My wife, Cybele, asked me to pick up some Kind bars while I was there. At the same time I happened to see one of my friends had checked in at Whole Foods and I jokingly told him to pick up the Kind bars for me. Moments later, Whole Foods joined in the conversation, as you can see below.
I really didn’t expect Whole Foods in Portland to put aside the Kind bars for me, although I thought I’d buzz by customer service just for fun and to bust them.
The customer service desk wasn’t where I thought/remembered it to be, and once I found the Kind bars I grabbed the rest of my shopping list and took off, not thinking to check my Twitter feed.
It wasn’t until I got home that I saw the more recent tweets from @WFMportlandME: (more…)
Can you really learn social media at a virtual event?
A few years ago I attended the first Social Media Success Summit(aff). It was a virtual event where you could “attend” from your desktop, watching social media experts talk about Twitter, Facebook and blogging.
As you can see from the video below, I had my doubts of what I could actually gain from a virtual event, but I took the chance and signed up.
It’s no exaggeration that the Social Media Success Summit changed the way I approached social media marketing, and thus the way I ran my business.
It was the best $300 I ever spent.
So flash forward a few years, and now I’m presenting at SMSS2012. Why they let some guy from Maine speak on the same virtual stage as Mari Smith, Brian Solis, Mike Stelzner, Chris Brogan, Amy Porterfield, C.C. Chapman and like twenty other experts I’ll never know.
Bottom line is that if you’ve been on the fence about attending the Social Media Success Summit, I can tell you from firsthand experience that it contains amazing content from some of the most knowledgeable people around. Just take a look at the full line up and topics.
If you’re running your own business, or you’re in marketing, or you’ve been recently given the title of social media manager there’s no better resource than SMSS. Take a peek at the video below and I hope to see you in May!
What do you do if you’re active in social media but it’s not helping your small business?
Dear Rich,
I run a commercial cleaning business and I’ve been using social media for almost a year. I have been blogging three times a week, creating videos, and tweeting several times a day. We have a Facebook page that gets updated multiple times a day but has very few fans and only my employees and family members engage with it, and only when I threaten them! Even when we ran a contest with an iPad 2 as a prize we only got a handful of new likers.
We set up a Google+ page for our business, but almost no one has circled us, despite the fact that we’re putting out fresh content daily.
Most importantly, in looking at our traffic reports, almost no traffic comes from our social media activity, and none of our new clients mention social media when we ask how they found us.
What are we doing wrong? I feel like I’m banging my head against the wall.
Things that are scarce are perceived as more valuable than things that are plentiful. How can you use this to improve your web marketing and social media?
We have been trained that things that are rarer have more value than things that are common. Therefore, to make things appear to have more value, marketers can promote or even fake the scarcity of an object or information.
Like many people, I subscribe to a number of daily deals, like LivingSocial. I know that if I don’t act now, I’ll miss out on 50% off a massage, food or snow tires. Interestingly, I’ve noticed I’m less compelled to buy a daily deal these days because I know that if I miss this half-off yoga class, there will be another one from a competing studio next week. The deal is still a good one, but the scarcity has been removed.
Scarcity also plays on our fear of loss. In one example from the book, homeowners who were told how much they would lose by not insulating their house bought at a much higher rate than another group that was told how much they would save.
Like social proof, authority gives us a short cut in dealing with the complexity of the modern world. We listen to our doctors about health care issues, professors about scholarly matters, and talking heads on TV for everything from child-rearing to national security issues.
Often, this is a good thing. People often become authorities after years of rigorous study. However, in a famous experiment by Stanley Milgram, average people were persuaded to shock another person to near death by a person wielding nothing more than a clipboard and a white lab jacket. (Thankfully, there was no electricity and the person being “shocked” was a confidant.)
Experiment after experiment showed that humans are completely unaware of the amount of autonomy they give over to others, just because of a title, clothing, or trappings.
From laugh tracks to tip jars, we are influenced by the actions and reactions of others. This is especially true when we’re unsure of how to behave in a given situation.
