Facebook Adds a “Reaction” Button

Facebook’s “like” button has always been insufficient, not just for marketers but for all of us.

How are you supposed to react to a post about your favorite team losing the Super Bowl, when your friend says that her mom is sick in the hospital, or a news item about a school shooting or a terrorist attack?

Nobody likes this stuff, but some of us click the “like” button anyway because we want to draw attention to the content and there’s nothing else to click.

So Facebook has decided to roll out a range of emotional reaction buttons. “Like” is still an option, but so is “love,” along with “sad,” “angry” and “wow.”

You might not see these buttons just yet because Facebook is rolling them out exclusively in Spain and Ireland before going global, but you’ll have access to them soon enough.

And so will your customers.

Your customers have always been able to express their displeasure on Facebook, but they’ve had to stop what they’re doing and actually write something. Now they can just click a button.

And the number of angry reactions will be tallied right there alongside the likes.

Feeling nervous yet?

Don’t. It’s all good.

You’re not going to anger your customers more than you already are just because they can register their disgruntlement by clicking a button. The difference is that you’re more likely to know they’re disgruntled, which means you’ll be more able to do something about it. You can’t fix problems you don’t know about, and you can’t placate angry customers if they silently stalk off in a huff.

Think of Facebook’s new range of reactions like a comment card. You do want to know what your customers really think, don’t you?

Just be careful not to make customer reactions your overriding concern.

“At the end of the day,” says Facebook product manager Richard Sim, “for a business we want you to post things that you know are going to drive business value for you, and optimizing for loves really isn’t the right business value for you.”

Google Will Know When You’re Lying

Google is making a list and checking it twice, and if you’re fudging your facts in your marketing—even if you’re doing it out of incompetence rather than malice—your search engine results are going to suffer.

At least that will be the case if a new algorithm is put into place.

Eight software developers at Google explained how it would work in a paper called Knowledge-Based Trust: Estimating the Trustworthiness of Web Sources.

We extract a plurality of facts from many pages using information extraction techniques. We then jointly estimate the correctness of these facts and the accuracy of the sources using inference in a probabilistic model. Inference is an iterative process, since we believe a source is accurate if its facts are correct, and we believe the facts are correct if they are extracted from an accurate source. We leverage the redundancy of information on the web to break the symmetry. Furthermore, we show how to initialize our estimate of the accuracy of sources based on authoritative information, in order to ensure that this iterative process converges to a good solution.

It only gets more complicated from there, and you won’t fully understand it you’re not a math whiz, but the bottom line is pretty straightforward. Your web site will be scrutinized for the accuracy of its facts and the accuracy of its sources. If you come up short in the honesty department, your search engine rankings are going to crater.

As long as their algorithm works more or less correctly, Google will be doing everybody a favor. Conspiracy theory web sites won’t get as much traction. Nor will the web sites of companies that lie about their products and their competition.

Nor, for that matter, will the web sites of companies that are wrong on the details thanks simply to laziness.

Marketers who phone in their content solely for the sake of search engine optimization will have to up their game if they want to get noticed by Google and therefore potential customers, but they should have been upping their game a long time ago anyway. Customers want accurate and compelling information, not slapped together paragraphs crammed with keywords.
Gossip web sites, the authors say, are currently ranked very high for obvious reasons, but they’re not considered reliable, so they’re going to fall in the search engine rankings. Some less popular sites, on the other hand, are going to rise in the ranks because they’re more accurate.

That’s terrific news for marketers, isn’t it? As long as we do our jobs the way we’re supposed to be doing our jobs, we’ll have another way to get noticed and find potential customers.

The Masters of Content Marketing

According to the conventional wisdom, content marketing is only possible thanks to the Internet and the ability to publish material digitally. Businesses can now turn their corporate web sites into magazines. By publishing compelling relevant content, they can communicate with their customers at both a higher and deeper level than they can with conventional advertising, but before the Internet, this was impossible. Media space had to be rented from newspapers, magazines and television and radio stations.

But it’s not true. Content marketing has been with us for more than 100 years. And by looking back at its 19th century pioneers, instead of reinventing the wheel, today’s marketers can learn from those who mastered it before they were even born.

