Social Pollination

Yet Another Round Up About the Lack of Women in Tech

Monica O'Brien — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:04:19 +0000

Honestly, I hate this topic. It annoys me and it bores me and I wish everyone would just stop worrying about inequality in the workplace, and especially in tech start-ups. But since the topic is making it’s rounds again, maybe instead of being annoyed and bored I should take the opportunity to educate people on why this is not a problem.

Here is the round-up first:

Addressing The Lack Of Women Leading Tech Start-Ups from The Wall Street Journal… in which the writer talks about how we need more women in tech and for some reason singles out TechCrunch

Too Few Women In Tech? Stop Blaming The Men. from TechCrunch in which Michael Arrington explains that women entrepreneurs who are qualified are so few and far between, and so sick of speaking at every tech conference under the sun

My Challenge to Michael Arrington & TechCrunch (Hint: it’s Not Hard) in which a woman named Michelle asks Michael Arrington to moderate his comments section because she was verbally bashed by a small group of men on the post for simply defending women

Who Really Was the Man Behind the Curtain in the Women in Tech Debacle? in which Michelle relates her experience to the real issues women face in the tech and entrepreneurship space

Women Don’t Need Exposure in which Rebecca suggests that the problem is the networks that men have in place that women don’t have the same access to

I responded to Rebecca’s post, which I actually enjoyed. I’ve adopted my comments below for this post:

As a woman who has often worked in tech/entrepreneurship I really don’t get why people care about having some sort of ratio. I just think the whole thing is pointless. Meaningless. Who cares if the industry is not 50% women? Or in this case, 10% women? It doesn’t affect anyone (man or woman) on an individual level, because I don’t buy that men only help other men. Personally, I’ve been privy to a large network of accomplished men who have helped my career through both mentoring and also just by setting a good example.

If a woman wants to be in these professions, she can be. Trust me. She is welcomed with open arms by all the guys. Even if the only people she works with are guys. I have been there.

These so called “gates” that make entrepreneurship and tech “male” industries are embellished at worst and entirely fictional at best. Because (in my experience) the things that hold women back in the industry are not the shackles of being female. They are the same things that hold men back: things like insecurity, over-confidence, lack of fresh ideas, unwillingness to sweat.

Now, can it be less comfortable when the entire office starts a fantasy baseball draft and you don’t like baseball? Yes, of course. But it’s no less comfortable than when the entire office goes out to a pub for a drink and you don’t like alcohol.

So here is the real problem. It is exactly what Michael Arrington argues: lots of women don’t WANT to be in these industries. They want to do professions that allow them to explore multiple interests at once. And yes, they want professions that allow them to get married and have kids and go to bed at a decent hour, none of which are easy when you are the CEO/Founder of a start-up.

Now, men might struggle with these trade-offs too, but not surprisingly women struggle more. There is no question that girls are programmed at an early age to think they need to be popping kids by 27. There is no question that girls are programmed at an early age to think they are bad at math, computers, video games.

But fixing that is a culture shift that starts with PARENTS. It starts way back when you hand a girl a barbie doll and her brother a set of legos. There is actual research that proves this, and books written.

For the girls who are not intimidated by math and computers at an early age, who do gain the skills necessary during college, the gates are wide open.

The reason tech doesn’t have women is not a “women need more support” problem, IMHO. I find all-female support groups offensive, personally, and also detrimental to my career. It is also not a “give us the key and let us play” problem. The guys are happy to let the women onto the playing field with them, they just ask that you play as hard as they do. In fact, the guys are welcoming the women based on the exact idea of equality that women are fighting for.

There is plenty of support and there are no gatekeepers, but the desire has to come from within the woman. That is the “problem” – which is not actually a problem. Feminism is about women having the choice, that’s all. Not about women fulfilling some ratio in each industry to prove they can play with the boys. We’ve already proven that.

Do we talk about the ratio of women to men on a football team? No. Because most women don’t want to do that either.

If women were not being accepted into these industries strictly because they were women, then yes, let’s fight for equality. I would gladly fight for girls to be on football teams.

But that’s not the issue. The issue is that we think there needs to be some magic number of women in every industry to feel like we’ve won some gender war. And that just hurts everyone.

Monica O'Brien is the author of the book Social Pollination: Escape the Hype of Social Media and Join the Companies Winning At It. Social Pollination provides a strategic blueprint that helps businesses leverage social media for crazy growth! For a limited time, purchase Social Pollination and get a free membership to Monica's private coaching forum.

Write about what you are learning to keep your blog fresh

Monica O'Brien — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 18:04:22 +0000

I am not living in Atlanta anymore. This sentence seems so stupid because very few people even knew I was living in Atlanta, because from the moment I went to Atlanta I had a feeling Atlanta wasn’t going to work out, and I didn’t want to pretend I was excited then three months later tell everyone about my latest decision failure.

So I am not living in Atlanta anymore. I’m living in West Haven, Connecticut now, in a perfect little second floor apartment with a tiny kitchen and a washer and dryer and a small glass table with a single chair where I can write a novel and look out the sliding glass doors at the same time, and exactly enough space for my clothes and books and husband. We have two rooms, and one of them is the kitchen, where we cook, eat, do laundry, and watch TV all at once.

We considered sleeping in that room too, because it has the air conditioner, but I talked Eric out of it because then we would have to rearrange the furniture every night and every morning. It’s that small of a room.

