Social Media Archives - Page 2 of 4

Followers, Friends, Fans, Business & Bullshit

February 18, 2011 by Phil Buckley 3 Comments

If you hang around the social media scene you hear a lot of purists say things like:

The numbers aren’t important
It’s the quality of the connections
The number of followers isn’t important
Focus on building deep relationships

Offering a different view can throw them into high dudgeon. But here’s the dirty secret that huge players like Scott Stratten(80K followers), Chris Brogan(174K) and Brian Clark(72K) don’t always talk about. Sometimes clients demand a number.

In the real lworld of day-to-day world of selling social media to medium sized companies you hear things like, “how long until we have 10,00 fans?” or “We need to have one million followers by the end of the year.”

If you’re Scott, Brian or Chris they will listen to you explain about how it’s all about relationships and it might take a year or even two to really build a vibrant following. If you’re not one of them, they look at you like you’re crazy.

You start the process and you pick up a few hundred fans the first couple of days and everyone is happy. A month later fans only trickle in at a few a day. Your contact tells you that she’s getting heat about the slowdown and something has to be done.

Because there is a cog in the machine that has to hand off a report that is being judged on a single hard number – social media piety takes a back seat to the new business reality. Someone needs to fix “the number”.

So you explain that there are ways to boost fans and followers, but the people collected are usually very low quality and many are just bots. Everyone sits around the table looking concerned then it’s clear – do what you need to do.

Buy Facebook fans in bulk — Fans are less than a penny each

Want 100,000 new fans for your Facebook page? No problem, write a check for $160 and you’re done.

I suppose with half a billion accounts, at least 1% have to be scam accounts right? That means that there are about 5 million totally fake Facebook accounts.

When I first looked into this I thought Facebook fans would be more expensive than Twitter followers, but they’re not. Thinking about a little more, I guess that makes sense.

Twitter fans are being hawked constantly within Twitter. I’m sure you’ve received a DM saying, “Get thousands of followers this weekend!”

At the BuyTwitterFollowers.com website you can… well, buy Twitter followers.

So do you make a small investment in an effort to display some social proof so that phase two will be natural? Do you buy some fans then hire Brand Glue in hopes that they can ramp up your follower retention?

The problem is once you start down this road can you ever get off the juice? When a client sees 10,000 new followers in a month, they will not want to return to 173 the next month.

Are you buying fans? Are you using any tools to help increase your folllower count? Is the number of people following someone a status symbol? Are you impressed by people who have a ton of followers?

Looking forward to your comments.

An Open Letter to Argyle Social

January 20, 2011 by Phil Buckley 10 Comments

I singled out Argyle Social for this letter because they are so far ahead of everyone else in the social media tracking game. Trying to get by with a free product after using Argyle is the most frustrating thing you can imagine. With that said, there’s still a long way to go for every product I’ve tried.

What I need to streamline my social media workload

I need the ability to put out a tweet or Facebook link one time and have an intelligent system take care of the details.

This will be easier if I use an example. Let’s say I have a piece of content that I consider “evergreen” and I want to periodically push out. I want it to appear 3 times the first day and then less and less over time until it appears just once a month. Something like this…

Day 1: tweet goes out 3 times, each time at least 4 hours apart
Day 2 & 3: tweet goes out once – but at least 2 hours from any time it went out the previous day
Day 4: tweet goes once but not within 2 hours of any other scheduled tweet
Day 6: tweet goes out once within 30 minutes of the time it received the most clicks over the past 6 days
Week 2: tweet once on the day it did the worst, but 6 to 8 hours later
Week 3: tweet once during an hour it has never been tweeted in before.
Month 2: tweet twice. Once before the 15th once after.
Month 3 and beyond: tweet once within 90 minutes of the time of day it has received the most clicks

In addition to all those calculations, it has to never be on top of previously scheduled tweets. Schedules tweets should never be in the same 10 minute block.

I also want the tweet to be “spinnable”. So instead of me having to dream up 20 different ways to tweet the same thing, I want the system to allow me to pre-load what I want. For example if the generic tweet was, “10 ways to write better twitter headlines” I want to be able to put it in something like this: {10|Ten|Top Ten|Top 10} {ways|tips|ideas} to {write|compose|publish} {better|improved|stronger|more clickable} {twitter headlines|blurbs|tweets}

That way the system will be able to write variations like:

Top Ten ways to publish improved tweets
Top 10 ways to compose better twitter headlines
Top 10 ideas to publish improved tweets
Top Ten ways to compose more clickable twitter headlines
10 ideas to compose better twitter headlines

What I need is just a big bucket to dump content into that magically tweets it out in a smart and sensible way and also learns as it tweets – is that so hard?

Finally I want an email delivered every morning with a wrap up of what happened the previous day that includes what worked, what bombed, segmented by platform and where they are in the life cycle.

What about real time tweeting?

When I click on something and it launches the Argyle bookmarklet I want some visibility into what is scheduled to go in the upcoming hour.

My friend Clint says it best, “software is suppose to make your life easier”. Right now most of the shortening/social media ROI tools are focused on providing value at the very end of the equation – reporting. But if you can save me a couple hours a week, that’s part of the ROI equation also.

Raleigh Media Leaders Event

December 15, 2010 by Phil Buckley 4 Comments

Last night was the latest Media Leaders event to take place here in Raleigh. This one was a bit more casual, mostly because it was a late decision to hold it at all during the holiday season.

It took place at the best neighborhood tavern in downtown Raleigh – Isaac Hunter’s Oak City Tavern on one of the coldest nights of the year! By 6:30 Lisa Jeffries had dropped off a gigantic tray of delicious huspuppies and about 8 gallons of sweet tea from Smithfield’s Chicken n’ BBQ to go along with the awesome snack trays that award winning owner/bartender Zack provided for us.

