Author Archive

  • Mar 08
  • 19

Use Social Media Marketing or Perish

You have two choices:

  1. Begin utilizing social media as part of your overall marketing strategy.
  2. Don’t use social media and watch angrily while your competitors put you out of business.

Which do you chose?

47-social1-031708 We at Pandemic Labs have been preaching this evangel since the formation of the company. Don’t worry, we are not nearly so arrogant as to think that we were lone crusaders for the cause. Greater thinkers than us such as Seth Godin and David Meerman Scott have been on the bandwagon since before there was a bandwagon. However, I truly believe that right now we are in the midst of a shift in marketing dollars on a tectonic scale. This belief is not just entrepreneurial optimism; the signs are all around us. I can see proof of the change right in my own office as new clients are coming faster than ever before. And then I saw an AdAge article by Beth Snyder Bulik which further signals what I have been thinking all this time.

I’ll begin by quoting a great bit of the article which mirrors my own sentiments so much that I smiled while reading:

However, for marketers, it’s a better idea to first do the back-end work of research to decide what they want to accomplish, what they want to say and how they’ll say it. You’ll also need to either appoint or hire someone to write and monitor the blog posts and responses. Nothing is worse than a half-assed blog with infrequent updates and little customer relevance or connecting.

I could not agree more. I expressed the same sentiments in an interview for Knowledge@Wharton:

“People come to us saying, ‘I hear viral video is cool. How do we do it?’ That’s funny, because if a company wanted to do a TV campaign, they wouldn’t walk into [advertising agency] Ogilvy and say, ‘TV is cool. How do we do it?’” The first question companies should ask themselves, says Peters, is, “‘What do I want to accomplish from this form of marketing?“

I do have one major disagreement with the article. Towards the end of the article Bulik says, “Social media is not, as yet, a great ad network, and it probably isn’t a great long-term traffic generator or brand builder.” I don’t think this is an accurate statement. While it is true that social media is not an “ad network,” I think it is certainly a long term traffic generator and most definitely a great brand builder.

In its various incarnations, social media is one of the most powerful ways to begin dialogues with consumers. Those conversations are absolutely building your brand. As we move forward, it will become clear that those brands which converse with and engage consumers will leave other brands in the dust. How can one claim that social media is not a brand builder? Even if Bulik were to believe that social media is not currently a “long-term traffic generator or brand builder,” her phrasing unfairly discounts the future potential of social media as it continues to evolve.

Overall, though, it’s a great article and I am happy to see it in AdAge. What are your thoughts on the reported growth of the industry? Let me know in the comments.

2 Comments
  • Mar 08
  • 18

Captivate Your Consumers

image credit: notsogoodphotography

When was the last time you were truly captivated? What was it that captivated you? Was it a performance? A charismatic speaker? A person’s eyes? A piece of music? There are many things it could have been, but I bet I can tell you what it wasn’t: a piece of marketing.

Let’s face it, marketing and advertising efforts aren’t usually the kind of things that capture your attention. Indeed, I cannot think of any recent marketing element in any medium that has held my attention hostage to the extent of the beautiful eyes in the picture above.

At this point, some older, traditional marketers are snickering at me. Too many in the outmoded marketing aristocracy think “captivate” is a nonsense word. “Captivate is a like Innovate,” they say, “easy to toss into your tagline or mission statement, but nearly impossible to truly achieve.” While I don’t agree that it is impossible, I concede that truly captivating your target consumers is difficult.

But that’s a lousy reason not to try.

So let’s try! Let’s look at some ways we can not only engage consumers, but how we can captivate them.

Engage Their Emotions

This is the element at which I fail most often. I fall into a trap which many often do: I engage my own emotions and expect that it will result in the same for my target consumers. If you’re a novelist this Image Credit: *MarSworks out OK because you can always fall back on “I don’t give a damn what others think, I write only for myself!” Alas, it might be just the opposite for marketers.

To better appeal to consumers’ emotions, it helps to remember one thing: emotions are not logical. I am incredibly moved by Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, but my reaction has nothing to do with the mathematical precision of its counterpoint. In fact, my music-major business partner once began to explain some of the theory to me, and I realized I didn’t care….I didn’t want to know. Similarly, I feel an emotional response when I see an Aston-Martin Vanquish, but it has absolutely nothing to do with what’s under the hood or the fact that it is an utterly impractical car for New England winters.

