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Interview: The Future of Cloud Marketing Software with Vocus CMO Jason Jue

Posted on 16. May, 2012 by BLarson in B2B, Blog, interview, interviews, Online PR, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Vocus

At TopRank Online Marketing, we are fortunate to provide consulting to quite a few innovative B2B companies that serve other marketers. A great example of that is PRWeb and parent company, Vocus, both long standing clients.

In late 2011 Vocus welcomed Jason Jue as Chief Marketing Officer. As Vocus & PRWeb’s Account Manager at TopRank, I was keenly interested in getting to know Jason better and learning his plans for the future – and what better way than through an interview for all readers of Online Marketing Blog to see?

In this interview Jason talks about the undeniable convergence of PR and marketing, what social media metric is most undervalued by many PR and marketing professionals, where marketers should invest for 2013 and his vision for Vocus.

Tell us a little bit about your background and what excites you most about joining Vocus? 

Prior to Vocus, I was Vice President of Marketing at Rackspace and had several executive positions at Dell in the US and Asia, marketing to businesses. Vocus offers cloud marketing and PR software to businesses in every market sectors and size that want to reach and influence buyers

I’m excited about sharing with businesses how easily our products work wonders for our current customers. Some of the leading marketing consultants such as Sirius Decisions and MarketingSherpa use our products to maximize their online publicity.

For some people, Vocus is synonymous with Public Relations software. Can you speak to how and when Vocus first expanded to offering marketing solutions?

We have always believed PR to be a core part of “promoting a product or service” or marketing. Many customers who buy our PR software have a marketing title, and we’ve recently seen faster growth in this group. These customers use our social media and PRWeb news release features of our PR software. For them, we created a cloud marketing suite which integrates search, publicity, and social media marketing. Our cloud marketing suite was the most successful product launch in Vocus history, and will be even better when it includes email later this year.

Do you see PR and marketing professionals as two separate audiences? Or are they converging disciplines?

In marketing teams that have PR and marketing professionals, we continue to see them as two audiences with different product needs, although their roles are converging, especially around social media. PR professionals are using social media for brand positioning. Marketing professionals use social media for lead gen. Meanwhile, for the millions of businesses who have few, if any marketers at all, the marketing functions blend together.

Use your crystal ball and give us a glimpse into the future. How will the Vocus offering change over the next 2 years? Where do you see the most opportunity for growth?

The future of marketing is simple and powerful integrated campaigns. Every marketing team realizes that when working together on unified and integrated campaigns, lead generation and brand perception results are much better than working alone.

I know that sounds like a pipe dream as marketing complexity has increased to address the everywhere all the time customer. Today’s customers are constantly switching back and forth from website, news, social, search, email, and mobile. To add confusion, each specialty has their marketing tools resulting in silos and disjointed communication.

In the near future, marketers will be able to buy cloud marketing software to easily manage integrated campaigns. It will incorporate the trendy with the tried-and-true tactics of marketing The essential elements will work together for better results in lead generation and brand perception. And, it will recommend how and when to engage with prospects and customers.

Seem unbelievable? I think it’s unbelievable that it hasn’t already happened. In the past 15 years, every corporate function, from marketing to sales to HR, has seen a proliferation of technology tools. Marketing is the only function without a major product suite. IBM is doing it for large enterprise marketing. We are integrating all the important marketing tools into a cloud marketing suite so every business, large and small, can easily achieve big results .

Staying on social for a moment, what is one social metric that you think may be most overlooked by PR and marketing professionals alike? On the flip side, any stat that you view as overvalued?

The most important social media metric is how many people actively recommend your product or service. I think the most overvalued metrics are fans, followers, and likes.

As 2012 is well underway, what is one investment you think marketers must make in order to succeed the rest of the year and into 2013? (i.e. invest in mobile marketing)

Focus on marketing fundamentals that will dramatically accelerate growth. Who is your target customer? What product or service should you develop for them? How should you promote to them? Why should they buy from you?

Then, find the best product for you that simplifies all the marketing tactics and trends. This product will then let you focus on the marketing fundamentals.

Thanks, Jason!

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. |
Interview: The Future of Cloud Marketing Software with Vocus CMO Jason Jue | http://www.toprankblog.com

Interview: The Future of Cloud Marketing Software with Vocus CMO Jason Jue

Posted on 16. May, 2012 by BLarson in B2B, Blog, interview, interviews, Online PR, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Vocus

At TopRank Online Marketing, we are fortunate to provide consulting to quite a few innovative B2B companies that serve other marketers. A great example of that is PRWeb and parent company, Vocus, both long standing clients.

In late 2011 Vocus welcomed Jason Jue as Chief Marketing Officer. As Vocus & PRWeb’s Account Manager at TopRank, I was keenly interested in getting to know Jason better and learning his plans for the future – and what better way than through an interview for all readers of Online Marketing Blog to see?

In this interview Jason talks about the undeniable convergence of PR and marketing, what social media metric is most undervalued by many PR and marketing professionals, where marketers should invest for 2013 and his vision for Vocus.

Tell us a little bit about your background and what excites you most about joining Vocus?

Prior to Vocus, I was Vice President of Marketing at Rackspace and had several executive positions at Dell in the US and Asia, marketing to businesses. Vocus offers cloud marketing and PR software to businesses in every market sector and size that want to reach and influence buyers.

I’m excited about sharing with businesses how easily our products work wonders for our current customers. Some of the leading marketing consultants such as Sirius Decisions and MarketingSherpa use our products to maximize their online publicity.

For some people, Vocus is synonymous with Public Relations software. Can you speak to how and when Vocus first expanded to offering marketing solutions?

We have always believed PR to be a core part of “promoting a product or service” or marketing. Many customers who buy our PR software have a marketing title, and we’ve recently seen faster growth in this group. These customers use our social media and PRWeb news release features of our PR software. For them, we created a cloud marketing suite which integrates search, publicity, and social media marketing. Our cloud marketing suite was the most successful product launch in Vocus history, and will be even better when it includes email later this year.

Do you see PR and marketing professionals as two separate audiences? Or are they converging disciplines?

In marketing teams that have PR and marketing professionals, we continue to see them as two audiences with different product needs, although their roles are converging, especially around social media. PR professionals are using social media for brand positioning. Marketing professionals use social media for lead gen. Meanwhile, for the millions of businesses who have few, if any marketers at all, the marketing functions blend together.

Use your crystal ball and give us a glimpse into the future. How will the Vocus offering change over the next 2 years? Where do you see the most opportunity for growth?

