Consumers are more active on social media than ever before, and not surprisingly, many marketers are struggling to keep up. It seems that, with an ever-evolving sea of data and technology, marketers don’t know where to start. Marketers are told what they need to do, but no one’s telling them WHY these tactics are important or HOW to execute a campaign around them. The WHY is just as important as the WHAT and WHERE.

In order to dominate, we have to remember the basics of social media marketing and management. So let’s get back to the basics:
 

1. Optimize Campaign Performance

Most successful marketing campaigns running today have one thing in common: they include consumer touch- points that cross multiple channels. And in today’s consumer landscape, the one channel you cannot afford to ignore is social media.

• Build a social brand presence on Facebook by publishing Pages that facilitate consumer interaction and then ask for that interaction.
• Offer Facebook fans and Twitter followers a reason to engage via social channels and drive conversions with fan-gated promotions and coupons.

2. Grow Your Subscriber List with Facebook

Data collected via social media, combined with CRM and behavioral marketing data, has proven to increase overall campaign effectiveness. After all, the more you know about your consumers, the better you can deliver relevant, timely messages.

• If you want consumer data, you have got to ask for it. So start by promoting a branded lead form on Facebook that requests email addresses along with basic demographic information.

3. Engage Loyal Customers by Using the Timeline

In order for a brand to be successful on Facebook today, they must see engagement from their fans. While it does require more strategy and higher-quality content, it also provides a greater opportunity to engage with previously idle fans, turning them into customers and eventual brand advocates.

• Gather your most engaging content and draw attention to it by “starring” and “pinning” it to your Timeline. For your brand, this may include - Video footage, Commercials, Event promotions , and Special announcements
• Use Value-Add messaging to engage your customers. Ensure that they get the most out of their like and/or purchase. Publish tips and tricks that maximize the value of their engagement with your brand on social media and work toward nurturing a positive brand experience.
• Whatever content you decide to “pin” or “star,” make sure it’s capable of enhancing your Facebook presence. Your network of Facebook fans should find it interesting, relevant, and be eager to engage with you because of it.

4. Remember the Mathematics

We must get better at analyzing and using data to create personalized and relevant messaging for our future and current customers. This could be as simple as keeping track of names, addresses, and past purchases via a spreadsheet. It could also be as complex as managing millions of different data points. Only the data relevant will survive.

Remember, that the lifeblood of any company is measured on our ability to create happier customers. We are reaching the point in social media where we must become more responsible with data and measuring the ROI of every channel.

I was once fortunate enough to sit in a training session with Jake McKee, “The Community Guy.” We were talking about building brand communities, and he said something that stuck with me. I believe he was quoting Guy Kawasaki.

“If you last three years as a community manager, you’re good. If you last four years, you’re really good. And if you last five years, you’re crazy.”

I must be crazy, because I counted it up. I’ve been doing community or social media management of some sort, (albeit for a lot of different companies) for over five years.

The ironic twist in this career field is the very traits that make you a good community or social media manager (empathy, an ability to connect genuinely with people online) are the same ones that make the job incredibly hard on you. Some of this may seem like a rehash of my post on the Cathryn Sloane debacle last year. But it’s worth restating: the internet is rife with incivility.

There are five kinds of people who will turn up on your brand’s social profiles and community sites:

1. Brand fans and customers with something positive to say.
2. Unhappy customers or constituents with a legitimate gripe.
3. Unhappy customers or constituents who are misinformed.
4. Irrational or anarchic “crusaders on a mission” who can’t be swayed with facts or logic.
5. Trolls or “pot stirrers” who just enjoy inciting drama.

Of those five, the ones who start out with something positive to say are outnumbered 4:1. The reality is, only a certain proportion of groups 2 & 3 will be positive even if you can fix their problem or correct their misinformation.

Some people are only ostensibly there to get satisfaction about a real or perceived issue. They’re really only there because they need a punching bag to vent their global frustration with the rest of their lives, and your company’s flub makes you the perfect outlet for their generalized rage.

There’s a lot of anger out there, kiddos, and a “faceless” company is an easy place to direct it. It’s easy for people to forget there’s a human being behind that logo avatar.

Of course, when the human being behind that avatar has an Amy’s Baking Company style epic meltdown, their human emotions become painfully clear. How about we try not to let ourselves get to that point?

Taking Care of the Person Who Takes Care of the Community

Community managers have a lot in common with parents. You’re the one responsible for seeing to everyone else’s needs. Remember the old saying “When mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy?” If your brand’s community manager is stressed, anxious and exhausted, your brand’s community can quickly sour. Community managers tend to be people who put their needs behind the needs of the group. However, that kind of thinking can be counterproductive.

You can’t nurture your community and be a positive leader and resource if your eye is twitching from pent up defensive aggression after getting verbally battered by a crowd of pitchfork-wielding netizens for weeks.

Here are a few tips for taking care of yourself:

Get some rest.

Community managers tend to work long hours. Sometimes, we end up addressing social media crises that erupt in a different time zone. While sometimes you just have to power through, make sure getting enough sleep is the rule, not the exception. You don’t make good decisions when you’re tired, and your emotions can be heightened. If like me, you consistently have “can’t shut off my brain” syndrome, address it with your doctor.

Get some exercise.

Community and social media managers spend a lot of time staring at a screen. You of all people need the healthy, mood-enhancing endorphins that exercise, especially outdoors, can provide. I have a cheap kayak. When the trolls are really getting me down, I strap it to my truck and paddle around the local park. I almost always end up with a better perspective afterwards.

Know what helps and what doesn’t.

YMMV when it comes to dealing with work related stress. For some, a cocktail, a movie night or a few hours shooting aliens in Halo set you to rights. But the same things that, on occasion and in moderation help, can also become unhealthy habits that just increase your stress in the long run.

Have an outside passion.

