Build lists of the people you want to interact with

You want your audience, influencers, and others to follow you, but you don’t want to be a spammy follower. Good twitter professionals understand that while following another user is one of the best triggers for a follow-back, having a positive relationship with the person you’re following is key to making that succeed. Lists (particularly private lists) are an excellent way to keep track of the people you want to reach and see tweets from them, making it easy to engage with them and build a relationship before following.

Save searches for keywords that provide conversation opportunities or good content

Spammy marketers will use tools to automatically tweet to anyone using certain keywords; this is an awful practice that makes your brand look bad, and rarely drives results. Spend time upfront to identify keywords likely to be in tweets you would want to respond to. Using twitter’s search modifiers [a question mark helps you find tweets that are questions (try with product category keywords), a sad emoticon helps you find negative sentiment tweets (try this with competitor brand names)] can help. Figuring out what the best combinations are and saving them makes periodic checking a breeze.

Queue content as you find it

One of the most time-consuming tasks I’ve had as a community manager has been finding content to tweet. It’s often feast or famine. Using a tool like Timely can be useful for queuing content and tweets as you find it or think of them whether you’re on twitter at the time or not. No worrying about scheduling or bookmarking and coming back to it later.

Use Tweetfilter to help highlight opportunities and filter out time-wasting tweets

My favorite twitter tool, Tweetfilter is a browser extension that (among other nice enhancements) lets you filter tweets by keyword (no more FourSquare check-ins!) or tweet type (filter out @replies, retweets, or tweets containing links) on any stream in twitter (home, profiles, lists, saved searches). Tools like Tweetfilter are precisely why I’m using twitter’s web client again; browser extensions can provide professionals with whatever functionality they need, not just the features each client happens to have.

One of my favorite ways to use Tweetfilter is to use all of the tweet-type filters, showing me just tweets with text and possibly hashtags. These are usually much more conversational than other tweets; an easy way to filter out distractions and just focus on what’s important: engaging other tweeters.

A particularly bad offender I’ve noticed is Bolt Bus. During a bad experience of my own last week, I tweeted at them three times over the course of three hours, only getting a response to my last tweet when I specifically said I could see them tweeting to others while they ignored the complaints of customers like myself and three others I mentioned by username. They never followed up with me after my reply to theirs, and as far I can see, never responded to the tweets of the others I mentioned.

Unfortunately, Bolt Bus is not alone. According to research by evolve24, 71% of customers who have complained on twitter have never been contacted by the company as a result of their tweet. Jay Baer has more excellent analysis and key stats from the survey: http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-monitoring/70-of-companies-ignore-customer-complaints-on-twitter/

While I’m personally upset to be ignored, I hate to see a business failing so badly at customer service and marketing basics. Hundreds of Bostonians in Bolt Bus’ target market will have seen my tweets (and tweets from my colleagues who saw and agreed with mine). I’m only one of what looks to be many customers being ignored. With wifi + power outlet amenities heavily focused on appealing to the tech-savvy, tweeting crowd, I don’t see this going well for Bolt Bus.

 

 

Three Quick (Fictional) Examples of Content Strategy

B2C: Lapadio, an online music company, wants to get more iTunes users to sign up and upload a list of their music library. They host monthly contests for users to build playlists for unique themes and add commentary, from their uploaded library. The content (and links to it as users promote their playlists in an effort to win) helps Lapadio rank for searches for playlists related to the chosen themes, and gets users promoting the service.

B2B: StudentStyle, a design and marketing firm for national student organizations, wants to convince more national fraternities, sororities, clubs, and professional organizations that they should invest in branding and marketing. They work with their existing clients to publish case studies tracking membership numbers, awareness on-campus and off, and alumni donations. They create surveys and compile the results to show low awareness from most students about what organizations exist on campus and what the benefits are. The latter content gets attention from campus newspapers and magazines, and the former is valuable material for StudentStyle’s sales agents.

