The Awkward Butterfly © by Stephen Brace

Last post we were talking about comment anxiety, and that moment of realization that comes when you realize that the comments on your blog/ in your social media network/ during your presentation /at your networking function aren’t enough to create a true sense of community.

If you leave your blog dialogue at the level of commentary, it will stagnate. You want interaction. Commentary looks like interaction, but it isn’t really. It’s a light touch vs a deep caress.

And sometimes commentary is appropriate.

If I have a core idea of something I have created, and I just want it acknowledged, that’s enough.

But if I want my customers, subscribers, clients, audience, peers to feel like they are part of something, I want dialogue.

Instinctively, as a new blogger, I knew this. I’d owned a huge poetry community once and I remembered the turning point between plodding on, and our rapid growth into one of the top sites in the world.

So even after getting up to a couple hundred visitors a day in my business blog, and having an occasional comment here or there, it still didn’t feel successful.

Okay, now people are making comments, but they aren’t talking to each other. FUDGE!

Only I didn’t say fudge.

People Need More Than Commentary?
What. The Fudge.

Have you had that epiphany before?

You think you’re doing a great job with your business blog, hitting all the big marks, learning a ton, people are stopping by your web house, sometimes they leave messages… you’re all ready to start patting yourself on the back when you realize something.

Blog comments alone aren’t going to get it.

A successful blog doesn’t just have comments, responses or acknowledgements. It sparks interaction. Just when you had enough work to do, right?

Yes, it’ll be more on your overflowing plate. Promise it’ll be worth it, and down the road may take some of the other stuff of that plate of yours.

In other words, if community fits, and grows the way it should, you’ll have less marketing to do in the long run. Heck, sometimes you can stop marketing if you do it right.

It’s easy to forget how much and how deeply we human beings need that other voice of someone else. Most of us are fine with “hey, I was thinking that too.” Or “that’s an interesting point, what do you think about this.”

Or “I have a question about how that would work”.

Even narcissists or psychopaths need the voice of another to say “I agree that you’re awesome.”

It’s a Basic Human Need, Discourse.

Maslows Hierarchy of Needs © by BetterBizIdeas

And I’m not talking about commentary. Which one sounds more like it falls in the Love/Belonging part of the Maslow Hierarchy to you?

Commentary is

• close-ended,
• one way but in two directions
• within in a specific narrow vein
• has some limits imposed on it

Conversation is

• open-ended,
• mutli-directional, at least two-way
• social exchange of information often sparked by a specific thing but may drift off into other areas
• not limited by much besides the interests of the parties involve

This is an extremely important distinction. Commentary easily stagnates and dies. Communities aren’t built upon commentary. Commentary implies control and restriction.

For example, though Facebook gives more space for responses, there are still limits imposed, as there are for the initial point that sparks the commentary. That isn’t to say you can’t have a conversation on Facebook.

Just that the fewer limits there are, the more authentic the discussion tends to be.

Want Better Conversation? Faster Community?

relax © by twicepix

You’ll have to give up some control? How much? I say 10 – 15% outside your comfort zone. Great growing place. You don’t want “This may hurt a little”.

You want, “Hey are you totally sure about this?”

Ever had to have a controlled conversation? Things that come to mind: meetings, court dates, advertising.

Controlled conversation is commentary.This isn’t evil, in and of itself.

I’m just saying that commentary doesn’t grow relationships, or businesses or influence or currency. Or communities.

You want community. No matter what you sell, there’s a community about it somewhere. A very serious, interactive one, or perhaps a light and playful one. But it exists. Wouldn’t you rather be a part of it – or even lead it – than not?

So how do you get from commentary to community?

I’ll explore them in more depth at a later time, here or my next AGBEAT Column. In the meantime, take a look at the people who are responding to you in social media, especially if you’re having trouble with marketing your products.

Then look at the communities you belong to, on and off the Web. What are they doing that your business could copy? And feel free to share. We can all learn together.

There’s only three types of pages in this site.

It’s not going to win a usability award, ever, as a whole site. But there’s only three types of pages, that only want three types of action.

At any given point, you’ll either see a sales page, a blog post or sign-up page, and most people here will end up doing one of three things when they land here:

• Buy something
• Read or react to a blog post
• Sign up for the newsletter

Most of the time it’s one of the last two items.

How does this relate to you? What’s all this about thinking and sinking?

