I am writing this article live from the IBM Smarter Commerce event in Nashville, Tennessee. Yesterday was day one and  jam packed with amazing presentations and learning. Redefining customer service, context of content and relationships are at the core of all conversations.

I am most inspired by IBM’s announcement of Watson, the engagement advisor. This is not your every day Watson. IBM Watson brings to us a faster, personalized service for smarter commerce. Delivered from the cloud and straight into the hands of mobile consumers, Watson, a cognitive computing system quickly learns, adapts and understands a company’s data fast and easily.

IBM Watson services include a training phase where IBM Watson Scientists work with the client business subject matter experts to train Watson, putting Watson to work fast. Watson’s value is obtained quickly and increases even more over time. Watson is a fast learner and immediately puts the learning into action to help businesses improve customer service via better experiences and faster problem resolution.

IBM states that out of the 270 billion customer calls handled annually, 50 percent of them require escalation or go unresolved. 61% of customer calls could have been resolved with better access to information. It’s estimated that $83 billion purchases are abandoned each year as a direct result of a poor experience.

Research also shows that 86% of consumers will pay more for a better customer experience and 89% of consumers began doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience.

“Watson is a game changer, taking Smarter Commerce to the next level transforming how people and companies interact, solve problems and build relationships.” says Maria Winans, VP Worldwide Industry Solutions Marketing at IBM.

We hosted Steve Gold, IBM’s Vice President IBM Watson Solutions for a special #GetRealChat Twitter chat on May 21, 2013. The conversation was deep and inspiring. Steve did a great job at explaining how Watson enables brands to crunch big data in record time to transform the way they engage clients in key functions such as customer service, marketing and sales.

What would you do with a Watson?

The key question for you is “What would you do with a Watson?” Tweet your answer using the #SmarterCommerce hashtag and / or simply leave your answer below in the comment section of this post.

When I asked my 13 year old son what he would do with a Watson, his answer was, “that’s easy, I’d put it on my phone and get straight A’s!”

IBM Watson #GetRealChat Recap 

Below is a recap of our educational #GetRealChat with Steve Gold, VP IBM Watson Solutions.  Stay tuned as we’ll likely have him back to continue the discussion and get to better know our new friend, Watson.

Chat transcript from 5/21/13 #GetRealChat held in Nashville at IBM’s #SmarterCommerce conference.

So you have invested thousands of dollars on what you hoped to be a killer website and/or blog. Yet something is still missing.  You are still lacking social engagement.

You may be creating the right content but you are making it too difficult for people to share it with their friends and community. Visitors to your site may want to engage with you on other social networks and become part of your community. The problem is they can’t do such if they are not invited.

You can’t be too shy in inviting them to join your other platforms. You don’t have to tweet noise at them all day asking them to join you on Facebook. Instead, create compelling content and kindly include social plugins that make it easy for them to join you on other social networks, share your content if they so choose to do such.

We get many calls from small to enterprise corporate organizations asking us “please help make our site and online presence more social and get more customers.”

There is no easy answer to do such overnight, and no plug-in is going to solve your online marketing problems. However, there are few ways you can increase engagement in the short term as you work on building a real online conversion funnel and integrated strategy that will deliver results. One of the first ways it to ensure your website or blog is social friendly. Make it easy for people to share, engage and contact you if they are interested to learn more about your products or services.

Below are 10 of my favorite WordPress plugins to increase engagement. While there are many more that could be included on this list, these are my favorite and what have helped my blog thrive the past few years.

Please feel free to add any I missed that you know and love in the comment section below.

10 WordPress Plugins to Increase Social Engagement and Build Community 

1. Gravity Forms
One of the most important features any website or blog must have is the ability to contact the owner. Gravity forms make this easy. You can easily setup forms and use them on as many pages as you want with just a copy / paste of the short code via the WordPress toolbar when editing a page or post. Requires no programming or super technical skills to get started. You can set it up to send an automatic reply to user submitting the form and also notify administrators as appropriate. It integrates easily with iContact and aWeber email marketing programs in addition to numerous other platforms and technologies.

*Check out Gravity Forms

2. Digg Digg
Enabling your visitors to easily share your content with their network is a key requirement for any successful blogger. Digg Digg is a social share bar that was acquired by BufferApp in 2011. I recommend including at minimum the Twitter, Facebook like and share, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Buffer buttons. Buffer enables users to set a schedule for auto posting content to their social networks over a period of time versus all at once. Take time to learn how the plug-in works and how to modify it to your specific website design. There are options for the bar to float on the side of the page or have a single row of buttons below or above the content.

Check out Digg Digg

3. Social Stickers
It is important to make it easy for people to get to your social network profiles. An easy way to do such is to include these simple buttons in a widget on your sidebar or footer.

At minimum I recommend you include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, your RSS feed and Google plus if you’re using it. Additional options are of course Pinterest, Slideshare, and more. Choose the buttons based upon your goals, objectives and audience.

Check out Social Stickers

4. Facebook Like Box
You can easily use the code provided by Facebook to include a like box anywhere you want on your blog or website. You can opt to include the conversation stream. At minimum I suggest you include the faces of the people who like your page. By default it will include friends of the person viewing the page if there are any.

Check out Facebook Like Box

5. Follow on Twitter button.
This is a one click button to follow a Twitter account on Twitter. Within one click any visitor to your website or blog can follow you on Twitter. Pretty simple.

Check out the Follow on Twitter Button

6. All in One SEO or Yoast for SEO Optimization.
One of the first things you also need is the ability for people to find your blog when searching for content. The model “just build it and they will come” is a myth. It no longer works that way, sorry. Truth is it never did.