Local: Othello Pizza, one of many restaurants competing for business in Harvard Square, is in an easy-to-overlook location. It wants to bring in new customers and keep them coming back.  Othello starts offering two unique promotions: every 100th customer can get their photo taken using one of the big wooden pizza paddles to put a pizza in the oven, complete with chef’s hat and Othello Pizza apron. Sharing these photos on its Facebook Page, they’re quickly tagged by the customer and shared with their friends. The second promotion is a weekly contest on the Facebook Page to suggest a design to do with pizza toppings. Fans comment with suggestions, Othello makes the one with the most Likes and posts a photo on the Page. Keeping fans engaged on Facebook makes sure Othello gets its less-engaging but business-driving updates (new pizzas, specials, etc.) seen by fans.

The “Content” of Content Strategy

Playlists, case studies, survey results, photos of customers, and product art — all different from the generic idea of blog post / website “articles” most of us associate with the idea of content, though text articles can be valuable content too. Content is any media or information being published / provided to a target audience. Content can be gathered from your existing business processes (aggregated, anonymized data from users / clients), contributed from your users (e.g. Yelp reviews and photos, customer surveys), or created by yourself.

Why Invest in Content Strategy?

Because content strategy is indirect (there’s not a clear “1 post = X new customers” line to be drawn), many businesses don’t see the opportunity; they’re too used to the simple propositions of advertising and direct marketing. Buy $X in ads, get Y in impressions, probably get around Z in new customers. But although content marketing doesn’t provide a direct output, it does provide a continuing output. If you buy an ad, you get a set amount of impressions or clicks. If you build a content channel, your content keeps getting visits, links, people sharing it, etc. long after you’ve created it.

Advertising lets you rent access to your audience; building a content channel lets you own access to your audience.

More posts to come on content strategy. Get updates from my RSS feed or by email.

How to Add Value to a Discussion

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!”

How to Hire a Good Marketer (for Startups)

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.

Is Social Media Bullshit?

The Death of Blogging, Email, Newspapers, and Telephones

The truth is, old mediums rarely die, they just stop being interesting. New tools come along and steal the spotlight, bouncing around with their youth and vigor, and make the old tools look so still, rigor mortis might be setting in. ‘Death’, as announced by these articles, is really just a stupid way of trying to say ‘boring’.

More Signal, Less Noise: The Power of RSS Mashups

Blog feeds let you send information. Feed readers let you receive it. Pipes, PopFly, and GMashEd let you:

• filter it.
• visualize it.
• combine it.
• correlate it.
• advertise it.

This Saturday and Sunday, April 9th & 10th, BarCamp Boston 6 is happening at Microsoft NERD in Kendall Square. It’s Boston’s geek unconference, an event where 350 – 400 of Boston’s most passionate and interesting people, from students to CEOs, get together for two days of intriguing sessions, excellent conversations, and free food. Unlike many conferences with expensive tickets, prearranged speakers, and an invite-only mentality, BarCamp is free to attend, open to everyone, and available for anyone to present at.

We schedule sessions live each day at the event, with anyone who would like to host a discussion or make a presentation on something they think their fellow attendees would be interested in able to check for interest and make it happen. Some of the things people are already thinking about presenting:

• Collaboration, Cooperation, Independence and Self-Sufficiency: Not a paradox
• Cross Platform Development for Unity
• The Idea Supercollider – Where Mind Mapping Meets Social Networking
• Islamic representations of androids, cyborgs, and AI.
• Figuring out the correct pricing model for your idea/product

I’ve been attending BarCamps since I moved to Boston, starting with BarCamp Boston 2 in 2007, and helping out since then. This year it’s been a privilege to head up organization of the event. I can’t emphasize enough what kind of value BarCamp has added to my life in the connections I’ve made and the fun experiences I’ve had. Whether you’re a startup founder, a freelancer, a student, a scientist, a developer, an artist, or an academic… hope to see you at BarCamp Boston 6.

Finding Conversation Opportunities

Twitter is about relationship-building. The last thing you want to do is spam members of your target audience with @replies linking to your product. It’s a complete waste of time, it’ll get you kicked off twitter, and it gives your brand a terrible reputation. You want your target market to become aware of your brand and form a positive association with it by providing value.

