Tag: Social Media

Some Thoughts On Followers: “Fake followers are hard to shake”

Carl Setzer

I just read “Fake followers are hard to shake” over at AdAge. Yeah, buying followers is tempting. Sure, it might look good on the surface, to have hundreds or thousands of followers. I’ve had many, many people ask me about buying followers. I think is a waste of money.

  • First, why? If your social media efforts are for a business, fake followers aren’t going to come to your store. They don’t engage. They don’t add any value.
  • Then there are all the recent efforts to purge fake accounts. If your follower count drops massively after one of the follower purges, you’re outed
  • Lastly, as this article points out, there are fairly straightforward ways to determine how many fake followers you have. If your goal is to become an influencer, or gain business leads, tools are coming that will out the buy followers tactic.

I expect that, in the not too far distant future, the various algorithms will easily detect copious numbers of fake followers. And I expect that will hurt you, whether via SEO hits from Google or Bing, or social media feeds devaluing your content. I firmly believe this is coming soon.

So, don’t opt for the lazy and fast. Build your brand slowly, carefully and organically. Engage other folks, post good content, and be your unique self.

Watch “How Unbox Therapy became the Biggest Tech Channel on YouTube” on YouTube

Carl Setzer

I stumbled upon this video today. Paddy Galloway does a great job in his analysis of Unbox Therapy, one of YouTube’s most popular tech channels. He gives some great insights for utilizing Youtube’s tools and algorithms to maximize your video’s presence.

Social Media Ads: Don’t Forget To Focus Geographically

Carl Setzer

Just saw an ad on Twitter for a service available in New York and San Francisco. Well, I’m in Seattle. I expect I’ll make my way to each of those cities in the next few years, but not in the near-term. It looked like a great food idea, but it’s not something I can do anything with right now.

What’s the problem, you might ask? Well, I expect they want their ads clicked on by likely customers. I’m not in that category, living a few thousand miles away. So, the few cents they paid for my click won’t turn into revenue, even if I love them.

Maybe, just maybe, these folks are looking at expanding to the Seattle area. But then you should have the ads go to a landing page for an expansion campaign.

Ads like these can be focused on geography. Pretty slick, giving you much more solid impact. And an essential tool to avoid wasting your online advertising budget.

A few years ago, one of my team-mates placed a Facebook ad but didn’t refine by geography. We had a great return on that if measured by phone calls. But most of those 100s of calls were from well outside our region. We would never be able to convert them to sales. So, a waste of money and time. It was easily fixed, but we spent a few hours of time answering gobs of out area phone calls.

Seth Godin’s: The Toxic Antidote To Goodwill

Carl Setzer

I’ve long admired Seth Godin’s writings and blog posts. Today’s post got me thinking, since it covers situations I’ve needed to respond to, and on many different sides.

The toxic antidote to goodwill

Seth points out:

“Anyone who has done the math will tell you that word of mouth is the most efficient way to gain trust, spread the word and grow.

And yet…

It only takes a moment to destroy. Only a few sentences, a heartless broken promise, a lack of empathy, and it’s gone. Not only that, but the lost connection can easily lead to lawsuits.”

I’ve had team members act this way, seen my leaders act this way, and, most importantly, received this attitude many times: “It’s not my fault. I did a perfect job. Tough luck.”

It destroys connection. Word of mouth now will work against you. In today’s highly connected world, these sorts of slip-ups can go viral and bring you a great deal of negative attention. And, sorry, I don’t buy the “any attention is good attention”.

When I was at Starbucks, I was part of the Corporate Social Responsibility team. Environmental issues, business practices, and corporate charitable giving were key components of our work (though that’s not all inclusive). When asked once, what value we brought to the company, my reply was “being allowed to stay in business”. More and more people are expecting companies to live ethically (within a range of definitions of “ethical”, of course). Considering such things as communities protesting the building of Wal-Marts, it’s clear, to me, that companies are going to face expectations of behavior that they ignore at their existential peril. And expecting to wait 5 years before acting is probably the most fatal of all thoughts.

