Over the last few weeks I have had a series of conversations about authors and social media. In every single case the conversations have revolved around how (and in some cases “if”) authors can benefit from social media. My answer in not only a resounding “Yes, authors can and do benefit from social media as a marketing platform,” but I believe they are also well positioned to flat out own social media. Here are three reasons why:

1. Authors create content and content is one of the two social media currencies. Conversation is the other currency.
2. Authors know they have to provide valuable content to succeed. Good social media marketing is based on the mindset that you earn attention through valuable content or conversations. Then, and only then, do you have the platform to introduce your business interests.
3. Authors know they have to reach the right people to succeed. Authors know they’re not writing books that appeal to everyone. They just want to appeal to as many of the right people as possible. This is a fundamental key to great social media marketing. When you take the focus off a “how many people will we reach” approach to a “who are the right people and how many of them can we reach” approach, social media will work. Authors seem to get this intuitively. Social media lets an author find and be found by the right people.

Many people are trying to figure out how social media can work for them right now. Authors just happen to be naturally suited to win with social media. The very things authors create happen to be what grows their audience. The audience is then well primed to spend money to support the author, which allows the author to create more valuable content. For an author with great content, it’s a cycle for success.

The bottom line is that authors are naturally positioned to succeed and flourish if they create content people find valuable. It’s almost always worked that way in the world of print. It’s even more that way in the social media world. It just so happens that today the content is also the best marketing tool.

If you have read this blog for any length of time or heard me speak about social media marketing, you know that I wholeheartedly believe that content is the best marketing strategy for using social media tools. Once you know that about me you almost always hear me talk about the Old McDonald approach to creating really, really valuable content. If you’re not familiar with Old McDonald and how he helps you with your content here is is:

Old McDonald In A Nutshell
Really valuable content is content that the people you want to reach will find valuable (rather than content you find valuable) so you want to focus on content for them and the Old McDonald approach (E-I-E-I-O) is to use at least one of these five things with your content:

E - Entertain (comedy, drama, mystery, etc.)

I - Inspire (make an emotional connection)

E - Educate (how to do something, what to do, what not to do, etc.)

I - Inform (news, stats, updates, ets.)

O - Outrage (knowing how to use controversy strategically)

Common Question
I’ve gotten some really good feedback about EIEIO over the last year. One question people usually ask has something to do with combining these values. They want to know if it’s preferable to keep content in a single category or if it’s all right to combine them into something like content that’s both entertaining and educational.

I don’t think it matters because so much of good content comes down to simply beginning with a focus on what the people you want to reach will find valuable. If boring, dry, static data would be the kind of information that would be valuable to the people you want to reach, then there may be no need to try to be overly entertaining with it. It has much more to do with the people you want to reach than with what you think will be fun to do. You won’t go wrong when you focus on them.

Where to Start
If you’re ready to get started creating valuable content but don’t know where to begin, I suggest you start with educational or informative content. Those two can be some of the quickest ways to show value to the people you want to reach, particularly if they don’t know who you are yet. Once you develop a following, you can branch out into something that may be more purely entertaining, inspirational, or controversial.

Information and education are sometimes the quickest ways to show value too. Entertainment and inspiration, for instance, depend more on people’s personalities and tastes, so if you don’t know the people you want to reach really well, you can add the most value to them the quickest by going the informational or educational route first.

The bottom line is that you want to start adding value as soon as possible. People choose to give their attention to the things they find valuable. If you will shift your marketing strategy to focus on value, you will get more attention from the right people for longer periods of time.

I was listening to a Q&A session with Seth Godin on the Marketing Over Coffee podcast today and Seth said something really interesting. He said radio was built for marketers. So were televisions, newspapers, and magazines. Without marketers and advertisers, these mediums would be finished. They would go out of business. The Internet, however, wasn’t built for marketers. It was built for communications.

