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.

David Alston is the VP of Marketing of Radian6, a social media monitoring company based in Canada. David recently commented on my blog post about social media and customer service. Through that comment we struck up a conversation in Twitter which led to David’s gracious acceptance of my interview request. The full Q&A is below.

One thing to note here before the interview is that David’s interaction with me though a comment on this blog is exactly what all marketing people should be doing. There are three camps that marketers are in, but only one where we all should be:

1. Some marketers don’t monitor what people are saying about their company or topics related to their industry.
2. Other marketers are monitoring the discussions but aren’t joining the conversations. This is better than the first camp because at least they’ll know when something is said about them, but it’s a very reactive posture as well. The monitoring seems more akin to just keeping an eye on social media to put a fire out rather than to serve to expand awareness of the company proactively. Monitoring potential fires is one thing, it’s just not the whole thing when it comes to social media monitoring.
3. A few marketers, like David, are raising awareness of their company by finding the conversations they wouldn’t otherwise know about and influencing people who wouldn’t otherwise know about them.

So consider this a case in point for the right way to do not just monitor social media, but to engage it as well. Here’s the interview with David…

MicroExplosion: Do you think companies are simply not monitoring their brand at all (meaning across all media…traditional and new) or is it more a neglect to pay attention to social media only?

David: Well, if you look at the 1000’s of companies that have been using traditional media monitoring companies (TV, print, radio) I would have to say that it’s probably more of an awareness thing. For example, if a company decision maker didn’t read the newspaper, watch TV or listen to the radio he/she probably wouldn’t consider monitoring traditional media channels all that necessary. The same goes for social media (blogs, online video and images, forums, opinion sites, micromedia). It’s usually when a company decides to dip its toe into social media from a corporate or personal level that the need finally crystallizes. Conversations about brands and issues are happening all the time online in social media with or without brand owners. Its probably best to be at least aware of these so engagement can be considered.

MicroExplosion: In large companies do you find that any particular departments are more interested in your services than others? For instance, is the corporate communications office more interested in social media monitoring than the marketing department or vice versa?

David: Each department has a different reason to be monitoring social media.

• Public relations – crises breaking online, monitoring effective of outreach campaigns
• Marketing – tracking brand voice vs. competitors, tracking a marketing campaign’s effectiveness, looking for possible trends, understanding the most influential sites to partner with or advertise on, discover competitor initiatives or positioning
• Customer Care – discover customer complaints and reach out, help with those clients requiring how-to assistance
• Sales – discover potential leads based on posts that declare “a need”, respond with offers of assistance for clients of competitors having difficulty
• Legal – uncover potential misuse of copyrights or patents, stay on top of any issues regarding inappropriate communications from an SEC perspective
• HR – discover potential employee candidates based on the expertise they are demonstrating or the comments they make about looking for work in a specific area of expertise/location
• Business Development – uncover potential channel partners

MicroExplosion: You mentioned in a comment on my blog that companies should “answer the social phone.” I think that’s a great phrase. Do you see organizations viewing this new task of social phone answering as something else to put on employee(s) full plates or are they carving out time and/or hiring new personnel to do this?

David: It is still early in the game for many companies deciding where the “social phone” should be primarily answered. The key thing would be at least assigning it to someone as a start. This could be someone in PR, marketing or customer care. Once a company gets a feel for the types of “social web calls” coming in and the volume they could better assess the best fit for this role within their company. Radian6 is working with leading companies now to help determine the best approach for them and how our platform can best serve each of their own unique situations.

MicroExplosion: How do you recommend a client respond if they have found their brand to be unfavorably mentioned in a blog, podcast, or some other social medium?

David: I guess it entirely depends on what is said, who is saying it, and whether or not the company has developed a relationship with that individual or with the community that individual belongs to. Generally I would say that the response needs to match up with the company’s brand promise for all other communications with clients and potential clients. Responding quickly in an appropriate way can also show that you care to listen and you want to help out. Not only will this buy a company credibility with the person who posted but it will also with those who read this person or are part of his/her network. In the end its about developing and maintaining relationships with people.

MicroExplosion: What does Radian6 do for a company that Google Alerts doesn’t?

David: Certainly most people usually start out this way. It can at least give them a snippet of what’s out there involving their brand. Our clients generally tell us that Google Alerts don’t get them the entire coverage they need across all social media types, don’t allow them to understand which posts and sites to pay more attention to, and can’t show them which trends are happening. They also find that Google Alerts don’t always get delivered in a timely way – which is important if you plan on engaging on a post with a majority of commenting and viewership happening in the first two days.

Our solution covers all types of social media (not just blogs) and delivers findings in real-time as discovered. It tracks conversational dynamics on each post (viewership, total comments, total unique commenters, and calculated engagement) which enables sorting ability to zoom in on the most viral conversations. With all of the posts on a topic in one place, users can then run ad hoc analysis charts and graphs based on keywords. Analysis capabilities like this enables a client to see trends and potential issues (ex. “forest for the trees”). Finally we can also determine the top influential sites on a topic based on a user-defined formula that includes conversational dynamics as well as total on-topic posts and on-topic inbound linking. Determining influencers allows a client to focus their engagement and outreach efforts for the best ROI.