You might be surprised to hear that West Haven is actually the fourth city I’ve lived in this year. The others are Chicago, Atlanta, and Jacksonville, Florida, the last of which was way too humid for my liking.

I didn’t tell anyone this either, because it’s just insane. What stable, sensible person would live in four cities in seven months? No one. But I am not particularly into either sense or stability.

It should be no surprise, though, that I am not living in Atlanta anymore. After six months of working full-time at Fizz, I’ve transitioned to simply consulting for them on digital projects for our clients.

I would love to say more. But I am still working up the courage to do so.

There are other things I’d love to do, like change the title of this stupid blog. Social Pollination is a good title for a book, but ever since I renamed the blog for “branding purposes,” I’ve lost interest in writing in it. I can’t churn out post after post with copy-optimized titles like “Five tips to tame your online addiction” or “10 reasons you need to be on Foursquare.” And I can’t think of creative ways to disguise blog posts about things I care about as blog posts that people who want to learn digital marketing should care about.

I’ve always said, though, that you don’t need a blog topic, that you should write about what you’re learning. This is so relevant to me now, more than ever. So that’s the new direction of this blog. Which is not actually new, because that was the original direction of this blog. It is me who is new, who is returning to the basics.

To celebrate, here are some things I’m learning:

About Business

If someone is expendable from your business, they are an employee, not a partner. Partnerships only work when both parts are equal. If you can’t find someone who is not expendable then you are best off just hiring someone to do the work you need done.

The biggest difference between corporations and start-ups is the number of people who have personality disorders. You are either the type of person who can deal with personality disorders, or you are not. If you are not, you should work for a corporation or for yourself.

About Life

Some people get ahead by breaking the rules, and some people get ahead by following them. I wonder if the real way to get ahead is to decide which type of person you are and stay true to that in everything you do.

It feels good to know who you are. If more people focused on figuring out who they are at a young age, like 16, there would be fewer quarter-life crises.

About Relationships

You can hate what people do while still being in love with them. Sometimes the only way to move forward is to just let go.

About Writing

I used to be writing a scene, and I would ask myself, “How can I make this funnier? How can I paint this picture better?” If it was a blog post, “How can I optimize this for the most clicks, retweets, comments?”

Now I ask myself, for both fiction and non-fiction pieces, “How can I make this more honest?” That was the point when I felt myself evolving as a writer.

#####

A final word, if you came here looking for a post about the newest digital technologies: no, I am not brilliant enough to rattle off six life lessons off the top of my head, wrapped up in a neat 300 words or so. I used a new software called OhLife to keep track of my thoughts for the last month, to force myself into honesty. Try it. You post by email, and what you write never gets posted publicly.

Most of what you write will not be brilliant, but there may be a couple gems worth looking back on later. I write without inhibition, once a day at 8pm, a couple sentences at a time. A week later, I have enough good material for a blog post.

I would recommend this product for any person or business that struggles with finding time to compose blog posts.

3 Things Small Businesses Can Learn From Virgin America

Monica O'Brien — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:36:41 +0000

This is a guest post from Maria Ross, founder and chief strategist of Red Slice a branding and marketing consultancy based in Seattle. She is the author of Branding Basics for Small Business: How to Create an Irresistible Brand on Any Budget (2010, Norlights Press)

OK, I have a major brand crush on Virgin America. Huge. I sigh when I see their logo at the airport, thrill when I’m able to fly them on quick trips down to San Francisco, and I just generally want to hang with Richard Branson over cocktails sometime. I talk about them a lot in my new book, Branding Basics for Small Business: How to Create an Irresistible Brand on Any Budget.

There’s a lot you can learn about branding effectively from Virgin America (and Virgin in general for that matter.) And these are lessons you can apply to your own business, regardless of your budget. You may not be as big as they are, but you sure as heck can practice these principles to better connect with customers and stand out from the competition.

Keep your mission simple, concise and relevant: “Make flying fun again.” Boom. That says it all. And every decision they make, big or small, is tested against this simple mantra. How inspiring is this for employees? How deliciously irresistible is this to frustrated and road-weary travelers? How different from the other airlines who tout generic, irrelevant platitudes like “best customer service” or “biggest value”? This mission has meaning and even just the wording tells you a little bit about their personality and the type of customer they want to attract. They are not just after those who can afford first-class or private jets who may not share the same flying frustrations as the rest of us. They are FOR the rest of us! Their mission is crisp, clean but still specific enough to their actual products and services. Is your mission something you can actually act on that will guide all of your decisions, or is it some lofty, esoteric statement that is not relevant to customers or employees?
Little things mean a lot: From their color scheme that extends to the ticket counters to the airplane cabin to the cheeky wording of their standard airport signs (“While impressive, if your bag is bigger than 24” X 16” X 10”, it must be checked”) to their clever in-flight safety video. Rather than a stiff actor giving me the same instructions we’ve started to tune out on every other flight, Virgin America shows a stylized animated video with all sorts of crazy characters – even a bull calmly reading a magazine next to an anxious bullfighter. The company’s sassy, humorous tone carries over to the script as well: “For the 0.0001% of you who’ve never operated a seat belt before, here’s how it works.” These are simple things (and stuff they need to spend money on to produce anyway), but Virgin makes the most of every single solitary customer touch point in order to convey their brand and make their target customers fall in love with them. What opportunities are you wasting to really surprise and delight your target audience? Perhaps well-worded email opt-out policies (“If you’d like to unsubscribe, we’d really miss you!”), a well-branded and interactive Facebook Fan Page, a memorable voicemail message (“We’re out helping our clients be superheroes today”) or even a branded email signature can really make a difference. Such hidden delights will surprise and enchant and get people telling others about you, like I’m doing here. Just ensure that these flourishes match who you really are in your DNA and what your brand is all about. If your brand audience is more conservative and formal than playful and snarky, then don’t try to go there.
Deliver on your promise: Virgin America directs all its brand efforts on convincing me they will make flying fun again. But if I didn’t experience their confident and polished employees, rapid check-in kiosk process, or the private TV’s at every seat that also allow me to order food at any time with my credit card – not just when they decide I should eat – then we’d have a problem. They would not be delivering on their mission and would then suffer from a brand identity crisis. Are you living up to what you are promising to customers? If you say customer care is your number one priority, do I get rapid response to my support issues and easy access to a live person? If your colors and website are all slick, modern and progressive but you only offer the same-old, same-old, what am I to think? It’s worse to go out there and talk the talk if you can’t walk the walk – worse than not promising it in the first place. Don’t just slap a coat of brand paint on your business. Make a promise and ensure your operations, employees, and customer experiences are set up to deliver on it.