My friend John Lewis set up a small table to accept donations for Stop Hunger Now, which is a local organization that can feed 100 people on each $25 donation.

We eventually had about 100 people show up to chat and meet new people. I love the fact that every time we get together for a Media Leaders event, there are new faces in the crowd.

About 8pm we picked our prize winners! The prize is a chance for 3 attendees to have lunch with a group of local leaders who aren’t always easy to connect with. The prize group this time is:

Aaron Houghton:

Aaron is Co-Founder and Chairman of Board of Directors at iContact Corporation as well as President & CEO at Preation. Aaron is one of those guys that looks at business from a unique perspective. He has a nice collection of war stories of what has worked and what hasn’t, but even better he knows why. Follow Aaron on Twitter.

Jennifer Kendrick Nixon:

Jennifer is the Public Information Officer at North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. That’s a long title, but I first became aware of Jen when she and her team spoke at a Social Media Breakfast event a couple years ago. But this year she and her crew pulled out all the stops to make the 2010 NC State Fair the most successful ever. Jen gets to work with a whole different side of PR and social media and she’s the best I’ve ever seen at making the NC Agriculture Department relevant and interesting even for non-farmers.

Cord Silverstein:

Cord is the Executive Vice President of Interactive and Social Media at Capstrat. You can see some of Cord’s best ideas at his Marketing Hipster blog, or you can pay his company and hear his brilliance in person. If you’re not following Cord on Twitter, you should be reassessing why your on Twitter and who you’re following.

The winners last night were picked at random from the check-in list. The lucky winners were Caitlin V. Smith who recently left her position as a Marketing Communication Specialist to become an Interactive Media graduate student at Elon, Cyn Mallard who is well-known in the Triangle from PechaKucha as well as her beautiful artistry at Cynergie Studio and my old co-worker Christine Seib who is a Senior Online Strategist at Responsology.

Thanks to everyone who attended and of course the Raleigh Media Leaders team – Morgan Siem, Meg Crawford, Karl Sakas and Brian McDonald!

How does April sound for the next one?

Small Businesses Lack Time for Social Media Marketing

December 4, 2010 by Phil Buckley 3 Comments

Amongst the products that are no longer being manufactured in the United States are more hours in the day or, more days in the week, for that matter. And that is seen a barrier to small business owners fully exploiting the internet marketing advantages of social media.

Excluding pure internet marketing companies (which are presumably all over the use of social media sites to promote their business), small businesses in the U.S. are increasingly aware of the importance and potential of social media marketing, but the lack of time, their own inertia and uncertainty about how to effectively tap into the marketing potential of social media sites are a prime barrier holding them back from fully adopting the new media.

BusinessWire.com reports that, “Social media marketing is growing among small businesses . . . but true breakout growth in this category is being challenged by (small business) owner inertia”.

Dissecting a newly released AMI Partners’ study U.S. Small Business Marketing Marketing Activity and Spending Study: Where and How U.S. Small Businesses are Spending Marketing Dollars – BusinessWire points out that most small business marketing decisions, are made by owners who are already weighed down with multiple management responsibilities and, thus, are unable to devote the time, resources and effort it takes to explore and engage with the new media. Traditional media therefore remains a more-or-less “automatic” marketing fall-back position for small business owners.

As a result of such multi-tasking overload, “factors like variable costs, lack of understanding and the need for proactive management act as hindrances to widespread adoption” of social media as a marketing vehicle. Small businesses’ social media inertia is not a matter of indifference, but more an issue of time and resource allocation.

The prolonged economic recession hit small businesses particularly hard. Because of this, overall small business “marketing activity in 2010 was down in comparison to levels in 2007,” according to AMI Partners, vice president, Don Best. “The greatest declines were in print, broadcast and outdoor media advertising,” he points out, while “conversely, online media experienced an incline.”

The rise in Internet marketing expenditures amid a general decline in overall advertising revenue is a strong indicator of the interest that small business has in the new media. Now, if they only had the time. “As the popularity of search and social sites continues to magnify among their customers,” notes Mr. Best, “AMI expects U.S. (small businesses) to become much more strategic concerning their online marketing activities, including social media.”

As BusinessWire points out, given that there are roughly 6.3 million small businesses in the U.S., “this presents significant opportunities for vendors that can offer these (small business) decision makers tools to better utilize the web for marketing.”

[NOTE: Ironically, BusinessWire is owned by Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway investment fund. One of Buffet’s earliest investment strategies – after buying the eponymous towel manufacturer that gave Berkshire Hathaway its name – was buying up local newspapers, realizing that newspaper advertising was, then, a cash cow.]

Photo by: katie weilbacher

This is a guest post by James Barry who covers internet marketing and related topics for Wolf21.com, a Toronto-based provider of comprehensive SEO services.

Social Media Profile Leveraging

October 11, 2010 by Phil Buckley 4 Comments

At the intersection of search and social is a confluence of opportunity.

If you have a plethora of social media profiles, take the time to leverage them to provide maximum efficiency for your site. Here’s some tips to get you started.

Tour of Britain 2010, coming down Constitution Hill, Norwich, UK. — Following!

Not all social media profiles are created equal. Some profiles nofollow outbound links, some nofollow links until your reach a certain level of participation and some give fully followed links.

LinkedIn: You have the opportunity to show 3 outbound links to websites from your profile. The default choices are to use anchor text like “My Website” or “My Blog”. A better idea is to change those by choosing “other” and then typing in a better choice. In the end, it’s mostly window dressing, the links are bounced through an internal redirect that then does a temporary 302 redirect to your site.