The future of marketing is simple and powerful integrated campaigns. Every marketing team realizes that when working together on unified and integrated campaigns, lead generation and brand perception results are much better than working alone.

I know that sounds like a pipe dream as marketing complexity has increased to address the everywhere all the time customer. Today’s customers are constantly switching back and forth from website, news, social, search, email, and mobile. To add confusion, each specialty has their marketing tools resulting in silos and disjointed communication.

In the near future, marketers will be able to buy cloud marketing software to easily manage integrated campaigns. It will incorporate the trendy with the tried-and-true tactics of marketing The essential elements will work together for better results in lead generation and brand perception. And, it will recommend how and when to engage with prospects and customers.

Seem unbelievable? I think it’s unbelievable that it hasn’t already happened. In the past 15 years, every corporate function, from marketing to sales to HR, has seen a proliferation of technology tools. Marketing is the only function without a major product suite. IBM is doing it for large enterprise marketing. We are integrating all the important marketing tools into a cloud marketing suite so every business, large and small, can easily achieve big results .

Staying on social for a moment, what is one social metric that you think may be most overlooked by PR and marketing professionals alike? On the flip side, any stat that you view as overvalued?

The most important social media metric is how many people actively recommend your product or service. I think the most overvalued metrics are fans, followers, and likes.

As 2012 is well underway, what is one investment you think marketers must make in order to succeed the rest of the year and into 2013? (i.e. invest in mobile marketing)

Focus on marketing fundamentals that will dramatically accelerate growth. Who is your target customer? What product or service should you develop for them? How should you promote to them? Why should they buy from you?

Then, find the best product for you that simplifies all the marketing tactics and trends. This product will then let you focus on the marketing fundamentals.

Thanks, Jason!

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. |
Interview: The Future of Cloud Marketing Software with Vocus CMO Jason Jue | http://www.toprankblog.com

Klout and the Reality of Return on Influence

Posted on 06. Mar, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, interviews, Jason Falls, Klout, Mark W. Schaefer, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media books, social media marketing

Video production by my friends at Candidio. Fast, inexpensive, great service.

(Abbreviated transcript below. Please watch video for entire interview.)

Jay: Welcome, everybody. It’s Jay Baer at Convince & Convert, joined today by a very special guest, my good friend Mark W. Schaefer. Mr. Schaefer, how are you, good sir?

Mark: I could not be better.

Jay: What does that W stand for anyway?

Mark: Wannabe.

Jay: Which brings us to today’s book, Return On Influence. Usually when I wave the book in front of the camera in these interviews, I have the book, but because I was graced with the electronic version of the book, I think I owe you $25, and I only have printed out the cover so that you can see what it looks like.

Mark: The hard copy book is coming to you. I’m going to be signing some copies next week. Of course, you’re featured in the book so I owe a great debt to you for your help.

Jay: Well, I think it’s quite the contrary, but thank you very much. It is a terrific book.

Mark: Thank you.

Jay: I devoured it. I devoured it recently on an airplane as I typically do. It was really, really good and obviously a tricky subject. There was a reason why nobody in social media has written a book about the nature of influence. Tell us why you decided to tackle this tricky subject?

Mark: The history of the book and how I got there is actually quite interesting and quite dramatic in some ways. I got really interested in the subject about a year and a half ago. I noticed that anytime someone wrote a blog post about Klout there would be this foaming at the mouth. People would be violent in there. One guy said to me on my blog, “Mark, are you with me? We’ve got to stop this.”

Jay: And you said, “No, I’m not with you.”

Mark: I’m thinking, wow, people don’t react this way over pagerank. This is something new. And then Jay, I started hearing about all these companies that were actually using it. Disney, Audi, Revlon; these are not schlock companies, so I got really interested in it. I thought that this could be a mainstream trend. Of course, now everybody knows about Klout and talks about Klout, but a year and a half ago it was unknown. And really, it’s actually still obscure to most people other than people like you and me. I made a proposal to my publisher, McGraw-Hill, and this was the tricky part. I turned in an outline and I said I don’t know what this book is going to be about.

Jay: That’s always what they want to see in the proposal process.

Mark: That got their stamp of approval right then and there, baby. And I said, because there is no story, there are no experts. This is completely new. It’s developing week by week. I can give you an outline of what I think it’s going to be, but I’m going to let the research tell the story. I turned to experts like you and to Robert Scoble, and the famous acclaimed author, Robert Cialdini, the author of “Influence at Work.” I did about 70 different interviews and I also did academic research to figure out how did we get here? What the science behind these formulas?

We don’t know their secret sauce and we never will, nor should we. It’s their secret sauce. There’s enough academic research out there that you can piece it together and have a pretty good idea of what they’re doing.

That’s what I did, and at the end of the day I tried to present a balanced book where I really give Klout and the other companies that are now flocking into this space a lot of credit for trying to do what they’re trying to do, but I also say there are problems. There are problems with gaming the system.

There are a lot of issues, as you know, with privacy. I addressed some of those issues head-on, but at the end of the day, I do think they’re onto something. I think that there is something legitimate here. I think that there is solid science developing here and that this is a trend we need to pay attention to.

What Defines Influence?

Jay: The book is called “Return on Influence”. The question people always have about Klout and similar services is how can you possibly deign to measure something as amorphous as influence? How would you, Mark W. Schaefer, define online influence? What is the marker of online influence?

Mark: That’s difficult.

Jay: Well, you wrote a book about it. It shouldn’t be that difficult.

Mark: It’s difficult to say in a sound bite. The first half of the book basically explores that question. It explores that difference. This was the interesting thing Jay, because not a lot has really been written about this. Volumes have been written about how to be influential and win friends and influence people, and how to be a better car salesman, and how to be a better this and how to be a better that, in the carbon-based world. But there hasn’t really been a lot written, and I was really amazed, Jay, at the lack of even research that’s been done as far as this idea of influence online.

Jay: One of the things that I think people struggle with, with regard to Klout and online influence, is this notion of reciprocity. We talked about that a little bit for the book. We have very much in our social media bubble this culture of “I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine.” Klout, by their own admission, says if you interact with people with higher Klout scores it will raise your own Klout score. That’s part of the algorithm. They’ve acknowledged that over time.

As we talked about in our interview, though, if people are doing things because it’s intrinsically beneficial to themselves, are you really influencing somebody when all they’re really trying to do is benefit themselves ultimately?

Mark: That’s so interesting. It’s such a interesting question. I really enjoyed exploring that part of the book, because what makes it so fascinating is that what I’ve found out through the academic part of the research was that humans have this insanely deep innate process to return a favor. We almost can’t stand it. When someone does something nice for us we just have to pay it back. We’re almost driven to pay it back.

