Disruption. If one word exemplifies what’s happening to the world of business today, that’s it. The high-speed pace of technological change, with its ability to disrupt business models and pricing has made disruption an everyday reality.  This point came home to me when I heard Ray Kurzweil speak at a Shop.org conference on how the rate of change is doubling every year and what that means for the future.  When you see the trajectory of change, and what it means to the not-too-distant future, you can’t help but feel a powerful sense of urgency about keeping pace. The only way to avoid being eliminated from the game in this environment is to disrupt yourself.

Clinging to the status quo is a recipe for extinction. I say this from the perspective of someone who works for a 134-year-old brand. You can never get complacent. You have to constantly reinvent your business.

Just look at the industries that have been disrupted by technology.  Publishing. Printing. Retail. Education. Banking. Music. Entertainment.  The businesses within these industries that survive have been the disruptors.

But, how do you dare to disrupt your own business? How do you move beyond the status quo?  Here are 6 trends that point the way and a reading that can help.

Entrepreneurship

You don’t have to found a tech start-up to be an entrepreneur.  You just have to have an entrepreneurial approach to every aspect of your business.  Act small.  If you find you are unable to have mini-start-ups in your company because your procedures are too cumbersome, your infrastructure too complex, or your hierarchy too structured take note. These are red flags that tell you, you’ve moved outside the realm of being an entrepreneur.

Failure

Failure is “in” because it’s a sign that you have taken risks and innovated.  The option—the  safe route based on best-practices and “the way it’s always been done” is a path to extinction.  Failure is the price you pay for being open to new ideas and for taking risks.  Learning to take calculated risks and get comfortable with failure is a requirement for entrepreneurial ventures.

Creativity

Creativity is a key factor in being able to disrupt the status quo.  And, creativity isn’t just for “creatives.”  There’s no reason why salespeople or shopkeepers should stay in a self-imposed ghetto of mundane thinkers. Several of the books on this list teach how creativity works and how creativity can become a discipline, rather than an unreliable and mystical resource. Taking the kind of leaps that are necessary to keep up with the marketplace means learning to be fearless and embracing creativity.

The Power of Fringe

The safe, middle-of-the-road, something-for-everyone business is not so safe.  When businesses were largely local, it only mattered that you stood out from a small number of competitors. When information was scarce, any source of information was valuable. Now standing out is more important.  Just check Google for generic terms related to your business if you’re uncomfortable with being different. Learning to be different–meaningfully and significantly different–is more important than ever.

Radical Simplicity

Cumbersome and complex businesses and products are ripe for disruption.  Simplicity (or at least solutions that appear simple) reduce the friction that comes between a person and an action or purchase.  Simplicity allows for the speed that goes hand-in-hand with disruptive technologies. Businesses like Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Square and Dropbox are examples of businesses that are simple to use and simple to understand.

Thinking Small

This trend is a subset of Radical Simplicity. As organizations get bigger, they tend to get more complex and slow down. Speed is one of the requirements of successful disruption and small has the potential to move faster and sell faster in the world of short attention spans.  People don’t have the patience to read long pieces of content, even in print.  People who are used to paying $1.99 for an app are going to think five times before paying $199 for a downloadable product. While this doesn’t require firing people or cheapening your output, it does mean rethinking your internal processes to be nimble and redefining the size of a piece of content.

The Reading List

Here are a list of books that address these trends. Some of them can fit into more than one category.

• The Lean Start-up: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries
• The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business by Clayton Christenson
• Zen Habits: Handbook for Life by Leo Babauta
• Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works by Ash Maurya
• The Power of Unpopular: A Guide to Building Your Brand for the Audience Who Will Love You (and why no one else matters) by Erika Napoletano
• We Are All Weird by Seth Godin
• Different: Escaping the Competitive Heard by Youngme Moon
• Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer
• Do The Work and the War of Art by Stephen Pressfield
• The Accidental Creative: How to be Brilliant at a Moment’s Notice by Todd Henry
• Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon
• Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance by Jonathan Fields

Have You Registered For Explore Minneapolis?

Don’t miss two days of intensive learning with some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the digital marketing and social media marketing space. Join SME’s Jason Falls and Nichole Kelly, The Now Revolution co-author Jay Baer, Edison Research’s Tom Webster, Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman, Neil Patel of Kissmetrics and more at one of the leading digital and social media marketing events of 2012, August 16-17 in Minneapolis, Minn. DON’T WAIT TO REGISTER! Seats are filling fast! Reserve yours today!

In case you missed it yesterday, my buddy (and now co-author) DJ Waldow and I threw together a quick webinar revealing five secrets of email marketing. It was a tee-up to share the news about our new book, The Rebel’s Guide to Email Marketing, which you can pre-order now on Amazon. It will hit stores late summer/early fall.

We recorded the webinar for those of you who couldn’t make it live so you could enjoy the content, as well. It’s fast, fun and useful. Enjoy!

Thanks for sharing in the celebration for the new book. Preorder your copy now!

A friend of mine recently emailed me to say that she has a new client but they’re wary of doing a blogger outreach program, and do I have any metrics about outreach ROI, especially for driving sales?

I wrote back: You’re asking for the holy grail.

However, while linking ROI to blogger outreach is not simple, it’s also not impossible. Think about the decades (centuries?) of PR people who have gone before us. How did they determine ROI on media outreach when all they had was “impressions” (a very fuzzy number that was, and is: self-reported from print and broadcast media)?

Blogger outreach is in many ways the same, and perhaps even easier, to track, than traditional public relations. Here are some ways you can add tracking and metrics to your blogger relations programs which will help you quantify the results of your efforts. These ideas are more or less in order of easy to complex; doing all five will really juice up your blogger outreach measurement.