Pollinisation Sociale and LeWeb 2010

Monica O'Brien — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 15:43:15 +0000

I’m very excited to announce that Social Pollination was recently published in French! The book is now available for purchase at many bookstores across the country, and you can check it out online from the Diateino website. You can also join the fabulous Facebook page and see some fun pictures below:

Pollinisation Sociale in bookstores!

I’m also hoping to speak in France in 2010, and specifically at LeWeb 2010. They are taking speaker requests and if you have a minute before June 30th, I would love if you could suggest me as a speaker at this link: http://www.leweb.net/leweb/forms/speaker-suggestions

If you’d like to suggest me, all the required information is listed below so you can copy, paste, and submit in less than a minute:

Speaker Title: National Director of Digital, Fizz

Speaker Name: Monica O’Brien

Proposed Speaker Biography: Monica O’Brien was born in Germany and spent her childhood jet-setting around the world with her American parents. Her travels include most of the United States and Europe, as well as Guam, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the Philippines. She is the author of Pollinisation Sociale : les médias sociaux au service de votre entreprise, with a forward by TEDxParis founder Michel Mikiane Levy-Provencal. Monica is also the Director of Digital at Fizz, an award-winning word-of-mouth marketing agency based in the United States that works with international brands including Intuit, Heineken USA, and Laura Mercier Cosmetics.

Monica is a lifetime member of Sigma Pi Sigma honor fraternity and was a 2007 Chicago Business Fellow, graduating with an MBA from the Chicago Booth School of Business at 25 years old. Her ideas have been featured in Advertising Age, The Huffington Post, and the Christian Science Monitor, and Monica was recently named one of the top 25 Tweeters in the city of Chicago by ChicagoNow, a subsidiary of the Chicago Tribune.

Proposed Topic Abstract: The topic is how start-ups and businesses can get word-of-mouth marketing in the digital age. Points include:

how to determine which social platforms are best suited to market the product or service you are selling
how to build buzz for your product or service among true influencers
how to incorporate word-of-mouth marketing and sharing into the actual product or service
how to encourage digital sharing in light of recent privacy concerns
and because 90% of conversations about brands happen in person, how to take word-of-mouth marketing offline – even if you are building web-based software

Proposed Topic: Social Pollination – How to pollinate the web with buzz about your products and services

I’ve also listed below “5 Reasons Monica Would Be a Great Speaker” if you’re not convinced:

Monica has experience creating digital strategies at both start-ups and large corporations, specifically in conjunction with word-of-mouth marketing, which is the best type of marketing for start-ups and new product launches
Monica’s book Social Pollination was recently published in French by Diatieno, the same publisher as Guy Kawasaki’s Reality Check and Seth Godin’s Tribes and Linchpin
Monica has a speaking career in the US, which means she has the experience necessary to put on a great talk for all attendees
Monica has *not* spoken in France before, so the ideas will be fresh to all attendees
Monica is very flexible and open to changing or tweaking this topic to make it perfect for the LeWeb 2010 audience!

Please click here to suggest me as a speaker for LeWeb 2010!

Also, if you know anyone who lives in France, please help me spread the word!

Finally, I’m booking for this exact talk here in the US too!

Email me at monica at monicaobrien.com if you are looking for a fresh voice in the digital space, and if this would be the perfect topic for your upcoming conference, meeting, bootcamp, training, or development program.

An Open Letter: What do you want to see next on this blog?

Monica O'Brien — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 18:15:53 +0000

Hi everyone!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the direction of my blog. When I had this idea of doing a video series paired with a live Q&A a few days ago, I thought I wanted to do more in digital marketing, since that’s what I do for a living. The only problem was, everyone is at a different place with their marketing knowledge, and I had no clue what level and what specific topics to cover to satisfy the most readers.

