Like many of you, I am a fan of Seth Godin and a regular reader of his blog posts, and a number of his books. I think he is a very intelligent man and I agree with his stance on marketing and communicating in a digital world.

Just now though, I was reading one of his latest posts and it occurred to me that although for many, the pinnacle of success is to have something “go viral”, a concept (viral marketing) that was created by Godin, perhaps it shouldn’t be our holy grail after all.

The word viral has been made synonymous something that is shared on a massive basis, something suitably “contagious” – like the Gangnam Style video with its billion plus views.

The thing I find interesting about virality is that it doesn’t guarantee success of any kind, other than numbers of views. The content most likely to go viral is not commercial at all, with a fairly small number of exceptions where a company has worked very hard and invested significant time, resource and creativity to come up with content that people will still love, despite the commercial aspect of it.

But what occurred to me tonight, is that when we are talking about sharing, shouldn’t we be looking at a word that is more user friendly than a viral illness? Going viral is equivalent to an epidemic – something like the plague. Is that really what we are trying to achieve?

How about a new term, that also implies sharing, but is more user friendly … something like ‘communal’ perhaps. Communal marketing? Going communal?

The sharing of content among a community of like minds. The contribution to that content by others in the community, making it better than the original, adding value and quality. How often is it the awesome comment threads beneath a video or a FB post that really make it worth viewing and sharing further?

Seems to me, that perhaps 2013 is a year for moving on from viral, rephrasing and acknowledging that there has been a shift.

For businesses and organisations that really want to see their potential audiences/customers engaged, lets aim for “communal” content instead.

Seems to me that it’s time for some change. My wish for 2013 (and the years that follow) is that I come across, read about and hear about more and more people in positions of power choosing to put people first.

People before profit, before political party lines, before religious rigidity.

Is it so difficult for those holding the reins to loosen them long enough to actually see and listen to what it is that resonates with people, that helps make a difference in the lives of the many rather than the few. To recognise that massive wealth, power and control is really not an end in itself, and that the driving force behind those motivations is most often fear?

The line between true leadership, and a paternalistic “of course we know best” approach is at times a thin one, and at others, a gaping wide divide.

My belief is that leaders need to gather information of all kinds – not just the facts of a situation, but also the impacts on individuals, families, workplaces and communities. What is the human cost of every decision and how can we make this better?

Leaders need to be open to new ideas and approaches, rather than stubbornly clinging to the ways things have “always been done” – which of course is never really true … everything evolves as a matter of course over time.

They need the ability to combine all of this, as well as their own thoughts and their vision of the road ahead to produce something that is workable and takes people to a place they couldn’t achieve alone, while making them genuinely feel involved and considered in the process.

Excluding and overriding people in the process of change is the fastest route to guaranteed dissent, revolution and resistance – no matter how brilliant the plan. Inclusion is key to enabling a process to continue, and who knows, that inclusiveness may also produce some gems that create something unique and spectacular as an outcome.

So I am looking forward to a year of brilliance, of inclusion and unexpectedly stunning outcomes. I think it is possible – do you?

Every blogger loves to see regular traffic coming into their blog. Some of us don’t care how people find us, just that they do – somehow.

It’s one of several modern versions of the ever delightful popularity contest that has emerged in the world of social media.

Funny thing is, the main traffic to my blog these days seems to be people looking for a Reddit image.

Just the Reddit logo – and for whatever reason, the Reddit logo I used happens to rank highly in image search.

Yep this image right here.

Question I have is, why so many searching for the Reddit logo? And why does mine rank so highly in image search? There are plenty of others, they all look pretty much the same tbh.

Is it because they are writing gratuitous blog posts like this one?

If you came here by clicking on the reddit image, take a second or three to comment about what you were looking for and why – go on, I dare you.

And if you are  redditor, you will fully appreciate The Oatmeal’s visualisation of Reddit taking down Digg …

Happy New Year!

My new philosophy – in fact I’m thinking of writing a book about it, is just that.

If you want to keep your clients and customers, and win new ones, and keep your employees – and recruit new ones, just keep it simple. Don’t piss them off.

Seems straightforward and obvious doesn’t it?

But apparently it’s not, or else there wouldn’t be so many people out there who are pissed off with companies, brands and bosses.