It’s hard to believe I’d want to spend more time writing after producing content for work all week, but my fiction writing hobby is a great outlet to get my mind off unresolvable situations at work. I can resolve my fictional characters’ conflicts, even when my community has conflicts I don’t have the power to resolve. Having something you intensely enjoy and have more control over than other people can help you when you feel hopelessly frustrated with situations you can’t fix.

TURN IT OFF and LET IT GO.

It’s an always-on business, but you can’t take that phrase literally. Unless you’re willing to sacrifice your personal life, family and real world friendships. Set limits. Maintain “office hours,” “on call hours” and “not available” hours, if you value your sanity.  The community will irrationally demand your attention 24/7/365. They can’t have it. And when you’re under siege, keep reminding yourself that it’s not personal, it’s not about you, and it’s often not even really about your company or brand. 

Have your own personal community.

Sometimes, the haterz are gonna get you down. Sometimes, despite your best Stuart Smalley impression, the job will get to you. That’s when you need to turn to your personal community—family, friends, spouse, church, book club, those other people at the bar you frequent—to cheer you up. Odds are pretty good that if you’re a community manager, you’re a likable person. Sometimes the best antidote to strangers calling you an idiot is having the people who actually know you say what they like about you.

Community and social media management can be “the toughest job you’ll ever love.” Just make sure whether you intend to do the job for one year or a dozen, you make it out with your sanity intact.

Related articles

• Capitalizing on Crazy with Community Management
• Community Management: Not Just a Job, It’s an Investment
• Dark Side of Community Management
• Interview: What an Agency Looks for When Hiring Community Managers
• 9 Ways to Become a Better Facebook Community Manager

One of the advantages of having exposure to a large e-commerce company and the incredible talent within its walls is that you learn from some of the top minds in the industry. It was just a few months into my tenure at CafePress that I started to dive deep into learning from the team that runs one of the largest Internet retail operations in the world. And boy, have I learned.

A common theme you’ll find in the discussions among the top engineers, technicians and marketers of these types of sites is with their metrics and analytics. Everything revolves around traffic, action rates, conversion rates and the like. Dealing with these numbers on a regular basis inspired me to put some thoughts into a white paper to help any business person or marketer understand how this analytics-first approach can be applied to social marketing.

Yesterday, Social Media Explorer in partnership with Exact Target published The Mathematics of Social Marketing, a free white-paper available over at the ET website. In it, I explain how you can build smart marketing on Facebook, Twitter or any other social network, by working backwards from your financial goals and applying a little mathematics thinking to your marketing. I can assure you, it’s useful and worth the download.

The paper will help you understand the difference between action rate and conversion rate, how to account for each and how to put real financial metrics to your social marketing efforts. Give it a read and drop me some feedback. I’d love to hear how you either have or plan to apply the mathematics advice to your marketing.

Download the white paper here. Then tell me what you think in the comments. Here’s to happy math!

The thematic meme running through the social marketing world of late is that we’re about to move beyond social media marketing as a primary practice to thinking more broadly about our marketing and our business. Social is part of a greater whole and social-only thinking won’t get you very far for much longer.

Part of this is driven by the social consultants threatened by those of lesser breadth of experience. Part of it is the reality that the industry is maturing. Social is now part of marketing. Marketing is almost impossible today without social.

But will this assumption that social is just part of what we do turn social into something we forget about?

I can attest that immersing yourself in a vertical or business like, say, online retail, means you start thinking about driving sales, moving the needles on the top- or bottom-line and looking for partnerships and revenue streams and cost savings. You start looking at the resources you’re pouring into social and expecting an immediate financial return for those. Sometimes social is about more than (or other than) direct revenue.

You’ll start expecting an immediate financial return for social

For many businesses, that means they’ll either go through the motions of social without really, genuinely investing the time and energy or they’ll forego social altogether and take the safe, proven routes of search engine marketing, ad spend and other acquisition and sales strategies.

It is true that social needs to be a part of greater thinking about business and marketing if you want to have a mature, optimal approach to contributing to your business’s success. But in doing so, I worry that the “More, Now!” mentality of today’s business will dictate we just forget about being social in lieu of selling more stuff.

What do you think?

Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes all the way from the UK via our friend, Michael Truby, Outreach Executive for Oxford based SEO company SEOptimise.

As a marketer striving to make your mark in this competitive world, you’re probably constantly looking for solutions to help you devise the most innovative marketing program.  One that is also quick, has greater reach, and lowers cost would make great business sense too.  As such, using the web to reach customers has become central to modern marketing. Within this online world, email marketing and more recently social media are two tools that have emerged as ones wielding considerable power and influence over customers.

Channels available to the ecommerce marketer

The always-on nature of the Internet has created a number of new ways to reach potential customers with offers, deals and promotions designed to tempt them into making a purchase from you. The rise in smartphone adoption has also created a number of additional opportunities, ready to be exploited for creating more sales.

Email

The staple mode of advertising in the Internet age, email remains popular with both marketers and consumers. Research published by the IAB found that 66% of consumers actually like to receive email messages from brands.

The rise of the smartphone has given email marketing a new lease of life. A recent survey from Adobe found that 79% of people use their smartphone for email – incredible considering only 78% said they used their mobile for making calls!

Many smartphone owners admit to using email features on their phones to “pre-screen” messages, allowing them to focus on important mail when they get back to their PC. However if the recipient can be tempted into opening the message, the chances of actually making a purchase is also greater.

As such email is an essential and welcome component of any marketing campaign.

Social media

Social media has become an unstoppable force, providing another point of contact between brands and their customers. It has also become a great way to get customers to repeat your marketing messages for you. Each social channel has its own rules of etiquette and engagement which marketers need to bear in mind as they reach out to customers.

Facebook

With a reported 1 billion users, Facebook offers businesses a potentially enormous audience for brand messages. For the greatest returns however, marketers need to craft messages so that consumers “like” it enough to share with their own circles of influence. Brands are best using Facebook to promote new products and services because there is no way of accurately targeting deals based on specific customer preferences.