Part of that is tweeting high-quality content and watching it spread via retweets and people recommending you (@KISSmetrics is killer at this). But part of it is knowing who you want to interact with, and waiting for the right opportunity to do so. Lists are a step in the right direction for this, but large lists can become as cluttered as your main tweet stream, particularly if a few high-activity tweeters take up 80% of the stream. These are some tools I think would help marketers do a better job of monitoring for conversation opportunities:

• Better list views – something as simple as showing only the most recent tweet from a list of people. CrowdStatus is okay at this, but the display interface is terrible, adding people is manual & time-consuming, and it includes tweets that are @replies (which are generally of less interest, and are filtered out of your regular tweet stream unless you also follow the person being @replied to.) An option to show 2 or 3 tweets from each person would be nice, too.

• Supress @replies when viewing an individuals tweet stream – Conversational tweeters are great, but I also want to be able to see what a person tweets about when they’re not tweeting @ someone specifically. A browser plugin or twitter client functionality that showed just the non-@reply tweets when viewing an individual would be useful. I’m hoping superstar twitter filter extension Proxlet will add this functionality.

• Smarter keyword search – Power users know you can do some crazy things with Google. Twitter has a few advanced options (filter for links, questions, limited sentiment search), but there’s plenty of room for improvement. I’d love to be able to train a search for an ambiguous term to distinguish between what I want and false positives. Being able to search for a keyword that is also my twitter handle without seeing all of my own tweets or @mentions would also be useful. And being able to search for a keyword within a set group of people (followers, people on a list), would be excellent.

Improving Content Timing & Engagement Penetration

• Scheduling following – First impressions are everything, right? Marketers often schedule content based on an editorial calendar with tweets written far in advance. It would be great to schedule follows so that the freshest content in my stream when people see who I am is also some of my most relevant content to them.

• Based on followers / hashtag activity, when to tweet (and results) – the “best” time to tweet is a hot topic among marketers, and there’s almost never any discussion about the context of it. Some of the biggest centers of twitter users are on opposite coasts of the U.S. – a 3 hour time difference!
  • WhenToTweet.com does a basic job of analyzing when a user’s followers are most active, but their premium version (analyzing more than 500 followers) has yet to materialize. I’d like to see analysis of all (or at least more than 500) followers, and some nice breakdowns of: how this changes by day, the timezones different percentages of my followers are in, when they’re replying & retweeting instead of just tweeting, etc.
  • When a tweet is sent out can make or break the success of a paid tweet through a platform like SponsoredTweets. It would be great to see them provide this kind of analysis of a user’s followers.

• See who users frequently interact with – Mr. Tweet used to provide a browser plugin showing who a user most often interacted with, but the data was rarely updated. Everyone wants to understand influence, and relationship building is so much more effective if you’re engaging not just your friend, but their friends too.

Measuring Value

• More sophisticated follower analysis.
  • How valuable is the channel you’ve grown? (how often do followers retweet people / me, how many followers do they have, how active / engaged are my followers, how many followers are inactive / spammy).
  • What are some of the common / distinguishing traits of of my followers? (keywords in tweets / bio, location break-down, popular follows, most influential people they have following)

• Tweet-quality scoring – There are many tools that analyze and rate the quality of your account, but few that examine the quality of your tweets themselves. How often are your average public (non-@reply) tweets retweeted / replied to? How often are you one of the first people to tweet content that later gets popular? How readable are your tweets? How original / varied are they?

• Weekly / monthly tracking of key metrics. Twitalyzer does a great job of providing a dashboard that aggregates multiple influence scores (Klout, twitter.grader, etc.) + twitter stats (# of tweets, # of followers, # of retweets, # of link clicks),  but for agencies, consultants, and in-house specialists, regular reporting and trend history (not at-the-moment checking) is key.

Twitter is providing an increasing amount of value to an increasing number of businesses and individuals. Applications that can add yet more value, and make the value more visible, will profit from it.

1) Targetting Interest Combinations

Facebook’s interest targeting will stack keyword after keyword into one big targeting pile. This is great for doing things like using “ipod”, “macbook”, and “iphone” to target a larger group of apple product lovers. But its useless if you want to target people who have two(or more) separate interests. If Facebook  added an additional interest field for people who want to target their ads to users interested in X1, x2, or x3 and Y1, Y2, Y3, or Y4, advertisers would be able to create much more relevant ads. iPhone app creators could target their ads to people who have “iPhone” in their profile and a relevant interest, for instance.

