Top 10 Tips To Becoming Rich and Famous Online

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’

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.

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

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

Follow the author Niall McKeown on Twitter

Everything I hold is either crying or melting

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.

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.”

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.