For the greatest success, brands need to exercise plenty of creativity to capture and keep the customer’s attention. One of the best examples of Facebook being used to engage followers like never before was Heineken’s “One like, one balloon” campaign.

The premise was simple; for every “like” that the official Brazilian Heineken brand page received, a green balloon would be inflated in the office. The Heineken staff would then post videos periodically showing their progress. Come the end of the day, the office was filled from floor to ceiling with balloons and Heineken had engaged 12,600 new Facebook followers. Once part of their “stream”, Facebook was able to push marketing messages to an increased follower base, spreading their message even further.

Over the course of the next 12 months, Heineken recorded a rise in Facebook fans from 1 million to 1.65 million, with a corresponding rise in brand awareness and a marked uptick in sales. The promise of something novel and entertaining may take some careful planning, but turning a like into something tangible is something any business can apply to their own Facebook campaigns.

Twitter

Popular with the 18-34 demographic, Twitter makes communication between people and brands instantaneous. However built on a broadcast-type basis, Twitter is also best for general announcements and link sharing designed to pique curiosity and encourage click throughs (just like an email in fact!).

Last year American Express unleashed the viral marketing potential of Twitter by creating a new loyalty scheme for their cardholders. In return for retweeting brand messages containing specific hashtags to their followers, cardholders were rewarded with couponless discounts which were applied automatically to their credit card. The customer benefited by receiving something, such as a free coffee at McDonalds, and American Express got some free coverage for their brand and offers.

Early this year American Express took things one step further by introducing hashtag purchasing for their registered users. By tweeting #BuyAmexGiftCard25 for instance, the cardholder can automatically purchase a $25 iTunes gift card and bill the purchase to their American Express credit card. Often these hashtag purchases are at reduced pricing, providing an added incentive for customers to continue promoting American Express. American Express benefits by encouraging customers to spend on their credit cards – on which their core business relies.

The key to the success of the American Express Twitter campaign is again down to turning an intangible, a tweet, into something of physical value – a free coffee or a purchase discount. Although American Express has enormous purchasing power, any business can, with some thought, create their own intangible-to-tangible promotions to encourage their customers to become brand advocates.

Pinterest

Seemingly out of nowhere, Pinterest has gathered over 25 million users since its official launch in 2010. Designed to focus purely on sharing visual elements, Pinterest lends itself to best to use by businesses with tangible products to promote. As with other social networks, the goal is to encourage users to see and share your content, acting as a hook by which others can be lured back to your ecommerce site in order to make a purchase. Pinterest also has a distinctly unbalanced user base, particularly in the US, with women making up the majority.

Although Pinterest has courted controversy for the ease with which users can share copyrighted materials, British airline BMI decided to use the platform to help promote their flights. Pinterest users were invited to select six photos from a collection of 45 supplied by BMI and “pin” them on their interest boards. At the end of each week, all of the users who had repinned the matching “winning” image were entered into a draw to win free flights. There were 3000 entries within the first two weeks of the competition.

The campaign was cheap and easy to set up, and helped BMI grow a following on Pinterest, and turn followers into advocates. The images were supplied by BMI leaving users nothing do but click their “Pin It” button, ensuring absolute simplicity and raising the chances of images being shared. The Pinterest Lottery concept can be applied by virtually any business with the assistance of a handful of high quality images.

There are of course other social media channels such as Tumblr and Google+ which may prove to be of interest depending on your business niche. The same rules apply to each however:

• Messages should be crafted for re-sharing by customers to their own networks
• Messages will be generic as personalisation in this broadcast medium is impossible
• Customers should be encouraged to interact with your brand via their chosen medium – answering product questions publicly will help raise awareness with other users too
• Adopt a softly softy approach and listen more than you broadcast to avoid turning customers off your message

SMS

Despite feeling decidedly outdated, text messaging remains extremely popular with people in the UK and is therefore a legitimate communications channel for marketers. The case of SMS spammers Christopher Niebel and Gary McNeish shows the power of text message marketing, making up to £7000 per day.

For legitimate businesses however, great care and attention is required to prevent SMS marketing from becoming unwelcome. Best practice would suggest that customers be asked to opt in to mobile marketing as it has the potential to be one of the most intrusive tools, turning a potential customer into a never-customer very quickly.

The Hilton hotels chain has implemented an SMS campaign in conjunction with Visa, rewarding customers for joining their loyalty program. When spending on their registered Visa card, customers receive up to 2 special offers each week in the form of a text message sent to their mobile handset. The more the customer spends, the more rewards they accumulate in their Hilton Honors account which can be converted into hotel stays and other goodies.

Again, the key to the success of the Hilton Honors scheme is the ease with which customers can receive and redeem offers. Although Hilton’s promotions cannot be shared or rebroadcast, customers are made to feel as though they belong to a privileged elite, encouraging them to spend – the overall goal of any promotion. The entire system has again been designed to be simple and effortless, increasing the chance of customer uptake – an essential consideration for any business looking to undertake a similar SMS marketing campaign.

Reduce friction for increased impulse buys

The array of communications tools available to marketers provides plenty of opportunities to tempt consumers into making impulse buys. The rise of the smartphone and the immediacy of connection afforded by the technology also means that there is less friction from message to purchase. Amazon is set to introduce “in app” purchasing across multiple platforms (Kindle, iOS and PC) in coming days.

“We’re passionate about making game developers successful, and we’ll continue to build services that make monetization easier and remove undifferentiated heavy lifting from developers,” Amazon Games director Mike Frazzini said of the development. Essentially they want to make it easier for customers to make a purchase.

The idea is to reduce the steps required for a customer to make a purchase, thereby reducing the number of opportunities for them to back out of the transaction. As people respond to marketing methods, regardless of the channel used, the follow-on process must be quick and simple to use for the best results.