In offering a bit of assistance to various clients and colleagues with minor campaigns, I’ve noticed in them one tendency I used to have – making things too complicated.

My site may be a sprawling fixer-upper as a whole, but each page has three or less types of options you can choose from. So the conversion rate for new visitors is higher than normal.

By conversion rate, I mean the % of people who take one of my most desired actions. Which actions?

First, I want to deepen the trust between me and you. It’s always harder to work together if we don’t trust each other. That can entail anything from reading another blog post (to determine whether you trust my information) or interacting with me in the comments (that could help you decide if you want to do business with me).

Second, I’d like permission to follow up with you at some point, mostly with tips that are too juicy or involved to share in public, but also to offer you special discounts on my services and products.

Third, I wouldn’t hate it if you bought something on a whim. I’d rather we get to know each other first, but I get how sometimes, you just don’t have time for the courtship and just want to get on with it. Maybe we can get to know each other later. Maybe you’ll just drive by. Either is cool.

What I don’t want, is for you to have to think about how to go about the process.

See, that’s the problem I was talking about in the title. It’s not that I don’t want thinking people at my site — I prefer to work with intelligent people.

What I mean is, you shouldn’t have to figure out how to do the things I’d like you to do.

Because what happens when you open Firefox, Chrome (or IE for the 8 people using it, still love you) and come to a page that you can’t figure out?

You leave.

If you walk into a store to buy groceries and see petals falling from the ceiling, hear harps playing, and see waltzing couples, if you stay it will be out of curiosity, not to buy groceries. Confused prospects leave. So there’s no longer a customer.

And that conversion rate sinks to Zero.

This goes for EVERYTHING if you’re trying to get one particular action, such as a sale or subscription, a click, a vote, a response to a blog post, or a retweet.

Yes, it’s different on a blog, where you want many options, and you want them to take a leisurely stroll around, deciding if they can trust your information or want to do business with you.

But if you want a person to do one thing – don’t make them think. Give them less than three options – only one if you can swing it.

You want someone to click a link?

Link directly to the link they should click.

You want someone to buy something?

Link to the product, directly, with clear instructions on how to buy, and no distractions.

You want someone to sign up for your newsletter?

Send them to a page where there’s no other option but sign up or leave.

Building a relationship first? It’s okay to have more than one option on a page during the courtship – but when you’re ready to close the deal, eliminate distractions that interfere with the buying process.

Try reducing the options on your site for a week. You may find that sales increase so much, you don’t even need more traffic.

But I’ll still be right here if you do.

I’m currently in love with a tool called Triberr.

Triberr Basics

Triberr helps you organize promotion of your blog posts as tweets with a community of other bloggers. You can currently join Triberr by being invited to a Tribe, or by applying to join an existing tribe.

Things That Initially Confused Me About Triberr

When you first sign up with Triberr, you get 3 additional tribes to run, in addition, to the one you have been invited to – so when you first sign in and see four communities instead of one, don’t be alarmed.

Start with the one you were attempting to join and fiddle with the others later. Do come back to those other three groups though – with them you can add other people, and build your own Tribe.

I like to use one to manage my own bookmarks from other sites, and decide which ones will also go to Twitter, or only go to Twitter.

There are two modes for publishing the group’s blog posts to your stream, automatic and manual.

If your Tribe allows manual tweeting, the settings area is at the top to your left, on the same line as “Members.” Automatic means that when a person’s blog post enters the stream of posts to go out, they go out right away. Manual means you have control over whether they go out, and some control over when.

You can set up multiple feeds and Twitter profiles by clicking the upper right link marked “Accounts”.

Bones are the community currency. If you need to do basic things like having more people in your tribe than the standard amount allowed, you’ll have to spend bones, but enough are given to you for free that when you join that if you aren’t in a mega-group, you needn’t worry about it.

If you create a group big enough to need bones, you can buy some.

Yes, Triberr Rocks

In a nutshell, that’s Triberr, tying other people’s blog posts to your Twitter, not just yours. I’ve found it helps boost my traffic, but that since I’m in manual mode, I have to make sure I have a tab open to publish posts. Actually I like that, because it forces me to read my peers work every morning, a step I tend to skip when I get busy. Building community with other people is an essential part of blogging, though.

Another tip regarding timing the tweets – if you’re interested in having posts go out during prime times on Twitter, the only way to change the timing for the moment is not to approve the tweet until you’re ready to publish it.