So rather than trying to guess (always a bad idea), I decided to ask. I sent an email to my newsletter list, asking them what free content they wanted to see in this video series. Here’s the description I got back:

For those of you who *don’t* have a product yet but are looking to create one, or for those of you who *do* have a product but might want to market it better, you want to find a profitable niche in your area of expertise.
Once you’ve identified your profitable niche, you want easy ways to find and target your niche online, that also work for offline products and brick and mortar stores.
Once you’ve zeroed in on your niche, you want to build a tribe or base of potential customers for your product.
Once you’ve built your tribe or base, you want to build loyalty and a consistent client base that continues to buy your products.
Once this system is set up, you want the marketing portion to take a life of it’s own, with referrals and content-sharing from your loyal fans on social networks and via word of mouth.
And finally, you want to do all of this without spending too much time or money on it. After all, you are super busy managing your business, and you can’t spend all day tweeting, blogging, and hitting “Like” on Facebook.

The email list seemed pretty set on this idea, but I’m curious – does it resonate with the people who only read the blog, too? After all, I’m going to put the 6-part video series on my blog (completely free) and I want to make sure I get your input.

So here’s the deal. I’m happy to create a free series of videos and webinars about these topics and I’m really looking forward to doing something cool that helps people – but I will feel really dumb if I spend all sorts of time creating this material, and it’s not completely, 100% something that people want.

If you really want to see something like this, please leave a comment to let me know that I’m not completely off-base. If you have a different idea, you can also leave a comment below with what you’d rather see instead!

Thank you, and hope you have an enjoyable Father’s Day Weekend!

Monica

How a medium-sized ecommerce store can compete with the big boys (and girls)

Jun Loayza — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 15:18:25 +0000

This is a guest post from Jun Loayza, a close friend and an internet start-up entrepreneur out of the Bay area. In this post, he shares some terrific tips and incredible insight for getting your ecommerce store off the ground and competing with the likes of the big boys, like Amazon and Zappos.

At the highest level, an ecommerce store can increase its revenue in two ways:

Increase traffic
Increase sales conversions

Small stores that generate less than $500,000 in revenue per year should focus on increasing traffic above all else. It doesn’t matter if you sell the best products at the best prices if there is no traffic to buy your products.

This post is for the mid-sized ecommerce stores that generate between $500,000 – $10,000,000 per year. You could of course use more traffic, but it would serve you best to optimize the shopping experience to increase sales conversions and utilize the social web to mobilize your fans into action.

The following 5 tangible tips will position your company to increase its monthly revenue and become a more profitable business.

1. Product Recommendations

Product recommendations are cross-sells and up-sells located on the Product Page or Shopping Cart page that significantly increase sales conversions, average order value, and total online sales.

Product recommendations are most effective if your store fits the following criteria:

Store has more than 5,000 visitors per month
Store has more than 100 purchases per month

Important details and variables in product recommendations:

Types of Widgets

There are 5 main types of product recommendations:

1. Customers who viewed this item also viewed: For comparison of similar items

2. Customer who bought this item also bought: Cross-sells that increase the number of items bought per purchase

3. Customers who viewed this item ultimately bought: Up-sells that encourage customer to purchase a higher-priced item

4. Customer with items in your shopping cart also bought: Cross-sells that increase the number of items bought per purchase

5. Recommended for you: Targeted product recommendations based on user actions and behavior

Placement

Product recommendations are ideally placed in the following location:

Below:

The product image
The product short description
The Add to Cart button
Customer reviews

Above:

The full product description
Tags or other extra features

Check out the sweet spot on the image below:

Wording

Wording should be A/B tested, as there is no universal phrase that works best with all stores. The general phrase looks like this:

“Customers who viewed this item also bought”

The phrase should be A/B tested in the following ways:

Customers | Shoppers | People | Users | Guests
Item | Product
Bought | Purchase | Recommend

Find the combination of words that works optimally for your store

Features

A product recommendation widget should contain the following features:

Title of the recommendation widget
Product image
Product title
Product price
Add to cart button
Relevancy
Left and Right arrows

2. Triggered Emails: Recommendations and Reviews

A shopper’s email is still one of the most valuable pieces of information that you can collect and utilize. Industry numbers show that stores that send targeted emails to shoppers who have opted into their email list generally increase sales figures by 15%-25% compared to when they didn’t use email recommendations.

Furthermore, stores that utilize triggered emails to request that a shopper review a product that he or she recently purchased increase their product reviews by 20%-35%.

Here is a breakdown of how you can use triggered emails to successfully increase sales, reduce shopping cart abandonment, and increase product reviews:

Triggered Email Recommendations

Triggered emails can be sent for the following events:

1. Shopper abandons the shopping cart after sign in

2-3 days after the shopper abandons the cart, she is sent an email with a reminder of the products that are still in her shopping cart. The email also contains product recommendations of other items she may be interested in purchasing.

The store may also want to include an incentive to finish the purchase, such as a coupon code for free shipping.

2. Once a month or quarterly email recommendations

Loyal shoppers are sent emails once a month (or once a quarter) with exclusive sales or targeted products that the shopper may enjoy. The emails are used to reward loyal shoppers and provide an incentive to turn them into a repeat customer.

3. Recommendations attached to a receipt

When a shopper makes a purchase, the shopper receives a receipt via email along with products that she may also like to purchase. The goal is to cross-sell the shopper with products that compliment the recently purchased item.

Triggered Product Reviews

Triggered product review emails send a shopper an email requesting that the shopper review the product(s) that she ordered. This email can be triggered 3-7 days after the shopper has received the product to make sure that she has had ample time to use the item.

Attaching free shipping coupons or other perks for reviewing an item can incentivize the completion of product reviews.

3. Facebook “Like” Integration

Large stores such as Levi’s and Sephora are effectively using the new Facebook Like button to make each product social. Here are examples of what it looks like:

Now before you go and spend money integrating the Facebook “Like” button into your ecommerce store, lets clear up your expectations.

