Will Marlow

People often think that social media is attractive because it's free.  But this is a simple misconception.  Social media isn't free.  Social media simply scales for free, but it won't scale at all without an upfront investment.

Just look at Rebecca Black, who is famous for performing what many people think is the worst song ever written, and the worst music video ever produced.  Her mother invested $4,000 in making the video, and now it has made more than enough money for her to pay for college.

If you want sensational results with social media, you need to invest whatever is necessary for your particular social media program to begin to scale, because scaling happens for free, which means you can reach far more people than you'd be able to pay to reach through advertising. 

The key question on everyone's mind at this point should be: how much does it cost for content to scale?  The answer depends entirely on who you want to reach with your content, and the nature of the content itself.  Proctor & Gamble has probably spent millions of dollars by now on its successful Old Spice Guy campaign, and they will probably continue to spend, because even though it may not be as successful as Rebecca Black's $4,000 video, it is no doubt generating more exposure than they could have paid the same amount of money to get.

At the other end of the spectrum, many people choose to go with a content only marketing approach on social media.  This is similar to Seth Godin's "drip marketing," where you create new, valuable content on a daily basis for your audience, eventually building an online portfolio of compelling content that draws your customers into your universe and earns their trust.  CopyBlogger is hands down the best source of information on content marketing, and despite never having spent a dime on advertising, the CopyBlogger Media company is generating seven figures in revenue with well-over 50% margins.  Their upfront investment was in the form of design, hosting, travel, and conference costs.  At this point, however, after six years CopyBlogger is now built on a solid foundation, and they benefit tremendously from free scaling.

For those of you who choose to pay for advertising in addition to having a social media program, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is treating those two programs as completely separate.  I've worked with a number of clients who started by separating the two programs completely.  But your goal should always be to bring in only NEW people through paid advertising, and once they know you, you should be able to interact with them freely via your preferred social media channels.  If this isn't a part of your marketing strategy, then you're going to pay too much for your advertising over time, and your social media program will probably never scale.

I think that some people have resisted social media marketing all along because they instinctively believe that there is no such thing as free ice cream.  For those of you who feel that way, I'm on your side.  Social media marketing is fantastic, but only if you're willing to make the investment in time and resources to start to scale.

Will Marlow is a Public Relations and digital marketing specialist. The photograph of the salivating dog above was also featured in this week's issue of the A-Town Dog Blog.

A big mistake that startups make is thinking that a company needs to be a certain (specific) size before it should begin investing seriously in public relations. That's the wrong way to look at it.

Instead, you should ask yourself: what does our company care about?  What do we need to accomplish, and how does PR fit in?  For example, most startups care about three things: (1) finding new customers, (2) retaining more current customers, and (3) shortening sales cycles.  PR can help with all of those things, but you need to know what you care about most before you pick a strategy, and certainly before you pick tactics.

Public relations is never a one-size-fits-all discipline.  Some companies need to invest in PR before they earn their first dollar in revenue.  Other companies are better off spending their resources elsewhere until they're ready to scale their operations.  So don't wait until you hit some magic revenue number. 

Invest in PR at the moment when you're ready to benefit from shining a spotlight on your website / product / company / idea.  (By the way, asking the question, "What do we care about" is a good idea no matter what type of organization you work for, and it'll help you avoid making lots of bad decisions, with PR or anything else.)

Will Marlow is a PR specialist, blogger, and amateur photographer who lives in Northern Virginia. The dog in the photograph above would like you to rub his tummy.  You should follow Will Marlow on Twitter. 

Whenever a new social networking product is launched, the question of whether it will KILL its rivals always comes up. 

But for those of you who are loyal to Facebook, never fear.  Google+ will NOT kill Facebook.

Here's why.  Google+ is not in the business of being the virtual glue that holds together your real world relationships.  That's Facebook's mission.  Facebook wants to make your real world relationships richer by letting you share, chat, and interact in a safe place online.