In the offline world, in the human world, usually that means whenever you do a favor for someone you’ve got your skin in the game. Someone’s knocking at your door at midnight saying, “My baby is sick. Can you take me to the hospital?” Certainly, a gift, a favor, something that happens at work, a promotion, you don’t forget those things.

Here’s the interesting part. Even though reciprocity on the social web can be something as small as pushing a Like button, that human instinct is still the same, so it’s way out of whack. I’m sure you experience this, and you mention this in the book, is that people maybe you don’t even know are tweeting you and maybe they’re leaving a comment, and in their mind they’re building up this social capital in your bank. Then all of a sudden they ask for a withdrawal and you go, “What? What? Where’d this come from?”

Jay: Yeah, it happens.

Mark: In their mind this is legitimate. It’s just like doing some big favor for you in real life. So there is this disconnect, and that is a big difference between influence in the online world and the offline world.

Maybe Narrowcasting Trumps Broadcasting

Jay: One of the premises of online influence and Klout and things of that nature is your ability to move larger than average numbers of people to act in some way. Yet, as our friend Jason Falls talked about in the book and I thought was really interesting, in many cases success on the social web isn’t so much about breadth in broadcasting, but about narrow casting.

As he says, he only needs a few clients at a time. He only needs a few people to read his blog, a few people to sign up for his monthly advice service for this to be successful. To some degree we’re being encouraged to build these big networks, but maybe we really just need a smaller network that really and truly cares about what we do.

Mark: I thought that was a really interesting contrast. In the book I used the example of my friend who really built a career because he was so likable and it got to a point where he kept getting promoted, and it got to the point we were saying, “Is this guy really smart or is he just so likable?” In that situation he has zero room for error.

If you build your career on likability in the offline world, you can’t have any enemies. You’ve got to really drive that. As Jason said, the numbers are so big in the online world you can afford to not necessarily be liked by everyone. I think he said, “I just have to be liked by six marketing directors in the world. That basically will make my career very nice.” That’s another very fascinating difference to explore.

Jay: Although if you look at it, I feel like there are people in our world who are inherently more likable or believed to be so, or that’s the public persona they project. It certainly helps if they have the chops to back it up. Look at somebody like Gini Dietrich, who is by all accounts highly likable and everybody wants to be around her, but she also knows what she’s doing, which doesn’t hurt. The combination of the two is really powerful.

Brogan is the same way. Very likable guy, much more so than most people would expect. Falls is the same way. It’s interesting. When you get it coming from both directions, I think it’s a one plus one equals three circumstance.

Mark: Absolutely. I think in many ways the social web really amplifies personality. If you’re a jerk people are going to sniff you out. You’re not going to be able to fake it very long.

Mark: Some of the people that you mentioned, I haven’t met Gini yet. I’m going to meet her at Social Slam.

Jay: Is she coming to Social Slam, too? Social Slam, April 27th, Knoxville, Tennessee, run by the man, Mark W. Schaefer. It’s going to be incredible.

Mark: What an amazing lineup. Gini is a keynote speaker, Mitch Joel, Tom Webster. Jay is going to be there, Marcus Sheridan, Stanford Smith from Pushing Social. This is amazing firepower in one room for an $89 ticket. It’s an amazing day.

Does Klout Score Mean You Know What You’re Doing?

Jay: It’s interesting, though, looking at it from the other perspective, something that a lot of people kvetch about it, they may not talk about it publicly as much, but this notion that just because you have online influence doesn’t necessarily mean that that qualifies you to be a consultant or an adviser to corporations. It’s the, “Just because you can write a blog that’s successful doesn’t mean that you should be in the blog advice business.”

I think Klout feeds into that mentality a little bit. People would say, “Well, I have a Klout score of 67, therefore I must be a social media consultant. I must be worthy of your time and attention.” That, I think, is a little dangerous.

Mark: It is dangerous. It really is dangerous. I think a lot of people draw similarities between a Klout score and a credit score. A credit score is not even an indication of your integrity, it’s not an indication of your ability or your willingness to pay off a bill, but it’s an indication of something. As long as you know that it’s very limited and what it’s an indication of, you’re going to be okay.

If you start using credit scores to make assumptions about people beyond this narrow little sliver of what it’s suppose to represent, it’s wrong. I talk about this in the book. I’m concerned about some of the human aspects of what could happen as these scores go mainstream, and that’s one of them.

It’s going to create almost like a caste system of haves and have-nots.

Jay: I’ve not experienced it personally, but I’ve heard tales of people putting their Klout score prominently on their resume, and people being hired and not hired for social media positions based on, at least to some degree, Klout score and things like that.

I think that’s a little bit of a misuse and misapplication of the data. But there are good examples of companies using Klout for promotional purposes or influence or outreach. What are some of the examples or cases studies that you think are interesting?

Effective Klout Case Studies

Mark: I think I’ve got at least 15 case studies in the book. To be honest with you, I think it’s the highlight of the book because these are case studies that have never been seen before and it lifts the veil of this mystery of what the brands actually do with these things.

What I love about that chapter is the creativity. You look at the one example from Burson-Marsteller, a large PR firm based in New York but they’re global, I think there are 80 offices or something like that, how they’re using Klout scores in crisis management. If something breaks, bad news for one of their customers, they’re actually looking at what the Klout scores re of the people who are trying to share this information and they’re making decisions.

They can predict if this thing is going to move or if it’s not going to move based on the Klout score. I actually think that’s a good use of the scores, because I think Klout scores are an indicator of how well people can move content through a network and beyond a network. I think that is what is the small sliver of what’s being measured here and increasingly well.

Jay: One of the things that I think you mentioned in the book, and I’ve heard people from Klout talk about it in presentations, is that on average somebody who is tapped to participate in a Klout Perks kind of program creates on average 30 pieces of content about whatever business that they interact with. Between Instagram photos and tweets and Facebook status updates and LinkedIn posts and blog posts, etc., it almost doesn’t matter as much the amplification of that person.

If you could say, “Look, here’s what we’re going to do. If you pay this company some money, we’re going to find some people, regardless of influence, and each of them are going create on average 30 pieces of content about your brand.” That, in and of itself, has value. That forced amplification opportunity is pretty interesting.

Mark: It’s measurable, and you can compare that type of impression in some ways to traditional advertising impressions. Here’s the power that a lot of people aren’t really understanding. This is the power of someone creating these impressions, let’s say, about a new Subway sandwich. While they’re sitting in the store eating the sandwich they’re taking pictures and they’re tweeting and they’re talking about this.

