Social Media Archives

100 People in the Triangle You Should Connect With Today

October 16, 2014 by Phil Buckley 51 Comments

There’s a problem that we all deal with. We want to connect with all the smartest people in our area, but sometimes the smartest and most capable people aren’t very visible to us.

A couple weeks ago I met 3 people that I didn’t even know existed and yet they were all amazing. How is that possible?

I decided to ask some of the smartest and best connected people I know who they feel is flying below the radar. We all know people who are amazing, but not well known.

Below is the list – in no particular order, it’s just the order in which people got back to me. I’ve made the list as easy as possible for you to connect with them.

Do you know someone who missing from the list? Let me know in the comments.
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Cheating vs. Looking for an Advantage vs. Business

January 13, 2014 by Phil Buckley 23 Comments

While reading Mark Schaefers‘s The business case for cheating your way to social media superstardom this morning I noticed something. When we cheat it’s “gaining an advantage”, when others do we say it’s “cheating” or “a scam” and sometimes even “scum”.

Yesterday I read a great post by Owen Good entitled, A-Rod May Not Be in MLB’s Next Video Game, but Virtual PEDs Will. Good draws a brilliant parallel that had never occurred to me before. If you’re playing a video game (like MLB 10) and you pay real money to buy additional skills for your virtual player are you digitally juicing?
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How do I get on the first page of Google?

June 10, 2013 by Phil Buckley 1 Comment

In 1970 Honda unleashed the N600 sedan on the American consumer. The car featured front wheel drive and an air-cooled, four stroke, 31 horsepowered two-cylinder engine, which was borrowed from the Honda CB450 motorcycle.

Honda didn’t think the N600 would replace the Chevy Impala, but they had to start somewhere. It’s the same on the web.

Every SEO gets asked the dreaded “how long until I’m number one on Google” a lot. At that point our job becomes one of teacher. Ranking first on Google means that your web page is better than any of the other 40 trillion pages on the web. That’s a pretty high bar right out of the gate.

So you spend a year making your site more responsive, adding better content, optimizing for conversions and building out your community. You still have very little traffic. You start to think you’re doing something wrong. You start asking around and looking at your competitors. Amazon makes it look so easy.

As you start to slog your way through year two you see some progress. You are starting to attract some links, a few people start to leave comments on your blog posts. Now you can feel your expectations start to rise. You feel like something good is right around the corner. Okay, maybe the next corner. Damnit, maybe that next one.

This is where half of the population gives up. This is what Seth Godin refers to as “the dip“. Seth’s main point in that book is knowing when it’s a dip that you have to power through, or something you should quit all together and move on.

I love the graphics that Rand Fiskin uses to illustrate this exact point. It’s the Google Analytics traffic line of his wife’s blog.

I’ve heard it said that it always feels like you’re losing, right before you win. If you still love what you’re doing and it feels right, I implore you to stay on the treadmill a little bit longer. Real success doesn’t come overnight.

I still remember the impact of Chris Brogan’s blog post about overnight success from way back in 2009 and how it made me more determined than ever.

My Personal Internet Conference

October 14, 2012 by Phil Buckley 2 Comments

While I was out picking up some yard supplies this morning I entered into a Twitter conversation with my friend who asked if I could recommend anyone to help moderate some of the panels at this year’s Internet Summit.

I need a couple of moderators for panels – do you have anyone you can recommend as being Entertaining, Intelligent, Engaging…?

As I started going through the Rolodex in my head it dawned on me that what I was really doing was giving her a list of people I would want to see moderating a panel. People I feel are entertaining, intelligent and engaging. Then it dawned on me that I don’t enough people how much I enjoy their contributions to the whole online/social/interactive scene here in the Triangle.
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Not Everyone Wants You To Be A Star

February 24, 2012 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

iconic Michael Jordan dunking — Iconic Michael Jordan dunk

Have you ever wondered what life would be like if you were a well known celebrity? How must it feel when Michael Jordan walks into anyplace in Chicago? Do you think there are companies out there that don’t want someone well-known associated with their brand? Can you imagine a company saying, “I don’t want to use Michael Jordan to sell our basketball sneakers because he used the Chicago Bulls as platform to promote his own talents.”