John Deere founded a magazine called The Furrow in 1895. He published articles about new agriculture technology and about how farmers could become more successful. The magazine was not a collection of ads for John Deere equipment, though it included those on the side. It was written by journalists and agriculture experts and aimed squarely at what farmers needed in Iowa and beyond.

120 years later, with 1.5 million subscribers in dozens of countries, it’s the most widely-circulated farming magazine in the world.

There’s also Saudi Aramco World, a gorgeous glossy print magazine about the peoples and cultures of the Middle East. It’s published by a multinational oil company based in Riyadh and Houston, but the magazine is not about directly about oil or energy. It’s about the place where much of the world’s oil and energy come from. It has been in circulation since 1949.

It’s hard to say how many customers Saudi Aramco has acquired thanks to an English-language magazine published in Texas. We all use energy resources from the Middle East, and no one will use more thanks to that magazine. It’s most likely not even a loss-leader. It’s a pet side project.

So why bring it up? Because it endures. It endures because it’s a serious magazine staffed with serious writers and editors that has earned a wide audience.

Just like John Deere’s The Furrow.

Also take a look at BenchMark magazine, an award-winning general interest engineering magazine published by Burns and McDonnell, an engineering firm based in Kansas City. Two years ago, it celebrated its 102nd birthday.

These three companies published their magazines—their content marketing—long before publishing was just a button, back when they had to use printing presses. They still use printing presses. The magazines are actual magazines. They aren’t just web sites. You can hold them in your hand.

They’re gorgeous. They’re relevant. They hold up next to “real” magazines like Newsweek and The Economist. Otherwise they would have died a long time ago.

The Internet and digital publishing certainly makes content marketing cheaper and easier, but it’s not new in the world. If you want to see how it’s done epically and correctly, start by studying the masters who’ve been knocking it out of the park for more than a century.

Meet the Universe Half Way

Author Chuck Wendig posts advice to aspiring and professional writers on his blog TerribleMinds.com that applies to professionals in virtually end field. (The language over there is a bit on the naughty side, so consider yourself warned.)

Meet the universe halfway and the universe will meet you in return. Explained more completely: there exist components of any career (but writing in particular) that are well beyond your grasp. You cannot control everything. Some of it is just left to fate. But, you still have to put in the work. You won’t get struck by lightning if you don’t run out [in] the storm. You must maximize your chances. You do this by meeting the universe halfway. You do this by working.

That is excellent advice indeed for writers. It also works for painters, dancers, graphic designers, musicians and actors. It’s excellent advice for doctors and lawyers. It’s excellent advice for entrepreneurs. It’s excellent advice for just about anybody who wants to accomplish just about anything.

Including business leaders. And marketers.

There are some things that you just can’t control. They’re in the lap of the gods.

You can’t force customers to buy your products. You can’t force readers to share your social media posts. You can’t force a single person to bookmark your business site or add anything to their shopping cart.

You certainly can’t force Wall Street to respond favorably to your quarterly earnings report.

You can’t stop Apple from building a better smart phone or Microsoft from designing a better word processor. And if you’re Apple, you can’t stop Samsung from building a competitive smart phone, and if you’re Microsoft you can’t stop OpenOffice from creating a new version of the word processor it gives away for free on the Internet.

You can’t do any of those things.

But you can work your tail off and constantly strive to improve. And the universe (or the market, or the Internet, or the high tech industry, or whatever) really does have a way of responding to consistently applied competent effort over time.

Afraid that no one is even reading your copywriting, let alone following your calls to action? Bummed out that your business doesn’t have enough Facebook followers? Keep producing relevant engaging content that consists of more than just ads for your business, and do it week after week, month after month, and year after year. If you’re constantly getting better, the people who need to notice eventually will.

Worried that your marketing strategy feels too much like groping in the dark? Yeah, well, so does everyone else’s. It’s no different if you’re starting a business, writing a novel, or hoping to invent the bestest mouse trap ever in your basement. Break your strategy apart. Test it. Refine it. And break it apart and test it again. Never stop improving by increments and you’ll get somewhere.

