I love numbers, okay? I’m always looking for ways to track them and find more accurate ways of showing them and representing them to clients. But I’ve also come to realize that there are unknowables that can’t be expressed by upward trending graphs of site visits, or momentary upticks of Facebook friends, or rising and falling Klout scores.

What really counts? Riding the wave of influence.

As difficult as it is to measure, becoming an online influencer is probably the most important thing you can have happen online.

I define influence as people who listen to you, believe in you, and then take action. On the simplest level, this is a retweet or Facebook ‘share.’ Moving up the social ladder, it’s a journalist who is inspired to write about you, or an online acquaintance who is moved to become a client.

Influence, also, can be measured. I use SocialMention and Icerocket to map a client’s online reach, and Topsy analytics is a nimble tool to delve deeply into who’s taking about what on Twitter. We compile all the data we find there and learn quickly whether our latest online campaign reached the people it needed to reach. With some analysis, we can see if our latest TweetChat rippled the online pond or if a blog was picked up by news aggregators.

But wait.  I’m going to go ridiculously simple on you now.

The best kind of influence of all is simply this: providing a soundbite on television, a podcast, or in a documentary, or being quoted in an article in an influential blog, newspaper or magazine. It’s easy to make fun of TV now (doesn’t Howard Stern appear on some show?) but major media appearances ripple the online ocean. If you are quoted, even briefly, in an online journal, or the online version of a newspaper or magazine, this pays enormous dividends later – you will turn up in Google searches for years, and even better if the journalist included a link back to your site when quoting you. That might make a quote online even more valuable than a TV appearance, over the long term.

How to make influence happen?

• Become aware of who is most influential and popular on your Facebook and Twitter feeds
• Research the gatekeepers of programs and publications you like – friend and follow them
• Look over the listings at HARO  to see what journalists are looking for
• Send press releases using PRweb.com or PRnewswire.com
• List yourself as an expert on ProfnetConnect.com
• Get to know a service like PRleads.com, which connects you with journalists

Connecting with journalists and producer/gatekeepers is a long-term process, so don’t expect instant results. It’s about building relationships, and even on a supremely ephemeral medium like Twitter, credibility counts. Communicate a clear sense of mission in all your online communications. People need to know what you stand for.

Lee Schneider is consultant at Red Cup Consulting, an agency that works with clients to build online influence.

Wave image by rzrxtion via Creative Commons License.

If those names mean something to you, you are probably nodding in agreement, because you know what they represent a means of spreading your influence online, whether you express yourself visually or not. If those names mean nothing, read on to discover their value.

Most of us who expect to get attention online know that we need to have an active website. Posting on Twitter and Facebook keep audiences interested.  Blogs and Twitter posts keep search engines visiting our websites so that they are more highly-ranked in search results. Posting to Google+ will help your Google rankings. But something else is happening with visually-driven portals like Pinterest. With Pinterest you can leverage the social web by using visuals alone, and at the moment it is leaving Google+  in the dust. The social web is about words, but it’s visual, too.

You don’t have to be an image-making pro to know that if you post to Flickr, those images will show up when people search for you, and they can bring people to your website in just a few clicks.(Especially if you write a short caption for them.)  If you post photo albums to Facebook, your audience is already in your space – connecting with you on Facebook. If you post images to Tumblr, a blog interface somewhat like WordPress, you also bring people into your world. Tumblr blogs are great visual vehicles, like this one that features the letterhead of famous people, or this one of famous people hanging out together.

Pinterest is the game changer in all this. Why?

When you post an image on Pinterest you can make it link anywhere you want – to your site, to a ‘buy’ page, to any number of ways you’d like to connect. If you have a product or service that is visually appealing, you are golden, because on Pinterest people will share your image – along with your link – among their friends. If you include a short caption, so much the better. Even if your product is a newspaper, there’s hope. Take the example of the Wall Street Journal, which has started posting quotes from the newspaper, which click through to online articles.

Here are a few tips to get you started.

• Post images that communicate what you stand for
• Your images should include a short caption or description
• Use the Pin It Button to add images from your website.
• Post links to your Facebook albums in your e-newsletter and in blogs

Image: MRBECK via Creative Commons License.