These are people who love your product, advocating your product where it’s being used. This is entirely new. Really, it’s a new marketing channel. This couldn’t have happened two or three years ago. You needed to have this widespread adoption, you would have had to have widespread access to high-speed Internet and widespread adoption of these publishing tools for this to even be possible.

The layer on top of this is the algorithm, figuring out who’s creating buzz. That is revolutionary. This whole process of creating an influence score like an E-score or a Q-score used to be, this is behind the curtain secret stuff, what’s Tom Hanks’ E- score, what’s George Clooney’s Q-score. Now everybody has an influence score, and brands are tapping in and finding these people. It’s a new marketing channel.

Using Klout Scores Internally

Jay: One of the things I think is really interesting, especially for the enterprise, is to measure internal influence, right? Who is influential within the company so that they can have teams coalesce around them, or communicate more effectively with coworkers, or answer more questions in terms of knowledge transfer. I really like that idea.

Mark: Thank you. That was one of my ideas.

Jay: Of course. Yes, I know. That’s why I brought it up. It was in the book.

Mark: Oh, thank you. Flattery will get you everywhere, Jay. It’s a little scary, too, because now you just can’t tell somebody that you’re being successful at an account or that you’re influential at an account. Why couldn’t you apply these same measures in an internal environment? Here’s the thing. Very rapidly, these online conversations are being connected to offline behaviors.

Look at the Facebook timeline and what Facebook is trying to do there; document every step of your life. Many people are willing to do that, so increasingly you’re going to be able to say, Jay Baer writes about a new restaurant or a new record album, and people are going to be putting on their timeline, well this person is connected to Jay. He’s influenced by Jay, and every time Jay writes about Radiohead, Mark Schaefer goes out and buys this album. Those dots are being connected. In short order, you’ll be able to do that in many aspects of our life and use it as an internal gauge. There’s no reason that that couldn’t happen and I think it will.

Jay: We’ve talked about this in the past and we’ve each written about it. Klout, itself, has some weaknesses. They’re trying to quantify something that’s very difficult to quantify. There are other companies in this space, PeerIndex, Peek Analytics, that are all trying to do opinions, people are trying to do virtually the same thing.

It’s a tough nut to crack, but I think we both agree that this concept of influence measuring is here to stay because it’s so valuable to businesses in this sea of information where every customer is a reporter, to be able to say, okay, well if every customer is a reporter and all these people are communicating about and to us, within that field, which of these people have a larger audience? I think that clearly is something that companies are going to gravitate toward and build into their day- to-day operations.

Mark: I think that wisdom is being cloaked by emotion. It’s a difficult situation because they’re innovating and iterating in public. You’ve built companies, I’ve built products and I’ve built companies and worked for big companies, and sometimes it’s like making sausage. It is ugly. You make mistakes, but hopefully at the end of the day you’re going to have a beautiful, tasty product. Klout has made some missteps. If it was a typical company, a normal company, we wouldn’t even know about it.

But they’re iterating in public and they’ve created a lot of controversy for themselves. Some of their mistakes were based on some of the judgments they made. Some of them it was the situation. Nevertheless, it’s created a lot of emotion that I think has cloaked this fact that they are onto something.

Let’s get through the emotion. Yes, there are problems, and yes, there are things that are wrong, but we’ve got to look at the facts. We’ve got to look at the very real business opportunities and look at how businesses are using this and driving action to their bottom line.

Jay: Certainly, and something that will help people cut through the emotion and understand the facts is the new book, Return On Influence: The Revolutionary Power of Klout, Social Scoring, and Influence Marketing.

Transcription services provided by:

Activation, Comfort, and Other Secrets of Online Community Management

Posted on 08. Feb, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, BlogWorld, community management, interviews, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media books

Video production by my friends at Candidio. Fast, inexpensive, great service.

(Abbreviated transcript below. Please watch video for entire interview. Somehow, my side of the video got cut out, so it’s only audio for me!)

Jay: Welcome everybody to Convince & Convert. It is Jay Baer joined today by a very special guest, my friend who is the Director of Community and all things fabulous at BlogWorld and also the author of Online Community Management For Dummies, Ms. Deb Ng. Deb, how are you?

Deb: I am terrific, Jay. How are you?

Jay: I am marvelous. I love your festive red background for videos.

Deb: Thank you. This is my dining room. We’re renovating. So everywhere I was sitting today, I’m like, “Oh, I don’t want people to see that. Oh, I don’t want people to see that.” So I came in my dining room where it was just a red backdrop.

Jay: It looks great. You should use it. I really like it. It pops as they say.

Deb: Well, my husband is Chinese, and red is a very lucky color.

Jay: Well, I loved the book. I thought it was really, really fantastic. I recommended it to several clients already. It really is a treasure trove of advice and best practices around community management. How was it writing it?

Deb: It was fun writing it. It’s the stuff I’ve always wanted to write, and it’s the stuff I talk about when I speak at conferences and I blog about. And it was actually a hard sell for Wiley. They weren’t sure people would want to buy a book about community management. But it sort of wrote itself. It was the easiest thing I ever wrote, I have to say. It was so simple to write.

Jay: Wow. That’s a ringing endorsement. Easiest thing you ever wrote. That’ll work.

Deb: Well, it’s second nature I think, to me. I don’t know if that sounds kind of silly, but it just all came so quickly.

Jay: You can tell when you read it that you actually have done this and that you’re speaking, in many cases, from a place where you have experienced these scenarios. That’s one of the things I really liked about it is that it walks you through a lot of “Hey, if this happens, do this thing, and if this other thing happens, do this thing.” It’s not just theory of community management. It’s very tactical, very practical and something that I think people will keep on the shelf and pull down and say, “Let me flip to that section. I remember Deb said something smart about that.”

Deb: I hope so.

Jay: One of the things that I see all the time, and you do as well I’m sure, now that many companies have come around to the belief that they should have a community, there isn’t a lot of community activation, or perhaps not as much as there should be. You talked about that a little bit in the book. How can we get people to do stuff as opposed to just click one button and join?

Deb: It’s hard, because we don’t want to spam people, and we don’t want to say, “Will you please comment on my blog, dammit?” I think we’ve all had those frustrating moments where nobody answers our calls to action. So I think we have to make it entertaining. We have to make it enjoyable. We can’t always be a commercial for our product. You have to make life a conversation and draw the community in. If they feel as if they have a say in the brands and that they’re a living, breathing part of the community, they’ll participate more, and they’ll advocate for you.