Frustrated that the competition is eating your lunch this year? Throw everything you have, including the kitchen sink, into eating your competition for dinner next year and the year after that.

There are no guarantees in any endeavor, but if you meet the universe halfway with competence and persistence over time, your efforts eventually will be noticed, and they’ll be rewarded.

Go Mobile or Die

If you don’t have a serious mobile marketing strategy by the end of this year, you might as well just post to Craigslist and call it a day.

In 2014, mobile users outnumbered laptop and desktop users. The average person now spends 51 percent or more of their Internet time on a mobile device compared with just 42 percent or less on a desktop or laptop.

Back in 2008, the average person used a laptop or desktop 91 percent of the time. The very first iPhone had only hit the market six months earlier, and iPads didn’t even exist yet.

In the digital era, 2008 was an eternity ago. It’s practically the old days of grainy black-and-white photography. No business needed a mobile marketing strategy back when flip phones were shiny and new (and expensive!), but mobile is now where your customers are.

Most businesses have some kind of mobile marketing strategy, but many haven’t thought it through. It’s just a checklist item. As Stephen Moyers at SPINX Digital Agency put it, “Those companies will likely be forgotten and become obsolete.”

That’s especially true if their customers are primarily young people.

MarketingCharts published an info graphic comparing users’ responses to mobile ads between Millennials (age 16-34) and GenXers (age 35-54). Ten percent of GenXers added a product to their wish list, while 15 percent of Millennials did. Eleven percent of GenXers saved a page, while 25 percent of Millennials did. Thirteen percent of GenXers purchased a product, while 23 percent of Millennials did.

Young people are growing up with smart phones and tablets. They don’t need to switch from a big lug of a computer on their desk to a tiny one in their pocket. They’re used to everything, and they prefer mobile more than anyone else.

Until cybernetic implants comes along, mobile devices will only grow in popularity. Some older folks can’t be bothered with all the newfangled gadgetry out there, but nobody lives forever. When retirement homes are full of GenXers, everyone in the country will have been using mobile devices for decades. We’ll have forgotten that we ever lived without them. Your sturdy old desktop may be tomorrow’s Commodore 64.

If your primary business right now is selling dumb phones to grandma—you know, the kind with the gigantic buttons that even a blind person can see—you probably don’t need much of a mobile marketing strategy.

Otherwise? Yeah. You do.

We’re already past the tipping point. If your marketing team is still just phoning it in (yes, that pun was intended), now would be a good time for a re-think.

Why Digital Marketing Matters

We all know digital marketing is the future. The Internet revolution has been slamming into legacy media with the force of Hurricane Katrina for more than a decade now.

But aside from the obvious fact that old media like newspapers and magazines are on the decline, why does digital marketing matter?

Because your customers are in the digital space. And they expect you to be there alongside them. Fortunately, that space provides a bounty of goodies that were unheard of in the past.

Dirt cheap ads. Digital ads are, or at least can be, cheaper than print ads. You can aim them precisely at your target demographic rather than using the spray-and-pray approach of traditional media that blasted your ads to the universe.

They’re also scaleable. Rather than paying full freight for a flat fee, you can cap your costs as low as you want to keep your campaigns under budget.

Everything is forever. Magazine ads are thrown into recycling bins after a month or even a week. Today’s newspaper ads are tomorrow’s fish wrap. Radio spots evaporate instantly, as if they weren’t even there.

Content you publish on your web site can linger forever if you want, and it costs virtually nothing.

Potential customers can and will find your content years after you’ve written it just by Googling. Two years from now, you can get paid thanks to work you did last year.

Two decades have passed since Bill Gates declared that content is king, and it’s still true. And Google agrees.

Your customers would hate you, of course, if you just dumped a bunch of keywords on your business web site and called it a day, but you wouldn’t have many customers anyway. They wouldn’t be able to find you. You’re dead to both Google and potential customers if you don’t produce authoritative, credible and relevant content.

It’s a requirement, yes, but it’s also an opportunity to turn your web site into a magazine for your products, your services, and your industry and start hoovering up some new prospects.

Reach customers everywhere. According to Smart Insights, technology users now spend more time on mobile devices than they do using desktop computers.