In regular life, a strong personal brand can sometimes be intimidating for a company. I remember talking with my friend Jeremy Smith when Twine Interactive (now Fragment Labs) decided to hire Wayne Sutton as their social media & community strategist. I told Jeremy I thought it was a nice win-win situation; Twine would get exposure to Wayne’s extensive network and Wayne would get a chance to work through some great strategies. But not every company wants to take a chance like that, and some may even feel the person who put in the effort to build a personal brand is somehow doing something wrong.

My long-standing social media crush has spent her life honing her personal brand to the point that when I think of Outspoken Media, I think of Lisa. Lisa started building her brand while at SEO powerhouse Bruce Clay Inc. Does that mean that Bruce Clay got screwed when Lisa left? I don’t think so, I think they both benefitted from their time together.

I know that Jay Dolan’s strong personal branding, award-winning social media blog and worldwide connections are helping him create better strategies for the clients he serves at his day job.

I can’t think of any examples of people with notable personal brands that haven’t helped the companies that have let them be their best. If you can, please let me know if the comments.

My Million Dollar Twitter Tool

February 22, 2012 by Phil Buckley 2 Comments

Do we really need another Twitter tool? I think we do.

I started thinking about this tool when I was one of the alpha testers for Argyle Social’s groundbreaking social media tracking toolset. What I loved about Argyle’s tool is that I could finally show the impact of social media to the boss and it made sense.

I know not every company is on the social media bandwagon yet, but I feel like it’s time for a tool that deals with the other side of the social media equation. Argyle Social and their kin have the part to the right of the equal sign all figured out, but what about the people on the left side of the equation?

One of my smartest friends once mentioned that the role of software is to make something easier. Now that showing the impact of social is “easy”, how about the making the curation and management of a social stream easier.

I tweet a lot. Much of what I tweet is articles that I find interesting and I feel like my followers might find interesting. Some get traction, some don’t. Some I retweet, some I don’t. Some I get a notice from bit.ly that they are getting more than 20 clicks, most don’t. One of the frustrating things is that some I think are awesome don’t get the exposure that I feel is due.

If I had unlimited time I could do the heavy lifting involved in scheduling stuff to retweet a day later, maybe again a week later and seeing what works best. I want a piece of software that does that thinking for me.

Here’s my idea, it has certain features of Argyle Social, BufferApp and a few others.

I have a tweet I want to send out. I add it to my hopper of Tweets that are awaiting distribution (much like BufferApp). There is a process which will deal with items in the hopper according to an algorithm. New tweets have precedence over older tweets that are being retweeted, and more popular retweets have precedence over less popular ones.

The hopper is configured via sliders where you can control how fast tweets are sent out and how often things get reweeted. Individual tweets can override the general settings.

Let’s walk though a quick example…

I have a tweet I want to send out about my super awesome Twitter Awesomeness Score page. This is evergreen content. It will live there forever and each time I give it a nudge it gets pretty good traction, but I only think to tweet about it a couple times a year. I would like to automate that tweet to go out every month. So I set the tool to make sure that particular tweet goes out once a month forever. That’s it – I don’t want to have to put in a time, or day – I want the software to figure it out, because that what computers are best at. The tool will look at what is in my hopper the next time that tweet is due to go out and make an intelligent decision about when it should be tweeted.

I have another tweet that is a link to an awesome infographic on tweets during the Super Bowl. That will only be interesting for a week or two, so I use the sliders to tell the tool to tweet that out a few times on day 1, a couple times on day 2 and after that retweet according to how it’s being received (clicks and RT’s). If it’s still getting love, throw it back in the hopper automaticaly until it dies off.

Now thing ahead 6 months. My hopper gets at least a dozen new links added every day, some will be popular long after their initial tweet and will keep my hopper filled, so then there has to be intelligence about how to quilt together my tweet stream. I don’t want tweets in rapid succession so maybe I never show more that 1 or 2 retweets each hour, and maybe when tweets start to age they only show up in non-peak hours.

This is clearly one of those ideas that can quickly spiral out of control and become a nightmare, but I think the core premise is solid and needs to be explored.

