As engagement and sharing on Twitter, Facebook and other social tools continues to increase, many bloggers are noticing a sharp decrease in comments on their blogs.  Of course, that doesn’t mean that interest is declining.  RSS and email subscriptions, site traffic and social sharing may all be continuing to increase.  These are tracked through a variety of tools and even popular commenting system Disqus scours social networks to find blog posts being shared and displays those as “interactions”.

Increasingly bloggers are concerned that even though they know that their posts are being shared through other channels, that their communities still aren’t commenting on their posts.  It’s a completely understandable feeling.  You work hard at putting together a thought or position, flesh it out, find an engaging photo or video to help enhance your point and then publish it to the world.  A comment makes us feel good and/or helps to extend the post itself.  Sometimes the comments are even better than the post.  So, when a blogger begins noticing a decrease of comments on their blog, it can be depressing.  It can cause bloggers to start rethinking their content strategy and possibly even considering whether or not they should continue blogging.

Every time I’ve been asked whether or not a blogger should be discouraged by a decrease in comments, I immediately ask them whether or not they’ve looked at the sharing of their post through other channels and what the feedback from those channels are.  Usually they tell me that their seeing their content being shared online but they still wish they were getting the comments on their blog.

I’ve been thinking about this often.  Admittedly, I comment a lot less than I used but I share tons more now.  Google Reader trends tell me that I share around 30 articles per day through there.  I also regularly share tons more through Twitter and Facebook throughout the day.  But, I probably comment on about 75% less blogs than a year or so ago.  I know, I need to improve on that.

However, as I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve been considering whether or not the decline in commenting is actually a bad thing.  If you stop by and comment on a blog, you may extend that conversation and/or let that blogger know that you appreciate their work.  Both are great.  Consider though that the conversation will only be seen by that community which is limited by the number of subscribers and the number of visitors to that blog.  But, if you share that blog post with your community on Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, then you’re promoting that content to your social graph thus extending the total overall reach of that post.  By sharing that post with your social graph, it will extend the number of eyes that may be seeing that blog for the very first time.  Or, if they’ve ignored other content from that blog, it may be that post that pulls them in and triggers them to subscribe or share it with their networks thus continuing to grow the overall subscriber base and reach of the blog.

You may think that I’m suggesting that comments are dead but I’m not.  I love comments as much as the next blogger.  I appreciate everyone that takes the time out to share their thoughts.  I also value everyone that shares my content with their social graphs because it helps to get my content out to more people.

It’s just something I’ve been debating in my own head lately so I figured I’d spill it out into a blog post and see what you had to say and where you may choose to say it.  So, what are your thoughts?  Do you prefer comments, social sharing or a combination of both as a measure of the engagement on your blog?

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Photo Credit: premasagar

The following is an excerpt from my new book, Facebook Marketing.  If you haven’t picked up your copy yet, you can check out this excerpt, read a few reviews and then decide if you think it will be helpful to you.

With Facebook starting out as a personal network, it has been a hard transition for people to become used to it as also a professional network.  Most use LinkedIn as a professional network, Facebook as a personal network, and Twitter is a hybrid that people are still trying to figure out.  But with the growth rate of Facebook, many have started to turn to it as a personal branding tool and professional network.  Marketers have begun turning to Facebook with Facebook Pages, Groups, and advertising as a way to reach out to their prospects, customers, and fans.

This transition has created a dilemma for many folks because they are resistant to using Facebook as a professional network, yet their colleagues, competition, and companies are become active on the network.  Also, as we develop friends in our industries, we want to extend that friendship and therefore turn to Facebook.  This starts to blur that line even further between work and home.  However, as Dawn Foster of WebWorkerDaily points out, we don’t want to confuse “personal” for “private”:

You can actually be professional and personal at the same time in social media without too much effort.  When we talk about ‘being personal’ on social media websites, I think that many people confuse ‘personal’ with ‘private.’  The reality is that you get to decide what to share and what not share, so you can still keep most areas of your private life private.

To deal with this dilemma, individuals typically have three options to choose from:

1. Maintain a single Facebook profile that combines personal and professional.
2. Maintain two different Facebook profiles: one personal and one professional.
3. Keeping Facebook only personal and not mixing work into it.