In Cialdini’s chapter on social proof he includes a number of examples of social proof gone haywire, from Jonestown to the murder of Catherine Genovese and the lack of action or reaction from 38 witnesses.
There are a number of variables that impact social proof’s influence over us.
People are hard-wired to be consistent, especially when they’ve publicly committed to a belief. How does that impact your web marketing & social media?
In chapter 2 of Robert Cialdini’s masterful Influence: The Psychology of Persuation, we learned that people have a knee-jerk reaction to responding in kind (or better) to favors…a trait referred to as reciprocity. Now, in the next chapter, we learn that we also wish to be seen as consistent.
Cialdini has a wealth of examples of this in his chapter, but one example that stuck with me is the story of people who agreed to put a giant, ugly sign on their front lawn, in front of their gorgeous home, that said Drive Safely. Not surprisingly, only 17% agreed.
However, in another group, they got an astounding 76% to agree to the same ugly signs! What was the difference?
“We are trained from childhood to chafe, emotionally, under the saddle of obligation. For this reason alone, then, we may be willing to agree to perform a larger favor than we received, merely to relieve ourselves of the psychological burden of debt.”
This is why Hare Krishnas give flowers to travelers at airports before asking for money; they know it’s difficult for people to receive a gift–no matter how small–and then refuse to give a donation.
In another example, the Disabled American Veterans organization sent a donation request mailing that got a respectable 18% response rate. They did another mailing and included those self-adhesive address labels and nearly doubled their response rate to 35%!
These are interesting examples of human behavior, but how can you use them to market your business? (And to do it ethically!)
Unlock the secrets of influence and improve the effectiveness of your web marketing and social media efforts.
Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion starts off with the story of a gift store owner at a tourist destination trying to sell some turquoise jewelery. It’s of good quality and she’s offering a fair price, but no one’s buying.
She tries putting it on sale. No dice.
She moves it to the center of the store. No dice.
She has her sales force push the jewelry. Still, no dice.
In frustration, as she’s leaving for a show, she scrawls a note for her store manager to sell all the jewelry at half-off. When she returns, she’s amazed that it all sold, every last piece.
What’s even more amazing is that her manager misread the handwritten note as DOUBLE the price, which she did.
At the higher price, the jewelry immediately sold out. Why?
The best web marketing articles of 2011…that appeared on our website.
Which is still pretty good. Because you know, we don’t just publish any old crap.
Here’s the last 12 months of articles that appeared in your inboxes if you’re a subscriber to the flyte log, our award winning web marketing email newsletter.
How to Set Up Your Google+ Small Business Page – Google+ is now open for your business. Learn how to get your G+ business page up and running in no time flat. Includes a how-to video to walk you through each step.
B2B Marketing in a Social Media World - If you think there’s no place for your B2B (business to business) company at the social media table, think again. Here are some specific tactics to build your B2B business.
Google+: How to Get Started On Google Plus – 2011 was a big year for social media, and no news was bigger than Google taking on Facebook with their own social networking platform, Google+. Learn how to get started and take advantage of some of the coolest networking tools possible.
Top 5 Blogging Tips: Expert Advice for Your Blog – Blogging continues to be a critical tool for improving your search engine optimization AND your social media optimization. Here are five expert tips to improve your blogging.
SEO Blog Tips: Turn Emails into Search Engine Visibility – You’ll never say “I don’t know what to blog about!” ever again. Or at least, you’ll have less of an excuse after you learn this simple trick that will give you great ideas for content creation.
How to Measure Email and Ad Campaigns in Google Analytics – Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool for measurement, but somethings are tougher to measure. If you’re running banner ads or email campaigns, here’s how you can determine if they’re paying off.
QR Code Marketing for Small Business – One of our most popular articles all year! Learn how your small business can put QR codes to work for marketing and communications.
Web Marketing for Service Professionals – A lot of service professionals aren’t comfortable marketing their services, and still others aren’t comfortable with the world of online marketing. Fear no more! This article will help you get your service based business up and running.
Things that are scarce are perceived as more valuable than things that are plentiful. How can you use this to improve your web marketing and social media?
