Will Marlow

"Give me enough medals, and I'll win any war."

In addition to writing this blog, I also have a large social media presence on Twitter and Google Buzz.  Through a survey that I did awhile back, and through simple observation, I can say that my social media presence is responsible for driving a very large portion of my blog readership.  (As a new blogger, and as a blogger who lacked a pre-existing subscriber base, social media platforms have been invaluable to me for finding readers and subscribers.)

"There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about." - John von Neumann 

When I am coaching clients on blogging and social media strategies, one of the most important themes is discipline.  At the beginning of your plan, you need to formulate a strategy that you have confidence in.  You need to write down the steps you are going to follow to execute your strategy (if you don’t write it down, it won’t happen).  And you need to build in multiple ways to measure success and progress.  (Measuring your success all along the way is crucial, because by measuring your results in the right way you’ll be able to fine tune your plan to achieve better results.

But what about straying from your plan?  As someone who reads Avinash Kaushik regularly, I won’t ever advocate randomly changing your strategy, because that’s a quick way to get lots of information and no insights.  But radically altering something in your plan, like doubling the number of posts you make, or reducing the number of posts by 50%, can teach you things you would never have learned if you had just “stayed the course.”  For example, I have a client who reduced her posts by 50%, then posted a survey, and this allowed her to speak directly to her most loyal, most consistent subscribers.  By reducing her activity, she was able to learn quite a bit about her most loyal subscribers, and this has allowed us to refine her communications strategy in a way that will deliver more value to this core group, and to create more of them in the process.  The von Neumann quote above, courtesy of Ben Horowitz, should never be too far from the mind of anyone who spends time in the social media space.

You should never use a new feature just because it's awesome.  This is because "awesome" isn't awesome unless it advances your goals.

My blogging platform (Posterous) added a new feature recently: this feature allows you to add "page breaks" into your blog posts, so that if someone is visiting your blog homepage, they would get to read perhaps the first paragraph, and then they would need to click "read more" to get the rest.  Most people think that this feature is nice because it allows you to fit more content on your blog homepage, but the point of it is actually very different.  If people can read your entire blog post (or, in fact, multiple blog posts if they scroll down the page) without clicking on anything, their entire visit on your website would be registered as "0.0 seconds," because analytic software always measures time on a website by subtracting the time stamp on page one from the time stamp on page two.  If there is no page two, your metrics look really boring because the visit will show up as zero seconds in duration, despite the fact that it could have lasted for 30 minutes.  Combine this with the fact that blogs typically don't require lots of clicking, and you get really boring data on blog traffic.

I doubt I'll use this feature, because even though it helps optimize your blog for analyzing traffic, it de-optimizes your blog for delivering content.  (This is because people frequently read blog posts by scanning them, and it may be a tidbit in the last paragraph of a blog post that convinces them to become a subscriber.)   I care about delivering content, not analyzing time stamps.  The features you choose to add on your website or blog should always be determined by your goals, and nothing else. 

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.

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.  

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.  

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.