Each of these has both upsides and downsides with not one clear answer or best practice, as of yet.  Thought it might not be clear yet, this will be important for you as a marketer.  Let’s explore each of these options.

Single Facebook Profile

If you don’t mind mixing personal and professional, you can maintain a single Facebook profile in which all engagement with the platform originates from that one profile.  This enables people to get to know the real you.  It’s just like the two faces that most wear on a daily basis: the way you are at your office and the way you are at home, with friends, or family.

Although so many of us are used to this split personality, why should we act like this?  Why can’t we be the same person at work as we are at home, maybe just dressed up a little nicer?  You have the same likes and dislikes, the same problems and victories, and your family, friends, enemies, colleagues and competitors don’t change when you’re at work versus when you’re at home.

Furthermore, realizing its growth, Facebook has continued to add features that allow you to tweak your privacy settings to allow you to use a single profile but limit access to data sets based on permissions, lists, and rules that you set up.  This means that you can create a list of your colleagues and then deny that list access to certain aspects of your profile.  By setting this up properly, you can achieve the privacy and separation that you want while not having to bother with two separate profiles or avoiding Facebook as a professional network.

Two Different Facebook Profiles

If you want to maintain split personas, between your personal and professional lives, you can create two different Facebook profiles.  One Facebook profile you can create as your personal account in which you upload personal photos, videos, and bio info.  This is the account where you interact with your friends, family, and others that you allow into your personal circle.  Just remember to use a personal email account and not one that anyone in your professional life knows.  If you use the same email, you open your personal profile to being found by colleagues.  Of course, you can always ignore the friend request, but it much easier and simpler to just use a separate email account.

The second account should be set up under a work email address that your colleagues would use to search for you.  Under this profile you can upload any professional content that you would like to share.  To reduce confusion between these two profiles, you should consider hiding one of the profiles from Facebook searches and indexing by search engines.  This can be done through the privacy settings for your profile(s).  Which one to hide is up to you, or you can hide both, if you want.

Not Mixing Personal and Work

Your last option is to simply not mix personal and work.  Some people decide that the easiest route is just not to promote their presence on Facebook.  They maintain Facebook as their personal social network and use LinkedIn as their professional network to connect with colleagues.  For those wanting to maintain that separation between personal and work, you might find this to be your cleanest option.

What’s your take? Do you maintain separate profiles or use a single profile for all engagement?

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Photo Credit: laikolosse

Have you had a chance to pick up your copy of Facebook Marketing yet?  If you’re still deciding whether or not it is worth your $20-ish, you might wander over to a few of the reviews so far of Facebook Marketing to see if that helps to convince you.

First up is a video review by Chris Brogan:

Next, here are a few other reviews that you may find interesting:

• Tim Peter – Facebook Marketing by Justin R. Levy (Book Review of the Week-ish)
• Valley PR Blog – Book Review: Facebook Marketing
• Deidre Breakenridge – Book Review: Facebook Marketing
• iMedia Connection – 6 Beach Books for Marketers
• Get Social PR – Facebook Marketing 9-Part Series

If you’ve written up a review of Facebook Marketing, please let me know in the comments.  I will keep this post updated with more reviews as I find them.

If you have already read Facebook Marketing, would you mind leaving a rating and review over on Amazon?

Most importantly, thank YOU for all of your support since the book launch!

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Anyone that has worked the startup life before knows how different and difficult it can be and how important marketing and lead generation is to the survival of the company.  Especially when you’re first starting out, the win of a single customer could be what pays the light bill for the month or the loss of a single customer could be enough to put the company on life support.  For those of you reading this who work at a startup, if there were a set of tips from a successful startup that would help you be a better marketer at your company, you’d want to know about it, right?

Recently Mike Volpe, VP of Marketing at HubSpot spoke at Atlassian Starter Day in San Francisco about startup marketing.  Mike used his experiences over the past 3 years of spearheading marketing for HubSpot while it grew from 5 to 160 employees and from a few customers to over 3,000.

I think you’ll find this presentation really useful as it has all sorts of actionable nuggets hiding inside of it. I know I took down a few notes and already shot off a couple of ideas to my team at New Marketing Labs. I would encourage you to sit back, relax, and hit play because I think you’ll do the same thing.