There wouldn’t be so many “social media gurus” making a very nice living out of trying to alleviate social media crises for clients with pissed off customers, and putting out guides on how to manage their social media channels.

How about, if business decision makers, before making their next decision about cutting corners on product quality, or sending their call centres offshore, or making any of the decisions they make every day that put profit or margins before people, just paused in their process, and asked – will this piss people off?

What is the “PPO factor” of this decision?

And what will that potentially cost us as an organisation?

Seems to me, a lot of decisions would be quite different if the PPO factor was fully taken into account. The short term benefits in terms of cost savings needs to be weighed against long term damage to a brand, which can utimately translate into some serious dollars.

And before you try to quote superficial articles like the recent one in Fast Company (nope not gifting them a link) that used a Bill Cosby (the business genius right?) quote about the key to failure being trying to please everyone, let’s just look at a few of the shockingly bad decisions arrogant CEOs, brand managers and various other powers-that-be have made on behalf of businesses:

New Coke – yeah they tried to fix something that definitely wasn’t broken in the minds of their customers, and had to retrench and release Coke Classic. A blunder that could have been avoided if their customers were truly at the heart of decision making.

Our friends at Walmart - tried to cut corners by denying employees their legal entitlement to lunch breaks. And ending up having to pay $172 million in compensation to workers, in just one of the successful lawsuits brought against them.

Hell Pizza – a kiwi brand that has made a reputation for trying to piss off as many people as possible it seems. And some of their loyal customers love them for it. But when the people getting angry are their own franchisees, and the “humour” goes over the line into insensitive and deeply inappropriate messages on social media channels, Hell’s owners need to stop and pay attention. Hell’s history of controversial advertising and billboard campaigns has frequently flown very close to to wind, but the most recent events have not been from a planned marketing campaign as such, and have done perhaps irreparable damage to what was a high flying local brand.

This company has just come to my attention in the last day or so, and from what I can see, is doing it’s best to piss many people off, all in the name of profit and possibly just sheer mean spiritedness. The kind of meanness that could be purely at a nasty employee level, part of the culture or actually company policy. If it is company policy, then Expedia has far more to be concerned about and accountable for.

What does it take to really piss people off?

From what I’ve seen it takes a fair few times before people will overcome the play nice factor, the “everyone makes mistakes” and “we are only human” rationalisations, along with “perhaps they were just having a bad day”, “I don’t like to make a fuss”, “well we just won’t come back again” and “we need the money” – if it’s an employer at fault. We are mostly well trained to be well behaved, and keep our complaints behind closed doors, which allows a lot of companies to get away with far too much.

But eventually, people hit their breaking point – especially when it’s a company that has got away with far too much, for far too long – and they show no repentence or concern for those they have upset. Brands who acknowledge there is a problem, and let you know they are working to make it better, have far more tolerance credits in the bank than those who just patently don’t care.

And while I think about it, one of the “brands” that really pays a price when they piss enough people off, is a political brand. If your governing party shows arrogance and lack of concern on a daily basis, eventually they will pay a price for that. Unfortunately, some seem to think they can get away with making the unpopular decisions as long as they have at least six months before an election to sweet talk the voters back into liking them again. Are we really that gullible?

I know there’s more, but I would love you to share your experiences in the comments. When has a brand or an employer (or a political party) pissed you off? And how many times will you tolerate that before you finally snap and “go social” (today’s equivalent of going postal)?

Look forward to your thoughts.

With Facebook shares on a downward slide, if you were one of the early investors, then you would probably say not much. If you invested early and think FB has bottomed out, then according to the “dollar cost averaging” approach, now is the time to buy more shares, thus averaging out the per share cost across your portfolio.

If you are just a Facebook user, not an owner, is it working for you right now? How is your engagement and your ROI?

I have noticed recently a number of businesses on Facebook who seem to have gotten carried away drinking their own “follower numbers” Koolaid and forgotten just why they were there in the first place.

So I thought it might be timely to put a few reminders out there, re how and why to use Facebook to grow your business and traffic to your website, as well as an update on some of FB’s more recent features for business promotion that will work from the mobile Facebook platform.

Here we go.

1) Drive Facebook fans to your site.