So why bother? LinkedIn gets a ton of traffic and people looking for you and/or your site will be better served by better anchor text.

Twitter: The link at your twitter profile is nofollowed. But there is another side to this one. First, your twitter profile is at least as powerful as your LinkedIn profile, so you’re crazy not to put your website link in your profile. Second, your link is also part of the data which is available through the API. That means that there’s a zillion other tools and sites that might pick it up and use it somewhere else.

Facebook: Outbound links are nofollowed. All the same logic in the Twitter reasoning applies here as well.

My friend Jay Dolan reminded me about a great place for a followed link, your YouTube channel page. You can add it under your profile section.

How about when you leave the big 3 (or 4)? There are lots of slightly smaller places that allow you to enter your url and give it a full follow.

Meetup.com: In my opinion, it’s one of the best places to get a high quality, followed link back to your site, especially if you get one from the front page of a popular meetup group. If you are a member of a group, make sure you add your site’s url to your meetup profile page – those links are followed and pass a good amount of link juice.

seomoz.org: You may not be familiar with seomoz if you’re not a search geek, but the way they do links is becoming more and more accepted. If you become a major contributor, they will remove the nofollow from your link on your profile page. That link would have a lot of juice to pass back to your site, but you have to put in the work.

Tri-Out: Nice followed links if your business has that information entered. The Pit has a profile filled out as full as possible.

Yelp: If you have a Yelp profile, you have the opportunity to add your url, but it is redirected in a way that offers zero SEO help, but because Yelp sees so much traffic, it’s still worth adding the link.

Google: I originally forgot about this one, but it’s a good one. If you have a Google account, you can also add your url to that profile. If you’re active in the Google forums you can get a good amount of click-throughs.

Did I forget any?

Peloton photo by: The Old Penfold

The Calculus of Social Media Theory

September 30, 2010 by Phil Buckley 4 Comments

During my commute this morning, I was listening to Professor Marcus du Sautoy‘s BBC series on A Brief History of Mathematics. The first episode dealt with two late 17th century mathematicians who worked on the same problem at the same time – the calculus, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. Professor du Sautoy declares that calculus is the mathematics of things on the move.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — Gottfried Leibniz

There is nothing more “on the move” than 21st century social media theory.

Calculus is used in every branch of the physical sciences, actuarial science, computer science, statistics, engineering, economics, business, medicine, demography, and in other fields wherever a problem can be mathematically modeled and an optimal solution is desired. It allows one to go from (non-constant) rates of change to the total change or vice versa, and many times in studying a problem we know one and are trying to find the other.

The Internet, the world wide web and social media are all moving at non-constant speeds. Smartphones and location-based services are are causing a change to previous social media theorems.

There are players from the ruling royal families that are involved and young upstarts that are struggling to get their ideas heard.

There are people who fear the new science and people who claim it will revolutionize the entire world. It has the ability to reshape the way people deal with problems. It will continue to be refined by those who come in the future.

The giants of today’s social media scene must have broad shoulders to accommodate the brilliant minds that are sure to follow. Who will build on the brilliance of Chris Brogan, Lisa Barone and Damien Basile.

I think powerful social media agencies will become like the Bernoulli family was to early mathematicians? Mentoring young but promising social media experimenters. Giving them a safe space to hone their craft and apply scientific rigor to their ideas.

The visionaries of tomorrow are all around us. They have great ideas and insights yet no single powerful place to showcase them. There is no Academy of Social Media in one of the world’s great cities where the best social media minds gather. Instead there is the Internet – where all the great minds of every discipline gather. The Internet requires you to not only be great, but also to make yourself heard. It’s the second part where the newcomer will show their brilliance.

There seems to be a new tool to measure social media influence introduced every week, Yet there is no one way to quantifiably measure it yet. There has been no Gottfried Leibniz to finalize the equation for us to compare Gary Vaynerchuk to Ashton Kutcher.

How do you define social media greatness? Is it different for everyone? Is it like asking what’s the best ice cream flavor?

Why I’m Joining Media Two Interactive

September 21, 2010 by Phil Buckley 30 Comments

Media Two Interactive Advertising Agency

Over a year ago I first ran into Michael Hubbard. He was offering his office as a last minute venue to hold the Raleigh SEO Meetup.

I had never met Michael before, but he immediately made me feel welcome and did everything he could to make the event a success. We chatted a bit after the event and started an easy friendship.

Within weeks I was dragging him over to lunch at The Pit to pitch an idea for SXSE. There’s not a lot of CEO’s that will take a lunch with a web developer with a dream, but not only did he accept my invitation, he listened to me and even grabbed the check.

I became friends with his new social media strategist, Morgan Siem and others. It seemed that Media Two was everywhere I wanted to be. Eventually we began to talk in passing about working together. Then a few months ago, it seemed to take a serious turn. Media Two had brought in some new high level clients and I was at a good point to make the transition.

I love that most of the “formal” back-and-forth took place over Twitter, but we actually had very little to work out.

So in a couple of weeks, I’ll officially get a desk at Media Two. It will be somewhere between social, search, copywriter and analytics as the Director of User Experience.

For me, the chance to work with the super talented people who inhabit the Media Two offices is a dream come true. Media Two may not be the biggest ad agency in town, but they are certainly doing some of the best and most creative work.

For me, the chance to work someplace that values its people, encourages discussion and idea generation is exactly what I’ve been looking for.

Real Estate BarCamp, the Raleigh, NC edition

September 5, 2010 by Phil Buckley 2 Comments

I was excited when I started talking with Meredith Morgan about speaking at this years RDU Real Estate BarCamp. I’ve long felt that there are a few industries that have had to figure out the Internet fast, or perish. One is the newspaper industry which I recently left, but another is real estate.