What About Spam?

Here’s how I look at it. I love the people I’m in Tribes with at Triberr. I love their content, I think they’re brilliant, I read their stuff, I was gonna retweet them anyway.

All Triberr is doing is making sure I don’t miss any. Lots of the most popular blogs on the planet do the same thing, they just organize it themselves.

What I do is set my tweets to manual. This way, I have to approve each one on a case by case basis. More work but then I get to read them first – I’m using it almost like an RSS Reader in that way.

If you work with good people, who are targeted to your audience, and you don’t abuse the system yourself, you won’t send spam out. And you can drop people from your Tribe if you’re an admin, and you can also leave a Tribe and join another if you like.

Not to mention that Triberr has guidelines in place that are likely to prevent spam abuse.

“I Need More Triberr Help”

When you get started, if you need more help, also take a look at the Triberr help section and some of the videos they have up on YouTube. Shout out to Dino Dugan, one of the geniuses I know over there, who you can tweet with questions.

Reply if you’d like to start a community tribe. You’ll have to participate in at least one of our free traffic challenges to join but after the video challenge is over there’s an easier one coming up.

Video Link: Sweet Dee Promotes The Bar with Crazy Paddy – It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

One of my favorite shows on cable is It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. It’s about the on-going antics of four degenerate, self-centered losers who co-own and/or work at a bar in Philadelphia. Kind of a “Friends”-gone-horribly-wrong sitcom. I love watching it for two reasons.

The first is just that it’s one of those shows that is so, so funny for reasons that are so, so wrong in every way that I should almost be ashamed of myself for watching it.

The second is that one of the underlying themes is them attempting any shortcut they can to make more money from their bar. I like to think how I would have advised them in real life. Of course, they aren’t the kind of people who would listen to me.

The Problems with the “Viral Video Fallacy”

The problem in the video above is that both characters are trying to do all the wrong things in getting their video campaign started.

Right now I want to talk about how, in an earlier scene not pictured above, Sweet Dee has decided she’s going to “make a viral video”.

There are so many things wrong with both the phrase “make a viral video” and the fact that she intends to do so in order to promote a local business that I hardly even know where to start.

1- By definition, there’s no such thing as creating a viral video. We’ll get into the particular of that another time.

2- Making a viral video to promote a local business isn’t the best idea. It may work, but why not go after a method that’s 90% likely to fix the problem instead of the one that’s only 5% likely, all other things being equal?

3- She ends up attempting to make the cringe-worthy spectacle you see at the beginning of the video, one of those horrible, local cable commercials that make you want to turn your set off during sponsorship breaks.

How NOT to Approach Creating Video for Small Business

Which brings us to Charlie’s idea of how to fix the problem. His idea? If you want to make a video that’s successful in the way YouTube videos are successful, someone has to get hurt.

And yeah, in the video, this is so funny that every time I watch this episode again, I rewind this scene and watch the ball hit her in the face in slow motion. It cracks me up, and ironically is a clip that would make me want to watch “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” if I’d never seen it before.

Not because someone is getting hurt, but because I would just have to know what was going on there.

In real life, I don’t think people getting injured on film is funny. I understand WHY people think it’s funny, but I’m much more empathic than normal people are supposed to be and on some occasions will actually be in pain myself watching something like that take place. Unless of course I know it’s fake.

Regardless of that – laughing at pain doesn’t sell… anything. Not in and of itself.

Unless you’re a national brand with the kind of budget that can afford to put a commercial up that looks to sell by demographic, hoping to reach enough people that the odds will bear this wasteful model out, a video based purely on entertainment value isn’t going to do more than raise awareness and brand you.

And possibly to an audience that doesn’t want to, or simply can’t, buy your product or service.

Even if you are? Please don’t hurt anyone.

Seriously though, if you’re coming up on this week’s deadline in the video traffic challenge and want to submit in time to make sure your video gets listed, but can’t come up with a topic, here are some ideas.

5 Video Topic Ideas for Business Owners

1. Create a video version of your about page. This isn’t my idea. I saw it yesterday on Twitter and can’t find the post now.
2. Repurpose existing content: Take a blog post, article, or presentation and turn it into a video. You can do this with screencast video software or just talk to the camera.
3. Lisa Barone says “Show Your Product in Action” in an article on Small Biz Trends. There are 5 more tips in that article.
4. Shoestring Marketing says “Ask Customers or Clients to send in video” – two more tips there.
5. Do a short parody of a misled solution to a common customer problem. Xerox just did a great job with this in their recent commercial featuring Michelin. I thought it was funny even though I didn’t get it at first.