Anyone want to brainstorm this through and see if we can make it come true?

Is Search Bowing Down To Social?

July 1, 2011 by Phil Buckley 1 Comment

Rand Fisking of SEOmoz recently gave a presentation that included a section of how they have documented a correlation between Facebook “likes” of a page to its ranking within the search results. His presentation received a bunch of chatter and last week he wrote it up at the SEOmoz blog to illustrate that correlation.

The article is worth the time to read, and re-read it because it really helps you to understand where Google is, especially right now, and where the near-term future lies.

When you are logged into Google and do a search you see some search results you may not see otherwise. Below is when I’m logged into Google and do a search for my favorite barbecue joint:

The interesting thing in the screenshot above is that the Twitter feed for The Pit is showing up as the 4th search result. Since me and ThePitBBQ are friends on Twitter and actually chat regularly, Google assumes that link is important to me and floats it up.

When I’m logged out:

Logged out of Google searching for The Pit

The result for their Twitter account has disappeared from the top of my search results.

If you didn’t catch what happened and why it’s important stop right here. Your search results are now being affected by your friends and what they like and recommend.

This isn’t new, Google has been pushing their “profile” pages for a while, and Bing is doing something very similar.

Logged into Bing searching for Raleigh SEO Meetup

That fact alone is enough to make you start building out your social graph. If you are an in-house SEO then you have to wonder if you can compete with a big agency that has a much wider net to cast.

Maybe that doesn’t impress you because you know that only about 20% of searchers are logged into Google.

If you just want to stare at some social networking data that will bring you up to date start at the latest social media report out of the Pew Internet group on Social networking sites and our lives.

The report has some great stats. Did you know that only 4 out of 5 Americans say they used the Internet? What is that 5th person doing with all their time?

The number of those using social networking sites has nearly doubled since 2008 and the population of SNS users has gotten older.

In this Pew Internet sample, 79% of American adults said they used the internet and nearly half of adults (47%), or 59% of internet users, say they use at least one of social networking site (SNS). This is close to double the 26% of adults (34% of internet users) who used a SNS in 2008. Among other things, this means the average age of adult-SNS users has shifted from 33 in 2008 to 38 in 2010. Over half of all adult SNS users are now over the age of 35. Some 56% of SNS users now are female.

Facebook dominates the SNS space in this survey: 92% of SNS users are on Facebook; 29% use MySpace, 18% used LinkedIn and 13% use Twitter.

Frequency of interaction on social networks

So now it’s clear – everyone and their aunt is on Facebook.

Does that matter to search optimizers? Um, yeah.

Last year if you wanted to rank for the term “big red dogs” the best way to do it was to buy the domain bigreddogs.com.

Over the past 12 months many things have changed. Direct match domains have become much less powerful and Facebook “likes” have a very strong correlation to higher search results.

Another study out of SEOmoz shows Facebook and Twitter’s influence on Google’s rankings

SEOmoz's social media factor correlation

This data was so unexpected that the guys at SEOmoz didn’t believe it, so they started digging deeper. When they dug even deeper it was even more obvious that there is a super strong correlation between Facebook likes and page rankings.

Twitter is a distant second to Facebook as far as influencing rankings.

So where does this leave us?

Social signals are just that – SIGNALS. They are one of many signals that the search engines use. With that said, I feel like they will continue to evolve and mature as the socially connected web continues to grow and displace the document web in share of time that people actually spend online.

As we move towards a much more mobile online world, nobody wants to search for answers the old “desktop” way – so information will need to be consumed differently and shared differently.

So here’s the take aways:

Get more connected socially.
Make sure your website makes it easy for people to share your content, especially to Facebook.
Make your site better in every way!
1. A better looking site gets shared & linked to more often
2. A user friendly site gets shared & linked to more often

Other resources and articles you should read for more information:

How Facebook Says Likes & Social Plugins Help Websites via Search Engine Land
What Social Signals Do Google & Bing Really Count? from Search Engine Land
First Comprehensive Study on Sharing from ShareThis & StarCom MediaVest Group
Facebook Like Button Vs. Facebook Share: Why I’m Keeping Both from Daggle
The Science of Social Timing Part 1: Social Networks from KISS Metrics

Has The Pit lost its social media mojo?