I remember back in the stone age (1990’s) when you would go to a real estate office and flip through giant binders and then the agent would take you for a drive to see them, chances were about 50/50 that she had never been to that property before. You learned to lean on the agent for almost everything.

Buying and selling a home will never be that way again. People have changed. The culture has changed. If you are web saavy you start your search at someplace like homes.com or realtor.com. The reason you start there is because when you search for houses for sale in Raleigh, those are the first two organic listings. Smartly Howard, Perry & Walston has decided to spend some money and grab the top paid spot for that query on Google.

Rounding out the top of the search results are Trulia American Homeguides and Zillow. Did I mention Google now incorporates listing into their super popular Google Maps platform?

How can John Q. Agent possible compete with that? It will require a change in the process. Marti Hampton competes by buying a sponsored listing at the top of the search results. The first organic listing for an agency (on page 2) is FMRealty, which goes about it the old school way – putting the phrase Raleigh and Real Estate on the page a zillion times. Paul Setliff also shows up doing a good job of putting a good blurb about all his properties on a page that is HIS page, not an iframe’d MLS page.

I’ve written before about bad realtor websites, and they continue to bother me. I’ve talked to a couple of agents about doing something better, but many don’t want to spend any money, which means the money they do spend on a site ends up getting wasted. I think most buyers and sellers would be more impressed with a kick-ass website that is a one time $2,500 investment than with a leased luxury car that runs $700/month.

I’ve talked to a bunch of real estate professionals that mostly get it, but say that they don’t have the time or resources to put towards their website/blog/Twitter/video blogging/Facebook/forums… you get the idea. The truth of the matter is that’s like someone in 1970 saying they don’t have time for talking to people on the phone. It’s just the way more and more people are doing business and leaders will take advantage of it and put even more space between themselves and the also-rans.

You don’t have to do everything, concentrate on channels that are working for you, or that you see working for others in your situation. If you’re selling mainly to retirees then Twitter is probably not going to be the most effective. If you are trying to attract newly married couples looking to buy downtown, the newspaper will not be where they are hanging out. What about the 45 year olds looking to upgrade?

One of the hardest part to teach people trying to expand into the new social space is the idea of listening. You do not have to be a selling machine to get sales.

That will be the hardest sell for me. Teaching sales people that they can take their foot off the gas pedal in social media, and probably get even better mileage.

These are just some of my ideas… your mileage may vary.

Twiffiency, Twitter Spam and the Making of Twitter-Awesomeness

August 19, 2010 by Phil Buckley 10 Comments

When I noticed the super silly Twiffiency phenomenon blow up on Tuesday I was struck by how much people love getting graded.

Everyone saw the auto-tweets that Twiffiency sent out on your behalf and quickly tested their own.. ummm, something. See, the thing is, even now, no one has any idea what that score means!

That’s when I decided to make my own Twitter gadget, but mine would be AWESOME!

I realized that it had to be simple and look cool, so I would use big font, use the default Twitter background and present people with a score that would make them proud enough to tweet it out voluntarily.

My Twitter-Awesomeness is 110% — Mike is very, very awesome

The Twitter-Awesomeness Grader page was born on Tuesday August 17th about 11am. Mike Adams was it’s first customer at 11:17.

This was version 1.0. At this point you didn’t even have to enter your Twitter name.

After about half an hour I decided to make it seem more life-like (version 2), and add a “Enter your twitter name” part. That way people would feel like something was actually happening.

Shortly after I added a delay and a spinning icon so that you would be even more convinced that it was doing something (version 2.0.1).

Finally I added a link so people could tweet out their results to their followers.

Hundreds of people stopped by, and it was fun to do some “rapid prototyping”, but what did I really learn?

Making a random number generator is easy.
People will do something if you make it easy enough
Everyone likes to be rated high
Lots of people think any widget is actually doing something valuable.

So here’s the dirty secret: my Twitter-Awesomeness Grader is a simple random number generator (between 99 and 110). In fact, when you land on the page, your score has already been determined. Putting in a name is optional. Clicking the button fires off a javascript call that hides the form and shows the score.

I also created a Client Twitter Grader for companies that need to convince a client that their current Twitter efforts are below par.

Why You Hate Your Profile Picture

July 30, 2010 by Phil Buckley 9 Comments

A few days ago, I attended a Better Headshot Tweetup. The idea behind it was simple. A bunch of people get together, network a little, drink some beer and get a few photos taken by a pair of professional photographers from Studio You Photography.

The Tweetup was at MindWorks Multimedia in Durham. It was a great choice because it’s a really cool rehab’d building downtown. Tera Simon did a great job bringing together her company, their awesome workspace and reaching out to Lonerider Beer for FREE BEER!

The photo on the left was taken that night in front of a green screen. I think it’s an awesome photo of Tera. Which is easy because Tera is beautiful. It almost captures her energy and happiness, but not quite.

The thing is, what does Tera think of it? If she’s like most people, she can point to a couple of things she doesn’t like about it.

We all have certain hang-ups about ourselves. Sometimes they are real. For example, I look fat in photos because… well, I’m not skinny. Other times I think I look old in photos, you know why? Right.

Here’s the thing, we usually look better than we give ourselves credit for. When was the last time you looked through a dozen photos of yourself and said, “I look good in every single one.”

How often does someone say, “that’s a great picture of you.” and we then assume they’re just being nice.

That’s the reason I usually tell people to let a friend choose their profile picture. The reason is that your friend/spouse/neighbor can see the real you in a photo instead of just the imperfectness that you zoom in on.

With the growth of social media profile pictures, it’s important that you feel like confident in yourself and the photos you use to present yourself with.