First of all, HUGE brands like Levi’s and Sephora receive around 50-200 Likes per item. Depending on the size of your traffic and brand, you can expect your Likes to range from 0-20 for most mid-sized stores.

The expectations must be clear: the “Like” button will not make or break your store. However, it is a very unique new feature with lots of potential.

The pros of using the Like button on your store:

Increased visibility on Facebook

Every time someone “Likes” a product in your store, the shopper has the potential of sharing her action on Facebook for all of her friends to see. This can drive word-of-click traffic to your store.

Targeted shopper reinforcement

A shopper that goes to your store and sees a product that is “Liked” by two of her friends is a little more likely to trust the store, trust the product, feel good about the product, and make the purchase.

4. Sweepstakes and Giveaways

Everyone and their moms are using sweepstakes to giveaway products to fans. Here is an example of a campaign that is currently running:

As a medium-sized store, you should not spend a fortune on a sweepstakes, and luckily, have many available options online for you to easily launch a sweepstakes for as low as $500 for a 30-day campaign.

My preferred Sweepstakes platform of choice is Wildfire. Though it’s very easy to use, it comes with many limitations and you must complete all of the following on your own:

Creation of Privacy Policy and Sweepstakes Rules
Design and copy of the Sweepstakes
Implementation onto your Facebook Fan Page
Collection of emails
Pick a winner and distribution of prize

If you need assistance in creating a sweepstakes, reach out to me anytime (my contact info is also at the end of the post).

Tip for long-term success:

If you want to run sweepstakes every month, I suggest investing the money to create a custom sweepstakes solution for your company. I recommend Convospark as a trusted partner that creates reliable, high-quality, custom Facebook applications.

5. Facebook Page Store

If you have a popular Facebook Page, then you will likely benefit from Store right on your Facebook Page.

The greatest benefit of a Facebook Page store is that the social-sharing aspect is directly integrated into the shopping experience: fans can browse items, share products with their friends, ask for feedback, and even purchase directly from the fan page.

Best Buy’s Facebook store links products back to the Best Buy main website:

Flower’s Facebook Page allows you to make purchases straight from the page:

I truly hope these 5 tips help you greatly improve your ecommerce store. I highly encourage you to take the time to analyze your ecommerce store to figure out tangible ways to improve your store SEO, usability, and features. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me at anytime.

—

Jun Loayza is the Co-Founder of Viralogy, a software company that specializes in improving sales conversions and decreasing shopping cart abandonment for ecommerce stores. You can reach him by email at jun [at] viralogy.com or through Twitter @JunLoayza

© junloayza for Social Pollination, 2010. | Permalink | 11 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: conversions, ecommerce, facebook, online stores, tips

10 Tips to Market and Sell Your Premium Content

Monica O'Brien — Thu, 20 May 2010 15:40:32 +0000

I received an email from Margee Moore who has a really fun app out now called Sleeping With the Laundry. The app comes with 20 chapters of Notes from the Mommy Track and it’s gotten great reviews on iTunes! Priced at $2.99, it is a steal compared to a book or an ebook.

But I’m not here to promote Margee’s app – instead I wanted to address an interesting marketing question she sent me.

Margee writes:

“I’m running a low cost social media campaign to promote my app, Sleeping With the Laundry: Notes from the Mommy Track. Would you recommend a facebook page, facebook group or what? Which one works best? Then how do you promote your page and get more members? I’ve got my one page marketing plan and I’m working it, but what’s the most effective way to sell apps in today’s social media environment?”

I don’t know all the details of Margee’s marketing plan, but I had a couple thoughts on how she should market her app.

Facebook Page vs. Group

First, I’ll answer the page vs. group question – it really doesn’t matter, but if you want to know the differences between the two, read Facebook Pages vs Facebook Groups: What’s the Difference?

What’s really important is getting the target audience to identify themselves on some sort of list so you can create an emotional connection with them. This can be a Facebook page, a Twitter stream, an email list, a Ning community, a LinkedIn group… what really matters is creating an emotional tie with each person on as many platforms as you can. I prefer Facebook pages over groups, but that’s just a preference and not a hard rule.

The real question is how do you start making these connections on various platforms? Read on.

Getting Down to the Core of the Product

I was a little nervous about answering this question at first, because I have never marketed an app and some might say I have no business giving advice about it. Then I realized that at the end of the day, Margee doesn’t want to market an iPhone/iPod app. She wants to market her content, and an app is just one form that the content could take.

If you look at the competition for this type of product, there are several levels:

Blogs written by moms in funny, essay format
Other iPhone applications that are classified under “Books”
Ebooks written by moms
Actual books written by moms
Audio books from moms

… and more. Margee has to compete with all of this content to promote her app successfully. The first step is to recognize that the product is the content, not the form the content takes.

