Will Marlow - Filed under 'Social Media Plan'

August 24, 2011

This Is the Only Thing That's Free About Social Media Marketing

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.

Filed under // Digital PR Digital Public Relations PR PR and Social Media Public Relations Social Media Social Media Plan Social media strategy

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March 19, 2010

How to avoid "chattering" in your social media strategy

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.

But how do you make sure that each post or update advances your goals and avoids pointless chatter? The biggest problem that leads to chatter (and this is a problem that wrecks many social media campaigns) is that people don't know why they are using social media. If you don't know why you are blogging in the first place, you'll never keep it up (most corporate blogs are abandoned after just a handful of posts). If you don't know why you are on Twitter, pretty soon you'll be telling people about the weather.

Here's how you avoid chatter: identify the two or three of the highest value actions that you want to see on social media. This may be when a donor writes a positive letter and posts it on Facebook telling people how great you are. It may be when a customer posts a picture of herself at one of your events with a caption that says how wonderful your last event was. It may be when you post a video and two dozen people leave encouraging comments. Maybe it's when you see that 20% of your sales traffic is originating from Facebook from your special promotions. Whatever the actions are, you should know them, and you should always keep them in mind when you are thinking about your next post - chances are, this will keep your content far away from topics like the color of your socks.

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.

Filed under // Facebook Social Media Plan Social media marketing Twitter

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January 13, 2010

Results from Day 1 - Did Bots or People Disappear?

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

My first observations/conclusions are as follows:

1. So far, no one from the list of people I interact with regularly has unfollowed me.

2. There were LOTS of bots and spammers following me, who were only interested in a recipricol follow (which I'm happy to lose).

3. There is a big advantage to following back your followers, in that you can always tell if someone is following you just by looking at their feed. If I don't ever go back to a 1:1 ratio, not being able to know this will take some getting used to.

4. I am going to add the initial people back very quickly, because I miss the DMs that this group sends me (I don't miss DMs from spammers or bots).

and lastly,

5. There are many people who take the "follow back" ethic very seriously and personally. I received more than one email angry email suggesting that I was being very rude. If that's the case, I apologize. I tried to take precautions against this by warning people in the days leading up to this experiment (which served the dual purpose of telling me who is reading my Tweets). In any case, my reason for doing this experiment was not to be rude, but to learn more about the dynamics of following/unfollowing on Twitter, and for the next several days I'll be monitoring what happens.

(PS - Interestingly, although my goal was to make it down to zero before adding people back, Twitter's odd numbering system never let me get down below 92 people on my follower list, despite not having a record that I was following anyone. In addition to that, Tweets from people who I no longer followed continued to show up in my feed until I replaced them with newly re-followed people.)

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.

Filed under // Follower Count How to measure Twitter influence Social Media Social Media Plan Social media strategy Twitter Twitterholic Unfollow

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January 11, 2010

Twitter Experiment Part 2: What I Hope to Learn from Unfollowing 12,000+ People

On Friday I wrote about my plan to do an experiment in which I unfollow 100% of the people I'm following right now, and then I'll re-follow only people who are not spammers or bots, and who I'm actually interested in. I am keeping a list right now of people who I interact with, or know, or who I find interesting, and I'll re-follow that list very quickly after I hit zero. If you want to be added to that list, just @reply me, or send me a DM, or email me at will@alumnifidelity.com.

On Friday I talked about WHY I was doing this. In this post, I want to talk about a few things that I hope to LEARN from doing this.

I look forward to learning:

How many people unfollow me, and thus, how many people on Twitter are only interested in following people who follow them back.
What happens to my "click through" rate.
What happens to my @reply and DM rate.
Whether this generates new word of mouth buzz and leads to new followers.
What this does to the overall visibility of my Twitter presence.

Confession: I'm also hopeful that I will be able to provide more evidence that having a large following is NOT a good measure of influence on Twitter. I believe that there is a misconception going around that a Twitter feed is only valuable if it "reaches" hundreds of thousands of strangers, as evidenced by huge follower lists. Firstly, I think that Twitter can be valuable even if it reaches ONE person who you wouldn't have reached with another mechanism. Secondly, I think that huge follower lists are faux-metrics. Hopefully my experiment can illustrate why the second point can be misleading, and possibly it can help people appreciate their small but committed core of followers, who are the source of true value on Twitter.

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.

Filed under // Follower Count Followers How to measure Twitter influence Social Media Social Media Experiment Social Media Plan Twitter Unfollow Will Marlow

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January 8, 2010

Twitter Experiment Part 1: An Intro to My Twitter Strategy, and What I Plan To Do

(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.

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, and Bowling Green State University, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge. Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

Filed under // Best of WM Followers Social Media Social Media Experiment Social Media Plan Twitter Unfollow Will Marlow

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