Flack's Revenge

3 Metrics to Help Stop Abandoned Blog Syndrome

The following is a guest post by Anne Giles Clelland of Handshake 2.0

Know thyself.

- Inscription at the Delphic Oracle

Know thyself.

Although the reasons for why we do what can be both, most of us tend to be one more than the other, either intrinsically or extrinsically motivated.

"Which are you?"

This is a question I have begun to ask clients who seek to increase a corporate online presence, particularly through a corporate blog.  Since I can write about clients, but not for them - social media is personal after all - and blogging is hard work, so hard that 95% of blogs are abandoned, if we know the answer to the intrinsic-extrinsic question from the outset, we can help avoid the “lights on, nobody home” Abandoned Blog Syndrome.

Clients who answer that they’re intrinsically motivated, frankly, have an easier time maintaining a blog.  They enjoy their ideas, gain satisfaction from expressing them in words, and appreciate seeing their own work online after they click “Publish.”  The process itself is the reward.

For extrinsically motivated clients, the way is more challenging.  When the reward comes from the results of the process, not from the process itself, what’s an extrinsically motivated blogger to do?

Monitor metrics.

Once a blog post is published, it’s globally accessible.  Each access to the post?  “Score!”

The premier metrics monitor is Google Analytics, but its comprehensive complexity makes using it a task akin to writing a blog post itself.

For the busy corporate blogger who welcomes extrinsic rewards, here are three metrics to check quickly to hear the crowd cheering.

Blog Software Metrics

Right there on the blogging software’s dashboard is a traffic hit counter.  As soon as the post goes up, the blogger can see when someone else has seen it, too.  If the company’s blogging software doesn’t offer metrics, I recommend ditching it and using software that does.  On a busy day, if checking other metrics doesn’t happen?  No reward, no motivation, no next blog post.

Fans and Followers

Once a blog post goes up, either automatically or manually, the extrinsically motivated blogger needs to share links to the post on Facebook and Twitter.  In an age of media fragmentation, the days of a blog being found by people are over.  A blog needs to be brought to the people.

A benchmark count right now of Facebook fans and Twitter followers is essential.  Then the blogger adds well-written posts with meaningful content to the blog followed by thoughtfully expressed updates to social media channels.  Tracking the number of fans and followers generated - or not - by each post lets the blog’s audience guide the blogger about what's valued and what isn't.  (I check fans and followers before a post, then about 8 hours later - that's about the lifespan of a blog post on its own.) The blogger takes the hint:  Write what they value.  More fans and more followers result.  Checking the original benchmark often and seeing the comparative increase can feel like applause.

Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)

Achieving results with a Google search results metric requires patience but can prove particularly rewarding to the extrinsically motivated business blogger doubting the R.O.I. of his or her efforts.  When people type search terms into search engines, 68% click a search result within the first page of results.  That means for 32% of search engine users, results on other pages essentially do not exist. 

When prospective customers uses a search engine to check out a company, what do they see on the first page?  If the company’s blog is not there - the personal expression of the company’s vision and mission - it can be.  High-value blog content, created consistently over time by a motivated blogger - whether through intrinsic or extrinsic reward - shared in social media channels, can move the blog to the first page.  A prospective customer can see what the company says, not only what others say about it.  If that blog-generated lead converts to a sale?  It's Hammer time.

Blogger, Know Thyself

My grandmother, just turned 100, still knits cotton yarn dishcloths for her daughters-in-law and granddaughters.  She finds knitting intrinsically satisfying and finds giving what she creates to those she loves extrinsically rewarding.  If she could not give her knitting away, would she still be motivated to do it?  Good question.  Answering for ourselves why we do what we do can give us great power to take actions that reward and inspire our motivation, whether to knit, to blog, even to consciously abandon a blog before we start it.

Anne Giles Clelland is the president of Handshake Media, Incorporated and founder of Handshake 2.0.

The following is a guest post by Anne Giles Clelland of Handshake 2.0

Know thyself.

- Inscription at the Delphic Oracle

Know thyself.

Although the reasons for why we do what can be both, most of us tend to be one more than the other, either intrinsically or extrinsically motivated.

"Which are you?"

This is a question I have begun to ask clients who seek to increase a corporate online presence, particularly through a corporate blog.  Since I can write about clients, but not for them - social media is personal after all - and blogging is hard work, so hard that 95% of blogs are abandoned, if we know the answer to the intrinsic-extrinsic question from the outset, we can help avoid the “lights on, nobody home” Abandoned Blog Syndrome.