In case you missed it during the presentation, Mike broke down the ABCs of startup marketing into the following:

-Avoid Addiction
-Blog Beforehand
-Create Convenience
-Data Drives Decision
-Employ the Exceptional

You can read a short description of each of these over on the OnStartups blog.

If you don’t already know Mike, you should get to know him. As any good marketer would be, Mike can be found all over the web on his personal blog, the HubSpot blog, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, just to name a few. He’s works for an awesome company and is a good friend of mine that I think you would enjoy following.

Were there any letters in the alphabet that you think Mike was missing? List them in the comments below along with a short description.

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For the past few days I have been staying in England for the annual Goodwood Festival of Speed. While the event has been a once-in-a-lifetime experience because of the cool work we’ve been doing with The Henry Ford and their future Racing in America exhibit, it’s also been extremely frustrating being here for one reason: lack of access to the internet. Go ahead, chuckle and get it out of your system.

As someone who spends the majority of their life online I come to rely on my ability to get online. I’ve become spoiled by my ability to virtually always get online from any location.

The majority of work that we do at New Marketing Labs involves needing to be online. One of the main reasons why I’m in England is to capture content to upload online. Sounded easy enough while back in Boston, right? Well, when planning the trip I knew that I wouldn’t have data on my iPhone. It’s just too expensive and I wasn’t going to get a UK phone just for this trip. I was ok with that. At least the hotel had free wifi, I thought to myself. Score. Except that as I’ve gotten settled at the hotel I’ve found out that they block access to every social site. So far I’ve found that they block Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Luckily I was able to get on to Flickr to upload all of the photos that I’ve been taking. But, otherwise, I’ve been basically disconnected from the social web for the past couple days.

Now, I agree that it is good to disconnect to spend time with family and friends but not when you’re traveling for work and need access. What I think is worse is that it’s like dangling a carrot in front of my eyes that I can almost reach. I can access the internet. I can even sort of access Twitter by going through TweetDeck. But, anything else = have fun trying. This means that I have to use precious time while at Goodwood huddled in the media tent trying to share a connection with 100 other folks uploading content of their own. It’s possible but I much preferred the idea of doing it from the hotel at night during my “off” time.

While I’ve been able to mostly get my work done, even if a bit delayed, it has been very frustrating. So, my question to you is what do you do when you run into technology issues that prevent, or greatly hinder, your ability to get your work done?

Correction: I’m apparently able to access Flickr but not able to see any photos while doing a search hence why there isn’t an accompanying photo with this post of someone running into a wall.  Their system is even classifying Chris Brogan’s website as a Usenet and is blocking it. Go figure.

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One of the most engaging features of LinkedIn, Groups, has been been refreshed and is starting to roll out to their users, now at 70 million worldwide.

LinkedIn Groups has been a part of the core feature set within the professional social network but, in my opinion, was one of the most under-utilized features.  People tend to belong to a lot of Groups that interest them but don’t necessarily engage with them on a constant basis.  One of the reasons is that it took multiple clicks to start a discussion within a group.  With this update LinkedIn is trying to put the focus onto creating conversations by making engagement easier and a key focus of the Groups.

Besides putting more of a focus on conversations, LinkedIn has also added new features including the ability to “Like”, “Pass”, or “Comment” on a discussion taking place within the group.  This will help to bubble up the top conversations within a group.  What I like the most about this is that it will make it quicker to drop in to LinkedIn for a few minutes, jump around to a few Groups, check out what’s going on, engage and bounce back out.  Prior to this update that is what one of the discouraging factors for me to using LinkedIn Groups.  I always felt there was a lot of value in them but it was a time suck to search through the discussion threads in all of the different groups to find the conversations that I found useful or wanted to be a part of.  That all changes now.

Here is a video demoing the new features to help explain it all…

This update makes me even more excited about LinkedIn.  It is a network that I find huge value in but, admittedly, don’t spend a lot of time in.  I tend to spend most of my time over on Twitter (follow me) or Facebook (friend me) and LinkedIn would always come in a distant third.  However, now I’m going to make it a point to spend more time engaging and using LinkedIn more effectively.

Are we connected yet on LinkedIn? If not, it would be awesome to connect and you can also keep updated with New Marketing Labs by following us over there.

