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Top 10 Tips To Becoming Rich and Famous Online

by Niall McKeown on 22.08.2011

The title of this blog is said with tongue-in-cheek. It’s as if there were buttons you could press to make fame happen, a set of rules to follow or a certain combination of technologies that enable riches to simply tumble your way. The web is falling down with websites offering easy answers to the complex question: “How do I become more popular on-line?” Well dear reader this blog illustrates what you need to do and what you should avoid doing.

Examples of some dubious recommendations from ‘get famous quick’ blogs include:

50 ways to get more people to like your Facebook page

10 surefire ways to get more Twitter followers

The most curious suggestions in the lists of quick fixes for stardom include:

Get Verified like the Dalai Lama

Only helps when you're already famous...

Buy Suckers and Hope They Are Too Stupid To Unsubscribe

...how many new Twitter followers will fall for that?

Link your ‘tweetbook’ to your ‘faceblog’

twitblog Top 10 Tips To Becoming Rich and Famous Online

Content on Facebook Rarely Reduces Successfully to 140 Characters

I’m a scientist at heart. I like to use evidence to prove my theories and as such I’ve selected several individuals, consumer brands and business-to-business service providers on which to conduct my research into Top 10 Tips To Become Rich and Famous Online.

wall of fame1 Top 10 Tips To Becoming Rich and Famous Online

Lee Munroe is a successful, creative, self-employed 27 year-old web designer that works part of the year in Belfast and part of the year on the west coast of the USA. Some might say he’s living the dream. I would be one such person.

Why has Lee got so many followers on Twitter? Probably because he writes a blog , “Designing User Experience and Interfaces for Websites”. Lee’s labour of love over the past five years has earned him respect from his peers. His peers see him as a web leader and re-publish his work causing others to follow him, increasing his readership.

Gerry McGovern has only 3,420 followers, so why has the Irish author of four successful books on Customer Top Task analysis so unpopular by comparison? Probably because the 16,000+ subscribers to his email newsletter prefer to read his weekly thoughts on the niche topic he leads via email.

Katrina Doran leads Northern Ireland’s beauty and fashion community. Her online persona, Sasha Sugah has 2183 friends and the Sugahfix.com website has over 4500 opt-in email addresses from ladies looking for fashion inspiration. Such is the depth of relationship with its readers, Sugahfix.com has the power to mobilise the fashion elite to attend fashion shows, bars, clubs and restaurants and can anoint an establishment as being ‘the place to be seen’. This can dramatically change the fortunes of an outlet.

Sugahfix’s power extends far beyond that of a print publication. They converse using social media with the leading influencers in their sector on first name terms. This massive influence didn’t happen over night, it has taken Katrina and her team years and selecting to take a leadership role to gain such level of respect.

CERN, the world’s leading physics laboratory, Jimmy Choo, a leading fashion designer focusing on the niche of high fashion shoes, and E-Consultancy, a UK leader on digital marketing all have two things in common. They don’t follow most of the tips offered in the ‘get famous quick’ websites and second, they lead and have strategically built and lead a tribe.

10 Tips To Becoming Rich and Famous Online

Stand for something! Get a niche
Proactively lead and challenge your niche audience.
Write stuff people want to read, not stuff you want them to read.
Be original and offer a unique perspective.
Gain respect over time. It’s a long game.
Treat followers as intelligent strangers, not ‘web traffic’.
Excite and please your readers and let them spread the word.
Understand that the technology is much less important than what you say.
The influence of the follower is more important than the volume of followers.
Ignore ‘Get Famous Quick’ tweets, blogs and Facebook postings.

Follow the author Niall McKeown on Twitter

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Mobilising the silent majority

by admin on 05.08.2011

In an expression of people power, on the web we regularly observe a smaller tribe who feel strongly about something enjoying a louder voice than a larger tribe who feel less strongly. This has big implications for how we manage our brands and our reputations online.

