10 Ways to Excite Your Blog's Readers

A lot of people talk about ways you can get more readers to your blog. I say why just worry about trying to get more readers, instead why not try to excite and thrill them?!? Here's ten ways I try to do that, but as you are reading these tips, always keep one point in mind; Look for ways to give your readers a sense of ownership over the content created on your blog. I always say that this blog is 'co-created content'. And it is, I write the post, and you guys run with it and leave amazing comments. The end result is that, thanks to you, the value of the post increases dramatically, because of your comments. So NEVER take your readers for granted, and ALWAYS look for ways to appreciate them, and give them a greater sense of ownership over your blog. Because that's what they deserve. Here's some ways you can get started.


1 - Say 'Thank You!' early and often. Never forget that without your readers, you are blogging for yourself. If you're ok with that fine, but for most of us, individuals and companies, we are blogging for an audience. Putting forth even a small amount of time to let your readers know that you appreciate their time goes a LONG way. Notice if you comment on this post, the first thing you will see is "Thank you SO much for commenting!"

2 - Ask for feedback. Let your readers know that you always want their input. When you raise a point or a question in a post, ask your readers for their thoughts. Look at my post on self-promotion, it currently has over 20 comments. The value of that post increased significantly because of the feedback via comments, from this blog's readers.

3 - Stalk your readers. Let's be honest, for most of your readers, reading your blog is NOT the highlight of their day. Most of the time, they will be on other sites, on other blogs. When you find them on other sites, such as Twitter, interact with them there. Twitter is still the top referring site to this blog, and while a lot of that traffic comes from links I tweet to posts here, much of it comes from people finding my blog via the link on my profile. Give them a reason to want to learn more about you.

4 - Comment on your readers' blogs. Remember, the best way to grow your blog, is to leave it. It's also a wonderful way to excite your readers. When you take the time to read THEIR blogs, and comment on THEIR blogs, you send the message to your readers that you are serious about interacting with them, and that you appreciate them. And use BackType to track the comments you are leaving. I wrote up a quick review of BackType yesterday for Search Engine Guide, but it's a wonderful way to not only track the comments you leave, but to also make sure you are leaving plenty of comments on OTHER blogs, and not just yours.

5 - Add your readers' blogs to your blogroll. Even now, I am constantly updating my blogroll to add blogs that I find interesting, and many of them are from my readers. For example, Liz Strauss left a comment here the other day, and I immediately thought 'Wait...do I have Liz' blog on my blogroll?' I checked, and I didn't, so I added it. Now you shouldn't add blogs to your blogrolls just because you want your readers to comment, but if you read the blogs that your commenters write, add them to the blogroll. It's just another way to say 'thank you', and help give your readers a bit more ownership over the content created on your blog.

6 - Add a widget to your sidebar that shows the pictures of your readers. This is the only reason why I keep the MyBlogLog widget up on the sidebar. I want my readers to be able to come here, and see their picture on the widget. *I* want to see their picture. And adding that widget is another way to create space on the blog that's just for my readers.

7 - Put the focus on your best commenters. How many times has this happened on your blog; You leave a post, and it gets a couple of comments, pretty much agreeing with you. Then someone comes along with 'Ok Mack all this sounds great, but I'm going to come at this from a different angle..', and they launch into this amazing comment that changes the entire tone of the conversation, with now half the readers siding with your points, the other half siding with the commenter. And the end result is, thanks to the spark from that one comment, you now have a vibrant conversation happening. Edit your post and add a 'Window' to the comments. How I do this is by taking that great comment that sparked the discussion, and I add it to the end of the post, like this: "PS: Check out this amazing comment by Shannon Paul- " And when you add the comment to the post, link to the person's blog that left the comment. Again, this person left a great comment that sparked a great discussion. Why not thank them for that?

8 - Link to your readers' blogs. Every morning I go to Twitter and as I am going through my feeds, I link to posts I find interesting on Twitter. And you'd better best believe that I go out of my way to link to people that I know are reading and commenting here.

9 - Actually care about the people that read your blog. Yes it might sound hokey, but you have to actually give a damned about the people that take some time out of their busy day to read your blog. When you do that, you start to think about ways you can put the focus on your readers. You start to look for reasons to link to them, to read their blogs, to tweet links to their best posts.

10 - Ask for help. What did I miss? How do you excite your blog's readers?


UPDATE: Check out the comment that David Armano left to this post via Bubble Comment.

Is 'no self-promotion' the great unwritten rule of social media?

Last Friday I was lucky enough to appear on Paul Chaney's User Friendly Thinking show on Blog Talk Radio(You can listen to the show and download it here). On the show we talked about how companies and small businesses can use social media to better connect with their customers, especially in tough economic times. Part of the interview also involved my talking a bit about the social media consulting/training services I provide.

Paul tells me that there was a surprisingly high number of listeners to the show (and if you listened to it live, thanks so much for your interest. I made a point to give a shout-out to my Twitter peeps ;)), and that it went exceptionally well.

But afterward, the most common question I got from people that heard the episode was "Wait, you mean you do social media consulting?"

Yep, I fear I've never been very good at promoting myself (notice I forgot to blog about my appearing on Paul's show prior to Friday), and my guess is I'm not alone. Lisa Hoffmann left an interesting post about Matt Bacak recently, and I left this comment:

For whatever reason, many of us are horrible when it comes to promoting ourselves. And I am the world’s worst about it. My guess is that many of us view our ‘followers’ and blog readers as friends, and don’t feel right ‘promoting’ ourselves to our friends. But that’s just a guess.

