Danny Brown

podcaster - author - creator

Latest posts from Danny Brown

Enjoy the latest posts from Danny Brown, and feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments after the post.

Your Best Work is You

If you were asked to give someone a link to your best work when it comes to your content, what link would you share?

For me, some spring to mind, but what?s to say they?re my best work? Perhaps my favourites for whatever reason – but best? I don?t know. And what defines our best work?

Is it the educational post about using the latest social media tool or application?

Is it the blog post about a charity that we?re involved in that hopes to change the world?

Or is it just an ordinary post, talking about nothing in general really?

After all, if you?re just rambling as you would to someone offline, wouldn?t that be your best work for a stranger/potential friend to read because it?s relaxed and honest?

You see, to me, every single thing we share about ourselves through a blog post is our best work.

Whether it?s sharing your expertise with someone who may be less knowledgeable on a certain topic, or recommending other people to read, that?s sharing yourself with people.

Even if you?are just writing about your day, if someone else finds that interesting and stays to read it,?that?s your best work. You?ve helped the day pass quicker for someone, and that?s got to be worthwhile.

So, where would?you recommend us to go?

PS ? If you?re curious, I choose this post.

Why I Don’t Want You to Come Back to My Blog Post After You Comment

One of the things that continues to intrigue me when it comes to content is how we interact with each other after reading a post.

I’ve shared various thoughts on how I see digital conversations evolving, and how we need to close the loop more on making the experience the best it can be for everyone involved – blogger, reader, subscriber or occasional visitor.

Due to a change in how readers consume content and how they discuss it afterward (and, more specifically, where they discuss it), many bloggers have decided to switch off blog comments altogether.

For me, this is a lost opportunity for these bloggers, as the often rich exchanges of thoughts and ideas help take a blog post to a much higher level than it was originally.

Especially when the likes of Postmatic make it incredibly easy for everyone to comment, and comment intelligently (as in, the natural way comments should be handled).

Postmatic

Commenting as An Everyday Action

Think about your daily activities – what’s (probably) the one thing you do the most, regardless of setting (personal or professional)?

It’s probably composing and/or replying to emails, right? Because email is the one thing that remains the same, regardless of technology advances and solutions – you get a message and you reply. Simple.

So why isn’t blog commenting as simple? Why do we need to have multiple solutions all offering (useful, but still fractured) features? Why do we need to provide passwords, sign in options, social actions and more?

[clickToTweet tweet=”Why do we need so many different blog comment options? Actually, we don’t. #content” quote=”While choice is great, the truth is we don’t need so many different blog comment solutions.”]

The truth is, we don’t. While Livefyre’s SocialSync option is pretty cool, and Disqus’s tagging and recirculation community feature is nice, they’re still disparate commenting options.

If I prefer Livefyre, I don’t want to have to create a Disqus account (and vice versa).

This disparate approach to commenting is one of the reasons a lot of bloggers are using when it comes to justifying switching comments off. Instead of commenting on blogs, social channels are preferred as it’s where people spend their time anyway.

Which ties us back to email as a commenting option, because people are already there and using it in pretty much everything they do.

Which is great news if you have a self-hosted WordPress blog.

Read, Reply, Rinse and Repeat

It seems obvious when you think about it – you (usually) get a blog post update via email, you get notifications of new tweets, Facebook statuses, G+ interactions, etc., via email, and you get notifications of a new comment on a blog post via email.

Taking that to its natural next step, Postmatic enables readers and commenters to reply to a blog post and/or comment via email, too. Instead of having to be at point of origin (the blog post itself), the Postmatic experience is pretty seamless:

  • You receive the latest blog post via email from your favourite blogger(s)
  • You read the post in your email inbox, and want to leave a comment
  • Instead of flipping through to the blog, you hit your email’s Reply button
  • You type your comment and hit Send.

And that’s it – job done. Once you hit send, the email is converted into a comment and appears on the post. If it’s in reply to an existing comment, it appears after that (threaded, if the blogger has that option set up).

Postmatic reply

Further comments and replies will come to your Inbox, and you simply continue to use your email to continue the conversation.