How long has it been since one of your Facebook posts actually took people back to your website? Alternatively, do you make the mistake of every second post being a plug for your business, product or service? Seems that some businesses have gone too far in focusing on posts that generate likes or comments, and fail to post content that actually brings those engaged followers back into your website. On the other hand, relentlessly posting promotional content has the opposite effect. Recent recommendations suggest that making 1 in 6 posts self-promotional is a good rule of thumb. Keep in mind that one of the primary reasons for people following a page, apart from showing they like a brand, is to gain access to giveaways, discounts, deals and offers, particularly ones that are exclusive to Facebook followers. So don’t miss out on the chance to give people what they are looking for.

2) Use promoted posts.

Facebook’s foray into the stock exchange has made it imperative to monetise the mobile Facebook platform, which is used by more than 50% of Facebook users. (Having just released a much better version of their iOS app, demand for a new Android version is high and Facebook has apparently insisted that their staff use Android phones to help get them motivated). Setting the scene for businesses to pay for exposure to their followers was Facebook’s move to restrict how many followers actually see each post, and to show you that less than 20% of your followers actually sighted any one piece of content. The way to get around this? Well you pay Facebook of course … as a promoted post. Once your page hits 400 followers (according to my research – let me know if this has been revealed for you at any other number), you will see the ability to promote a post to your followers for a set $ amount, which ranges depending on your reach. It’s a one off cost, and worth it if you really want to connect and engage with those followers. The post is guaranteed to show up in the newsfeeds of your followers, which greatly increases the opportunity for them to engage.

3) Decide which metrics are meaningful for you.

Facebook insights gives you some good data, so have a careful review of what you can discover, then decide what makes the most sense based on your social media objectives. If one of your objectives is to drive traffic to your website, as per 1) above, spend a little time in your Google Analytics and check out the numbers under Social as a source of referrals. If you are trying to build followers and awareness of your brand, keep track of “talking about this” numbers. These numbers will head upwards significantly if you start promoting your best posts.

4) Get co-ordinated.

Ensure that all your ducks are in a row, across your website, Facebook, Adwords and any other promotional activity you are investing in. Make sure they work together, not against each other. Create a promotion, build a landing page on your site, set up your goal tracking in Analytics so you know if your ads are working. If you are running an event, ensure you also set it up on Facebook, give it plenty of mentions, drive traffic to it with Facebook ads, use promoted posts and possibly a Facebook deal if you have that option. Tie it altogether and put a bow on it!

Leveraging your marketing dollars is not hard, you just have to think it through and cover all your bases.

And that’s it for this post. Feel free to comment if you have any thoughts or want to let me know how well Facebook has been treating you lately.

In the world of light speed change that is the social media universe, being self-taught is the norm rather than the exception, and the average age of social media specialists gets younger every day.

Unfortunately, in this environment of no degrees, no rules, no hierarchy, some also seem to be suffering from a lack of respect.

Yes, you may be a “wunderkind” when it comes to getting eyeballs on social content, or launching the next ubiquitous meme, but the basic rules of business, teamwork and respect for others are still highly relevant.

It is not enough to be able to communicate brilliantly in the online world, it is still vital to be able to command the traditional set of face to face communication skills, in order to achieve positive outcomes for businesses and their customers.

Straddling online communities and offline workplaces means developing a set of skills that are equally relevant in both environments, but need to be finely honed to take into account the different expectations and etiquette in each.

Over time I have evolved a simple mantra for businesses wanting to use social media: Be Human. When it comes to face to face business interactions and building teams, Be Human still applies but I would add, Show Respect.

Respect the time, intelligence and experience of the people you are working with and for. Don’t assume that you are the most important conversation or interaction in their day, or that your schedule is more important than theirs.

Don’t assume they should want to drop everything to deal with your requests or issues.

Be appreciative when they do drop everything for you, and return the favour when you can.

Show humility when you are working as part of a team – blowing your own trumpet will usually just alienate your potential supporters. Let your work speak for itself, and if you are asked to talk about what you have to offer, then do so. Don’t take every 1 second gap in conversation as an invitation to talk about yourself, how great you are or your latest achievement.

Don’t assume that because you are under 25 you know more about the digital environment than your older team members. Sure you may not remember a world pre-internet, but that doesn’t mean you automatically know how to achieve a business ROI from social media, or how to maximise the nature of social for your company’s client base.

For every digital native who believes they have all the answers, there are many who are happy to learn from those around them, so I don’t want to tar all with the same brush … just to ask those who don’t seem to be prepared to listen, to think again and give respect where it’s due.