Since the birth of the web, accelerated by the advent of the social networking revolution, internet users, including you and I, have aligned ourselves into tribes. By the people and causes we follow on Facebook and Twitter, and the comments we leave on social media, we define our values, beliefs, and interests very publicly. Whilst identifying the tribes to which people belong in the offline world can be tricky (albeit tattoos and sports jerseys can often give us a clue), in the online world, a cursory look over someone’s Facebook or Twitter profile will tell us a huge amount about them. Thus people make connections with those of like mind and join up their voices behind common causes more easily than ever before.

roland bunce facebook1 Mobilising the silent majority Just ask Bangor’s Roland Bunce, recently on the end of an online viral campaign to have him crowned Ireland’s Next Top Model how powerful the network effect can be.

A few years ago, Chevrolet launched an SUV into the US market, called the Tahoe. This thing was a monster (seriously, Google it, in Ireland you’d need an HGV license to drive one) but it was perfect for soccer Mom and soccer Dad to take soccer Brad to soccer practice on a Sunday morning. It was pressing any number of middle-class-dream buttons in that marketplace and was selling fairly well.

Their marketing department, wanting to leverage the power of the crowd, decided that they would run an online promotion, whereby they would produce the first twenty seconds of a TV advert and give their online audience the tools to finish the last ten seconds. Customers could upload photos and videos and add their own marketing slogan and text to the final seconds of the advert. Once all of the contributions were made, they would be put into a voting system, with the plan being that the most voted for advert conclusion would be put into post-production and make it on to the TV.

The slogan on the most voted for commercial? The Earth is not your Bitch! Second most voted for slogan? Global Warming isn’t a Pretty SUV Ad.

global warming isnt a pretty ad Mobilising the silent majority

Needless to say the winning adverts never made it to the TV.

earth is your bitch Mobilising the silent majority

So what dynamics drove this outcome? Well quickly their audiences separated themselves into tribes, with two tribes dominating. The first tribe was soccer Mom and soccer Dad who were very happy to live the middle class American dream but who didn’t feel particularly passionate about their Tahoe. The other tribe was the environmentalists, fewer in number but with much greater strength of feeling about the product. The outcome was that the tribe who didn’t like the fact that the SUV drank a gallon of gas every 10 miles felt much more motivated to contribute to the discussion than those who liked having an impressive car sitting in the driveway.

For commodity and everyday experiences, think about what drives us onto social media to comment? It’s typically an uncommonly good, or more often, uncommonly bad experience. Therefore if brand managers don’t work out ways to balance their most extreme customer opinions with the views of the silent majority, they are doomed.

Think of telecoms providers use of social media. They are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Do we feel overjoyed at their service when their broadband and telephone services work for another day in life? Barely. But do we feel angry beyond reason when their broadband and telephone services are down? You bet we do. So unless they work hard to engage us in conversations outside of the context of their service they can never win with online conversations.

What do the hotels who rank at the top of Trip Advisor for the term Hotels in Ireland have in common? Firstly they run really good businesses; secondly they work hard to ask their regular customers to leave feedback on the web letting people know they are happy with the service they receive.

Edmund Burke’s famous dictum reminds us that for evil to prevail good men need simply do nothing. Online, for your brand to flounder, you need simply ignore what people are saying and make no effort to influence the conversation. To ensure that your extreme customers, often your negative extreme customers don’t have a disproportionally loud voice, you’ve got to work hard to motivate and mobilise your majority of happy customers. And as with Ireland’s Trip Advisor trailblazers, that involves firstly running a first rate business and secondly asking your customers to second that online.

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Everything I hold is either crying or melting

by admin on 18.07.2011

It may come as a surprise that much emerging online customer journey planning theory has lots in common with traditional retail theory. A look under the bonnet suggests that they share convenience as a critical success factor and sales driver.