It’s so simple, you wonder why it hasn’t been done before (well, unless it has, but I haven’t seen it, and the Postmatic implementation is super easy).

What I’d Like to See Added

I’ve just started using Postmatic, and I can see how popular it could become. Email is such a natural function for us, and we’re not limited by platform – desktop or mobile email is just as easy to use as each other.

Because of this, organic conversations can now be second nature too – we’re not having to jump over to multiple blog posts, nor do we have to worry if the blogger has their site optimized for the mobile experience.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Email is second nature to everyone, regardless of tech know-how. Blog comments should be too.” quote=”Email is second nature to everyone, regardless of tech know-how. Blog comments should be too.”]

These two points alone should see Postmatic find a pretty big userbase, and make blog commenting “popular” again. It’s also pretty good when it comes to features and support.

Postmatic features

While the existing?setup and features are easy and uncomplicated, some features that would make great additions would be welcome in future updates:

  • Currently, it’s for self-hosted WordPress only, and native WordPress comments. If Jason Lemieux, the Postmatic developer, can offer support for other platforms, either as a shortcode or line of script, it could really make Postmatic one of the default systems for commenting. (Note: Jason has kindly worked behind-the-scenes to make Postmatic work with wpDiscuz, which I currently use for comments).
  • The newsletter option that Postmatic offers, while excellent, doesn’t support custom deliveries (like the weekly newsletter I deliver, for example). Support for this is coming, so I look forward to seeing how it’s implemented.
  • Social sharing from the email would be useful. Given Postmatic’s goal is to make commenting easy, by letting you reply from your own email, sharing of posts could be affected if traffic to comment on an actual blog post is reduced. Including sharing options would definitely help here.

All things considered, though, I’m really impressed and excited by the possibilities of Postmatic. Making it feel as second nature as writing an email could really see the resurgence of comments at source.

And for many bloggers, that alone puts Postmatic in a great position to be an essential content tool.

To see how Postmatic works, simply reply to the comment I’ve left below the post, or leave your own comment and see how the reply is handled.

A Look Under the WordPress Hood at DannyBrown.me

Every now and again, I’ll get asked what plugin or solution I’m using on this blog to achieve a certain effect or result.

Because I use self-hosted WordPress to power this blog, it means there’s a crazy amount of add-ons, plugins and other optimization and performance solutions for bloggers to choose from.

While that choice is great, it can also be overwhelming.

Since I’m a self-confessed geek that likes to try out pretty much most things on this blog in the name of experimentation, I’ve used a fair few solutions in the six-plus years I’ve been blogging here.

It’s been a while since I last took a look at what’s underneath, so here’s what’s currently powering my blog, and why you might want to consider it for yours.

To make it easier (in case you’re already really happy with your sharing solution, for example, but looking to get more server speed), I’ve separated them into four main categories.

While some plugins may crossover into other categories, I’ve gathered them into the following areas:

  1. Security
  2. Optimization
  3. Visibility
  4. Growth

The solutions below are a mix of free and premium – what version you use depends on your need. Let’s dig in!

1. Security

While we may want a lot of eyeballs, shares, subscribers, downloads and more from our blogs, we need to make sure we actually have a blog up and running, that’s safe from attacks, and that can be restored if anything happens to it.

While there are various solutions out there, these are the ones I like and currently use.

Anti-Malware and Brute-Force Security by ELI

While WordPress is a great solution for any blogger, it can also be prone to frequent brute force attacks (where hackers try and gain access to your blog by multiple username and password attempts). The Anti-Malware and Brute-Force Security plugin by ELI is a great way to counter these attacks.

Anti-Malware Security and Brute-Force Firewall – WordPress plugin WordPress org English Canada

Features include:

  • Automatic removal of known threats and back-doors
  • Automatic blocking of SoakSoak and other known malware
  • Quick Scan options to give an overview of current threat status
  • Complete scan to look at every part of your WordPress site

This is one of the most comprehensive plugins I’ve used when it comes to brute force protection – definitely recommended.