Both of these plug-ins add much efficiency to properly optimizing your blog or website for the search engines. We use All in One SEO and have had great results for ourselves and client sites. However, we are also testing Yoast on a couple of sites right now. Both are good.

Check out All in One SEO
Check out Yoast

We have tested several different wordpress commenting systems and always come back to Disqus. Why you ask? Because it simply works. I am also a big fan of LiveFyre but had some conflict issues between Infusionsoft and LiveFyre. I got tired of dealing with the issues and them pointing fingers at each other. I wound up leaving them both thru the process. Disqus doesn’t have these problems.

What You Say? 

I am not going to do some big ol’ synopsis of the drama that is behind and in front of this scenario. I don’t want to be involved, don’t want the drama in my day, life or business.  I will keep it simple and simply share with you the screen capture of their Facebook page. The page and their comments speak for themselves.

I don’t know the history. I don’t want to know it. There are probably reasons they are so upset. However, there should never be a reason any brand behaves in such a way on the social networks. If you feel the need to tell your community off, take a breath, take a walk, turn off your computer. Don’t blast it on your page.

The bottom of this post shares a few of the most recent blog posts we have written, one of which includes how to delight your audience using social media. This bakery is certainly not delighting their fans. Sad, truly sad.

Tonight on our Twitter chat, #GetRealChat we will be talking about how to delight your social media community and audiences. Join us at 9pm et on Twitter if interested. It was already scheduled and conveniently aligns well with this unfortunate case study of what not to do.

I did not link the below image to their Facebook page or website. I do not want to support such behavior. I am certain you can find it via a simple Google, Bing, Twitter or Facebook search if you are stuck on seeing it for yourself. In less than one hour I have seen their Facebook likes increase by 3,000!

Scenario: Amy’s Baking Company was on the Kitchen Nightmares show. The show highlights their poor food and terrible customer service, yelling at customers and more. The retaliation on the page has to do with the bad reviews on social media sites and other happenings on the show of which I do not want to get into here on this page.

Update 5/15/13: 

The owners of the restaurants posted on Facebook they were hacked and comments on Facebook were not theirs. Though it may be true, my bets are that it is not. Their words are exactly how they treat their paying customers as shown in the videos.

Video segments for Kitchen Nightmare Reality Shows:

Segment 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6LY7TJ16pg

Segment 2:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQDtoHpAWhg

Amy’s Baking Company Stating they were hacked on 5/15/13. 

Amy’s Baking Company Original Facebook posts blasting their community. 

Related Resources and Tips To Avoid Such Scenario

What do you think of when you think of the word “delight?” Some may think of a huge ice cream cone. My 9 yr old son may think of a $50 gift card to his favorite online game or a super size Slurpee from 7-11.

Delight is in the heart of the receiver. What delights me, won’t necessarily delight you the same way.

According to Dictionary.com, the word delight is defined as “to please someone greatly.” Notice the key word of “greatly.” Delight does not equal status quo. It does not mean doing, writing, posting, tweeting, pinning, +1-ing the same exact thing every other business in your niche is doing.

Have you ever thought about how you can delight your audiences? When you are developing your marketing plans, editorial calendar, tweet content for the day or week are you thinking about the positive impacts it can have on the lives or businesses of the people reading them?

Even though we are all “delighted” differently, we do have some common needs when it comes to being delighted.

Most people want to:

Feel loved

Feel needed

Be valued

Be Smart

Feel cared for

Be fulfilled

Not feel stupid

Laugh

Feel emotion

Be inspired

Dream

Succeed

Do you know how to delight your audiences? Make them feel something that feels unique to what other brands are blasting at them. To do this you must know who your audience is. You must know how to delight them. You must know what delights them. Do they care more about laughing, learning, being empowered, feeling smart, achieving a specific goal? What is it they really want? What is their end game?

Download this worksheet to help you analyze and prioritize your audiences. It’s based on the Forrester Post Methodology and will help you begin to develop a social media framework that is focused on the goals and objectives of your audience.

12 Ways to Delight Your Social Media Community and Audiences

1. Be human. Humanize your brand. Don’t talk like a robot in 1995 corporate speak. Realize that your brand is everything about you from what you tweet to how you respond to comments on Facebook. Don’t hide your employees. Let them shine and be a living, breathing representation of who and what you are. Read more here-> “13 Characteristics of the Human Brand.”

2.  Make them feel loved. Loved you ask? Why loved you may be giggling? Because at the core of our inner being is a need to feel simply needed. We want to feel loved, be loved. When someone visits your blog, Facebook page or other social network profile are you making them feel loved? Or is it all about you?

3. Capture their heart in the first 30 seconds. What are you doing to make their first 30 seconds on your platform delightful? If you can’t answer this question, you need to start here. First impressions are everything.

4. Slow down to speed up. You aren’t going to delight your audiences overnight or on the first day you launch your Twitter profile or Facebook page. Building and launching an integrated online platform takes time. Give yourself and your team the time to do it right. There are many brands out there doing it fast, trying to win the market with old tactics and spamming. Slow down and do it right and at the end of the game you’ll be the winner, guaranteed.

5. Think integration and architecture vs only fast wins. When we work with clients we help them build their brand and social foundation with a framework designed to delight their audience BEFORE launching. Many contact me or our agency, Marketing Nutz in a huge hurry to launch. They often say “build us a platform just like yours, fast.” What many don’t realize is our integrated online platforms have taken years to build. We didn’t just start with a marketing nut Twitter handle. We started with a business plan, social brand architecture, business models and an integrated strategy to take it all to market and achieve a positive ROI. We are far from launching our full vision though many think we’re just some crazy, tweeting marketing nuts.