Almost everyone has a mobile device in their pocket except when they’re showering or asleep. That won’t change until we start wiring technology directly into our eyeballs and brains, and since that’s not happening any time soon, your marketing strategy had better be mobile.

Mobile is where you want to be, though. If someone tells you about an exciting new product or service that sounds interesting, odds are good that the first thing you’ll do is tap it into your phone. Your customers do the same thing. That’s where the conversion process begins.

Which brings us to:

Easy-peasy calls to action. Calls to action are always a long shot, but they were over the horizon back in the old days.

How many times have you seen an ad on TV for a product that looked interesting and followed it by actually calling the 1-800 number to buy it? Compare that to the number of times you found something awesome on Amazon and added it to your shopping cart.

Amazon makes it even easier now with one-click ordering. Returning customers can skip the whole shopping cart thing altogether. Just one click and, boom. They’re done.

You can’t built that functionality into a newspaper ad.

The Internet is still littered with struggling business sites without any buy buttons, which is like having empty shelves in a strip mall. But if you do everything right, your digital ads, your social media strategy, your content marketing and your buy buttons mean you can attract new customers and sell them your products while bypassing brick, mortar and legacy media entirely.

Search and Destroy Your Corporate Gobbledygook

Your corporate gobbledygook is killing your copywriting.

Mumbo jumbo. Bafflegab. Gibberish.

Those are great words. You know what’s not a great word? Solution. Not if you’re selling software. You want a better word than “solution” for software? Try “software.”

If you’re using words that normal people don’t use—or worse, if they have no idea what you’re talking about—you’re doing it wrong.

The same applies to novelists, by the way. Fiction writers should write with the words they use in their heads every day. That way they’ll be sure to use the words that everyone else uses in their heads every day. Novelists who consult a thesaurus for every second or third sentence to find words that aren’t in everyone’s heads barf up inpenetrable prose that gives the rest of us headaches.

Likewise, when corporate gobbledygook creeps into your copywriting, it’s time to go on a search and destroy mission.

Want a longer example? Here’s Sarah Mitchell over at Global Copywriting:

Are you a leading provider of innovative, cost-effective solutions with world-class service and a unique portfolio of robust products? Are you pleased to announce a next-generation partnership to become an industry leader in quality assurance to optimise customer satisfaction? Are you focused on flexibility, scalability and high-performance outcomes? I hope not. I really hope not.

Most of the words in that paragraph are gobbledygook.

“From a business perspective,” she adds, “they’re so overused they’ve ceased to have meaning.”

Our hat is off to Sarah for bringing this problem to everybody’s attention, but she accidentally did it herself.

That phrase. “From a business perspective.” It’s also corporate gobbledygook.

It means nothing and it’s structurally kludgy.

Here’s a new and improved sentence: “They’re so overused in business they’ve ceased to have meaning.”

Those of us in the business world have heard the phrase “from a [blank] perspective” so many times that we sometimes forget it means nothing. “From a business perspective.” “From a finance perspective.” “From an IT perspective.” “From a marketing perspective.”

Its awkwardness is so familiar we hardly even notice it anymore.

We forget it sounds awful and weird and forced and just…wrong to everyone else.

We don’t mean to pick on Sarah here. Really, we don’t. She just absorbed that cringe-worthy phrase like the rest of us. Using it is a habit, like saying “he was like” instead of “he said.”

It’s sort of okay if you talk that way (nothing bad will happen to anybody, at least), but for goodness sake don’t write that way.

The folks at Mule Design created what they call the Unsuck It tool that transforms sucky language into language everyday people can tolerate.

“Going forward” should be replaced with “in the future.”

In finance, “spend” should be replaced with “spending.” Spend is a verb, not a noun. Slang is okay in the office, but keep it out of your copywriting.

“Leverage technology” should be replaced with “use technology.”

We could do this all day. David Meerman Scott at Web Ink Now compiled a list of 325 examples of gobbledygook words and phrases that he found over and over again in 711,123 corporate press releases.

Maury Maverick coined the word “gobbledygook” in 1944 when he was a U.S. Representative in Texas. He wrote a mock-threatening memo banning nonsense language and declared that  “anyone using the words activation or implementation will be shot.”