In final illustration of this first point I present an example from my own recent experience. Last week I wrote a five-page proposal for launching a client’s new company blog. I covered everything, showing not only what we could do, but how we would do it. Upon reading the proposal, the client called me and said, “I just read the first paragraph of the thing you sent me and I’m sold. What the hell is all the rest of this crap?” Not only didn’t he read the details, he didn’t want to read them. For him it was all about my first paragraph, a high-level, impassioned preamble that answered not the how/what/where/when, but the why. It captivated him, his attention held such that he didn’t even need to keep reading. He wanted to move right to the services. The details (which engaged me) were worthless.

Use Multimedia:

I laugh when I hear the term multimedia because it reminds me of the 1998 Encarta Encyclopedia CD that announced proudly it was a multimedia encyclopedia. Multimedia is now taken for granted…it’s just the way things are. But I’m surprised how many marketers are not using or misusing audio, video, and images in their efforts.

image credit: Dan ZenA picture may be worth a thousand words, but the right picture is priceless. Great visuals have been a staple of advertising for decades and using imagery is one of the easiest and most touted methods for captivating consumers online. Pictures often evoke an emotional response more directly than a paragraph of text. Imagery removes the burden of processing a long string of alphanumeric characters, leaving the consumer’s brain free to feel. Please note that I am not claiming imagery evokes a better emotional reaction than text, simply that it evokes a quicker reaction. And in the age of ten second attention spans, quicker sometimes means better.

Video is another way to appeal to the powerful emotional responses of your consumers and hold their attention. I daresay that if you believe in the power of pictures then the power of video is self-evident. The “moving picture” has been the dominant form of advertising for decades and that’s not an accident. Video engages…it captivates. Enriching your site, your blog, your news release with video hits your consumers with a 1-2 punch; the video captures their attention and your copy answers the details they might need to finally decide to buy.

Last, but certainly not least, is the power of audio. If you’re not sold on the power of sound then go rent “The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers” and try to watch the Helm’s Deep sequence with the sound muted. It’s nigh unwatchable. Why? Because sound is the foundation from which the tower of human emotion rises. Sound conveys inflection, timing, harmony, melody, and activates a wholly different area of the brain than the text and imagery perceived through the eyes. Even the simple act of putting blog posts into podcast form can be powerful. The narration of your podcast will allow you to convey emotional elements of your text to listeners in a captivating way, often enabling you to hold their attention for longer periods of time.

Be a Human:

It is difficult to establish a rapport with a faceless corporate monolith. I, for one, would much rather speak to a person than a logo. I doubt that I’m alone in this.image credit: TheArtfulBadger Blogging and marketing gurus spend a lot of time talking about developing your “voice.” At it’s most basic level, your “voice” is the digital representation of your personality. Notice the important root of “personality:” person. It is difficult for a company or brand to have a personality with which people can engage.

The transmission of a person’s personality into the digital space is not easy, and there are few things that make it harder than writing by committee. Perhaps your shiny new company blog is still viewed as an experiment by the fundamentalists in charge of your company’s marketing department. As such, the task of writing the weekly blog entry falls to some junior staffer fresh out of college. Although the higher-ups won’t deign to write the blog posts, they are still unwilling to publish a post without running it through the editorial wringer which is so often the bloody battlefield from which press releases and corporate statements emerge mutilated and impotent. By the time the post is published it lacks any semblance of an individual voice and falls flat with any consumers who happen to read it.

Don’t fear the voices of the people who write your company blog. You’ve presumably hired these people because they are smart. Let them out of the box. Let them connect with consumers and maybe–just maybe–you’ll find yourself the proud recipient of a captive audience that genuinely respects the honesty of your online ambassadors. People are smart enough to realize that Microsoft cannot have a conversation with them, but people within Microsoft certainly can.

I am reminded of a anecdote related to me by Larry Weber. His daughter came downstairs one day, laughing. Larry asked her what was wrong. Barely containing her giggles she said, “Coke wants to be my friend.” To her, and millions of others like her, the idea that Coke wanted to be her friend on Facebook was absurd. Her friends are people, her friends can go to the movies with her. A brand does not fit any definition of the word and she knew it instinctually. Be human or be laughed at.