Regardless of which messaging method you choose to adopt, the keys to increasing temptation for ecommerce customers are:

• Make offers relevant and compelling
• Use analytics to target specific customers with specific deals wherever possible
• Make the path to purchase as frictionless as possible to encourage impulse buys and prevent abandoned carts
• Adhere to the etiquette of your chosen medium at all times to ensure a continued good relationship with customers.

If you can get those in order, your ecommerce marketing efforts your customers should be tempted!

About the Author: Michael Truby is the father of one, a big football (soccer) fan & player and he is an outreach executive for UK based SEOptimise, specializing in email communications. His previous experience includes account management & customer-centric roles. Visit his website, follow him on Twitter or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is starting an important movement with her book Lean In and online community LeanIn.org The premise is that there is a vast inequality of women in senior positions in the workforce and she is committed to opening the conversation about why. In her Ted talk, Sandberg argues that “women are not making it to the top of any profession anywhere in the world.” In corporate, she mentions C-level jobs held by women are 15-16% and have remained flat since 2002.

Personally, I’ve always struggled with men vs. women debates on equality in the workplace. It always seems to turn into a he vs. she debate that I find to be counterproductive. However, the recent buzz around Sandberg’s book led me to listen to her Ted talk and I’ve since ordered the book. After review, I was presently surprised, but I think there was one critical missing element to her analysis. First, let’s take a look at her key points.

Sit at the Table

Sandberg argues that women aren’t taking their seat at the table. She tells the story of being at a pitch with a large investment group and watching the women sit around the edge of the room. It’s as if women wait for permission to take a chair around the table. Why is that? In another story, Sandberg tells the story of three college students, herself, a female friend, and a young gentleman who all finished an assignment for a class. Both women wished they had done more on the assignment after significant research and analysis, while the young man stated he got the highest grade in the class. She argues that, “women systematically underestimate their own abilities” which may be one factor in their level of achievement. She goes on to say that, “women do not negotiate for themselves in the workforce” citing that “only 7% of women negotiate their starting salary.” When women achieve success they “attribute success to external factors” while “men attribute it to themselves.” It’s relevant to pursue a discussion around why women attribute help from others as the reason for their success, while men readily take credit. This leaves room for the argument that women have a confidence problem. She rounds out the story with an anecdote about a speech she did at Facebook, where a woman told her afterwards that she needs to “keep her hand up”. Sheryl had agreed to take two questions from the audience; after the second question was asked, the woman put her hand down.  Sheryl went on to answer three more questions. Have you ever noticed that women are the first to put their hands down when taking questions after a speech at a conference? I hadn’t, but I’ll be paying attention next time.

There certainly could be a great discussion about women finally taking their seat at the table.

Make Your Partner a REAL Partner

It is important that we start sharing responsibility in the household equally

The other area Sandberg delves into is equality in the home. She cites a statistic that says, “if a woman and a man work full-time and have a child, the woman does 2x the housework and 3x the child care.” She talks about the benefits of splitting home responsibilities in a variety of areas, perhaps one of the most important being the impact on a healthy sex life and half the divorce rate. Male or female, we are leading busy lives. It is important that we start sharing responsibility in the household equally. Fortunately, my husband is more than an equal partner. In fact, he could likely argue that I’m not doing my 50% as we’ve been building our business. I’ve outsourced housecleaning, yard work and other items as we try to find balance, especially where we have to choose between more time with the children and household duties. We’ve chosen to spend that time with our kids, but we are in a position where we can make that choice. I remember the days when we couldn’t, and it felt like the list of household needs never ended. My stress level rises just thinking about it, so I can imagine the pressure women have when their partner isn’t a REAL partner in the household.

There is certainly room for discussion on how women and men can create an equal partnership at home, too.

Don’t Leave Before You Leave

Women should be putting their foot on the gas pedal of their careers up until the very last day before they leave a company

The last area Sandberg explores is how women plan too early and start making decisions before they need to be made. She talks about how we start planning for when we are going to leave a job far before it’s time to leave. Specific areas she mentions are planning for a pregnancy. Sandberg talks about how women start to “lean back” to make room for a new baby in their lives and possibly sacrifice promotions 2 to 3 years BEFORE they are even pregnant or in one story, before the woman even had a boyfriend. She argues that women should be putting their foot on the gas pedal of their careers up until the very last day before they leave a company. The minute we start “leaning back” we begin the process of sabotaging our future success. We could take that promotion we’ve been working hard to achieve and decide how we want to proceed at the point when we are actually going on maternity leave, not 2 years before.

It’s a valid point and one I’ve definitely seen in the workplace. This is certainly another area worth having a conversation about.

Sandberg states that this inequality is something that is unlikely to change in our generation, but it’s something we can hope to reverse for our children and grandchildren’s generation which is why the work she is doing with Lean In is so important.

Stop Stabbing Each Other in the Back

Success and likeability are strongly correlated for men and negatively correlated for women

There’s one area that Sandberg doesn’t mention that I think is even more important that all of the other three combined; women are their own worst enemies.

I’ve worked with a lot of women in my career. It would be tough to argue that I ever leaned back or didn’t take my seat at the table. I am a career woman and I’ve always stood up for myself in the workplace. In my opinion, I always attempted to handle myself with grace despite my tenacious drive to succeed. I never knowingly stepped on someone else’s success in order to achieve my own. I have always prided myself on viewing the success of others as a testament to my own achievement, rather than taking credit for others success. I owned my own success through the empowerment of others. I befriended people at all levels of the organization. I was the person who was invited to the executive happy hour and the “employee” happy hour. This is something I was immensely proud of. All of that is said, not toot my own horn, but really just to say, I wasn’t a head strong b*tch in the work place.

However, that didn’t stop me from experiencing the negativity from women around me. I watched as women talked behind each other’s backs, told lies about each other to senior management, and would go as far as to discredit each other for the sake of themselves in the eyes of management. It was disgusting. I saw women be catty, overly emotional, two-faced, and manipulative all to tear another woman down and sabotage her success. Women were unbearably jealous of the success of other women. Sandberg alludes to this when she says, “success and likeability are strongly correlated for men and negatively correlated for women.” There were a couple of times I saw similar actions from men in the workplace, but it was far more common amongst my female colleagues.