We won’t shoot you if you write, “from a call center perspective, we’re trying to optimize customer satisfaction going forward,” but we guarantee that hardly anyone will read past that sentence.

So knock it off already. You’re only hurting yourself.

What are Facebook “Likes” Actually Worth?

Facebook “likes” by themselves are worth nothing.

There. We said it.

But how can that be true if you need a comprehensive social media marketing strategy to succeed in business these days?

Your Facebook page and other owned media gives you a chance to engage with your customers, to share useful information, and to build trust. That’s how you build and expand a loyal customer base.

It doesn’t matter how many “likes” you have if you’re not doing any of those things. If people “like” your page, but you aren’t regularly publishing and sharing relevant content, your posts won’t show up in their feeds and there won’t be much to actually like.

You might attract some new customers if they see that you have a huge number of “likes,” but if your new prospects don’t have a good first-time customer experience, they won’t be back.

Does your company magically get a dollar every time someone on Facebook clicks “like”? Nope.

Is a person who clicks “like” guaranteed to purchase one of your products or services? Nope.

Will customers learning about you for the first time line up outside your door because they saw that your Facebook page has hundreds of thousands of “likes”? Nope.

A large number of Facebook “likes” and Twitter followers can be a decent reflection of how much people like your company and your social media presence, but if you’re doing it right those figures are a by-product of your success. They should never be the objective.

Far better to have a small loyal customer base than a legion of people on the Internet who once clicked the “like” button but have moved on and forgotten all about you—or worse—in the meantime.

By all means, rack up those “likes.” Just remember that you can’t take them to the bank.

Social Media is Not a Fad

Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest may turn out to be ephemeral (remember MySpace?) but social media is as permanent as the Internet. Marketers who haven’t figured it out yet or who think it will go away when the kids find some new shiny objects to play with need to think again.

There is no shortage of newspapers, magazines, and corporate web sites on the Internet, but the majority of communication online takes place in the context of social media. That’s especially true for young people. You might still think Facebook and Twitter are newfangled, but as far as young people are concerned, email is the new landline.

Social media isn’t just a way to keep in touch with friends and to make new friends. It’s increasingly where people learn about new products and services. If you doubt this, just broaden your definition of social media slightly and you’ll see why this is true.

Look at Amazon. It started out as a bookstore, but today it sells almost everything now, from car stereos and video games to groceries and kitchen cleaning supplies. Just about the only things you can’t buy on Amazon are motor vehicles and real estate.

Every product on Amazon has a place for customer reviews, and only the newest and least-selling products have no reviews. Customer reviews are so ubiquitous there that you can learn something about a product even if it has not been reviewed. At the very least, you know it’s not selling.

Amazon isn’t exactly a social media site, but there’s no question that its vast customer review section is social media. It’s an online media space where individuals are given a microphone and a soap box to talk to a virtually limitless number of other people about nearly every conceivable product. Call it something other than social media if you want, but it certainly isn’t traditional media.

No one would dispute that Goodreads is a social media site. It’s where bibliophiles review books for each other. The exact same conversations take place on Amazon.

Nothing beats word of mouth marketing if you can earn it. Sticking with Amazon for now, consider that some of the best-selling books have launched to the top of the charts with no traditional marketing whatsoever. Hardly anyone had ever heard of science-fiction author Hugh Howey when he self-published a post-apocalyptic short story called Wool, but a handful of people stumbled upon it, loved it, told their friends it was great, and praised it in reader reviews. A slightly larger handful of people then found it, told their friends about it, and wrote more reader reviews. This continued in an ever-widening circle and convinced the author that he should expand his short story into a full-length book and then into a trilogy. It wasn’t long before Ridley Scott optioned the film and made Howey rich.

All thanks to word-of-mouth marketing on the Internet.

This kind of word-of-mouth marketing is everywhere on the Internet now. Amazon’s customers rely on it not only when deciding which books to read, but also which smartphone and which set of headphones to purchase.

Amazon is just one example. All kinds of local businesses are made or destroyed by customer reviews on sites like Angie’s List, Urban Spoon, Trip Advisor, and Yelp.

This is revolutionary.

