Last week we explored the first five of the Top 10 content marketing tips you need to know.  Today we’ll dive a little deeper, while acknowledging that this is a vast topic.  To keep up on content marketing trends I suggest you follow the Content Marketing Institute blog.

Here are the final five of the Top 10 content marketing tips you need to know:

6.  Listen to what your audience is complaining about.  The best content solves problems.  With this in mind, participate in communities with your peers, prospects and clients to note trends in what matters to them.  Sometimes these topics will be ones that they are excited about, but the hot button topics that they regularly complain about are the topics begging for your expertise, help and solutions …so give it to them.  They’ll love you for it!

7.  Consistently connect.  Delivering your content on a regular basis is crucial. You can have short blog posts as well as long ones, but post at least once a week if possible.  Post and comment on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and relevant blogs to your industry daily.   Regularly post on, and through, platforms like Foursquare, Instagram, Flikr, FoodSpotting, YouTube, etc.  Give people a reason to look forward to each time you’ll share new content, by being a resource that they want to follow.

8.  Make people feel special.  This is the key to a happy life and one of the best ways to ensure that people will care about you and your content – care about them first.  As Zig Zigler famously said, “You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.”

9.  Entertain before informing.  One of the cardinal rules of public speaking is to entertain 90% of the time and inform 10% of the time because no matter how great your information is, no one will listen to you if you don’t entertain them.  This doesn’t mean you have to be a dancing monkey with unending witty comments, but being interesting is what will attract people to interact with, and share, your content.  Think about the content you love and the people who make it.  They make you smile and laugh, don’t they?

10.  Repurpose, repurpose, repurpose.  Content is a dish best served over and over in different formats to multiple audiences to reach as many people as possible.   Once you put your hard work in to creating a live webinar you can also record it to be replayed, transcribe it into an eBook (as well as multiple blog posts, white papers and one-sheets), chop pieces of it into “how to” videos, grab nuggets of wisdom out for tweets and Facebook and Google+ posts, and the entire presentation can be loaded to SlideShare.  Aim to work once and then repurpose your content at least 5 different ways.

It’s Valentine’s day.  You forgot to prepare.  You’ll be rushing out to grab one of the last boxes of chocolates and bouquets of flowers left in the grocery store.  Why put yourself through so much stress?

There’s a better solution to this years Valentines procrastination, send your love a sweet tweet that could be read by The Golden Voice – he’ll say it better than you or I ever could.  And besides, just for writing the tweet you’ll be supporting kraft in giving food donations to Feed America.

This marketing campaign for Kraft is a smart mini-copy of the Old Spice social media marketing campaign that everyone loved. The original twist that’s pretty cool is that Kraft employed a man who was recently homeless to help spread the love on Valentine’s Day.  The added charity piece of helping to feed hungry Americans and the fact that you can participate are cherries on top.

…but you should still grab that bouquet of flowers and stay out of the valentine’s dog house.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Two bills being voted on next week in the House of Representatives contain language that could censor the Internet in ways you would never imagine.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House of Representatives and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate are well meaning, but if passed, will be destructive to internet freedoms we’ve all come to expect as well as forces that have helped innovation on the internet flourish. Both pieces of legislation greatly weaken theDigital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which for over a decade has helped Internet companies grow and flourish.

The recording industry, movie studios and television studios are the driving forces behind these bills. We are all very aware of how the music industry ‘s slow and regressive response to digital music backfired while not helping recording artists or the music industry.

Instead of creating better ways to legally download music (as Apple did for them by creating iTunes), their solution was to sue music lovers. Imagine the repercussions of this industry, and the Hollywood studios that have not adapted to how digital innovations have affected their industry, dictating policies that regulate the Internet.

Some of the companies and organizations that have opposed these bills so far include American Express, AOL, Creative Commons, Demand Progress, Discover, eBay, Etsy, Facebook, Foursquare, Google, LinkedIn, MoveOn, Mozilla, OpenDNS, PayPal, Twitter, Visa, Wikimedia Foundation, Yahoo! and Zynga. They are joined by web founders, public interest groups, non-profits, advocacy organizations, thinktanks, industry associations, websites, online services, cybersecurity companies, engineers, international human rights advocates, entrepreneurs, founders, CEOs, executives, venture capitalists, academics, experts, educators, editorial boards and student newspapers.