Do you find LinkedIn Groups useful? Do you think you’ll spend more time hanging out around Groups with the update?

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If you’re anything like me then every time you see CTU headquarters, the White House Situation Room or any other fusion center-styled office space, you wish you could have a similar set up.  Imagine if you could have your own Situation Room to monitor everything going on online around you and/or your company.  I’m sure you can immediately think of how you would arrange it, right? Maybe a tool like Radian6 on one screen, Twitter on the other, a cool visualization chart that you’re not really sure what it does on yet another screen, multiple keyboards, touchscreens, iris scanners, fingerprint readers, and other cool gadgetry.  Ok, maybe I got a little carried away.  Until earlier today I thought this was a far-fetched dream of mine until I came across an interesting Mashable post highlighting what Gatorade is up to.

Gatorade has created their own social media command center.  Yes, it actually looks like a real command center with most of the gadgetry that I daydream about having in my office.  This allows Gatorade to fuse multiple sources of data and make real-time decisions based on how, for example, a marketing campaign is being received by the community.  Besides using this command center to monitor the social web, Gatorade is also using it for more traditional digital marketing metrics such as monitoring the optimization of landing pages, trying to increase engagement on their sites and reduce the exit rate.

Want to get an inside peak at Gatorade’s Social Media Command Center? Check out this YouTube video to begin drooling, er, I mean, to begin your tour:

If your company is fusing together multiple sources of social data, are you doing anything unique similar to Gatorade?  If so, please post any links in the comments below.

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Early yesterday morning while walking my dog, Sasha, I noticed a vehicle in my parking lot had been vandalized.  The car was sitting on two slowly buckling milk crates and it was missing all four of its wheels.  As I walked past that vehicle I realized that another vehicle beside it had one of its windows smashed.  I called out management offices as I was heading into the office to alert them and get the police en route.

Towards the end of the day I ended up running into the property manager and inquired as to what he suspected happened and whether or not there had been other problems reported on the property.  He told that me that it appeared to be targeted to the main vehicle because it had expensive tires and rims.  I was surprised that my wife or I hadn’t woken up during the night when the vehicle’s alarm, presumably, went off while the car was being jacked up and the tires were being stolen.  The property manager explained that the resident reported hearing his alarm go off but had just silenced it from his apartment figuring that it had been accidentally tripped by weather or an animal.  Had he actually looked to see why the alarm was going off, it is possible that he could’ve interrupted the crime.

Besides ensuring that there was nothing left in my vehicles that could attract criminals, I began thinking about how oblivious we are to car alarms nowadays.  We have become so accustomed to hearing alarms buzzing that many times we won’t even glance in the direction of the alarm while walking through a parking lot.  Have you ever done that?  I know I sure have.  Now, related that to your marketing program.  Are you ignoring the alarms going off all around you?  Do you even realize that alarms may be sounding crying for your attention?

Identifying the Alarms

Being able to identify the alarm and knowing what you need to be listening for is the first step.  What types of alarms should you be aware of?  They can come in a variety of formats but some of them may include:

• Declining responses to a marketing campaign
• An increase in spam complaints
• Continued lack of engagement from your community
• A decline in RSS or email subscribers to your blog
• A lack of growth in followers, fans, or subscribers

These are just a few of the many alarms that could be sounding that you continue to hit the silence button on.  Your alarms may be different than those that I have listed.  Exactly what the alarms are really doesn’t matter.  What matters is that you identify them so that you can properly respond to them before it’s too late.

Responding to the Alarms

So, you’ve identified the alarm, now what?  You should develop both a strategic and tactical plan to address the issue and respond to it.  The level of the response will be dictated on what the alarm actually is and based on how long you might’ve ignored it.  Much like a progressive disease, the longer it goes untreated, the harder it may be to correct.  What are some ways you can respond to the alarm(s)?

• Switch up the day and time you send your email marketing
• Review your site analytics over a period of time. Identify where the decline began or where it started to level off.  What were you doing (or not doing) during that time?
• Did you recently update your blog and forget to add the “Subscribe” button back?  Yep, I’ve done that before.
• Have you ever analyzed what type of content you produce?  Is it one-way push? Are you promoting others? Do you only retweet others work?

