Will Marlow

Google launched Buzz 13 days ago, and after spending some time getting to know it better, I wanted to write a quick introduction for people who are still wondering (a) how it works, (b) how it's different from other social media platforms and (c) why they might want to use it.

In everyone's favorite list format, here are the answers to those questions:

1. Google Buzz works in the following way: you access your Google Buzz account through Gmail, and the service allows you to post "updates" which have no character limitation.  Your posts can include rich media like pictures and videos.  Gmail has over 200 million users, which means that the scope of Google Buzz is huge, because each Gmail user was given a default Buzz account along with followers from among their email contacts.  As you post updates, the people in your Buzz network can leave comments, register a "like," or send you a message.

2. Unlike Twitter, which has one feed that shows everything you say (whether you're writing your own original post, or commenting about someone else's post), Google Buzz let's you comment on someone else's feed without using your own feed to do it.  This means you can have conversations with thousands of people, while only updating your own feed at your own pace.

3. Unlike Twitter, there are no follow limits on Google Buzz.  This means you can follow thousands of people, and potentially earn lots of follow backs.  Buzz can get away with this for two reasons: (1) 13 days is not long enough for spammers to flood the system with noise, and (2) it is not yet open to third party apps the way Twitter is, so every time someone follows someone else on Buzz, they physically need to follow them.  This places a natural limitation on the amount of following that can be done, which itself is a protection against spam that doesn't exist on Twitter.

4. On the same topic of follower numbers, unlike Twitter (or Posterous), you don't need to display the names of the people who are following you OR the number of people who you are being followed by and are following.

5. If you comment on someone else's Buzz update, you'll start getting updates in your inbox when other people comment on that thread.  This is jarring at first.  It makes it look like you actually have email in your inbox.  However, it appears that Google simply wants to bring these updates to your attention separately from all the other Buzz noise, because if you've commented on it you've highlighted its importance.  This feature will definitely annoy some people, and I wouldn't be surprised if Google introduces filtering options.  Many people consider their inboxes to be sacred and don't want non-email to fill it up.  However, this aspect of Buzz underscores the fact that Buzz is really an "email-based" social media tool, which is where it derives a lot of its uniqueness.  Even if the hype that is surrounding Buzz right now dies away, it may have strong staying power due to its email roots.

6. So how is Google Buzz the same as Twitter and Facebook?  All three platforms occupy the same category: they are all outposts (to borrow Chris Brogan's term).  This means that Buzz is a great place to meet new people, have new conversations, and to develop a new traffic stream to your primary web base, which should be a blog or a website that you use to deliver real value and host your most important work.

7. So why would you want to use Google Buzz?  If you are interested in truly interacting with people, the features on Buzz are creating lots of rich interactions.  I have over 8,000 followers on Twitter, and far fewer followers on Buzz, but I can already see that my Buzz posts are generating as much or more engagement than my Twitter posts.  It is important to avoid fake success metrics like follower counts and fan lists when measuring success in online media.  It's much better to look at the number of comments, clickthrough numbers, re-posts, "favorites," "likes," and links.  These measures are much harder to fake, and right now the features on Buzz (and its early adopter user-base) have made for the most engaged/engaging platform around.

8. The final point I'd make about Buzz is that if you divide the world between Twitter and Facebook, you'd see Twitter as the best tool for "pushing" information to lots of people, and you'd see Facebook as the best tool for "pulling" information in from the people you choose to connect with.  In my opinion, the strength of Google Buzz is much more in its ability to let you "push" information out than pull it in, which makes it more of a threat to Twitter.  But it took more than 13 days to build Google Buzz, and it'll take longer than 13 days to reach a final verdict on where the platform is headed.  I hope this was a useful early analysis for you.

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.

Loading mentions Retweet

The Executive Director of the National Society of Collegiate Scholars, Steve Loflin (@sloflin) invited me to Boston to make a short presentation about online fundraising at the Annual Meeting of Collegiate Honor Societies.  I'm making the presentation today at 3:00, and I wanted to share some of my notes below.