Google+ doesn't do that.  It doesn't even TRY to do that.  Instead, Google+ wants to be the catapult that helps you launch your message/product/company/idea to greater and greater numbers of people more effectively.  It also wants to be the net that you use to pull in the best information from the people you respect.  That is Twitter's business, and my guess is that Google has a weakened Twitter (there are no full-time founders left at Twitter day-to-day) in its crosshairs right now, but most people are missing that story.

Just look at the reviews of Google+.  My hero Thomas Hawk wrote a great analysis of why Google+ is great for promoting photography.  He's mostly correct in what he says, but the very fact that Google+ is great for photographers is evidence that it is NOT competing in an area that Facebook cares about.

By the way, if anyone wants an invite to Google+, just let me know in the comments below, by email, or send up smoke signals.

The social media landscape is a pretty messy place.  Your job, as a social media manager or digital PR pro (or whatever you call yourself) is to organize things, and clean them up.  How do you do that?  You make lists, lists, lists, and more lists. 

Lists are something that come naturally to PR pros, and they need to start coming naturally to social media marketers.  Think of it like this: if there are 50 million people who post 5 million photos every day on Flickr, only 250,000 of them leave comments, write testimonials, or Fave the photos that they like.  And, of those 250,000, there are probably just a few thousand that care about the same things that you care about.  Just by realizing that, you have cleaned up the Flickr universe tremendously, reducing it from 50 million people to 250,000, to a few thousand, or preferably a number small enough to fit on your list.

Your job is to edit, edit, edit, until your lists are small, manageable, CLEAN, and powerful.  Before you can accomplish anything as a social media manager, you need to clean things up first.

Will Marlow is a PR specialist, blogger, and photographer who lives in Northern Virginia. The photograph of the Golden Retriever above will be featured as the lead photograph on the July 18th edition of the A-Town Dog Blog.  You should follow Will Marlow on Twitter.

One thing that bloggers struggle with is the challenge of making their blog more memorable to first-time visitors.  One of the most useful metrics you should be tracking in Google Analytics is how many "return visitors" you are getting.  If you aren't getting many return visitors, you're probably also failing to grow your blog. 

Most people focus on making their blog STICKIER, and this is generally a good thing.  You can make your blog stickier by optimizing the structure of your blog, and having strong, well-placed calls to action that lead visitors to provide you with their contact information, or by offering multiple convenient ways for people to subscribe to get updates from the blog (RSS, email subscription, Twitter links, newsletter options, etc).  Don't get me wrong: stickiness is important, and you need to nail down all of these things in order to make sure you convert a good percentage of visitors into repeat visitors/subscribers/customers.

But making a blog stickier isn't the only thing you should do.  You should also try to make your blog more memorable.  This takes creativity, and it requires you to think like a marketing pro.  Here's what you do: you need to identify some key messages and metaphors that crystallize the reason that your blog exists in the first place.  It's not easy -- this is how marketers make their money.

Here's a great example.  A few weeks ago I did research to identify the best photography blogs, and I looked at about 20 different photoblogs.  The next day, without consulting my notes, the only two blogs that I was able recall were Digital Photography School, which I was already familiar with due to its connection with Darren Rowse, and Thomas Hawk's photography blog. 

Why did I remember Thomas Hawk's blog?  Because on his About Thomas Hawk page, he says that he has an obsessive compulsive goal of publishing 1 million photographs before he dies.  That qualifies as a BHAG, or Big Hairy Audacious Goal, which Jim Collins talks about in Built to Last. 

According to Jim Collins, almost all of the world's best companies embrace BHAGs that seem impossible at first, but that serve to push the company to greater and greater levels of success.  In the case of blogging, however, a BHAG can also be like a "handle" that a first-time visitor can get her hands around to pick up the blog, and carry it with her.  In a world of 150 million blogs, you need to find lots of ways to crystallize for your readers exactly why your blog exists, otherwise you'll be forgettable, even if you have high quality content.