A few months ago I made some changes to my The Viral Garden and added sections spelling out the consulting, training and speaking services I provide. Before I did so, I spent a lot of time reviewing the blogs of other people who I knew provided similar services. What I found was that most offered little to no mention of this on their blog. I found a few solid examples, such as Amber Naslund and Chris Brogan, who I think do a fine job of promoting their consulting and speaking services on their blog. But most people seemed to almost have made a conscious choice not to promote themselves.

I've talked to some pretty influential people in the social media space about this, and have gotten conflicting answers. Some seem to think that the less promotion the better, as the best promotion is in creating value and helping others. And others told me that they didn't understand why consultants didn't promote their services more, as they felt their friends/readers/followers would want to know about them.

What do you think? I almost always err on the side of less promotion being better, but I'm beginning to wonder if I might sometimes be overreacting. If you offer similar services, what's your stance on promoting yourself on your blog, and how do your readers take it?


Pic via Flickr user ehnmark

Track multiple metrics to measure the performance of your blog

Let's face it, it's tough to get an accurate read of how your blog is performing by measuring just one metric. Case in point, let's look at how I've tracked traffic here since launching The Viral Garden in 2006.

For the first year of blogging here, I used SiteMeter to track the number of visitors to this blog. I noticed that while posts were gradually getting more comments and the blog was collecting more links, that daily traffic was barely growing. After a few months I was averaging about 100 visitors a day, but by February of last year, that number was only up to around 200 visitors a day.

So I started doing some snooping around my site's analytics, and discovered that while traffic was growing at barely a crawl, Feedburner told me that the number of subscribers to the blog's feed was growing about twice as fast, and had caught the avg. daily traffic. That opened my eyes, and I started paying attention to my subscribers, and how they were reading my feed. Based on the information I got from Feedburner, I changed my blog's layout and added options to sub to my blog's feed via the most popular feed readers, such as Google Reader, Netvibes, and NewsGator. Before I had only had a button for Bloglines, which was buried down toward the end of the sidebar. After adding more buttons (including a FB chicket counter), I moved them all to the top of the blog, where they could be easily found.


As you can see, these changes accelerated the growth I was seeing from feed subscribers, and while it has slowed a bit recently, the number of feed subscribers is still currently at record levels. And as subscribers continue to take off, daily traffic to the blog continued to barely grow, it was at around 200 visitors a day in February of 2007, and now it's at about 275 a day. A lot of this is simply a change in how people want to view blog content. Now, most want to keep up with their favorite blogs via a feed reader. That wasn't so much the case in 2006 when I launched The Viral Garden. This is why you need to look at multiple metrics to give you an idea of emerging patterns within your readership.

Another example, while growth of traffic to the blog and feed subscribers are currently at all-time highs, both are slowing in growth. But the number of email subscribers to my feed is taking off. I launched an email version of my feed via Feedburner in late April of last year. For much of last year and this year, I would add 5-10 new email subscribers a month. But over the past 2-3 months, I've been adding 20+ subscriptions a month, and it's on pace to catch avg. daily traffic to the blog around Feb or March of next year.

Why the sudden spike? My guess is it's partly because I've spoken at several confs over the last 3 months (where the attendees are newer to social media, and might prefer to have blog posts sent to them via email), and because my Twitter usage has spiked in the last few months, resulting in my adding several hundred followers. And my guess is that many of these followers are new to reading blogs as well, and are more interested in the email version of my feed.

The point in all this is, if you keep a close eye on your blog and track multiple metrics, you can get a much better idea of how your readers are interacting with your blog, and what appeals to them. Do you know how many comments per post you averaged last month? How your traffic/subscribers are trending? Do you know which site was the top referrer of traffic to your blog last month? You should.

Which metrics do you measure to determine if your blog is effective? Why do you choose those particular ones?

PS: As you might have guessed, I'm a big fan of Feedburner. Here's a post I wrote last year that walks you through 10 Ways You Can Use Feedburner To Grow Your Blog.

The Viral Garden's Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs - Week 131

Here's the standings for Week 131:

1 - Duct Tape Marketing - 259,000 (+3,000)(LW - 1)
2 - Church of the Customer - 247,000 (+3,000)(LW - 2)
3 - CopyBlogger - 45,737 (+451)(LW - 3)
4 - Web Strategy by Jeremiah - 17,142 (+268)(LW - 4)
5 - Chris Brogan - 13,641 (+533)(LW - 5)
6 - Search Engine Guide - 13,085 (+463)LW - 6)
7 - Logic + Emotion - 11,021 (+57)(LW - 7)
8 - Influential Marketing - 7,684 (+33)(LW - 8)
9 - Daily Fix - 6,479 (+62)(LW - 9)
10 - Jaffe Juice - 4,905 (+5)(LW - 10)
11 - Converstations - 3,394 (+165)(LW - 14)
12 - The Viral Garden - 3,382 (+84)(LW - 13)
13 - What's Next - 3,371 (+25)(LW - 12)
14 - Conversation Agent - 3,322 (+107)(LW - 15)
15 - Drew's Marketing Minute - 2,939 (-576)(LW - 11)
16 - The Social Media Marketing Blog - 2,585 (+94)(LW - 16)
17 - Being Peter Kim - 2,417 (+18)(LW - 17)
18 - Social Media Explorer - 2,199 (+72)(LW - 18)
19 - Emergence Marketing - 1,926 (+5)(LW - 19)
20 - Greg Verdino's Marketing Blog - 1,856 (+48)(LW - 20)
21 - The Social Customer Manifesto - 1,779 (+57)(LW - 21)
22 - Techno Marketer - 1,700 (+31)(LW - 22)
23 - Paul Isakson - 1,664 (+5)(LW - 23)
24 - Spare Change - 1,402 (+15)(LW - 24)
25 - Movie Marketing Madness - 1,342 (-13)(LW - 25)


The Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs are ranked according to the number of subscribers, according to FeedBurner. The number you see after the blog name is how many subscribers accessed the blog's feed, according to FeedBurner. FeedBurner (and I had to look it up to make sure) tracks the number of times your blog's feed is accessed, and matches it against the IP address of the computer making the request, to approximate the number of subscribers that access your feed, and report this as the number used in the Top 25. After that number is a positive or negative number, and this represents how many readers the blog gained or lost from last week's Top 25. The final stat tells you what position the blog held in the Top 25 Last Week (LW). If you see this; (LW - UR), it means the blog wasn't ranked last week.