I don’t have an in-depth knowledge of retail theory, but I know enough to know that customers’ buying patterns will change if you put the milk beside the cheese beside the butter in the cooler, as opposed to the butter beside the milk beside the cheese. The layout of supermarket shelves has become an evidence-driven science and many salespeople for big consumer brands spend a lot of time trying to convince supermarkets to put their products in the prime positions.

convenience layout Everything I hold is either crying or melting

If the theory isn’t of particular interest to you, you might at least be familiar with the practice. This typically takes the form of small children wanting the crisps being displayed by the counter at an adult’s knee level, or adults chomping into a chocolate bar they didn’t need because it was located beside the till.

Nothing in a large supermarket happens by accident, every aspect of your experience when you’re in the door has been planned, implemented, monitored and improved over many years. The result? Those pesky supermarkets are so darned convenient they get the maximum from us they possibly can every time we visit.

Some years ago I spent some time with a marketer for a major FMCG brand who was explaining to me that they were enjoying tremendous traction with one of their products across many customer segments, but the product just wasn’t getting bought by a key group for them – mothers shopping with toddlers and young children. They observed, watched and experimented, but regardless of what they did, sales of this product just weren’t going up amongst this key demographic.

Eventually they realised they were going to have to commission some market research to get to the bottom of all of this and sent out their best clipboard armed team of researchers. They asked both qualitative and quantitative information, and one of the answers a young mother provided was so good that it became the title of the report.

When asked why she didn’t buy this particular product she explained “your company has to realise that when I am doing my shopping everything I hold is either crying or melting.”

patience motivational poster Everything I hold is either crying or melting

If ever there was an image which we should hold in our minds when we are designing search, social, mobile, email and web communications for our customers, it is the idea that as we try to market to them they are balancing a hundred other things which are screaming for their attention.

You conduct email marketing. Think of the Inbox it arrives into. How are you going to get your customers’ attention above what their bosses and customers have sent them?

You conduct social marketing. Think of the Facebook wall or Twitter feed it gets published to. How are you going to be more interesting that Saturday night’s photos or the latest industry news?

And so on. Search Engine Optimisation. Pay Per Click Campaigns. Mobile websites. You are dealing with a ruthless, impatient customer who already has too much information. Plan all of your online marketing activity with the overriding characteristic of your customer in mind.

You are marketing to a customer in a hurry.

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All Hail The Wheelbarrow

by Niall McKeown on 24.06.2011

Imagine you’re standing in front of the Taj Mahal marveling at its construction. A local Guide comes up to you and states “Such a wonderful creation, we have but one to thank”. “Who’s is this special person?” you reply. “Oh, it’s not a person, it’s the new wheelbarrow,” suggests the guide.

Startled by this revelation, you ask for more details. “Well,” says the guide, “If it wasn’t for the wheelbarrow there would have been no way to get all of our content needed for the construction of this masterpiece from the delivery area to the building site, therefore we must all hail the wheelbarrow”.

taj mahal wheelbarrow All Hail The Wheelbarrow

Not wishing to appear rude but concerned with the Guides logic you contest the claim by asking, “Don’t you think the planners, architects, project managers, builders and artisans should be given even a little credit?” The Guide ponders for a moment then says, “Yes, but they are old news now, we have had them for years. This new wheelbarrow is where it’s at now”.

Social Media is the new wheelbarrow. Many marketers give the credit for creating new sales or a new movement to the social network when actually it was words, pictures and ideas that created the movement, the social media platform simply facilitated getting the ‘content to site’.

While Social Media platforms are a super important part of the process, we still communicated and had connections before its arrival. I believe that social media gets credit where credit isn’t due, distorting its importance in the marketing process, misdirecting many marketers.

Successful individuals or organisations that make rich movements and happy customers via social media always focus on the complex task of creating compelling content that stimulates debate, sharing and has context with their audience.

You should ask yourself how much time and effort goes into creating that winning engaging content driven strategy and how much of your time goes into playing with wheelbarrows?