So I’d argue that before we blame society or men for holding women back, it’s time to take a tough look in the mirror. I’d argue that one of women’s worst enemies in corporate success is other women. If we want to have a meaningful discussion about something that is in our control and something that we CAN impact in our lifetime, let’s talk about letting go of the jealous rage and start supporting each other. Let’s make a conscious decision to be a cheerleader for other women, to stand up and be our greatest advocates, to make a difference TOGETHER, not in spite of one another.

Now that’s a conversation we can have NOW that will have an immediate impact. Let’s talk about the others and make progress for our future generations, but let’s do something that will make a difference today, at the same time.

What do you think? Do you find yourself succumbing to the factors Sandberg mentions? Have you experienced the dismantling wrath of another woman or group of women? What do you think is holding women back from C-level positions in the workplace? Leave a comment and let’s have a healthy conversation.

Related articles

• Meet the Woman Sheryl Sandberg Leans On (forbes.com)
• Sheryl Sandberg advances gender equality (stanforddaily.com)

Is it possible to monetize your blog, website or digital presence without advertising? Certainly it is, but only in certain contexts. Consultants or businesses can focus their energies on providing thought leadership and educational posts with the thought that interested parties will reach out to them to hire if and when they need the help. The organic content leads to search engine results which leads to traffic which leads to leads, and so on.

Put yourself in the shoes of the professional blogger or writer who doesn’t make ends meet with consulting or free-lance services for a moment, though. They almost have to depend on either online sales of what they write, often in the form of e-books and paid email subscriptions, or some sort of advertising as revenue. Affiliate advertising is enormously popular among this set and has proven a lucrative career for many online entrepreneurs.

But as audiences become desensitized to advertising, perhaps even antithetical to it, and the all-important conversion and click-through rates dwindle, what can individuals do to continue to drive revenue?

These are the questions we asked ourselves at CafePress a few months ago. (Disclosure – I’m an executive at CafePress. This post is about something we’ve launched. It’s cool, though. Keep reading.) Certainly, CafePress offers an opportunity for anyone to monetize their content — image or written — by placing it on any number of products. You can upload a picture you took of your family, a pet or sunset and turn it into a mouse pad, shower curtain, canvas wall art, wall clock and more. You can pull that funny Tweet you posted yesterday and make it a bumper sticker, poster or T-shirt, too.

So as we asked that question — how can we make it easier for people to monetize their content without just asking them to slap an affiliate ad on their blog — we landed on what we think might be a pretty neat idea: The PressIt Button.

The PressIt button allows you to apply a class to any image you have on your website and make any text on your blog or website active to be placed on CafePress products. When you set an image to be “Press-able” a little, green “PressIt” button appears in the upper corner of the image. You click it and a carosel of products with that image appears. Your audience can then buy something with the image if they so choose.

Photographers and graphic artists now have an easy way to productize their content!

But the button also appears when anyone visiting your website highlights any text on your site. The button appears in the upper corner of the highlight. If clicked, the carosel loads with products containing that word or phrase on them.

Here’s a little introductory video to show you what it looks like.

The WordPress plugin is available here. The JavaScript and other information can be found at the PressIt info page. We’d love for you to give it a try, of course.

But now back to the meat of the discussion: How can bloggers and non-profits and other companies monetize their online content in creative ways? Not everyone will want or need print-on-demand solutions to allow their content to be productized. But not everyone is a consultant or free-lancer either. How are you monetizing your online presence?

As always, the comments are yours.

Recently, the FTC released updated guidelines for disclosure in advertising. This 2013 update, titled “.com Disclosures,” supplements their 2009 Testimonials & Endorsement Report, which was one of the first explanations of the requirements for disclosure of endorsements, sponsorships and other payments from online endorsers, including bloggers.

The primary reason for the disclosure requirement is to assist readers and viewers in determining whether a blogger or endorser has a material connection to the brand about which they’ve produced content. It seems pretty obvious (to me, at least) why this is important to know.

The notion of disclosure in product promotion is certainly not new and not without controversy; you may not realize that the radio payola scandals continued from the 1950s through the early 2000s. The FTC has been scrutinizing, and fining, brands that do not police their endorsers for decades, and the latest guidelines are meant to bring endorsers, and the brands that hire them, up-to-speed for the social media era.

What’s New in Disclosure-land?

The most relevant part of the update for those of us working in social media is the idea that endorsements and disclosures must be made in all media, including short-form media such as Twitter. As Twitter has risen in popularity there’s been some question about how and how much disclosure was required when tweeting about sponsored posts or other types of paid content, and these guidelines make it clear – Twitter is not exempt.

But this is not a Twitter-only update; there’s much more to the new guidelines. They provide in-depth explanation on the FTC’s “Clear and Conspicuous Requirement” – and although this in and of itself is not new, as media has changed so much, there are new ways that endorsers need to protect themselves and their brands to provide clear and conspicuous disclosures.

Of particular relevance to us, the new guidelines explain the FTCs opinion on:

• Proximity: Even in a space-constrained ad or promotion, the disclosure must be physically closely related to the statement or endorsement. An endorsement in one tweet followed by disclosure in the second tweet is not enough.
• Prominence: Disclosures must be prominent, viewable on any device, and not buried within a web page. Fine print may not cut it, and prominence is even required on a mobile web page.
• Multimedia: Disclosure is required even for audio or video claims and endorsements, with in the same clear and conspicuous way as expected for written media (with proximity and prominence).

Importantly, the FTC has also made it clear that all disclosures must be in “Understandable Language” – which means that using a hashtag #spon or #spons may not be readily understandable to all viewers. The FTC suggests using “#Ad” “Ad:” or “Sponsored” in tweets to be ultra-clear that a tweet or link within a tweet includes compensated content.