Check out Anti-Malware and Brute-Force Security by ELI here.

Login Lockdown

Tying into the brute force attack method of trying to access your blog via multiple attempts at guessing your username and password, the Login Lockdown plugin does exactly what it says on the tin, by locking down access to your blog after a set number of attempts.

Login Lockdown

You can:

  • Set the maximum number of attempts to log in before locking down access
  • Set how long a failed attempt is locked out for
  • Hide login error messages
  • Lockout invalid usernames (useful for a blog with limited amounts of users in the backend)

While it’s a pretty simple plugin, it’s effective. And you can’t ask for more than that.

Check out Login Lockdown here.

Monitive

If your content is created for any kind of business value, the uptime of your site is crucial. Heck, even if you’re a personal blogger like me, uptime is still hugely important and something to keep an eye on.

Monitive makes this process easy. Simply create and account and they’ll start monitoring your site’s uptime.

Monitive

Frequency, type of alerts and reports are determined by the plan you’re on, but even the free account’s pretty awesome.

Check out Monitive here.

VaultPress

One of the worst things that can happen to any blogger is to lose his or her content due to a crash, hack, glitch or simple user error. If you have years of content, this loss can be even more painful.

VaultPress is a fantastic solution that not only backs up and restores your site (with real-time back up options), but also protects your themes, plugins and settings into the bargain.

VaultPress

Given that it’s from Automattic, the creators of WordPress.com, it’s almost guaranteed that this will be a great plugin, and so it is.

  • Alternative: iThemes offer an alternative called BackupBuddy. I was using this, but found it was causing load issues due to continuous creations of CRON jobs, so made the switch to VaultPress. More information on that issue can be found here.

Check out VaultPress here.

2. Optimization

Along with security, optimization of your blog should be one of the things you’re constantly tweaking. Google has already advised it will penalize slow sites as well as those that aren’t mobile-friendly.

Apart from your own penalization, though, the user experience – that of your readers – should be top of mind too.

Here are the solutions I use for optimizing my blog.

Akismet

One of the granddaddy’s of the WordPress plugin world, Akismet is probably a mainstay in the majority of WordPress blogs online today when it comes to protecting blogs from comment and trackback spam.

Akismet

It also allows you to see how many comments have been approved by regular commenters, and enables you to bulk clean your comments area from span, keeping your site free of extra load and bulk.

Check out Akismet here.

Anti-Spam

While Akismet does a pretty good job of keeping spam at bay, it can still be beaten by automated scripts that bypass its algorithm. This is where Anti-Spam comes into play.

antispam

It inserts an invisible checkbox, kind of like a captcha, that automated scripts don’t see. This adds an excellent second layer of filtering, and one that only real people will bypass (even though they’re not aware it’s there). This plugin has essentially killed all but the most determined of spammers on my site.

Check out Anti-Spam here.

CDN Linker

One thing that every blogger should be concerned about is site load. Not only is Google looking unfavourably on slow sites, but visitors are more prone to leave a site that doesn’t load in an acceptable time.

CDN Linker is a plugin that makes the connection between your preferred CDN solution (more on that shortly) and your site (even if you’re using a local caching option). It’s lightweight, easy to set up, and effective.

Check out CDN Linker here.

MaxCDN

I’ve mentioned earlier how Google doesn’t look favourably on sites that load slow. A lot of these load issues are caused by sites hosting images and files on their own servers. If they’re not set up for this, cue load issues.

MaxCDN is an excellent solution that does the heavy lifting for you, and lets you just get on with the important stuff like content.

CDN by MaxCDN | Experts in Content Delivery Network Services

I use a hybrid of MaxCDN, CDN Linker, and WP Super Cache to keep my load times to a minimum. Because of the theme design I use (media rich, large featured images), this has made a huge difference in my own blog’s performance, and is well worth the monthly cost to do so.

Check out MaxCDN here.

WangGuard

Run a blog for any decent amount of time and you’ll get your fair share of spam commenters. As well as being a pain in the ass for bloggers, spam commenters (or sploggers) can ruin the experience for other commenters too.