Would you rather have these companies and Internet-related professionals determine what’s best for the Internet and its users? We can probably agree that they are more aware of what’s beneficial for the Internet than the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America.

Reddit has announced a blackout on January 18th to protest SOPA and Wikipedia is considering joiningthem. Thousands of people are changing their Twitter and Facebook avatars to include a Blackout SOPAbadge across their face in protest.

SOPA and PIPA aim to help private corporations shut down unauthorized websites where people download music, movies, and TV shows. Most of these websites are outside of America, so these corporations are looking to combat them in a few ways. 1) Block access to infringing domain names. 2) Sue U.S. based search engines, blogs, websites, directories and forums to remove links to these sites. 3) Stop funding these websites by not allowing advertisers to support them.

The consequences that SOPA and PIPA supporters do not mention include: 1) This will not stop downloaders. History has proven this. 2) It will cripple startups by allowing corporations to sue any company they decide is not filtering to their subjective satisfaction. One of these lawsuits can easily bankrupt new websites and search engines that offer competitive alternatives to their corporate brethren. 3) The ambiguous language in PIPA and SOPA leaves plenty of room for misinterpretation that can make websites pioneering new avenues look like pirates. In the past, this could have affected sites like YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Facebook and hundreds of other social sites where people express themselves, organize protests, share news or make art.

The bottom line and main question to ask yourself is, “Do I trust the U.S. government to censor the Internet and protect free expression of its people? And if I do, do I trust other governments who will probably follow suit?” The next question to ask yourself is, “Is it worth the potential of creating a censored internet that is less innovative and stable in order to possibly help the RIAA and MPAA sell more music and movies?”

I strongly recommend contacting your Senators and Congressional Representatives or visiting American Censorship to make your voice heard on these critical bills that can negatively impact the Internet that you use every day. If online activists could make GoDaddy flip its support on SOPA and PIPA, then it can happen with Congress too.

This article was originally posted in Huffington Post

Photo via http://gplus.to/billypan

News and speculation about Google+ is flowing faster than the  Boulder creek during this monsoon season.  We’re not even 3 full weeks into the release, you still have to receive an invite to get in, and Google+ users are already expected to hit 10 million by tonight and 20 million by the weekend.

Some people are wondering about privacy.  Spammers are asking people to click on links in the comments of popular posts.  Ford built a Google+ business page before Google released their own versions.  Early adopters are prematurely announcing the demise of Twitter and Facebook. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, I gave a presentation to a class of executive MBA students last Saturday who hadn’t even heard of it yet.

As someone who thought Google Wave would have a major impact, before watching it crash - along with no one really using Google Buzz, I’m hesitant but overly optimistic that Google got it right this time.  The fact that millions of people are using it daily already, when Google Wave never got much traction, proves that we’re finding value and ease of use for the first time in a Google product aimed at social networking.

Photo via Dobromir Hadzhiev

Only time will tell how successful Google Plus will be, but the main factor will be how much time people choose to spend on it versus other social networks.  If you have to choose between reading news feeds from friends and posting on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ it could feel like too much time to manage.  In addition to this, there’s also the time you spend reading blogs and consuming other online media.  Of the people I’ve surveyed, Google+ is cutting mostly into Facebook time, but as quickly as Google+ hits 20 million or 100 million users, our habits and the amount of time we spend on each social network will certainly change.

If a shiny new technology object sees a great launch, the ensuing challenge is sustaining interest.  That probably won’t happen with Google+.  The main reason that they are the only company that has a chance of unseating Facebook’s social networking dominance is that Google has the resources, credibility and user base to make a major impact swiftly.

Google+ is already tied into Gmail, the 3rd largest webmail provider.  Google Apps is used by over 3 million businesses with over 30 million employees. Google Search enjoys over 34,000 searches per second.  With that many people spending time on Google products each day, mixed in with Google+ being a social network people like, and we may see Google take back the coveted mantle of where web users spend most of their time online.