Intro to online fundraising 

• Fundraising is about two things: (1) relationships and (2) storytelling.  For all 35 of my clients, no one ever gets a donation unless there is a relationship between the donor and the place they are making a gift.  In recent years, there's been a trend that has reshaped fundraising in some incredible ways.  A second type of relationship has started mattering more than ever.  That's the relationship between a donor and her friend.  Using any number of online tools, after someone makes a donation, they can now alert large numbers of friends and in some cases they can even solicit them on behalf of the organization to match their gift.  This phenomenon is changing the way schools, nonprofits, and political organizations are allocating their resources.
• No longer do you want to spend close to 100% of your resources on soliciting new donors and cultivating current donors.  Instead of that, organizations are spending more and more resources on enabling their current donors to tell their friends and family about their own donations.  What’s the ROI on this type of activity?
• Traditional "new donor acquisition" methods tend to net a ".03%" conversion rate of prospect to donor.  We see friend-to-friend techniques netting a conversion rate of about 30%.  That means that by some important measurements friend-to-friend fundraising is 100x more effective at new donor acquisition than traditional fundraising.

The long history of friend-to-friend fundraising

• People have always known that friend-to-friend fundraising is the most effective way to raise money, but until five or six years ago, it was too expensive to do on a large scale.
• Previously, "friend-to-friend" fundraising was limited to large donors who give $25,000 or more.  It was cost-effective to organize those large donors to ask their friends to match the gifts. 
• Additionally, on a smaller scale, many organizations have a history of distributing pre-stamped stationary and pens to encourage current donors to contact their friends.  Problem with this was that if the materials went unused, the organization operates at a loss. 

• Online fundraising pages.  This is a very simple concept where you take all of the friend-to-friend communication and you put it online on a single personal fundraising page.  
• Eliminate production costs and greatly reduce the resources required to communicate with the volunteers = a very compelling return on investment.
• Add in non-fundraising communication platforms like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter to supplement tools that are geared specifically for fundraising.  This ensures that the focus stays on fundraising even as activity migrates to large social networks.  

Loading mentions Retweet

A few years ago, it was very fashionable for schools to invest heavily in building custom social networks that were designed for their alums to use.  The upside of building your own social network is that you own all the data, and you make all the big decisions that determine what happens on the social network.  The downside of building your own social network, however, includes:

Loading mentions Retweet

If you want to take your blogging to a high level, you should make sure you have a blog that is customized to help you advance your specific goals.  My top priorities for this blog are: (1) delivering useful, clear content to my readers, and (2) making it easy for readers to subscribe to my blog.  These may be simple goals, but pursuing them ruthlessly means you need to remove all distracting elements from the blog, and making sure that all elements that remain serve a purpose.  When you have a minimalist style, any dumb parts will stand out like a sore thumb.  

As you know, I started with the default Posterous settings, which are excellent, and made the following customizations:

1. Rather than keeping the "login" navigation at the top right of the page (above the fold), I moved it to the bottom right, below the fold (which is the same thing that @guykawasaki does with his Alltop page. 
2. I increased the size of the header by 2x.
3. I posted a hidden "About me" page, and posted a link to that page to serve as a replacement for the default Posterous "profile" page, which I hid from view.  Posterous's default profile page is great for the social networking aspects of the platform, but it is a huge distraction and source of confusion to most of my readers, who don't care that I happen to use Posterous's platform.
4. I removed the faint text that said, "Contributors," along the right side of the page, because I'm the sole writer of this blog.
5. In addition to letting readers subscribe via Posterous's default subscription path, I added a Twitter button AND a Feedburner email field.  For some reason it was tricky to get all these options to display consistently whether you were reading from a specific post OR just reading from the blog homepage, but I eventually figured out how to get it right, which is important because for my blog this is part of the "anchor" section, which readers rely on to navigate the site. 
6. I posted a hidden "Most popular posts" page and put the link beneath the "About me" page.  These are the two "informational anchors" on the site.  Beneath these two links, you have the three "engagement anchors," which include a Twitter button for people to subscribe via Twitter, a Feedburner email subscription field, and the default Posterous subscription button, for fellow users of Posterous.  (Note: I wanted to keep a link that said "Follow me on Posterous" because that is one of the few nods to Posterous on the blog, and I want to give the platform credit for powering this site.)
7. I purchased a custom domain name (www.willmarlow.com)
8. When you view a blog post, rather than seeing the view count and the number of times the post has been "Favorited" in the top part of the page, I moved that information down lower, because I needed that prime real estate for the anchor section (and because the importance of that information is debatable).
9. I removed the Posterous tag from the top of the page.