How many photos have you see of yourself where you thought you looked good? Here’s my scale:

I’ve never seen a photo of myself I’ve liked
I’ve only liked 1 0r 2 photos of myself
I can usually find at least one photo from an event that I like how I look
I usually like how I look in photos
The camera loves me

I’m about a 3. How about you?

What Happens When You Let Others Define You

June 4, 2010 by Phil Buckley 14 Comments

This week there was a online reputation management crisis that hit a local bakery. The online reputation management part of the equation was handled so poorly that now all that exists is the digital tire tracks.

There’s a lot of talk about how the bakery handled their problem poorly and how Twitter and Facebook filled up with comments from people saying they’ll no longer support them. But what about someone who moves here tomorrow, how does today’s blowup transfer?

Here’s how Google answers a query for crumb bakery raleigh tonight:

Google search result for crumb bakery raleigh

Bear eating a fish in a river — Bear Food

This means that eventually the “bad press” will overwhelm their other run of the mill search results. Since they have basically gone silent since the shit started hitting the fan, they have allowed others to totally define the entire event, including how they should respond.

I love the advice Lisa Barone gave LeBron James during his reputation management problem.

Here’s my advice. Constantly feed the bear. If you aren’t the one feeding the bear, someone else will feed him for you.

Awesome Alaskan Coastal Brown bear photo by: Alan Vernon.

Why I Shop at Kerr Drug

May 28, 2010 by Phil Buckley 4 Comments

When I moved down from Massachusetts in 2003, I had to adjust to living in a new environment where many things were different. Things that were familiar were easy for me to stick with. The few Dunkin’ Donuts and CVS were the two most familiar stores that were here.

Kerr Drug with Kerr Cafe in Hillsborough, NC — Kerr Drug with Kerr Cafe

Now it’s seven years later and I love sweet tea, Carolina BBQ, the Bulls and I shop at Kerr Drug.

There’s a couple of reasons I now shop at Kerr Drug, but mainly it’s because they are a local drug store, and because of Morgan Siem.

At the 30,000 foot view Kerr, CVS and Walgreens may appear to be very similar. So why do I choose Kerr Drug?

I’ve written about why I love The Pit BBQ, and it’s almost the same reason. For me, it’s personal. Having one of my best friends working with Kerr means that I will do what I can to support her. I know how hard Morgan is working to show Kerr Drug the value and power of social media – and I believe in the same things. I also want to help support a strong social media presence so that they lead the way and help prove the benefits of creating community with outreach, recognition and online coolness.

So the funny thing is, for me, this is absolute ground-zero grassroots social media 101. I am friends with Morgan, Morgan helps Kerr Drug with their social media, so now I support Kerr Drug.

See if this makes sense…

I’m lucky Morgan decided to come to my social media presentation at one of our SEO meetups
I was lucky that Michael offered up the MediaTwo conference room at the last minute for that meetup
Kerr Drug is lucky that they sent Shawn to that meetup
Michael and Ellie were smart to see that the questions he was asking that night were cries for help
Michael was smart to see the potential in Morgan from her participation at that meetup
Kerr Drug is lucky to have one of the best social media strategists in America working on their campaign.

I know that I can’t possibly be the only person that has been impacted like this. Maybe someone reading this will be swayed to Kerr Drug also.

Welcome to a social media world Kerr Drug, you’re in good hands.

Why you need to build your business one customer at a time

May 20, 2010 by Phil Buckley 2 Comments

There’s no other way to build a business than one customer at a time. The truth is, even if you have 100,000 customers each week, they all found you one at a time. Your prices, or value or something appealed to each one of them on a different level. What I like about The Pit may make someone else hate it.

I have brought people to The Pit for lunch and dinner because I love the food AND the way I’m treated there. Some of those people will return because they had a good experience also. So maybe Eric the manager doesn’t come out and greet every customer, but if I’m selling a new guest on how much I like it there, then the job is already being done.

The truth is, there’s no such thing as a single customer. Anywhere I go, I’m going to tell my family if my experience was at either end of the customer service spectrum. Because we hang around a tribe that is mostly the same, we influence them. “It’s a small world” because we hang around people we have a lot in common with. If my wife loves a new thing for our son, she’s going to tell her friends who also have small kids. Gaining or losing a single customer is rare.

99% of the businesses in the US could do with better customer service. That starts at the top and spreads like a virus. If the boss cares, you tend to care. I experienced that first hand while working at a Marriott in Boston while I was in college. There was a feeling of “let’s do everything we can for the customer” that permeated everyone who worked there. It was almost impossible to not be helpful.

But what if I did upset a customer? What if in the modern social media world a customer gives me the Kevin Smith treatment? I realize that it’s an opportunity to learn from. I step in as quickly as possible. Admit my mistake and try to fix it. The days of deny, deny, deny, cover-up, deny are hopefully gone forever (except, of course, in Washington DC).

If you like being treated like a real human being when you’re the customer, why would you think anyone else wouldn’t. For example, when I’m at Home Depot and can’t find anyone to rip my plywood it drives me insane, but then just as often there’s someone there who goes totally above and beyond and gives me hope.

The ideat that big companies can’t do one-on-one relationship building is just plain wrong. They can, and they can do it well if they want to allocate the resources. When you compare the lifetime value of a customer, it makes the salary of the person keeping them happy seem well worth it.

Consider that the cell phone companies spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars to capture each new customer. Yet seemingly then do everything in their power to alienate you! If you could keep just 1,000 customers from switching carriers, you could save your company half a million dollars a year.

Building your customer base one satisfied customer at a time seems silly, until you realize that’s there’s no other option.

Photo by: loop oh

Can you really build your business one customer at a time?