This article was originally published in The Huffington Post.

Photo by Orlando Photo Chic via Flikr

I’m probably not the guy you’re expecting to say that social media strategy is a myth.  But alas, I’m THAT guy.

There’s a huge misconception about the term ‘social media strategy.’  Social media is a tool.  Saying you have a ‘social media strategy’ is like saying you have a ‘shovel strategy’ or a ‘hammer strategy.’  Maybe that’s why almost anyone with a Facebook page or Twitter account can sell ‘social media strategy’ to people who don’t know any better until after they hire them.

What businesses are really looking for is a marketing strategy, and tips on effective persuasive communication, to use on social networks. …but that doesn’t roll off the tongue as well as ‘social media strategy’, does it?  The harder part is that a lot of times they short-sightedly think they just need a Facebook and Twitter presence without having a clue about how to effectively communicate on these social channels.

When I create social marketing strategies for companies they always interact with offline marketing campaigns and offline activities that don’t become marketing until you create content about them online.

A great social marketing strategy has three components: 1) It begins with how to reach the top goals of the business, 2) It leverages multiple offline and online channels, and 3) It builds a community for the brand based on ongoing and ever-deepening relationships with customers.

So if you’re calling yourself a social media strategist – stop!  You’re calling yourself a tool strategist; which is only one degree away from calling yourself a tool.  If you have a marketing education and experience then call yourself a social marketer or digital marketer or anything besides a social media strategist.  If you have no marketing education or experience, stop pretending you know how to help businesses operate online – what they do is different from what you do with your friends online.  At best, you’re a social media theorist, not a strategist.

If you think you want help with social media for your business then look for people and companies with great marketing experience who effectively use social media daily themselves. This way you get the benefit of their marketing expertise  in how to best communicate to people through social tools.  What struggling or growing companies need is great business strategy+great marketing strategy+understanding best practices for social tools to = reaching company goals.

Now it’s your turn, leave comments on your reactions to this post – including if you think I’m off base on this one.

Add This, the social sharing widget, recently released the trends in social sharing they documented for 2010. It’s not surprising that Google had more growth than Facebook, but did you expect Stumble Upon to have more growth than Facebook?

The statistic worth noting is that Email is 38% bigger than Twitter.  This doesn’t make Twitter ineffective.  In fact, Twitter click through rates kill Facebook and Email.  If you want people to click on a link Twitter is the place to place those links.

What the Add This statistic on email should tell business owners is that email should not be overlooked.  As social media has risen in prominence and stature in the word of mouth marketing world, email has been prematurely ignored or abandoned by many companies.

The simple truth is that email still builds relationships when consistent communication is sent to people who opt-in to read messages from your company.  The open rates on email campaigns can run run as high as 36% where direct snail mail campaigns average a .05% – 2% open rate.  Remember that most snail mail marketing is unsolicited and unwanted whereas email is requested by people who want to receive offers and information from your company.

In summary, don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.  Just as you need to use the best in offline and online marketing to support your word of mouth efforts, you need to use a mix of the best online tools to extend your reach and build your business.  Three tips you can takeaway from this article are:

1. Twitter is where your links will receive the highest click through rates so connect to your friends and followers with URLs on Twitter
2. Facebook is where people share the most and where you should engage your customers
3. Email will get you the most referrals so communicate weekly with your customers

This post was originally published at Oxstein Labs.

Before you read the full story, I want to start with the fact that Vonage gave me great customer service, but getting there was an unnecessary adventure.

Back in August of 2009 I signed up for a Vonage phone line when AT&T dumped their VOIP service in Colorado. I was happy with AT&T Callvantage for years and had actually left Vonage for AT&T years ago because of frustration with Vonage’s service issues and dealing with their call centers in India, which have since moved back to the United States.

In February of 2010 I realized that I was using the phone on rare occasions. Using the combination of my iPhone, Skype and Bria was a good one for my personal and business needs. When I called to cancel Vonage I was reminded of their exorbitant early termination fee. (I consider this common telecom company extortion. Can you name one other service you have to pay to stop using? But we’ll save that for another post.)