We didn’t start by spamming offers, we started by doing social listening and learning as much as humanly possible about our target audiences, the social media communities and ecosystem as a whole. Integration takes time but the payoffs are exponential compared to those who want to build their social house overnight. There is no social media easy button. Roll up your sleeves and do this stuff right.

6. Inspire them to be better. Inspire your audiences to connect with you with a foundational goal of achieving their objectives. Inspire – Connect – Achieve! To do this you must know their objectives. To know their objectives you must know them. When you know your audience then you can know how you can help them be better. How can you help them learn? How can you help them go faster? Work smarter? Be smarter? Share more valuable information with their colleagues, clients, partners and friends? What matters to them? Figure it out and provide it.

7. Strike an emotional chord. Make them feel something. If you want to grab my attention on Twitter, make me laugh. Make me cry. Make me feel something, anything. When I have a super busy day and I am replying to tweets on Twitter I have no choice due to the amount of them and time constraints but to choose where and when I am going to respond. It is an easy choice for me. I respond to the people who grab my attention. The people who are nice, who make me feel good. The people who are genuine. The people who make me laugh. Pull an emotional chord. Don’t send snarky tweets trying to get attention. Most people can see right thru the snark and won’t respond. I ignore the trolls and the folks looking only for attention. Be genuine and offer something of emotional value.

8. Focus on relationships and the heartbeat of social media. The heartbeat of social media is people. People like you and me. People who laugh, cry, get mad, go crazy, get married, divorced, have kids, lose family members, win jobs, lose jobs, get promotions, win new clients, get new opportunities, have fun, play hard and work hard. Offer value to the people in your community with a goal of building real relationships. Offer value and knowledge. Be part of the thriving, lively beating heartbeat of social media.

9. Teach them. What knowledge can you share with them that will make them smarter? How can your knowledge drive real efficiency in their life or business? Share your best stuff, not just the junk you wrote two years ago that is over used and over sold. Check out this post, “Are You Sharing Your Best Stuff” for more information and ideas on this topic.

10. Make it easy to engage with you. People want to connect. They don’t want to be spammed at every opportunity you have to do such. Give them an opportunity to engage with you, your brand, and your team. Be available. Open up your comment stream on your blog. Enable people to engage with you on the social networks such as Facebook. Respond to tweets on Twitter in a short time period.

11. Focus on inbound marketing and organic attraction. If you create content that does the things listed above you will organically attract your right customers. Focus on offering value for the right audience, make it “findable” on the social networks and search engines and you will see results. Creating the right content that delights your audiences will organically attract them to you and your brand if implemented correctly. Of course there are many details and considerations to implementing an inbound marketing strategy that brings results. I can not possibly teach you everything you need to do for this in one simple blog post. I can share with you though that my number one tip is that you know your audience. Learn how to inspire, attract and connect with them as a top goal.

12. Listen. The most important thing you can do to better delight everyone who comes in contact with your brand is to listen to them. Listen with a goal to understand, not just think about the next thing you can shout back at them. Bottom line, listen more than you talk. You’ll be amazed how much you can learn about your audience when you shut up and listen. Try it!

 What You Say? 

Are you delighting your audiences as a top goal? If not, are you ready to do such? Ready to at least give it a try? What brands delight you the most? Why? What is it about them that delight you?

Heartbeat of Social Media Series

This blog post is part of a series titled “The Heartbeat of Social Media“. It includes a deep look at how communities work, what people are doing within them and how businesses can better understand how they can fit in, provide value and derive benefit as both a business as well as individual people.

Subscribe to the series for updates and access to special videos, webinar training and more. Would love to hear your input and have you participate in discussions and debates as we challenge each other to be part of what makes the social network heartbeat healthy and alive!

What he didn’t anticipate was how quickly it would pass over the one billion users mark and that it would be used by many businesses as a platform of growth. Today most businesses already have a business page on Facebook and you can hardly find an advertisement without a mention on how to find them there.

Last month, Dan Levy, Director of small business at Facebook shared some statistics about the small businesses from the United States that are on Facebook:

• There are more than 2 billion connections between local businesses and people.
• In an average week, there are over 645 million views of, and 13 million comments on, local business Facebook Pages.
• Approximately 70% of monthly active users in the U.S. and Canada are connected to a local business on Facebook.

While Facebook needs no introduction, I do hope that these stats will convince you of the potential of using it as a tool of business growth. If you’re trying to figure out how to do so, here are some tips:

1. Content

I’m sure you’ve heard of the saying ‘content is king‘. That is only partially true and, in my honest opinion, content and community needs to co-exist.

If you want to grow your business with Facebook, you have to be constantly adding value and engagement on your page. Good content would certainly help you to do that, but good content is wasted and ineffective if you don’t have a supportive community to broadcast your content to.

Start by growing a community before you start promoting. The reason to do so is because you have to build trust within your community, and your community need to trust that you would broadcast useful content that will add value to them. People will only buy from you when they have trusted your business.

2. Freebies 

Who doesn’t LOVE freebies? I know I do! A few months ago, according to Exact Target, 36% of consumers likes a fan page to receive a freebie or a sample.

Here is a personal story, a few weeks ago, I was searching for photoshop actions to help me improve my photoshop-ing skills. A photoshop action is ‘pre-set editing’ and one can simply click a button to have a photo edited according to the settings.

I then stumbled upon Paint the Moon website and soon discovered that they were giving away free photoshop actions for those who like their Facebook page. It didn’t take me long to go onto their page to like their page to download the freebie.