May 17, 2010 by Phil Buckley 8 Comments

Come on, we all know that you hear stuff like, “value every customer”, “a single customer can have an impact beyond that single sale” or “1,000 true fans can sustain you”. But in the real world that’s bullshit right? You want to be the one to tell your boss that you spent the last 8 hours cultivating a single sale? You want to be the person to tell your boss that 1,000 customers can sustain his 401K, medical plan and bonus structure?

The real question is how do you fake it? Can you make it appear that you care about your customers? When they start complaining about some silly minor issue, you’re suppose to stop what your doing and coddle them. Is that really where we’re at now? My dried out chicken breast gives me some sort of right to chat with some underpaid social media intern who apologizes for a store he’s probably never heard of and asks if I’d like a dollar off coupon. It’s pathetic really.

Am I going to “connect” with my local plumber on Facebook? Maybe I should become a fan of the children’s resale shop in the next town over. Oh, wait, I know, I’ll start following Ashton Kutcher on Twitter so I’ll know all the trendy places in Los Angeles (even though I live in North Carolina).

Where would the world be if people cared about each other in a real way? Could we have giant corporations that employ thousands of people and treat them like human machines? Hell no! We couldn’t have companies like General Motors, AT&T and Microsoft if we had to value customer feedback and bend to the will of the mob. Those companies are there to make a profit for their shareholders, not to listen to you whine about “bad design”, “spotty coverage” or “monopolistic tendencies”.

There’s people saying that the current wave of social media tools are fundamentally changing the way business is being done. You may have noticed those changes because your mortgage is going down, cars are getting cheaper, your cable company called and is now delivering all channels in HD for free and cell phone plans top out at $14.99/month (unlimited).

Now you may be able to pull out one small example of a business “doing it right”, but please don’t drag that ComcastCares horse out of the barn again. How old is that one? And have you talked to people who use Comcast? They still hate their cable company.

If you got this far reading this post, you should probably leave a comment so we can “engage”, but that’s a lot of work and bother, so you’ll probably just click away – because as micro-consumption digivores, we only make an effort when it’s really no effort at all.

Photo by: Barry Adams

Raleigh Media Leaders Lunch Prize

April 26, 2010 by Phil Buckley 9 Comments

I just got back from a great lunch with some of the smartest people in the Triangle world. It was the prize that we gave away at the April 6th Raleigh Media Leaders event.

We met up at Raleigh’s best Asian restaurant, The Duck and Dumpling. I hadn’t met Brooks Bell (Founder and CEO of Brooks Bell Interactive) or Jesse Lipson (CEO of ShareFile) before so I was happy to make those new connections. I had met Michael Hubbard (CEO of MediaTwo Interactive) before, and always enjoy talking with him about the current social media landscape. The winners of the lunch were Jenni Bruckman who is the Senior Marketing Manager at Coldwell Banker Howard Perry and Walston, Maura McDonald who is a freelance designer running McDezigns and Theresa Spera who is the Director of Programs and Member Services for the Automotive Aftermarket Suppliers Association.

Raleigh Media Leader's lunch at The Duck & Dumpling

After some really good edamame and handmade sweet potato chips we got into some brief introductions and some questions.

Mailing list questions, how to start, how to refactor and how to get opt-n when you buy a third-party list. What I found really impressive was the insightful questions Brooks asked while trying to get to the root of the problem, the on-the-fly solutions Jesse has used in the past to overcome similar problems and the new metrics Michael suggested as better indicators than just “opens”.

We spent some time talking about the changing face of both real estate and automotive. Theresa shared a great story about traditional snail-mail versus email. It’s important to remember that the best medium is the one that works.

I love the idea of a casual lunch like this as a way to make new connections. The Media Leaders were generous with their expertise and time, the winners were also allowing us to cut into their busy schedules and that’s always appreciated.

All the participants are people who should be on your list of people to know in the Triangle. All of them are on Twitter except Theresa, but she did acknowledge that the peer pressure is getting unbearable, so soon she will relent.

Michael Hubbard as mediatwo
Brooks Bell as brooksbell
Jesse Lipson as ShareFile
Maura McDonald as MCDezigns
Jenni Bruckman as jennibruckman

Thanks to the entire Raleigh Media Leaders team, Brian McDonald, Morgan Siem, Sarah Burris and Dan London.

Graduating into a Social Media World

April 11, 2010 by Phil Buckley 12 Comments

I recently had a request for some help from a young woman who is graduating this spring from a nearby college. She asked if I could help her get started towards finding work in the communication field.

It got me thinking about a couple of different things. The first became even clearer while listening to Seth Godin’s latest book Linchpin. Most of us come out of school woefully prepared to make our way in the world. We offer a prospective employer only the promise that we’re not really as pathetic as our resume make us out to be. We almost never have any actual experience doing anything valuable. We generally think we’re smarter than we really are, and that we should be paid more that we’re worth.

The second was just how connected you can become by going out and actually meeting people. I’ve spent the last 18 months trying to build up my network in Raleigh. When I received that email the other day was really the first time I stopped to consider the awesome people I am now connected to.

So back to the first point. My advice to someone just getting started is hustle. If you’re unsure what that means, watch some of Gary Vanerchuk’s videos (or read his book). If you’re still unsure, go have lunch with Molly Buckley and she’ll explain it. Molly lives hustle 24/7, or watch how someone like Gwynne Murphy works her ass off for two different companies and still finds time to attend a ton of networking events and volunteer at still more.

Make yourself desirable. Make yourself memorable. Look at yourself from the other side of the table. Why should someone like Ignite Social Media hire you? There’s no doubt 100 other resumes in the pile with yours that are equal to, if not better than yours. I can tell you that the fancy typeface and extra thick paper you printed your resume on won’t be the deciding factor.