1) Set Goals

While some of my SME colleagues advocate that you can have success without defining upfront ROI goals (and I agree with that in some situations), I find that giving clients some expectation of an outreach program’s capabilities sits better with them and helps me and my team stay focused. Note that I said “some expectation” – I never sit down with a client and say something like, “we’re going to deliver 10,000 clicks to this product page which will result in $1,500 in sales.” Instead, we talk about what success will look like to this client. Are they looking for awareness of the brand in general? Engagement in a coupon or promotion? To drive sales of a particular category or product? This is a give-and-take: we may have suggested blogger outreach to them, in which case we have to help them understand where we can measure our efforts. We then set some broad goals based on some of the measurement ideas which follow.

2) Measure Online Activity

We’re marketers, not necessarily web developers or analysts. But if our client’s (or company’s) goals include tracking online activity, we have to have a direct line to understand the online activity our efforts, including blogger outreach, are generating.

One of the first things I ask a client for (as an agency – if you’re internal, you as a social media person need this too) is access to their Google Analytics (or other analytics package). I want to be sure that their analytics tracking is set up properly to really capture all of the traffic and conversions our efforts are sending to them, and I don’t want to wait for their internal team to get back to me to understand how our efforts are performing. Yes, I know, Google Analytics is scary for some, but there are some great tutorials out there to help social media marketers learn to segment their efforts; I promise if you spend a little bit of time with it, it won’t be nearly as scary.

I recommend setting up Advanced Segments in Google Analytics to track the bloggers you’re reaching out to, keeping in mind that their traffic could also come via their Twitter accounts or Facebook pages (or Pinterest, or Google+….). You can put all of the blogs you’re courting into a single segment, or divide them up in some way that helps you understand the activity in each. For example, if you’re an iPad app for kids, you may have separate segments for tech blogs, app blogs and parenting blogs. If you track your outreach time and costs for each segment, then assign a value to the segment’s activity (keep reading), you’ll begin to understand where your time is best spent.

3) Compare Blogger Outreach Activity With Advertising

My colleague Nichole Kelly advocates for treating social media activity like other forms of media; again, if you’re the social media person this may not be second nature to you (vs. if you’re also well-versed in media buying, etc.), but this is an important place to stretch your knowledge. Follow Nichole’s advice and consider ad-like metrics for your outreach efforts and compare that against other marketing spend the company is doing. For blogger outreach, consider your time, payments to bloggers, cost of coupons or promotions, etc. in the total cost, and then divide that by the impressions, clicks, leads or sales you get from those efforts.

Get with your media buying counterparts to compare your numbers to theirs and see where you can improve, and where you’re ahead. If they’re still spending on television, I’m pretty sure you’re kicking their butt with blogger outreach.

4) Track Coupons

Everyone loves a coupon, right? So do many bloggers. If you’re mounting a blogger outreach campaign to a segment of blogs for whom coupons are appropriate (typically frugal, parenting, app/tech/gadget blogs, plus others), consider setting up exclusive coupons for the top bloggers you’re trying to attract. Not only can you get more attention from the blogger if they feel they’re getting something special to share with their readers, those coupon codes are gold in terms of helping you to track ROI. When they’re redeemed online you ought to be able to get a report (from your e-commerce folks) on redemption rates and total sales against the coupon, so figure out which bloggers sent the most traffic and at what dollar value.

Some marketers can take this through to offline, particularly if they control the whole channel; if you’re a retailer you can track a coupon distributed online all the way through to point of sale. However, for product or service companies this may be more tricky – getting third party retailers to report coupon metrics back to you is a pretty complicated process. So consider this for driving online activity through blogger outreach first, and then get creative translating your efforts to offline programs.

5) Affiliate Programs for Bloggers

Your company may already have an affiliate program: an online referral program whereby affiliates (often websites or blogs, sometimes emailers or other online marketers) get paid a flat dollar amount or percentage of sales for every sale they send through to your client’s/company’s site. You can use an existing affiliate program for blogger outreach too; or, if you plan on doing a lot of blogger outreach and you don’t have one, ask your company to set up an affiliate program to help you with your efforts.

The beauty of affiliate programs is that you typically only pay for success….success in whatever way you define it. Looking to drive sales? Connect to bloggers and give them a VIP (top-dollar) affiliate commission in order to drive sales. Combine that with a coupon and you could really drive ROI. Know that some affiliates will take time to put your company, product or offer into their queue; also as with any blogger outreach effort, some will hit, and some will miss. Bloggers who are most likely to want to join your affiliate program are frugal/coupon bloggers and those that write about “products” often: craft, tech, shelter/home, travel etc. Though don’t hesitate to suggest it to any bloggers you work with, if you have an affiliate program available.  You can also track sweepstakes entries, video views, anything really – as long as the value to the affiliate is worth their traffic (which they could send to you or to someone else who will pay them more for their efforts).

Savvy bloggers will take an affiliate commission over a sponsored post payment if they think your product/offer will resonate with their readers, and then they’ll push it harder than they would for a sponsored post.

In the end, don’t forget: with any blogger outreach effort, do what you can to go beyond the standard pitch (you all know I don’t believe in pitching, I consider bloggers as marketing partners), and you’ll see better engagement which should lead to greater ROI.

Have You Registered For Explore Minneapolis?

Don’t miss two days of intensive learning with some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the digital marketing and social media marketing space. Join SME’s Jason Falls and Nichole Kelly, The Now Revolution co-author Jay Baer, Edison Research’s Tom Webster, Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman, Neil Patel of Kissmetrics and more at one of the leading digital and social media marketing events of 2012, August 16-17 in Minneapolis, Minn. DON’T WAIT TO REGISTER! Seats are filling fast! Reserve yours today!

 Image source: flickr (Charlyn W)

If you joined DJ Waldow and me today for our 22-minute webinar on five secrets to email marketing, you learned that one of the secrets was that he and I have written a book. I’m proud to tell all of you that The Rebel’s Guide To Email Marketing is now available for pre-order on Amazon and will be in your local book stores late this summer.