You may be surprised to hear that the scientific choice, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), is usually most associated with magic. People (not my clients; they’re too smart) have a magical belief that if sites are sprinkled with magic SEO dust everyone will find them in the vastness of the Internet. Don’t get me wrong – SEO works. You can certainly pick one word, or at best one phrase, and optimize a site for it.

If you sell chocolate and you work at your SEO hard enough, you can fix it so people who Google ‘chocolate’ will find your site. If you want ‘cheap domain name registration’ you can optimize for that search easily. But what if you do something more complex than sell one thing? Or what if your services (like mine) involve a lot of moving parts? What if you’re a real estate broker who specializes in various regions of a city? What if your restaurant appeals to different kinds of people, not just those in the hunt for ‘cheap eats?’

Pure SEO can only really help you if your elevator pitch is more like an elevator word.

When we optimize a site for search, we are making those searches machine-friendly, making sites easy to read for bots, spiders, and crawlers who provide data for rankings. In this world, single words become incredibly powerful. I think that’s pretty weird, because when shopping for services or connecting with a cause, we are looking for something complex, not something simple. We often seek something with more edges and surfaces than a couple of words can express. Also, the Internet is also always changing (perhaps you’ve heard this, yes?) and no single search stays golden for long. Check out Google trends and you’ll see that ‘biggie smalls lyrics’ surge one day and someone else’s lyrics surge the next day. Nobody knew what a social media consultant was a few years ago, but now we know that most people searching for one live in New York, Toronto or London. The SEO you do this week may surge you to rankings heaven, but depending on what your competitors are doing, and what others are posting and looking for, you may sink next month.

There is another way, and it’s the social way.

Google is gaming its own rankings to give a boost to Google Plus, so posting something there will give you more juice. Post to Twitter, and all those Tweets are indexed by Google. Writing blogs, posting to Pinterest and writing for The Huffington Post will all improve your rankings, and in ways that are more complex than one-word searches may reveal. If Facebook is your beat, post away there, but know that what happens on Facebook stays there – Facebook posts will do nothing for your Google rankings.

Test this theory by Googling your name or business name. Watch what comes up. When I Google ‘Lee Schneider’ my Huffington Post archive tops the list, because I shared it on Google Plus. LinkedIn is next, because LinkedIn is spending a lot of money buying placements and has a lot of activity on the site; I know it’s my most active and engaged network. Next is my company site for DocuCinema, and then another Google Plus posting about a panel I recently moderated for the San Francisco Green Film Festival. If I try the same exercise with my Twitter handle ‘docuguy’ I get a listing of my Twitter posts, my stories on Storify and my Pinterest listings – all of which are closely associated with the name ‘docuguy.’

The takeaway for your business? Thought you’d never ask.

• Be social and more people will find you online
• Posting to Twitter, Google Plus, in blogs and on LinkedIn will shape Google rankings
• Think visually – posts to YouTube and Pinterest will boost rankings
• Be dynamic – search thrives on novelty and change, so keep posting regularly
• Use SEO for specific, phrase-oriented searches and optimize SEO page-by-page
• Use social engagement to reach out to a community interested in your work

Do you like to read stuff? Since you’ve gotten this far, I’d say the answer would be ‘yes.’ My ebook ‘What Should My Blog Be About?’ is ready and you can download it at a special discounted rate at this link.

Photo credit:  Yodelanecdotal via Creative Commons License.

Most of Red Cup’s clients have email lists. Some are modest, some are hugely influential. They all have something in common:  A high rate of ‘open.’ That means that people are anticipating our email newsletters and actually open and read them. Here are some best-practices tips to massage your message.

4 tips to Massage Your Email Message

• Use a simple subject line that is not overly promotional or spammy. ‘Special Offer’ is ok but ‘Special Offer!!!!!!!!!!!’ is not. ‘Secrets revealed about [your business]‘ will work just once per year.  Informative titles like ‘Our October Newsletter’ work just fine.

• Keep it short.  Ideally, your newsletter should fit on a page with little or no scrolling.