Conclusion:

There are undoubtedly many other ways to captivate your consumers, but this post is getting long and the flight I’m on is about over. I suppose the value of this post is found not so much in a rigid adherence to the three methods, but in an increased receptivity to new marketing ideas. Every company is different, and no two brands alike. As such, the exact method of your new marketing endeavors can take many shapes. What’s important is to realize that the internet presents everyone–startups and Fortune 500s alike–an unprecedented avenue through which to converse with consumers. Captivate them. Engage them. Or lose them.

5 Comments
  • Mar 08
  • 7

The Paradox of Self-Promotion: Part II

Paradox-Vertical

On February 19th I posted an article called “The Paradox of Self-Promotion with Social Media.” I was honored by the success of the article. The post made the front page of Digg, became popular on Mixx, and sat atop a couple of keyword lists on StumbleUpon. This attention was valuable not just because of the traffic driven to this blog but because of the conversations which resulted.

I have spoken with many people via email and social sites about the paradox of self-promotion. Agreements were offered, disagreements put forth, and from these discussions I realized that the original article is not actually complete. Or perhaps it is complete, but engenders another question. That question is:

“When do I stop promoting myself?”

This question is just as important as any of the questions tackled in the original post. In the first post I argued that self-promotion in the social media world is not only possible, but necessary in the early stages of your blog/video/website. But what did I mean by “early stages?” At what point are your done with the early stages? Unfortunately, there is not sign post along the road to give you an incontrovertible landmark by which to travel. To know where you are in your journey, you are going to have to experiment a little. These experiments are not hard, they just require some willpower on your part.

But why bother to experiment, why not just keep promoting all of your own stuff? This is also a valid question. The answer is two-fold. First, self-promotion can be time consuming. The labor might not break your back, but think of all the time you could save if your readers and fans had assumed the mantle of promotion for you. Second, if you continue to rigorously submit all of your own content to sites like Stumble, Digg, Reddit, and Sphinn then you lose the possibility that a more powerful user will submit your content. Think about it, MrBabyMan might have submitted your awesome new video to Digg and that would have counted for a lot in both viewers and chance of reaching the front page, but if he were the second to digg it after you, you would have lost all that potential.

So when do you stop promoting yourself? When do you perform this little test? Right now. If you are anything other than brand-spankin’-new, then take a chance and don’t promote you next post/video at all. You won’t know if anyone likes you enough to submit you to social sites if you don’t give them a chance. I see so many people submitting their own content to every site right after they publish it. I too have been guilty of this. So take your next post, suck it up, be willing to forego the 100 stumble visitors that you would have gotten, and see what happens. If the experiment fails miserably and after 3-4 days nobody submits your content anywhere, then you know you have more work to do. Go back to your content creation, work on building subscribers and fans, and go back to helping yourself along by promoting yourself. But don’t forget to take a chance once a month and see where you stand. You never know, next month you might have twice as many subscribers and realize that TheNanny612, Zaibatsu, and DoshDosh all think your stuff is great. You wont know if you don’t stop for a second and take a look.

2 Comments
  • Feb 08
  • 28

What Viral Marketing is NOT

We work very hard with our clients to determine not only if viral marketing is the right social media strategy for them, but also to determine which form their viral marketing campaign should take. The internet is fluid and there are various forms of media within it with the potential for viral spread. In speaking with a client the other day about ideas for a new campaign, it occurred to me that in some ways it is easier to describe what viral marketing is not rather than what it is. Indeed, people like neat orderly lists that clearly—albeit incorrectly—assign boundaries to otherwise amorphous concepts. Perhaps in the near future I will write a nice neat list of the many ways one could implement viral marketing, but right now I am more interested in discussing how not to do it. Certainly, knowing what a thing is not will help us to know more clearly what it is.

Viral Marketing Is Not:

 

  1. Butterfly Marketing: I was aghast when, reading through some marketing forums, I found a user claiming that the only “real” form of viral marketing was butterfly marketing as presented by Mike Filsaime. What’s worse, there were other users agreeing. I vehemently disagree with this statement. I don’t know how Butterfly Marketing works, but I can tell you for sure that there are numerous examples of successful viral marketing campaigns for companies like BMW, Trojan, Office Depot, and Coke that have absolutely nothing to do with a $1,497 program that can earn you “$60,341 in 7 days.” Butterfly marketing is not viral marketing. I am not sure I even want to dignify this scam with further comments.