How to Sell Content

When you want to sell content, there are a couple things to consider:

Format – People are very specific about their preferences for reading entertainment content. Right now, it seems that Margee is limiting the reach of her content to iPhone and iPod users, but that’s not quite accurate. In fact, she’s limiting the reach of her content to iPhone and iPod users who prefer to read their entertainment content on their iPhone or iPod. This is a drastically smaller group of people than the people who could read the content on the iPhone or iPod. Solution: Whenever you are selling content, you want to get your content in as many forms as you possibly can. That means selling it:
- in the Amazon Kindle store (which also works on the iPhone)
- on ebook communities like Scribd.com (you can set your price for your ebook and you get 80% of the profits)
- in an audio book for the Audible store (create using a free program like Audacity)
- potentially as a physical book that is sold in bookstores
It’s surprisingly easy to get up and running in most of these formats and I would highly recommend broadening the reach in this way. Margee will make more money from her content and will sell the product to people in the format they want to consume the material.
Pricing – Margee has priced her iPhone app at $2.99. She is competing with other iPhone apps in the book category that range from free to $9.99. That said, Margee’s app is probably on the higher end of the pricing, because so many iPhone apps in the book category are completely free to download. Solution: It’s clear that if you compare the app to a free blog or free app with similar content, the app is overpriced. When you compare the app to an actual book, though, the app is a bargain. Position your product to give people the perspective that this is a bargain by comparing it to the highest-priced format you could have put it in.
Preview – No one can read your content until they buy your content. But no one will buy your content until they’ve sampled it in some way. To sell content, you must have several previews available to promote on various networks. In Margee’s case, she has 20 chapters of content in the iPhone app. Solution: If Margee took two or three of those chapters and pollinated the social web with them, a portion of those people would also consider buying the app. She has done some social pollination with previews, but I bet she could do a lot more. Here are some ideas:
- PDF each of the preview chapters and put them on ebook sites like Slideshare.net, Scribd.com, DocStoc.com, and Issuu.com for free download (here’s a more complete list of ebook communities)
- Break up the chapters into shorter blog posts and use them as guest posts on blogs written by moms
- Record the preview chapters via audio or video and put them out as a podcast on iTunes (which is a highly targeted audience for the app)
- Add the preview chapters as PDFs to a website or blog, then put the links in an email signature, Twitter stream, and Facebook profile
- Use the preview chapters to pitch traditional media
- Turn the preview chapters into a Google Gadget that people can add to to their Google homepage
For each of these ideas, Margee can include a link to her app so the audience can purchase the full version of the content.

Getting More Fans/Followers/etc.

This is another question Margee had and something that most people would love to understand better. Here are the three steps I use every single time I sign up for a new social network:

Import contacts from your email address and other networks
Cross-post the link on every other social profile you have, every marketing piece you print, and every email you send out
Create compelling content for the network you have (I know this is general, but going over this for each network would be beyond the scope of the article – instead you can just Google “Create compelling content for your Facebook page” to get ideas about this)

Clearly it’s not as easy as I’m making it sound because it takes time to build a real network. The point is, there are no shortcuts. You have to work at it every day. I have worked at it with this blog since the summer of 2007. That said, everyone has a network from work or school, so start there and let it grow organically.

Creating a consistent brand

One other thing I wanted to address was creating a consistent brand. Right now Margee has a Facebook page called Sleeping With the Laundry, a website at www.moxiemom.com, and a LinkedIn group called Market Like a Mother. I think it’s terrific to maintain all these networks since they already exist and have a following, but also believe that creating specific groups to promote this specific content would be helpful for promotion. Also, put the links to the Sleeping With the Laundry communities EVERYWHERE – on the blog, email signature, Twitter background, Facebook page, LinkedIn profile, etc.

Hopefully you’ve gained at least 10 new ideas to market and sell your premium content on the web, for free. Thank you to Margee for agreeing to let her app be a guinea pig, and if you’d like me to do a marketing write-up for your product just email me at monica at monicaobrien.com!

© Monica for Social Pollination, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Networking, social media, social media marketing

I finally read The 4-Hour Workweek. Here’s what I think.

Monica O'Brien — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 01:04:58 +0000

When it comes to business books, I’m like the anorexic girl at the five star restaurant. Always order, never eat. Push the food around on my plate.

My shelves are lined with interesting books, but I only ever read a small subset of fiction (usually urban fantasy or sci-fi). I told myself I would not buy any more business books, because I never read them, and because I already went to an expensive business school that assigned those classic HBR essays where 90% of the material from most business books are derived. At this point, if I want to learn more about business, my time would be better spent studying philosophy.

So the 4-Hour Workweek has been out forever, and it’s not like I hadn’t heard of it until now. My former boss Penelope knows the author, Tim Ferriss, and wrote a scathing blog post about him that has received over 600 comments to date. On the flip side, several of my co-founders and closest online friends at Untemplater (a lifestyle design blog for young people) are those I-will-buy-anything-that-Tim-Ferriss-recommends-because-he-is-Tim-Ferriss kind of raving fans. They talk about him a lot. And I don’t think they are crazy, but they do seem crazy about his work, and they might be onto something.

So I knew Tim Ferriss was smart and I knew the book was an NYT bestseller. It still wasn’t enough. It was only this past week that I saw Tim Ferriss somewhere online and noticed: “Hey… he’s really, really cute. (!)” It hit me out of nowhere. And I realized, it is so rare to find smart, world-changing writers who are also attractive. So I broke my rule and bought his book to learn more.