WangGuard counters this by detecting and removing sploggers through a variety of ways – checking for duplicate emails, checking emails against DNS servers, enabling honeypot traps and more. An excellent solution.

Check out WangGuard here.

wpDiscuz WordPress Comments

While?there’s been a lot of talk recently about blog comments dying, I don’t buy into that. Sure, they may be moving more onto social channels, but there’s still life in “traditional blog comments” yet.

A relatively new plugin, wpDiscuz offers a sleek and elegant approach to comments, without all the bells and whistles that other commenting solutions come with.

It also uses native WordPress comments as its starting point, and this makes using wpDiscuz super easy.

  • Simple name and email requirement to leave a comment
  • Ajax powered to stay on-comment as well as utilizing “load more comments” versus pagination
  • Voting up and down options
  • Social sharing options
  • Customizable to fit your theme brand and design
  • In-depth backend to optimize usernames, commenter options, notifications of new discussions and more

I’ve recently started using wpDiscuz after being impressed with it on my wife’s publisher site. Its clean, simple to use, fast, and – most importantly – lets you keep full control of your comments on your own domain.

Note: After having issues with the Ajax loading, as well as mobile commenting, I disabled wpDiscuz. I now use Postmatic, for commenting via email, as well as their own commenting solution, Epoch.

  • Alternative: Previous to wpDiscuz, I’d experimented with a hybrid comment system on Inline Comments and G+ Comments, but have had to disable for now due to a theme incompatibility. Livefyre is also an excellent solution.

Check out wpDiscuz here.

WP Lightbox 2

When bloggers use images on their sites, it can be pretty hard to see the detail, dependent on both how much text is on the image, and the blog’s design (a small main content area will limit the image’s dimensions).

WP Lightbox 2 allows your readers to click on the image, and it’ll expand into a more optimal size (even on mobile). You can also create galleries as well as photo albums, and filter how large the image displays, based on browser screen size.

Check out WP Lightbox 2 here.

WP Smush Pro

Tying back into the optimization combination of MaxCDN, WP Super Cache and CDN Linker, WP Smush Pro helps keep media file sizes down by reducing an image file’s size on upload.

WP Smush Pro

With the option to optimize existing images, and extremely simple set-up, it’s a great way to keep server load down even if you’re not using any other caching or optimization solutions.

Check out WP Smush Pro here.

WP Super Cache

As sites get heavier with load, caching content is a great way to ensure your visitors get to enjoy a speedy site. Caching simply means you’re “pre-loading” saved content, instead of having to load new files on every visit.

WP Super Cache is one of the best, as well as one of the simplest (even though it still has pretty in-depth features if you want them).

  • Legacy cache versus supercache, offering more options on where your content is preloaded from
  • Comment compatibility (comments will still show up right away)
  • Dynamic caching for certain pages
  • Cache rebuild to ensure each new visitor gets optimal load

There are a host of features on WP Super Cache, and it’s pretty easy to set up (with excellent support).

I don’t actually use it as my main caching solution – I leave that to MaxCDN, WP Super Cache and CDN Linker (and I explain here how to do that).

  • Alternatives: One of the most popular caching plugins is W3 Total Cache. From personal experience, I found this too intensive for my needs. A simpler solution is Quick Cache.

Check out WP Super Cache here.

3. Visibility

Of course, it’s all well and good having great security, and optimizing your blog ready for all the traffic that will come your way, knowing they’ll be presented with a safe and optimized blog. Not so fast, Skippy.

Making sure your content is seen is, surprise surprise, pretty key too – and if you think that’s an obvious statement, you’d be wrong, sadly.

Working on the visibility of your blog will be a constant challenge, but doesn’t have to be one you’re not prepared for.

Infinite SEO

There are a lot of blog posts that will tell you SEO is dead and content is the new king. While SEO as a standalone tactic may not be as important as is used to be, it’s still a key part in any successful content plan.