Clients who answer that they’re intrinsically motivated, frankly, have an easier time maintaining a blog.  They enjoy their ideas, gain satisfaction from expressing them in words, and appreciate seeing their own work online after they click “Publish.”  The process itself is the reward.

For extrinsically motivated clients, the way is more challenging.  When the reward comes from the results of the process, not from the process itself, what’s an extrinsically motivated blogger to do?

Monitor metrics.

Once a blog post is published, it’s globally accessible.  Each access to the post?  “Score!”

The premier metrics monitor is Google Analytics, but its comprehensive complexity makes using it a task akin to writing a blog post itself.

For the busy corporate blogger who welcomes extrinsic rewards, here are three metrics to check quickly to hear the crowd cheering.

Blog Software Metrics

Right there on the blogging software’s dashboard is a traffic hit counter.  As soon as the post goes up, the blogger can see when someone else has seen it, too.  If the company’s blogging software doesn’t offer metrics, I recommend ditching it and using software that does.  On a busy day, if checking other metrics doesn’t happen?  No reward, no motivation, no next blog post.

Fans and Followers

Once a blog post goes up, either automatically or manually, the extrinsically motivated blogger needs to share links to the post on Facebook and Twitter.  In an age of media fragmentation, the days of a blog being found by people are over.  A blog needs to be brought to the people.

A benchmark count right now of Facebook fans and Twitter followers is essential.  Then the blogger adds well-written posts with meaningful content to the blog followed by thoughtfully expressed updates to social media channels.  Tracking the number of fans and followers generated - or not - by each post lets the blog’s audience guide the blogger about what's valued and what isn't.  (I check fans and followers before a post, then about 8 hours later - that's about the lifespan of a blog post on its own.) The blogger takes the hint:  Write what they value.  More fans and more followers result.  Checking the original benchmark often and seeing the comparative increase can feel like applause.

Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)

Achieving results with a Google search results metric requires patience but can prove particularly rewarding to the extrinsically motivated business blogger doubting the R.O.I. of his or her efforts.  When people type search terms into search engines, 68% click a search result within the first page of results.  That means for 32% of search engine users, results on other pages essentially do not exist. 

When prospective customers uses a search engine to check out a company, what do they see on the first page?  If the company’s blog is not there - the personal expression of the company’s vision and mission - it can be.  High-value blog content, created consistently over time by a motivated blogger - whether through intrinsic or extrinsic reward - shared in social media channels, can move the blog to the first page.  A prospective customer can see what the company says, not only what others say about it.  If that blog-generated lead converts to a sale?  It's Hammer time.

Blogger, Know Thyself

My grandmother, just turned 100, still knits cotton yarn dishcloths for her daughters-in-law and granddaughters.  She finds knitting intrinsically satisfying and finds giving what she creates to those she loves extrinsically rewarding.  If she could not give her knitting away, would she still be motivated to do it?  Good question.  Answering for ourselves why we do what we do can give us great power to take actions that reward and inspire our motivation, whether to knit, to blog, even to consciously abandon a blog before we start it.

Anne Giles Clelland is the president of Handshake Media, Incorporated and founder of Handshake 2.0.

Introducing Tomorrow's Topic and Guest Blogger

Blogging and Twitter offer a smorgasbord, a constellation of people to communicate with  and share info and ideas.  I am constantly amazed by this, and have "met" a bunch of great people that I otherwise never would have.

Yet, the word "met" needs to go in quotes because I have never actually met most of these people in real life.  As such, there are limits to how well I can really know them.  Many, if not most, seem like partially formed images. 

Then, there are those who do seem very vivid and real to me, despite the fact that we never met.  One such person is Anne Giles Clelland.  Anne is:

• An entrepreneurial, marketing and social media dynamo
• Pioneering news ways to help clients get value from social media; her blog Handshake 2.0 is one example
• A tireless booster for economic development in the Southwest Virginia locale that is her base of operations (she is up for a Rising Star Award at NewVa Corridor Technology Council TechNite 2010)
• A triathlete
• A former school teacher

I am pleased to say that Anne will be guest blogging here tomorrow on the topic of avoiding abandoned blog syndrome.

Good Pitch Blog (post)

I thought my last post, What is YOUR Brand of Social Media Snake Oil?, was provocative, and might stir up some controversy, if not flames and violent disagreement. (For the record, I really do believe what I posted and did not do so just to get attention).

But there really wasn't much blow back (OK, I lost a few Twitter followers).