Jay: What we see now is, as companies get more serious about this kind of work, an increasing usage of content calendars and community calendars and things that have more of a plan around how to do this. Do you think that kind of work is the enemy of true community, or can they coexist?

Deb: Yes and no. I do have some things that I do on a regular basis. For example, the first Monday of every month is brag your blog day on the BlogWorld Facebook page, because I don’t want to forget. If I don’t schedule a certain day for things, I forget. I will say I’ve never scheduled a tweet in my life. I don’t believe they’re engaging. I have scheduled blog feeds on Twitter, but I don’t schedule tweets, because you can’t have a conversation. You can’t schedule community. So, I think there are times when you can create an editorial calendar and plan out a course of action. But as far as scheduling engagement, I just don’t see it happening.

Jay: I like that quote, “You can’t schedule community.” That’s good. Consider that stolen.

So many times now, it seems that Facebook in particular has become the de facto community platform. How do you feel about that?

Deb: I have mixed feelings. First of all, Facebook is where the people are. The majority of Americans or even globally, the people who we want to reach are on Facebook. So it makes sense that we put a lot of our effort into Facebook. Most of my friends and neighbors don’t want anything to do with Twitter or Google+ or Pinterest or any of the other social networks, so it makes sense that we’re on Facebook. But I really do wish that I had the same engagement levels on the other social networks. Twitter has turned into such a disappointment for me, because it used to be the best place to go for conversation. Now, it’s sporadic unless we have our weekly Twitter chats, and it’s sort of like a link farm. So, I will put half my efforts, I would say, for the day into Facebook to grow that community, because that’s where we have to be, and that’s where most of our community are, but I won’t give up on the others as well.

Jay: One of the things that you said in the book was trying to steer your community away from negativity, which I thought was a really commendable point to make, because we see, certainly in the social media space, there are blogs out there that seem to use negativity as their oxygen. I try not to fall into that trap myself, but they’re out there. What’s your take on it?

Deb: I think that negativity begets negativity. So, if you have a space that makes people feel uncomfortable, it’s going to be like the earth after the apocalypse. Only the cockroaches are going to be there. People who thrive on negativity are going to stick around, but the people who want an intelligent conversation where they’re not always being accused of something or being called a loser, they’re going to move on. So I have no problem with disagreement as long as it’s respectful disagreement. I know that I’m not right all the time, most of the time. But you can tell me why without telling me to go make a sandwich.

Jay: So, can we disagree without being disagreeable?

Deb: Exactly.

Jay: One of the things that I loved about the book was your section on the welcome plan, which I think gets overlooked so often in communities. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a blog or Facebook. That first time that person peeks their head out is when you really have to give them succor and comfort and make sure that they stick around. Can you talk a little a bit about that welcome plan and how you think it should be done?

Deb: Sure. I compare it on my community to the high school dance. So nobody ever wants to be the first one up to dance. So maybe the chaperone will sort of start encouraging people to get up and dance. They might introduce a couple or get up to dance herself, although we would laugh at any chaperone who did that.

Jay: I was just thinking about that. I’m like, yeah, that would really get the party started, when the chaperones are dancing.

Deb: But somebody has to get the party started, and that’s where the community manager or moderator comes in. This probably works mostly for forums or blogs, because they have an area for this, but a welcome folder with frequently asked questions, a place to introduce yourself, and just a place to ask questions make people feel at ease. Then maybe the community manager can help to get that person, make them feel comfortable around the community, introduce them to people, and just bring them into the conversation. I honestly believe that it’s in a community manager’s best interest to know as much about her members or his members as possible, because then they can draw them into the conversation and know their areas of interest.

Jay: One of the things that you’ve always done really well is the combination online/offline community. Your community doesn’t really exist unless it exists at some point in three dimensions. Can you elaborate on that a little bit and how you can make your community work in the real world?

Deb: I think that it’s fine and dandy for you and I to tweet a lot and talk on Facebook now and then. But what do we really know about each other besides what we share? You don’t really know a person, I think, until you meet them online. When you know people, you trust them.

Jay: And that’s one of the great things about BlogWorld. It allows those kinds of interactions and conversations to take place and why it’s an event that most of the people in the social media and blogging industry would never dream of missing.

Deb: It’s the first conference I ever attended actually.

Jay: Wow. I want to see if anybody else who is watching this video, the first time they ever went to a conference ended up being the community manager for that conference. That would be some sort of a crazy . . .

Deb: Years later, too. That was in 2007. I was hired in 2010.

Jay: Wow. I didn’t know. That is a crazy tale. How about that? Good for you.

I am a big fan of this book, Online Community Management For Dummies. Do not let the fact that it is a Dummies book scare you, or do not look down your nose at it, because I feel like I know a fair amount about this kind of stuff, and I learned a lot from this book. It’s like a fire extinguisher of knowledge, and I’m really, really glad that you wrote it.

Jay: Deb, thank you as always for all that you do and for writing the book and for spending a little time here at Convince & Convert.

Deb: Thank you so much for having me, Jay.

Caring, Consistency, and the New Relationship Marketing

Posted on 15. Sep, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, Book Reviews, content curation, content marketing, interviews, Mari Smith, personal branding, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media books

Jay: Hey, everybody. It’s Jay Baer from Convince & Convert. I’m joined
today by a very special guest, my pal Mari Smith, live from
San Diego.

Jay: You are always awesome. You are always awesome. I want to see you all bummed out and sad sometime because no one has ever seen it. It’d be like seeing a narwhal or a unicorn or something like that.

Mari: Occasionally. I have my moments.

Jay: So, you’ve got a new book coming out in mid-October. Tell us all about it.

Mari: I do. I’m very excited about it. It’s called The New Relationship Marketing

I’m really, really excited because it’s the fusion of what we all know is the technical aspects of social media, what buttons you press, what tools, what stats to measure, all the kind of left brain hard skills as well as something that I’ve really honed a lot over the years, which is the soft skills, the people skills, which is crucialfor real success, in my opinion, in social media online and offline. It’s having skills like empathy and really being able to listen and read between the lines and expressing genuine care and compassion for people, regardless of where they come from. It’s really interesting.

It’s like the whole essence is about leveling out the playing field, if you will, so that brands, businesses of all sizes literally can friend their customers and prospects. I like to think of the acronym B2C and B2B as really being more like P2P now, people to people.