Are you overwhelmed yet? Ready to head for the hills and a social media detox? As a consultant advising our clients on what forms of social media they should be engaging in from a business perspective, the reality is that for many business owners, marketing managers and product managers, the world of social media is simply becoming more and more difficult to a) understand b) manage and c) demonstrate a ROI for.

Inevitably, the first thing I now recommend is that social media management either becomes part of the job description of several existing staff members, across marketing and customer support roles, or that it becomes a full time role for at least one staff member. Keep in mind that we are in New Zealand, where the majority of businesses employ less than 50 staff.

As things continue to move so rapidly, it also makes a lot of sense to partner with a company who make it their business to keep abreast of changes in the existing channels (like Facebook’s latest business page changes or the new apps for Google+ Hangouts), can digest the best information out there, and make the most relevant recommendations.

Specialist advisors can also help analyse the tremendous amounts of data available through the wide range of paid and unpaid social media listening/management tools, and develop focused strategies based on that data.

My advice for businesses who want or need to engage, but are feeling overwhelmed by their social media options, is:

1. Pick your playing field based on resource, target audience and priority. Don’t try and be all things to all people.
2. Be consistent across all channels – ensure your customers/clients will have the same experience no matter where they choose to engage with you.
3. Find out where your customers and potential customers spend their time and ensure you are there too.
4. Make good use of the data available to you to make strategic decisions about how and when to engage.
5. Always keep your overal marketing and business objectives in mind – after all they are the reason why you are doing this in the first place.

That’s all I have for now. If you have any tips to add, please leave them in the comments below.

Fresh from participating in iStrategy Sydney, I must say that one thing in particular stood out for me. No matter how much businesses and marketers want to find ways to monetise the social media experience, the fact remains that social channels are first and foremost for ‘ordinary people’ – that is, all of us, to enjoy connecting and communicating with each other, about things they find of interest – or equally, things they hate.

After listening to a number of speakers talk about the technologies they are either developing, or working with in their businesses, to monitor and mine data … that data being the aggregation of our personal comments and interactions across social channels, as it relates to a company’s brand, products or services … I believe that there is no real replacement for having a team of well trained, perceptive, communicative staff working inside those channels.

Human beings – not software algorithms or analytics.

Employing or redeploying staff to focus on social media – call them ‘online community managers’ , social media specialists or whatever you want, but realising that no technology substitutes for the ability of humans to gauge tone and sentiment towards your brand, and respond appropriately in a timely manner.

Keeping your fingers on the pulse of a number of high traffic/high engagement online communities (like Reddit for example) provides the opportunity for your team to notice, report on and decide the best response to anything that is trending in those communities. Many times there will be no need, or opportunity to respond, other times there may be some action you can take to pick up on something that is trending … with a humorous response to a popular meme, for example, or a video response to something that is rapidly going viral.

Being inside those communities every day means that you will be among the earliest groups of web users to be aware of what is going on … as opposed to those who pick up the same content and respond to it months after it has ceased to be of interest to those at the ‘bleeding edge’.

Software is never going to be able to do this for you, only well trained, well briefed and empowered staff will be able to do it.

Where do you draw the right staff from?

Possibly from a pr or marcomms background, ideally with existing strong online networks and experience of engaging in and moderating online communities.

If you have a brilliant front desk person looking for advancement, they could also make a perfect addition to your social media team – friendly, responsive, enjoy engaging with your customers or clients, able to direct queries to appropriate people in the company … all good attributes. As experienced ‘gatekeepers’ they often also have accutely honed instincts about the tone of a conversation, or what the motivations might be behind a particular person’s engagement with your company.

Creating a structure around daily online engagement is key to making this effective, with a system for quickly escalating anything that needs to be considered from a strategic standpoint.

Being equipped for an agile response will ensure your brand begins to be seen as being savvy, ahead of the game and continually relevant to online consumers.

As an example of how this can be managed, cast your mind back to the original “old spice man” campaign. The video ads were written and shot within a 48 hour period, and once they were released, personalised responses on twitter and YouTube flowed rapidly and with the same level of humour and intelligence as the original scripts.

If you can assemble a creative social media team who can not only monitor and respond to brand mentions, but also run creative campaigns and respond with relevant content, then you are well ahead of the majority of companies who are still afraid of sinking too much time and resource into social.