Strong bounceback week for the Top 25, with 23 of the 25 blogs gaining subscribers. The Top 6 was especially strong, all gaining at least 200 subs. And the gap between blogs #11-15 continues to narrow, and my hunch is that Drew's Marketing Minute at #15 was just an error in reporting by FB. We'll see next week.

No new blogs this week, and Customers Rock! just missed the cut. Remember if you want to have your blog be considered for inclusion in the Top 25, make sure you add the Feedburner feed count chicklet to your blog.




Next update is next Wednesday.

When and how often should a blogger comment?

One of the things I love about Beth Harte is her inquisitive nature when it comes to social media. Recently, she got an interesting discussion started on her blog around how often bloggers (be it individual or company) should respond to comments left by their readers. Beth believes that every comment from a reader deserves its own response in the form of a comment.

Here are my thoughts: I have always considered this blog to be 'co-created content' between you and I. As a result, I look for ways that I can give you, my readers, more ownership over the content here. This is a big reason why I have the MyBlogLog widget on the side, have a huge blogroll, and add poll questions. All of these are about my readers, either putting the spotlight on you, or giving you more control over the content created here.

And when it comes to comments, my view is that the comments belong to the readers. That's your chance to have your say. As such, my view is that the fewer comments from me, the better. Now I do try to comment on every post that gets comments, but I am very mindful of how many comments I leave. If a post has 10 comments, you might see that 3 of them are from me, possibly 4, but that's pushing it. My feeling is that if there are 20 comments and 10 of them are from me, then I am talking WAY too much. I don't want the conversation to revolve around my opinions, but yours. I stated my opinions/thoughts in the post, the comments are where you have your say.

So it's a bit of a tightrope to walk. Now one area where Beth and I are in complete agreement is when bloggers, especially popular bloggers that are considered 'thought leaders' NEVER respond to comments on their blog. I hate this because these bloggers are viewed as being 'thought leaders' by people that are new to this space, and by companies that are wanting to get involved in social media. They could see how these bloggers never respond, and think that's the best way. But I'll go ahead and put my soapbox back under the bed, as that's a post for another day.

What do you think? Do you prefer Beth's method of responding to every comment, or do you think that less is more when it comes to bloggers responding to readers. Do you think I need to be leaving more comments here, fewer, or is it about right? How do you handle leaving comments on YOUR blog?

Pic via Flickr user crazytales562

Being a farmer versus beating a dead horse

As always, there seems to be a lot of talk about defining the ROI of social media. And I think Jason Falls has one of the better posts I've seen on the subject, along with an excellent video interview with the always amazing KD Paine.

But as I saw what seemed like the millionth post about defining the ROI of social media today, I realized that most of this talk seems to be coming from marketing and social media bloggers and consultants. In fact, in taxing my limited memory, I cannot recall a single instance where I spoke with a potential client, or a business marketer/owner at a conference, and they asked me about defining or proving the ROI for social media.

Not one.

Instead, they wanted to learn how these social tools might WORK FOR THEM. They want to hear about the benefits of blogging, they want to understand if Facebook is really worth their time. They keep hearing about Twitter but think it all sounds like mindless chit-chat, and want to know if they are right.

IOW, they want to learn. They want us to teach them.

And I think that we are doing a bit of a dis-service to ourselves, and this space by continually harping on the ROI of social media. Why do we need to define this? Is it because the potential clients we talk to demand to know, or is it because we feel a need to vindicate our beliefs and theories about social media?

I think it's more about the latter, and I will admit that I am as bad about this as anyone. But I think in order to TRULY advance this space, and to advance the potential that companies have to better connect with and understand their customers via social media, we need to focus more on TEACHING, not on being 'proven right'.

So my call for today is to stop worrying about trying to 'prove' the worth of social media to those that 'don't get it', and let's start teaching to those that WANT to learn about social media.

Pic via Flickr user Hellsgeriatric

The Viral Garden's Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs - Week 130

Here's the standings for Week 130:

1 - Duct Tape Marketing - 256,000 (+3,000)(LW - 1)
2 - Church of the Customer - 244,000 (+3,000)(LW - 2)
3 - CopyBlogger - 45,286 (-449)(LW - 3)
4 - Web Strategy by Jeremiah - 16,874 (-150)(LW - 4)
5 - Chris Brogan - 13,108 (+273)(LW - 5)
6 - Search Engine Guide - 12,622 (-91)LW - 6)
7 - Logic + Emotion - 10,964 (+8)(LW - 7)
8 - Influential Marketing - 7,651 (-72)(LW - 8)
9 - Daily Fix - 6,417 (-25)(LW - 9)
10 - Jaffe Juice - 4,900 (-2)(LW - 10)
11 - Drew's Marketing Minute - 3,515 (+16)(LW - 11)
12 - What's Next - 3,346 (-53)(LW - 12)
13 - The Viral Garden - 3,298 (-26)(LW - 14)
14 - Converstations - 3,229 (-106)(LW - 13)
15 - Conversation Agent - 3,215 (-35)(LW - 15)
16 - The Social Media Marketing Blog - 2,491 (-2)(LW - 16)
17 - Being Peter Kim - 2,399 (-1)(LW - 17)
18 - Social Media Explorer - 2,127 (+118)(LW - 18)
19 - Emergence Marketing - 1,921 (-1)(LW - 19)
20 - Greg Verdino's Marketing Blog - 1,808 (-30)(LW - 20)
21 - The Social Customer Manifesto - 1,722 (-48)(LW - 21)
22 - Techno Marketer - 1,669 (-12)(LW - 22)
23 - Paul Isakson - 1,659 (LW - UR)
24 - Spare Change - 1,387 (+17)(LW - 23)
25 - Movie Marketing Madness - 1,355 (+36)(LW - 24)


The Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs are ranked according to the number of subscribers, according to FeedBurner. The number you see after the blog name is how many subscribers accessed the blog's feed, according to FeedBurner. FeedBurner (and I had to look it up to make sure) tracks the number of times your blog's feed is accessed, and matches it against the IP address of the computer making the request, to approximate the number of subscribers that access your feed, and report this as the number used in the Top 25. After that number is a positive or negative number, and this represents how many readers the blog gained or lost from last week's Top 25. The final stat tells you what position the blog held in the Top 25 Last Week (LW). If you see this; (LW - UR), it means the blog wasn't ranked last week.

Sixteen of the blogs in the Top 25 were down this week, with only 8 being up. Interestingly, most of the downward moves were very small, 3 blogs lost only a subscriber or 2. Could this possibly be early affects of the seasonal dip in blog readership during the Holidays? Next few weeks should give us a better idea.

Paul Isakson's blog debuts in the Top 25 this week, and Customers Rock! just missed the cut. Remember if you want to have your blog be considered for inclusion in the Top 25, make sure you add the Feedburner feed count chicklet to your blog.

BTW please have a safe and Happy Thanksgiving with your friends and family!




Next update is next Wednesday.

Social media is a trust-enabler

It's been interesting to see how the marketing portion of the blogosphere has changed over the last few years. When I started blogging in late 2005, many of the posts were of a more 'philosophical' nature. We talked about why social media SHOULD help companies better connect with their customers, simply because there weren't really that many case studies that we could point to. Those of us that were using blogs to connect with each other could see how companies could benefit, but we couldn't really point to any working examples to help bolster our theories.

Thankfully, we now have plenty of successful examples that highlight the positive changes that can happen when a company successfully incorporates social media into its existing communication efforts. But a recent post by Hugh reminded me of why social media is so vitally important.

Social media changes the way a company and its customers communicate with each other.

The average company has average customers. The company likely doesn't make much, if any, effort at actually communicating with, or understanding its customers. Likewise, the customers probably don't understand the company, or have much of an incentive to.

Which means that since neither group understands the other one, neither group TRUSTS the other one.

So the average company is spending big bucks on blasting one-way messages at their customers, while the customers get on every blog and forum and YouTube and talk about how much the company sucks, because they are blasting one-way messages at them that totally miss connecting with them.

The company is having an internal conversation about the customers. The customers are having a completely different external conversation about the company. Both groups are speaking in a completely different language, and making completely different assumptions about the other group. As expected, this leads to neither group understanding the other, and neither group really trusting the other.

But the great thing about social media is that it gives companies a way to connect with their customers. Suddenly, the participants in the internal discussion within the company, and the external one among the company's customers, have a way to interact. The language of the company begins to slowly seep into the conversation the customers are having, and vice versa. Over time, each group begins to slowly understand the other, and trust the other.

When the company begins to better understand and trust the customer, it then increases its level of interaction with its customers. This helps the company make its marketing and communication efforts more effective and efficient, because it now better understands its customers.

And with that higher level of trust comes the creation of a barrier to entry for your competitors that are still blasting one-way messages at its pissed-off customers.

Does this make sense?

Company Blog First Look: GE

Thanks to a mention from Dan Schawbel on Twitter, I was alerted this morning that GE has started blogging, and has joined Twitter. It seems that GE Reports just went live today, and had been writing for the blog for several days previously, so there were plenty of posts waiting on those of us that have found the blog. Even though it is WAY too early to feature the blog in the Company Blog Checkup series, I wanted to give some first impressions, and some advice to GE moving forward.

First, I applaud GE for jumping in the social media waters. That should be said upfront.

Second, the blog is no doubt getting slammed by readers after apparently going 'live' earlier today, then posting that "Starting today, GE Reports is asking for your questions. Do you have a question about GE? Ask us. We’ll do our best to answer them right here on this site." So if they haven't already, I would advise GE to make sure they moderate comments and publish them as soon as possible. And answer as many as you can, as quickly as you can. This will make a big impression on your readers/investors.

Third, I would add a link better explaining what RSS is, and the advantages to your readers of subscribing to your blog's feed. This is a great feature as it lets your investors get news about GE sent directly to them.

Fourth, please clearly identify who is writing this blog, give us a link to their bio, and add their pictures to the blog. Might not seem like it's that important, but it helps put a human face on your company, and it makes it easier for your readers to trust what you write on the blog. And given the nature of the information you'll be sharing, and who you will be sharing it with, trust will be at a severe premium. Adding a pic and bio is a very simple way to increase that trust level. BTW the YouTube videos and channel are a nice touch as well.