This is my second book (thanks to all of you who have supported No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide To Social Media Marketing) but DJ’s first. And if you know both me and DJ, you know he’s truly the subject matter expert on email marketing. But we wanted to work on this together and, well, I know a couple things here or there that might be helpful.

Who’s A Rebel?

This book is for anyone who wants to be excellent at email marketing, but that also knows best practices are only applicable to you and your organization if you test, measure and prove them. Your brand, audience, market, industry and more are unique. So listening to the “rules” from software companies or even industry thought leaders is like choosing to eat chocolate ice cream because it’s the most popular flavor, not because you like it. We’ve broken email marketing down to help you understand its usefulness, the necessary technical elements for the business owner or marketer, how social media and email marketing work together to form a more perfect marketing union and then we break down all those pesky “rules” and show you why and how you can break them and be successful.

Preorder the book now. You’ll learn something good and have fun reading it, for sure.

Why The Rebellion?

As you could tell from No Bullshit Social Media, I’m not a fan of rules. Yet everywhere DJ and I turned to discover information and advice on email marketing, that’s all we saw. “You must do it this way!” “You shouldn’t do it that way!” We wanted to poke holes in the rules and show people that you can do the unthinkable (using ALL CAPS in subject lines, using one big image rather than text, etc.) and still kick ass with your email marketing efforts.

Plus there just hasn’t been a lot of updated information for the non-web-centric reader on email marketing in a while. With the advent of social media, the advancements in email marketing software and more, the book world was ripe for a book that included a fresh look at email marketing and what companies can do to use it successfully.

Here’s more from both of us … we’re excited!

How You Can Help The Rebellion

Well, yeah, you can preorder the book. But we also need help making sure more people know they don’t have to follow the lemmings off the email marketing cliff! If you have a blog, magazine, newsletter or similar and would like one of us to contribute to it in the form of an interview or perhaps a guest post on email marketing, let us know. We’ll do our very best to accomodate those requests.

If you are involved with a local professional organization that would like to talk about improving email marketing as a monthly topic, we can both provide virtual content (live interviews, webinars, Q&A sessions via Skype or similar). Both of us have limited availability for coming to your community to talk about email marketing as well. We only ask that your organization or its sponsors purchase a minimum of 100 books and cover our travel expenses. Just fill out our contact form and let us know the details. We won’t be able to do visit every one, everywhere, but both DJ and I love getting out and networking socially rather than just social networking online.

And, of course, if you know of an organization that is doing a poor or no job with email marketing, buy them a copy or several copies. Or introduce us to them. Maybe we can help correct that by showing them The Rebel’s Guide.

Here We Go

Writing a book is a project and a process. It’s been a fun one to work on with DJ, who is enthusiasm incarnate. The book is useful, fun and even a little irreverent. And it doesn’t have a swear word in the title, so it’s coffee table safe. Heh. You’ll soon read and hear more about the book as we get closer to the publishing date, but rest assured, it’s going to be a good primer for those who don’t quite know email marketing well and a useful reminder and refresher for those that do.

We’re going to have a lot of fun talking about email marketing in the coming months. Thanks for supporting us in this.

So go ahead: Preorder The Rebel’s Guide To Email Marketing now. I guarantee that with or without the leather jacket and shades, you’ll immediately be more cool.

Let’s just get straight to the point… social media sucks. Plain and simple. For years it’s been “business as usual” and then suddenly everyone is bouncing around words like “social”, “engage”, “community” and all kinds of other blather. Some of the biggest companies in the world such as Ford, Starbucks, Dell, American Express and many others have fallen for the trap. I’m here to warn you before you do anything stupid. Social media sucks and here’s a few reasons why …

1. Social media shifts the limelight from brands to the customers. It was fine when brands were the stars. They spoke and customers listened. Now customers are the ones who speak and expect to be heard. Social networks like Twitter and Facebook allow them to easily share their opinions. Ecommerce sites even encourage the most vocal folks to leave customer reviews directly next to each product. Of course it’s all bad when you allow a negative review to slip by.
2. Social media forces companies to learn new tools. Never mind that it’s easier than ever to measure customer sentiment, track sales conversions, identify qualified sales leads and decrease customer service costs. The phone email and fax are the only toolset you need. In fact, the growth of smart phone owners last year increased by 10% to a total of 46% of American adults making it even easier to cold call folks wherever they may be, right? Besides, what could any respectable sales person do with social media besides tweet about their lunch and play Farmville? (hint)
3. Social media has changed the direction of marketing and sales from outbound to inbound. Companies are becoming more like publishers and distributers of content.  An average of 60% of B2B respondents to a recent content marketing survey say they intend to increase their content marketing budgets over the next 12 months.
4. Social media provides lots of ways for customers to get information. Why can’t customers simply trust corporate web sites or call their helpful sales reps?  Instead they actively share buying experiences and solicit opinions from friends and followers. Remember the increase in smartphone ownership I mentioned previously? Well it looks like some folks are using their smartphone for a bit more than just phone calls and Angry Birds.
5. Social media forces companies to be more human. No more do layers of automated customer support systems, grinning celebrity endorsements, slick promotional campaigns and PR spin guard me from facing my customer at the end of the day. They know that behind every business is a group of human beings just like them. They expect a reasonable touch of empathy in their interaction with a brand. Traditional marketing only takes you so far without that empathy. Even great companies have felt the sting of forgetting this key ingredient. Communications, customer service, sales, product development and marketing are all places where empathy should exist. Brands need to be walking in a pair of their customer’s shoes at all times if they hope to keep pace with the today’s connected customer.

Well there you have it. A handful of reasons why social media sucks for businesses. As you might have noticed by now I’m being facetious, but there are still plenty of business owners and C-level folks who think of social media as a flash in the pan or all fun and games. The bottom line is that it’s a reality. Applying social media to business takes effort, time, commitment and empathy. To those that continue to dismiss social media before doing their due diligence, social media is going to continue to suck.