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The Ice Cream Effect on Web Businesses

by Niall McKeown on 17.06.2011

According to the International Dairy Foods Association, in 2007 30.5 % of ice cream sold was Vanilla. Chocolate was next coming in at 10% with Choc Chip coming in at 5.7%. The next 50 flavors collectively didn’t add up to the top three combined.

ice cream popularity The Ice Cream Effect on Web Businesses

The best web businesses also get a disproportionate amount of traffic in similar scales to the top three ice cream flavours. The best e-commerce sites, business-to-business sites per industry sector, charity sites or whatever sector you’re in, the big players usually dominate the majority of the traffic, leaving the smaller players to lick up the rest.

So common sense would say that if you’re going to open up a web business, it should be selling ‘Vanilla’ and you should try to be leading the top three vendors. Well, back-in-the-day that might have been a strategy worth considering, however the dominance of the big players is extremely hard to shift, now that the web has matured somewhat.

Say your ‘Vanilla’ product was to sell denim to the masses. You have all of the top brands in stock and the price is right. How do you get attention? Your differentiators are too small to cause viral chatter, display ads too costly to start building brand and both paid and natural search are closed out due to heavy competition.

the vanilla problem The Ice Cream Effect on Web Businesses

The answer more often than not is “DON’T DO IT”. Only ‘lick what you can swallow’ and go for a niche say, Rocky Road Ice Cream and lead the lovers of this niche taste. Getting 30%, 10% or 5.7% of this smaller market is a lot easier to dominate and is more profitable than going up against the Vanilla behemoths.

The talent, cost and effort required to dominate the niche can of course be calculated before committing to entering the market. For example, run a Pay Per Click campaign and understand the search terms that cause clicks before you build the website. Feel out the market size and propensity of the customer to purchase before commissioning a website. Then take your findings and build the web strategy around the customer’s tastes, not yours.

Every week I see businesses that spend money on becoming web enterprises only to see their dreams melt because they didn’t do the web research, monitor the competition on the web or truly understand the customers’ propensity to purchase. They achieve only fortuitous conversions all because the customer seeks out the best in market. The web enterprise chose to sell Vanilla when they really should have gone Butter Pecan.

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Brand hasn’t gone away you know

by admin on 16.05.2011

Analytics evangelists have done a tremendous job in shaking the marketing profession out of bland or meaningless online success measurements, but in their quest for micro-measurability, some are in danger of overlooking sales psychology and oversimplifying human buying behaviour.

Zoe, aged 15, wants a mobile phone, and her only chance of affording one is to get her father in a weak moment to cough up the mullah. She goes online and researches various mobile phone websites, searching by brand and checking out what Apple, HTC and Nokia have to offer. She posts on Facebook that she’s looking for a new phone and asks her friends what’s hot and what’s not. She identifies a phone that she would like, she prints out its specification in PDF format, and she puts it on a tray at the weekend as she gives her poor oul Da breakfast in bed. He breaks, and buys her the phone online later that day.

In order to buy the phone, Zoe used search engines, social media and web to research, and a website to buy. So which channel is responsible for the sale? They all are. And we haven’t even started to think about above the line marketing which means that those brands were in her mind in the first place. And then there’s the tiny matter of product desirability. And so it goes on.

You’re the marketer at Nokia and you want to get more sales from Zoe’s friends, and you have marketing budget to make this happen. As a result of her buying process, which platform do you change your tactics on, or invest more money in? I don’t know the full answer to the question but I do know it’s more complex than going into Google Analytics, seeing that initially Zoe visited you via a search engine, and therefore concluding that you should invest more money in SEO and PPC.

A Northern Ireland based insurance company uses the web to win business, by running a website which includes a quotation engine, email marketing, search engine optimisation and appearing on price comparison websites. They are cost competitive, however they are not the cheapest in that cutthroat marketplace.

Virtually all of their online sales leads come from price comparison engines, and nearly all of their online sales come from Northern Ireland, even though their price comparison information is displayed throughout the UK.

So why do many people in NI go on to get in touch, whereas much fewer people in GB feel motivated to move to the next step? The answer is brand. (Of course many GB insurers have different prices for NI, but the pattern is still visible versus their NI competitors.) They consistently advertise on television and on billboards.