  1. Repurposing Content: Creating a TV commercial and then putting it on YouTube when it has finished its run is not viral marketing. One of the biggest causes of failure in early viral marketing campaigns was the belief that a funny commercial would automatically viral around the internet. This is clearly not the case. There is now research and data showing the differences of viewing habits online when compared to TV. Marketing content that was originally created for success on television rarely meets with such success online. Coincidently, successful online content would likely fail miserably on television. In marketing, successful viral media must be created with the internet in mind just as successful TV commercials must be created with television in mind.

  1. Bribing Consumers: I fully expect to meet with some resistance on this point and I suppose I will just have to learn to live with the knowledge that some people don’t agree with me. The source of disagreement on this point stems primarily from the fact that I am not claiming this method is “not viral marketing,” but that it is “not the right kind of viral marketing.” Offering existing customers incentives to get their friends to sign up may, in fact, encourage person-to-person to spread. But, I maintain that this practice results in a sort of “one-off” viralness, sacrificing quality of engagement for quantity of new customers gained. For instance, a user of PartyPoker.com may take advantage of the $20 he gets for every one of his friends he convinces to join, but this method appeals to him only financially. I worry that a company-customer relationship built solely on mutual financial gain is fleeting and inherently weaker than a relationship built on trust, loyalty, and engagement. Again, I stress that this is a legitimate marketing tactic which can achieve results. I warn only against the belief that it is the only form of viral marketing that works.

  1. Adding Share Buttons: On this blog, we use the ShareThis plugin to allow readers to more easily share our content on their favorite social sites. There are other ways to do the same thing: FeedFlare, Sociable, or just adding the site-provided buttons of your favorite places. Creating ease of shareability is crucial to the viral spread of many pieces of online media. That being said, putting share buttons on traditional sales documents or web pages will not make them viral…in fact, it will not even help. Yesterday I found the website of a social media optimization company which will here remain nameless. That company had sociable-style buttons for Digg, Stumble, Del.icio.us and a few others on every page of their site. Their “About Us” page was two paragraphs of dense copy that read like a web 1.0 sales brochure and sung the praises of the company in every possible way. But wait! What’s that? Oh, I have the chance to share this page with my friends on Digg…great! It was even possible for me to Stumble their contact page. This is absurd. People share content and it is unlikely that your corporate history page is worthy of sharing in the way that DoshDosh’s new blog post is. Furthermore, in the case of services like Digg, the button is virtually useless after 24 hours following the first Digg. Once that mark is passed you won’t get on the front page and you are not going to get any real traffic from Digg. I have seen similar instances of adding share buttons to things are just not going to be shared. Sure, Stumble might send each of your pages some traffic, but you could achieve that without placing a Stumble button right there on top of each one. There is a lot of great content out there so “shareable” content often needs to be written with that goal in mind. Adding buttons to things willy-nilly will not make them viral.

This is clearly not a comprehensive list of all the things which are not viral marketing. Who knows, there might even be some people who disagree with me and think that putting a Digg button on your site is all you need to market virally. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I think this list almost requires a companion list of some examples of what viral marketing is. I will tackle this next week and hopefully we can start a discussion of the forms of viral marketing and share some more examples of things which are labeled “viral marketing” but really aren’t.

 

 

7 Comments
  • Feb 08
  • 27

Musings of a Digg Power-User

One of the top users on Digg is supernova17. An amazing 49% of all stories he has submitted have made it to the front page. Below is an interview with supernova17 about what’s going on at Digg and what he sees in the coming months for Digg and the world of social media. This is the first in a series of interviews which PandemicBlog will be conducting with movers and shakers in the worlds of social media and marketing.

supernova17

How long have you been a Digg user?

I’ve been a member of Digg for over three years. I first registered back on February 2nd, 2005.

Are there other social sites that you are active on?

I have user accounts on probably all major social media sites out there. However I try to focus all my time and energy on Digg. I’ve been trying to be more active on StumbleUpon more recently.

If Digg is your favorite, why is that so?