Christopher Penn provides some very good Twitter-specific examples of appropriate disclosure on the Shift Communications blog.

What Do the New Disclosure Requirements Mean for Brands?

The FTC has always maintained that the burden is on brands to ensure that their endorsers (in this discussion, primarily bloggers and other online influencers) are in compliance with their guidelines for disclosure.

For years, savvy PR and digital firms have been suggesting language to influencers to include with their brand-sponsored or influenced content. The updated guidelines provide even more specifics for brands to share with influencers, including the “#Ad” or “Ad:” and “Sponsored” suggestions as well as how to disclose in multimedia. The guidelines also provide a number of very helpful examples, which brands can adapt for their own use when working with digital endorsers.

I would hope that the revised guidelines spur brands and their agencies to take a good look at their policies and processes with regards to influencer endorsements. Now is the time to revisit how your firm reviews and polices endorsers; if the FTC is going to make an example of anyone, it’s more likely to be the brand than the endorser. Monitoring for brand mentions is not the same as monitoring for disclosure, so be sure you know what you’re looking for.

The FTC, in one of their blog posts, gave us a handy mnemonic to help us remember what we need to do here. It’s M.M.M.:

• Mandate a disclosure policy that complies with the law;
• Make sure people who work for you or with you know what the rules are; and
• Monitor what they’re doing on your behalf.

And beyond influencer outreach, brands are also beholden to the endorsement guidelines for their websites, advertisements, and celebrity endorsements. Given how broad-reaching these requirements are, brands should probably review the guidelines with their legal counsel.

What Do the New Disclosure Requirements Mean for Bloggers?

Many bloggers have been providing very solid disclosures for years, especially on their blogs, but as I said above, there has been some question of what’s required in short-form media such as Twitter.

Starting now, bloggers should be labeling all tweets, Facebook updates, and sponsored Pinterest pins or Instagram photos, as well as videos and Vines, with the appropriate clear-language disclosure designation: at the minimum, Ad or Sponsored.

There’s no question that these requirements will change the nature of what influencers will tweet and post in short form and possibly long form as well, and quite frankly, I think that’s fine. In my opinion, there’s too much low-quality, unengaging branded content out there anyway, so if fear of these requirements causes a few bloggers and tweeters to drop away, all I can say is yay.

How to Do Disclosures

As I said, the FTC’s Guidelines document provides a number of examples on how to meet the new disclosures requirement, but it does leave many questions unanswered.

So let’s look at a few posts that define when disclosure is required. The “when” hasn’t really changed since the FTC’s original 2009 document – the new doc mainly updates the “how.”

• Dianne Jacob from Will Write for Food explains what kinds of financial arrangements require a disclosure. This is a great breakdown which will be useful to brands and bloggers alike.
• Jeff Hurt writes on the Engage365 blog about what speakers and conference bloggers (those who liveblog or cover live event content) must disclose.
• New Media Expo has a very comprehensive guide to the FTC guidelines, written while the new guidelines were in public review.
• Nyerr Parham, at my client Appinions, an influence marketing platform, writes about the new regulations and what brand influencers must disclose. [Author note: Did you see that? Disclosure within the sentence!]

Tools to Help With Disclosures

To my knowledge, only one company has stepped up to fill what seems to me a glaring hole in helping brands (and also endorsers) create and manage more effective disclosures. That company is CMP.LY; they’ve just relaunched their service with a very cool set of new features and functionality, some of which directly facilitate the Understandable Language requirement.

To see how CMP.LY works, check out my friend Steve Garfield’s recent Vine about a Cadillac ATS he was given to drive.

Note that Steve was not compensated for the test drive, nor was he expected to write about the car – so he did not include an “Ad” or “Sponsored” in his Vine/Tweet – but he did feel compelled to disclose the relationship, hence the use of “disclosur.es.” CMP.LY also has a number of other Plain Language URLs, including “ter.ms,” “leg.al,” “paid-po.st” and “affiliate-po.st” – all of which could be extremely helpful to both brands and bloggers.

CMP.LY is free to individuals – anyone can sign up and use their plain language URLs and disclosure links. Their services for brands and agencies are quite comprehensive; beyond influencer/endorser disclosure tools, they also offer legal review and compliance software for social media. Current CMP.LY clients include Jamba Juice, Nissan and Hain Celestial.

Regardless of how you implement it, now’s the time for all brands and bloggers to get a firm grasp on the FTC regulations. The implementation of these standards will be beneficial to all, and especially readers.

DISCLOSURE: I have no material relationship to any brand or person mentioned in this post except for Appinions, which is a client.

DISCLAIMER: I am not an attorney, nor do I play one on TV. The information provided herin is not legal advice and is only based on my own experiences as a marketer. None of the above should be considered a substitute for you consulting your own legal counsel who will guide you and your company (or blog) in how to manage disclosures and endorsements.

Image source: Flickr.com (jeffanddayna)

Facebook is rolling out its Threaded Comments for brand pages, and on the surface it seems to be a great tool for engagement.

However, not everything that is good for the one makes sense for the many.

A friend recently flagged me while watching the stream of Tweets coming from a conference, wondering if my eyebrow would do similar gymnastics. The rather innocuous advice being offered revolved around social media communications in a crisis:

“You need to engage the customers one on one, and answer each rumor or comment individually.”

That is not a verbatim, but it is close. It is also very close to driving your sanity – and your company – into the ground.

The word “crisis” has been abused in social media. Remember the Applebee’s “crisis?” It wasn’t much of a blip, even after Applebee’s did some ill-advised things. Remember that Motrin thing? Google it. Remember that one where the company said something dumb and someone got offended and the Consumerist post was linked by Mashable?

In the everyday world of social media, businesses ought to be friendly. If you’ve got the time and the bandwidth to greet your customers like the humans that you are, that’s fantastic. “Facebook is your Digital Lobby,” my friend David Griner would say.