• Provide value. If you write ‘this is about me, and a little more about me, and wait, there’s more, about me’ you won’t hold your audience for long. Let your readers know about informative blogs you’ve written, special events, changes in the field you’re both interested in, or provide a list of apps you’re using or books you’re reading.

• Be specific. If you are sending out to 1,000 people and only 25 people open, you have the wrong people on your list. Here are some strategies to remedy that.

I’ve had great success sorting my lists into people who open and people who don’t.  I send the non-openers a note that politely asks ‘are you in or are you out?’  It has a high response rate, and those who engage stay engaged. Those who don’t open I can remove from the list and I save clients’ money.

Mailing list providers, like MailChimp, Vertical Response or Constant Contact charge by the number of people on your list or the number of sends. Sending to non-openers wastes perfectly good money that could be used instead for chocolate.

But you can take things further and get even better results. If you query your recipients on a few of their preferences when they sign up, you can send them email newsletters specifically aimed at their interests. Send only to the red wine drinkers, the people in a certain zip code, the people who say they’re ready to buy in the next six months, or those who prefer great white sharks over blue whales.

By the way, that last example is a real use-case, one we recently did for BigAnimals Expeditions.

MailChimp and other providers allow you to see who clicks on specific links in your newsletter. We compiled a list of those who clicked (i.e., showed interest) on an expedition to dive with sharks and sent just those folks a followup email newsletter specifically aimed at them. Since they’d already showed interest in that expedition by clicking on it, the rate of open was very high and the expedition leader, a client of Red Cup, was able to fully subscribe the trip. It wasn’t a fluke (if you’ll pardon the fish pun), because we did it again. selling all the places in a subsequent expedition. The key was noting who clicked and then segmenting the list into interests. This way an email list with 5,000 people on it can become personalized.

MailChimp, Vertical Response, Constant Contact, iContact, AWeber, emma, Mad Mimi, and Get Response all provide email services, and you can find good comparison tools for them all here and here. We use MailChimp the most, followed by Vertical Response.

Who is Marshall McLuhan?

Photo Credit:  o5com via Creative Commons License.

You might want to say, “Why bother? I can’t be in all those places at once. I don’t have that much to say, and also my head is going to explode.”

Sure, I hear you, but you’ve probably also heard that we are all media companies now. Clients, customers and allies want to engage us and they want to do it with online content. It’s not about putting out press releases. It’s a conversation. This is a game-changer because the answer to “I want you to make me come up at the top of Google search results” is not simple SEO anymore. Fact is, Google is messing around with its own system right now, manipulating it so that your socially -networked content drives you to the top of search results, not necessarily keywords and all that.

It’s all part of Google’s effort to promote Google+, but it means all that stuff you post to Twitter and Google + really matters. Twitter, blogs and Google+ are dramatically different from Facebook in this way. Facebook doesn’t allow its content to indexed by its arch-rival Google.

Whatever you put on Facebook stays on Facebook and Facebook’s growth is slowing. If you want people to find you outside of the Facebook world, you have to post to other places.

That’s nice. But my head is still going to explode. It’s overwhelming.

Consider that you can only do one thing well. The trick is to pick which one.

Explore Your Options.

Most social media tools are still free. This means you can experiment with a marketing budget of zero. Zero is a good budget to have. The metrics you can grab are really good using tools like WordPress, Twittercounter, Social Report, and others. In the wine business? Check out vintank’s Social Connect. Using these tools you can test, measure, test again and generally figure out your strongest channel in a couple of months.

Examine Yourself.

The knee-jerk advice has always been “write a blog.” Shockingly, however, not all of us are great wordsmiths. Some of us are visual people and others are a little, shall we say, non-linear. Stunningly, we are not all original content-generating machines either. Some of us are hunter-gatherers and others are curators. Okay, for the visual folks, you can post images to Flickr, which is heavily indexed by Google. For the non-linear/visual folks, Pinterest is a wonderful online scrapbook and fun networking tool. Storify allows you to curate content from everywhere to build stories, and Summify builds a team of like-minded content generators who make you look good.

Be Efficient.