What’s Next

The next steps are to continue monitoring the changes you have implemented and track whether or not they’ve been successful.  Always monitor, evaluate, experiment and adapt.  This will ensure that you’re staying alerted to alarms before it becomes too late.  Much like the resident who lost all four of their tires, when you realize that you shouldn’t have hit the silence button, it may be too late.  Worse case scenario is that you’re so blind to the alarms that you slowly bleed your entire community or customers and have nothing left.  Just a hint: try to avoid that from happening.  It’s usually not healthy for your business.

Do you silence the alarms going on around you?

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Photo Credit: wallyg

A recurring topic seems to be whether or not social media is a fad.  Personally, I’d like to think that we’re past having to justify whether or not social media will disappear any time soon.  But then I interact with my circle of family and friends that aren’t marketers or involved with social media beyond possibly looking at friends photos on Facebook and I realize that social media is still an unknown for many.  Do you experience the same frustrations?  Are you constantly justifying why people log into Twitter to tell the world what they had for dinner?

Well, Eric Qualman, author of Socialnomics (affiliate link), is back with a follow up to his original “Social Media Revolution” video and he has some new stats to share in this video.  Did you know that:

• Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
• 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. met via social media
• If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest country behind China and India.
• In the time it takes to watch the below video, there will be over 100+ hours of video uploaded to YouTube
• There are over 60 million status updates on Facebook daily
• To reach 50 million users it took radio 38 years, TV 13 years, Internet 4 years and the iPod 3 years.  Pretty remarkable huh? It took Facebook less than a year to add 200 million users.

These are just a few of the many stats that Eric shares in this refreshed video:

How do you prove to others that social media isn’t a fad?

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One of my areas of interest continues to be how social media is being used by government, at all levels (Federal, State and local), military, and politics. We have seen plenty of examples of how government and politics (sometimes one of the same) are using social media.  We have even seen how some branches of the military, such as the Air Force, are using social media.  But, what we don’t usually get to learn about is how these groups organize their social media efforts.  Following the social accounts is helpful but gaining insight into why and how they’re engaging in social media begins to allow us to shape the way that we can measure their success (or failures) online.

Two main documents will usually provide you with the needed information to begin to form this basis: the organization’s social media policies/guidelines and their social media strategy.  The first step is finding out if they even have either of those 2 documents.  The next step is exploring the documents to find out what their constraints are, why they’re getting involved with social media and how they hope to benefit from it.

While there are an abundance of social media policies floating around online (check out Coca-Cola’s, for example), it becomes harder to find published social media strategies.  That’s why I was surprised and excited to find that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had published the Chairman’s 2010 social media strategy.  You can check out the full social media strategy below.

Don’t know who the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the Chairman is?  Wikipedia defines the Joint Chiefs of Staff as “a group of military leaders in the United States armed forces who advise the civilian government of the United States.”  The Joint Chiefs of Staff are the Chiefs of each of the four military branches and are overseen by the Chairman who is appointed by the President of the United States and is, by law, the highest ranking military officer and principal military advisor to the President.

Now that we’ve had our short history lesson, did you know that the Chairman, Admiral Mullen, is actually active on multiple social media accounts such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube?  Not only is Admiral Mullen and his staff active on a variety of social networks, but their involvement is being guided by, according to their strategy, four main goals:

1. ENGAGE – Begin engaging in interactive conversations with our followers and post more personalized content about the Chairman.
2. ALIGN – Align the content creation process for social media with Chairman’s Top 3 Priorities, assimilate social media content creation into existing Join Staff processes and products, and involve the entire public affairs shop, speech writers, editors, CAG, and Aides.
3. DRIVE – Use social media content to get in front of events, trips, and testimony to lead the discussion and focus questions.
4. EXPAND – Continue to grow the Chairman’s online audience and identify new social media platforms to engage from.

For each of these categories they have identified a list of objectives and, where appropriate, a list of goals to achieve.  One of the objectives that caught my eye was under their goal of providing “social media business cards at all events as a source of more information.”

I think it’s great to not only know that the Joint Chiefs of Staff have a social media strategy but that they have published it online for all of us to peruse, share and discuss.

What say you about their strategy?

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