Have You Registered For Explore Minneapolis?

Don’t miss two days of intensive learning with some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the digital marketing and social media marketing space. Join SME’s Jason Falls and Nichole Kelly, The Now Revolution co-author Jay Baer, Edison Research’s Tom Webster, Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman, Neil Patel of Kissmetrics and more at one of the leading digital and social media marketing events of 2012, August 16-17 in Minneapolis, Minn. DON’T WAIT TO REGISTER! Seats are filling fast! Reserve yours today!

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is of the guest variety and offered up by my friends Gini Dietrich and Geoff Livingston. Their new book, Marketing in the Round, is out and available. They are smart. It is good. Pay attention.

The world of marketing in small and large businesses is a siloed one. Companies have ad campaigns, PR plans, social media strategies, and websites built independently and bolted together in a haphazard manner. It’s surprising how rarely these disciplines work together to achieve corporate objectives like establishing a second vertical for a product, or increasing website sales by 30 percent year-over-year.

Multichannel strategy revolves around choosing and weaving tactics across media type to achieve these objectives. Our new book Marketing in the Round provides means and methods to do that in the current of era of widespread corporate social media adoption.

Here’s a sneak preview on method.

Tactical choices begin with objectives. Strong marketing programs begin by setting corporate objectives and goals. From there marketers examine the resources at hand, competitive positioning, and the general market landscape. This research allows them to determine a primary market approach, which is usually led by one of the disciplines, direct marketing, PR, advertising, or social media/interactive.

Once an approach is selected, that’s where the ball drops. But understanding how cross disciplinary tactics support the overarching approaches empowers strong collaboration across marketing programs to achieve goals. Individual disciplines can determine which tactics to use to help out.

Let’s use social as an example.

When a primary approach is selected it’s usually because of the resources at hand. But a company often has multiple sources of resources. If a public relations campaign blends a launch event and PR to market a new product, why not use the company’s normal social media resources that week to provide a live stream of the event, and direct customer interactions on social network sites?

Perhaps you can give special access to the influential voices who are active within your community. An infographic can be released on your blog to help make the cases. Special research or additional content can be developed and released. Or you can crowdsource pictures and other content from customers who first get their hands on the product, and share them across your network.

Nikon recently released their much anticipated D4 DSLR camera to the professional photography marketplace. In addition to its conventional top-down PR campaign, Nikon continued its tradition of giving new DSLRs to influential bloggers to shoot photographs with and review. Further, the company disseminated early photos with the camera to give bloggers something to talk about when the camera was released. The launch was received with widespread conversation online.

There are so many ways to creatively weave social media into a PR campaign, it makes no sense not to do it in the planning phase. You are limited only by resources and imagination.

Weaving social media into other primary approaches is equally easy. Consider a company that interacts directly with customers as their primary focus. Social media is the ideal medium to have one on one conversations with them. That includes the usual Twitter/Facebook/Pinterest (or other network) customer responses, loyalist programs in small crowdsourcing or private communities, niche-oriented content, and more.

Five Guys is a great example of a company that built its brand through great product (if you’re into burgers) and customer service programs. The company spends very little money on public relations and advertising, but it does invest in social media. Five Guys sees its participation online as a primary way to continue providing excellent customer service and interactions.

It all gets back to the strategy session and making sure everyone sits at the table and weighs in on how they can help achieve overarching goals. If you are a solo marketer – as is the case with many small businesses – go beyond independent programs. Assume your customer sees more than one type of communication from you, and see how you can use social to drive deeper engagement, loyalty and sales from them.

During that strategy session you should have goals that drive every decision you make. In the selection of approach and then tactics, it’s important to build SMARTER goals into your program. How will social help increase sales? By adding a social media virtual event product launch, we will increase our traditional new product lead generation during the first week by 30 percent. Having clear attainable goals let’s you manage the campaign in process, and takes the mystery out of social media ROI and outcomes.

Geoff Livingston (geofflivingston.com) is an author and marketing strategist, and serves as VP, Strategic Partnerships for Razoo. A former journalist, Livingston continues to write, and most recently he co-authored Marketing in the Round, and authored the social media primer Welcome to the Fifth Estate.

Gini Dietrich is the founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich, a Chicago-based integrated marketing communication firm. She also is the founder of the professional development site for PR and marketing pros, Spin Sucks Pro and co-author of Marketing in the Round.

I once provided counsel for a company that had little confidence in social media marketing. It begrudgingly decided it would hire a consultant, go through some strategic exercises and probably prove that social media was bullshit and it would be better off sticking with its traditional guns.

The brand’s insistence with my work, as is with most clients I’ve dealt with, was that we measure everything as infinitely as possible. Skeptics are like that. They want to know how many clicks, how many re-tweets, how many milliseconds the time-on-site number increases each month, even if none of those measures really matter. Social Media Explorer has always been more partial to sales and lead conversion or at least metrics that match the client’s business goals. We reported those as well and met the client’s expectations.

Picture of a common measuring tape in inches. It is divided into 1/32nd of an inch. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

And after a few months and some short-term measurable impact through social media, they cut the cord. The metrics were good, but not eye-popping. And probably not as good as their last ad campaign. Skeptics don’t care that social media is not advertising and there needs to be time spent building a relationship with customers there. They want a 5.9 rating overnight or 150,000 impressions … or at least a promise that 150,000 issues of the magazine their quarter-page ad appeared in were distributed somehow.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not upset the client decided social wasn’t for them. Best to explore and find out than to A) Not know or B) Explore, hate it and keep on banging your head against the wall. Some brands … or more specifically brand managers or CMOs … are just better suited to put social media off for the next guy or gal in charge. And maybe they’ll hear me yammering on about approaching social media marketing strategically and that you can measure if you plan to do so and give Social Media Explorer a shot.