Today, I’m a huge fan of their product. I’m using the photoshop action and am already considering to purchase their collections to take my photoshop skill to the next level. Not only am I a hugely grateful potential customer, I am also a relevant audience that is likely to return to their page to digest their updates.

3. Facebook Contest 

A contest is another great way to grow fans and grow your business on Facebook. What is the difference between a freebie and a contest? Well, a freebie can consist of lower-value items, such as one photoshop action from an entire collection – usually to just give them a sense of what they would be buying. A Facebook contest could actually win them something big, perhaps the entire collection or a private consultation with their in-house designers.

The reason why contests work is because they not only help grow fans on a page, but it helps to grow email leads too. Most Facebook third party contest apps like Binkd comes with an email capture form that would need to be completed before fans can participate.

Two years ago, my girlfriend started Leneys, an e-commerce women’s apparel store. To help give a boost to her Facebook page, she hosted a Facebook contest giving away some of her apparels. The contest did so well, it attracted over 2,000 fans. Today, it has over 22,000 fans and many of them whom participated in the contest became loyal customers until today.

4. Discounts

A discount is another way to grow a business with Facebook. According to the same survey by Exact Target, 40% of customers like a page to receive a discount. 

Here are a couple of approaches when giving away discounts:

a. Like a page to get discount

The simplest would be asking someone to like a page in order to get a hidden discount code that they can use when they pay at your local store or pay when they checkout from an online store.

 b. Like a product for discount

This one is slightly different, unlike earlier, it requires someone to like a product to receive a discount. To illustrate it better, here is an example by For Human Peoples, a t-shirt and poster company.

As you can see, when someone clicks the like button, they receive a code for a 5% discount. When they do, not only will they receive a 5% discount, it would appear on their profile too.

 5. Use Promoted Posts

Remember the saying ‘birds of a feather flock together’? Promoted posts are used to target people of similar interest that are connected with you. It can be very effective for businesses if they use it wisely.

Businesses need to have an end goal that would help grow your business. Promoted posts can be seen as a ‘vote of confidence’ from yourself to your friends and family – in other words you’re telling them that you have trusted the post and they should do the same to.

Use promoted posts when:

• You’re giving away something useful that fans will like and they will tell their friends.
• Running a social media contests. Fans loves contest and promoting it would help get the virality you need to spread not only your contest but also your brand awareness.
• You’re looking to capture more emails for your mailing list.

Those are five simple yet effective methods that can be used to help you grow your page and your business with Facebook. One of the most important tips is to figure out how you can be part of the conversation on Facebook rather than just turning your page into a promotional feed.

Onto you now, what other methods have you used to grow your business with Facebook? Love to hear from you.

Image credit: Fady Aziz

Even though I know you want to hear me answer “yes,” to this question, I can’t. When I hear you ask this question, what I really hear is “we don’t want to invest in a real strategy or bother with executing a plan that will bring results. We want to instead execute tactics and random acts of marketing because we think they deliver instant results.”

Stop the Random Acts of Marketing!

Random Acts of Marketing (RAMs) will destruct your ROI morsel by morsel, post by post. There is no way around it. RAMs may deliver instant gratification as you can cross tactics off your list as completed. However, they will not provide real business results that will help you sustain your business for the medium or long term.

Be very careful when prioritizing based upon instant gratification versus investing in social media strategies and tactics that drive real results. Far too many business leaders confuse random acts of social media and buzz with social business success.

Focusing only on creating buzz for your brand using social media will not help you nurture relationships, nor grow your business. Plus chances are if you are just starting out with social media you have nobody listening to your self proclaimed “awesome buzz” as you haven’t invested the time or resource to build community.

Community does not happen overnight. Winning the hearts of real people eager to listen to your messages, hear your brand stories, read your posts, and share your photos takes investment. Loyal brand evangelists and engaged community members are earned over time, not purchased over night.

Who Is Listening to Your Brand?

Who is on the other end of your yelling, noisy, screaming offers of sales & bargains? Do you know who is listening on the other end? Is anyone listening?

One of the first steps in creating a social media strategy for business is to understand your audience. You simply can not skip this step no matter how smart you are. It doesn’t matter how long you have been doing business, marketing, writing, social media or whatever it is you do.

Think about this for a minute…

Social media is about people.

Social media is about content.

Social media is about conversations.

Social media is about relationships.

Social media starts with people. How can you be successful in social media if you don’t know WHO it is you want to have a conversation with so you can nurture a relationship? How will you know what content you should write, tweet, post, pin and +1 on Google if you don’t know who you are writing for?

How can you optimize your blog, website and social media profiles for search if you don’t know who is searching and what words they are using. You must know what they want, how they want it and how they communicate about it to be relevant in their hearts and minds.

Who is your audience? How old are they? Do they have kids? Grandkids? Where do they live? Why do they live there? What brands do they like? Why do they like those brands? Why should they like your brand or care it exists?

Telling me you want to only create buzz, get right to tactics without a strategy is like telling me you want to go fishing without a boat or a fishing rod. Yes, you can fish on the side of the lake, but being married to a man who LOVES to fish, I can tell you he much prefers and usually catches better fish being in his boat in the gulf of Mexico or right smack dab in the middle of the lake.

Communities Create Markets:

I recently wrote this post about how communities create markets. In the graphic below you will see that the only way you can move your social communities filled with real human beings from the left side to the right side is if you know who they are.

You can’t move them to a loyal, paying customer and evangelist by shouting buzz and sales at them all day on Twitter and Facebook. You need to invest time in them, help them achieve their goals, help them solve problems, inspire them to do better, be better and live their life with empowerment. You can’t do any of these things if you don’t know who they are. There is simply no way around it.

Don’t Start With Tactics!