But when you have a bona fide crisis — one that impacts your stock price, or halts trading altogether — one that dominates every headline in your sector or even the popular press — one that highlights a real disconnect between your actions and the promises you’ve made to your customers… you aren’t in the feelgood business.

Gamechanger Events Also Change the Rules

The value of social channels changes drastically in a crisis. Yes, you need a real-time and nimble forum for sharing your message. Yes, you need to maintain a constant push of information, because the moment you stay silent too long your detractors will fill the vacuum and set the agenda for you. But the real value of social channels in a crisis is in listening and intelligence.

When you detect that certain words are now trending along with mentions, or that some questions are suddenly showing up on your Wall, that is valuable information that needs to plug into your messaging strategy. When a rumor starts getting some wind behind it, you don’t attack the messengers! You take away the wind! Answering every single person is a nice gesture, but it is doomed to fail because you aren’t maximizing your time. Use that human resource to better purposes.

Which gets us back to Facebook…

Threads Fray With Loose Ends

The threaded comments are wonderful for one-to-one engagement. In a real crisis, they bog you down, and leave a lot of loose ends hanging. You’ve created the expectation that answers will come, and you won’t be in a position to deliver.

In a crisis, Flat comment streams may give you more bang for your buck. Facebook defaults to show the most recent 50 comments, which means that if your dip back into the line every 30 comments or so your response will be there and visible. The format forces you to be more general in your responses, which helps with focus on the big picture.

Do you want to toggle between the two? Not sure how that will work for your company, nor for the third-party tools you might be using.

New features are fine, and they are inevitable as social networks attempt to meet expectations and stave off future competitors. But just keep in mind that not every change works to your benefit, and unintended consequences abound.

I’m not a social media manager. So I offer my apologies in advance. In just a minute, you’re going to be thinking I could be quite a bit more sensitive. My wife probably wouldn’t disagree with you.

But hey, I’m sensitive about some things. I’ll unapologetically tell you that romantic comedy is my favorite movie genre. I would never balk at quiche (I might want some pepper sauce though) and I think George Michael is (was) great. These things count for something, no?

Now that you understand my softer side, I want you to hear me on this…

You social media managers sure whine a lot.

Now when I say “you,” understand of course, I don’t literally mean you. You read our stuff here at Social Media Explorer. You mean business. A weekly dose of Jason Falls and his bullshit-busting articles are right up your alley. Mrs. Kelly tends to call a spade a spade, too and you love her stuff.

You can handle the truth.

So when I say you social media managers are whiners, I’m talking about the ones that, er, well, whine a lot. And golly-gee, can they whine.

They whine in blog posts—not on their company’s websites, but online.  They whine on social media. But these are clever little whiners. The whining is disguised in posts about “unrealistic expectations” or “reasons executives don’t get social media” or “questions you shouldn’t ask.”

Those types of headlines suck me in. I expect to find some interesting revelations, but invariably what I find is whining. It’s often well crafted, or subtle, or creative, but it’s whining nonetheless.

Don’t tell me it ain’t so. I see it every day. Today, I went to one of the web’s leading social media sites and read two pieces of world-class whining in a row. Go ahead and challenge me on it and I’ll serve you a Denny’s Grand Slam plate of whining served with a piping hot cup of bitching and a  glass of fresh-squeezed moaning.

I present the finer whines.

(But also, some highly sensitive solutions.)

“People in the company think I screw around on Facebook all day.”

I hear you. I read it all the time. It’s a bummer. But you know what? If people think you screw around on Facebook all day, I suspect it’s because you screw around on Facebook all day.

Not true? Well then why not prove it? How about you draft up a nice little list of marketing objectives, ways your social media marketing efforts achieve them, and data that proves it? Then, march into the Chief Cynical Officer’s office and (1) show him how many people like his company and (2) what that translates into in business terms.

“Everyone expects me to get the company 10,000 Twitter followers.”

Crazy birds. This is just one example. These types of whines include: make our videos go viral; get more +’s; more downloads; more people subscribing to the blog; and a miscellaneous heap of achievements that strike me as having a whole lot to do with social media.

So excuse me, but do they have the wrong department? Should these types of media milestones be cast upon the custodial crew? Maybe they should be stuffed into the customer service suggestion box? As you can see, I’m kind of confused. But I think I have the answer.

Try this. Get more Twitter followers. Get more subscribers. Get more eyeballs on the videos and get more tweeps talking about your company’s content. Or get your resume together and go whine at another company.

“Very few people in the organization understand what I do.”

Hmm. Tough one. Social media does tend to remain mysterious to a lot of people. But I think I have a solution for this one too.

Tell them what you do. Publish something. Conduct internal training. Send email. Make an informative slideshow. Here’s a wild idea: create an online forum to help employees understand how awesome it can be to exchange ideas and engage online. Would this sort of thing be asking too much? I’m thinking these are fair requests to make of a communications professional.

“I’m not given the resources I need.”

What resources would that be? I hit up this website’s CEO, Nichole Kelly, for answers on this one. She said social media managers tend to ask for: online tools, social media ads, and better content.

These are resources indeed. The e-ticket to get them would appear to be human resources and financial resources—and maybe a little dollop of resourcefulness.

Okay, sure, it’s never easy to extract more money from the boss and it’s harder still when people who don’t appreciate what you do to begin with populate the offices above. But again, whining won’t cut it. You need to beef up your RFR (that’s my new abbreviation for “request for resources”) with compelling arguments and evidence.

More specifically, speaking to the trio of things on the social media manager’s wish list….

We need to (but don’t) invest in the serious tools we need.

Getting a budget, or a bigger budget, for anything is an exercise in presenting potential (and attractive) ROI. So there’s your charter.

Do not lead with “Facebook this” and “Twitter that” or anything that conjures images of kittens and casseroles to social media naysayers. Lead with core business goals. Follow with clear strategies for achieving them. Connect the dots to the tools that will accelerate your success.