This got me thinking about why good marketers can struggle with how to use the Internet for marketing. It’s not that they don’t know how to do their job. It’s that they don’t know how to do their job with a medium that wasn’t built for their job. I’ve seen really good old media marketers try to apply their expertise online and it fails. It just wouldn’t work.

The Internet is a different animal altogether now more than ever in the social-media-web-2.0-new-media kind of world the Internet has turned into. You must engage differently. You must add value. You must think communications rather than marketing because marketing will happen from the communications rather than communicating only to do marketing.

You can’t think old and do new. You can think old and do old or you can think new and do new, but that’s it. Those are your options.

About a year ago I started working with Jeff Mims, the owner of Mossy Creek Custom. Jeff is a gunsmith who was launching his business in the Nashville area. I encouraged him to start blogging as the primary means of promoting his business because, like many people starting their own businesses, he had very little money to put into marketing and promotion. I spent some time with Jeff so he would have the best perspective to make blogging work for him. He then went and set up a free Wordpress blog and got busy blogging.

A year later Mossy Creek Custom is getting business from across the country and Jeff’s blog posts are found much higher in Google search results than gunsmiths who have been around for decades.

I interviewed Jeff last week in his shop because his business seems like one of the least likely candidates for blogging as a marketing strategy, but you’ll hear in the interview below that it’s certainly paying off. The point here is that if good blogging can work for a gunsmith, why wouldn’t it work for you?

I have said before that the average American is targeted with an average of 4,000 advertising messages everyday. We can’t remember even ten of the 4,000 ads from yesterday because we have great filters in place to keep them out but that doesn’t seem to stop advertisers from putting all those ads out there.

Now, despite what you may think, advertisers and marketers are people too. The problem is when a marketer is in his/her job it’s easy to forget about the things they know don’t even work on them. So while a marketer for a local car dealership knows he changes the channel when commercials come on TV, he keeps pushing those ads for his own company. It doesn’t make any sense but it’s happening today in virtually every industry.

A Marketer’s Toughest Question
The hardest question for a marketer (or advertiser or public relations person) to ask is this: is it better to say and do nothing than to create another one of those 4,000 messages that get filtered out everyday? The short answer is, yes, but that’s a tough pill to swallow. The fact of the matter is that marketers are paid to do stuff, even things that don’t work. In many organizations it’s better to do the same old marketing that doesn’t work than to try something new.

The Necessary Shift for Marketers
It’s necessary that traditional marketers shift their thinking. Rather than talking about yourself, your company, your product, or something else we probably don’t care about, try adding value to the people you want to reach. When you add value to someone’s life they may decide to give you the opportunity to talk with them again. The more value you add, the more opportunities you earn. That’s what social media can do and why it works. It gives anyone the chance to add value to people you want to reach. It’s the reason a guy in his garage with no marketing budget can compete with a multi-million dollar company. It’s exactly the opposite of the 4,000 ads that get filtered out. Instead of being blocked, valuable content is grabbed. There’s no worry about filters. The filters are down and the content is willingly taken and even passed along to other people who will find it valuable.

Though I’ve said this many times (so this is my apology to longtime readers) the best way to position yourself mentally for creating valuable content is to remember five things:

• Be entertaining
• Be inspiring
• Be educational
• Be informative
• Be outrageous

When you speak to these ideas rather than telling people why you’re so great, you’ll see they can figure that out for themselves…and then they’ll tell some people for you. Or, just keep doing things the way you’ve been doing them…we don’t want all those good filters going to waste.

If you know me or have been reading this blog long you know I’m a firm believer in the idea of compelling content being the best way to use social media tools. That’s what the whole “Old McDonald” approach to good content is all about. If, however, it’s still not coming together for you, think about this: content MUST have value to the people you’re trying to reach. If it doesn’t, it’s not good content. It’s probably boring information that lacks something interesting or it’s marketing copy that’s just you talking about you.