The war continues to rage in the world of affiliate marketing about whether the affiliate network responsible for the “first click” (thus responsible for presenting a company’s price at the start of the sales process) or the “last click” (thus responsible for closing the sale) should get the commission when a customer buys a product via their platform. The reason this war seems unlikely to end any time soon is because sales is way more complex that this simplistic model can tolerate.

Analytics are tremendously strong in helping us understand the latter stages of the buying process, and of driving efficiency via a program of optimisation into our search, affiliate, social and web activities. We can clearly identify where customers drop off, where they get frustrated, where they leave and go elsewhere. And whilst we should embrace this measurability in pursuit of happier customers and increased sales, we should never overlook the role that reputation and brand plays in driving desire and expectation in the first place.

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Clear Facebook success trends starting to emerge

by admin on 19.04.2011

As we knew it would, strong patterns are emerging from what makes successful Facebook marketing versus what makes waste-of-time Facebook marketing. Whilst it would take a braver man than me to venture too far from the general rule “we don’t know, yet” it does seem that the common sense rule “it’s social media, not commercial media, people, the clue is in the name” will keep you generally on the right track.

If you were in a sales presentation around a Board Room table and someone asked you what your company did, you would answer the question very differently to the way you might answer the same question asked by a friend at a dinner party. If you answered too casually in the Board Room you would lose the sale, and if you answered too formally at a dinner party you would risk the verbal wrath of the Come Dine With Me narrator guy.

In other words, context impacts content.

Or to put it a different way, context doesn’t change the content but rather the style in which is it presented. This is the big theme which is emerging from Facebook studies.

Here’s the light social stuff which is reaping benefits for brands:

The beleaguered and busy customer is happy to engage with promotions and lightweight interaction, but that’s as far as their interest and attention generally stretches.

Integral marketing is working nicely with relationships between offline and online working particularly well; FMCG sector is leading the charge in this regard.

Conversation between brands and their customers is possible, and with good strategy behind communication, positive conversations can prevail in the social arena. Meaningful customer service can take place.

However as soon as brands go heavier or deeper or more salesy than that, trouble starts.

“Like” gates are driving people mad and do your brand damage. Either engage with your customers or don’t, but don’t tease them by putting desirable content beyond a “like” gate. Customer behaviour is clear in this environment; like … read content … unlike … never come back.

Deep campaigns aren’t working. They are very alluring and can get the creative team very excited but too often we see that punters just don’t care enough. Campaigns with lots of pages, interaction, inbuilt apps and linked micro-sites are just too much like hard work for too many customers. Treasure hunts, games, prediction contests and team games are too high maintenance for the weary consumer.

Extended permissions are stretching customer patience to breaking point, with drop off rates as high as 30% for trusted brands. What asking someone for access to their entire demographic profile from an un-trusted brand does to their perception just isn’t worth thinking about.

Perhaps counter-intuitively sweepstakes and viral promotions just aren’t going viral. Even massive incentives aren’t enough to get anyone other than bargain hunters (who have no loyalty, or even interest, in the brand) motivated to fill out forms.

More often, less deep, more genuine, is how customers are expecting to engage with you online. The theme of the hour is consistent, lightweight engagement. Sure, that’s not a strategy by itself, but already it’s enough to give us some broad parameters to run more successful campaigns and avoid common pitfalls.

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Bribing friends to influence people

by Niall McKeown on 14.04.2011

In many low engagement industries the term “social media” is being passed around as if it was almost a replacement for advertising.

If your business appears on a monopoly board, has been owned by a government in the past, isn’t an authority and hasn’t achieved super brand status, it’s likely your organisation has to run competitions in order to attract ‘likes’ on Facebook or followers on Twitter.

Once bribing the reader into becoming a friend the brand now faces a tough challenge. Loyalty from bought friendships is not usually based on love and converting the context of that relationship stands to be a very tricky process.

The newfound friend is only there because you tempted them with the allure of gifts, not to hear about your product or service. Gaining the friendship was the easy part. Converting it into something more profitable takes communication skill.