Download this Audience Analysis Worksheet to help you prioritize and analyze your audience. It is based upon the Forrester POST methodology and will guide you through a series of questions that will help you segment and know your audience better.

The biggest mistake business leaders make when developing and executing their social media strategy is to start with the tactics and technology first before they know who their audience is.

You must know who your audience is, who you are and how you can help them solve problems. It’s only after you have this foundational knowledge that you can determine your social strategy and approach for building your social media plan.

The tactics and technology come last. Setting up a Facebook page or Twitter account is the easy part. It’s free and only takes a few minutes. It’s leveraging them with tact, smarts, and in an integrated approach focused on your audience and business goals as a top priority that will bring results.

There is no social media easy button. You must take time to research, listen, and understand your audience. A good social strategist often listens far more hours in a day than they do talk or spam social profiles. If  you aren’t paying attention to who your audience is, what they are saying, how they are engaging and trying to understand deeply what exactly it is they need from you, I recommend you start today.

The heartbeat of social media is people. You can never go wrong by investing in human beings. Don’t waste another day on Twitter spamming, blasting noise. Make a commitment to be part of the beating heartbeat that helps the social ecosystem thrive with value, empowerment, relationships and more.

Your goal each day should be to inspire your audiences to connect with you with a goal of helping them achieve their goals. When you help them achieve their goals, you achieve yours by default. Inspire – Connect Achieve! Don’t make it more complicated than it needs to be. Got it?

Heartbeat of Social Media Series

This blog post is part of a series titled “The Heartbeat of Social Media“. It includes a deep look at how communities work, what people are doing within them and how businesses can better understand how they can fit in, provide value and derive benefit as both a business as well as individual people.

Subscribe to the series for updates and access to special videos, webinar training and more. Would love to hear your input and have you participate in discussions and debates as we challenge each other to be part of what makes the social network heartbeat healthy and alive!

How does this relate to business you may be asking? Well, read on and you will see it relates in many ways.

You have a blog. You have a website. You may even have a content marketing plan and marketing strategy being executed.

My question for you today is this: Are you sharing your best stuff? Are you really, really sharing your best stuff?

I am seeing more and more business leaders, brands, bloggers, educators that are holding back on sharing the goods. Some are auto tweeting links to blog posts with out dated links or tools that expired over a year ago. Come on folks. This isn’t your best stuff.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is an umbrella term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation and sharing of content in order to engage current and potential consumer bases. Content marketing subscribes to the notion that delivering high-quality, relevant and valuable information to prospects and customers drives profitable consumer action. Content marketing has benefits in terms of retaining reader attention and improving brand loyalty.
*Source: Wikipedia

The purpose of this post is not to teach you everything about content marketing. Doing such would not be possible in a single blog post anyway. You can review numerous resources at the bottom of this post that will help you learn more about what content marketing is and how to leverage for business results.

The purpose of this post is to encourage you to dig deep and answer the question “am I sharing my best stuff.” I hope that you can give yourself an honest answer. If you are not sharing your best stuff, then I hope you will be encouraged to do such.

Your audience wants to: 

Be inspired

Be motivated

Be educated

Be enlightened

Feel empowered

Know something their competitors do not know

Learn how they can make a difference in their world, for their customers

Have access to the best information possible to make decisions

 

Here are 12 Tips To Determine if You are Sharing Your Best Stuff

1. Current. Is the content current? Bottom line if you are sharing and still promoting content that is two years old AND inaccurate, stop! Update your content and make it current to today, period.

2. Unique. Is your content unique? Does it offer something of value that is not already plastered on social media billboards, blogs and websites across the internet? Or does it offer something truly unique to you, your brand and your offering? Does it offer a unique way to solve a problem, learn a new skill or do something? What is unique about it? Are you sharing anything that offers unique value?

3. Helpful. Is the content going to help them in any regard? Are you helping them connect with others? Enlighten their thinking? Become more educated on a topic? Better their business or life in any regard?

4. Positive tone. Is your blog filled with rants and raves of all the things you hate or love?  If the only time you feel inspired to blog is when something goes wrong with a brand you buy from or a bad client, then why complain about it on your business blog? Every blog post you write is leaving a brand impression with anyone who reads it. If all you do is complain, that is the brand personality you are building for your brand and yourself. Focus on providing content that is positive and enlightening. Yes, there is sometimes a need to share something negative to educate, but do it with caution and smarts. If you must blog about negative all the time, then consider starting a more personal blog to do such.

5. Purposeful. Does your content have a purpose. Is there a reason to write it, read it and learn from it? With every piece of content you should ask yourself, “what is my purpose of this content?” Does it provide value, meaningful, helpful, inspirational?

6. Solve a problem. Does the content help solve a problem or pain point your target audience has? Does it really solve the problem or does it just amplify the problem?

7. Does not include trickery. Do not trick your audience with inflated blog post titles, or never ending mazes to get to the content you advertise. If you tweet or promote in any regard a free white paper on a topic, then within a couple clicks they should be able to download the white paper. Don’t make them watch a video, click thru 10 pages and then find out they need to pay you $29 to get the white paper. Have some ethics and make it easy for them to get to what it was you advertised in the first place that led them to your blog or website.

8. Quality. Is the content written in high quality? Is it accurate? Is it informative? Are there grammatical errors? Is it something you would want to read and obtain value from doing such?

9. Share secrets. The truth is the many “secrets” you may think you have are not secrets at all. Share your best possible content. Of course you need to hold some back for your clients and to protect your intellectual property and “secret sauce.” However, I challenge you to share more “secrets” than you are today. I will guarantee the benefits of doing such will out weigh the risk if you just give it a try. We share some of our best stuff daily. The same tips I blog about, distribute via worksheets and more is the same content and strategies we use with clients.

