Mar 05
AndrewHumor, Life in Digital
You know the feeling you get when you’re showered and freshly wiped and yet the inside of your butt cheeks still feel wet and you irrationally think it might be poop even though it’s probably just moisture? Welcome to Friday B.S. We know exactly how you feel.
I’m barely hanging on to the twitter train. Twitter to me is kind of like a puzzle. I can see the picture on the box and it’s pretty and I want to put it all together, but then I shuffle through the individual pieces and I just can’t figure it out.
I signed up for twitter for the same reason I signed up for facebook. I’m not an entrepreneur, but I am a writer. There’s something to be said for being able to connect with fans of all ages. For entrepreneurs, social networking represents a free way to advertise your wares. All you do is generate a shortened url to a product you are selling, and presto, tweet the link to your followers / post the link to your wall and you’re in business. But for someone in the public eye, it is also a convenient way to extend your reach. You can interact with your fans in short, contained bursts that have a minimal amount of drain on your day to day life but maximum amount of impact on expanding your brand. 
But you might have noticed what I didn’t say. I didn’t create my profiles in order to meet new friends. I didn’t create profiles in order to find people from high school that I had long since buried in the graveyard of people I barely remember, whose names spark only the vaguest recollections of times long since passed. I didn’t make a profile so my parents could keep tabs on me, or I could post photo albums from last weekend, or to become a fan of my favorite bands. All of that stuff happens, but it’s ancillary to my intent. And it always has been.
When I first started using twitter, I would post jokes as I thought of them. Then I started to post when I was drunk. Then I discovered the hashmark and started posting things like
Woke up at 1am to I Wanna Dance w/ Somebody blaring and thought ‘What are my roommates doing?’ Wasn’t them. #falselyaccused
Then I realized that since I am a writer, I should be advertising my books. So I started posting links to the sales page, and updating my followers on the writing process, and tweeting every time I wrote a new blog post. Then I started taking random pictures and posting them with a caption (like this morning, the one of the car I parked next to with the trash barrel in the passenger’s seat and some kind of alien glob coating the side mirror). And finally, after all this time, I just tweet about whatever random thing I’m doing at the time.
But here’s what I don’t get. Why do you care? I barely care about the minutiae of my own life.
The latest wrinkle is follower-farming. Essentially, huge lists of followers who will follow you back. It’s a great idea, I guess, if gathering together a huge following is your thing. But what’s the end game?
The only way to find out is to try it. So I gamely signed up to follow 1,000 new accounts, and lo and behold, just 24 hours later, I have whopping 1,000 new followers myself. It worked as promised. But as far as I can tell, the vast, vast majority of the people I’m following don’t post any original tweets. They retweet crap from other people, post advertising links and sometimes just post lists of their own followers. Over and over and over again. Then there are the select few that tweet quotes from famous people. Over and over and over again. What the fuck? Why? Please someone explain it to me. First off, how is that a good use of the tweeters’ time and energy? And second off, really I mean really who is actually reading your tweets with genuine interest?
Let’s forget about social networking as a means of personal expression. If you’re the kind of person that regularly updates your facebook status or tweets about your day – that’s a legitimate use of the tool. Instead, let’s talk about entrepreneurship. My friend, someone I respect greatly, has said more than once that twitter (and facebook) are free means of advertising. But the message is untargeted and gets lost among this vast network of people who aren’t using the social networks for what they were intended for. Am I wrong? If I tweet a link to my book to 1,000 followers, have I succeeded in piquing their interest in my product or my brand? Are my 1,000 followers, themselves ostensibly entrepreneurs, as interested in my product as I am in theirs (if so, hooboy! I’m in trouble.) I really don’t get it. Not only do I not get it, I’m reasonably certain that my advertising attempts through social networking aren’t going to result in book sales except from people who were already inclined to buy my book in the first place.
Despite all this, I really like connecting with people through facebook and twitter. For every five or so friends or followers I have, there is one that I’m glad to be in contact with. For the rest of it though, I just don’t know what to think. The twitter train is moving pretty fast, but I’m not entirely certain that I even need to be on board.
