Will Marlow

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.  

"My purpose in reading has ever secretly been not to come and judge but to come and steal." - John Updike

Some of you know that photography is one of my hobbies (any of the photos you see on this blog are ones that I've taken).  I try to be selective about the photos that I share on Flickr, which I use essentially as a photojournal.  But until a few weeks ago, I did not "brand" my Flickr feed in any meaningful way, and this almost cost me a missed opportunity for promoting my business and this blog.

I want to credit Jason Calacanis (who is half entrepreneur, half media powerhouse), for giving me the idea to brand my Flickr feed.  Jason always includes links to his Twitter feed, his business and his weekly podcasts  in the description of his photos on Flickr.

So I copied him to see how much traffic I would get.  Immediately after doing this, a great food blog called Pretty Food & Drink decided to use one of my Flickr photos (above) in one of their posts, and it attracted over 1000 comments, as well as many click-throughs to my original Flickr photo.

If I hadn't put a link to my blog (or business, or school, or charity) in the description of the Flickr photo, all of those new visitors would have hit a brick wall when they saw the photo.  They may have liked it, or hated it, but most of them would not have had any option to get to know me better.  Now, I have some new subscribers who may have found me in a very roundabout way, but I'm glad to have them here.

This illustrates one reason why it's important to periodically audit your website and social media presence to make sure you aren't missing any opportunities to accomplish your goals.  In my case, I care about my subscribers.  In your case, you may care about donors, volunteers, or customers.  Whatever opportunities you're looking for, you need to make sure you aren't missing any easy ones, because once they're gone, they don't come back.   

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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.

Your only marketing challenge is to make it really easy for your customers, friends and fans to talk about you.  The state of Montana, where I'm on my honeymoon right now, fits into this category.  Anyone who happens to drive through Montana notices its beauty, and some people (like me) feel compelled to take photographs and share them with other people.  Therefore, from a marketing perspective, the state of Montana has a simple challenge: encourage and allow visitors to share their experiences with their friends by maintaining an active Facebook page, encouraging photography competitions, sponsoring Artist-in-Residence programs, etc., all of which are done here.

Life is easy when you are naturally remarkable.  For the rest of us, we need to do everything Montana does (i.e., enable our customers, friends and fans to talk about us in a variety of ways), but we also need to work really, really hard to be remarkable.

PS - You can check out some more of my photos from Montana, including beautiful waterfalls, mountains, and a black bear that was about 40 feet away from me, on Flickr here.  

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.

If you manage a social media plan for an organization, one of your most important assets is your personal network.  (Don't think for a second that professional social media managers have a substitute for this.)  One of the reasons that the social media space scares so many people is that in order for you to succeed in social media, you need to be authentic, and that means you need to be able to write almost as fast as people talk.  Between posting content to Facebook, your blog, a Twitter feed, or any other channels you use, and leaving and responding to comments from Fans, you are inevitably going to have typos and mispillings occasionally, as well as ideas that sound good at first, but on later inspection, need to marinate more before you put them out for public consumption.  This is nothing like the old print world.  

The enemy of a good social media plan is chatter.  Chatter is what gives ALL social media a bad name.  For example, if a major nonprofit or school were to update their Twitter account with a Tweet that said, "Isn't it a beautiful day out?"  That's borderline chatter, and I would never feel comfortable with that type of update.