10. Invest in your readers. Bottom line you can never go wrong by investing in people. Is your content investing in the brands and people visiting your blogs, websites, and social network profiles? Are you truly investing in them?

11. Good intentions. What are your intentions? Is your only goal to increase subscribers to your email list or to sell something? Or do you have a genuine goal to inspire, educate and empower. Keep your goals and objectives focused on providing value in every word you write, and your results will be exponential.

12. Inspire – Connect – Achieve! Inspire your audiences to connect with you and your brand. Help them achieve their goals and you will achieve yours by default. When all else fails and you do not know what to write about, write content that will inspire and help your readers, audience, clients, partners and target customer solve problems. Help them better their life or business and you both win!

Quit Holding Back

Why hold back? When you hold back and save only the best parts for yourself you may miss out on the greatest customer, partner or friend of a lifetime. Share what ya’ got, the good, the great and the awesome! I dare ya’!

Additional resources: 

• Worksheet: Download our POST audience analysis worksheet to help you identify and prioritize your top audiences. It is based upon the Forrester POST methodology.
• Worksheet: Download our Content Marketing Asset Inventory Worksheet
• Slideshare Presentation: 16 Content Marketing Golden Rules for Real Results
• Blog Post: 16 Golden Rules of Content Marketing
• Blog Post: 25 Content Marketing Ideas for People Who Don’t Like to Write
• Blog Post: 28 Attributes of Good Content Marketing to Rock Your Social Business!
• Blog Post: Content marketing is not a new shiny object invented via social media
• Blog Post: 15 Reasons Random Acts of Marketing & Social Media Don’t Work (Marketing Nutz)
• Blog Post: You Can’t Fake Relevance in Social Media, Business & Life
• Blog Post:  Is Your Content Worthy of a Like, Share, Pin, Retweet or Google +1? (includes definition of content marketing)
• Blog Post: Social Media Buzz, the False Perception of Social Media Success
•  Blog Post: Are You Ignoring the Social Inspiration People Metrics?
• Blog Post: Inspiration Made Simple: Pick 3 Things
• Report/ Blog Post: Content and the new Marketing Equation (Brian Solis)
• Blog Post: The Definition of Social Business
• Website: Content Marketing Institute

The truth is that communities take time. Just like relationships are built on trust that is earned over time, communities are no different. The higher the patience, the greater the end results. Communities are made up of people coming from different backgrounds and education. They have different understandings and expectations what a community is and why they have joined your community.

Earning the trust of community members early on is critical. Community members start out in the “community” or “opportunity” zone and will move to loyal evangelists or paying customers over time, after trust is earned. Moving them from a “free” community member to a “paying” customer takes investment of time, sharing of information and patience.

Below are a few tips to help community leaders build loyal tribes of evangelists.

1. Be aware of the needs of new community members versus long standing members. New members have different needs than someone who has been a member of your community for a longer period of time. Be sensitive to their need for communication, introduction to other members and help getting acquainted with the norms of the group.

2. Set expectations and guidelines for all members in the community. Keep the guidelines positive but direct enough to provide the needed structure and safety for all.

3. Provide opportunities for members to converse openly. Invite them to special online or offline events. Encourage them to introduce themselves, share their needs from the community as well as what they can offer others.

4. Be available. If you are leading a community, make sure that you are simply available. You don’t need to be available 24/7. However, be available to answer questions, join conversations and help the community learn and grow. Make it clear when you are and are not available by setting proper expectations.

5. Be supportive of organic role development. If people in the community volunteer to take a leadership role for a specific area or task, openly invite, encourage and empower them to do such. Some of the best communities are self governed. If you as the leader of the community are the only one leading, it is likely to become a silo’d dictatorship versus a thriving, healthy community.

6. Be supportive of the OPC (other people’s communities.) One of the greatest benefits of community is the ability for community members to tap into the OPC. There is much power in bringing multiple communities together. Offer structure for these types of dialogs to happen and don’t be afraid you will lose community members by integrating the OPC. Be confident in and know the OPC will help you.

7. Set goals. Know what your goals and objectives are for the community. Take time to understand your audience and community members. Know what you want to get out of the community as well as what members want to achieve.

8. Share your best stuff. When it comes to offering value to the community, don’t hold back. Share your best tips, strategies and information you can that will help them. If you do this, others will do the same. A community of value is a community set to grow and succeed.

9. Be patient and acknowledge where in life cycle of community member growth the person is. Don’t expect new members to become loyal evangelists overnight. Give them time to build relationships, absorb information, learn, and feel comfortable with you and the other members.

10. Reward good behavior. Acknowledge when community members do really good things. If someone has been helping you with moderation, responding to questions then thank them publicly for such. Same goes for people sharing great information that provides value to others.

11. Offer unique information only available to the community. Don’t share the exact same posts to the community group you share on your public tweets, Facebook pages and Pinterest. Instead create unique content only available to members.

12. Inspire your audience to connect with you with a goal of helping them achieve their goals. If you focus on their goals, you will then achieve your goals by default. Inspire – connect – achieve. You can never go wrong by investing in real people.

13. Focus on the heartbeat of social media. The heartbeat of social media is you and me, it’s people. Focus on contributing to the healthy heartbeat of your communities as well as others. Don’t be the person spamming, trying to get more likes and follows. Instead, offer real value, invest in people. You’ll be amazed at the organic results with this small differentiation from what most are doing. Trust me, it works.