Scheduling Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, and LinkedIn updates using Twuffer, Hootsuite or TweetDeck is a good way to get your life back. If you need research to sound reasonably intelligent (I know I do) try Google Reader to clip articles, Evernote to organize things and Sparrow to get your inbox to “zero.” Clients who use my application called Red Cup Office to organize their teams can clip their notes right into Evernote. Trello is a virtual whiteboard on which you pin virtual index cards – an enormously useful ap that I am using for three teams now. If you have an iPad or iPhone, Zite grabs what your Twitter friends are posting, mixes it with your Google Reader results, and creates a personalized magazine that I read more often than the New York Times.

Photo credit:  Jurvetson via Creative Commons License.

Which one of those approaches will reach more people, do you think?  A loaded question, I admit. Here’s some elaboration on why I think your social narrative needs to be more substantial than something that you can deliver between floors.

There’s no substitute for face time. We have to talk to each other in order to connect. But even if you are an Olympic-quality networker, there’s only so much ground you can cover in person, and only so much talking you can do before sleep deprivation sets in. But that’s just where your social narrative can help.

What is Your Social Narrative?

What is a social narrative, anyway? And more importantly, what does your social narrative sound like? Your social narrative is the story of what you stand for, the story people tell when they talk about what you do, and the story you have to communicate if you want to build support, gain friends, and show your value to the world. If you build and express your social narrative, you create a powerful engine that is your proxy online.  It goes where you can’t be and can be everywhere the web reaches.

We humans are narrative creatures. We respond well to stories that play out over time. That’s why there is a vast difference between creating social media that is to be tossed down like potato chips as opposed to a social narrative that is designed to engage readers, viewers and listeners and keep them coming back for more. There are a number of factors that go into crafting a social narrative.

A social narrative …

• can be a brief, entertaining history of your company
• can be the origin story of how you got started in your cause or business
• can be a story-driven roll out of a product or service

A social narrative …

• must connect with what you stand for
• has to communicate your unique value in the world
• must be capable of being told and re-told by others

Your social narrative must connect with others in a root way – and be a simple enough story so that people can remember it and tell it to others. That’s why, when helping clients build their social narrative, I often begin by telling about how they got their business started and what motivated them to do so. We get at the core values of the business in that way, and people respond to values. If your work is about eating well, producing local wine, or celebrating the eco-conservation movement, you stand a better chance of celebrating with like-minded people if you celebrate these values in your social narrative.

Think about these examples: On a whim, Steve Jobs audited a college calligraphy course, and it later inspired him, when coming up with an early design of the personal computer, to allow the user the personal creativity to choose a font. (True story, with the roots of ‘think different,’ Apple’s famous slogan, baked right into it.) Hewlett-Packard started in a garage with simple entrepreneurial values. (Also true.) These tiny snippets communicate aspects of the big values driving these very successful companies. These stories have become touchstones of passion, passed from person to person like legends. Social narratives matter. What’s yours?

Photo credit:  Crowd by Wayne Large via Creative Commons License.

Lee Schneider is the lead consultant at Red Cup Online Strategy + Media. He helps clients construct their social narrative and reach more people with their message.

Listen to a podcast on your computer, iPod or iPad. Grab a podcast from somebody’s website or from the iTunes Music Store. Lots of subscriptions to podcasts are free. If you sign up, iTunes will update you when there is a new podcast. And the world of podcasts gets even better.

The best thing about a podcast is that it’s a great combination of a radio and a time machine. Think about it. Radio is just terrific as a story delivery system. It’s personal and portable. Compared to video or movies it is cheap to produce. Then there’s that time machine. Podcasts allow your listeners to shift time – they listen when they want and on whatever device they want to use. This choice empowers them, making them more likely to be receptive to what you have to say. The bar to entry into podcasting is not high. You don’t need much equipment. If you can talk and interview, you can do a podcast.

Why do a podcast?

If you have a message about what your business stands for, or an employee, business partner or client you want more people to know about, or a case study to tell the world about – a podcast is just the thing.

Podcast Tips

Keep your podcast conversational. People are looking for a dialogue.

Keep your podcast short. There are only a few podcasts that hold my attention for a whole hour – WNYC’s Radiolab is one of them. Twenty or thirty minutes sounds good to me.