Wait a second! You bought a business book because you thought the author was cute?! Two points:

For those who disagree with my assessment, watch this video. At some point in the last year, Tim went from being a semi-goof ball who wore webbed-toe shoes and hung out of trees in the city, to a bearded GQ-styled Chinese-speaking cross between James Bond and Brad Pitt. (Note: The former is kind of cute too, but it’s a more subtle cute that didn’t stand out to me at first.)
For those who think it’s shallow of me to buy a book because the author is good-looking… I have already stated that Tim is really smart. The attractiveness was the tipping point to actually purchasing the book, not the main reason. Also, I get a comment at least once a post pairing physical attractiveness and smartness. Like this one: “Good information. You’re also gorgeous by the way. Its always fun to read smart posts by a pretty woman.” and this one: “Monica, you’re cute and you’re smart and you didn’t seem to be full of propaganda. And now this. Please.” We are all guilty.

The Best of The 4-Hour Workweek

The overall concept of The 4-Hour Workweek has nothing to do with four hours. The main idea is that you can work much less if you minimize distractions and focus on the 20% of things that create 80% of results. Both the workplace and the school system in the US are built on the archaic culture shifts of the Industrial Revolution; The 4-Hour Workweek is an anthem to circumvent the ineffectiveness of these systems while still negotiating in a world that clings to them.

I don’t want to summarize the book, so I’m going to share a few of the lessons that resonated with me most:

1. “Don’t show dedication, demonstrate results.” Dedication is showing up from 9-5, working longer hours, and wearing the “workaholic” badge. This doesn’t necessarily produce results; in fact, it generally demonstrates a lack of focus and inability to get shit done. The New Rich (the tribe identifier in Tim’s book) just get important stuff done in the shortest amount of time possible.

2. You can accomplish a lot with credibility, and credibility is viral. There are four easy ways to develop credibility quickly:

Group affiliations
Client lists
Writing credentials
Media mentions

3. If you think you have a lot of work, you suck at two of the steps in the book – eliminating the unnecessary and automating the repetitive. There are three reasons you can’t get out from under your work:

Time wasters
Time consumers
Empowerment failures

4. On creating and selling products:

“Be a part of your target audience.”
Don’t put your customers on a pedestal – simply “Provide an excellent product at an acceptable price that solves legitimate problems in the fastest manner possible.”
Profile the top 20% of your customers and find more of them
Put the other 80% of your customers on autopilot, and fire the ones who suck all your time
Sometimes it’s better to choose your distribution strategy first

5. On going on a media diet (I already do this, big time – but I like that other people think I’m not crazy):

Don’t check your email constantly (it’s other people’s tasks to be processed, not cocaine to be snorted)
Don’t consume a ton of media (you can get by on headlines and lunch time conversation)
Don’t watch a ton of TV (this is not from the book, but a friend recently told me that most people only consume nine channels. I personally watch three television shows via the internet and have completely cut my cable bill)
Stop buying stuff (it weighs you down, and you are able to take more risks when you see how easy it is to live like a poor person)

6. Efficient vs. Effective – “Don’t confuse efficient with effective. The best door-to-door salesperson in the world can be incredibly efficient, yet nowhere near as effective as a bad spammer. Someone who checks email 30 times a day, has an elaborate system of organizing, might be incredibly efficient but not effective.”

There was so much more in the book that I didn’t include here because it wasn’t necessarily new to me. I am pretty happy though; as a fairly unconventional type, it takes a lot for me to get six somewhat life-changing points out of one book. I think it was worth it.

The Worst of The 4-Hour Workweek

Although I got a lot out of the book, it would be unfair to leave out a few things that almost kept me from finishing it. Mainly, there were a couple chapters that were really difficult for me to get through! The first is a chapter about outsourcing to virtual assistants in India. I’ve had a virtual assistant before and they can be great, but the tone of this chapter made me want to throw things. The only reason I didn’t is because there was a snippet of a particularly famous Esquire column (My Outsourced Life) from AJ Jacobs, who I’m a long-time fan of.

The second one that made me put the book down is a chapter about email processing. There is actually an entire chapter about just this topic. Tim suggests you set up an auto responder that tells people you do not constantly check your email and lists the times when you will respond. Completely unnecessary. Instead, check your email whenever you want and don’t waste other people’s time telling them when that is. You don’t need to tell people that they can call you in an emergency. If they needed a response in an hour and don’t receive one, they will call and ask if you got their email, to which you respond no. So much easier.

A final minor annoyance that people may want to be aware of is that the Kindle version of this book is hard to read. I think this is mostly the fault of the Kindle. But I covet the paper edition that’s floating around in my head (I’ve never actually seen it) where everything is laid out nicely in tables, with little tip boxes scattered throughout. Definitely buy the real thing if you want to read the book. It will save a headache.

How my life has changed so far

I’m amazed that I finished this book. I love Seth Godin, but I only made it to the second chapter of Meatball Sundae. Finishing a business book is a huge accomplishment for me – and actually, I can’t remember the last time I did it.

So far, I’ve implemented three things in two days from the book:

Fixed an empowerment failure – I realized that the reason I’m not moving along in a specific project is because I haven’t given the guy I hired enough autonomy. He has to write emails and wait for me to revise them and approve them before sending. I am terrible at doing this on a regular basis and have been a huge bottleneck. So I gave him his own email address and asked him to send emails on my behalf, saying whatever he wants to get the results we are going for.
Profiled my customers – I changed my complete marketing strategy for a product I’m working on based on initial feedback. Instead of redoing the product to market it to the people I already have relationships with, I figured out who really loved the product just as it is. I’m now going to find more of those customers (part of a fairly large market segment) and market the product to them instead.
Started eating a slow-carb diet - so this is not actually from the book. It’s from the blog, but I wouldn’t have explored the blog if it weren’t for reading the book. Also, the book convinced me that Tim is a strategist and obsessive tester, so I decided to try the diet he recommends to lose 20 pounds in 30 days. I don’t expect to lose 20 pounds, but if I lost 10 I would probably start reading the blog religiously. So this is also kind of a test – is this guy really so good at hacking life, and should I pay more attention?