Heartbeat of Social Media Series

This blog post is part of a series titled “The Heartbeat of Social Media“. It includes a deep look at how communities work, what people are doing within them and how businesses can better understand how they can fit in, provide value and derive benefit as both a business as well as individual people.

Subscribe to the series for updates and access to special videos, webinar training and more. Would love to hear your input and have you participate in discussions and debates as we challenge each other to be part of what makes the social network heartbeat healthy and alive!

Email marketing continues to be a strong method digital marketers can utilize as part of their marketing mix. It is a universally used tool that everyone sits down to check at work or home.

While tweets on Twitter and posts from a Facebook page may or may not be seen by a follower or fan, Email must be handled by the recipient.  Upon being received it forces action to be taken.  This key point makes email marketing a significant, though not new and shiny, digital marketing method.

From a business perspective, email marketing, can be a key asset in delivering timely and focused information to customers and potential customers.  At a minimum businesses should be collecting email addresses from existing customers as a means to be able to continue to stay in contact with them and keep them updated on new products and services.

When used in collaboration with other digital marketing tools, email is a key value because it is a tangible, ongoing asset that can be re-used.

Online digital marketing has evolved and continues to change.  Gone are the days when having a static, non-changing web page suffices for reaching and marketing to consumers on the Internet. Today’s consumer is using multiple digital tools and so to effectively reach them means a company should be utilizing multiple channels in message delivery. Email serves as one leg of a three-legged marketing tool along with a blog and social media.
Within this three-pronged strategy,

email is the distribution mechanism, while a blog is the content center and social media is the conversation mechanism.

When new content is posted on a blog, email can be a method of distributing notice of the new article, while social media offers a conversation mechanism for users to talk about the content.

For many companies, their email list is really the foundational marketing piece. It’s a jewel of great value containing the names and direct contact method of customers and would-be customers that enables them to “get in front of” these people regularly.

Using the Facebook Advantage

Facebook, with over 1 billion users, including over 680 million daily active users, has the broadest age-range diversity of any social networking platform.

Because of the active user base and penetration across key purchasing power demographics, it’s a very important place for companies to have an active presence.

When Facebook Pages use app promotions on tabs, the tandem of Facebook and email can help marketers reach people where they are (Facebook) and engage with them.

This adds value to their social media efforts, while—when done with intent—also builds their email list.

Facebook promotions offer marketers a powerful way to boost engagement and extend the reach of their Facebook Page. There are numerous types of Facebook promotions that can be run on Pages. Below we’ll outline a number of examples of ways a Facebook promotion can be used to grow your email list.

All of the types of promotions mentioned below must use third-party apps displayed on a Facebook Page tab such as TabSite. This is necessary to comply with Facebook’s promotion policy.

#1: Sweepstakes Facebook Promotion that Builds Email List

A sweepstakes is a chance-based promotion that can be hosted on a Facebook Page tab and typically has users complete a simple form to enter. After a set date, winners are then drawn randomly from all entries.

With the form for entering the sweepstakes, those setting up the promotion can outline in the terms that submitting their email address also is their agreement to opt-in to the associated email list. Users must click the box to accept the terms to enter.

Below are two examples of sweepstakes apps that could be used as part of a Facebook engagement strategy and email list-builder.

#2: Facebook Trivia App Promotion

Another chance-based Facebook promotion that can be used to engage Facebook fans and their friends as part of an email list-building strategy is a trivia promotion. With a trivia tab, users typically must complete basic entry information, including their email address, and submit their answers to the trivia questions.

Users are intrigued by the trivia itself or the prize offered and are willing to complete to enter.

The opt-in would either need to be outlined with a checkbox to agree in the terms or upon submission an opt-in email could be sent for the user to agree to. Best practice is always to make this clear up front to ensure the greatest opt-in percentage.

Below is an example of a trivia app by the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves that is being used as part of a Facebook engagement strategy.

#3: Facebook Photo Contests for Email List Building

Contests come in all variations from photo, caption, essay or video submission contests. Each offers a great opportunity to draw entrants and voters to a Facebook Page.

A contest can also be a great way to build your email list! The key is to make sure you know and focus on your primary goal. Since the primary goal of a Facebook contest typically will be engagement and expanding Page reach, the email opt-in should simply be a natural part of the entry process and not something that draws undue attention to itself.

A helpful way to incorporate email opt-in as part of a Facebook contest is toinclude information about the email list in the terms of the contest. Facebook fans then enter the contest and receive a follow-up opt-in email from your business inviting them to confirm being added to the email list.

Facebook photo contest entries can be part of an email opt-in strategy.

So there you have it!

It is possible to run a great Facebook promotion that boosts your social engagement and builds your email list at the same time.

By thinking through the possibilities of your promotion, you can make the email list-building flow seamlessly with it.

Make sure you don’t overlook the opportunities with Facebook promotions to build your list!

Consider a suite of app tools like those offered by TabSite to run approved Facebook promotions.

Every piece of content you create should have a marketing plan to support it. Why invest in something if you don’t have a plan for how you are going to reap benefit from such?

Below are 16 Golden Rules for Content Marketing. I could write a much longer list of these. However, to keep things simple, we’ll stick to short and simple for now.

16 Golden Rules of Content Marketing for Real Results

1. Slow down to speed up. This is pretty straight forward. Take time to do the following things on this list before you invest in a copy writer. Content marketing is much bigger than a blog post or words on a page. Content marketing involves knowing your audience, setting goals, determining and executing marketing tactics to leverage the content to help you meet business goals and the list goes on. Take time to slow down so that you can speed up over time and continuously drive higher and higher return and efficiencies.