I first heard about Digg when Kevin Rose was presenting a segment about the site on TechTV back in fall of 2004. I loved the idea of user generated content and lurked on the site for a few months before registering, so you can say that I’ve been following it since day one. I think the reason why I keep coming back to Digg is the uniqueness of the content. Also, over last few years I became friends with a lot of users on the site and I still talk to most of them almost daily. I know what kind of story submissions to expect from each one of them.

Seth Godin says that Digg has no “real-world” equivalent. It is a completely new thing. Do you agree with this? If you do, what needs and desires do you think this “new thing” has filled in people?

I think he hit the nail on the head. Digg was probably the first site of its kind. Digg is kind of like your own little New York Times edition that you can pick up and read on the subway; the difference here that the ordinary people like you and me find and promote content to front page. In traditional “old school” media outlets, you have half a dozen people who get to pick what will be read and seen by readers or viewers. On Digg, it’s impossible for a couple of people to pick what gets on front page each day. If everyone thinks that it’s something cool or interesting, only then will it reach homepage for all to see and enjoy.

What are the most profound changes that have seen taking place on Digg within the last 12 months?

There are two major things that changed the way Digg functions today. I think it’s no longer a site where geeks or nerds came to read technology related news. Over the last year or so they have been adding all sorts of new categories like politics and entertainment. Politics is the second most popular category on Digg. At any given moment during the day you will probably see two or three political stories on the front page. Another big change that took place just recently was the complete overhaul of the promotion algorithm. The staff wanted to give more power to newer users because the so-called “super” users were controlling almost fifty percent of all front page content according to some sources.

What would you say is your biggest issue with Digg? What do you want to see changed?

The biggest issue today is the new promotion algorithm. The change resulted in stale content on the front page. Digg originally wanted to give more power to the regular members and encourage new users to submit stories. However, the change backfired and now it takes up to 100 diggs to reach homepage. This change made it harder for regular active users to promote their stories. I think Digg should trust the old time users who are known to provide good content and not make them have almost 200 votes on each story just to hit front page.

What could happen that would make you stop using Digg?

I think I would stop submitting stories if the site ends up being bought by a huge media company. The new owner will most likely try to implement its own content into Digg and that goes against the site’s core idea of random user-generated stories.

In your time on Digg, have you seen an increase in the number overt marketing attempts?

The number of people visiting Digg each day grows bigger and bigger every single day. Marketers and SEOs want to capitalize on that huge free traffic. It only takes just a few clicks to reach homepage if your story is interesting enough. It’s just a matter of how you present it to the members.

How do you think the Digg community feels about marketing attempts on Digg? Why do they feel that way?

You will never see stories about marketing or making money with blogs on Digg. I think the users look down upon those who try to promote such things. They want to see general news, humor, pictures and videos instead of guides on how to monetize your site.

What are the mistakes that you see people making when they are trying to market or promote something using Digg?

If you want to promote or market something on Digg, don’t do it the obvious way. Try to present useful information in the post related to your content. For example Top 10 lists or top reasons about a particular thing always get more votes.

What do you think the next 12 months hold for Digg?

It will be interesting to see how the 2008 Presidential elections will be perceived on Digg. The politics section will never overtake technology, but it will come pretty close. Also, I’m eager to see how the site will deal with the huge number of users. These days you have to check at least 10 or so pages in the upcoming section to find good stories.

What do you think the next 12 months holds for social news and media?

Social media will continue to grow, more and more websites are implementing “Digg this” or “Stumble” buttons. New York Times online technology section now has a similar engine that promotes stories based on user votes. I think more major news websites will follow this trend of giving little more power to the users.

______________________________

We’d like to thank supernova17 for agreeing to this interview and sharing his unique knowledge of Digg. Keep an eye out for future interviews from the social media world.

4 Comments
  • Feb 08
  • 22

The Rise of Social Media Marketing

DinosaurI’ll be honest, it has been a while since I studied dinosaurs. But if memory serves, they pretty much ruled the world for about 160 million years. Seriously, for a good long time it was not that great being a mammal. Then, about 65 million years ago, something happened and almost all dinosaurs and a boatload of other animals became extinct. This event is referred to as the “Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event.” (At this point you can either be impressed with my paleontological knowledge or realize that I just looked up the term on Wikipedia.)