———-

David, thanks for the interview. You provided some great insights here. Check out the Radian6 website to learn more about their company and services.

Becky is a marketing strategist for a large company here in Nashville. One evening she was planning some snacks for an evening with friends when her search for a snack led her to purchase a book she didn’t know she wanted. Here’s the email Becky sent to her director the next day:

“I Googled Chili’s because I wanted to find out how much it would cost to get chips and salsa to go. When I Googled Chili’s, this link came up that said “Brand Autopsy: Would you miss Chili’s?” That intrigued me, so I clicked on it and found the blog of a marketing guy who used to work for Starbucks and Whole Foods. He, in turn, raved about this new book that is all about marketing and social networks. I thought it might be something that our whole team would benefit from. Isn’t it ironic that I was looking for chips and salsa and found a marketing book? But it hit the right audience at the right time!”

I really like this story at a number of different levels because:

• It shows the power and influence of blogs even in the most unlikely of connections.
• It reminds me that people trust blogs that seem trustworthy.
• It reminds me that your target audience cannot be segmented so neatly all the time because Becky the marketer wasn’t looking for a book but she found one and bought it (and will likely buy one for the entire marketing team at the company) when she was Becky the snack shopper.
• It reminds me of the power of a Google search and how blogs could make (or break) the positioning of your brand.

The book Becky found was called “Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed By Social Technologies” by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. I’m reading this book now too but I found out about it through Twitter via Jeremiah Owyang.

I’m keenly aware of the irony here (and also the affirmation of the power and influence of social media) that a book called Groundswell benefited from the groundswell in at least two cases I can point to directly (mine and Becky’s) and I’m sure countless others. So the question is, what are you waiting for if you’re not getting in yet? Don’t fight the groundswell.

We have another batter up for social media batting practice. Dave Delaney has recommended five tips for a pediatrician. The full scenario and his ideas are below. While we’re on the social media batting practice topic…Mitch Joel included a comment from me on his most recent episode of Six Pixels of Separation. He had some great additional info to include. Here’s the scenario that was pitched to Dave and his ideas follow…

Scenario: A pediatrician wants to know how she would be able to use social media to promote her practice. She’s currently spending money on local advertising in multiple areas and wants to know how social media marketing would work for her. She’s not viewed as the best pediatrician in her community but is widely recognized as one of the top five.

Dave’s ideas:

1. I would recommend that the pediatrician create a Google Adwords campaign targeted to her local zipcode(s).
2. I’d advise that she be sure she is included on Goggle in their business search results by adding herself to Google maps.
3. Depending on her available time and interest, I would suggest developing a blog and posting to it regularly. The blog would also offer all appropriate social bookmarks and tags.
4. She should also considering posting on local parenting forums always being sure to link back to her website.
5. Finally, she should consider sponsoring a quality parenting Internet radio show (AKA “podcast”) like Two Boobs and a Baby.

Thanks for the ideas Dave. I’ll include a similar real-life scenario I discussed a long time ago about a blogging dentist I know here in town.

All bloggers want more traffic to their site. It doesn’t matter if it’s a professional blog or some random musings from your life, you want more traffic if you publish a public blog. Sure, you know about blogrolls and link exchanges, but do you ever link specifically to posts to bring some traffic to you blog? You can. Here’s how.

Linking to posts (called trackbacks or pingbacks depending on what your blog tool calls them) is a way to show that you wrote a blog post specifically talking about a post on another blog. That referring link then shows up on the original blog either under the trackback area or in the comments. That referring link can then send people to your blog to see what you had to say on the topic.

For instance, if I wrote a post about how Seth Godin gives a good explanation on the types of people who use Firefox rather than Explorer, I would link to it as I’ve done here and grab the trackback link at the end of his post. That trackback link can then be inserted into a special trackback field within Wordpress (some blog tools can do this automatically…just check how your blog platform deals with these or try this). Then my post referring to Seth’s post would show up on his blog.

Wordpress is especially generous to pingbacks. If you were to link to this post for instance (the permanent link) it would show up in the comments. Wordpress works like this for all users unless the blog’s author has specifically turned the feature off.

The strategy here is that you add value to the conversation and get to bring people over to your blog to see what you’ve said. It’s better than a comment because it shows you took some time to really respond to the blog post. People who read the comments will be more likely to click over to see what you said because they also recognize that you took the time to write it.

One final thought here…don’t be a jerk. Don’t trackback unless you have something valuable to add. There is such a thing as spam trackbacks and spam pingbacks and you don’t want to be one of those. Just add something to the conversation and you’ll be fine.

You may not know it but you have some control over the way your blog’s RSS feed displays. You can allow your feed to show a summary (which usually consists of the first paragraph or introductory sentences in your post) or the full post. Most blogs default with the full post display but I was asked recently if I thought the summary option is a good idea based on the premise that if people can only read an introductory paragraph from the post then it will drive traffic to the blog.