Have you got ideas for what kind of video to create that hasn’t been mentioned already? Do tell!

Resources:

List of Our Video Traffic Participants

The Original Video Traffic Challenge Thread

Network Solution’s Case Study on What It Takes to Make a Video Campaign both Viral and Successful

Fast Video Traffic Free Sample Chapter

Video Challenge Participants: Tomorrow is the deadline for the first video in the challenge. If you have your video up as a reply to the post announcing our Video Challenge Participants by tomorrow, I’ll help promote your video and the blog post where it’s published for an entire week starting tomorrow. If I pinged you on Twitter to alert you to this post, it’s most likely as a nudge to remind you.

If you left it for me elsewhere, please let me know where.

The video above, also found on YouTube, is based on the article, “Facebook for Business: A Simple Spam-Free Way to Get People on Facebook to Visit Your Site“, which is free for republishing.

If you’re an affiliate of Fast Facebook Pages Traffic , then you can replace the link in this article with your affiliate link when you publish it to your site or newsletter. This video is one of those that will soon be available in the affiliate section, if you want to embed the link in the video, and publish it to your site, as well.

This free presentation, called One Very Simple Way to Use Facebook for Business goes over one simple 7 step process for finding out whether Facebook for Business will work for you. You can find out in 15 minutes a day for a week. I also have a free video and an article about this process coming up for anyone who is a free member of this site.

As always premium Free Traffic Tip & Traffic Reality members will get it first, as well as a few extras.

I hear so many people, so often, talking about how much they hate Twitter when I first ask them if they’re using it.

Then I introduce them to a couple of neat people or ideas, and when I hear from them a few months later, all of them rave about it, and laugh at how they were using it wrong.

And I laugh with them, because I made the same mistake they did. My story is just like theirs: A friend (@Rumford) told me about Twitter.

I went there, I didn’t get it, I began to hate hearing about it all the time.

Another friend enlightened me and  I love Twitter now.

But loving it or hating it really isn’t the point when it comes to your business, is it?

The bottom line is, can Twitter help enhance the bottom line of your business? The answer is yes.

You can hate Twitter, you can love Twitter, but that’s not the issue. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again- Stop tryng to fall in love with the various technological wonders and start learning how to leverage them for your business, or have someone else in your organization get on it.

Now.

It doesn’t have to take up a lot of your time, either, if you opt to do it yourself, which in my opinion is the best option.

As an entrepreneur, you can get away with being on Twitter for an hour or less a week, and still get pretty impressive results in terms of traffic, sales increases, customer service, and pre-sales connection building.

Here are seven reasons you should take a look at developing a Twiter strategy immediately.

1. Tweetchats.

Industry leaders get together and put on free text seminars. It’s basically free training.

2. Hashtags.

Twitter is organized in a way Facebook isn’t.

You can get news and updates about a topic by following a unique identifier called a hashtag. If you blog or are in a time sensitive industry, it’s critical to get news and developments first. Even if you just want a leg up on your competitors for marketing, it’s so important.

3. Pre-introductions

One of the best ways to connect to someone at a conference, meet up, expo, or networking event, especially if they’re well-known, is to be able to say “I follow you on Twitter” and reference an interaction you had.

When people came up to me at BlogWorld 2010, this was the thing that turned acquaintances into mutually profitable relationships the most.

Lots of people know me on Facebook or through Facebook – but the people who I met, who became customers, clients, friends, helpful peers, or peers I helped, were the people who knew me through Twitter.

4. Follow bloggers, not just blogs.

Want fellow bloggers to link to you?

Want them to write about you?

Thinking about starting a blogger campaign?

Use Twitter to make initial contact. It’s a non-intrusive way to begin the types of bonds that result in that last-minute favor at crunch time. Don’t know what to say? Retweet a link to one of their blog posts.

5. Exposure

Speaking of retweeting, Twitter is one of the easiest and fastest ways to spread a link. Get retweeted and you can get massive, immediate exposure.

I’d say with Tweetmeme, it’s the biggest reason why Digg.com is dying- you get more top stories with the option to ignore the surrounding chatter on Any topic, not just technology. Tweetmeme embraced the very people Digg was rejecting, and Twitter only filters for spam. Even light-handed commercial messages are okay, and get passed around.