Theories differ as to what caused the event, but it’s clear that one really good thing came out of it: us. When all the big things died, it gave all the little things a much needed chance to get a foothold and start their own journey towards world domination. So what does this have to do with social media marketing? Everything.

The forms of “new media” and “new media marketing” with which this blog concerns itself are still exactly that: new. The vast majority of marketing and advertising dollars is still spent on mainstream, mass-media marketing. Even online marketing spending is still heavily weighted towards pay-per click, in-stream, and other traditional marketing methods shoved carelessly onto the digital world. “New media marketing,” is a small mammal in a world still run by dinosaurs. But that’s changing. We can see it happening all around us, and the topic has been discussed on this blog and others before. I write today specifically because I found two separate reports which, while not the harbinger of the traditional marketing apocalypse, certainly signal a shift in power that is already taking place.

Let’s begin with traditional off-line advertising:

In the results of an Association of National Advertisers and Forrester Research study released today:

  • 62% of marketers say traditional television advertising has become less effective in the past two years.
  • More than 50% of advertisers said that when half of all TV households use DVRs, they will cut spending on TV advertising by 12%.
  • 87% of respondents said they intend to spend more ad dollars on the Internet this year.

These stats are amazing. Over 60% of marketers are now admitting what we have all been feeling for some time: TV commercials just aren’t working like they used to. If half the advertisers say they will cut TV ad spending by 12% when DVR penetration reaches half of all households, then that’s somewhere upwards of 4 billion advertising dollars that will be looking for a new home. Couple that with the number of marketers who will be spending more ad dollars on the internet this year, and it becomes clear where those homeless billions are going to go when the time comes.

Now let’s look at online advertising.

This is the part where traditional online advertisers say, “Hey, what makes you think any of that money is going to be spent on new media campaigns?” It’s true that pay-per-click style advertising is still the largest subset of the online marketing industry. But, I would claim that these PPCers and pre-rollers and post-rollers are just as susceptible to the coming extinction as the dinosaurs of traditional marketing. All these PPC banner ads and rich media ads are simply the digital incarnation of the traditional marketing models of interruption and top-down thinking. I think people make the wrong distinction when they think that traditional marketing will die while internet marketing will thrive. That is drawing the line in the wrong place. It is traditional marketing models that will die, and new models that will thrive. A rich-media in-stream ad before an online video is not “new media marketing” simply because it is attached to online video. It’s still an interrupting nuisance that just shouts a message at me rather than conversing with me.

It is not just theoretical or ideological problems that these PPC marketing strategies must face, however. There are hard numbers that show one inherent problem with such marketing. That problem is click fraud, and ClickForensics has some new data out showing an increase in the already woefully-high click fraud numbers.

ClickForensics Graphs

Look at these stats taken directly from the report:

  • The overall industry average click fraud rate rose to 16.6 percent for Q4 2007. That’s up from the 14.2 percent click fraud rate for the same quarter in 2006 and 16.2 percent for Q3 2007.
  • The average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, including Google AdSense and the Yahoo Publisher Network, was 28.3 percent in Q4 2007. That’s up from the 19.2 percent average click fraud rate for the same quarter in 2006 and 28.1 percent for Q3 2007.
  • The 2007 industry average click fraud rate grew by 15 percent over the industry average click fraud rate for 2006.

I think click fraud is just the precursor to larger problems that will plague these forms of interruption-based online advertising over the coming years. The more I read, the more I study, and the more work I do with social and viral marketing, the more I deepen my conviction that the approach to marketing must change in order to reach consumers. You can no longer demand their attention, you must earn it. And if you have to earn their attention, then you have to engage them more than most marketers are used to. Marketing is becoming a conversation, not a sermon, and the rise of social media marketing is upon us.

For more on this topic, make sure to subscribe to our feed. Next week I will be publishing a follow up post entitled “The Rule of Reciprocity” that will discuss the importance of the “conversation” that must start taking place in order for marketers to continue to engage consumers.

