It?s funny how our mindsets change with the onset of age. Or experience. Or a mixture of both.
Take social media. When it first started gaining traction with the masses around 2009, it was seen as ?the great connector? ? a way for everyone to share, learn, support, and more.
[Read more…] about The Personalization of Social (Or Why We Need to be Architects)
Recently, I gave this blog a bit of a design makeover, and moved to a much more minimal look and feel.
In fairness, my previous theme – Myth, from MeanThemes – had a pretty stripped back look, with a simple hero image for the header area, and single column design for the content.
This is a part of a special series looking at how social media has impacted the lives of its users. This week, the story comes from Randy Milanovic.
It was 2009. The world was being thrown into a ‘downturn’, and my visual?communications?firm was starting to feel it. I was focused on my work and burning the candle at both ends.
That was of course, until I was admitted to emergency and received a stage IV cancer diagnosis. My doctors advised me to get my will in order.
10 days later I’d lost 60lbs, was skeletal, and struggled to remain conscious while suffering from excruciating pain.
On that 10th day, a man I’d recently met through my business visited me in hospital. As I lay in my hospital bed, he pulled up a chair next to me and put his hand on my shoulder.
Almost immediately I felt heat – as if he’d put a hot water bottle on it. He sat with his hand on my shoulder for what I imagined was around 6 hours. The heat steady and strong.
Each time I moved or tried to mumble a few words, he advised me to lay still and keep quiet. He said he was giving me energy.
While he sat there, I felt my mind drift?uncomfortably?downward. At roughly half way, very deep down, the pain disappeared.
For the first time since being admitted to emergency my mind?cleared – became sharp almost – and everything was silent.
I heard a voice ? my own ? boom into that silence,?“I haven’t accomplished enough yet.?
I agreed, and with that I began to drift back upwards. Back into the pain and into a battle for my life.
Upon surfacing, my visitor abruptly lifted his hand and matter-of-factly stated,??Well I?m done. I?d better get back and help my wife with the renovation.”
Many long months of chemotherapy, anti-bug cold rooms, and endless hours spent staring at the second hand of the clock on the wall, I was released from hospital.
Emaciated from my battle, with not enough strength to climb the stairs to my bedroom, I spent day and night on a recliner in my living room while my family tended to me, fed me, helped me to the washroom, kept the fevers cool and the room warm.
And I got a new puppy who would climb up and wrap himself over my shoulders, keeping my neck?delightfully?warm.
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With time, I became strong enough to leave the recliner. Using my mobile?phone, I studied. I was determined to return to work wiser (forever an entrepreneur) and rebuild by communications business.
Over the next 18 months, I improved my strength, continued to expand my knowledge of all things on the web, and began planning to make something of the new opportunity I had promised myself.
Not a gym-goer, I sought out alternate exercise options. Sure I could walk and even hike, which was a good start to?improving my health, while unfortunately doing almost nothing for my upper body fitness.
Being on the water in canoes and kayaks as a youth in BC, it wasn’t long before I eyed and purchased a pair of kayaks. Yes, a pair. I would encourage others to join me.
To this day, I extend invitations to family, colleagues, neighbours and even strangers to join me for a paddle. When on the water, I find we are all filled with peace and calm, and it is an incredible way to?recharge.
In late 2010, I was able to return to work, a few hours at first. My colleague and I?went door to door to generate new?business. We won enough work to stabilize.
That new work paid the bills but didn?t change anything. I didn?t see anything in those projects that would present opportunities to accomplish??more?, as had motivated me to survive the Cancer.
What would change things I believed, was a concept that was swirling around in my mind. One of how I might combine my twitter?account with my portfolio and blogging to attract new clients.
I then happened by a Forrester study that talked about Paid, Owned and Earned media.
And everything clicked.
I would focus on attracting new business in a downturn, simply by sharing knowledge.
A Google Adwords coupon arrived in the mail. A $20 crutch I felt I needed. I beefed up my website, started tweeting, and wrote about the new?business we?d recently earned via my blog.
A week or so later, we earned $12,000 in new business, for a return on my $20 investment of roughly 600x.
Along with that return came a realization that the Adwords weren’t needed.
Simultaneously aware of the unsellable position I’d put my small?communications?business in by making it about??me’, on the strength of?our initial Inbound success, I made the difficult decision to close my now 13-year old visual?communications?firm, and open Kayak Creative Services Inc. (KAYAK).
I then reinvested the $12,000 in a new hire, started writing content, eliminated Adwords, and very quickly earned close to $300,000 all entirely Inbound, this time generating roughly 25x my initial investment.