2) Interest Exclusion Targeting

Sometimes it’s as useful to be able to specify the people you don’t want to reach as it is the people you do. What if I want to target people who are Republicans, but aren’t interested in Glenn Beck? Or people in Boston who are interested in baseball, but don’t list the Red Sox as an interest? This is another simple way Facebook ads could be made a lot more relevant.

3) Target by Family Relationships

We can target by single, in a relationship, married, etc. Now that Facebook lets you set who your brother / sister / mother / uncle is, why can’t we target by that? How many women are tired of seeing ads targeting mothers just because they’re in a certain age range?

4) Save Targeting Sets

Advertisers combine many targeting options to try and define a specific audience. Long lists of interest keywords, age criteria, city combinations, education levels; it would be great if Facebook allowed advertisers to save these combinations with a custom label, instead of having to recreate them each time or copying an old ad as a starting point.

5) See Increase in Page Likes from Each Ad

As a page administrator running ads to my page, I can see how many ‘actions’ a specific ad generated, if it’s the kind that can be liked (liking the page as well). But if the user simply clicks an ad that takes them to my page, and Likes it there, I can’t see which ad is the source of those likes. It’s very possible that some ads generate many click-throughs, but few likes upon page arrival. I want to see which ads those are!

6) Automatic A/B Testing

Creating a bunch of ad variants to test title, image, and copy doesn’t take as much time as it could thanks to Facebook’s “Create Similar Ad” feature, but monitoring results, pausing and unpausing ads to make sure they get equal amounts of impressions, and narrowing down what’s working and what isn’t… is a tremendous time sink. I’d much rather give Facebook a set of titles, images, and copy to test, and have it auto-rotate through to discover the best combinations and report back to me.

Clearly there are some things that can’t be tested this way (titles referencing images, copy referencing titles, etc.), but a great deal of ads could use this kind of automatic testing. It would also be a great way to combat banner blindness, if after the best-forming combination started to decline in results, the second-best image/title combo automatically started getting used instead.

7) More Fan Info From Fan Insights

Pages provide a gender, age, location breakdown of fans. A few additional data points I’d find extremely useful are:

• common interests – what are the most common interests of my fans, as a group?
• most active times – when are my fans active on Facebook? when are my fans active on my page?
• most active fans – which fans are most often liking, commenting, and sharing my content?
• # of shares – how often is my content being ‘Shared’? Which content?
• photo / video views – which of my albums / photos / videos gets viewed most often?

The better page administrators can understand their fans, the more engaged they can keep them.

Better Ad System = Better Results for Advertisers = More Money for Facebook

Many might suggest that providing better tools for advertisers and reducing the waste in their ad spend would mean less money for Facebook. I’d suggest that by providing better results to advertisers, they’ll not only see more spending from those advertisers in the future, but more advertisers deciding Facebook is worth looking into after all.

Setting New Goals & Making New Plans

The startup provided at least a rough framework for the next year that I was building plans around; milestones, important events to attend, etc. With that no longer in the picture, what do I want to work toward? And what am I now free to do? One of the big things is travel. As I can work remotely while doing consulting, now seems like an excellent time to see what life in other parts of the world is like. From everything I’ve read and observed from friends, having travel experience is by far one one of the best ways to achieve personal growth. So by Spring of 2011, I want to have traveled outside the U.S.

Building a New Financial Foundation

As I mentioned in my post-mortem for EasyImpress, I can’t see myself ever trying to start a startup again without enough savings to be able to focus solely on the startup for 6+ months. Travel, self-education, and side project experiments all have costs too. So one of my biggest priorities is increasing my income, diversifying it so that I’m not solely reliant on consulting work, and saving enough to have an investment & living expense fund ready for a new venture.