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4 Comments
  • Feb 08
  • 19

The Paradox of Self-Promotion with Social Media

Introduction

Social media is a beautiful thing. The internet is finally living up to its potential as the first truly democratic medium. The traditional gatekeepers (to use a Seth Godin teNetworked Worldrm) of mass-media no longer control the flow of information. In fact, I would argue that the term “flow” of information will quickly fade into our linguistic past. Web 2.0 has introduced us all to the “currents” of information. Things are far less linear than they used to be. On the new web–the social web–information is carried on numerous currents, moving back and forth, and changing at the whim of immense social forces. This fundamental change in the mechanics of the dissemination of information has engendered, and is further propelled by, the evolution of social media. Entertainment can now be created by anybody and shared with everybody. The relative worth of a news story can now be voted upon by anyone who wishes to participate. It has never been easier to report on the news, to assert one’s opinion, or to spark controversy with unparalleled tools of demagoguery. The web is now a social creature.

This new social creature has rules. If you are a blogger, a user of the myriad social websites, or a plain old internet jockey, then you know these rules already. They combine to form a sort of codex of etiquette for the social media world. In fact, the blogoshpere is already rife with the proto-”Miss Manners” books of the social media age. You don’t have to look very hard to find lists of tips like:

  1. If you want to contact a blogger about featuring you, make sure you subscribe to them first. Read their stuff so you get a feel for who they are. Comment intelligently on their posts over the weeks that you are getting to know them. Only after you have built a rapport can you then approach them.
  2. Do not spam people. It will get you banned.
  3. Always respond to people who comment on your blog posts. This helps foster a relationship and will help increase subscribers.

Are these not the “Men should stand when a woman enters the room” of the digital age?

The Problem

Guy With SignThis new social web and the etiquette evolving within it have been a fascination of mine for some time. I guess you could say that it’s one of the reasons I do what I do. Of particular fascination to me is the paradox of self-promotion. One of the major rules of social media is “don’t promote yourself.” It is enforced with varying degrees of severity in different communities, and there are certainly places like MySpace where self-promotion is the apparent modus operandi. But when it comes to tools like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Mixx, Sphinn, and others, the paradox becomes much more apparent. In many ways, it appears to be the digital extension of the real-world impoliteness of talking about one’s self. As my father always told me, “Don’t brag. Let your actions do the talking.” Wise words. However, the sheer enormity of the internet presents a problem with this way of thinking. Here’s my definition of the problem.

The Paradox of Self-Promotion with Social Media:

Social media generally frowns on self-promotion, in many cases admonishing outright those who practice it. But with the sheer numbers of new videos, posts, sites, pictures, and stories appearing each and every day, self-promotion is a necessity for anyone starting out and hoping to gain any sort of foothold.

The Solution

Painted Rubik’s Cube

I assert that self-promotion is vital to the launch of any new social media endeavor. Whether a marketer or an individual, whether starting a blog or making videos, you have to be your own #1 fan and evangelist. There are plenty of people out there who will love your content, but you have to help them notice it. There is nothing wrong with this, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. However, there are some things you can do to help obfuscate the paradox and take those vital steps to gaining a foothold in the wild west of the internet.