This could mean any number of things: either everyone agrees (I sincerely doubt this), no one reads my blog (I know that isn't true), people read it and just didn't care enough to want to comment, or those I was most obviously talking about consider me to be small potatoes, and me and/or the topic to be unworthy of a response.

Anyway, I did get a very nice pitch from Deb Holland of The Marketing Zen Group.

There is so much noise about bad pitches (and believe me, I do get my share of these); in comparison, much less attention is given to effective ones, and to people who do the job well.  So, in the spirit of Karma (appropriate, given the name of the company and book) I thought I would shift from the snarky tone of my last post to my more usual charming self (OK, I know I am laying it on thick here) and share a few nice words about her pitch.

Deb obviously took the time to discover topical blogs such as mine and approach me with a personalized email pitch.  Her note said:

...your post about the various brands of social media snake oil is so dead on, I decided to tell you about my personal brand of social media snake oil.

Mine is called the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the unvarnished truth. And that is that social media ONLY works if you remember two things: that its a consumer platform, not a marketing platform, and that it is an amplifier, not a shortcut. It isn't a replacement for solid marketing strategy  and it certainly doesn't replace a great PR effort. 

Thats the whole point of my boss's new book, The Zen of Social Media Marketing. This book is based on real life case studies, and practical examples, and starts with the premise that social media marketing comes LAST...

When I mentioned that I liked her pitch, she replied:

My theory on pitching is simple – pay attention to the outlet you’re pitching, and try to give them something appropriate that fits in with their editorial focus.  (I’m not big on “canned” pitches that are the same for a thousand targets on a list you pulled from a database.)

Makes so much sense, doesn't it?  And, news flash - it really works.

What is YOUR Brand of Social Media Snake Oil?

I have a post on Social Fluency today about a backlash to social media consultants that may be brewing.

I can relate to this.  Although I don't mean to discount the success of the social media elite, I am not convinced that building a large following online automatically equips someone to dispense effective and practical advice for others.

Too much of it sounds like religious, effete BS, and some of it actually makes my skin crawl.

• You have heard the brilliant A list bloggers implore companies and brands to "get transparent" and have naked conversations.
• You have admired the life streams of the social media elite.  Watch them as they stream golden showers of pithy prose and important activities all over the place.
• It has sounded all so impressive and important as they implore you to curate your fine corporate content collection.

Don't make me laugh, I have seen some of those "corporate content collections."  OK, there might be some good info in there somewhere but most of it is nothing to write home about, "curation" seems like way too lofty a term to apply (most client-side folks would agree with this statement, I believe).

Anyway, you can go to Social Fluency to read the rest of my rant if you like.

My Wrap on SxSW

I attended the South by Southwest show for the first time this year and found it to be very worthwhile.  I learned a lot, made some great new business contacts, and caught up with a bunch of people I had not seen in awhile.

You can read more about my experiences there, and learn about top Twitter tools of the social media elite by reading my post on the Social Fluency blog.

Media Wonderland: Down a Rabbit Hole and Through a Looking Glass

Several stories recently made me think we are edging toward a strange new reality - one in which everything is distorted.  It brings to mind Alice in Wonderland.  Or, perhaps the better analogy is the quantum physics world, where the very act of observing or measuring something changes the experiment and the outcome.

So what am I talking about? Let me list the threads behind this thinking and then I will tie them together.

• David Carr's piece in the New York Times, Breaking the Story that Isn't, talks about the hall of mirrors effect that happens when reporters try to sniff out each others' stories (and write about them).  It starts out:
  

Reporters have always kept an eye on other reporters... but what if watching your competitor becomes the whole story?  More and more inside the echo chamber... there are published reports about what other reporters might be doing.  On the Web, it takes nothing more than a rumor, or even a rumor of a rumor.

Later, he relates a conversation with a source about a story in progress who said: "You realize you are daring me to do a post about what you are working on, right?"

• There was a news report earlier this week that an Israeli raid had to be called off because a soldier leaked details in advance on his Facebook page.

• I heard a news report on talk radio about a Web site called Please Rob Me (see Consumerist post about this) that searches Twitter and uses geolocational tools like FourSquare to monitor people's activities, discover their comings and goings and identify which houses are empty.

• My own experience in seeing news get leaked prematurely because some tenacious blogger ferreted the information out from some public filing or other source.

• My own observation that reporters and PR folks are becoming increasingly transparent about what they are working on, by spilling their guts on Twitter, for example.

• The feeling of surprise (and sometimes twinge of annoyance) when people note your Facebook interactions ("Oh, I see you are now friends with...")