I would love to hear your stories and how you structure the roles of your social media teams within your business. Please feel free to share in the comments below.

So the buzz online seems to be all about Pinterest at the moment – and how it is driving more traffic than Twitter or Facebook to some sites.

Is that how it’s working for you? Are you on Pinterest yet?

Of course it’s another means of curating and sharing the things that you are interested in, although I have had a few friends ask if there is anyway to simply use it as a private resource without all the social sharing aspect of it. As yet, I haven’t discovered how to do that, so if you have worked it out – or know that it can’t be done, please post in the comments below.

Alongside Pinterest, although it has been around for longer, is paper.li – a platform that automatically creates a daily “paper” based on the content feeds and filters you set up.

Exploring paper.li tonight, I discovered that they recently launched Nomad, which enables you to embed paper.li content into a web page or blog. You can even have your paper.li page showing as a Facebook tab.

All of which is interesting for those who want to gather and share targeted information all in one place, but surely there must also be SEO benefits of these tools?

With Pinterest, everything that is pinned is also a backlink to the site you pinned it from, plus of course if the image is interesting or compelling enough, it will be re-pinned frequently and gain even more traction.

And the best part about it is that the links are Dofollow so they will actually be picked up by Google as a popularity indicator.

If you want to add the Pinterest button to your site, you can find the code here http://pinterest.com/about/goodies/

With paper.li it primarily focuses on retweets with links relating to the subject of the newspaper. So potentially, if you ensure you hashtag links you are retweeting, particularly of your own original content, then you may get a little traction in terms of traffic or even twitter followers.

It seems that the best way to stop your paper.li from becoming spammy is to use the manual rather than automatic option.

Again, I would be interested to know if anyone is seeing traffic coming through in their analytics with paper.li as a referring site.

Comment below on your experience and if you have seen any noticeable increase in traffic from either of these sources – I would love to hear what you have to say.

This week’s anti-SOPA protests, initiated largely by the Reddit online community, illustrated the power and reach of this community and their ability to mobilise for what they consider to be a worthwhile cause.

The Reddit world is all powerful, all consuming, inspiring fierce loyalty amongst its members, driving them to higher and higher levels of comment witticisms, each time walking the razor sharp edge of being voted up or down, and the consquences for their karma on the site.

For those members of the Reddit community who actually care about such things, and it appears they are legion, having a post that makes it to the first page of Reddit.com, with hundreds (maybe thousands) of upvotes, is more exciting than a promotion at work, winning free shit, the birth of your firstborn, or pretty much any other offline event.

So for the Reddit community to suggest a blackout, was effectively them agreeing to cut off their internet hookup for 24 hours – a major sacrifice, only lessened perhaps by the fact that they knew they weren’t going to miss out on anything while the site was blacked out.

A note re Reddit sharing …

A word to the wise, for those who are not die hard Redditors but unknowingly click the “share on Reddit” button on the bottom of blog posts, thinking Reddit is just another social platform to spread your content on.

Don’t.

Unless the content you are sharing is an incendiary critique of some kind, a completely new ‘meme’ about to take flight, an image that is spectacularly good or awful for some reason, a skilled parody with great (or really really bad) production values.  Just don’t.

Reddit is not a Digg substitute, just waiting to be gamed by random passers by for the purpose of SEOing links back to spam flavoured content.

Those who are successful Redditors succeed because they invest significant effort in crafting their witty, attention grabbing headlines and do their best to ensure the content they are linking to is original and of some benefit/interest to the wider Reddit community. They also regularly engage in comment threads, voting posts up and down, and consistently bring fresh content of value to the table.

Redditors are not people who happily link and retweet to any content that flashes through their Twitter feed.

Reddit is the place that pretty much every funny image, video, meme or parody your friends share on Facebook or Twitter comes from. Sometimes Redditors will have shared that content months before it gains enough viral traction to make it to your own circle of Facebook friends.

Oh and a link that makes it to the front page of Reddit? Can result in millions of hits, which is not for the fainthearted or those without a lot of bandwidth.

So if you’re up to the challenge, wearing your flame retardant knickers and are highly confident in what you have to share, by all means, take the plunge.

If not, can I suggest that you cease and desist … and all will be right in your world.

signed with caution,

Redditor’s wife