Infinite SEO is a great plugin with a host of features that anyone can use:

Infinite SEO
  • Control over page or post SEO
  • Preview for how your SEO will look in search results
  • mozRank and Page Authority based on external links
  • Intensive sitemap creation and indexing
  • Automatic internal linking for better cross site authority
  • Multisite and BuddyPress integration.

While there are several other SEO plugins around, for me this one beats them all.

  • Alternatives: I’ve previously used the hugely popular WordPress SEO from Yoast, as well as the All-in-One SEO Pack, and both are excellent alternatives to Infinite. Yoast is more involved, and probably better suited to more advanced needs.

Check out Infinite SEO here.

RSS Footer

This is a bit of an older plugin, so you may not want to use it (often older plugins can cause conflicts with later versions of WordPress or, occasionally, a security concern).

However, I’ve used RSS Footer for years with no issue. When used, it adds a simple sentence to your RSS feeds, and shows where the content was first published. Great for more visibility if your content is syndicated, even better to beat content scrapers at theor own game.

  • Alternative: RSS Footer has actually been enveloped into its developer’s SEO plugin (it’s from the same guy that built WordPress SEO). However, you can still download the original plugin on its own if you don’t use WordPress SEO.

Check out RSS Footer here.

Social Warfare

Perhaps the most effective way of getting any content seen is through social sharing, and there are no shortage of excellent solutions around, both free and premium.

I’ve experimented with more than my fair share, and the one I’m impressed with the most currently is Social Warfare.

Social Warfare: Your Ultimate Social Sharing Arsenal

The name alone should tell you this plugin means business.

  • Cached share counts for faster loading
  • Sort posts by social popularity
  • Customize tweets for optimized sharing
  • Optimize images for sharing on Pinterest
  • Optimized images for sharing on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn
  • Use different meta descriptions for open graph sharing
  • Integrated Sniply Buster plugin to combat the Sniply content hijacking script
  • Multiple design options, including responsive buttons, and sticky share options

As I mention, I’ve used countless sharing plugins and this one has really impressed me. The developers are also great at listening to suggestions and pretty fast with support issues.

  • Alternatives: Two great alternatives to Social Warfare are Flare from Filament Apps, and the Monarch sharing plugin from Elegant Themes. Both offer multiple design options, stats, mobile sharing options and more.

Check out Social Warfare here.

4. Growth

Ironically, this part of blogging is one I never really used to care about. And, to a degree, I still don’t: you won’t see any annoying pop-ups shouting at you to subscribe before you’ve even seen the content, and I don’t use my newsletter to sell anything.

However, as content consumption gets even more fractured, and audience attention dwindles, growing your blog and its community is key to any kind of success and longevity.

Elastic Email

There are a host of email service providers when it comes to blog newsletters – MailChimp and AWeber are probably the two best known.

However, depending on the size of your list, these can get costly, which is why Elastic Email is such an excellent solution.

Elastic Email

While you can use Elastic Email as your newsletter form builder as well as sender, I prefer to use MailPoet for my forms (as shown further down), and Elastic Email for my delivery.

Features are excellent:

  • Easy subscriber cleansing tools
  • Real-time reputation monitoring to show your current status (spammy or trusted)
  • Activity reports
  • Single API to integrate other newsletter services (the way I do it with MailPoet)

Perhaps the best feature of Elastic Email though is the price.

Starting at $0.99 per 1,000 emails, the cost goes down as your email numbers increase. I’m currently only paying $0.39 per 1,000 emails – a small fraction of what I’d pay with other providers. And it’ll only decrease in cost as I continue – result!

Check out Elastic Email here.

Magic Action Box Pro

Look to the bottom of this post, or any other on my blog, and you’ll see only one call-to-action (CTA) – a subscription box for my weekly newsletter.

As I move more into personal content and interactions, the newsletter is perfect for me, and Magic Action Box Pro is perfect for what I need.

Magic Action Box pro
  • Support for any autoresponder service
  • Gated content options
  • Multiple and responsive templates
  • Sales box and sharing box options
  • Simple placement choices

While I don’t use many of the features (gated content and sales-oriented CTAs), what I do use has made a huge difference in email sign-ups. And for something that’s been built to provide that lift, you can’t ask for much more than that.

