Social Strategist - Online Strategy & Innovation

How to Add Value to a Discussion · 02/19/2010

Join the conversation!, the Cluetrain Manifesto said. And every year new businesses / bloggers / young professionals hop eagerly aboard, charging into your blog comments / presentations / conferences to say:

“Hi! Great post / talk / point. Could you answer a question you already answered in it? Here’s something you said, restated in a slightly different way. Now, could you do something for me? This task, or that task, that has no clear benefit to you, and by the way, visit my website at www.mywebsite.com. Thanks! Great post! Bye!”

A-wha? Clearly, this isn’t the way anyone wants to come off, but all too often people in a hurry to “participate” (promote) leave only a sense of vapid selfishness behind, at best annoying those they interacted with.

But there are ways to accomplish your goals and provide value to the people you interact with. The web really is a conversation, sometimes slower paced, sometimes a massive interaction of hundreds of people at once. Just like real conversations, one of the most important things to do before joining in is to listen, and listen carefully. Many of the misguided blog comments I’ve seen don’t even use (or know) the blog author’s name. Listening is about more than understanding the topic; it’s about understanding the speaker’s perspective on it, and opportunities to provide value to both him and his other listeners.

Ways to Add Value

Once you’ve taken the time to be mindful of the context of a conversation, you still have the problem of how to think of something valuable to say. One of the best frameworks is the Six Ws: Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How?

Who? – Putting a human face on a situation, talking about how someone has / is dealing with it. Sometimes who is you; personal anecdotes that illustrate a point from the discussion (or one of your own), are enjoyable to read.

What? – Most of the time this is the conversation itself, but sometimes (particularly objective news reports or press releases), there’s opportunity to turn information into meaning. “What does this mean?” is a question many people want answers to.

When? – What’s the time context around this topic? Has it come up before? Were there previous discussions / events that you can point out as related? (It’s even better to synopsize points from these previous discussions that haven’t come up in this one.)

Where? – What’s the geographic context? Can you provide a local angle / anecdote? Or identify similar conditions that make the topic / event relevant in other locations?

Why? – What are the further considerations around a topic (e.g. who gains / loses)? Why is all about using your natural intelligence, logic, and experience to add insight.

How? – What led to this? What factors contributed? What is the actual process (if it’s one many aren’t familiar with)?

Essentially, I look for a question that the discussion hasn’t covered yet, and try to answer it. Sometimes it’s valuable just to ask the question, but you have to be more careful with this — it can come across as superior, or imply that the conversation starter hasn’t gone to enough effort to supply more information. They key is to contribute something because you think it will be valuable to those involved, not just to contribute.

Join the conversation. And say something worth hearing.

What do you think?

How to Hire a Good Marketer (for Startups) · 02/04/2010

It’s the question I hear second-most often, right after “How do I hire a good developer?”. Marketing is one of those skills a startup can’t do without, and realistically, probably shouldn’t be started without. Most founders have at least some marketing skills, and that works for a while. But they reach a point where they want to focus on what they’re great at, and don’t know how to determine if someone else is as good at marketing as the founder is at coding, business, etc. If you’re in that spot, or just in the unenviable position of trying to attract customers / users to an idling completed product, here’s your guide to choosing someone who can help turn up the heat.

What is Good Marketing?

Good marketing exists at the intersection of awareness, analysis, and creativity.

Awareness: Of the market, of how it will perceive different messages, of what others are doing to reach your market, of how your market communicates with each other, and of trends within related markets that may be applicable to yours.
Analysis: The ability to take information and create meaning. Being able to answer more than one “why?” about a change’s occurrence. Being able to predict more than one scenario, and explain the factors that make each more / less likely.
Creativity: The ability to create new methods, rather than just improvements to existing ones.

What Skills Does a Marketer Need?

Every marketer must have a well-honed talent for effective communication. Someone with average communication skills can take information and restate it in way they’re better able to understand it. Someone with above-average communication skills can take information and restate it in a way that others will be better able to understand it. Above-average communicators can take the same content and frame it many different ways (“in need of repairs” becomes “fixer-upper”). Most importantly for applications, above-average communicators can translate features into benefits.

For web-based businesses, a marketer also needs to be skilled at the following:

Knowledge of incentives. Understanding what motivates people (to purchase, to participate, to create) is essential for marketing.
Search Engine Optimization. Search engine traffic drives signups/sales directly, assists with referrals, and provides additional opportunities. A marketer should know how to identify what terms to target, how to find out how often people are searching for different terms, how to increase your rankings, and how ranking well for different terms will accomplish your business goals.
Content Creation. For cash-strapped startups, being able to create interesting content is key for inbound marketing strategies to bring users. Even if you’re not trying to bring in customers, creating interesting content will get you noticed in your industry, and in the media, leading to partnership, investment, and acquisition opportunities.
Analytics. Startups that want to accomplish their goals must be able to measure them, and they must have a marketer that’s able to test different means of accomplishing them. You can only improve efficiency by seeing what affects it, whether it’s A/B testing your site, or determining which of your marketing efforts are getting the most bang for your buck (or effort).

How do you Find a Good Marketer?

The best marketers combine passion with the ability to communicate it. A good marketer for your startup is going to be one that understands your target audience, preferably by being a member of it… unless your target market is people who are bad at marketing.