Over the years, I’ve had Milton Friedman’s statement “a business’ responsibility is to maximize shareholder value” presented to me many, many times. Though I my eyes roll at that (I’m firmly buy into the Triple Bottom Line engagement model),  I find the response of “what time period are we talking about?” to be the best. “Maximized shareholder value” for today? This minute only? Should the future ability to operate be sacrificed for maximized profits for the next earnings report? How many times has Wall Street rewarded such short-term thinking? Massive layoffs create a super strong quarter? Exciting! Except now the company can’t scale, or, sometimes, can’t even meet their current business flow. Considering the long-term detriment for such short-term decisions needs to be rewarded.

One additional thought with all this: the power of the individual. Sure, I can post a nasty critique of <insert evil company> on <Twitter/Facebook/Instagram> and get thousands/millions of views, have the “contact us” section of your website crash, and your phones ringing incessantly for days. But there’s the other side of this. The power of the empowered employee who chooses to engage, and solve problems. Sadly, it won’t be as powerful. It would be great to see “Oh My God, <company x>, your <employee name here> did <awesome thing> and our lives are so much better” end up with 1.5 million likes and RTs. But that won’t happen without a significant cultural shift. But that pushes you in the right direction. And if you don’t have a huge global presence, that’s the gold. Might actually be the only gold. Which, once tarnished, is so terribly hard to get back. You might not be able to make that investment in time/money/energy to repair before your company fails.

 

Food for Thought: Anil Dash’s “The Year I Didn’t Retweet Men”

Carl Setzer
Twitter's Megaphone

I’d forgotten about Anil’s post to Medium a “little ways back”, so I was able to look with fresh eyes.

“The Year I Didn’t Retweet Men”

I really appreciate his efforts to amplify responsibly. And have tried, over the years, to take the same idea to heart. I may not have Anil’s reach, but I have a significant online following. Significant enough that I feel a certain responsibility to use my platform justly.

I like how his efforts changed:

  1. the nature of his online interactions
  2. the flavor of his feed
  3. and how it changed his perceptions about the world
  4. made his experience on Twitter happier

Though not a fan of the whole “resolution” thing, and since it’s August, seems kinda silly anyway, I like the idea of making purposeful decisions.

I intend to be much more thoughtful about what I share. I have tried to avoid the meme-du-jour, and things everyone else is doing. I also have avoided any hate-retweeting. Our world has enough rage, including the things that drive me towards rage. I have been trying to focus on the positive, yet avoiding a Pollyannaish approach. Positive and effective efforts, change, thoughts: that’s what I try to amplify.

So, doubling down on this. Thanks, Anil, for the reminder and motivation.

Seattle Big Blog Meetup Reunion And Such

Carl Setzer

Several years ago Monica Guzman, then with the Seattle PI’s Big Blog, started hosting Big Blog meet ups. I stumbled upon one my posts from one, pinged the folks in the picture, and the discussion shifted to having a re-union.

So, we’ve launched the discussion. Part of the purpose for this post is to have the discussion in a single space, and not fill up our Twitter feeds.

Anyway, please comment below with ideas, suggestions, interests. Also, check back often. I’ll update this as it progresses.

Pro-tips to maximize social media marketing

Carl Setzer

I subscribed to Ragan’s PR Daily years ago. Ragan provides timely insight into the current state of PR and it’s related fields.

Lauren Friedman just posted “3 tips for creating a real-time marketing command center“. Her points are spot-on. Read the article! However, here’s the  highlights:

  1. Social Media marketing/PR is about engagement (sorry for the buzzword, but it’s important to get this). Listen to the audience, read hashtag threads, know what the discussion is about and your relevance to it.
  2. Know your market! How is your audience going to respond your commentary. And, sometimes, silence is valuable. One doesn’t need to be involved in every high-profile discussion, and at times it’s critical to steer clear.
  3. Teamwork: having valued “ears” you can bounce ideas off “right now” is valuable. Diversity is key to those teams, ensuring you avoid the tone-deaf statements.

So, take a minute and give it a read.