Will Marlow - Filed under 'blogging'

March 5, 2010

About this blog

I write this blog in order to help non-technical people who want to understand technical things. I do this because in the last five years, the line that separates technical and nontechnical roles has blurred for lots of people. Take journalists for example. Journalists shouldn't just write a story anymore. They should write a story AND promote it online to make sure that even if they're fired from their newspaper, they'll have an online readership that may follow them to their next assignment. That's a valuable asset.

There are tremendous opportunities for non-techies to expand their horizons, and my goal with this blog is to seek out complex topics (like search engine optimization, website development, formulas for viral marketing, online fundraising, etc.) and make them understandable and useful. (To be sure, one of the ways I do that is by leaning on people who are a lot smarter than me.)

The following questions guide me as I decide what to post on this blog:

Would someone at a business, a university, a startup, a corporate marketing office, or a nonprofit potentially find this information useful?
Would I personally regret forgetting the information?
Has the topic already been covered elsewhere in a similar way?

I definitely want to hear what readers think, and periodically I may post a (very, very short) survey to get feedback on how I'm doing. But if I don't do a survey, you can still leave comments, send me an email, or connect on Google Buzz or Twitter.

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web 2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge. Read more about Will Marlow here, or email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

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Filed under // Blog blogging

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February 27, 2010

How to apply the so-what rule to social media goals

The thing that separates a good goal from a bad goal is this: a good goal is something that you can take meaningful action to accomplish, and a bad goal is something that you have little influence over. One of my jobs is helping organizations develop social media strategies, and one of the biggest problems I see is that people set goals like the following, "I want to have 10,000 followers in six months," or "I want to have 30,000 blog subscribers in a year." The problem I have with goals like that is not that they are too ambitious. Ambition is GREAT. The problem is that those goals can only be advanced by tactics, and you need to implement the same or similar tactics whether you want 10,000 subscribers, 20,000 subscribers, or a million subscribers. In other words, those goals may be measurable, but they are not actionable.

For an example from my own social media strategy, my initial goal with my Twitter feed was simply to create an online place where people could get all the most important news and analysis about online communications, fundraising, education, and entrepreneurship. I wanted my Twitter feed to be a type of "resume" that would communicate to my clients and investors that I was immersed in the details of my company. That's something that I have complete control over. And once I was satisfied that I had accomplished it, I was able to think about adding other goals, such as creating a new pipeline for speaking engagements.

To borrow a phrase from my hero Avinash Kaushik, after you set any goal you should ask yourself: "So what?" If there isn't an obvious answer to that question, you should find new goals. Your goals shouldn't just be things that you hope will happen somehow someday, they should be like those little flags that tell the slalom skiers where to go if they want to win the gold medal in Toronto.

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web 2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge. Read more about Will Marlow here, or email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

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Filed under // blogging online communications Social Media social media goals Social media strategy

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January 17, 2010

"Discoverable" Blog Posts

There's a difference between a "discoverable" blog post and a "popular" blog post. For example, my most popular recent blog post was about how my car was unfairly towed while I was eating dinner at one of my favorite restaurants, and how the owner stopped preparing food to personally drive to the towing lot. My most "discovered" blog post, however, was about a little-known Facebook application that let's you keep track of how many friends have unfollowed you on Facebook.

My most popular posts are viewed by lots of people all at once virally, but "discoverable" posts are viewed by a few people every day, Monday through Sunday, by people who have never heard of me before, but who ask Google a question, and who are given my blog as one of the potential answers.

In other words, one important way to "introduce" yourself to people through a blog is by answering questions that persist over time among the people you're interested in knowing. (Quick hint: It's most helpful to answer questions that no one else is answering.)

PS - As a quick update to my blog post on how to find out who has "unfriended" you on Facebook, follow this link to find a very helpful program that Facebook can't remove that can help you keep track of who has unfollowed, if you're interested in knowing that.

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge. Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

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Filed under // Blog blogging content optimization Google Search Popular blogging Search SEO

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January 5, 2010

Let Yourself Be Found (Flip the Switch)

Proctor & Gamble, currently the world’s 8th largest corporation and over 170 years old, was the first company to put a toll-free 1-800 number on all of its product packaging. The first year after doing so, it received 200,000 phone calls from customers offering ideas or complaints. P&G, with revenues of almost $80 billion in 2009, spends hundreds of millions of marketing dollars aimed at identifying and locating customers. But all it needed to do was flip a switch and suddenly 200,000 customers reversed the process and started finding P&G.