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Andrew Marx is the author of Accidents Happen. You can follow him on twitter.
Feb 04
AndrewA Writer's Blog, Business, Life in Digital
It sounds irresistible in theory. A completely free marketing campaign that reaches potentially millions of prospective customers. But how do you know if it works? (Click here for part one or part two of this article)
There are some obvious answers. 1) It works if your friends forward your message to other friends and their friends forward it on to people who you would never reach otherwise. For instance, the best viral videos get 100,000 hits or more, usually within the first few days. 2) If you have a subscriber-based service (like a podcast or mailing list) you can measure success in the increase in subscribers that you gain and keep. 3) The most obvious of all: did you see a spike in sales?
Depending on how technology-savvy you are, you can gather a lot of hard data on the success of your campaign. You can track the number of times an e-mail was forwarded. You can google search for your campaign keywords and see how many results pages come up related to your viral campaign. You can use some facebook metrics to track the popularity of your fan page. You can use twitter search to look at the trends for your particular keywords (by the way, trend tracking is available even if your keywords aren’t appearing a lot – they do not have to be in the top ten most popular trending topics for you to track them). In addition to that, your website can have a hit counter, google has its own analytic package, and you may be able to track clicks through any of the social networking tools you end up using.
Here’s a strong caveat: if you have to beg your friends to help viral your message, then you already don’t have a strong campaign message. It doesn’t hurt to ask them to spread the message along, but the true success of viral marketing is to get other people to do the work for you. Remember, what you have at its core is a word of mouth campaign. The success of your campaign is grounded in your ability to create a message that people want to share on your behalf. You are capitalizing on a culture of endorsement for your product. Whether you achieve that through humor or creating a thought-provoking message or some other catch that makes your pitch shine, it is really the power of your message that propels it to viral stardom. But the vehicle that takes you there is other people’s interest.
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Writer’s Income is a weekly blog that covers all aspects of writing for publication. Topics include writing, publishing, and marketing with an emphasis on doing all the work yourself.
About the author
Feb 02
AndrewA Writer's Blog, Business, Life in Digital
It sounds irresistible in theory. A completely free marketing campaign that reaches potentially millions of prospective customers. But how does it work?
A viral campaign at its heart is a word of mouth campaign. (Click here for part one of this article) You create a message to advertise your product and send it out to as many people as possible. The vitality of your campaign depends on those people then forwarding your message on to others – specifically potential customers you wouldn’t reach otherwise.
To design a campaign, you first need to look at the specifics of the product you are selling, the time available to produce the message, the resources available and how best to reach your target audience (since you should always pitch to them first). Start by writing down your top-level outcomes. For most of us it would be “to interest new customers in purchasing my product” but there could be other outcomes for you as well. Perhaps your outcomes are “to get people to sign up for my mailing list” or “to announce a special sale starting soon.”
Then decide how you want to get the message out to potential customers. Videos, weblinks, comic strips, podcasts, and sound clips are all viable viral vehicles for your campaign messages. But it helps to work within a medium that you are comfortable with. Videos tend to be looked on as a universal medium for viral marketing, but if you don’t know the first thing about putting together an effective video message then you might want to start somewhere else.
Once you’ve have decided what kind of message you are going to create, you need to figure out how to present your pitch. It helps to create an outline or even a storyboard to plan out how your message is going to look, feel or even sound. Then look at the overall scope of your campaign and ask yourself:
1) Does the message make sense for the product?
The best campaigns not only make obvious connections to the product, but the campaign actually makes sense for the product being pitched. Dancing babies are great, but what do they have to do with what you are selling?
2) Is there a clear call to action?
A call to action is a specific instruction for the customer to take action after viewing the message. It can be to direct them to a sales website. It can be “come by our store today.” It should be very specific and it should match your top-level outcomes.
3) Is the message eye-catching?