And it isn't lost on me how much times have changed to see a major corporation like GE launch a blog, and have this on the sidebar. In the end, don't worry if you run into some growing pains, because those WILL happen. Just stay with it, be as honest as possible with your readers/investors, appreciate their time, and do everything you can to engage and interact with them. If you make a sincere effort to connect with your blog's readers, they'll pick up on that. BTW if anyone from GE has any questions, feel free to leave a comment here, or if you want, you can email me any questions you might have.

What do you think about this effort? Granted it's VERY early, but what would you advise GE to consider as they move forward with GE Reports?

UPDATE: Megan at GE clarifies in the comments that the blog did NOT go live today, it actually went live at the end of October.

The Viral Garden's Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs - Week 129

Here's the standings for Week 129:

1 - Duct Tape Marketing - 253,000 (+4,000)(LW - 1)
2 - Church of the Customer - 241,000 (+3,000)(LW - 2)
3 - CopyBlogger - 45,735 (+753)(LW - 3)
4 - Web Strategy by Jeremiah - 17,024 (+242)(LW - 4)
5 - Chris Brogan - 12,835 (+340)(LW - 6)
6 - Search Engine Guide - 12,713 (-272)LW - 5)
7 - Logic + Emotion - 10,956 (+148)(LW - 7)
8 - Influential Marketing - 7,723 (+606)(LW - 8)
9 - Daily Fix - 6,442 (-10)(LW - 9)
10 - Jaffe Juice - 4,902 (-101)(LW - 10)
11 - Drew's Marketing Minute - 3,499 (+15)(LW - 11)
12 - What's Next - 3,399 (+49)(LW - 12)
13 - Converstations - 3,335 (+26)(LW - 13)
14 - The Viral Garden - 3,324 (+34)(LW - 14)
15 - Conversation Agent - 3,250 (+118)(LW - 15)
16 - The Social Media Marketing Blog - 2,493 (+76)(LW - 17)
17 - Being Peter Kim - 2,400 (+139)(LW - 18)
18 - Social Media Explorer - 2,009 (+109)(LW - 19)
19 - Emergence Marketing - 1,922 (+29)(LW - 20)
20 - Greg Verdino's Marketing Blog - 1,838 (+82)(LW - 22)
21 - The Social Customer Manifesto - 1,770 (+28)(LW - 22)
22 - Techno Marketer - 1,681 (+81)(LW - 23)
23 - Spare Change - 1,370 (+5)(LW - 24)
24 - Movie Marketing Madness - 1,319 (-10)(LW - 25)
25 - Customers Rock! - 1,018 (LW - UR)


The Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs are ranked according to the number of subscribers, according to FeedBurner. The number you see after the blog name is how many subscribers accessed the blog's feed, according to FeedBurner. FeedBurner (and I had to look it up to make sure) tracks the number of times your blog's feed is accessed, and matches it against the IP address of the computer making the request, to approximate the number of subscribers that access your feed, and report this as the number used in the Top 25. After that number is a positive or negative number, and this represents how many readers the blog gained or lost from last week's Top 25. The final stat tells you what position the blog held in the Top 25 Last Week (LW). If you see this; (LW - UR), it means the blog wasn't ranked last week.

Another solid week for the Top 25, with 20 of the 25 blogs gaining subscribers last week. But it was tough being in the Top 10, as 3 of them lost links. I've noticed that Being Peter Kim and Social Media Explorer have been especially hot the last few weeks, and that continues with both adding over 100 subscribers last week.

Customers Rock! re-enters the Top 25 at #25. Servant of Chaos just missed the cut this week. Remember if you want to have your blog be considered for inclusion in the Top 25, make sure you add the Feedburner feed count chicklet to your blog.




Next update is next Wednesday.

Twitter getting too messy? Get organized with TweetDeck!

Ever since I joined in March of last year, I have been struggling with the best way to use Twitter. More than anything, I use Twitter as a way to connect with people, to share links, and chat it up. But the problem I began running into several months ago was that I was following so many people that it was difficult to keep track of all the conversations happening, and especially hard to stay connected with the people that I had actually met and were friends with.

So I started significantly shaving down the number of people that I followed. While this made it easier to keep up with my friends on Twitter, it created a new problem; Many of the new followers I would pick up would unfollow again if I didn't follow back. Which is understandable, and I do the same thing.

But after seeing how Chris Brogan uses TweetDeck during last month's Marketing Profs Digital Marketing Mixer, I've started playing with it again. And what I love about TweetDeck is that it's a great way to get organized. It lets you create multiple columns that you can view at the same time, like I have one column with all the tweets from all the people I follow, a second column with tweets from the people I am friends with, a third column for my replies, and a fourth column for DMs. What I love about adding the column for my friends is that it allows me to start following more people, because now the people I want to stay in touch with have a separate column for their tweets. And additionally, it makes it easier for me to connect with new people, because as I follow more people, I get a sense of what their tweets are about, and it makes it easier to add them to my 'friends' group on TweetDeck.

Using TweetDeck as a powerful Twitter-monitoring and product feedback tool

But I also think that this system of organizing would work wonders for a company that wants to monitor Twitter! Look at the below screenshot where I have searches up at the same time for 'ipod touch', 'iphone', 'ipod' and 'nano'. This would allow someone from Apple to search and see what people on Twitter are saying right now about each of these products. Or if they were a brand manager for a specific line, such as the Touch, they could focus on more specific terms. This gives a company a great way to monitor the conversations that are happening on Twitter about them and their products, but also helps them identify HOW their current and potential customers are using their products. They can see which features are popular with customers, and which ones are not. Also, notice that many people will ask for recommendations on a product before purchasing. By using TweetDeck as a monitoring tool, companies can see which features customers recommend, and which ones they aren't too thrilled about.