So…let’s go back to the old McDonald idea. If good content that has value to someone contains at least one of the EIEIO elements (Entertain, Inspire, Educate, Inform, or Outrage) then you are creating content with value. If you’re still stuck though, add “me” to the end of the words. It would look like this:

• Entertain Me.
• Inspire Me.
• Educate Me.
• Inform Me.
• Outrage Me.

See what’s missing here? You. It’s not about you. It’s about me…the person you’re trying to reach. Now go write a blog post for the “me” you want to read your blog.

Last week I was in a meeting with people from a number of different organizations all discussing a common issue. I was the “social media” guy at the table with a few traditional marketers with various specialties along with non-marketing people working through an particular situation. During the course of the discussion I realized again how stark the difference is between the way I approach marketing and promotion compared to some more traditional marketers. I attribute this difference in thinking to people like Seth Godin, Chris Anderson, and Robert Scoble…all of whom have provided books and blog that have formed the way I approach the new technology for marketing purposes. I took some notes of my thoughts at the time and here’s what came out…

It’s not that television as we’ve known it doesn’t matter. It’s just that it doesn’t matter as much as it used to.

It’s not that newspapers as we’ve known them don’t matter. It’s just that they don’t matter as much as they used to.

It’s not that radio as we’ve known it doesn’t matter. It’s just that it doesn’t matter as much as it used to.

It’s not that marketing, advertising, public relations, and any other form of promotion as we’ve known it doesn’t matter. It’s just that it doesn’t matter as much as it used to.

It’s not that the way you’ve been marketing isn’t effective anymore. It’s just that it’s less effective today than it was yesterday and it will be increasingly less effective tomorrow, next week, and next year.

The lesson here isn’t that you have to make a total switch to social media marketing today. The lesson is that you need to be moving toward social media marketing and as you do, you can’t think about it the same way as the old way you did marketing.

I’m going to admit this up front: I have a few issues when it comes to advertising agencies and marketing firms. I don’t think they’re all bad, but I believe there are a lot of new options (which are better for the client) for people who need the same types of services that ad agencies and marketing firms offer.

For instance, you can find really good graphic design, web design, or web development services from a multitude of companies that have no more than two people in the company. More than likely, if you go with one of those you’ll pay about half of what the agency will charge you because you’re not covering a large overhead. I once worked for a company whose annual rent was more than what most of the people who worked there made in a year. It wasn’t that the work was that much better or that the technology was that much more expensive or that the staff was that much more talented. It was just that the company had a lot of overhead to cover and that was passed along to the clients. Again, not all the larger places are bad, but the best big ones are specialists, not generalists.

Here are three things to think about that may lead you to fire your current marketing firm or advertising agency:

If your agency doesn’t communicate with you, fire them. If you don’t recall the last time you heard from them, how are they supposed to know what your needs are? Even worse, I know of a company today that has an agency on retainer but doesn’t use their services. Their agency never contacts them and doesn’t have a clue about what’s going on with them, but they keep on collecting the fees every month. I think it’s dumb for the company to keep paying the retainer and very bad business for the agency to keep collecting without doing a thing for their client.

If your agency isn’t a learning organization, fire them. The world of marketing is changing too fast these days. If they’re not keeping up then they’re selling you outdated (and less useful) services. Many agencies did something well many years ago and are still trying to sell those same services. A lot of them have come to the cold realization that the old way doesn’t work anymore and are scrambling to figure out what to do next. I can only imagine how confused their clients are.

If your agency hasn’t given you a new idea in the last six months, fire them. This goes along with the learning organization point above but takes it a step further by actually expecting the agency to be leading in some way. It’s not enough to be learning, you have to be applying the new learning as well. If your agency is still making the same recommendations you got from them a year ago, they’re probably not learning and they’re certainly not leading.

The latest episode of The New Mediology is now available in iTunes or you can listen online.

In this episode, Nathan and I discussed the online advertising methods we have seen work since on the last podcast we talked about banner ads as something that doesn’t usually work online. If you listen to the podcast (or have listened to previous podcasts) be sure to leave a message on the comment line at 1-800-881-6059.