2. Build your content foundation. Think brand and message architecture versus random acts of messaging. Random Acts of Marketing will eat every last morsel of return for breakfast and lunch. Same goes for content marketing. Your brand architecture should include images, design and content. The content should be broken down into tiered messaging versus everything having equal value. For example, the highest tier would be your vision and mission statement where a product or service level message is several tiers lower. If you communicate with your audience not understanding these tiers and what they mean to your audience you will likely confuse them greatly.

If you are lacking at minimum a basic message and brand framework you will likely have a difficult time answering and/or following the rest of the tips on this list. If you having trouble knowing what to write about, how to integrate your content marketing then chances are you need to slow down to speed up and focus on your foundation before you execute additional random content marketing tactics.

3. Set goals. If you don’t know where you are going, you won’t know when you get there. Set goals that are SMART – Smart, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time bound.

4. Know who you are. Know who you are and what value you offer your audience. Know what you mean to them. Know your strengths, weaknesses and how you differentiate from your competitors and replacement products or services.

5. Know what your audience wants. What do your customers, partners, clients, prospective customers, stakeholders and community want from you? How can you help them solve problems? What keeps them up at night? How can you offer them the highest value possible. Download our POST audience analysis worksheet to help you identify and prioritize your top audiences.

6. Know what ya’ got. What content do you have that you can leverage? Start by doing a content asset inventory.  Identify all assets including but not limited to video, podcasts, written content, blog posts, whitepapers, and presentations. For each piece of content mark it as a status of “IN”, “OUT” or “UPDATE”. This basically means each piece of content is either going to be used, will not be used, or needs updated before it gets used externally. Download this content asset inventory worksheet to help you get started.

7. Embrace Imperfect Perfection. You must start somewhere. If you wait until everything is absolutely perfect you’ll never launch, or by the time you do it will be old news and not relevant. Focus on value to your audience over perfection.

8. Create once, use many. Focus on creating the framework mentioned in #2 above. When you invest in a solid foundation and create a “Message House” or “Message Bible” it enables you to create once and use many. This increases the ROI on all content. You start by developing a foundation from which you can build upon. From the foundational messaging and content you can tweak for different audiences, niches and campaigns as needed.

9. Integrate and avoid Random Acts of Marketing. Make it a goal to eliminate Random Acts of Marketing (RAMs) wherever and whenver possible. The bast way to do this is to ensure content marketing is integrated with your business and marketing. Content should not be used as a band-aid to a bad sales or marketing week. Instead leverage it as a competitive weapon to inspire and connect with your audience. Focus on integrating content with every step of the sales and marketing funnel.

10. Be You. There is only one you, so be that person or that brand, period. Don’t copy your partners, customers or competitors. Build your own plan, brand and content marketing strategy. As I always say there is only one way to do social media, social business and content marketing, and that is the way that works for you and your business.

11. Stay fresh. Don’t get stuck in old ways. Stay up to date on industry trends, data, and news. Keeping your content fresh will help you stay relevant in the eyes of your most important audiences.

12. Try the cow. Think out of the box. The image to the right of this tip is a simple cow stuck on a fence. I have used this image in presentations, blog posts, ads and more with high return. It is one of the highest perfoming images of any we have used. Who “woulda thunk” a cow would work so well? Try it. You never know what results you may have. Your “cow” image may not be a cow. It may be a monkey, human being, plant or anything that makes people laugh or think different. My point here is to try something different.

13. Create a real conversion funnel. Don’t trick your audience into multiple opt-ins making them think they are getting something free when in reality you just want their email address so you can spam them. Focus on real value and a conversion funnel that quickly delivers them the content requested and helps you achieve the desired conversion over time.

14. Don’t over complicate it. Bottom line, you don’t need to over complicate content marketing. Focus on building your content and message foundation and brand, knowing your audience and the other things on this list. When you do such the content marketing becomes easier and easier.

15. Take them on a journey. If you are just starting out with a new venture, business, brand, campaign, research project or anything, take your readers along for the journey. Humble yourself and your brand. Let them know you are starting something new. Share with them the highs and lows. When you do this they become a closer part of your community. When you achieve success, they then feel as if they were part of building you, because they were. They will then celebrate the wins, achievements with you.

16. When in doubt inspire them. If you are new to all of this, the best thing you can do is to inspire your audiences as you work on the foundation of brand and message architecture. If you focus on inspiring your audiences to connect with you with a goal of helping them achieve their objectives, you will then achieve your objectives by default. Inspire – Connect – Achieve!

Additional resources: 

• Worksheet: Download our POST audience analysis worksheet to help you identify and prioritize your top audiences. It is based upon the Forrester POST methodology.
• Worksheet: Download our Content Marketing Asset Inventory Worksheet
• Slideshare Presentation: 16 Content Marketing Golden Rules for Real Results
• Blog Post: 25 Content Marketing Ideas for People Who Don’t Like to Write
• Blog Post: 28 Attributes of Good Content Marketing to Rock Your Social Business!
• Blog Post: Content marketing is not a new shiny object invented via social media
• Blog Post: 15 Reasons Random Acts of Marketing & Social Media Don’t Work (Marketing Nutz)
• Blog Post: You Can’t Fake Relevance in Social Media, Business & Life
• Blog Post:  Is Your Content Worthy of a Like, Share, Pin, Retweet or Google +1? (includes definition of content marketing)
• Blog Post: Social Media Buzz, the False Perception of Social Media Success
•  Blog Post: Are You Ignoring the Social Inspiration People Metrics?
• Blog Post: Inspiration Made Simple: Pick 3 Things
• Report/ Blog Post: Content and the new Marketing Equation (Brian Solis)
• Blog Post: The Definition of Social Business
• Website: Content Marketing Institute