Check out Magic Action Box Pro here.

MailPoet Newsletters

While it’s all well and good getting new subscribers, if you’re not delivering emails that are appealing, you’re simply turning these new subscribers off.

MailPoet is an excellent email template builder that also comes with analytics around your subscriber actions, multiple list options, the option to implement in widgets and pages, and more. There’s also a WangGuard MailPoet Connector plugin to stop spammy email sign-ups.

MailPoet - A newsletter plugin for WordPress

I moved to MailPoet from Feedblitz?earlier this year and I wish I had done it a hell of a lot sooner. Easy to use, far more design options, and simply a better experience – recommended.

Check out MailPoet here.

Note: As of June 18, I’ve made the full switch to Postmatic for email delivery and comments by email – you can find out more about that here.

Future Plugins and Solutions – And You

Of course, as any blogger will tell you, just as content direction and voice is always in flux, so are the plugins and solutions we use on our blog.

While the options above are my current choice, they’ll be added to very soon with two very cool solutions that take content interaction and discussions in very interesting directions – more info on that soon.

Also, being on self-hosted WordPress, we’re so very lucky to have an amazing community of developers who are always trying to improve every experience – front end, back end, reader, blogger – that to stand still would be foolish (and impossible).

I can’t wait to see what comes next – in the meantime, though, I’d love to hear what you’re using.

Fire away – the comments are below, and all yours!

Brands and Marketers Won’t Ruin Social Media – Consumers Will

There’s a popular saying that marketers ruin everything. As a marketer, I agree and disagree.

Yes, crappy marketing by brands, or crappy marketers in general, ruin social media. Yet that’s been true of any crappy marketing, and it’s not restricted to social media.

Let’s face it, crappy anything ruins something.

  • A crappy experience with a customer service adviser who’s having a bad day can ruin your perception of a brand;
  • A crappy meal can ruin your special evening;
  • A crappy update of your favourite movie series can ruin your fond memories of what came before (I’m looking at you, George Lucas!!!).

But for some reason, marketers and brands are coming in for special attention recently, with many articles across the web decrying how social media has been ruined by brands and marketers.

For me, though, it’s not marketers of brands who have ruined social media – it’s consumers. Specifically, consumers who say they want brands to be a certain way on social media, but their [consumer] actions don’t back that up.

Why Are Marketers Being Blamed for Social Media’s Descent?

As I mentioned at the start of this post, the belief that marketers ruin everything, especially social media, is pretty popular and widespread. Run a search on Google for the term “marketers ruined social media” and you’ll get almost half a million results.

Some of the posts and articles include titles like How Marketers Ruined Social Media, What It Takes to Succeed at Social Media, Is Marketing Ruining Social Media?, and Don’t Pee in the Pool: How Digital Marketers are Ruining Social Media.

Spot any recurring themes there?

In addition to these posts, my friend and co-author on Influence Marketing, Sam Fiorella, published an interesting post the other day titled Social Media Has Killed Consumer Trust.

Sam uses graphs from Student Monitor that shares how US college students make decisions. The most trusted resource was still friends and word-of-mouth, with “information on the Internet” coming in at less than half the word-of-mouth percentage.

Influence-Marketing-Social-Media-Trust-Millenials

The takeaway was that social media, because of brands and marketers and their method of sponsored content, placing importance on numbers of followers, and using fake influence scores to determine authority, has been ruined by lazy marketing and poorly implemented tactics.

And on that, I agree. But do the actions of lazy marketers (and I use that term loosely when speaking about some of these “professionals”), who put more emphasis on quick hit, low return campaigns speak for all of marketing and brand engagement strategies?

No.

[clickToTweet tweet=”It’s not just lazy marketing to blame for social media’s fall from grace – it’s also consumers.” quote=”Much like you wouldn’t blame the dog for the stink coming from the cat litter box, don’t blame the wrong people for social media’s perceived downfall.”]

But it’s not just lazy marketing that’s to blame for social media’s so-called fall from grace – it’s consumers, and the demand for more personal and human interactions, and then crucifying the brands that do this.