We?d managed to institute an improved business model that included service and education along with projects over a term, eliminating the feast and?famine rollercoaster traditionally associated with creative businesses.
Central to the taming of the roller-coaster was the decision?to?engage and empower our clients to collaboratively work alongside us.
In effect, turning the traditional agency model of project-based services for a fee, into one of true ongoing collaboration where clients participate in all efforts, from content creation, to search optimization, and social engagement, through to campaign deployment.
Truthfully, the model hasn?t been a win for every client, though the vast majority have gone on to attract new?business generating millions of dollars in new business.
In late 2011, I was introduced to HubSpot?via?an article I came across. The company’s co-founders, having coined the term??Inbound”, had?developed a methodology that expanded my understanding of the concept.
I was an instant fan, consuming their material?voraciously.
At the same time, I began telling people about my online journey, convinced that SEO and content were merging, and in 2013, wrote my first book??Findability: Why Search Engine Optimization is Dying + 21 New Rules of Content Marketing?, which was the subject of a very complimentary article on?Forbes.com?by Jason DeMers.
Three months later, Google released their Hummingbird?algorithm, revealing that I?d been perfectly correct in my insights on the subject.
The book briefly saw position number one in Amazon’s Canadian and US stores, number 3 in Japan, and is currently available in a dozen languages via Kindle.
KAYAK was nominated for the 2013 Calgary Chamber of Commerce Small Business Awards, in both Breakout Business and Small Business of the Year categories.
We went on to become a finalist for both receiving coverage by the Calgary Herald, Financial Post, Rogers Media, Ottawa Citizen, and?numerous smaller media outlets.
Following that, I?ve gone on to write hundreds of articles on topics surrounding?marketing, business, social, seo, and creating premium lead capture websites that help our clients open real opportunities for business growth, believing in a give-and-you-shall-receive philosophy.
Now?three and a half years on, as a HubSpot Partner Agency, KAYAK is focused on a lead?generation, content marketing, and search optimization niche.
We’ve swiftly risen from unknown – passing local competitors – to become an internationally-recognized player in our field, attracting business from across North America and beyond.
More recently, I was nominated by E&Y for their Entrepreneur of the Year honours. (We’ll have to wait for October to know how far I make it.)
The next time I face my maker, I’m determined to look back over the wide range of successful ventures, careers launched and paddles enjoyed, thankful for my second chance and knowing I made the most of it.
And, if?you’re curious about my hospital room visitor, I did manage to corner him one day many months later. He offered this explanation to my pestering,?“Somebody did it for me.”
About the author:?Randy Milanovic is an entrepreneur, marketer, author, and blogger of online marketing, SEO & social engagement topics. ?He’s a stage IV Cancer Survivor, Social Media Today contributor, and advocate for client empowerment.
You can read more from Randy over at KAYAK, or connect with him on Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.
I?m a marketer by trade. It doesn?t matter if it?s traditional marketing, or digital/online marketing ? at the end of the day, the tools may differ but the trade stays the same.
Yet in a previous life, I also headed up the main call centre for the U.K.?s largest communications company, and that was based around the service side of things.
And you know what?
Service beats marketing hands down any day if you want a successful company.
You can have the greatest product; the most amazing sales pitch; the must-buy item of all time. And yes, they?ll bring in the dollars.
But that?s where they stop.
Sure, you can regurgitate a sales or marketing message into a different campaign, and call it something different. But at the end of the day, it?s still a limited experience.
Service, on the other hand? That?s the gold in the jester?s hat.
The other thing about?great service is it not only builds loyalty to a company, but encourages organic marketing via the advocate(s) that service has created.
You listen to a customer, and show you care about their support of your product, and they’ll be the first to share your details to friends, colleagues, family, etc., when it comes to them looking for the types of product or service your company creates.
Point in case – MeanThemes and Postmatic.
Anyone that’s been around this blog for a while will know I tend to change its design more than Madonna changes “dance partners”….
It’s become a running joke, and I’ll admit to tinkering with the look and feel much more than any blogger should. But, for me, it’s all part of the ongoing evolution to present the best experience possible, for both reader and myself.
The theme?you’re looking at now (at least, if you’re on-site – if you’re reading through email and haven’t seen it, pop on over, I won’t bite!) is Myth, from MeanThemes.
I’m a huge fan of the Medium approach to content presentation – large featured image, clean typography, no distraction content area. So, for me, Myth was perfect.
Setting the theme up was pretty easy, but then I ran into some roadblocks with some settings (mainly, plug-in conflicts and some drop quote styling).