June 10, 2011 by Phil Buckley 24 Comments

Anyone who knows me or has read more than one post here knows I love The Pit whole hog barbecue in Raleigh. I have been a fan since 2009 when I was so impressed that I even wrote up how The Pit was doing social media right. I became friends with Eric Harris who was a the manager there and also the brains and the energy behind their awesome Twitter presence.

Eric understood the power of the new social networks and how he could leverage them to help his business. He understood the most crucial aspect of Twitter and Foursquare – that he was talking to real live people. Eric never lost sight of the goals of every social media campaign – bring in more business, make existing customers more loyal and organically spread good will that reflects back on your business.

Twitter conversation with The Pit — This is why I love The Pit. 100% customer love.

I ran into Eric a couple of weeks ago and he told me he was moving over to manage The Raleigh Times. I didn’t think to much of it until today.

Last night I tweeted at The Pit’s Twitter account asking if they could hold a table for me at lunch today. As usual I heard back from the account that it was taken care of. I assumed that Eric was still handling the social media for The Pit.

I didn’t really think anything else about it after that. I was confident that my favorite restaurant would have a table for me at lunch.

Then something happened this morning that was totally unexpected and caught me by surprise. At about 9am I received another reply from The Pit but this one had a very different feel to it. I immediately knew it wasn’t Eric. It must be whoever took over the day-to-day Twitter responsibility for The Pit.

So what was so shocking to me? What was so terrible that it caused me to sit down and write this post?

The response was lame.

A lame Twitter response — A different type of Pit Twitter response

The response wasn’t bad or mean or inappropriate. It was just lame.

Because I have always been a huge fan of The Pit’s social media prowess it killed me to see them slip down to the level of “not awesome”. The reason I think the response was lame is because it was written from the perspective of “how can we direct this potential customer so that he conforms to how we need things done” rather than “how can we help”. In addition, the link provided was wrong. It should have been a link to the reservation service through Open Table.

I think people who don’t have a passion for social media think it’s easy. Great social media is not easy. It’s hard work.

The reason I love The Pit is because Eric Harris and everyone there always made me feel like I was special. They have a passion for customer service which came through loud and clear through Twitter.

I still love The Pit. It is still my go-to restaurant when someone comes to visit from up north. It’s still the place I always suggest for a big party type of event.

I hope Eric takes some time to explain not just the tactics of Twitter to the new person, but the goals and strategy that made me their biggest fan.

Case Study: Local Politics and Social Media

May 18, 2011 by Phil Buckley 1 Comment

When I was working at Media Two I met a young woman who was doing her internship with the social media team. When I met Anna Beavon Gravely she was the president of the student body at Meredith College with just a couple months before her graduation. She was smart, funny, passionate and some might even say intense. She was an unabashed conservative with a goal to someday be the person standing behind the podium giving the White House press briefings.

I checked in with her yesterday to find out which GOP presidential campaign had hired her. Surprisingly, she told me that she has set her sites on working with some of the North Carolina candidates running for statewide office. While she was an intern she had mentioned how much she wanted to help Pat McCrory become governor by helping out in the communication office. Yesterday she said that she was talking with Dan Forest who is running for Lt. Governor. She’s excited to help Dan because she’s sure he has the right ideas to help North Carolina.

That’s where this case study starts.

When I put his name into Google, he doesn’t show up, in fact it thinks the query is incorrect and asks if I meant it with 2 r’s in his last name . One of the results was for LinkedIn (there are 7 Dan Forest’s). I finally find his LinkedIn profile and it’s terrible. No optimization at all has been done to position him as someone you would vote for.

I understand that running for Lt. Governor of North Carolina isn’t the same as running for president, but having your social media strategy figured out should be considered basic blocking and tackling.

I find Dan Forest’s Twitter account and although his stream is a bit light, I decide to follow him. A little while later I get a DM from his acount asking me to validate myself through TrueTwit. I wouldn’t recommend anyone use a service like that because it creates one more hurdle for me to jump before you will decide if I’m worth connecting with. For someone looking to connect with as many people as he can this is a epic fail.