Jay: Do you find that as more and more people gravitate towards social media and start to use the tools and the shortcuts that we lose some of those soft skills, that we misplace those? Look, I can set it on HootSuite or Buffer and forget it, and it’ll fire out automatically, and then we start to lose some of that human touch. I feel like, in some ways, it’s becoming more about the media and less about the social.

Mari: Yeah. I 100% agree, and it’s really interesting. As you and I both know, social media as an industry per se has matured or is maturing. It’s so very young. Actually, Gary Vaynerchuck has this great metaphor. I think he says the Internet, not just social media, is a baby but it has a maturity. I heard him say
this once at an event: It’s a baby with a mustache.

Jay: It’s true. I started online in 1994, which is really early in this game, and that’s a long time, kind of, but it’s fewer than 20 years.

Mari: Right. Well, but the social aspect of it actually was the paradigm shift because businesses are missing out if they think they can just use these tools. There are some terrific tools, HootSuite for example, but if you think that you can just automate, set and forget, you’ll get some results. But it really will not be the same kinds of results if there can be some genuine interaction and someone in charge of that in the company, that could be outsourced, who’s listening and paying attention because you know why, the consumer has come to expect it. They will take their dollars to the company that engages with them and treats them like a real human being, not just a number on a list.

Jay: Yeah. What’s really interesting though is my book, in part, is about speed and having to do things faster as a company. I find that those two things tend to sometimes work at cross purposes. So, customers expect us to be faster as a company, but yet they also expect us to engage with authenticity and with empathy and with caring. It’s hard to do both of those things at the same time, isn’t it?

Mari: It is. It actually is, and there are some tips that I talk about in my book that would be rapport building skills, like using people’s first names. Believe it or not, a person’s first name is the sweetest sounding word in their entire vocabulary.

For example, if somebody’s Twitter handle includes their name, you can still say, “Hi, Jay @JayBaer. It was great chatting with you today, Jay. I really, really appreciate you.” Using people’s first names in any correspondence where it feels natural. If you do it every time and always at the beginning or whatever, it’s going to look forced and contrived. But, naturally, you’re doing your best to communicate online, the same way that you would in person chitchatting with a friend. And even, it’s not necessarily as you scale and get larger as a company or a brand or a person, not having to think that you have to respond to everybody because it’s not humanly possible. It’s not really scalable, but if you respond to enough people in a day in a warm, friendly, sincere way and with the rapport building tips, people can really feel when you’re genuinely giving and helping them versus like, oh yeah, by the way P.S. we can help you and buy our product, and here’s a link, always turning into a sale.

To me, you can accomplish a lot in a short period of time when you are consistently showing up as that genuine and caring person. There are many, many people and brands that do a great job of this.

Jay: I’m glad you mentioned consistency, because a lot of people spend a bunch of time in a row on social media, and they lock it down for two hours or three hours. Then, they go away for the rest of the day or for a week, and it becomes this very staccato participation wave where they’re overwhelmed by it and then they’re not involved at all. I suspect that you recommend the opposite, more of a sustained level of involvement. Is that true?

Mari: A hundred percent. It’s funny. I was just doing a session earlier, and one of the questions I got asked was about how much time a day should you spend. I always find that an awkward question.

Jay: That’s a hard one, yeah.

Mari: Well, it just depends on how much time you have available, what your goals are. What resources do you have available? But, I’ll guarantee you this. If you focus more on consistency versus the amount of time where it is a certain amount, literally you are showing up, it’s more of a consistent presence.

Jay: One of the things that I do to sort of take advantage of how people do dive in and dive out of Twitter, in particular, is a lot of times when I’m tweeting posts of my own, my own blog posts and things like that, I typically tweet those within three minutes of the top or the bottom of the hour, because I figure more people are checking Twitter right before their next appointment or right after their appointment ended.

So, I’ve actually tested it, and I’ve seen a lot better results in that six or seven minute window right before and right after the top of the hour than at 4:22 or 4:44, things like that, when people are probably involved in some sort of a meeting.

Mari: That’s a great tip. That’s an awesome tip. I love HootSuite for Twitter. I use it every single day because you don’t necessarily get penalized or anything for using a third party on Twitter. You do a little bit on Facebook, but it’s great for that scheduling.

Another tip right on the back of what you just shared is one time recently, and I think it’s maybe KISSmetrics that had done this infographic. I’ve lived in the States for eleven and a half years now, and I never knew this. It said 80% of the American population lives in the Central and Eastern time zones, and I’m in Pacific so I maybe start tweeting around 8:00 a.m. Well, it’s already 11:00 a.m. on the East Coast. So, I started to back it up a little bit and program some tweets to go out at 5:00 and 6:00 a.m. my time, and noticed like you better traction for that, too.

Jay: One of the questions that I think is on a lot of people’s minds right now, especially with the release of Google+, is more more? Is doing more in social media, or participating more with relationship marketing, is it a linear relationship? The more time I spend, the better off I’ll be. If I’m in Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and Google+, is that inherently better than just being in a couple? I get that kind of question from thought leaders and business owners all the time, and it’s a hard one to answer. What do you think?

Mari: Brilliant question. I love where you’re going with this. Ultimately, it is a personal choice, and the great equalizer is time. We only have 24 hours in a day. Unless you’re a brand or you’re doing real well financially and you just feel like forking out tons and tons of money to community managers so that they can be responding on your behalf, not necessarily as you but for you,
great, my hat’s off to you.

I have great admiration to mention Chris Brogan’s name again. I was a little shocked at first, but I did have some admiration that he just put a sign up on Facebook when Google+ came along. He’s like, “I’ll move. If you want to interact with me, I’m over here.” He’s the first to admit, he never really fully embraced Facebook. For myself, it’s totally different.

Jay: Yeah, almost the opposite, right? That’s always been your place.

Mari: Exactly. I’ve always just been madly in love with them. They are my first love. It was challenging for me in the last – what’s it been now – about six to eight weeks since Google+ really first launched because I was excited. I was saying to people, my God, I’ve never been this excited since May of ’07 when I first got on Facebook.

The cool thing I found, even though there are many, many thought leaders, many experts are on Google+ and they’re sharing voraciously, I found to get some tremendous mileage at one post a day. One post a day, that’s it. That’s the thing we were just saying. The consistency is there.

So, right now I am managing my own presence on Google+ and Twitter. I do all my own tweets. But Facebook is where I implemented a whole new campaign recently, thanks to something I learned from Jeremiah Owyang about scalability. He talked about how it’s really challenging for brands and businesses to use social media as a customer service mechanism because it’s a bottomless pit.

