Jim Connolly Marketing

I’m all ears!

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Here’s a quick communication tip, based on my observations of some amazing communicators over the years.  All of them shared a common characteristic, which is essential if you want people to REALLY connect with you.

Your undivided attention

In every instance, these masters of communication gave 100% of their attention to the person they were speaking with, whilst they were with that person.  They maintained eye contact, nodded in agreement in all the right places and never once looked around the room.  They listened a lot, and spoke a little.  When they were with that person, they WERE with that person – 100%!

Some of the least effective communicators, like those you often meet at networking events, do the total opposite.  You can see them looking over your shoulder for their next networking victim, as they say; “tell me about your business” or “tell me how I can help you.”

Business is all about people

Business is all about people and the way they feel.  If we take time to show genuine interest in; our colleagues, our clients, our prospective clients and our contacts etc, we can massively improve our relationships and make business a lot more enjoyable and profitable.  Notice I said; “take time to show genuine interest”?  I know you are already interested in these people, but just like those expert communicators I mentioned earlier, it’s important to show people clearly we are interested in them and what they have to say.  Let them know you are listening, with visual feedback.

Not all spam is created equal!

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I was just thinking how the term spam is being used right now, for a lot more than unwanted, unsolicited emails.

For example:

  • If someone sends you an unwanted sales message via a social networking site, we call them social media spammers.
  • When they leave comments on your blog, purely to build links or sell us something (rather than contribute), we call them comment spammers.
  • When they fill forums with cut and paste marketing messages, we call them forum spammers.
  • When they send you unsolicited text messages, we call them SMS spammers.
  • When they subscribe you to their newsletters without asking, we call them newsletter spammers.

Not all spam is created equal!

What you may not have known, is that some of the people who use the kind of techniques outlined above have NO IDEA that we regard them as spammers!

In many cases, they are often acting out of ignorance.  They see others using one of those techniques, so they think it’s OK.  They assume that it must work, to some degree.  They forget that even if a small number of people visit their site after they did any of the above, they may have just ruined their reputation with thousands or tens of thousands of other people in order to get those few clicks.

Whilst it may be popular to assume that everyone who you consider a spammer runs a suspect business, I have found that in many cases the businesses are legit.  The businesses look dubious, simply because they are being marketed using dubious techniques. I’m not talking about those who send automated spam emails to millions off people every day.  I’m talking about poorly informed business owners, who send you messages you never asked for, newsletters you never subscribed to and Tweets that read like a sales pitch.

The bottom line is that anyone, even legitimate people with a great service, can be written off as spammers if they pester or pursue people with their online marketing.  No one needs that kind of reputation, if they are serious about developing a long term, successful business.

Twitter follower numbers have little to do with influence!

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Twitter follower numbers mean a great deal to a lot of people. However, it seems that as Twitter matures as a service, the number of followers someone has, has very little to do with their influence. For those of you like myself, who use Twitter as part of your marketing mix, this is worth knowing; as you can waste a LOT of time chasing follower numbers, when it’s the quality of your Twitter network that really matters.

Twitter follower numbers and influence

I’ve noticed a significant change over the past year, where many of the people with tens of thousands of followers, who ReTweet my posts, generate little if any traffic to the blog.  Yet, many people with relatively small Twitter followings seem to have far more influence, when it comes to getting their followers to take some kind of measurable action.

It seems that I am not alone in this observation.

A recent paper by Meeyoung Cha from the Max Planck Institute, was covered in The Harvard Business Review.  With Twitter’s full permission, Cha’s team monitored 54 million ACTIVE Twitter users and was able to measure a number of metrics, including things like ReTweets and the number of times a user / brand was mentioned by their followers.  They came to the conclusion that Twitter follower numbers do not equal influence. Cha said:

“Our claim is that follower count is not sufficient to capture the influence of a user (i.e., the ability of an user to sway the opinions of her followers). It only shows how popular the user is (i.e., the size of her audience). But, as we showed in our paper, retweets and mentions, which measure the audience responsiveness to a user’s tweets, do not correlate strongly with number of followers.” (There’s an excellent, short summery of the paper in this post on ReadWriteWeb)

Tens of thousands of Twitter followers & near zero influence

I am seeing examples of this every day.  Only last week, a guy ReTweeted a link to this blog, to his 40,000 followers.  As he works in marketing and claims to be a highly influential Twitter user, I was curious what the click through rate would be – So, I monitored it!