Be Human, Except Don’t Be

One of the reasons social media was seen as turning point in the relationship between consumers and brands was that it finally allowed us, as consumers, to have a one-to-one conversation (or as close as) with the brands we do business with.

Yet, much like anything that affords people extra power, this can be (and is) abused. For example,

  • In 2011, social media guy CC Chapman went after Ragu in not just one blog post, but three, each one escalating a little more, because Ragu had reached out to Chapman about a new campaign they were doing involving dads, and Chapman took offense to the approach.

These are three early examples of consumers not only reacting to brands and their faux pas, but reacting in a way that essentially placed the brand in a no-win situation (just ask GAP when they crowdsourced a new logo on social media, and the response they got, for another one).

What each one does is show while consumers (even marketers are consumers away from the “day job”) want brands to be on social and be receptive, it’s actually more about being on social and on the consumer’s terms.

Does that sound like the kind of two-way interaction/relationship that social media was originally lauded for?

We All Need to Be Responsibly “Social”

Of course, times change. While social media may have been celebrated for its ability to connect consumers with brands, and vice versa, that relationship goal (or the perception of a relationship) has changed.

Eager to avoid a “social media fail” like the 89 million results a search for the term results in, brands lost their voices, and subsequently acquiesced to any and every little bit of criticism online. Even when brands were in the right, they’d apologize and advise they’d try do better.

[clickToTweet tweet=”We say we want brands to be more human on social media. Then we destroy them for trying.” quote=”The only thing to fear is fear itself. That, and being a brand on social media when the cards have been stacked against you before you even sit down at the table.”]

Sensing this, consumers have become more vocal, and even when they’re in the wrong, the groupthink mentality kicks in and the social media consumer “wins” pretty much every time.

When this happens, we all lose. Brands pull back from social, and the research and intelligence that can be gathered to improve the customer experience is lost.

While we, as consumers might celebrate the fact our publicly available data and updates aren’t being mined by brands, is it actually a victory? If it means crappy marketing strategies and questionable approaches to privacy are concerned, yes, it is.

But if a brand is answering queries on social media, and the consumer still craps on them for daring to provide the right answer, is it really the brand at fault?

Is it really the marketer who’s at fault for tailoring ads, offers and campaigns that a consumer has specifically said they want, and then that same consumer complains about seeing the promotion in their social feed?

Like I said earlier, it’s become a no-win situation for both brands and marketers on social, even when they’re doing things the way consumers say they want things to be done.

Ironically, perhaps the lazy marketers have got it right. After all, if brands spend a sizeable amount of money and personalized approaches to please the consumer, and still get beaten down for it, why bother? Why not just spray and pray like the crappy marketers have been doing for years?

Why indeed.

If we really want social to be the place it can be, we need to stop crapping on brands that try to do it right. Otherwise, it won’t be marketers and brands that ruin social media – it’ll be us, the consumer, by turning it solely into a soapbox for the loud and brash bully.

And that never works out well for anyone…

Important Message for RSS Subscribers – This Feed is Moving

Two and a half years ago, I moved my blog from Google’s Feedburner service to Feedblitz, due to concerns over the continuation of Google’s service.

Because of these concerns, it made sense to make the switch to Feedblitz to ensure delivery of this blog by either email or RSS.

Unfortunately, the experience with Feedblitz has been a poor one. Very limited email templates, delivery issues, and wonky metrics that fluctuated all over the place made for a frustrating time – especially for a paid service, and one where its competitors offered far more for the same price.

So, I moved my email off Feedblitz a few months ago, and this weekend I moved my RSS feed off Feedblitz too, and back over to Feedburner Feedio.

If you subscribe to this blog by RSS, there’s currently a 30 day redirect from the Feedblitz feed. This means you’ll still get any posts I publish between now and the end of February, at least.

To continue receiving posts after then, you need to update your feed with the following address:

http://www.feedio.co/@dannybrown

And that’s it – simple! Thanks for subscribing so far, and I hope to see you around after I finally close the door on Feedblitz.

Cheers!