I will continue to optimize the blog by making minor changes designed to make the blog more readable and user friendly, and I'm appreciative of any feedback you may have for things I'm doing right and things I'm doing wrong.  Please don't hesitate to let me know what you think.  And if you share my goals, I'm happy to send you what you need to use my optimized blog template as your Posterous "theme." 

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.

Loading mentions Retweet

Where I live in DC, we just got the largest snowfall in 90 years, and now we're preparing for another blizzard that could drop an additional ten inches.  Most news coverage talks about all the negative impacts of the blizzard, but flip that coin over and you can use it to engage your audience.  If you work for a school or nonprofit and you have valuable equipment stored outside, take photographs or videos and share them online via your Facebook or Flickr profile.  If you work for a nonprofit that helps low-income people or the homeless, send an emergency announcement to your supporters letting them know that the weather has increased the need of the people you serve.  If the blizzard damaged the grounds of your school's campus, use Facebook to ask your students and alums to submit their own photographs of the damage by uploading them online.

Loading mentions Retweet

As this chart from Twitterholic shows, less than 24 hours after unfollowing 12,000 people, I was unfollowed by over 3,500 followers!

Loading mentions Retweet

Today I am beginning to unfollow 12,000 people, making my way down to zero.  Currently, almost everyone I am following is also following me back.  And starting last Friday, I began informing my "followers" of this experiment, and anyone who has been paying attention to my feed has had ample time to hear me announce that I am culling faux-followers, and that I will quickly begin to add people back who I interact with, or who reach out to me, or who I am interested in.  

Loading mentions Retweet

(Click here for the second part of this post.)

Before I get to the problem with my Twitter strategy (and what I intend to do about it), I want to explain a few things first.

As of today, I have 12,730 followers on Twitter.

The way I've built my following is fairly simple.  I post updates that are focused on my expertise (education technology, charitable fundraising, and web marketing), and I make myself easy to find for people who are interested in the same topics, I update at regular intervals daily, and I follow back individuals who follow me unless they are a spammer or look weird. 

In addition to this, I have been on Twitter for awhile, and in my early days I proactively sought out other like-minded and interesting Twitterers and I introduced myself to them by following them.  Many times they followed me back, @replied me, or interacted with me offline.  I also talk to people via Twitter, respond to DMs, and maintain public profiles on Flickr and at this blog at www.willmarlow.com to give my followers more insight into my personality and my work.  In addition to all of this, as the cofounder of AlumniFidelity.com, I am regularly interacting with customers, investors, and end-users who are tech-savvy.  This has led to lots of my followers.

I also never engage in obnoxious spam activity or use obnoxious Twitter “clients” that alienate the people who I hope to interact with.

One problem with my Twitter strategy is that my liberal “follow back” approach (like Guy Kawasaki, I follow people back as part of Twitter courtesy), I have accumulated a large number of spammers and faux-followers in my following column, which I have recently gotten sick of.  It occurred to me that I’m currently following a large number of feeds that I don’t read, and the fact that I’m following them increases their own credibility (spammers try to build up followes for that reason, I’m compiling a list of users who I interact with regularly, or whose insights I appreciate, or who I happen to know are legitimate users, and I’m going to unfollow all 12,400 people, with the exception of this relatively small list.

If you are NOT a spammer, and I’m currently following you, please @reply me or DM me if you want me to add you to my private list of people who I will follow back after I hit zero.

I’m not sure how long it will take me, but starting in 6 days, I’m going to unfollow all 12,400 people, until I reach zero, and then I will slowly begin adding followers who I’m truly interested in.

To summarize: problem = I’m following too many spammers and bots on Twitter.  Solution: unfollow everyone, and re-follow only a select number of people who I am actually interested in. 

As always, send me an email if you want to chat about any of this.

Loading mentions Retweet