Naturally occurring word-of-mouth marketing has been with us for thousands of years, but in the pre-Internet world we could only spread the word to friends, family members, and acquaintances. Today, however, one person can broadcast a message to hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of strangers.

If you’re still skeptical about social media marketing, let that sink in and reconsider web sites like Facebook and Twitter. They weren’t designed up to sell anything like Amazon, nor were they designed for word-of-mouth marketing like Trip Advisor and Yelp, but millions of people live online in these virtual spaces, and they talk about everything there, including, sometimes, which products and services they love, hate and why.

The Internet is simply where people talk to each other now, and since most of us don’t have a column in the New York Times, most of that talk is on social media sites. These places are the new office break rooms, the new corner coffee shops, the new sports bars, the new grocery store lines and the new community centers. They are the new billboards, the new classified ad pages, and the new bumper stickers. They are where almost all digital discourse takes place.

This will only go away if the Internet goes away, and that’s only likely to happen if a giant asteroid smashes into the planet.

So ask yourself: do you want to be part of those conversations or not?

How to Silence Your Inner Critic

Writer’s block is a myth, but writer’s paralysis isn’t.

Many years ago, when I was still a baby writer, I attended a regular writer’s workshop in Eugene, Oregon, taught by professionals.

The woman who ran it, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, then-editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, asked everyone in the room to raise their hands if they’d ever experienced writer’s block or something similar. A dozen or so people—half of us, myself included—raised their hands.

She then asked how many people are or were English majors in college. The exact same people—again, myself included—raised their hands.

Everyone in the room was stunned.

Every single person who had spent time in a university English Department suffered from “writer’s block” at least sometimes, yet no one else did.

What was going on? Was “writer’s block” somehow taught to people in college?

Yep.

Not on purpose, of course. Literature courses are all about criticizing what somebody else wrote. If you spend enough time criticizing other people’s work, and if you’ve internalized the fact that even Shakespeare and Milton are subject to criticism, your own inner critic can mushroom to Godzilla size and paralyze you even if you’re writing something that would never be confused with “literature,” such marketing copy or even blog posts.

You need the inner critic when you’re editing, but it should never be the size of Godzilla, and it needs to shut up entirely when you’re in creative mode.

Start with Draft Zero. There is no getting around it: you must produce a first draft, and your first draft will be sloppy. As Robert Graves said, there is no such thing as good writing. There is only good rewriting.

But even the most seasoned professionals can feel a bit of anxiety, trepidation, or paralysis while writing a rough draft.

One solution is extraordinarily simple. Think of the first draft as Draft Zero. Only after you’ve cleaned up that mess do you have a first draft. If you can internalize this idea, your inner critic will leave you alone and let you get started because it doesn’t matter if Draft Zero is littered with problems.

Pre-write. If that doesn’t work for you, try this instead: create a document on your computer for the sole purpose of pre-writing. This is not the first draft of your copywriting, content marketing, blog post, story or article. It’s just a warm-up. It’s practice. Just start typing whatever it is you’re going to write about later.

It’s going to suck. So what? You’re not writing yet. You’re just stretching.

Do this for ten, twenty, maybe thirty minutes. Then go have a cup of coffee and look at your warm-up again later.

You might be surprised to discover that you already have a serviceable draft

If not, who cares? Some of what you wrote during your warm-up will be worth preserving and copying and pasting into an actual draft. And you will have produced those parts without the inner critic sticking his nose in because you weren’t actually writing. You were just typing.

Dare to be bad. Best-selling author Dean Wesley Smith used to tape a hand-written note to his computer monitor that said, “Dare to be bad.” It was his way of shutting up his inner critic so he could get on with his work and clean up any messy parts later.

His subconscious—and yours—knows what it’s doing and can produce at least some decent material on the first go-around if it can be liberated from the need to be perfect.

Daring to be bad, pre-writing, and starting with a Draft Zero are just three different ways of hog tying your inner critic, putting duct tape over its mouth, and tossing it into the basement. You don’t want to kill your inner critic. You need it for editing and cleanup. But it will paralyze you if its reading over your shoulder as you type your first draft.

Especially if you majored in English.