What if you already knew a person who worked there? What if you knew a couple of them? What if you had previously bumped into Jim Tobin and left a good impression? Then your resume might not even be in the pile with the other 100 people.

You’ve heard the old saying, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” Often you hear that said in a derisive way from someone who didn’t get a job or promotion. Usually that person spends more time playing fantasy football at ESPN.com than worrying about what’s going to happen when her job goes away, so she’s unprepared and caught flat-footed.

There’s another saying, “build your network before you need it.” That is one of my favorites. Very early in my social media life, I was sitting next to Raleigh’s Mr. Hustle, Wayne Sutton. We were at a small tweetup because Jason Keath was in town. It was my first visit to The Pit BBQ and the manager came out to say hello because of all the chatter he saw on Twitter about the tweetup. Wayne and the manager chatted for a few minutes and left the door open to do something better planned in the future. After he left, Wayne said 3 important words, “always be networking”. There were a few other people at that dinner that I have since become friends with, all of them have large and influential networks. Knowing them allows me to connect with their networks if needed, and vice-versa.

Sarah and Morgan at Raleigh Media Leaders — Sarah and Morgan checking out an iPad at Raleigh Media Leaders

Last week I met Sara Gilbert and Morgan Eberle at the Raleigh Media Leaders event. What impressed me about both of them is that they were smart enough to show up. They were hustling. I approached them right at the beginning of the event because I hadn’t seen them around before, and once they said UNC and Journalism I knew I could connect them to at least 2 other people with the same background at the event. I pointed out my friend Morgan Siem to them and saw them all talking a few minutes later. I’m not sure what, if anything, will come of that meeting for any of them, but it’s a connection all 3 would have missed out on if they had stayed home and watched tv.

So if you’re graduating soon, what are you doing to get a jump on your competitors? Do you have your Facebook page locked down properly? Do you have a Twitter stream that wouldn’t scare away an potential boss? How’s your LinkedIn profile? How’s your blog look?

If you think you’re going to be able to run past Molly, Gwynne, Sara and Morgan by simply emailing in your resume, you may want to apply to grad school tomorrow.

100m photo by Jonas Merian

Value versus Free

April 2, 2010 by Phil Buckley 15 Comments

Tuesday night is the second Media Leaders event being held in Raleigh. The first one held back in January was great and I expect this one to be just as good. The question for some people is, “is it worth paying for?”

It’s an interesting question, free has taken on a life of its own in the social media age. It’s a question that I and the other organizers wrestle with. In the final analysis it comes down to the question of how much do you value an opportunity to meet and socialize with friends, peers and mentors in your industry and community.

For me, if I want to just hang out with my peers at a tweetup, that’s always available to me for free. I have very low expectations of such an event to actually make an impact on my life. It’s just fun to see all my friends.

If I want to see my business peers and maybe take it up a notch, then I would try to see who else in my industry is attending Chuck Hester‘s LinkedIn Live event. I know Chuck spends a lot of time getting those ready and offsets the cost by having companies sponsor the event.

We think of Media Leaders as a slightly different concept. We aim to make the event equally useful for C-level executives and entry-level evangelists. There’s not a lot of interruptions or music or food, it’s aimed at letting people connect.

There’s not a lot of places where someone just starting out can bump into a true leaders like Media Two‘s CEO Michael Hubbard , Brooks Bell Interactive‘s Founder and President Brooks Bell or ShareFile‘s CEO Jesse Lipson. Not only can you talk to them, you have a pretty good chance of winning the drawing, which is a lunch with them where you can pick their brains! Spending an hour with such smart and successful people could actually change your life. Maybe they give you a new idea, or tell you the crazy idea you have is brilliant (or terrible), and maybe there’s some real synergy and they want to work with you on something. It’s the opportunity to make the connection that’s important.

But what if you don’t win the free lunch? Everyone attending the first event seemed to be in the perfect mood. Because it was a straight-up networking event, everyone chatted and met a lot of new people. Use the event to meet a competitor, talk to someone who is hiring or a company you’ve always wanted to ally with.

I’ve been cutting back on time I’m spending attending social events to only include the ones I feel have real value for me. This is one that meets that criteria. If you’re attending just to hang out in the corner with your close friends, you’re missing the true value of the event.

The Raleigh Media Leaders event is on April 6th at Issac Hunter’s Oak City Tavern on Fayetteville Street in downtown Raleigh. You can still get tickets for the event.

Photo from: Brian McDonald

How Does Your Church’s Reputation Fare When Crowdsourced?

April 1, 2010 by Phil Buckley 3 Comments

I heard a fascinating segment on All Things Considered during my long commute home yesterday. It was about a new website called Church Rater.

The basic idea is that when you move into a new community and need to find someplace to worship, now you can see what others are saying about the local churches. Interesting right? Then you quickly zigzag into the other associated questions. Who is writing the reviews? Why are they reviewing that church? All the same questions that businesses dealt with a few years ago.

If I run the hardware store on Main Street and my competitor writes a review saying I stink, well, such is life as a private business. With religion, there’s a lot more tied up. People call some churches cults, or certain pastors are singled out as oppressors. Should that type of stuff really be in a church review?

I’m a huge fan of Yelp style reviews, and I think that a site like ChurchRater.com is on to something. I also think that it will become a lightning rod.

When I moved from Massachusetts to North Carolina I had to find a new church, and it meant I had to spend a few weeks sitting in different parishes until I found one I liked. I would have appreciated a little guidance.

One of my favorite parts of the report was a quote from Dwight Friesen, who teaches theology at Mars Hill Graduate School. He says it reduces it to a sort of Ecclesiastical Bandstand, “Yeah it’s got a good sermon, easy to worship to. I’ll give it an 8.7.”