It was cheaper to finish out the contract at $10 (plus $6 in taxes and fees) each month for 100 hours of local service, which I knew I wouldn’t use, rather than pay the early termination fee. So I agreed to that change.

On August 30, 2010 I called and finally canceled the service, or thought I had. A few days ago I noticed that I had been charged $16 in September and again in October. I called Vonage yet again to correct the mistake. For an hour I explained the situation to their representative and then to his supervisor, who said they did not have the power to issue a refund for the $32.

Their notes showed that I had accepted a free month of service in exchange for continuing the service, which is not an agreement I had made, though the representative kept trying to push me into accepting it. They were robots following their scripts with a mandate to not let a customer leave easily.

During conversations with both of them I did something I have never done in these situations before: I mentioned that I have over 30,000 Twitter followers with whom I would be sharing my experience. They didn’t seem to care. After they acknowledged that my account notes demonstrated I had dropped to the lowest plan in February, they claimed the only way they could help me was to cancel my service and possibly issue a refund later.

According to the supervisor I spoke with, any refund issued would still require them to review the August 30th recorded phone call to confirm that I had not accepted a free month of service (which, incidentally, they had charged me for anyway). I asked the supervisor why anyone who was forced to pay for a service for 6 months that they wanted to cancel would agree to staying on for a free month. Any thinking person can understand how illogical that argument is.

Ideally, a good customer service rep would acknowledge the mistake and rectify the situation in a way that the customer leaves feeling good about the company. This would result in the spreading of positive stories about their experiences with the company. Instead, the people I dealt with repeated in a mechanical way that they understood my problem, but that they couldn’t solve it.

What a difference 17 hours and 30,000 Twitter followers makes!

I posted a note on Twitter about this at 5pm Thursday night. By 9:30 am @Vonage responded to me by asking me how they could help and then brought @Vonage_Voice into the online conversation. A virtual Twitterstorm ensued in front of about 35,000 people following me and @Vonage.

The Vonage social media customer service person was helpful and tried to get me offline as quickly as possible to talk with someone on their Executive Response Team. Undoubtably, this was mostly done to make me happy enough to stop telling people online about my bad experience with Vonage. My refund was magically issued about 2 hours later, without anyone reviewing my August 30th phone call.

So why couldn’t the representative or the supervisor I wasted an hour on the phone with offer me the same solution?

I’m sharing this story in hopes that Vonage and other companies will address their ineffective customer service systems so that customers don’t need to resort to calling them out publicly in order to be treated fairly and receive a resolution for their account issues. Having an Executive Response Team is smart. Not giving lower level employees the freedom to fix an inexpensive mistake is short sighted.

In hindsight, how much revenue will Vonage lose on the negative public relations this easily solvable situation generated? Vonage’s competitors and tens of thousands of potential customers can now discover and review customer to corporate communications on the social web that are now indexed and archived online forever in the Library of Congress.

How much money was wasted by having 4 employees use up two hours of company time responding to my case? Definitely more than the $32 a representative could have refunded to me after a 10 minute conversation.

This isn’t a Vonage issue as much as an issue with doing business the old way versus the social business way. We’ve all had similar experiences and wasted dozens of hours with companies that continue to use antiquated customer service systems.

All they have to do to make the systems better is to treat customers like people instead of dollars. Companies should stop forcing customer service representatives to behave like robots, for fear of upsetting their supervisors when the best resolution is to give the customers what they want – even if that means to cancel service.

If Vonage had done that I would have been posting on Twitter, Facebook and blogs about how this is one company that ‘gets it,’ instead of the dissatisfaction you’re reading now.

Hopefully, as more companies realize that we live in a social ecosystem where people have voices that are heard by other customers, their customer service practices will change. Companies who embrace the social web enjoy customer loyalty from people who will promote them and give feedback on how to make their products and services more valuable. This engagement can only boost the companies’ bottom line if they pay attention and make strategic changes based on the feedback they are receiving.