What these items have in common is the increasingly mercurial nature of info and efficiency of the Web and social networks in disseminating it. 

The fact that people are so freely wearing real time information about what they are doing on their sleeves has many implications for journalists and communicators such as PR professionals and bloggers. Reporters - the good ones, anyway - will increasingly take their cues from bloggers and get better at chasing the digital breadcrumbs that indicate a potential story. By contrast, an emerging skill for the PR field will be the ability to contain info rather focus so much on getting it out.

In an age of info glut, it is often the lack of information that can create a sense of allure and generate interest (Google and Apple are masters at this).

The teams that can successfully create suspense and build on it, i.e. manage the sharing and dissemination of info without letting the story get out and ahead of them (no small task these days) will be the ones that get people to stop and take note.

 

Tech PR, The Reality Show

I got the chance to watch SPINdustry, the new show on E!, and thought "big deal - one  more reality show about PR that gives everyone the wrong impression of what the field is really about."

In saying this I don't mean to criticize the entertainment PR field.  And I get the fact that we are in a celebrity-driven culture.  Hollywood is great and so are attractive people and flamboyant personalities.  I could see how some might find all this to be very entertaining.

On the other hand, does the show really do the broader PR field any favors?

The good people at E! hope to make money on this show, and it is excellent PR for the agency Command PR.  My Flack's Revenge gig , on the other hand, is to examine issues about the industry (PR in general and tech PR very specifically), pull back the curtains and educate.

In that vein, let me humbly submit that the field of tech PR could be good fodder for a reality show and provide its share of fun moments, while helping to educate people about the profession and showing another side of it.

There are parts of the business best left to the imagination - all the back office administrative stuff, for example - but other parts that would be great fun to watch (or maybe I am partial).  We've experienced many "fly on the wall" moments that have been entertaining and funny (often unintentionally). Some of the most outrageous ones occurred in the dot com years, granted, but lots of frivolity still ensues.

Here is what the ad copy might say for some fictional reality show for Tech PR (I am accepting proposals to produce this, serious offers only please).

Tech PR, the Reality Show! (OK not the most creative, I am still working on the title - how's about Tech Reality Bytes?)

• See the rock star CEOs of tech exert their Svengali effect and entrance the media!
• Enjoy brainstorming sessions in which we devise ways to make a chip or circuit board seem exciting
• Gaze at the trade show booth babes - yes, sex sells even in tech!
• Laugh at the confused looks on journalists faces as spokespeople string buzzwords and acronyms together with nary a real word in between!
• Delight in our campaigns and stunts, which have featured everything from neutered bunnies to drinking shots on tricycles at trade shows!
• Watch the tap dancing and delight in the smoke and mirrors as software demos hilariously go off the rails!
• Laugh as the tech PR peeps take a break from daily business to do team building in the form of bowling - scores will be settled!

Help Your Info Rise to the Top

I wrote a post for the Social Fluency blog that explains how to get attention for your information: Top Tips for Giving Your Info an Edge

Please see below for an abbreviated version, and visit the link for the complete post.*

As I explained in my post Revenge of the Press Release, it can help to think of the Web as a battleground of ideas and information, an environment in which Darwinian rules apply and only the “fittest” info survives.

It is all about survival of the fittest info. The crowds applies their wisdom and are a filter, deciding what info is hot. They consume the info and share it, elevating its ranking and alerting others in the process.

So, how can you give your info that vital edge? And what steps can you take to ensure that you get the desired result (i.e. your info is shared and/or or brings people to whatever the best next step might be?)

Unfortunately, there is no magical “silver bullet” for doing this; there however are some general guidelines I can offer (more details are available under each at Social Fluency).:

Be Brief

Be Loud

Be Sticky

Layer Info

Dress it Up

Know the Buzz Du Jour in Your Space

There’s No Substitute for Hard News

* I thought of a couple of more important points to add:

You need to make sure you use the right keywords in your copy.  This will help both human readers and machines (AKA search engines) identify the info as something that is relevant.

Also, it helps to use writing style and forums that are appropriate for the information you're communicating, and understand ways to share information across the social networks (see Paul Gillin's excellent post on the last point).

Are you a Serial (Agency) Killer?

I wrote a post on the Fusion PR Forum blog today that explorers the phenomenon of the serial PR agency switcher.

Many companies find that they need to switch gears with regard to agencies and PR quite often.  The post offers some ideas about what might be going wrong in these situations, and advises a holistic approach to assessing PR needs and identifying potential problem areas.

I encourage you to visit the blog, read, and comment.