Smartly he links to his website in his Twitter bio, but then his website isn’t live yet. This is another terrible idea. Why would you send me to a site where I again can’t connect with you? From a search perspective, the non-branded “coming soon” page is basically an ad for the company that will be producing the website – so then when it does finally go live the search engines will be confused because it used to be about another company and now it’s about Dan Forrest. There’s no “noindex” tag to keep the search spiders away until launch.

His Facebook page looks like it was given at least some amount of thought because it’s filled in. The actual conversation going on there is weak again though. Not surprisingly when you land at Dan’s Facebook page the first thing you see is an invitation to “GIVE NOW”. Gee, thanks – it’s nice to meet you too.

So how is it that a smart guy running for statewide office can seem so clueless about social media?

Dan Forest is about my age and our demographic is on the edge. We either grabbed onto technology in our 20’s and though it was awesome or just used it for work and that was about it. The problem is, if Dan doesn’t figure out social media quickly he can start to look like someone who is out of touch. Nobody running for statewide office wants that label.

Politicians have long understood the need for a communications director, but what about a digital communications director as well? The person who knows the ropes of traditional media is not very likely to also be a cutting edge digital operator.

So what’s a guy in his position to do? He needs to look at hiring someone who gets the social space and the importance of streamlining a message, building a network, listening more, optimizing content so that he and his ideas are easily found and engaging in some level of online reputation management.

Remember the young woman I mentioned at the beginning of this post? I would recommend that Dan hire here asap as his digital Communications Director so she can save his online campaign. She’s been thinking about this stuff longer than he has.

How is your favorite candidate doing from a social media perspective?

UPDATE: Dan followed me back today, 11 days after he made me jump through hoops to follow him. In those 11 days he retweeted one item where ethand (from Pennsylvania) mentioned that he had just met him.

Why Boston Rob Won Survivor: Redemption Island

May 16, 2011 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

Boston Rob on Survivor: Redemption Island — Boston Ron's patented smirk

I’ve been a fan of Survivor since its first season 11 years ago. Some season’s have been better than other’s, but last night’s finale for season 22 was the best yet. If you were paying attention, Boston Rob was playing the roles of Dale Carnegie, Don Corleone and Oprah Winfrey.

If you didn’t watch this season of Survivor, I’ll recap it quickly. Rob took control of the game on day 1 and nobody else stood a chance. This was Boston Rob’s 4th time on the show, and he had evolved into a perfect player. The truth came out at the big wrap-up show that came on after the finale where all the competitors come back to talk about the season. It was there that his genius was displayed.

The Lesson YOU should take away from Boston’s Rob’s Win

More than one of the players said that Rob’s strength was in the way he built relationships. He took the time to build whatever relationship was necessary with each player. For some he was seen as a guy pal, others a big brother and still others as a wily veteran. Each person had a different and distinct relationship with him, and each rightly felt special. Then he would also constantly check in on everyone.

Phillip Sheppard

Crazy Phillip

The most interesting person on this season was a “former federal agent?” Phillip Sheppard. Nobody liked Phillip. He was an outsider and acted a little bit crazy at times and especially the younger women couldn’t even listen to him. Boston Rob on the other hand saw something else. There’s no doubt that Rob saw the strategic advantage of having a lightening rod in camp to take the heat of himself, but he also did the thing we all wish we were strong and smart enough to do. He listened to him. At the wrap-up show Survivor host Jeff Probst asks Rob, “Rob what did you see in Phillip that nobody else saw?”

Well you know here’s the thing about Phillip. With all the talk that was said back and forth, Phillip is a lovable guy. He’s a guy that if you just listen to him for a second, listen to the story that he’s trying to tell. He’s from a family of 16… ah 12, Left home at 16. He’s going on and on. Imagine what that’s like for a minute. You’ve got to be constantly fighting for attention, and I just said, you know what? Here’s a guy that if I just show him some love he will be there for me. It’s not any different than what any of us want. We all want to be loved and we all want to be heard. So when everybody else would be giving it to Phillip for giving them a hard time…[looking at Phillip] I mean socially there were times you, you know… he wasn’t a picnic. But at the same time he was someone I could go to and find a common ground and we could exchange, we could have an exchange on that.

