Will Marlow

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

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.

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.

A lot of people say that content is king in social media marketing.  I've been guilty of saying this myself.  But the problem is, it's not true.  

People who don't use Twitter sometimes ask me why I started using Twitter.  The reason is simple: I was the cofounder of a startup company, and all startup companies have zero credibility: they have no customers, no track record, no glossy sales materials, no industry relationships, and an untested product.  You improve those things slowly, which we have done.  But on day one, you need to do everything you can to demonstrate, among other things, that you are who you say you are. 

Twitter is a no brainer for that.  With Twitter, I can have a conversation with a customer, and later when that customer Googles me and my company, she can see that I think and write about the same issues that we talked about.  She can also see that I spend seven days a week thinking and writing about those same issues that she cares about.  And, over time, she can see that I've done that for a long time.  That's one source of credibility, and that's what drew me to Twitter in the first place.  But gradually, as my company grew, I began to interact with people and Twitter became more valuable as a source of new connections and relationships.  In my next post, I'm going to tell you why this has led me to create a brand new Twitter feed for myself, @willmarlowchats.

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Will Marlow is a digital strategist/online marketing consultant.  He's the co-creator of  AlumniFidelity, which is a Web 2.0 fundraising platform for colleges, nonprofits and secondary schools.   He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, and Bowling Green State University and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge.  He would love to help you market your business on the Internet, boost the fundraising numbers for your school or nonprofit, or sellout your next big event.  Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

Dear universities,

Many of you want to use social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to supplement your arsenal of fundraising tools, and that's great.  The challenge is that social media platforms are different from almost all other types of communication tools.  In order to pull value in from social media platforms, you need to push value out to your intended audience.

Here's how you should do it: first, forget about fundraising.  Instead, focus on the students, prospective students and alums who need your help.  Specifically, use Twitter and Facebook to give them information that will help them succeed in their classes, find internships, connect with fellow alums, find jobs, and stay in touch with one another.  Use these platforms to announce the achievements of people in your community.  Use Flickr and YouTube to post videos of homecoming, sports events, reunions, and undergrads having a great time succeeding on campus.  Use social media platforms to make announcements whenever any of your grads are mentioned positively in newspapers or blogs.  Write posts that show how proud you are of your community.

In short, don't focus on using social media platforms to do fundraising.  Instead, focus on using social media platforms to deliver value.  Then, when you are fundraising, point to your social media presence as one of the many ways that you enhance the lives of the alumni without spending money on glossy direct mail.  This will not hurt your fundraising prospects.

Hint: a major reason to go with this strategy is that prospective students, current students, and recent grads are the quickest cohorts to connect with you on social media platforms, but each cohort is generally slower to connect than the last.  This has nothing to do with how web-savvy the users are.  It's simply because prospective students need the most information from you, because they need to decide if your school is the best fit for them; current students are willing to connect with you, because you can deliver them information that will help them succeed while on campus; and recent grads are similarly interested in connecting, because they need your help to find mentors and jobs.  The slowest cohort of all to connect with you on social media?  That would be the donors themselves, who need the least from you.  The way to get them involved is to show them how much value you're delivering to their fellow alums who need help.

Sincerely,
Will Marlow
Internet Advisor, Social Media Strategist and Fundraising Consultant

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Will Marlow is a digital strategist/online marketing consultant.  He's the co-creator of  AlumniFidelity, which is a Web 2.0 fundraising platform for colleges, nonprofits and secondary schools.   He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, and Bowling Green State University and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge.  He would love to help you market your business on the Internet, boost the fundraising numbers for your school or nonprofit, or sellout your next big event.  Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

*I took the photo above on Saturday, August 21, 2010 at an event to help the recently homeless in Fairfax, Virginia, which was put on by FACETS, a great charity where my wife works.

A lot of people think that all the different social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc.) are more complicated than they really are.   Every social media platform, however, has one thing in common: they all make publishing possible.  That is the key to the social media revolution.

It used to be that a website was like a brick wall.  You would visit the website for your school, or a charity, or a business, and you saw a bunch of information on the webpage that someone from that organization posted, and that was it.  You couldn’t get any further than the brick wall.  (Early on, some websites posted real email addresses and bios of people who you could interact with from the organization, but that is basically like installing peepholes in the brick wall.)

The smartest people who run websites today are tearing down the brick wall completely, and replacing it with glass rotating doors that you can see through and walk through.  How do you do that?

• If you run a theater website and someone buys tickets for one of your shows, you shouldn’t just give them a dead receipt (i.e., a brick wall) you should give them a page that lets them write a short testimonial about how much they are looking forward to the show, and link them to a page where other fans have done the same thing.
• If you run a nonprofit and someone registers to be a volunteer at your next event, let them also signup to recruit two additional volunteers, and don’t force them to do it without help.  Give them tools to send email, import contacts, connect to their Facebook and Twitter account, and let them trigger their own reminders well in advance of the event.
• If someone makes a donation to your school or nonprofit, give them the opportunity to create a personal fundraising page (like the type that AlumniFidelity enables) that allows them to become a fundraiser, and not just a one-time donor. 
• Rather than showing only official photography on your website, make sure that there is a method for submitting photographs that your fans take at events, or launch parties, or from old events that may have taken place years ago.  You should make it easy for anyone to subscribe (and also to unsubscribe) to receive updates when new photos and videos are posted.  

The point is, the next generation of Internet marketing for all organizations is this: when a fan/customer/donor stops engaging with you, it should be because they are satisfied that they have done everything that they want to do with you.  The worst thing you can do is to put up a brick wall that prevents an energetic fan of yours from doing more to carry your goals forward.

I was recently talking to a journalist about the following question: should businesses (or schools or nonprofits) care about the quantity of followers they have, or the quality of their followers on social media platforms like Twitter, Buzz, Facebook, and elsewhere?

But the more important question that executives in all industries are struggling with is this: what is the return on investment of social media?  How much should we invest in social media?  How much will we get out of a social media plan?  This high level of uncertainty is at the core of any new social media marketing campaign, just like it's at the core of any new business, or any new product launch. 

So what do you do? You need to begin systematically eliminating uncertainty from your social media plan.  Rather than focusing on the number of followers you have (10? 200? 4,000?) you need to define exactly what you hope to achieve with social media, and then you need to begin achieving those goals.  In other words, if you have 10 followers on Twitter, but you can point to specific positive outcomes that resulted from your Twitter marketing, like sales that are linked to Twitter discount codes, or ticket sales through that channel, or even softer goals like reduced customer service costs or an increased number of positive customer interactions, then you can begin eliminating the uncertainty that's preventing your success with social media.  (And this will allow you to come up with a responsible budget for scaling your social media marketing.)

So the short answer is: quality is king.  There's nothing sillier than someone on Twitter who has 50,000 followers, zero engagement and nothing to show for it.

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.  He would love to help you market your business on the Internet, boost the fundraising numbers for your school or nonprofit, or sellout your next big event.  Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

"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.