Keep your podcast real. If it becomes too much of an infomercial people feel betrayed. Remember the 80-20 rule –  80% information, 20% selling.

More tips can be found on my friend David Doucette’s show Podcast Coach, available on iTunes as a free download.

Looking for ideas for your first podcast? Talk to me or email me. Or give a listen to my podcast, which is called be global. It’s about visionaries who are using the Internet to explore new ways of global collaboration. It’s a free download on iTunes and also at the DocuCinema website.

Podcast FAQ

Do I need a lot of equipment?

If you have a computer you have enough for a basic podcast. Moving up from there, you can do a lot with a decent USB microphone. Or you can hire someone who has equipment to do the podcast for you.

Do I need to be a professional interviewer or radio announcer?

If you can carry on an engaging conversation you’ll be fine.

How do I get my podcast listed on iTunes?

It’s easy to submit a podcast to iTunes. The Apple site gives all the details.

How do I come up with ideas for a podcast?

I can help with that.

Lee Schneider is the lead consultant with Red Cup Online Strategy + Media, a social media strategy company that helps socially responsible businesses and entrepreneurs get noticed online.

Graphic: Courtesy of The Noun Project via Creative Commons License.

Vision marketing is understanding the story of your business and then telling that story online. If you’re telling the right story, you will ride a huge wave of social influence. That’s because vision marketing connects you with a global movement  - one that is certainly bigger than you are.

Once you get out in front of that social movement, it will not only bring more visitors to your website, it can also create seismic shifts in the way people love, live and work.  Pretty big stuff.  Online influence is powerful.  Would you like to know how to ride the wave? Let’s look at some examples from the web and among my clients.

Seth Godin

Seth Godin writes the most popular blog in the world created by an individual.  His business advice is honest, blunt, and funny. But Godin is also involved in bringing marketing skills to developing countries. He has run a workshop in Africa for Acumen Fund, and as a marketer he is willing to passionately advocate a cause, like ending malaria. His book Tribes is a primer on connecting with groups to sell something or create change. We know what Seth Godin stands for.  For me that means he’s practicing vision marketing.

Blake Mycoskie

Blake Mycoskie, of Tom’s Shoes, has written a book called Start Something that Matters. He wears his humanitarian activism on his sleeve, building his business as he works equally passionately to eliminate poverty in developing countries. For him, and others like him, there’s no distinction to be drawn between doing well and doing good. He encourages everyone to ‘Love your work, work for what you love, and change the world—all at the same time.’ Mycoskie has mastered the art of the clear message driven by heart and passion. For every pair of Tom’s shoes sold, a pair is given away to someone in need.  For every one of his books purchased, a new children’s book will be provided to a child in need. He calls it ‘one for one,’ and I call it brilliant vision marketing.

Ann Gentry

Ann Gentry is a chef, author and the founder of two Real Food Daily restaurants in West Hollywood and Santa Monica, CA. Both locations are more than popular – they are loved.  They are more than places to eat – they are places for a lively community to gather. The customers are mostly vegan and vegetarian, but the restaurants also attract people who are  just curious about good food.  Most importantly: They are all part of a community of people who want to eat well, who want to know that their food is organic, and at Real Food Daily they feel they are part of a movement that endorses sustainability, buying local, and growing food without pesticides.  Ann speaks to many of these issues in her Huffington Post blog and in public appearances.  She has a book out called Vegan Family Meals that is climbing the charts at Amazon. While working on Ann’s social media strategy, I discovered that being part of this larger movement amplified Ann’s message.  A good example of vision marketing.

Amos Nachoum

Biganimals Expeditions is run by Amos Nachoum, a charismatic photographer and adventurer who explores the oceans worldwide. He can take you to Antarctica, to Tonga, or to San Diego to create moving and memorable encounters with animals like Great White sharks, Leopard seals, and penguins.  He is also active in ocean conservation, as reflected in his Twitter news feed, and he speaks all over the world to help people better understand the animals with whom we share the planet.  With Amos, I discovered a client who lets the world know what he stands for.  To me, that’s deeper than what we call branding – that’s vision marketing.