One of the things I’d like to try is niche content marketing. Creating and monetizing content, primarily via a blog, seems like a great way to:

• Learn more about a subject or two that I’m interested in.
• Get more experience building traffic and promoting web content.
• Get more experience creating process that minimizes time input and maximizes quality output for content creation.
• Create small but constant passive income streams.
• Create an asset that could be sold in a site market like Flippa.
• Fill in some of the empty / under-served spaces on the web.

So, roughly, the plan is to: continue serving my existing consulting clients, look for new one-off consulting opportunities, and create, grow, & monetize one or two niche content channels. My goal is to have saved $10,000 by my 25th birthday, in July 2011.

Regaining Reputation and Gaining Credibility Indicators

The hardest part of shutting down EasyImpress was the amount of reputation and ego I had invested in it. A failing startup is often a classic sunk costs trap: you feel like you’ve put so much into something, you can’t stand to stop, even if it doesn’t seem likely things will turn around with further investment. In addition to the time and money I’d put into EasyImpress, I’ve made life choices that I defended to others with the vision of my startup succeeding, and I would like to think that I appeared and presented myself to others as a young businessman on the rise.

Now I’m several steps back again. Even though I feel like the past two years have gained me many things, my credibility hasn’t significantly increased. Credibility is a tricky measure that requires converting successes (whether financial, educational, or experiential) into signifiers that others can understand (diplomas, titles, possessions). Most people judge you by three things: what you have, what you’ve achieved, and who you’ve been recognized by.

Appearing credible to others is important. Credibility is the key that gets you past gatekeepers and allows you access to opportunities. My consulting work again at least gives me the credibility of a profession to claim, and for those who care even some impressive clients in my portfolio of work. But the accomplishment of having created a successful business is still what I’m lacking.

For now.

1. Momentum is everything. Lost momentum isn’t just missed opportunity, it’s a weight that slows your startup down.
2. Value before revenue. Don’t spend all your time working on a plan to generate revenue from a community / product before you’ve proven that it provides enough value to people that they’re willing to use / pay for it. Market traction first, revenue extraction later.

After that experience, I wasn’t eager to spend years creating something great and looking for funding before I ever saw a real dollar of profit come from it. Big ideas always go through multiple stages before they reach their real potential — I wanted to start with a business much more simple. Creating a product that solves a problem, that people will pay for.

My mother publishes a real estate magazine in the southeast, and has since I was a child. Some of my first efforts in web development was creating & maintaining websites for real estate agents in my hometown. In the ten+ years since then, it struck me that most Realtor websites weren’t much better than what I was able to create at 13. It seemed like a clear enough problem: agents have crappy websites that don’t effectively get them traffic, get them leads, or market their listings.

Some market research indicated that there were many services that provided agents with websites (a good sign that there was demand for it), and that almost all of them were doing a crummy job of it (by the standards of someone who uses the web on a regular basis). My co-founder Andrew mentioned he had a friend in California he’d worked with before who did a steady business creating websites for people with Drupal, a powerful CMS I was aware of (though I had worked more with WordPress).

And that’s how EasyImpress began. I won’t recount the next 2 years in detail; I want this post to provide actionable advice, not just narrative. So without further ado, here are my takeaways:

Do Not Start a Startup Without a Full-Time* Team

I don’t think I would ever start a business again without:

1. Enough savings to keep me housed & fed for 6 months (and therefore no need to work on other things to meet basic needs), if not longer.
2. Everyone on the founding team committed to work 20+ hours a week on starting the project, and a clear milestone at which they were willing to make it priority #1.

Startup culture idolizes people who quit everything and instantly commit 100% to a new venture. Realistically, many of us who want to start a business of our own aren’t in a position to do this, because of responsibilities we have to others. And rarely are the best potential co-founders unengaged with other projects. But I would never again want to be a founder of a startup I wasn’t able to bring 100% of my time to.

Carefully Consider Doing Anything You Are Not Passionate About

Startup life is very unstructured. It’s up to you to motivate yourself, and even if what your startup will bring you (stability? wealth? importance? credibility?) motivates you, you will find it much easier to work on the daily tasks and everyday challenges of building a business if the business itself is something you’re passionate about.