What are your tips for using TweetDeck? How do you organize your Twitterstream, and if you monitor Twitter for your company, how are you doing it, and have you trying using TweetDeck?

BTW, think Motrin and their agency could have benefited from monitoring Twitter yesterday?

Social media is a lotta damned work

Whenever I speak at an event about blogging and social media, I always like to point out how these tools are wonderful ways to let companies connect with their customers, when properly positioned.

But eventually, there's always a few questions about how much traffic you can drive to your blog through SM, like what about Digg? Or Facebook? How important is it to have the right keywords targeted?

Let me tell you that social sites can be a wonderful way to draw attention to your blog/site. For example, I now have about 2,300 people following me on Twitter. When I go to Twitter and link to a post I've written here, I can expect to get 50-100 referrals from linking to it on Twitter. If other Twitter users retweet it, that figure can quickly balloon to several hundred visitors for the day.

So on average, every time I go to Twitter and link to one of my blog posts, my blog gets an extra 100+ visitors. Sounds good, right?

Now for the 'rest' of the story.

It's taken me about 20 months to gain 2,300 followers. In March of this year, I had been on Twitter for a year, and had about 500 followers. So the majority of my followers didn't come till I had been active on Twitter for over a year.

In addition to 2,300 followers, I've now left over 9,700 tweets. According to TweetStats, over 75% of those tweets have been replies to other Twitter members. And according to TweetBurner, only about 10% of the sites/blog posts I link to, are my own.

So this means that the majority of the time I spend on Twitter is used talking to other members, and when I do share links on Twitter, only about 10% of them are my own.

If my main goal for using Twitter was to drive traffic to my blog, I would have quit using Twitter within a few weeks. There's just too much damned work involved if your only goal is to draw attention to yourself. And if I shifted my usage and started only promoting my blog posts, my number of followers would fall off a cliff, because that's not why people are following me.

So if you are a company that's considering joining the social media waters, please make sure you understand this:

Social media is a lotta damned work, and if you're only interested in using the space to promote yourself, you'll quit before you see the results you want.

Why do I stick with Twitter? Because I love interacting with other people there. I love sharing links with my followers. Do I love linking to my blog posts and seeing my traffic here spike? You better believe I do. But what REALLY makes my day is when I ask my followers to follow one of my friends, and that person DMs me a few minutes later to say 'Thank you SO much asking everyone to follow me, I just added 40 followers!'

THAT makes my day. And if you want to effectively use social media, it had better be what makes your day as well. It's not about you, it's about loving the ability that these tools give you to connect with other people, and to share valuable content with them. Why does Twitter work so well for ComcastCares? Because Frank already loved connecting with Comcast customers and solving their customer service problems. Twitter just gave him a new way to do that.

Why does social media work for Masi's Brand Manager Tim Jackson? Because Tim is a people person, and discovered that blogs and social media gave him a new way to connect with his customers and retailers. Which is what he was already doing, but social media gave him a more effective way to connect with others.

Social media is a lotta damned work. But if you want to use these tools as a way to connect with other people, that lotta work is worth every second.

Pic via Flickr user .hln.

UPDATE: This post was partially inspired by this one from Amber. She nails it, there are no shortcuts to successfully using social media.

#Motrinmoms = Exhibit A for online monitoring

Over the weekend, a nice lil Twitterstorm erupted after Motrin ran an ad on it's main website that many mommy bloggers took offense to. And those moms descended upon Twitter to vent their anger over the ad, making #motrinmoms the most common term on Twitter. And as of this writing, the Motrin main website is down.

As the backlash grew during the day, one blogger sought out the agency that handles the Motrin account and contact them to see what they thought of the Twitter-backlash against Motrin. Apparently, they had no idea it was happening.

And to me, this is the biggest issue in this entire 'crisis'. Motrin apparently did little to no monitoring of their intended audience before or during the Twitterstorm. Which is still baffling to me in this day and age of free and easy tools to let you do just that.

Simple monitoring using Google Blog Search or Twitter search would have immediately alerted Motrin to complaints from customers, and they could have started reaching out to angry customers in order to defuse the situation. If your company isn't using both of these tools, start doing so immediately.

Another key point: The quickest way to convert an angry detractor into a passionate evangelist, is to listen to them and act on their complaints.

That is, if you are willing to listen in the first place.

Pic via LisaHoffmann's tweet.

The Viral Garden's Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs - Week 128

Here's the standings for Week 128:

1 - Duct Tape Marketing - 249,000 (+2,000)(LW - 1)
2 - Church of the Customer - 238,000 (+3,000)(LW - 2)
3 - CopyBlogger - 44,982 (-117)(LW - 3)
4 - Web Strategy by Jeremiah - 16,782 (+214)(LW - 4)
5 - Search Engine Guide - 12,985 (+27)LW - 5)
6 - Chris Brogan - 12,495 (+608)(LW - 6)
7 - Logic + Emotion - 10,808 (-125)(LW - 7)
8 - Influential Marketing - 7,117 (-289)(LW - 8)
9 - Daily Fix - 6,452 (+145)(LW - 9)
10 - Jaffe Juice - 5,003 (+75)(LW - 10)
11 - Drew's Marketing Minute - 3,484 (+47)(LW - 11)
12 - What's Next - 3,350 (+47)(LW - 12)
13 - Converstations - 3,309 (+172)(LW - 14)
14 - The Viral Garden - 3,290 (+82)(LW - 13)
15 - Conversation Agent - 3,132 (+88)(LW - 15)
16 - Techipedia - 2,483 (+76)(LW - 16)
17 - The Social Media Marketing Blog - 2,417 (+119)(LW - 17)
18 - Being Peter Kim - 2,261 (+137)(LW - 18)
19 - Social Media Explorer - 1,900 (+146)(LW - 20)
20 - Emergence Marketing - 1,893 (+35)(LW - 19)
21 - Greg Verdino's Marketing Blog - 1,756 (+35)(LW - 22)
22 - The Social Customer Manifesto - 1,742 (-9)(LW - 21)
23 - Techno Marketer - 1,600 (+64)(LW - 23)
24 - Spare Change - 1,365 (+23)(LW - 25)
25 - Movie Marketing Madness - 1,329 (-24)(LW - 24)


The Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs are ranked according to the number of subscribers, according to FeedBurner. The number you see after the blog name is how many subscribers accessed the blog's feed, according to FeedBurner. FeedBurner (and I had to look it up to make sure) tracks the number of times your blog's feed is accessed, and matches it against the IP address of the computer making the request, to approximate the number of subscribers that access your feed, and report this as the number used in the Top 25. After that number is a positive or negative number, and this represents how many readers the blog gained or lost from last week's Top 25. The final stat tells you what position the blog held in the Top 25 Last Week (LW). If you see this; (LW - UR), it means the blog wasn't ranked last week.

Another solid week for the Top 25, with 20 of the 25 blogs gaining subscribers last week. Not as many blogs were up as last week, but 9 of the 20 up blogs gained over 100 subscribers, with Chris Brogan's 608-subscriber gain being the biggest. Social Media Explorer had another big week and moved up another notch this week.

Servant of Chaos and Customers Rock! just missed the cut this week. Remember if you want to have your blog be considered for inclusion in the Top 25, make sure you add the Feedburner feed count chicklet to your blog.




Next update is next Wednesday.

How do you budget your social media time?

I am always trying to tweak/examine how I spend my time with various social media sites and tools. A big reason why, is because I honestly love connecting with people and sharing ideas. I learn SO much, but at the same time, I am a social media consultant, so I have to balance out the benefits to my business, as well.

I have two rules for budgeting my social media time:

1 - Spend 10 times as much time OFF my blog, as I do on it,

2 - Spend 10 times as much time promoting OTHER people's content and blog posts, as I do my own.

Other than that, I am pretty flexible. And really, I think I need more rules. Like I spend a lot of time on Twitter, because I love connecting with SO many amazingly smart people, but I also see traffic benefits to my blog. And the connections I make via Twitter occasionally do lead to work/speaking opportunities.

So I'm always on the lookout for ways to improve how I budget my social media time? How do you manage? And how much time do you spend with social media each day? Being a social media consultant, I obviously spend more time with these tools than most people.

How do you manage your time? And perhaps more importantly, how do you determine if your time is well-spent? What are you looking for?

Pic Tunnels of Time via Flickr user fdecomite

Let's stop hyping social media, and start explaining why it's so important

I had an absolute blast speaking last Friday at Learn About Web. It's funny because when I speak at a conference, I'm never quite sure where the audience is on the social media learning curve. I assume they are beginners that are curious, but that at best are really just starting to play with these tools.

But when arriving in Pasco for LAW, I was immediately struck by the fact that of the 100+ attendees, there were only about 5 with laptops, and those were all at the speaker's table. So when it came time for me to reference Twitter in my presentation, I stopped first and said to the audience "When I say the word 'Twitter' to you, how many of you have absolutely no idea what I am talking about?"

The majority of the hands went up.

This is a problem that I have, and that many of us in this space have, in that we are so excited about these tools and sites, that we sometimes hype them, but don't explain why they deserve the hype. I tried to stress in my presentation (and Jennifer and An did a great job with this as well in their presentations) the fundamental reasons why social media matters to businesses. I stressed that these tools are important because they allow us to quickly and easily connect with other people. In the case of a business, those 'other people' just so happen to be their customers. Which is a good group to connect with.

And I noticed when I started that there were lots of frowns and looks of bewilderment in the audience when I started talking. By the end of the talk, many of those same people were smiling and nodding along as I made my points.

We always stress to companies that they need to approach social media from the mindset of their customers. That they need to create content with their customers/readers/listeners/viewers in mind. But as the people that are helping companies get into this space, we need to follow our own advice, and approach these tools with the best interests of our clients in mind. We don't need to focus on the hype around social media, but instead we need to focus on WHY these sites and tools are getting hyped. On how businesses can benefit from them.

I am a big fan of this saying, and shared it at the start of my presentation; Don't focus on the tools, focus on the connections that the tools help facilitate. We always talk about how social media can 'improve the conversation' between a company and its customers, well I think we can also help improve the conversation around social media. Especially now as we are in troubling economic times, companies don't need to know what the newest Shiny Toy is in the social media space, they need to know how and if it can help them better connect with their customers.

BTW here's a pic of the speakers having an absolute blast at Learn About Web in our NASCAR limo! Craig Sutton and the gang at Bright Web Marketing hit a home run, and are already planning on having LAW again next year!

Blogging for Business session links from Learn About Web

Hello Learn About Web! I mentioned several blogs, tools and sites in my Blogging for Businss session on Friday, and here are the links so that you can check them out for yourself!

Stats on current and projected blog readership and creation from 2007-2012.

Breakdown of which age groups are reading blogs and blogging on a weekly basis.

Information on Graco's blogging strategy and the results they have seen. Graco's blog.

Newcastle Square Realty's blog.

Avis' UK Blog.

Dell's Direct2Dell blog.

MasiGuy's blog.