A Big Hairy Audacious Goal is just one way you can make your blog more memorable, but it's something that has probably never occurred to most bloggers like it did to Thomas Hawk, and hopefully it will get you thinking about all the different ways you can differentiate your blog, like a marketer works to differentiate any product or company.

Will Marlow is a PR specialist, blogger, and photographer who lives in Northern Virginia.  One of his BHAGs is to take at least one high quality photograph of every monument, memorial, statue, and iconic building in Washington, DC.  Here are some of those photographs.  You should follow him on Twitter.

Here are some highlights:

You can also get my attention on Twitter, where I'm @willmarlow.  My Twitter stream is where you'll find links to my new blog posts, updates about some of the companies and organizations I work with, occasional updates about my personal life, and some of my photography.

A  little more about me

Capitol Hill was where I first learned the fundamentals of PR and digital communications.  My first job after college was for Congressman Frank Wolf.  Despite knowing basically nothing at the time about online communications, I was put in charge of designing a new website for my boss, setting up an E-Newsletter and building up the subscriber base for it, as well as integrating social media into his communications strategy.

Later, I co-founded AlumniFidelity based largely on what I learned about online fundraising and digital communications in the political space.  The concept of "friend-to-friend" fundraising goes back a long time, well before the invention of the Internet, but online friend-to-friend fundraising was pioneered in the political world by people who later worked for Barack Obama.  I saw how awesome it was in 2006, and I wanted to build a system that could help schools, athletic teams, and charities.

We founded AlumniFidelity in 2007, and today AlumniFidelity has over 50 clients, including the University of Virginia, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Georgetown's Capital Breast Care Center, Towson University, and my alma mater, William and Mary.

In Q4 of 2010, I joined LogiXML, which is an early-stage software startup in the business intelligence (BI) industry.  LogiXML provides software that helps organizations do interesting and useful things with data.  Ever since co-founding AlumniFidelity (a SaaS-based company that itself pushes off lots and lots of data), I have been fascinated by the business intelligence industry, because I believe that the most interesting things that are happening right now are happening due to innovations in the way we visualize and represent data.  Joining LogiXML was an opportunity that I couldn't resist, because it put me in a position to get to know the BI industry firsthand.  I helped LogiXML get covered in over 30 major publications like InformationWeek, Information Management, Dr. Dobb's Journal, the Financial Times of London, and others.

About this blog

Just so you know, I am doing my best to keep this blog optimized for two things: (1) delivering content and (2) engaging with my readers.  To this end, there are only two levels of navigation.  Everything is organized chronologically or from the "anchor navigation" along the right side of every page.  For those of you who like to "search" a website, you have that option too.  I let people connect with me on Twitter and you can also subscribe by email or RSS.  In the "anchor navigation," I include four crucial sections: "About me," "About this blog," "My most popular posts," and "My reading list."  These four sections should give you everything you need to know about me and this blog.  I also do my best to make it easy to contact me.

Some photographic highlights...

Here is me with my boss Congressman Doc Hastings in a radio studio back in 2007:

And here I am with my first boss, Congressman Frank Wolf, who I served as Deputy Press Secretary for two and a half great years from 2005 to mid-2007.  The image below was scanned from a photograph that he signed as I was leaving the office, which you can read in the top right hand corner.

Here is me with my hero Buzz Aldrin back in 2005.

Last night my car was towed from a restaurant's parking lot while I was eating dinner inside.  The owner of the restaurant stopped preparing sushi to personally drive me and my party to the towing lot to retrieve the car.  The owner could have handled this problem in any number of acceptable ways, and most of those acceptable ways would have resulted in me repeatedly telling a story to my friends about how my car was towed while I ate dinner at his restaurant, and how inconvenient it was.  Now, I will instead tell the story about how he personally drove me across town to retrieve my car after it was towed.