My advice is to never just do the summary and here’s why…

• The summary option assumes people care enough to click out of their feed reader to go to you blog. Many feed readers are scanning headlines and if they see something that catches their interest, they want to read it then and there. That’s a primary reason for having a feed reader to begin with…the person chose to bring the content to them rather than go to every blog to read the posts. iGoogle wasn’t the most popular Google property in 2007 for nothing. Increasingly, people want their online information consolidated, convenient, and quick. Don’t make it hard on them because they will likely keep moving through their feeds and never click over to read your post.
• The summary option assumes that unique visitors to the blog are a more important statistic than the RSS readers. Personally, I believe the richest statistic you can measure for your blog is your RSS subscriber base. Those readers have elected to pull your content into their feed reader. They are your new opt-in list so treat them special and don’t make life harder on them. You need them more than they need you.
• The summary option isn’t a common practice with 99% of blogs. If for no other reason, don’t do this because you’ll be the one blogger who forces people to click over to your blog to read the posts and it’s just counter cultural (in blog culture that is.) If you do the summary, the best case scenario is that people will ignore it an move on. The worst case is they’ll think you’re controlling and egotistical…and they still won’t read it and will move on.

The bottom line is that anything you may gain in some new traffic to the blog will be a much bigger loss in people’s attention and your influence because you’re creating a hurdle they have to get over if they want to read your posts. It’s just not a good idea. You have more to lose than gain.

More than likely you saw Office Max’s Elf Yourself promotion during the last two Christmas seasons. If you’re not familiar with it, Office Max created the site to let people upload pictures of themselves or someone they know and put the head on a dancing elf. It was huge. It seemed like everyone I knew and was reading online was talking about it particularly during the Christmas season of 2006. As good as Elf Yourself was, it also had a consequence…it encouraged other companies to try something similar and less remarkable. Case in point: Get Irish Now promoting Irish Springs body wash.

I could spend the bulk of this post talking about how Get Irish Now falls short of Elf Yourself in originality and overall delivery but I think the thing that struck me most is that I found out about Get Irish Now because someone from their PR firm emailed me to let me know. In the email pitch they led with a comparison to Elf Yourself and then went on to compare Get Irish Now to “virtual worlds” and opportunities for people to create their own content online.

Without getting into a really long explanation on this for those who don’t know about virtual worlds like Second Life, neither Elf Yourself nor Get Irish Now are virtual worlds. They’re not even close.

As for the claim that people are really interested in creating content, I agree wholeheartedly but I think the stats that back those claims are more along the lines of social media sites like YouTube or blog or podcasts.

My point here is that if you’re going to pitch yourself to bloggers you really, really, really need to know what you’re talking about and who you’re talking to. If you’re a PR person or just want to pitch yourself, your service, your product, or something else to bloggers you need to know what you’re getting into. For more on this check out what Chris Anderson did several months ago. I also talked about this when another PR firm contacted me in August. In that post I recommended five things to consider when you pitch bloggers and here they are again if you weren’t reading this blog last summer. The full explanations for the points below are on the original post:

• Remember that bloggers are individuals not organizations.
• Be direct. 
• Don’t be a spammer. 
• Bloggers would rather make and break news than react to news.
• Study the individual blogs you hope will work with you.

The bottom line is that pitching your ideas to bloggers is great. I do it too. You just have to remember that you pitch bloggers differently than organizations. Some PR professionals seem to still be learning that.

One final note on Get Irish Now…if you load the site and just wait, meaning you don’t do anything for a minute or two, the guy will come out and harass you. Depending on your sense of humor you’ll either laugh or want to punch him.

A few weeks ago I was blessed and honored to sit down for a few minutes with Dan Miller, the author of No More Mondays and 48 Days to the Work You Love for his podcast. We talked specifically about why you should care about blogging and other social media, how a person can use new media tools to promote what they do, some examples where I’ve seen this work, and how to get started.

Here’s a link to listen to the interview on Dan’s website or subscribe to Dan’s podcast and listen to it there.

If you want to know a bit about what Dan’s specialty is, check out this video of him on a recent Dave Ramsey Show and his blog. Dan’s principles have a lot to do with where I am today professionally and I’m grateful for the time and wisdom he’s provided. He’s also a great person to work for because he knows what he wants to know, he knows what he doesn’t know, and he finds the people to help him know what he needs to know.

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.

I thought of one additional thing to add to my post earlier today about the recent hire of a full-time blogger at eBay. The additional thought is this: eBay didn’t try to outsource the blogging responsibility.

I’ve had conversations with people who think blogging is something that can be outsourced to college students or copywriters or stay at home moms or new media consultants. It can’t. None of those people know the company as well as someone who is inside the company day in and day out. They can convey the culture. They won’t have the relationships. They won’t respond as timely because they will probably be running most of their content through someone before they post…particularly if there’s an issue that demands a rapid response.

Outsourcing your blogging is not only a bad idea, it may be misleading in too. A great organizational blog conveys that your reading a person who is a true representative of the organization. Someone who lives and breathes the organization…and an outsourced blogger just won’t do that. Don’t outsource your blogging. Don’t even think about it.