This is the short-attention span generation. You need something within your message to get your audience to immediately take notice. The good news is that for viral campaigns, it’s not necessary to keep their attention for very long.
So what happens if your product isn’t glamorous, exciting or particular flashy? What happens if you don’t know the first thing about marketing? What happens if you just are not familiar with the technology to start a viral campaign? Then ask yourself:
1) Is this the type of marketing project I should be embarking on at all?
2) Should I pay someone to do the work for me?
3) Do I have the time and resources to complete the campaign myself?
My recommendation is to create a sample message – short and sweet – as a test run. For instance, create a 20-second video clip using your phone’s video recorder and post the video to YouTube. Ask your friends to watch the clip and provide some feedback. Or draw out a comic strip with your pitch and post it online. Ask people to leave comments about it.
By trying it out, you also take the process from start to finish and possibly identify some pitfalls that maybe you weren’t aware of. Here’s one that you may not have thought of: what if Facebook isn’t working the day you want to link to your campaign on the site? Technology fails all the time, websites go down, internet connections are lost. A test-run gives you the opportunity to see where things might go wrong before you spend a lot of time and energy on a large-scale campaign. I would also recommend keeping a list of all the things that may not have worked the way you expected them to so you can plan for it next time.
Finally, before you move on to a full-blown campaign, ask yourself:
1) Is it clear what I am selling?
2) Is it clear how to purchase my product?
3) Is it visually interesting?
4) Am I achieving my top-level outcomes?
If the answers are ‘no’ then tweak your campaign. Once you are comfortable with your test message, it’s time to move on to the full-length pitch.
Part three will look at how to measure the success of your viral campaign.
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Writer’s Income is a weekly blog that covers all aspects of writing for publication. Topics include writing, publishing, and marketing with an emphasis on doing all the work yourself.
About the author
Jan 31
AndrewA Writer's Blog, Business, Life in Digital
It sounds irresistible in theory. A completely free marketing campaign that reaches potentially millions of prospective customers. But does it work?
Viral marketing is a word of mouth campaign using one of the various free social networking sites, of which facebook, youtube and twitter are probably the most heavily played to. You post a link or a video to the site and your friends share the link with their friends and you’re in business. Instantaneous increase in your potential audience ten-fold.
But does it work?
Viral marketing, whether it’s a video or a web link or a photograph, relies on volume. It requires buy-in on a scale beyond your circle of friends and their circle of friends. It works by the sheer numbers, the likelihood that if you can reach enough people, someone is going to buy.
Viral marketing is completely contrary to the notions of conventional marketing. The whole point of marketing is to focus in on your target demographic and pinpoint your advertising to people who show a bent for buying your product. You aren’t marketing to make friends, gain fans or followers. You are trying to convert sales. Most viral marketing is completely untargeted. The people receiving your message may not be the ones you are trying to reach.
But does it work?
In a sense, word of mouth is the best way to sell a product. Unsolicited testimonials are hands-down the most effective type of marketing. Viral marketing taps into the notion by having your friends recommend to their friends whatever you’re selling.
But the untargeted nature of viral marketing means that your message may get lost along the way. You may be missing a call to action that urges people to make the purchase. As long as facebook and youtube and twitter are free, the only cost to you is your time. So yes, if you can make sales by this means and had minimal or no costs to launch a campaign, then the return on your investment has the potential to be high.
In part two, we’ll look at some ways to maximize your viral campaign. In part three, we’ll look at ways to measure your success.
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Writer’s Income is a weekly blog that covers all aspects of writing for publication. Topics include writing, publishing, and marketing with an emphasis on doing all the work yourself.
