that’s exactly what has plagued Stumbleupon for so long.

Granted, part of the issue is that users aren’t typically librarians and really don’t know how to categorize things for the betterment of others.  Now, we as SU users have more options:

• Arts/History: Design, Photoshop, Quotes, Woodworking
• Commerce: Home Business, Luxury
• Computers: Facebook
• Hobbies: Crochet, Quilting, Scrapbooking
• Sci/Tech: Gadgets, Technology
• Society: Christmas

As far as social media goes, the noteworthy update in there is that you now can have an interest called Facebook.

Keep up the good work, StumbleUpon!  We appreciate it.