Self-motivation is not an ability that once you have it, you keep it. It’s a reservoir of will that’s filled with ambition, enjoyment, good humor, and small successes. It’s drained by mundanity, difficulty, failures, and fears. If you’re not refilling that reservoir on a regular basis, you will find yourself attempting to escape or avoid further drain.

There are many good business opportunities that I find interesting, though maybe I’m not inherently passionate about them. My new rule of thumb: if I can’t bring an opportunity to fruition (providing reservoir-refilling successes, emotional and/or financial) within 6 months, I’m not going to pursue it.

Don’t Use a Platform More Complex than Your Solution

One advantage we had was that I knew our market well. Most real estate agents are not web savvy, and one of the reasons so many agent websites were terrible was because the services providing the tools to create them were unintuitive and overly complex. Simple was one of our mantras from the beginning. We hid Drupal’s techie-focused control interface from the end user and provided an interface that started with 3 simple menus: Add, Edit, and Options.

Drupal was attractive because it provided all of the CMS functionality we needed, and had a thriving ecosystem of add-on modules that provided additional functionality. Surely it would be easy for us to pick-and-choose what we wanted, right? Wrong. Using Drupal was probably our worst mistake, because it reduced the efficiency of the time we were able to spend on the project significantly.

Instead of spending time creating or improving functionality, much of our development time was spent trying to figure out what in Drupal was causing something to happen, which module was interfering with another’s operation, or how to modify something Drupal simply didn’t provide a hook for. And Drupal itself provided tons of functionality that we didn’t need at all, and was just dead-weight in memory usage.

When it comes to technology platforms, it’s often easier to add things on than it is to take things out or untangle abstraction. Don’t start with a platform that does more than what you need.

If Things Aren’t Going Well, Persevere but Set Milestones to Sop

One of my biggest regrets after shutting the doors on EasyImpress is not doing it 3, maybe 6 months sooner. Our team had been feeling negative about the project for a while. Part of that is the ups and downs of the startup roller coaster. I don’t think anyone should quit their startup because they’re at a slow point or are feeling negative about its prospects. But I don’t think you should push blindly forward, either.

Set clear conditions (no sales after X months, fewer than X hours worked by team each week, unable to solve problem after X dollars more spent working on it, etc.) at which you’re going to cut your losses, and stick to them. Don’t get stuck worrying about sunk costs. If you keep working past your points of failure, you’re not just losing more money and effort; you’re losing time to put into other opportunities you could be pursuing.

The best part of shutting down our startup is that we’re now able to work on things that will reward us.

For myself, I realized it was because I was afraid. And it’s much easier to tell yourself, or others, that you’re not succeeding at something because you haven’t tried hard enough (or at all) than because (everyone’s secret fear) you’re simply not able to do it, or not able to do it as well as you’d like to think you could. I think this a more common root of procrastination than many would like to admit. And it may be why so many tactics people try to overcome procrastination don’t work; because they’re focused on causes like a lack of structure, or a disinterest in the task.

Curing procrastination caused by a fear of rejection or fear of failure is a different matter entirely. It’s not about making time or improving motivation. There are two approaches you have to take:

1. Accept that it’s okay to fail.
2. Build your confidence, and trust what you’re good at.

If you ever want to improve, you have to accept the possibility of failure. None of us are naturals at everything. The people I’ve seen who seem to pick up skills with ease are actually people who obsessively practice a new skill, failing rapidly and repeatedly in a short amount of time, until they’re succeeding more often than not.

Entrepreneurs at my age are often good at many things, but rarely masters of anything. We’re praised for being good at these things, but often we’re still feeling like a novice, or remembering how bad we were at it in the beginning. If you want to overcome this, you have to keep succeeding (with the risk of failure each time), until your skills and your confidence in them improve.

Finally, know that there’s a way you can make your fear of failure work for you. Any time you’re procrastinating a task you know you need to do, remember that it’s as sure of a path to failure as attempting the most difficult of challenges. And not just failure at the task, but failure at the bigger project it’s a part of. Procrastination may help you avoid failure in the short term, but it will lead to a larger failure every time.

You don’t become a failure by failing to succeed. You become a failure by failing to try.