The How To Takeaway

The takeaway? Social forces are market forces.  Becoming part of or, even better, leading a social movement puts the wind in your marketing sails.

Photo Credit:  h.koppdelaney via Creative Commons License.

It sounds easy, but actually it’s pretty hard. Because an effective social media marketing plan involves asking the right questions. For a recent customer satisfaction survey conducted by Red Cup for Real Food Daily, we had the wise advice of a number of specialists and marketing consultants. We needed to know about the people eating at RFD’s restaurants, why they went there, what they liked, what they wanted to see change. It was a relatively short, but information-packed survey.

We ran our survey on Wufoo.com, a simple resource with a funny name that allows you to build complex surveys and polls and distribute them online. It is amazingly easy to set up and it works with MailChimp, which is what Real Food Daily uses to stay in touch with the 8,000+ subscribers on its mailing list. RFD, a beloved vegan and vegetarian restaurant with several locations in Los Angeles, has become a major force online, with that 8K mailing list as mentioned, more than 8,000 followers on Twitter, and more than 5,000 friends on Facebook. Its founder, Ann Gentry, publishes in The Huffington Post. With channels like that, you can get your message out on social media, and we found that fans of RFD really wanted to contribute their voice to our online poll.

After our survey went out online, we received more than a thousand responses, and more poured in as the survey was distributed in the restaurants on good old-fashioned pieces of paper stapled together.  Wufoo can build reports easily, so in short order we knew a lot about the fans of RFD and were able to slice and dice that data in many ways.  (Is anybody noticing the cooking references in that last sentence?)

Building surveys is an art.  If you want to get a sense of the how-to, check out the Online and Mobile Survey Group on LinkedIn, where there are lots of lively discussions on best practices.  We’re already planning our next survey for Real Food Daily. It’s going to to be about the online preferences of RFD’s sizable social media audience.

Image by Colin Logan via Creative Commons License.

Lee Schneider is a consultant in social media strategy with Red Cup Online Strategy + Media in Santa Monica, CA. Red Cup analyzes your online presence, builds a communication strategy for you, and grows your visibility so that people recognize the value you offer. We prepare online surveys for clients and maintain Twitter and Facebook feeds worldwide.  

According to a study published by Mashable, most conversations are happening on Facebook around 3pm. So that’s when you should be live on Hootsuite if you are using Facebook for a business. But if you are serious about your social media marketing, be sure to start posting to Facebook in the morning. Your status messages may hang around for a few hours, but they will be at the top of the newsfeed when most people begin sharing on Facebook, which happens around noon, and again after 7pm.  Those times are most active, Mashable reports, because 65% of Facebook users access the site when they are not at work or at school – in the early morning or evening. Post first thing in the day, then look for commenters after 5pm.

How to use Twitter for a business? A leading company studying social media marketing, Kissmetrics, published a blog claiming that most retweets occur in the afternoon, so that is a good time to post. A good frequency is from 1-4 tweets per hour. User spikes occur around lunchtime and at the end of the workday.

Most importantly, nearly 50% of the US population lives in the Eastern time zone, and Eastern and Central represent 80% of the population. That means that if you’re posting at 10pm pacific, most of your US audience is asleep or if awake, are professional insomniacs. Cue up your posts to the majority of people who might read them and you’ll get more connection. If your message is global then you won’t have to worry much about timezones. It’s always 5pm somewhere.

If you use a link shortener like bit.ly you can track your Tweets and see when your followers are most active. There’s also an online tool called Tweriod that not only tells you when the best time to post might be, but also posts at that time for you. Twitter users are pretty comfortable with repeated posts, and you can even post the same thing several times.

If you are asking “why social media marketing?”  Here’s one answer:  People are looking online for news,  so these channels are strong choices if you have a message and need to connect.

Clock image by Jorg Weingrill via Creative Commons License.

Lee Schneider is a consultant in social media strategy with Red Cup Online Strategy + Media in Santa Monica, CA. Red Cup analyzes your online presence, builds a communication strategy for you, and grows your visibility so that people recognize the value you offer. The company manages Twitter news feeds and posting to Facebook for clients worldwide.