In the 60 minutes following his ReTweet, just 5 (yes, FIVE) people in total visited that particular post.  I will give him the benefit of the doubt, and say all 5 clicks came from his 40,000 followers.

An hour later, I asked a friend of mine with under 1000 followers, to share that same link and using her tracking software, monitor how many people clicked the link.  26 people clicked through in the next 60 minutes, using her unique RT link, all of whom showed up on my own analytics software.

What are your thoughts, regarding influence on Twitter?  Please take a moment to share your feedback!

Let’s work together and grow your business. To find out more click here!

Marketing messages: It’s all about THEM!

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All too often, small business owners market their services based on what is most appealing to them.  They make offers that they think are great.  They focus on benefits that they think are important.

Here’s the challenge with that approach: It’s very ineffective!

Your prospective clients buy for their reasons, not yours.  If you want them to become clients, you need to be able to see things from their perspective and adapt your marketing messages accordingly.  You need to write in terms that are native to them, not you.  You need to inspire them to call you, email you, visit your store etc, and they will only do that if you give them a good reason to.  This means using their language, to demonstrate the benefits of what you do, based on their most pressing needs.  It’s all about THEM.

I saw someone recently trying to encourage small business owners, to attend a free talk he was giving, about how to use foursquare.  Here’s what his primary marketing message was:

“Learn how to geosocialize with your local commercial spectrum!”

Now, for 99% of the small business population, that phrase will be more likely to turn them off, than convince them to check out the service.  He was talking in HIS language, not his intended audience’s.  He failed to explain in clear business terms, what the benefits of attending his talk would be.  He failed to explain why a busy business owner should take time out from running their business, to go and listen to him.

One of the fastest ways you can improve the effectiveness of your marketing copy writing, is to review your material and ask yourself:

  • Is this written in the language I use, or the language of my prospective clients / customers?
  • Does this message clearly explain, in as few words as possible, compelling reasons why they need my product or service?

If you find your copy is failing on either front, rewrite it.  This time, place all the emphasis on them and their needs.

Let’s work together and grow your business. To find out more click here!

How dependent is your business on Twitter, Facebook etc?

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If your Facebook or Twitter account got suspend or deleted, what impact would it have on your business?

I ask this question, because I’m seeing more and more people invest huge amounts of their valuable time building social networks on 3rd party sites, which they have very little real control over.  Conversely, I see remarkably few people invest anywhere like enough time on the development of their own social media platform – namely, a commercial, self-hosted blog (like this one.)  I’m sure you’ve seen it too; people who only manage to put new content on their own blogs a couple of times a month, yet they update Twitter or Facebook on and off all day long.  Their blogs are being neglected, yet their Facebook stream is packed with interesting posts, great ideas and useful links.

In other words, they are building their primary social networking hub on something they have little real control over – Something that can be suspended or deleted without their consent, at any time.

Twitter account suspensions

I was prompted to write this after receiving an email this morning from a reader, who has just had his Twitter account reinstated AFTER Twitter suspended it, without warning or reason, for 8 days!  Although I no longer follow him, I do read his stream occasionally and it is a very typical Twitter account, which doesn’t spam or abuse anyone.  By the time his account was restored, 2 new prospective clients had unfollowed him.  Apparently, they saw the “account suspended” sign and assumed he was a scammer!

In fact, of the 30 or so people I know of, who have had their Twitter accounts suspended, I can’t think of any that were actually doing anything wrong.  By the way, one of those I helped get their account back, via a conversation on Friendfeed, was non-other than Chris Anderson; Editor of Wired Magazine and creator of what we now know as the freemium marketing model.  Again, a completely random suspension.

Free blogs get suspended too

Just over a week ago, 70,000 people, (yes seventy thousand) had their Blogs shut down without notice, when the blogetery blogging platform they were using was closed down.  Some of these people will have invested months of their time, developing content for that platform, only to see it erased without warning.  Had that same time been invested in developing on their own self-hosted blog, it would still be there.