Operating a business with the customer in mind is more beneficial and cost effective on multiple levels. Maintaining hierarchical systems where both employees and customers are marginalized is both disempowering and costly.

We live in a new era of collaboration between companies and the customers whose loyalties they seek. It’s better to build a large following of raving fans than to burn customer bridges over $32.

Please share your own stories of inadequate customer service in the comment section to help corporate America understand what’s broken in their systems so they can understand how to prevent future damage.

This story was originally published in the Huffington Post.

This article was originally posted at Oxstein Labs.

Even as more and more companies hire Community Managers to give them a social media presence, the general attitude towards social media is, “Everyone’s doing it, so we need to do it too.”  If this is where you’re coming from, you’re most likely to cover the tactics with little strategy and mixed results.  A better way to go about it is to follow these Top Three ways to build a kick ass social media marketing presence.

Photo by ChicaD58 via Flikr

1. Have a strategy. Having a Twitter account and a Facebook page does not a social media strategy make.  The first question is not, “What are you doing online?”  The first question is “What do you need to see in three years to know that your business is succeeding?”

Once you know the answer to this question you can look at the numerous tools and tactics available through social media to create a strategy.  This strategy needs to be based on your business goals and ideally will integrate your social media marketing actions with every department of your company.

If a social media expert acts like a hammer looking for a nail and talks about what social media will do for you without first asking you about your business, RUN.  I’m amazed at the number of social media firms that don’t practice offline what they preach about online.  Listening isn’t just a tactic, it’s a way of operating that makes every person and every business better.

2. Define and express your brand personality. If you don’t know what your brand stands for, no amount of social media marketing will help you. Write down the three words that you feel best describe your company. Then ask your partners, employees and customers to tell you three words they think of when they think about your company.

Chances are that they will tell you something different.  If so, then it’s time to do further research on what your customers most want.  Then make sure your brand offers what they want.  This is much more important than what you think they want or what you think you should give them.  Listen to them and then deliver what they ask for.  It’s a simple concept that most companies ignore.

The message that most companies think they are sending is usually not the one that the public is receiving unless they have millions to spend on broadcasting the message incessantly.  Volvo means safety, but what does your local ice cream store stand for?

Your brand personality is the foundation for your social media marketing actions and should be the foundation of how your company operates in every department.  If your message is unknown or not consistently practiced daily by every employee then it is false and the public will figure it out faster than you can Google comments about your company.

This personality needs to affect what you tweet, who you follow, how you respond to people, what contests you do or don’t run on your Facebook page, whether you make videos, if you ask fans and followers to make videos, what context you come from when you announce something, whether you have an online TV show, how you build relationships and alliances online, and much more.

Photo by Jonny Goldstein via Flikr

3. Establish your social media presence with your goals and message in mind. Yes, I said presence, not campaign.  You can’t do this short term.  Social media marketing is as essential to your business as customer service and good accounting practices. People live online now.  If you aren’t interacting with people where they hang out, you will be left out.  No two ways about it.

Strategically decide if you want to be on Twitter, Facebook, You Tube, UStream or whichever social platforms you choose.  Depending on your company size, your industry, your budget, where your target audience participates and lurks online, and other factors, you will have to prioritize your online activities.

Once you know where you want to be you can plan out when and how you will launch and develop your presence to meet your business goals.  Have realistic goals with grounded plans of how to reach them and always be anchored to your core message.

I have had clients who pull numbers out of the air like expecting 10,000 Facebook fans in a month.  Well, that’s a nice goal in a short time frame, so how do you expect to get there?  What are you going to give people to make them care about you enough to “Like” your Facebook page?  Why do you want 10,000 instead of 1,000? How will you entice them to come back again or to tell others about you?  How does this number, or how you get to this number, represent and enhance your company goals?  What demographics do you want to make up this 10,000 number?  Do you realize that 100 rabid evangelists that love your company are worth more than 10,000 people who click “Like” and then don’t pay any more attention to you?

Social media marketing, like all streams of marketing, is part art and part science. If you develop your brand and your communications in authentic ways with your goals and your customers in mind you’ll be thrilled with the results.  What other tips would you give companies just starting out on the social media marketing road? What tips can you add for companies maturing in this space who are looking to improve their results?