We should (but don’t) invest in ads on social media sites.

If the boss already thinks you’re wasting time on social media, you can imagine how quickly you’ll be shown the door when you come looking for money too. You better damn well come prepared with a plan.

What’s the objective? How will it be measured? Why is “said” advertising a fit for achieving objectives X, Y, and Z? Why will the company be increasing (not decreasing or deep-sixing) its online ad budget in the months to come?

Our content isn’t strong enough.

Ain’t it the truth? But WHO cares? If the boss stands between you and the money vault, you better make sure the boss cares.

You may have to go back to content marketing square one and build a case for the strategy at large. The exercise that follows should include a strong case for why quality trumps quantity. Along the way, you’ll want to acknowledge the power of SEO, but explain why engagement matters more.

Finally, when it comes time to finance the hiring of the writing, design and production talent you need, I suggest having some undeniably awesome real-world case studies in your back pocket. You might paint very clear pictures of two competitors—one kicking ass and taking names—and one playing the ever-present copycat game that amounts to wasted time and space.

So there you have it: the flavors of whining I come across most often. I know, I know. It’s tough. Not everyone gets this social media stuff.  Whatcha’ gonna’ do?

I propose you resist any temptation to get defensive and play offense like an ass-kicking social media all-star.

Business is having a love affair with big data. In the last few months it seems that every conference and webinar I come across has “big data” on the agenda.

Big data is the allure of more. More information. More access to behavior. Opportunities for more sophisticated analysis.  The thinking goes likes this: If we know every move people make then we not only know everything,  but we can predict everything.  As business people we love it because the information is finite, scalable and measurable.

It’s ironic that big data has such an allure in an age when some of the most important information happening online is coming out of conversations. And the way to analyze online conversations is to read them, participate in them and try to understand them without a formula.

Conversations are not data. Anyone who has ever tried to analyze them through sentiment analysis knows this.  If you ever watched Star Trek, you can imagine clearly that even an advanced, science fiction character like Data, misunderstood human conversation.

Computers don’t understand context, sarcasm, emotion and tone.  They are likely to misunderstand a line like “I just love the way (insert brand name) waits 3 days before answering my email.”  Formulas also can’t see subtle patterns and long term trends in the ways people respond to certain topics.

The fascination with big data is allowing marketers–particularly the bigger brands—to set aside the need to listen to and participate in conversations.  They grapple with the concept of making meaning out of conversations since you can’t plug them into an algorithm and come out with useful guidance.

There is only one effective way to understand conversations, which are the most human form of information, and that is to listen to them and use a human thought process to analyze them. This may be blasphemy to the quants, but the human mind can intuit things that a computer can’t.  There are some things that you just can’t take a measuring stick to.

Understanding conversations means you have to read Facebook comments and blog comments, often responding and then gauging the response.

Here are the objections I’ve heard from big brands:   It doesn’t scale.  We don’t have time for that.

The problem with this excuse is that you can’t really leave your Facebook page or blog on auto pilot.  Someone trained and talented at qualitative analysis should be reading those conversations and hopefully responding when necessary and deleting spam.  Nothing says “I’m not listening” like Facebook and blog comments filled with spam.  The person reading those comments should be sharing what she learns weekly.  Sometimes the learning comes from the content of the messages and sometimes it comes from recognizing that historically, certain types of posts get more comments than others. You’ll only understand why because you’ve read them.

The curious mind of a great community manager will ask herself questions to try to understand the conversation. How was the post worded to elicit the responses we received? How rich in content are the comments for different types of questions? What types of posts give us the best information about our readers?

One thing is true–understanding content on this level doesn’t “scale.”  You have to put more time into it and use people that have the qualitative analytical skills to understand what’s happening. What doesn’t ring true is that there isn’t enough time or money.  That statement reveals that it isn’t given importance and is too complicated or “fuzzy” to make an effort to understand.

If you don’t put the effort to understanding conversations, there is nothing genuine about them.  Not  only do you learn more by reading and responding, but when people know you’re listening, they share more.

On the Lion Brand Facebook page we delete spam comments and respond when its clear that our community needs information that isn’t available from others in the community.

What we learn by being part of the conversation

• The “why”

Why people do or do not like a pattern or product we shared. This helps us with product development.  People aren’t robots and beyond hitting the “like” button, they’ll tell you why they like or do not like your offerings. This information is not the same as the information you get from doing surveys. It’s organic and self motivated.

• Sleeper ideas

We offer yarn, related products, and patterns to use them with. Every once in a while someone will suggest something different than what we are offering and when the community starts raising their hands and indicating that they’ve heard a great idea (not from us) we take notice.

• Content ideas.

The topics people bring up naturally, in response to our posts help us know what associations they have with subjects we bring up. After running a comic about knitting needles used as weapons, we discovered that people had been stopped from bringing their needles into courtrooms.  This gave us an idea for a post about when and where people are stopped from doing their hobby—a very emotional topic.

• Knowing our customer

You understand your customer on a whole different level when you are in conversation with them and care enough to learn to communicate better with them.  We learned what topics turn our customers off (politics!), where they are uncomfortable with technology so we can respect their concerns by providing more information about how to access content, which venues are appropriate for edgier content and which will get you in trouble; the fact that we have really different kinds of people on different social platforms and how to speak to them in their own language.

• Sometimes it’s not about numbers

We recently learned something from listening to our community that surprised us. We didn’t hear it from a lot of people but the fact that it came up a few times and the intensity with which it was said told us that we had to do something about a wrong impression people had.  We intuited that it could be more widespread than we were hearing about.  It’s the kind of information that I can’t share publicly but we do know just what to do about it and we would never have figured it out had we not paid attention to a few voices without counting the “ocurrences” of a word.

That’s the kind of information you’ll hear if you realize that humans do not communicate only in ways that can be analyzed by a machine.

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