I think the problem stems from the plethora of terrible church websites. I look at my own church’s website and cringe at how terrible it is. If someone takes the time to keep up the church website, you’ll end up getting better, more targeted worshipers into your church, and less angry people who bash you at ChurchRater.com.

This is another case of a business that lagged to far behind the web, and the web hates a vacuum.

I’d love to hear your take on an open church rating system.

Photo by: Ed Yourdon

Raleigh Media Leaders Inaugural Networking Event

January 28, 2010 by Phil Buckley 39 Comments

On January 27, 2010 Raleigh, North Carolina proved itself as a major social networking hub. Again!

About 3 weeks ago, I saw a link on my Twitter stream about a nationwide networking event called MediaLeaders. I sent an email to Josh Ochs in Los Angeles to see if I could shoehorn Raleigh in at the last-minute. Josh liked the idea and basically told me to grab some people and get going.

I had not planned anything of any real significance before, so I knew I would need a lot of help. I had originally bounced the idea off Sarah Burris, and she helped me get excited about it, so I knew I had to bring her in right away. Sarah spends her days doing PR for Carolina Advanced Digital so I knew she’d be a huge help. She handled everything flawlessly.

I also reached out to the sharpest marketing mind I know, Brian McDonald. Brian was the taskmaster that we needed to stay focused on making the event something different, something that people would look forward to attending. There’s no doubt we wouldn’t have had the reach we did without Brian McDonald on the team.

One of my best friends also happens to be a serious social media workhorse at the MediaTwo Interactive Ad Agency. Morgan Siem has quickly become my go-to girl for all things social. She always had a simple way to fix our complicated hurdles.

I had only really known Dan London a few months, but in that time he had really impressed me with his big-picture understanding of marketing, search and social. Dan was there all along the way helping us sharpen the ideas that ultimately led to the big night. Of course Dan did have a weird need to hang around his house after work, something about a wife who was due to have a baby girl the day before the event!

We all got used to Google Wave by the end of week one, and by the night before the event we were old pros. I was unsure of its value until that point, but as a collaborative tool, it worked great.

Once the team was in place, we had to choose a venue. It wasn’t an easy choice. I love the guys at The Pit, but I wasn’t sure it was the perfect type of venue. I had just met the guys that run Issac Hunter’s Oak City Tavern downtown, and it’s a fantastic place, but we would have had to figure out how to bring in some food and we were short on time. The Raleigh Times was also in the mix, but I thought it might be a tight squeeze. That meant that our best choice was going the The Busy Bee Cafe. It had everything we were looking for.

Now we were down to about 2 weeks to see if we could actually get some buzz about it. We were all really excited at the chance to host an event that the awesome Triangle community could enjoy.

Step 1 was figuring out what we would do for 3 hours. We tossed around a bunch of ideas, but we kept coming back to wanting to offer something different from Chuck Hester’s LinkedIn Live events, or the Triangle Social Media Club‘s events or random tweetups and meetups. We wanted to put something together that would offer a benefit for C-Level executives as well as more junior people who can benefit from meeting and connecting with them.

The MediaLeaders networking concept is on creating a cutting edge junction of leaders in PR, media, marketing, advertising and tech while discussing current events and new ideas. We figured that meant trying to create a relaxed social atmosphere where everyone could schmooze and also make new contacts. We would keep the music low, the interruptions to a minimum and the overall value high. We also decided to have one prize to give away, but not something you could wrap-up. We decided to reach out to 3 of the most influential and smartest people in this orbit and ask them to give up some of their valuable time to have lunch with 3 lucky winners. Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim fame, Patty Briguglio, President of MMI Public Relations and Barrett Joyner the Development Director of The Healing Place of Wake County.

We arrived and started setting up about 6pm. Sarah had grabbed some adhesive name tags so that as people came in, they could be easily recognized, and also brought about 70 sharpies in every color possible. We set up a small table by the door to handle what we figured would be a manageable crowd of about 75.

When Chris Moody from Bandwidth showed up with their giant old-school telephone booth, we knew we were almost ready. Chris has been an awesome force on the Raleigh scene and the photos with their phonebooth has been a huge success due mostly to the beautiful photography of Sledge.

A half hour in we had a line down the stairs waiting to get in! It was getting busy, and fast. At 7:40 we took a minute to thank everyone for coming but you could hardly hear us over the PA system because we had already let over 100 people through the door. Thankfully Lisa Sullivan, Leslie Wilkinson, Mandy Steinhardt, Tucker Peterson and Karl Sakas volunteered to help us out. Karl and Tucker estimated later that at least 150 people showed up for the Raleigh Media Leaders event!

Everyone seemed to be having a pretty good time, I didn’t notice people starting to trickle out until about 9pm. There was still about 50 people hanging around at 10pm when the event was officially over. By the time Brian and I were lugging laptops, projectors and cables down the stairs at 11pm, there was only a handful of friends keeping us company.

We saw lots of Tweets from people saying the had a good time, which is always nice. My favorite Media Leaders tweet came from Colleen Bradley who attended the Boston Media Leaders event:

That’s what networking is all about. Building a network that can help you when you need help, and offering help when you can offer help.

I watched the tweets from the other Media Leaders cities, and they couldn’t hold a candle to Raleigh. When Wayne Sutton talked about the 19 reasons the Triangle is better than Silicon Valley, here is #20.

I had a blast helping organize the Raleigh Media Leaders networking event. I hope everyone who attended got something out of it, even if it was just some of the awesome hummus that The Busy Bee provided.

We’re already thinking about the next one, but would love to get some feedback about what worked and what didn’t.

Thank you to the entire Triangle community for a great night!

You can see a bunch of photos from the event on Flickr tagged with Raleigh and MediaLeaders