But here’s the rub with companies like the one described above: A friend recently saw an advertisement for them … trailing the back of a bi-plane at a large, outdoor event.

And what, pray tell, infinite metrics did they get from that?

The digital space offers unprecedented access to lots of things. None is more compelling than the measures we can produce for clients. But those metrics are going to offer brands one thing they didn’t expect: honesty.

They’ve never gotten that before.

No matter how many of anything we report, no matter what percentage increase month-over-month, no matter what definitive conversion rate averages … nothing, and I mean nothing, will ever beat, “50,000 people may have seen your ad!”

Have You Registered For Explore Minneapolis?

Don’t miss two days of intensive learning with some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in the digital marketing and social media marketing space. Join SME’s Jason Falls and Nichole Kelly, The Now Revolution co-author Jay Baer, Edison Research’s Tom Webster, Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman, Neil Patel of Kissmetrics and more at one of the leading digital and social media marketing events of 2012, August 16-17 in Minneapolis, Minn. DON’T WAIT TO REGISTER! Seats are filling fast! Reserve yours today!

Editor’s Note: In light of our recent affirmation that forums and message boards are a bountiful home for consumer interaction and engagement around brands and products, I thought it appropriate to invite some solid expertise here to help advise us on how to proceed in exploring online forums for marketing purposes. Today’s guest post is by the person I regard as the foremost expert on managing online forums in the U.S., if not the world, Patrick O’Keefe.

I regularly find myself in the position of having to defend online forums, without actually wanting to be put into that position.

It’s kind of awkward and strange because forums don’t need defending. They don’t need me. They don’t need anyone. Forums were around before you got into “social” (professionally) and they’ll be around after you make your exit.

Yet, I regularly run across people who compartmentalize them in a way that is odd and unfair. It usually goes something along the lines of: forums are old, dying, outdated, no one uses them and they never evolve. These thoughts are incorrect. When these comments are made, most of the time, the person just doesn’t understand forums and needs to make a bold statement to appear confident.

Example forum view, from PhpBB. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For some reason, some people choose to look at different tools and different platforms in an adversarial way. As if convincing themselves that it is “Facebook vs. Forums” makes their lives easier or more manageable. I don’t understand this.

I started in “social” (or, as I like to call it, online community management) in 2000. For a year or two before that, I had done some forum moderation. If you could see the tools we had at our disposal 12 years ago and compare them to the tools that we have now, you wouldn’t be thinking in an adversarial way. You’d be thinking in a grateful way, amazed and appreciative of the choices that we now have available to us, when it comes to all of the tools and platforms.

I may have written a book about managing online forums, but I use and love Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, LinkedIn, SlideShare and other platforms. It is never an either/or scenario. It is a matter of choice and using what will work best for you. In this post, I’ll be discussing how you can get the most out of a forum you don’t own or operate, as a brand representative of some sort, whether that be agency or in-house.

The Power of Forums

When you type a question into Google, there is a fair chance that you will end up at a forum. And I literally mean a question about anything. Electronics, cooking, car repair, vacations, taxes – anything. Why is this? Is it because forums game the search engines better than anyone else?

No, actually, it’s sort of the opposite. Search engines are finding where real knowledge is shared and exchanged and it is bubbling to the top of their results.

Pick a topic. It doesn’t matter what. There are online forums dedicated to that topic where people are engaging in a meaningful, passionate way right at this second. In many cases, this also extends to products, companies, celebrities and more. If you are trying to reach people interested in that topic, this is the place you need to be.

What is true of most generic platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and Google+, is that people use them to share their thoughts on anything and to engage with individuals. If you want to check up on your friend from college, you use Facebook. If you want to share a random thought that popped into your head, you use Facebook or Twitter. But, if you want to discuss the martial arts with other passionate martial artists, you go to a martial arts forum.

In the entire social web, generally speaking and with plenty of exceptions, forums are where the deepest, most engaging conversation around specific topics and interests occurs.

When Jason told me that 90% of the discussions occurring online around banks and bank products were in forums, I was a little surprised. Not because I didn’t think that a lot of it occurred there, but just because I thought there might be a broader mix. But, it makes sense. If you want to ask questions about banks and discuss bank products, where do you go? To your Facebook friends? Or to an online community dedicated to finance, banking and/or investment? (And yes, if you have a friend who is uniquely qualified to offer expertise, you’d probably go to them, as well).

Forums Are a Different Beast

I run into people who use Facebook and Twitter and then are perplexed that they weren’t allowed to post a link on a forum. They think they should be able to do what they do on Twitter on my forums and when they can’t, they think that I am being difficult. When, in reality, they are guilty of thinking they are entitled to something, which is ugly.

You have to consider the nature of online forums and structured online communities. On Twitter, I have to opt-in to you. I have to click the “Follow” button to see what you say. The same is true on Facebook. You don’t enter my stream unless I explicitly opt-in. These are your profiles. This is not the case on forums where everyone can see everything. It is a community space and not your space. As such, the guidelines for the forum must be respected at all times.

You have to think of each forum like its own country. One forum will have totally different guidelines and social norms from another. Many countries subscribe to similar standards of law, but even in those cases, there can be local laws and slight differences than what you are used to.

Failing to understand this can lead to backlash and can end up with you being rightfully tarred as a spammer. Do you think that it is easier to ask for permission, than forgiveness? Not on forums. It’s hard to ask for forgiveness when you’ve already been banned. Initially, joining in a forum may seem scary. But, it’s really not that bad once you have the proper handle on it.

Understanding How to Engage on Forums

It is easy enough to locate a forum that has an audience you’d like to reach. Perhaps they are already talking about your company or product. Or you did a Google search for “<insert your topic here> forums” or “<topic> community” (without the quotes) and found a forum that you can identify with. Generally speaking, you only want to join forums where the level of conversation is one that you and your company can comfortably be associated with.