  1. Don’t Just Promote Yourself: I am starting with the most obvious one on purpose. I met someone on a forum the other day who was asking for people to Stumble his blog. I looked at his blog and then checked out his Stumble profile. His Stumble account was two months old (about as old as his blog) and in that time he had only Stumbled 27 pages. All 27 pages were his own blog posts. If he wants to use Stumble as a self-promotion tool then he better start acting like a real stumbler and promote the pages of others in addition to his own content. The same goes for any social bookmarking, news, or voting site. If you are trying to use Digg to get your blog noticed, you have to Digg other things as well. Embrace the tools and become a real user. This will not only increase your power as a user, but will vastly increase the potential for making friends and connections who will be more likely to vote on what you submit. I have even read some articles saying that you should not submit any of your own material for the first two months of your account. While I don’t think there are any hard and fast rules, I think it is very important to commit time and energy to your social media tools. USE the services, don’t ABUSE them.
  2. Pick Your Battles: There are more social sites than I can count on my fingers and toes. Hell, there are even more than I could count if I used your fingers and toes as well. While it is certainly a good idea to have sharing links to at least five on them on your blog, you really need to pick 2-3 to begin your self-promotion work. As I said in #1, you have to be a real user and vote for more than your own stuff. But, you can’t be a real user of more than three of these sites and still have much of a life left to do whatever it is that you want to promote in the first place. I know this because I tried to run my business while building multiple accounts and I cracked like an eggshell. Hopefully, when you have gained a loyal fan/reader/user/friend base, you will have plenty of people who can share your best stuff on the sites you are not on. Don’t spread yourself too thin.
  3. The Golden Ratio: I have a friend over at Mixx who says he has found that he can submit one of his own posts for every ten other things he submits without being seen as “spammy.” This is his golden ratio. I have another friend at Mixx whose ratio is more like 1:2. He submits his own stuff all the time and no one seems to care. What’s his secret? I have no idea. The important thing to realize is that you will have your own golden ratio. There are many factors to take into account such as: how many friends you have, what topics your content deals with, etc… You must experiment. Start with at least 1:10 and see if you can work your way down from there. My ratios are often more like 1:20 on Mixx and 1:40 on StumbleUpon. But that’s just because I spend a lot of time reading other bloggers and I like those sites, so I am naturally submitting a lot of things.
  4. Stop Shouting: Almost every social site has some form of the “shout.” Whatever it’s called on your site of choice, it is the way you can send a little message to other users that you are connected to, and I think it is the most abused tool in the social media world. I don’t care who you are, you cannot be so good at scrubbing the net that everything you find is worth sharing with everyone you know. Shouts work best when used in moderation. There are people on Digg who send me ten shouts a day. Multiply that by 10 friends and I have long ago reached my overload point. I have switched off. I don’t even look at shouts any more. The biggest favor you can do for yourself (especially when you are still submitting your own content from time to time) is to reserve your shouts for very special things. Make your shouts mean something because people are very good at noticing which of their friends seem to shout anything and everything.
  5. Study Your Playing Field: Some sites (such as Newsvine) say in their Terms of Use that users are not supposed to submit their own content. Other sites (such as Sphinn) welcome the submission of your own material and even encourage it because it allows for more accuracy in titling and tagging. The important thing is to know your sites. Know the rules (and the community sentiment) toward self-promotion for each site you use. This bit of work on the front end will save you a lot of headache down the line.
  6. Make Friends: I know it is hard to believe, but being social is a cornerstone of social media. Take a moment to let that sink in. Making friends has two main benefits. First, it can help increase the power of your account. While no one knows the exact algorithms of these sites, it is the popular belief that profiles with more friends/fans/groups/reviews/etc have more weight. Secondly (and most importantly), the friends you meet through the sharing of what you’re into are the most likely candidates to become submitters of your stuff. If you’re into SEO, and have an SEO blog, then make SEO friends and they just might like your stuff. It’s a great feeling when you see that a friend of yours from Sphinn added your new post to her del.icio.us.
  7. Full Disclosure: This last point has worked very well for me in the past, but it is based on having followed the previous six suggestions. It is never a bad idea to disclose that you are submitting your own material. This is a sort of preemptive strike at the would-be naysayers. As long as you are not submitting your own stuff all the time, many social media communities will be very tolerant (even receptive) to the submission of your own material as long as they feel you aren’t trying to deceive them. Social media users HATE being duped….or, better said, hate feeling like they were duped. Being transparent about your self-promotion allows you to get your stuff out there and ensure that it is properly tagged, while limiting the potential for negative response. I consider full disclosure to be a more effective and more sustainable alternative to the next suggestion.
  8. Alter-ego: Although I do not use this method, I would be remiss if I did not include it here. Many people would suggest that, in the beginning, you can circumvent the paradox of self-promotion by creating a secondary account for yourself on social sites that cannot be traced back to you. While this practice is exceedingly common, and many still recommend this solution, I think it is becoming increasingly obsolete. In addition, it violates the terms of service of many of these sites. The biggest downside though, is that having two accounts on the same site spreads you time and attention. You should be focusing on building one respected user, and the attention required to nurse a second user could be better used elsewhere. An alter-ego may be fun to test with, but don’t rely on it as your primary way to self-promote.

In conclusion, I would like to say that I think the acceptance of self-promotion within the social media space is increasing. But that doesn’t mean it is easy. The goal of anyone—be it individual or marketer—is still to reach the point where your fans/readers/subscribers become your evangelists. Seth Godin doesn’t have to share his own posts, nor do Kevin Nalts or Chris Crocker need to share their own videos. But they didn’t start out that way! Don’t be afraid to be your biggest fan, and don’t feel like you need to hide behind a secret second account to share your content. Use these tools to get yourself started and you will be on your way.

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