I’ve encountered a surge of friends, associates, and acquaintances who are new to blogging. What I’ve found is that in some cases the new bloggers have been blog readers for quite a while and have picked up on a few things about blogging culture, etiquette, technique, and strategy. In other cases, the new bloggers have jumped right in without having spent a lot of time reading blogs (and therefore missing some of the above mentioned things.) I applaud anyone who’s jumping into the blogging waters so this post is for the people who are relatively new to blogging but may have missed a few things along the way…

Here are seven things new bloggers should know:

1. Terminology 101 (part 1): Your blog is a blog so just call it that. It’s not a website or a blog site. It may operate as your web presence (which is what I do and recommend in many cases) but it’s still a blog. It would be incorrect to say, “Check out my blog site.” It would be correct to say, “Check out my blog.” It’s as simple as that.
2. Terminology 101 (part 2): Every entry you add to your blog is a post. Your entries are not blogs. The blog is the entire space but a post is a single entry. Some new bloggers will say, “I just wrote a blog today about…” which isn’t correct. They wrote a post. Not a blog. You can say “post” or “blog post” but not blog. A blog is your web presence (see number 1 above.)
3. Determine your posting frequency: When I was in second grade I signed up for a race with about thirty other second graders. When they shot the gun I took off like a flash. I was a blaze of red-sweat-pant-Member’s-Only- jacket-wearing-glory. The problem was the race was a mile. I was in first place for the first 100 yards. I ended up in dead last. I had no energy for most of the race. I used it all in the first 100 yards. New bloggers can start like that. You have new ideas and are fired up and ready to go…which is great, but if you don’t plan on keeping up that pace for the duration of your blog life, dial it back a little bit to something you can sustain. I recommend you determine your meal to snack ratio. Blogging is not a sprint.
4. Triple the amount of time you spend thinking about your post titles. Most likely you spend only a few seconds on your blog post title but it’s actually one of the most important things you can do. People tend to scan titles and your title may make or break whether someone actually reads the post. This is even more important as people continue to use feed readers in increasing numbers. Your posts are just one trickle in a stream of information and your title is what people will use to determine whether they will read your post or not.
5. Link to people when you mention them. This is one commonly overlooked but easy to fix issue. Good blogging etiquette is to link to a fellow blogger when you mention her/him. If you mention them by name just hyperlink to them. Every blog tool does that. If you see something on someone’s blog and it inspires you to write a post based on what you saw, give that person a “hat tip” if you don’t mention them specifically in the post. If you’ve ever seen something at the end of a blog that looks like this: [HT to Chris] then it’s a reference to a post I saw on Chris’ blog. It’s a hat tip to Chris. Bloggers love links and they love to receive credit when credit it due. They’ll also return the favor in many situations so this can be strategic as well. Link love is a wonderful thing for everyone.
6. Check your moderated comments often. If you moderate your comments try to check them at least daily because commenters want to know that their comments were worth the time they spent to post them. Comments exist to encourage discussion and dialogue but if it takes you forever to approve the comments, you’re not encouraging someone to comment in the future. More than likely they’ll think you rejected the comment and then what was supposed to be a positive experience for the person turns into a negative one because they’ll be sitting there wondering why you didn’t approve their comment. Just approve them often and only reject the stuff that’s spam.
7. The golden rule of blogging is to provide content. Unless your blog is intended to be something personal for yourself, friends, and family this rule applies to you. If you have any hopes of blogging with the intent that people will find it helpful, useful, etc. you need to provide content on a regular basis. Here’s the test: how many of your previous ten posts were about you verses about something that meets the Old McDonald test? Content is about your readers. A personal blog is about you and that’s fine…but if you’re not writing a personal blog, don’t make it about you all the time. The fact of the matter is most people don’t really care about you but they do like it when you give them something entertaining, inspiring, educational, informative, or even outrageous. They may be amused about little things going on in your life from time to time and that’s fine to talk about, but otherwise, give them substance that has value for them.