Boston Rob played a near perfect social game. If you’re trying to understand social media and how to become more influential within your niche, CBS just had 13 episode primer if you were paying attention.

If you’re interested, the wrap-up show is available at the Survivor website.

The New Reality for Small Business Owners

March 26, 2011 by Phil Buckley 23 Comments

I have a 3 year old that loves cupcakes. We’ve driven 30 minutes on a whim to drop in on The Cupcake Shoppe. When my in-laws moved to the town next door, they found a great cupcake shop in Fuquay called Cupcake Bite.

The first I heard about Cupcake Bite was from my mother-in-law who said the cupcakes were delicious! The next day my wife and son tried it out. They also liked the cupcakes, but the person handling the counter was brief at best and rude at worst. After about 8 or 10 visits mt wife finally left a message for them on their Facebook page and on their Yelp listing.

Both the Yelp review and the Facebook post were basically, “I love the cupcakes, but the service is so bad I’ve stopped going”.

So this is the part where the world has changed.

In 1995, the only customer who mattered was the food critic from your local newspaper. Now everyone is a critic. Even scarier, you have no idea who has influence until it’s too late.

My wife received a Facebook message from the owner that said:

Hi Kristen,
This is Gina, the owner of CupCakeBite. I saw your post and I wanted to reach out to you. I appreciate your business and am happy to hear you enjoy our cupcakes. I’m sorry that you’ve had a bad experience here and of course, would like to prevent that from happening again. That being said, I would have really appreciated you talking to me first before posting on our Facebook page and writing a very negative review on Yelp.

Every small business owner would like that, but the hard reality is that’s not the way the world works anymore. People post on Facebook the same things they have always chatted about to their friends, but now everyone can listen in. Almost nobody ever says, “let me talk to the owner”.

It doesn’t matter if you think the new way sucks, it just is.

People in general don’t care about your business, they care about themselves. A small business just getting started has to give people a reason to love them. People want to support small businesses in their town, they want to be the one that tells their friends that they found a great new place, they want to be the one that is known by name at the cool new place. In exchange for that kind of passion, you need to make them feel special.

The not so secret part of the equation is that the more love you push onto your customers, the more love they’ll bring back to your business.

If I was advising the owner as a social media strategist, I would recommend the following:

Stop removing negative comments on your Facebook wall and fix the problems creating the negative feedback.
If you ever find yourself writing the phrase “with that said” in an email to a customer, stop writing. No customer cares about how hard you have it.
The people who leave you negative feedback may be your biggest fans in disguise, love them more to find out.
Learn the names of your best customers, or at least their faces so you can greet them. That goes for everyone in the shop.
Every once in a while, ask someone what cupcake their next-door-neighbor would like, then give it to them in a separate bag so they can hand deliver it to them. Word of mouth is powerful.
Stop looking at comments as positive and negative, and instead think, “that’s interesting”. Respond to both types with the desire to learn.
Try to stay positive with yourself, your staff and your customers.

Did Howard Stern Gave Birth To Facebook

February 27, 2011 by Phil Buckley 2 Comments

Watching people talk about their lives on Facebook is normal – everyone does it. We talk about our kids, our friends, our loves and hates. People think that Mark Zuckerburg (or the Winklevosses) came up with that idea. I think Howard Stern invented social media.

I remember listening to Howard Stern every morning during my 75 minute commute each morning back in the late 90’s. He would talk about everything going on in his life and the life of his staff. Nothing was taboo or off limits. He would ask questions of his guests that no other media outlet would dare.

He was “sharing” his life on an unprecedented scale. His marriage failing, his kids, his dating life, his co-workers lives, their answering machine messages… all shared.

Howard Stern was the Twitter stream for about 20 million people every morning.

How you can help

The Lesson YOU should take away from Boston’s Rob’s Win

Phillip Sheppard Crazy Phillip

Phillip Sheppard

Crazy Phillip