When you join a forum, you are joining to contribute to that forum. Not to take advantage of it and not to siphon people off to your website. I recently had someone join a forum that I manage and they started a thread to link people to a blog post they had written. This was removed and I sent the member a nice, polite message to let them know. In his response, the member said that he didn’t have time to post replies on my forums or any forums, only to link to his blog, because “life is too short.”

That’s great. Just don’t expect to be welcome on many forums. You have to want to be there. If you don’t, it shows and people will pick up on it. If you are actually interested in contributing, let’s talk about how you can get started on the right foot. An individual forum may allow you to go further than what I describe below, but to understand that, you must become better acquainted with the community and, perhaps, talk with the staff. What I lay out here will give you a good foundational basis for that.

The Guidelines Are Your Friend

Pretty much every forum worth engaging in has posted policies of some kind. Read these closely. Some brand representatives see this and think they are the enemy and that your job is to find a way around them to push a message or advertise something. This is a bad way to look at them.

The guidelines are actually your best friend. They serve as a vision statement for the community, discussing what is allowed, what isn’t and what sort of people will be attracted to the forums. For you, they are a cheat sheet. They give you a leg up on what you can expect.

You should always respect the guidelines. Never bend them, let alone break them.

Observe the Norms

Before you jump in, take a look around. See how others contribute and how top posters and especially staff members share. Like the guidelines, this will help you to feel comfortable and to participate in a manner that respects the community. Get the lay of the land, like you would in any environment that you are new to.

Your Signature is Where You Link and Identify Yourself

If the community allows you to have a signature and include links in it (check those guidelines), that is where you can include a link to your stuff.

Just as important, depending on whom you are and who you work for, is the need to identify yourself, in the interests of full disclosure. It is vital that people know of the relationships that you may have to companies and interests discussed on the forum so that they can view your words accordingly and trust your perspective.

To try to hide these affiliations is ethically and, perhaps, legally wrong. If you share thoughts that relate to the company you represent and people find out that you are affiliated with them, you are dead. If you share thoughts that relate to competitors of your company and people learn of your affiliation, you are dead. If you comment on interests and initiatives that may, in some way, help or harm your company and people learn of your affiliation, again, you are dead. Always, always disclose.

If you are stupid and slimy enough not to disclose, you better be lucky enough to get away with it because a small enough company can be killed by the resulting attention. Many of the people who try to deceive members of a community are eventually caught because they did it for too long and got too greedy. It just takes one minor detail and then you are exposed and your name is dirt.

One last note on signatures and identification. On a forum, a person posts – not a company. For example, “Social Media Explorer” doesn’t create posts. Instead, Jason Falls, the CEO of Social Media Explorer is the one who posts and this is clearly identified. A person at the company contributes to a forum, not the company itself. It’s a small, but important distinction.

Contribute ON the Community

You participate in a forum to contribute to the forum. Not to send people elsewhere. The one exception to this might be the case of, for example, a software company that has a substantial knowledgebase and FAQ. If you join a forum you don’t run and answer questions by simply linking to your FAQ over and over again, that might come across as a bit spammy.

Instead, your job is to add value to the forums themselves, not to send people in a million different directions. Even if it means copying and pasting answers from your own FAQ, rather than linking to it. It may be OK for you to link to an FAQ conservatively, but run that by the staff first.

That sort of example aside, answer questions in the forums and provide answers in the forums themselves. Not as links to articles or blog posts that you’ve written. When you provide value and when you provide good answers, that is where you see the real value of forums. People respect your knowledge and look to you for your expertise. They look at your signature, visit your website and you are top of mind for them when they think of that particular topic. Forums are a tremendous way to demonstrate genuine expertise.

This is tricky because it isn’t the cleanest thing to measure and the people who think you can measure everything will be disappointed. As my friend Ted Sindzinski said recently in an article on social ROI, “as good as metrics are, they only tell you the story of how to grow those metrics and that isn’t always a part of the greater tale of what’s making you succeed.”

Contribute Good Stuff

It’s important to contribute good stuff for the reasons we just discussed, but also because posts on forums can live on “forever.” You need to be aware of what you contribute and ensure that you are adding value and representing yourself and your brand in a positive manner. Many large forums have outlived many of the buzz social media platforms that have come, gone and are no longer accessible.

When you make a post, count on it being accessible for a very long time. On forums, you can’t just delete a message or close an account, like you might delete a tweet or close your Twitter account. When you contribute to a forum, your contribution is linked to the contributions of others and removing those contributions damages what others have added by removing the context. For this very good reason, many forums will not allow for the mass removal of posts.

Don’t (Be the First) to Mention Your Stuff!

A great guideline to follow is to never be the first to mention your company, product or services. Don’t be the first to introduce your commercial interests into a thread. If someone brings it up, excellent, you can probably thank them or answer their questions on the forum.

But, you don’t want to start a thread to say “hey, my company exists!” You don’t want to be the first person to mention your new product. You don’t (obviously, I hope) want to post press releases. You are here to offer value, not mention your company. I suspect that some of you reading this may say, “well, then I’ll just befriend a veteran member and persuade/pay him or her to mention my stuff.” No. Stop. Don’t do that, either. That falls into the whole disclosure issue I described and, frankly, is sad. You’ll get caught and you’ll pay for it. As someone who has caught people and made them pay, trust me when I say you will pay.

There may be dedicated sections in a forum where it is OK to mention your stuff. Make sure that you understand the particular guidelines for participating in those sections and that you participate in an exemplary manner.

If You Are Ever in Doubt, Ask the Staff

Finally, if you ever have any question as to whether or not something is OK, ask a staff member. Usually you can do so privately, which is ideal, but sometimes you might have to do it in a dedicated forum. It’s amazing to me how many people miss this step and assume it is OK to post that message advertising something that I then have to remove. By then, they’ve already got a strike against them and we have a negative relationship.