Any time I wrote to Chris, one of the co-founders of MeanThemes, through their ticketing system, he was on the ball and responded within 24 hours, often much less.
Not only that, but I’m currently looking at the Lasso plug-in for front-end editing to tell stories more effectively on here, and that has some weird CSS tricks it needs you to implement.
Chris spent a week looking at the plug-in, how it integrates with themes, what CSS improvements it needs, etc, and is submitting all that info to the Lasso creators.
Now, remember, this isn’t part of the MeanThemes toolset. Nor is it really any of Chris’s concern.
The fact he took all this on board, though, and advised me to wait until his suggestions reach the Lasso team, validates my decision to go with MeanThemes and make them my de-facto go-to if/when I decide to change up my theme again.
I’m a huge fan of Postmatic, as anyone who’s read my blog posts over the last 6 months can attest to.
For me, they make blog commenting fun and more social again, and they make it so easy that anyone can take part and enjoy.
They’re also great at implementing updates that make sense, both from a blogger and from a reader/subscriber perspective.
Yet, more than that, they have one of the most awesome user support teams in place.
For example, I mentioned earlier I’d had a conflict between Myth and a couple of plug-ins. Postmatic was one of them, where the little check box to subscribe to posts wasn’t showing.
While Chris from MeanThemes helped me resolve that issue (with some CSS, then a full theme update to fix the way the theme hides labels on the comment form), Jason from Postmatic set up a test server to go through the Myth theme and see how Postmatic could help.
I also had some issues with how Postmatic’s comment plug-in Epoch (currently in beta) displayed comments when activated.
Instead of blaming a theme, or citing incompatibility, the Postmatic team worked to add new features to Epoch that meant the native styling of a blog’s theme could be adapted by the Epoch plug-in.
And to put the icing on the cake, when I borked my theme because I dropped in some rogue code, Dylan – the Postmatic lead dev – jumped in to fix it for me. On the friggin’ weekend!
To say I was impressed would be putting it mildly…
I speak a lot about the relationship behind the sale.
I see it as a key part to any business. As I mention at the start of this post, yes, marketing and sales and advertising and all the other cool and sexy stuff is great. They?ll get you the keys to the front door.
But the real business success stories come from service.
Service is the solution to any problems or aftershocks created by sales, or marketing, or advertising. Service is the host that?s waiting to look after you once you use the keys that sales and marketing have given you.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Service is the solution to aftershocks created by sales, marketing, or advertising. ” quote=”Service is the solution to any problems or aftershocks created by sales, or marketing, or advertising. “]
Simply put, by all means, have the best sales, marketing and advertising team around. But make sure you have a superstar service team or mindset, because that?s where your customers old and new will really be.
Just like I?ll be there for Chris and the MeanThemes team, and Jason and the Postmatic team, because?they?ve made me an advocate for their brand, personal and business.
Even if I personally stop using them, I?ll still be happy to recommend their businesses.
And that?s all you can ask for your company when building service success stories. Agree?
Note: If you want a top-notch WordPress or Ghost theme with awesome support, please do check out MeanThemes. And if you want to make blog comments and engagement fun and social again, sign up for Postmatic.?
When people think of growing an engaged audience, it’s usually in reference to blog readers; or an email list; or visitors to a sales page on your website; or listeners to your podcast; a social network community, or similar.
But what are we really building an audience for?
Is it simply to participate (click through on an offer or download a product)? Or is it to interact, via comments on a blog, tweets, Google+ conversations and more?
If it’s the former, then do we even care about engagement?
After all, no-one says anything on a sales page except the seller, so where would the need for engagement be?
If it’s the latter, though, and you’re looking to build a truly engaged audience or following, then understanding your blog audience is key to building your goals for what that engagement will look like, and what your end goal really is.
When I first started this blog, there was no agenda for it to be a lead generation platform. While a lot of business blogs will act as a cover for a sales message (and there’s nothing wrong with that), my goal was a bit different.
Instead of having a ton of ads and affiliate links, and subconscious messages to drive traffic to the website of the agency I ran at the time, I simply wanted a place where I could put ideas out and have others respond to them, no matter whether the response was positive or negative.
There were so many blogs out there that simply state a point of view and don’t encourage further conversation – I found little to get excited about on these blogs. So I made a decision.
While I couldn’t guarantee that I’d get a lot of readers, I would guarantee that those who did find me would arrive at a place where their view was just as important as mine, if not more so.
I’d also keep my viewpoints honest, even if it meant pissing off the “leaders” in the space that I was blogging about (and that’s happened a few times!).
Again, this meant that readers would know that they could come to my blog and learn exactly how I felt about something, and they’d have the platform to share their frustrations too, whether they agreed with me or not.