About the author
Mar 30
AndrewHumor, Life in Digital Branding, Fame, satire
Dying for fame? Dreaming of riches? Want to be among the social elite? That is so last century. This century it’s all about branding. Your brand name is your fame, it’s your privacy policy, your public profile, your media spin. Most of us have nothing to offer but ourselves. You think you’re special, and damnit, it’s about time you start proving it to the world. Start selling yourself today and make your mark tomorrow. And remember, you only have yourself to brand! Get started with…
Step 1: You ain’t got a name, you ain’t got a life
Name is everything in branding. It becomes the way people recognize you, something that distinguishes you from the rest. You can use your real name, a variation of your real name or make some shit up, but if it’s not memorable, you’re already dead in the water.
The savviest individuals sass up their name with just enough vroom to catch people’s attention. So throw away Miss Sally and call yourself Miss Salle! Your brand name should roll off the tongue and stick in their throats. It should blaze on paper and sound like the coming of the new dawn through the microphone.
Step 2: Become an e-medium
Remember, you’re selling yourself, not some product, not a book you wrote or a t-shirt you designed. You are selling you. And these days, you’re nothing without your network. Spread the word through every conceivable form of electronic medium known to man. Never heard of twitter? You’re six months behind. Not on facebook? That was two years ago. MySpace? Four. Haven’t bought your own website? Ten years ago, the best were already putting their stamp on the internet with their brand.
Go now and buy the damn website with your brand name on it. Already taken? Buy a different. Make it short, clever and spell it right. Don’t know what to put on it? Leave it blank then, but do not, whatever you do, leave it out there for someone else to snatch up.
Step 3: Do it Stupid
People win over fans by making themselves out to be total asses. Your brand name succeeds when you’re the biggest ass on the planet. Don’t be a wuss. Your brand is driven by your ability to do something totally bullshit and then film it and put it on YouTube. That’s how people know that for that one precious moment, you were the king of total assholes. They won’t even remember what you did, only that you were the mofo that did it.
And get on it because people are doing stupider and stupider shit all the time. Pretty soon we’re gonna run out of stupid shit to do and then you’ll be stuck a nobody. Is that what you want!
Step 4: Beat It
Branding helps you carry the momentum of your accomplishment into the future. It’s the hook that keeps people back for more. Everyone is forgotten. All your accomplishments are for nothing 15 minutes later. But damnit, your brand can live on forever. Put it all over the web, spread it through the hot fingers of your friends and people you’ve never met who will obsess about you. Take pictures.
Remember, they aren’t forwarding just a YouTube clip, they are sending your brand all over the internet, spreading it like butter on bread. And the way to keep it up is to beat it into the ground. Twitter yourself into a frenzy, tag yourself in photos on facebook. Make a blog, start a photo album, add another video clip. Do whatever it takes to feed more of yourself into the world wide web until we are stuffed so full all we shit out is you.
You can’t ever let up! You can do it. The minute you stop, the minute you rest on your reputation, the minute you take a breather, you risk ruin unless your brand can carry you through to the next triumph. Only through the power of branding can you sell forever the one commodity that you actually have to offer the world…that commodity is you and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise!
Mar 29
AndrewLife in Digital Facebook, Internet, Technology, twitter
Raised on twitter and facebook and xbox games where you play against players in Indonesia, it’s no wonder that face time doesn’t have intrinsic value anymore to the next gen. These days, pretty much anything can be replicated and accomplished remotely. It allows us to date from afar, order take-out, even talk run a business without ever having a physical storefront.
Being old fashioned, I’m not so impressed that we encapsulate our experiences into 140 character snippets, nor update our so-called status everyday with vague and vaguely threatening lines like “I can’t believe that just happened to me.” It’s a breeding ground for misunderstanding and apathy. After all, a few non-sequitor status messages and it’s a lot like crying wolf too many times. It becomes totally meaningless.
I don’t think we’re completely beyond brunches and going out drinking with our friends after work, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that the next gen is heading towards a mentality where those things become less the social norm. Technology has empowered us to communicate more efficiently but the cost hasn’t been measured yet. If everything is tasked and accomplished through an electronic medium, it essentially removes the need for human contact, the human element and devalues face time with other people. Is it crazy to suppose we are just turning ourselves into automatons where face time is replaced with remote time? One new generation at a time.
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