One of the best ways to find candidates is to identify the marketing people at related, but not competing, services targeting a similar demographic, and ask them to recommend someone.

How do you Determine if They Have the Skills?

The best evidence is always just that: evidence. If they can show the results they specifically generated for projects (“I increased…”, not “My company increased…”), that’s excellent.

Some questions you may want to ask in an interview are:

How would you describe my company to a friend you wanted to use it?
- Their answer should describe benefits, from a user point of view, rather than features.
What are two specific types of potential users you think we could better focus on reaching, and how? – or – What are two specific ways you can see our product being used, and how should our marketing target people who would most use it one of those ways?
- They should demonstrate an ability to make some kind of intelligent segmentation of your overall market into audiences that you can create specific messages or use specific mediums to reach.
What trends do you see in our industry that we could tap into, to attract more users?
- Here they should either show you that they know the scene well, or that they’re motivated enough to do research about it. The trends they recommend tapping into should be people-focused.

Be Open to Change, but Establish Trust & Test It

A good marketer can only help you if you let them, and that may mean changing that front-page description that you think is just fine, or targeting search terms that seem counter-intuitive. But remember that there’s a reason you’re looking for marketing help: they’ve learned lessons you haven’t yet!

Work with a new marketing team member to create clear, measurable goals. Provide clear priorities for how you want different resources (their time, development time, money) used. Pursue new marketing efforts with set expectations for when and how they’ll be measured, and let the results speak for themselves.

What do you think? [1]

EasyImpress & Making Every Hour Count · 08/24/2009

One of the realities of working on a startup part-time (boot-strapping with consulting & other work to pay the bills) is that you must chip away at things. The caffeine-fueled all-night development sprints you read about are the rare exceptions, that come at a heavy cost to your health and productivity over the next couple of days.

Be As Smart With Time as You Are With Money

One of the best time-management strategies I’ve learned is to divide projects into two categories: those I need long-term focus on, and those I can work on on-and-off. A free 6-hour chunk of time is a much rarer commodity than a free half hour or 15 minutes. Imagine your time is like money that’s deposited in random amounts in your bank account, and withdrawn later, unused or not.

If you had $600, you shouldn’t spend your time shopping for all the office supplies you need, but spend it on the high-price items you have few chances to get. Buy office supplies a few at a time when you have $15, $20, $30 to spend.

Effort is important, but efficiency is essential.

What do you think?

Real Estate BarCamp Boston · 06/12/2009

Real Estate BarCamp Boston 2009 Logo Today I’m at Real Estate BarCamp Boston, connecting with industry techies, vendors, and agents. One presentation, one interview, and many introductions later, I’m done with the scheduled sessions and off to enjoy some pizza and networking. If video of the presentation or interview become available, I’ll link to it here. Thanks to everyone I met for great conversations; please check out my real estate marketing website service, EasyImpress.

What do you think?

3 Ways to Find Anything Online · 06/11/2009

Friends and colleagues have given me a lot of praise for seemingly knowing about everything web-related. And while I can answer a good number of “How can I…”, “What are the…”, and “What’s the best…” questions off the top of my head, the biggest lesson I’ve learned about providing value to others is that it’s not about knowing everything, it’s about knowing how to find almost anything. Below are my top 3 resources for being able to find almost anything.

1) Delicious Bookmarks

The “biggest collection of bookmarks in the universe” is searchable & tag-browsable, making it an invaluable tool for taking the simplest phrasing of what you’re looking for and getting great results. One of the particularly nice tricks I’ve discovered is that when browsing tags, you can chain them to find items marked with multiple tags. (e.g. http://delicious.com/tag/marketing+tips+basics). Being able to view tags and users who’ve bookmarked items is great for turning on good result into several more by finding people/tags covering similar items.

2) Specialized Directories

Sometimes I just want a nice, long list. Directories are anytime I’m looking for something containing keywords that are ambiguous, or used in many different contexts. Anytime someone asks me for a web service that does X, if I don’t know offhand of one, I Go to Web 2.0. Other directories I use often are:

The Niche Social Networks List
The Niche Social News Sites List
The Funded – Directory of venture capitalists, with ratings & reviews.

3) Specialized Search Engines

You can be okay at everything or you can be great at a few things. The jack of all trades rule applies to search engines as much as it does people, which is why Google has spent so much time creating specialized search engines (Blog Search, News, Scholar, Books, etc.). AltSearchEngines is a good source for every specialization under the sun, but the five I find myself using the most often are:

BoardReader – This forum search engine lets me choose if I’m searching for individual posts, whole threads/topics, or entire forums about a keyword.
Twitter Search – Anytime I want to find out about something happening now, Twitter search is the place to go. Links in people’s tweets help me find content faster than Google can index it.
SearchYC – Search engine for startup incubator YCombinator’s Hacker News community.
Yahoo! Site Explorer – Entering a URL in this tool allows me to find every site linking to it. SEOMoz’s LinkScape tool is similar, and includes anchor text information.
Google’s Keyword Tool – Allows me to enter keywords and find out how often they are searched for. Extremely useful not only for market research, but for finding out which phrasings of similar keyword sets are more common.