Even WordPress.com, which I consider the best free blogging platform by far, can suspend or remove your blog if, for example, one of their moderators believes you have Search Engine Optimized it, so that it’s too Google friendly and does not read well enough for people.  In a list of blogs that are not allowed on WordPress.com, they list their now famous SEO clause:

Blogs that are written for search engines instead of humans. These blogs are dedicated to trying to fool Google and other search engines into ranking them or the sites they link to highly. WordPress.com is not meant for this type of activity.

The challenge here, is that many people would consider that “type of activity” to be nothing more than SEO!  It’s a very grey area.  What you or I consider a legitimately optimised blog post, one particular moderator at WordPress may consider to be too SEO friendly.  If so, and someone reports it, you are at best suspended or at worst, the blog is deleted.  I have to say here, that typically, the moderators at WordPress are very good these days and only want to block scammy blogs.

Your marketing on your platform

However, why give someone who knows nothing about you or your business, the power to suspend or delete your business blog, when you can build a self-hosted WordPress blog, like this one, which you control and direct 100%?  In my opinion, this alone is a great reason for business bloggers to consider owning their own platform.

My point is that whilst social networking sites are a brilliant idea and a great opportunity for you to reach new people, you should also consider investing in a central Internet space or hub, which YOU control and can develop with total freedom.  No 3rd party should have the power over you or your business, to be able to pull the plug on your primary online platform.

But I put at least 95% of my social media time into producing content for this blog and connecting with the reader community here.

Because of this, if any of my social media / social networking accounts were suspended, I would still have a thriving community of readers, commenters and people who regularly email me via this blog.  I would still be able to reach new prospective clients every hour of each day.

Surviving information overload!

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Following on from yesterday’s post, about the need to be a student and not a sheep, today I would like to focus briefly on the importance of improving our comprehension in the era of information overload.  It’s one thing for us to read something of value, but if we fail to comprehend what we have just consumed, we will learn nothing.

I deliberately tend to write shorter posts than many bloggers, because like every professional writer worth their salt, I know the importance of brevity.  A well written, short piece of information rich copy should be easy for the reader to absorb.  So, that’s what I aim for.  However, when you look at the comments on longer blog posts, it shows that many people comment, with very little understanding of what they just read.  I get it here occasionally myself.  I have had people arguing with me, via comments here, simply because they never took the time to read everything, before commenting.  They were arguing with me, even though they were in 100% agreement with what I wrote.

Information overload

The challenge for all of us today, is that there is just so much content out there.  I did a search on Google a moment ago, for the phrase marketing blogs and found mine (on page 1!) with over 90 MILLION other results.

Just 15 years ago, if we wanted to keep abreast of what was happening in business, we had the business section of our preferred daily newspaper and maybe a few industry magazines, which were published monthly.  That was it!

Today, there is an almost limitless supply of business information; some good, some not so good, but all vying for our attention.  Our senses are assaulted with a seemingly endless supply of must click links via social media too.  It’s little wonder people are skimming over content rather than reading and comprehending it.   So, what we see right now are people who tend to skim over 50 or 100 articles or blog posts in a day, rather than actually read and think about 5 or 10 of them.

In our desire not to miss anything important, we risk missing everything!

It’s a little like those networkers, who flit from person to person after 30 seconds, because they want to meet everyone at an event.  They meet 150 people and yet they connect with  no one.  Another person at the same event, studies the attendee list and decides to selectively speak with a dozen people.  He or she connects with all 12 people and potentially makes some really useful contacts.

For me, one of the best ways to improve comprehension, is to read more selectively.  Look for the best sources of information in your niche, read their work and then take time to think about what you have just read and how you can use it.  Birds of a feather flock together, so you should find that by sticking with your most valued writers, they will introduce you to new, great writers too.  Give yourself a hard limit, by setting your bar high and only read from writers, who regularly deliver the goods.

Replace those who are under delivering, so your list stays fluid, but always focused on what YOU find most valuable.