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Good stories not Facebook cause messages to spread

by Niall McKeown on 06.04.2011

James owns an Insurance Brokers. He has several offices dotted around the country with a reasonably healthy but declining book of business. His business is under pressure as many of his loyal customers check out prices online before renewing their insurance with him, driving down his margin and thus the level of service he can offer.

“If I get my existing customers to like me on Facebook then their friends will see my posts and my message will have a much greater reach” James claimed. His hope is that using social media will amplify his voice and allow him to reduce his marketing budget.

James has several challenges that he may have overlooked. Assuming he can get customers to like his business on Facebook this action in itself does not create viral activity. His posts to Facebook appear on his customer’s Facebook wall, but the friends of the customer don’t automatically see James’ post.

His business, while massively important to him has little interest to his customers. Insurance is often a once-a-year purchase, a necessity, certainly not a year round fascination. So the challenge is – what will James say to his customer that is of year round interest?

Finding customer context and quality stories are key components when creating a social media plan. It can take hours of effort and a lot of talent to create quality content that resonates with customers and unless customers engage with the content and start to share it, the message has no viral component and doesn’t spread.

Stories travel and become viral. The ultimate challenge is to move customers from being mere spectators to becoming engaged, sharing participants. My advice to James would be to try email marketing; it is likely to be a more successful channel than social marketing.

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Bonnets and beeswax

by admin on 09.03.2011

As Marketers we are used to giving our products and services a thorough coat of beeswax to make sure our businesses are in showroom condition before we expose them to customers. But online the customer wants to have a look under the bonnet, and what’s more they have access to the tools and channels to do just that, whether we want them to or not.

There is both massive opportunity and massive threat in this. The threat for those running second rate businesses and hoping to cover over the chipped paintwork and rust with a lick of paint and a drop of polish is that first rate marketing no longer covers over second rate business. Reciprocally the tremendous opportunity for marketers and business owners is that with the right online strategy, the relationship between how well you run your business and how positively your business is perceived, has never been closer.

Reputation is the lifeblood of any business, and on the web finding out about the reputation of anything – a business, a town, a person – is very straightforward.

With apologies in advance to the fine folk of Ballymena who may be reading this, I’m going to indulge in a little stereotyping that would make Andy Gray blush. Ballymena was in the news back in November 2010, because a suspicious object was found in the town centre. In response to the news story on the BBC website, across social media speculation was rife regarding what this object may have been:

ballymena facebook1 Bonnets and beeswax

The point is easily and loosely made, reputation precedes comment, and reputation is invariably magnified in social media.

So effectively what is already believed and known gets amplified and enhanced. Happy customers who have bought from good businesses comment on how well they’ve been treated and angry customers have the perfect vehicle to let the world know how lousy their treatment has been.

Contrast the fortune of Northern Ireland’s thriftiest town (said to be full of Scotsmen, but with their generosity removed – joking, I’m joking people!) with the fine folk of creative kitchenware company Lakeland.

In the current dwelling of this author, Lakeland are big heroes. My wife contacted them a few years ago when an item arrived with a minor fault to see how she could return it. “Don’t bother returning it Mrs Dunlop,” they replied, “that’s too much trouble for you, we’ll send you a new one right away”. Late last year she received a customer feedback note, and made a small comment about an item she had received, and stressed that the issue was so minor that she would never have mentioned it but for the fact that they had asked. Lo and behold, a fortnight later, a new item arrived.

Take a trip into social media and you’ll see that my wife isn’t the only person feeling the love for Lakeland. They only need to say the most casual things and they are showered with affection. A comment last year about a customer service award they won resulted into 100s of ‘likes’ and dozens of comments from customers saying how well deserved the award was.

Lakeland love nothing more than opening the bonnet on their business and letting as many people as want to, have a look inside. Because they know that the more people see what they are really like, the more people will like them, buy from them, and recommend them to their friends.

This isn’t the only win for Lakeland. I don’t know for sure, but I bet you they need to spend less on beeswax than any of their competitors.