Any one of these improvements is more than worth the $9 and the weekend worth of time I spent on this book. I would highly recommend this book for just about anyone – there are case studies throughout of people from all walks of life implementing the techniques.

Click here to get The 4-Hour Workweek

My last confession: I didn’t really want to write this post. I am afraid I’m becoming too much of a fan. If there’s anything I’ve learned from meeting interesting people online, it’s that when you put them on a pedestal it just gives them a longer way to fall. I remind myself that people are just people. And I test with my friend who has met Tim Ferriss: “I finally read Tim Ferriss’ book. He’s hot. And interesting.”

He replies, “Too bad you didn’t have this epiphany a month ago. You could have met him and gotten his book for free at SxSW.”

Later in the conversation, we are talking about the novel I am writing. He says, “Oh, I have a fiction book you’re going to love. It’s called Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman.”

“I love Neil Gaiman!” Pause. “Wait… isn’t that the book Tim recommended in his last video?”

“Yeah, that’s why I read it!”

© Monica for Social Pollination, 2010. | Permalink | 21 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Careers, Challenges, Happiness, Networking, Personal Branding, Relationships, Workplace, young entrepreneur

Round-Up: Atlanta Radio Edition

Monica O'Brien — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 15:01:27 +0000

Hello everyone! Disclaimer: this is not a typical Social Pollination post with new ideas and opinion, nor is it a summary post with good social media news from around the web. This is just a round-up to share some guest posts I’ve had on other blogs in the last week so people who have asked know where to find them. Here they are:

Four Search Engines Marketers Should Know About on Social Media Explorer (345 retweets, 30 comments)
How to Market to Gen Y on the American Express Open Forum (198 retweets, 12 likes, 2 comments)
Six Steps to Running a Successful Blogger Outreach on Danny Brown’s PR blog (86 retweets, 32 comments)
Six Tips to Building Brand Loyalty on Personal Branding Blog (8 comments, 86 retweets)
12 Ways to Get Inbound Links Using Social Media on Shimon Sandler’s SEO blog (4 comments)

I also did an in-studio interview for High Velocity Radio which you can listen to here. The experience was awesome! I learned a lot and I will probably be doing much more radio in the future.

Also, for people who want to know more about my new job, how I got it, and what I do, the answer is covered in the full radio interview (not the excerpt).

One note on the blog posts: I’ve gotten a ton of emails asking questions about the material I covered. I’m going to answer only a few of the more interesting questions via blog post here. For the rest – I hate to be a brat, but a lot of the questions are covered in my book, Social Pollination. So my answer is go buy my book .

The good news is, if you read that first and then have additional questions, I’d be happy to answer!

Gen Y Cares About Conversation; Everyone Else, Not So Much

Monica O'Brien — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 05:31:13 +0000

Back in college, my sorority had a rule when we were voting in new members: anyone who used the word “nice” to describe a rush candidate got sprayed with a Super Soaker.

Yeah, it’s weird. But we never made the mistake of voting in women just because they were nice. That’s the point.

It amazes me how many PR and marketing professionals talk about the importance of conversation – that numbers and fans and followers don’t matter, and that’s it’s actually about building relationships. I don’t disagree with them. The part I disagree with is the conversations they seem to want.

The conversations most people want are the ones where you nod your head in sheep-like agreement, write a comment like “Wow, that’s amazing!” and generally participate in the virtual circle jerk.

Gen Y is the exception. [Edit: These bullets now contain "proof" for our skeptical readers.]

Gen Y is more tolerant due to the culturally-diverse environments they were raised in
Gen Y is more passionate about world issues, including politics and the environment.
Gen Y is more open about religion, money, and politics – formerly taboo topics.

[Another Edit: It irritates me to post these bullets because they are quite obvious and quite distracting. I also didn't want the conversation to turn to whether any of this research is "valid" or not, but if you want to argue it, knock yourself out I guess.]

All this adds up to a generation that thrives on raw, authentic conversation. When bloggers in Gen Y ask for your opinion, they actually want it. They are comfortable with disagreeing, with sharing their viewpoints, with debating, with defending their stance, and even with changing their minds.

Everyone else? No. Most bloggers want the ego high, especially as they move up in their respective professions. There are exceptions, of course. But for the most part, the big marketing and PR bloggers I’ve interacted with don’t want to debate with you. They don’t want to challenge themselves or hear that their ideas don’t make sense or find out that what they’ve written could be improved upon. They don’t want to show vulnerability, and any respectful disagreeing is met with vehement defense.

They don’t want conversation. They want you to be “nice.” Because that forms “relationships” and builds “community.”

There’s a reason my sorority hated the word “nice.” Because being nice has nothing to do with real, passionate, and interesting conversation. It has nothing to do with authentic relationships where people work through their differences and grow closer as a result.

There’s no reason to be rude or disrespectful. But being nice is just political.

I think my generation is above that. But what do you think?

© Monica for Social Pollination, 2010. | Permalink | 51 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Authority, Beliefs, Blogging, Challenges, Conversation, Environment, Friendships, Gen Y, gen y marketing, Networking, Opinions, Personal Branding, social media, social media marketing