You keep throwing money at more community managers, and it just keeps scaling and scaling. His recommendation was to create a customer advocacy program. I’ve actually recently implemented what I call my MVPs or Mari’s Valuable Peeps. I have about a half dozen members of my community, who totally for free, out of the goodness of their heart, are answering questions for me on my fan page.

I give them exposure in exchange. I drive people to their sites and their pages. They get business because they’re in a slightly different business, doing fan page design. You’ve got to find what works for you.

Jay: The thing is those people will rise to the challenge. They’re hungry for an assignment, and that is very much what AOL did back in the day when AOL found themselves with tens of thousands of chat rooms, back when that was the thing, pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter, pre-MySpace.

So, you can’t, as a company, have 10,000 paid moderators, right? It just doesn’t pencil out. So, they said, “Okay which of you people who are totally into goldfish or Harley-Davidsons, or whatever this is about, wants to be the king of the geeks? Raise your hand. Congratulations, you’re the moderator.” It makes a lot of sense. It’s a smart strategy.

Mari: You can do that. You do that on a fan page on Facebook because people can post as their own fan page.

Jay: One of the things I like a lot about the book, and I’ve had a chance to read most of it, is you talk a lot about having a brand positioning for yourself, right? So, knowing what role you play, not in an artificial way, but what role do you play in these communities? In your case, you are the relationship marketing expert. You are the Facebook marketing expert. Everybody who knows you knows that, and you are extraordinarily good at staying consistent about what it is that you do and the value that you offer. However, I see a lot of people doing that poorly, as I’m sure you do as well. So my question is: What do you think is the bigger mistake, inconsistency of effort or unfocused branding?

Mari: I would probably go with the latter, because I think you literally only have a few brief seconds to make a first impression. If you’re all over the place, you’re saying you wear six different hats, you’re an expert in this, you also do that. You have 40 million links for people to check out. It’s like too much already. You look like someone who is not focused and is not clear. People will much prefer to do business with a specialist than a generalist. Once you get that piece locked down, you know what you stand for. You’ve got your focus in place, which I always love to have the acronym focus stand for “follow one course until successful.”

Jay: To be a true relationship marketing expert, can you do that as a content curator, or do you have to be a content creator? Curation is all the rage now. Everybody wants to go out there and show people what are good resources versus what are not good resources. It’s valuable, and I do a lot of it, as you do as well. But can you really get to where people want to get by just doing curation, do you think?

Mari: Well, it’s a brilliant start. Somebody who may be making a career transition or they really want to establish themselves as a thought leader and become an authority. I love how the root word of authority is author. If you want to be an authority in a niche, author more, write more. It doesn’t mean you have to have a published book. Eventually, you might, but write more content for blogs, for your social profiles, for commenting, etc., but in addition you want to be a great curator.

The key distinction from the relationship marketing standpoint is you want to put yourself into the curation. Don’t just hit retweet, retweet, retweet, and forward, forward, share. Actually make a little comment.

Jay: Fantastic. The book is amazing. People are going to benefit from it so much. I’m looking forward to it hitting the bookstore shelves
(in mid October) it’s The New Relationship Marketing from Mari Smith.

The root of authority is author, everybody remember that. And follow one course until successful. Everybody remember that. Thank you very much for the time, and I really appreciate it.

Mari: And you, likewise. Thank you.

The New New New Rules of Marketing and PR

Posted on 07. Sep, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, David Meerman Scott, interviews, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media books, social media marketing

Video production, editing, titling by my friends at Candidio. If you need your raw video footage tidied up good, fast, reasonably priced, they are the guys.

—–

Jay: Hey everybody, it’s Jay Baer from Convince & Convert, joined today by a very special guest, Mr. David Meerman Scott, author of the bestseller The New Rules of Marketing & PR.(affiliate)

David, how are you, good sir?

David: Hi. I’m good, Jay. How are you? Glad to see you have the third
edition there, too.

Jay: I do. I’ve got the most recent. It is the new, new, ” alt=”” /> Marketing and PR.”

David: Yeah. It’s kind of crazy. I agree with you. It’s kind of crazy.

When I wrote the first edition, I was writing in 2006. That was
before Twitter, “BT.” Now it’s like way back in the Dark Ages. I
thought I had some good ideas. There were a few people doing the
sorts of things that I was talking about, but I thought I was
sort of a little bit niche-y. Lo and behold, there were entire
conferences and thousands of books and tons of people who
specialize in this new form of marketing. It’s pretty exciting
to have been very, very early in seeing the trend.

Jay: People call this a modern business classic. You’ve
heard people say this. It’s like “Good to Great” or something
like that. As an author myself, that’s got to be an amazing and
an interesting feeling for you. You didn’t set out to write a
modern business classic. It just sort of worked out.

David: No, it just sort of worked out. I guess what it teaches me is
to trust your gut. When I wrote this, it was a couple of years
after getting sacked. I got fired. I was Vice President of
Marketing. . .

Jay: They weren’t ready for the new rules. They were ready for the old
rules.

David: Exactly. I was Vice President of Marketing at a company called
NewsEdge, which was acquired by Thomson Corporation. As part of
the acquisition, they decided, “This guy’s got some radical
ideas. It’s not going to work over here.” So they sent me along
on my way.

But that was a great thing because number one, they sent me
along on my way in a really crappy job market. That was the
beginning of 2002. If you recall that period of time, that was
right after 9/11, and it was really, really tough. I had
essentially no choice because there were no jobs. There were no
VP Marketing jobs available in ’02. I didn’t really have much of
a choice except to write and speak and jump up and down about
these ideas that I felt pretty strongly about, the idea that on
the web you are already published. Put out great content, and
you’re great. Put it out crappy, and you’re crappy. It seemed to
resonate fairly early when it came out, but there was so much
push-back back in ’07 when the first edition came out.

It is kind of cool that people are calling it a modern business
classic. I think what’s most cool for me though is the book is
out in 25 different languages.

Jay: Wow.

David: And we’ve sold a quarter of a million copies of the book in
English. It’s just an amazing number of people out there that
have the ideas.

Jay: And the fact that you wrote it as your fallback plan, right? It’s
such a genius story. It’s like Yakov Smirnoff, “What a country,”
right? It’s like, “I don’t have a job. I am going to write a
best-selling book.” That is truly fantastic.

David: You know what? I was fired three times in my career, and every
time that I was fired I ended up with something better. I don’t
want to wish being fired on anybody, but there is a lot to be
said for having somebody force you into thinking about what
you’re going to do next.

Jay: Good counsel. To think about it as you said, you’ve done three revisions of this book, and fewer than five years have elapsed.