By doing this, I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have had some great discussions on here, and these have continued across the web on platforms like Google+ and Facebook walls.
There may not have been a huge amount of conversation in the beginning, but I stuck to my goal of having an open mic where all opinions are respected equally. For me, this has led to the growth of the blog since these early days more than anything else.
Of course, like anyone, I’ve made mistakes along the way, and I know I’ll make more – that’s just how we are.?For example, a few of my early posts were the kind I call “traffic jams” – lots of traffic, but not going anywhere.
Basically, the types of post that were easy to write but had little real substance.
That’s not to say they were written that way deliberately – every post I’ve written has been with good intent.
But from a satisfaction viewpoint, there was little to be had from some of these earlier posts. I could have easily stayed on that path, and would have probably had a lot more subscribers than I do today.
But the likes of Mashable already has these types of posts covered.
Instead, I wanted somewhere that would be a real source of engagement. So I learned from the early posts, and made a more conscious effort to write more questioning posts, and try to offer up ideas that weren’t available elsewhere.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Write more questioning posts, and offer up ideas that aren’t available elsewhere #blogtips” quote=”Make a conscious effort to write more questioning posts, and offer up ideas that aren’t available elsewhere”]
And it worked.
My subscriber list grew, as did the engagement with my readers – and not just on my own blog. There have been some great examples of continued discussion as readers took the original viewpoint into a brand new direction and really made me think about the original post.
For someone that thrives on that kind of exchange, you can’t ask for much more than that.
It’s not just the interaction where the benefits have come. By building an area of trust where people would feel welcome in a safe and open community, it resulted in that same community showing their own value.
For example, when a non-profit consultant attacked me personally regarding a social media-led charity project I had founded, the community rallied in numbers to counter the claims, resulting in her removing the piece from her blog.
They also rallied round me when I was seriously ill in 2010, and for that I will be eternally grateful. So, yes, opening up your blog offers some huge benefits.
That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have done anything differently – heck, if we’re always satisfied, then we aren’t growing! If I had my time again, I would have implemented some things differently.
I started off writing a blog post a day (and sometimes I posted more than once on the same day). Sometimes this made me publish stuff that, in hindsight, could have (should have) been better.
In the middle of 2011, I made a conscious decision to post less frequently and really ask questions of the stuff I wrote about. I’d like to think it made me a better blogger and resulted in deeper conversations and points of view being exchanged.
Let me rephrase that – I would not have been afraid to speak more honestly. There were times early on when I wouldn’t have offered a negative opinion about certain people, since I (incorrectly) thought they were right. Turns out we all get blinded by vacuous respect.
When I realized this, and began writing openly about questionable practices or calling out BS, it opened up a new level of understanding between blogger and reader, since others were clearly thinking the same thing.
One of the things many bloggers complain about is that social sites like Twitter and Google+ have seen comment numbers decrease, as conversations about a post shift to the network as opposed to taking place on the blog itself. But that’s missing the point.
Engagement comes in all shapes and sizes and, while your blog may be the most desired place for discussion, true engagement allows the discussion to expand wherever people feel most comfortable talking. ?If I was to do anything differently here, it would have been to get active on a Facebook Page sooner (and now Google+).
[clickToTweet tweet=”Engagement comes in all shapes and sizes – don’t limit conversations to just your blog. #blogcomments” quote=”Engagement comes in all shapes and sizes – don’t limit conversations to just your blog”]
Because, ironically, I’ve tended to find that the more willing I am to converse away from my blog, the more likely people are to click through and read more of my stuff. And that’s a win-win in anyone’s book.
Of course, this is just personal experience and thoughts on my own blogging journey. Will the above work for you in helping to meet your own goals? Maybe, maybe not.
A lot will obviously depend on your own data. For example, going by my analytics, the demographic of my readers is absolutely right for the content I’m producing. And tools like Postmatic, and the conversation that springs from there, can help?me optimize even further for new audiences.
I know that when I’ve used the framework of what’s worked for me when helping others set up a new blog, they do tend to find a good level of engagement from the off. So, the fundamentals mentioned above may be useful – but don’t quote me on that!
One thing that is guaranteed, though, is this: if you want to build engagement, then build your learning first and never stop learning.
If you can see where you’re going right, and learn to notice where you’re going wrong, it’s a lot easier to take the steps needed to meet your own success metrics, whatever they may look like.
And if you can do that? Well, you’ve just laid the foundations in building your engagement model. Now you just need to keep building.
And with the right data behind you to support these foundations, the next steps won’t be as difficult as the early ones.