Tim's Plurkshop on how companies can use social media to connect with their customers.

Toby Bloomberg's profile of Tim's social media/blogging efforts with Masi.

MediaHunter's interview with Tim about Masi's marketing efforts.

Link to recent case study I did with the ROI for Tim's social media marketing efforts for Masi.

The Viral Garden's Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs - Week 127

Here's the standings for Week 127:

1 - Duct Tape Marketing - 247,000 (+4,000)(LW - 1)
2 - Church of the Customer - 235,000 (+2,000)(LW - 2)
3 - CopyBlogger - 45,109 (+657)(LW - 3)
4 - Web Strategy by Jeremiah - 16,568 (+330)(LW - 4)
5 - Search Engine Guide - 12,958 (+380)LW - 5)
6 - Chris Brogan - 11,877 (+618)(LW - 6)
7 - Logic + Emotion - 10,933 (+318)(LW - 7)
8 - Influential Marketing - 7,406 (+72)(LW - 8)
9 - Daily Fix - 6,307 (+56)(LW - 9)
10 - Jaffe Juice - 4,928 (-17)(LW - 10)
11 - Drew's Marketing Minute - 3,437 (+24)(LW - 11)
12 - What's Next - 3,303 (+65)(LW - 12)
13 - The Viral Garden - 3,208 (+41)(LW - 14)
14 - Converstations - 3,137 (-45)(LW - 13)
15 - Conversation Agent - 3,044 (+129)(LW - 15)
16 - Techipedia - 2,407 (-44)(LW - 16)
17 - The Social Media Marketing Blog - 2,298 (+35)(LW - 17)
18 - Being Peter Kim - 2,124 (+97)(LW - 18)
19 - Emergence Marketing - 1,858 (+9)(LW - 19)
20 - Social Media Explorer - 1,754 (+93)(LW - 21)
21 - The Social Customer Manifesto - 1,751 (+12)(LW - 20)
22 - Greg Verdino's Marketing Blog - 1,721 (+90)(LW - 22)
23 - Techno Marketer - 1,536 (+13)(LW - 23)
24 - Movie Marketing Madness - 1,353 (+69)(LW - 25)
25 - Spare Change - 1,342 (+11)(LW - 24)


The Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs are ranked according to the number of subscribers, according to FeedBurner. The number you see after the blog name is how many subscribers accessed the blog's feed, according to FeedBurner. FeedBurner (and I had to look it up to make sure) tracks the number of times your blog's feed is accessed, and matches it against the IP address of the computer making the request, to approximate the number of subscribers that access your feed, and report this as the number used in the Top 25. After that number is a positive or negative number, and this represents how many readers the blog gained or lost from last week's Top 25. The final stat tells you what position the blog held in the Top 25 Last Week (LW). If you see this; (LW - UR), it means the blog wasn't ranked last week.

Another solid week for the Top 25, with 22 of the 25 blogs gaining subscribers last week. The Top 10 was particularly impressive, with 9 blogs gaining, and those 9 all gaining more than 50 subscribers. Past the Top 10, Conversation Agent, Social Media Explorer, and Greg Verdino's Blog all had strong moves upward, with SME's move pushing it into the Top 20.

Servant of Chaos and Customers Rock! just missed the cut this week. Remember if you want to have your blog be considered for inclusion in the Top 25, make sure you add the Feedburner feed count chicklet to your blog.




Next update is next Wednesday.

The Speed of Twitter

This morning, as I do on most, I went through my feeds in Bloglines looking for blog posts that I could share with my followers on Twitter. I read Mike Sansone's post on how beginners can get started with Social Media, and knew it would be a post that many of my Twitter friends could find valuable.

So I linked to it on Twitter, and almost immediately, my followers began Re-Tweeting it to their followers. If you aren't that familiar with Twitter, a Re-Tweet is when you re-send a message that someone else sends, and you share it with your followers. So I shared the link with my 2,000+ followers, and within minutes, about a dozen of my followers had Re-Tweeted the link to THEIR followers! Within a matter of minutes, thousands of Twitter users were exposed to this post.

This is why Social Media is so important, because it is SO easy for people to quickly share and spread ideas. If you have an idea/post/story that resonates with others, it can literally zoom around the world, via the internet, in minutes.

Not every business should be on Twitter, but given the communal nature and the ease at which ideas can be shared, I think every business should at least spend some time there and see if it's right for them. If we aren't connected already, you can follow me on Twitter here.

Are you using Tweetburner?

The way I use Twitter has been constantly evolving since I joined the site in early 2007. Currently, I have two main ways that I use Twitter:

1 - For conversation

2 - Sharing links

As far as sharing links, as I read through my feeds in Bloglines, when I come across a post/article that seems interesting, I will drop it in Twitter and share it with my friends and followers there. But I have always wondered if there was a way to track which links are more popular than others, so I would have a way to gauge which topics are more relevant to my followers.

Well now I've found a way, sorta. Tweetburner let's you track the links that you share on Twitter, and tells you how many times they are clicked. It also lets you see which links are the most popular within the last hour.

Now here's the kicker; Tweetburner only tracks links shared with the URL-shortening service Twurl. You can use this from the frontpage of Tweetburner, or it's a built in option for Twhirl and Tweetdeck, if you use those Twitter clients. For months I've been trying to use Tweetburner to track my shared links, but it took till yesterday to figure out that you had to create the links with Twurl! Whoops!

So play with Tweetburner and see what you think. I share links on Twitter because I want my followers to find value in them, so anything that helps me track how much value they place in these links, is a good thing!

What about you? Have you used Tweetburner to track the links you are sharing on Twitter? Or do you use another site?