When you ask a staff member, you are giving yourself complete confidence in posting. Generally speaking, the staff will appreciate that you asked first, rather than doing something that was inappropriate and led to them having to spend time cleaning it up. Plus, you will also be building a respectful relationship with them, which can help you down the road if you have any ideas for a partnership or more traditional advertising campaign.

Conclusion

The social web is a big place. It’s always funny to me when I meet people who think it primarily consists of Facebook and Twitter. If you believe that, you really are missing a majority of the social web. It’s a lot bigger and more diverse than that.

Forums and structured, focused communities offer a great deal of value, representing a concentrated audience of the people that you probably want to reach. They are engaging now, around your company, your products and your industry. I’m not saying everyone should join a forum and start contributing, just that you should be aware of them as a legitimate, powerful platform. Engaging with individual forums should be a strategic option you consider, right alongside engaging with people on Facebook and Twitter. They are worth your consideration.

Patrick O’Keefe is the founder of the iFroggy Network and has been managing online forums and communities since 2000. He authored the book “Managing Online Forums,” blogs at ManagingCommunities.com and can be found on Twitter @iFroggy.

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Brian S. McGowan, PhD, is a research scientist and author of the forthcoming fall 2012 release of #SOCIALQI: Simple Solutions for Improving Your Healthcare.

Healthcare in the U.S. is provided across a frighteningly broken and fragmented system of providers and institutions. As a result, the quality of American healthcare is consistently ranked among the worst in the developed world, and costs incurred per patient are 2-5 times higher than in comparable countries. Our problem isn’t that we’re incapable of providing high-quality care – in pockets throughout the country, we provide the most effective care in the world. Our problem is that for every five-star healthcare system we support, there are a dozen systems struggling to stay up-to-date.

Our healthcare system is broken because it’s fragmented. Information fails to flow freely, and best practices are treated as competitive, proprietary elements. In a healthcare culture that spends millions advertising “We’re #1,” it comes as no surprise that someone else has to be #2, #3, or even #50. This is entirely intentional. This situation is created by the restriction of information – and it can be salvaged, in turn, by improving information flow. This is where social media can pay big dividends.

The Value of Social Learning

If you ask physicians what they like best about the continuing education courses they take, they’ll tell you that they enjoy engaging with other doctors in the hallways; they love the interactivity of the sessions. If you followed those same physicians back to their workplaces and asked how they answer the questions that are raised over the course of a normal workday, they’d tell you that they consult with a colleague. What they won’t say, probably because they lack the perspective, is that the majority of learning that occurs over a medical career is social learning. My proposition is that social media applications, like Twitter, are the natural evolution of the social learning that takes place in hallways and lecture halls throughout the country. The added benefit is that social media can extend learning across time and space so questions can be posed, and answered, by broader audiences of healthcare professionals.

How Should Medical Practices Utilize Social Media?

Social media applications have three primary uses for physicians and healthcare systems. The first is the provision and coordination of patient care. Here the general, open applications like Facebook and Twitter should not be used, or should be used only in very narrow circumstances, because of issues pertaining to privacy and liability. There are new enterprise platforms being developed that add a social layer to the workflow of healthcare professionals to enable a collaborative care model. The second use is as a vehicle for engaging the public in a broad conversation about preventative health and disease management. Here the general, open applications like Facebook and Twitter are the perfect vehicle to disseminate new information about health and wellness. These channels also help the practice or institution promote itself across the community. The third use is as a vehicle for education and staff development. Here a combination of general, open applications and enterprise platforms ensure that information flows across the organization and that novel best practices and latest advances are integrated quickly and effectively into the organization as needed.

Of the three uses, it is the first that offers the greatest upside, but also the greatest challenge; the second may not have the greatest return for the effort. For this reason I advise organizations and healthcare professionals to embrace bucket #3 – to implement a model for effective learning and professional development through social media. This is a safe and relatively simple first step to extract the greatest value from the first and second buckets.

How Should Patients Use Social Media?

Patients’ perspectives on health are, understandably, very different from their doctors’. One of the first questions that patients ask themselves after being diagnosed is, “Am I alone?” Being a patient is frightening, and feeling isolated in your diagnosis makes the experience much, much worse.

Image via CrunchBase

Social media ensures that patients can find one another, they can offer support, and they can offer counsel. Facebook groups allow patients to support a cause. Hashtags and tweetchats on Twitter allow patients to share, to curate, and to engage in dialogue. Platforms like ACOR and CaringBridge allow for more in-depth conversations when Twitter character limits just won’t suffice. Importantly, patients may just want to lurk or they may want to remain anonymous in their plight or affliction, and many social media applications have been developed with that need in mind.

In closing, I offer a few words of caution: what you share online may never be truly protected. Data breaches happen, and information can live in “the cloud” forever. Regulations have been slow to protect health-related information that’s shared through social media channels. My advice is to be protective of your personal information, but to not be paralyzed – the benefits of supporting health and wellness through social media far outweigh the risks.

Brian S. McGowan, PhD, is a research scientist who has worked as a medical educator, mentor, accredited provider and commercial supporter. McGowan is author of the forthcoming fall 2012 release of #SOCIALQI: Simple Solutions for Improving Your Healthcare. Connect with Brian on Twitter: @BrianSMcGowan

A number of my friends either are, or plan to soon be, writing their first books. I’m really excited for them. I was in their shoes a year ago, plowing through writes, rewrites and edits, putting thoughts on paper and hoping someone out there would think the topic was interesting enough to plop down $24 for a book about it.

All of the folks I’m referring to, in addition to several others, have asked me if writing a book is worth it. While there are few thrills for someone who classifies themselves as a writer more pleasing than seeing your name on a real, hard-bound piece of literature on the shelves of a real bookstore, I thought it appropriate to share a few thoughts with you on the value of writing a book.