Nonprofits, schools, and companies are beginning to think of social media the same way. Just turn on the channel (with a blog, a Facebook profile, Twitter, YouTube, or a specialty service like AlumFi), and let your donors, volunteers, and customers find you. Take their messages seriously. Respond to them over the same social network with which they contacted you. You’ll have richer communications, better relationships with your base, and a better year overall than you would otherwise have had.

Will Marlow is the co-creator of AlumniFidelity, where he helps schools such as the University of Virginia, William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, and Bowling Green State University, as well as about 25 other schools and nonprofits, with online fundraising and marketing campaigns. Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

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Filed under // blogging Blogs e-Commerce Facebook Fundraising Marketing PR Social Media Twitter

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January 3, 2010

The Ideal Journalist

I was having a discussion with a journalist the other day about what combination of skills/traits are desirable in a journalist today.

We came up with some interesting thoughts.

According to us, the ideal journalist (without the support of a staff) should:

1. Be a great photographer.
2. Be a great videographer.
3. Be very well-versed in Photoshop and Vegas, not to manipulate images, but to build mashups of photos and videos to supplement stories.
4. Be a near-daily blogger to keep the most loyal readers updated on what she's doing.
5. Be an active "Twitterer," Tweeting both her own stories and the stories she wishes she wrote (that is, for creation and curation).
6. Use "bit.ly" links to track how many people click on her stories, so she could talk about how many readers she brings with her to whichever company she writes for.
7. Use Google Analytics or some other tracking software in her blog so she understands which of her story formats were most popular and successful, and she improve her presentation over time.
8. Be comfortable responding to readers in comment fields all across the web, and would setup various alerts to notify her when a reader was talking to her or mentioning one of her stories.
9. Have an online bio where she lays out her modus operandi, her standards, her skills, her background, and what readers should expect of her.
10. Have good grammar.

Personally, I think the only journalists who will have any job security or steady work in the years to come will be those who have a strong personal connection to their most loyal readers. And to do that they need to understand how to produce stories that are optimized for the Web, not optimized for paper.

PS - If a journalist can do all this, and they manage to build a daily traffic of 2,500 unique visitors, a rough estimate for how much revenue they would get from advertising would be $60,000 a year. That would be cool, especially because if you're smart enough to build that level of traffic, you're probably smart enough to develop other streams of revenue to supplement it.

Will Marlow is the co-creator of AlumniFidelity, which helps schools and nonprofits improve their online fundraising results. Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

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Filed under // Blog blogging Blogs journalism journalist Media newspapers

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January 1, 2010

Communicating in 2010

Many people focus on the content of their message. They refine and tweak and improve their message, and when they really nail it they may land an op-ed in the Washington Post, or their video may go viral, or some other great thing will happen to get them attention.

But the thing that seems to separate the most impressive modern communicators (people like Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki and Apple and Google and Barack Obama) isn't the content of their message, it's their delivery. (And they don't use every social media platform or megaphone available. But the things they do, they do really well.) Obama maximizes his time in front of the teleprompter, Godin writes a great blog post every day, Guy Kawasaki Tweets 60 times an hour, Apple famously doesn't touch any social media at all, and like Google it has employee evangelists who each have their own style and portfolio.

For these people and companies, the messaging itself seems effortless. It's the delivery they work on.

Will Marlow is the co-creator of AlumniFidelity, which helps schools and nonprofits improve their online fundraising results. Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

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Filed under // AlumniFidelity blogging Blogs Communications Obama

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December 18, 2009

15 Years of Progress

Back in America pre-1995, this was the communication landscape:

9,000 commercial radio stations
1,100 television stations
11,000 periodicals
11,000 newspapers.

How have things changed? Despite the best efforts of media executives to extinct themselves, there are still thousands of commercial radio stations, network TV stations, periodicals, and at least a few dozen newspapers left in America.

There are also:

200 million blogs - (the cost of publishing ideas has plummeted)
38 billion emails exchanged every day (the cost of sharing information has plummeted)
On a bad month for YouTube, 100 million people view over 6 billion videos (the cost of auditioning has plummeted).

Sometimes I just like to look at the numbers to help me think about how much the world has changed since 1995, all of 15 years ago.

PS - If you need to be inspired about how much technology and social media has transformed the way we communicate, check out this awesome video.

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Filed under // Blog blogging communicaion Media newspaper decline newspapers

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