David: Right.

Jay: The game has changed immeasurably, as I say all the time. Marketing has changed more in the last 5 years than in the 50 years preceding it, and there’s no question about that. It’s crazy, and some of these people who, including us, I wasn’t raised on a computer. All of a sudden, you’re like, ‘What happened? Where was the memo’? All of a sudden, everything that we thought was true isn’t true, and vice versa.

David: But the good thing is that you wrote the memo. You and I and people like us are the ones that are writing the memos. We’re the ones that are saying, ‘Here’s how you do this thing’.

To me, that’s really, really exciting. I kind of every once in a while say, ‘Wow, how did I end up here? This is kind of cool’. And thanks again to the people who decided they wanted to sack me way back when.

Jay: That’s right.

David: It’s interesting how quickly it moves. The first edition didn’t include Twitter because it literally didn’t exist. Facebook was only for students when I wrote the first edition. As soon as the book came out, Facebook opened up for people who were not students, who did not have an .edu email address. All of a sudden, the book is obsolete. It comes out, and the next day it’s obsolete. Then the second edition comes out, and all of a sudden things like foursquare and other GPS components that are used for mobile marketing, iPhone apps and stuff, all of a sudden they’re really important for marketing. My second edition hits the shelves, and I’m like, ‘Goddamnit, I’m missing that’.

And wouldn’t you know it, practically to the week that the third edition comes out, woo-hoo, we’re finally current. And guess what? Google+.

Jay: Exactly. Well, it’s hard because in comparison to blogging or things like that, the time horizon of book publishing is pretty tough. You have to give them a manuscript months, literally months, before the book appears, and months is a long time in our business. So it’s almost impossible.

David: Months is a long time. The book officially publishes this week, although it started to ship from Amazon and it was available on Kindle a couple of weeks ago. But Google+ was the first or second week of July or something like that. I forget exactly. Oh great, this wonderful Google+ thing the whole planet is talking about, and this new book that’s supposed to be the bible of online marketing doesn’t even include it.

Jay: You can’t win them all. That’s why you’ve got to have a fourth edition.

David: You know what? Now, it’s going to be every two years in August.

I’ve got a cycle, and the reason for August is really important. It’s because again, I’m dumbfounded that the book is used in literally hundreds, approaching 1,000 different universities around the world as a textbook, and they’re on the cycle. The U.S. academic cycle begins in early September, so having a new edition come out every other year for the academic cycle means it comes out in August. So I’m now on a regular cycle to have it come out every other August for the reason of that academic cycle.

Jay: That makes sense.

Because there’s always pressures to be in more places, do you feel like the new rules are easier to follow for big businesses or for small businesses?

David: That’s an interesting question. I actually think it’s easier for small, just because they have more willingness to implement them, and they have less people with the baggage of what “old marketing”. . . I shouldn’t say “old marketing.” I don’t want to imply that things that are offline are old, or things that are offline are wrong. They’re not. It’s totally cool to do television commercials if they work for you. It’s totally cool to have yellow page ads if they work for you. There’s nothing wrong with any of that. But if they’re not working, you shouldn’t have them. I’m not implying that it’s either/or.

I’ve found that small businesses, entrepreneurial organizations, start-ups generally have a heck of a lot easier time implementing the ideas because they carry less baggage than some of the bigger companies do.

Jay: What’s one of your favorite new stories that you included in this version?

David: In this version? One of my favorite stories these days is a story . . . it’s about real-time, too, because I’m a big fan of real-time. I had a book come out on that topic, Real-Time Marketing and PR.(affiliate) It’s a story about how Joe Payne, who is the CEO of

I’m delighted that the third edition is out. Probably as soon as this video comes out, it will be out. So we’ll make sure we link that up. It is The New Rules of Marketing & PR.(affiliate). If you think you’ve read it in the past, check out this new version. There’s a bunch of cool new stuff in there, good stories and a lot of updates on new tools and opportunities.

The man, the myth, the legend, David Meerman Scott joins us. Thanks so much for your time, as always.

The 3 Keys to Social Influence

Posted on 03. Aug, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, interviews, jay baer, Klout, personal branding, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

This is an interview I did with Klout for their Klout Stars series, where they ask “influencers” about their background in social media.

1. How did you get started in social media?

I was originally a political consultant, helping manage campaigns for Governor, U.S. Senate, and President. I moved out of that industry into digital marketing in 1994. Since then, I’ve owned several companies in the online marketing world, including an award-winning agency that I sold in 2005. In 2008, I started Convince & Convert to help corporations and other agencies strip away the hype and successfully integrate social media.

I love social because it’s the perfect combination of online marketing and retail politics. You’re trying to win hearts and minds one at a time, or a few at a time using stories and humanization, but you’re using digital techniques to do so, rather than salacious 30-second ads and cheesy direct mail.

I started my Convince & Convert blog to create a place that straddles the line between social media theory and social media execution, while always trying to show how social is an ingredient, not the whole entree. Same thing for The NOW Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter and More Social
the book I wrote with Amber Naslund. It’s not a book about doing social media, it’s a book about how companies can BE social.

2. What’s your strategy for the content you produce and share on social media?

My mom and stepdad were both high school teachers, as was my grandmother. Education (and tequila) runs through my veins. I see my role as that of a translator and coach, taking important social media principles and explaining them in a practical way to people who are very smart marketers and businesspeople, but not necessarily social media practitioners day-to-day. With my blog, my Twitter feed, my twice-weekly email newsletter, and other vehicles, I try to curate what matters and add a heavy dose of my own interpretation and advice.

3. What advice do you have for someone who wants to take their social media influence and presence to the next level?

Three things to remember:

First, it’s a paradox, but the more you “sell” the less you sell. You earn the right to promote in social, you can’t buy it. The difference between helping and selling is just two letters, but those letters mean everything. Find a way to genuinely help other people via social media, and it will come back to you five-fold eventually.

Second, realize that social media happens fast, but success is accrued very slowly. If you think you’re going to be able to get involved in social media and have massive influence in two months, you’re kidding yourself (unless you’re a celeb, in which case your influence just needs to be unlocked, preferably from aboard a yacht).

Third, there is NO shortcut. People invariably try to game the system, to increase their Klout score by doing this or doing that. I’m fortunate enough to have interacted with a lot of people who are (at least according to Klout score) considered influential in social media. And the only thing that is universal among them is that they worked extremely hard to make it happen. I firmly believe that just about anyone can make social media work for them, but you have to love it and you have to put in the time.