The folks who couldn’t figure out newsreaders and RSS feeds are there, receiving the benefits of this technology without knowing how to use it.

6. Your competitors.

If they’re on the social media sites, they’re getting access to your customers who are on it as well. Some people think having your audience visible and accessible on sites like Twitter and Facebook threatens the well being of your business.

But that’s only true if you aren’t in there building the relationship, providing resources and being of value to them. The kinds of customers that aren’t loyal, or are primarily price-conscious aren’t the ones you want anyway. They’re often the hardest to please.

Your competition is going to have access to your audience whether or not you’re on the social media sites, whether or not you advertise or market yourself. The key is that this access not be exclusive to them, and your presence ensures that they know there is a better option: you.

7. Your customers.

Twitter has a small audience in comparison to Facebook.

But the part of your audience on either doesn’t necessarily overlap. And the audiences that are using Twitter and Facebook are getting the same benefits of you – fast news, free resources and training, and the other items I’ve listed here.

Using Twitter, you can provide maximum customer experience is minimum time through sending out resource links in a readable style, providing customer service, or taking hashtags to the next level with a sense of community.

At some point, having a presence on the top social media sites is not going to be optional for successful companies, just as having a website and a blog is considered the rule rather than the excepiton. Nowadays, people are putting their Twitter handle on their business cards.

If you use web technology in your business in any way, including simply for publicity or having a website, having a Twitter handle isn’t just a good idea anymore. It provides a competitive edge.

… delivering great content to a hungry audience in the way they want to receive it, consistently will bring you success in the long term. All the other rules of web marketing are there to accelerate the long term, or to provide for you in the short term.

If you see someone become successful online, they followed this simple formula. Listen in to find out what got me thinking about this.

It truly is the Ultimate Traffic Method, better than JVs, having affiliates, great organic search results.

But the catch is? It often takes ten years to become an “overnight success”. So if you need food on your table now… well that’s what all the other advice is for.

Resources:

Tia Peterson’s lovely post on Amplify that got me talking about this.
The blog post in question on BizBlogChicks, also by Tia Peterson.
The successful blog it discusses.

Here are the steps:

1- Find your audience.
2- Find and research a sore point.
3- Find and research an existing expert.
4- Start at the easiest point and go for the widest exposure.
5- Start again at the narrowest niche and get the most specialized exposure/
6- Leverage both into maximum exposure.
7- Repeat monthly, at least.

I go more specific and in-depth in the audio. If you can’t see the player, feel free to download the mp3.

Here are the steps:

1- Find your audience.
2- Find and research a sore point.
3- Find and research an existing expert.
4- Start at the easiest point and go for the widest exposure.
5- Start again at the narrowest niche and get the most specialized exposure/
6- Leverage both into maximum exposure.
7- Repeat monthly, at least.

I go more specific and in-depth in the audio. If you can’t see the player, feel free to download the mp3.

You hear so much about how the economy is down…

and sales are down…

and traffic, profits, life, work is down, that it’s almost a culture shock to see local small business not just making it, but kicking butt, in your area.

I mean, everyone is broke, but people I know for a fact aren’t well off have iPads.

There’s supposedly no money in circulation, right? But Starbucks is packed every time I go.

We’ll come back to all that in a minute. One thing I want to make clear – this isn’t an isolated incident. I’m not offering this as mockery to people who have lost their jobs or had to let people go, due to the rocky economic climate.

I’m offering this as hope that perhaps, the way we need to measure what’s successful in our country is changing. I’m offering this out as hope, hope that it’s not just one business that can do something like this to make a hard time a thriving time.

Hope that we can ALL make it.

In fact, I have four examples I’ll be focusing on this week in this and other blogs:

1. The Dominican Hair Salons
2. Cindy’s Karaoke
3. Annie’s Art Gallery, and
4. Fish Market Restaurant

Before you think “this isn’t for me” event marketing works whether your business operates online, offline or both.

In this audio I’ll be discussing:

• What Event Marketing Is
• Why It Works
• Examples of Successful Event Marketing Implementation

Can’t see the player? Download here.
Coming up soon:

• Examples of Event Marketing succeeding online
• Tips on How to Create a Must-Attend Event
• Marketing Your Event Offline
• Marketing Your Event Online