The Book-Only Perspective

From a strictly business perspective, and looking at the book project as a singular business venture, writing a book is a horrible idea. This doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing … keep reading. But the simple math looks like this (based on my experience as well as conversations with other author friends):

• The average book advance for a first-time author is probably $10,000 to $15,000.
• The average time it will take you to research and write your first book (assuming it’s a 300-page, business book) is probably about 100 hours.
• The average time it will take you to edit your first book (same assumptions) is probably about 25 hours.
• The average time it will take you to plan the marketing and promotions of your first book, including booking speaking gigs and the like, is probably about 10 hours.
• The average time you will spend on the road promoting and speaking about your first book, provided you want to aggressively sell the bejeezus out of it and perhaps even hit a few best-seller lists, is about another 100 hours (and that’s conservative).
• So let’s say you get paid a $15,000 advance and put in 235 hours. You’re basically getting paid about $64 per hour.
• The $15,000 is an advance on your royalties. So you don’t actually get paid more than that until your book sells enough copies to account for $15,000 of your cut. This is probably going to be about 10,000-12,000 books. Most modestly successful business books sell about 5,000-8,000 copies. So, chances are, you’re not going to see a dime beyond the $15,000.

I don’t know about you, but my hourly rate is a bit north of $64. So looking at a book deal alone, it’s a no-brainer: Go do something else.

Bookshelf (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Honestly, if you self-publish, you can earn far more than the $2.00 or so per book you’ll get with a publishing company. But you don’t have distribution channels like Barnes & Noble, etc., to help you, so you’re sacrificing reach for per-book profit. While many, like Mark Schaefer, have self-published very successfully, I can tell you from personal experience that Scott Stratten could never have texted me from Melbourne, Australia, to say he just saw No Bullshit Social Media in a store had I not been with a legit publisher.

I’m sure Mark and several other self-publishers have made more than $15,000 on their books. But you’re going to need a large online audience and a hell of a topic for your book to be able to hit that number. For me, self-publishing is not a smart route if you don’t have a built-in audience of 50,000 or more blog readers, Twitter followers and the like that can account for buying 5,000 or so books. No, the numbers don’t sound high on what you need to sell, but it’s harder to get people to buy that many than you think.

And depending upon your content, maybe a paid e-book or even a “report” is a better option. Social Media Explorer is about to launch our first market research report, The Conversation: What Customers Are Saying About Banking. It will be priced at around $300 (for an approximate 100-page report) and focused on a narrow industry. But if we sell just 50 of them, the revenue will greatly exceed what I’ve made from my first book, thus far.

The Book-Plus Perspective

The reason you actually write and publish a book is not to make money from sales. Unless you’re Stephen King. You write and publish a book for credibility. That credibility allows you to charge more for what you did before.

As a social media marketing consultant, my hourly rate increased. As a professional public speaker, my fee increased. In a matter of days (on or around Sept. 15, 2011), my hourly rate jumped $50 per hour (which was conservative … I could have gone up $150). My speaking fees almost doubled. (I’m still one of the cheapest social media keynote speakers on the market, though.)

As a result, I’ve probably pulled in about $40,000 in additional revenue from September 15, 2011 until now. When you look at that perspective, writing a book is a no-brainer: Write your ass off!

But Honestly …

The worst thing I could do here is mislead you. There’s a lot more that goes into the Book-Plus perspective than just getting a book published. I know a number of people who have published books who didn’t already have an established presence or professional public speaking career to speak of and, thus, weren’t able to capitalize on the opportunity.

Sure, they raised their rates, but a book alone isn’t going to allow you to go from charging $100 per hour to $200 per hour. You’re going to need a sizable online following or audience, some strong client pedigree and the drive to go after clients willing to pay more for your services. You’re not going to be able to go from charging $2,000 for a speaking engagement to $5,000 without that same sizable audience, some really crisp keynote talks and some word-of-mouth buzz that you’re good at holding a room and delivering a great talk.

Having a book brings you credibility, but it’s not going to close the deal for you. You’re still going to have to be a stud at lots of other things before you can make “published author” translate to more dollars.

There are lots of other secrets and insights I could share about being an author, the book writing process, the book publishing world and the like. But those are for another time. (Not to mention, I don’t want to make my publisher any more freaked out than they are that I wrote this. Heh.) This gives you what I think is an honest look at what the business of writing a book is really like. Hopefully, it will help you figure out whether or not you want to dive in and get published.

Good luck!

Next Tuesday I’ll help Spredfast kick off a neat webinar series that is focused on helping you “Spruce up your Social This Spring.” The social media management solution provider has gathered myself, Michael Brito, Jeremiah Owyang, Kristen Sussman of Social Distillery, Amy Kalm from Intuit and Tom Carusona of Aramark, along with Spredfast’s awesome team of social strategists and marketers to help you learn more about three key topics over the course of the next five weeks.

Tuesday, I’ll co-host the opening webinar on Creating and Using Great Social Content with Sussman and Spredfast’s Ellen Westcott. We’ll talk about content strategies, how to repurpose content and go through the list of questions and ideas you can use to inspire yourself to produce content that produces natural engagement from and with your audience. Sign up for Tuesday’s opener and join us!

On June 5, Brito, the EVP of Social Business for Edelman Digital and author of the book Smart Business Social Business, Kalm and Spredfast’s Director of Social Media Jordan Slabaugh will tackle the topic of knowing and delighting your customer. This webinar will be focused on helping you consistently produce a compelling social experience for your audience, to keep them hooked and your brand top of mind. Register for that session and learn!

On June 26, Owyang, Carusona and Spredfast CMO Jim Rudden will dive into Organizing and Creating Social Program Processes. This will help you take the theory to activation and show you the steps to help guarantee success in implementing your social programs. Register for the June 26 webinar as well!

All the sessions are free and open to anyone. For registering, you’ll also get a copy of Spredfast’s 7 Whiteboard Sessions for Every Social Strategist whitepaper.

Go ahead, register and join us so we can all Spruce up our Social!