This article was originally posted in the Huffington Post.

Last week was the week of ‘instant.’ It began with the launch of Google Instant, which added a new evolution to online searches. And then almost instantly, we saw the birth of Google Instant : Maps, Google Instant: Images, YouTube Instant, Etsy Instant, iTunes Instant, and Twitter Instant.

What the proliferation of instant online platforms means for you is that information is coming at you faster and (hopefully) it is better targeted to what you are searching for. The general idea is that the search box is smarter than you are. It will finish your thought for you and give you multiple terms which ideally helps you to create better search terms.

By using instant searches it is expected that you will save 2-5 seconds per search. The predictive nature of Google Instant, for example, is designed to guide you to the best result before you have time to type in what you are looking for. There is debate as to whether this is true.

As an example, as I started to type in “best cities in America,” this is what I saw:

Granted, I had only typed in three letters, but it is curious to note that Best Buy is the first result. Is that because people are looking for Best Buy more than any other ‘best’ topic on Google? Or is it because they spend the most amount of money per month in paid search with Google for the term ‘best’?

As soon as I typed “best cities i” the top result was actually “best cities in America,” which is still impressive.

Many people have already turned off Google Instant, but if you haven’t tried it yet I suggest you give it a go. Nothing’s perfect, but Google has seemed to improve the user experience yet once again.

This article was originally published in Huffington Post.

Labor Day 2010 will forever be remembered in Boulder as the day the Four Mile Canyon fire began to burn. Today, two days later, over 7,000 acres and 140 structures (including 9 homes owned by fire fighters) have been consumed by the fire that is still burning.

In a sign of a tech-savvy community, residents immediately began flooding Twitter with the hashtag #boulderfire to share information. This proved to be most helpful as we discovered the failure of the 911 callback system designated to alert people to evacuate their homes. It is rumored that once it was clear that the 911 callback system was not reaching home owners, Twitter became the main way to reach people in the evacuation area quickly.

As the fire spread, the Humane Society offered newly homeless pet owners a sanctuary for their pets. Again, the news was shared primarily through their Twitter account. Restaurants quickly followed suit with offers of free food and drinks for anyone who was displaced by the fire. People with police scanners or personal views of what was happening rounded out the real time Twitter postings of news while others retweeted posts to help. And TweetyGotBack has created a Twitter background to support fire fighting efforts along with a link to BoulderFire.com where you can use the “Offer Help” or “Get Help” buttons in a Craig’s List-like system to connect donors with fire victims to get them the items they need.

On Facebook the City of Boulder announced community meetings and health warnings. Residents also posted updates on their personal Facebook pages to share helpful news, pictures and You Tube videos of the fire taken by residents.

On this third day of the fire, we are still tracking the fire through Google Maps because they have the most detailed information available in one place. This is only possible because community members are generating the content in real time. Google Maps offers the only platform where we can all aggregate shared knowledge in an actionable way.

Finally, cloud computing has also come to the rescue in the form of a Google docs editable spreadsheet organizing help by the community and for the community.

If that wasn’t enough, a Four Mile Fire Help forum is organizing housing help and other resources for fire evacuees. Since Gold Hill residents lost everything, they have started a collection website. They can use anything from clothes and personal hygiene products to toys, bikes, cars, kitchen utensils and almost anything you have laying around as an extra item in your house.

We are living in an age where connecting, engaging and building community happen in ways we could not even imagine just five years ago. Tragedies are never easy to weather, but hopefully the prominent role social media has taken in our lives will be one additional way to help, heal and maybe even save lives, when disaster inevitably strikes.

All Hazards blog has a larger list of Colorado Wildfire Resources in one place. The Boulder Daily Camera has a good list of How To Get Help. The Boulder Office of Emergency Management launched a comprehensive response page at http://boulderoem.com. Donations for Four Mile Canyon fire victims are being taken by calling either 211 or 866-760-6489. Goods, money and food are also being collected by Volunteer Connection at services@volunteerconnection.net or 303-413-7737.