This weekend Mattie Dietrich (the one who brought you H-I-larious) is visiting us and she’s going to be mad I mentioned her here, but didn’t hyperlink her name.

Please someone (other than me) explain to her you need to have an online presence to have something to link to. When you search her name, she only comes up in other Gin and Topics. Not quite the same.

But we have a weekend planned full of fun stuff I haven’t quite figured out yet. Perhaps a boat tour, a museum or two, and lots of eating (I blame Pete).

While we’re off galavanting, I leave you with Gin and Topics. This week’s videos are courtesy of Lindsay Bell-Wheeler, Kat Krieger, Susan Cellura, Joe Thornley, and Mr. D. Yes, it’s true. I did no work on this issue this week.

5. Pumpcast News. I received this about an hour after last week’s Gin and Topics ran so it was too late to include it – and many of you have likely already seen it. But, if you haven’t seen it, it’s well worth the five minute break. A couple is “surprised” by a man talking to them from the monitor at the gas station and they break out in song. I know it’s been proven a fake, but it’s still very, very good.

4. Lindsay and Hank Do the Chicken Dance. On Tuesday, it was National Dance Like a Chicken Day. We were all joking about doing an Arment Dietrich chicken dance, but distance makes that impossible. A few hours later, Lindsay surprised us by doing the chicken dance with Hank. It’s laugh out loud funny. In fact, I had an asthma attack from laughing so hard. But you may have to know her to think it’s as funny as I did. Regardless, it’s worth the watch.

3. Women and Compliments. This is funny because it’s true. It’s a bunch of women who compliment one another and their ensuing conversation. Very, very funny. But there’s some serious language in it so not safe for work of for mom (sorry, mom!).

2. Kiss Cam Breakup. You have to watch this all the way through because they keep coming back to the couple where he’s on the phone. Trust me on this one. You want to wait until the end.

1. Burnout Challenge. Not only is this a workout challenge, but it’s a challenge to you to see what it’s wrong. Just watch the first 35 seconds and see if you can tell me what’s wrong. Don’t read the comments or it’ll ruin it for you. Go ahead. I’ll wait. Did you see it? No? OK. Freeze it at 21 seconds and look at the left side of the screen.

Have a great weekend!

The post Gin and Topics: Singing, Dancing, and Kissing appeared first on Spin Sucks.

Happy Birthday, Aimee West!

For those of you who don’t know Aimee, allow me to introduce you.

She began her career as a printer and then became pretty adept at creating and designing websites. But when social media hit the scene, she dug in to learn some new skills and (like the rest of us) figured out she could use the tools to enhance not only her job, but that of East Lansing Food Co-Op (or ELFCO, as the cool kids call them).

She found her true love in the folds of Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, and more. With her design background, she discovered the skills were pretty transferrable and she set about convincing ELFCO to let her take some risk and test some theories.

It’s pretty clear, by looking at the ELFCO social networks, she knows what she’s doing and is having fun doing it.

Not only does she manage all of this, she also handles all TV production and, as it turns out, she also is a video star! She does baking, beer, gluten free foods, outdoor gourmet, and more for ELFCO. Methinks there is a Hollywood star hiding out in Michigan.

She’s the mother of two (a son and a daughter) and she is a very fun addition to our community. In December she won Facebook fan of the week (we hold this every Friday, people! Stop by!) and her comment was, “Thanks! So excited to be a winner! *Imagine mascara running and snotty nose from crying so hard*.”

Fantastic and funny!

In honor of her birthday, I shall “sing” her the song my mom sings to all of us kids:

Happy, happy birthday Aimee dear.

Happy days will come to you all year.

If I had one wish then it would be…

A happy, happy birthday to you from me!

Introduce yourself, wish her a happy birthday, and get to know her. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Vimeo, Pinterest (I LOVE Pinterest!), and Google+.

The post #FollowFriday: Aimee West appeared first on Spin Sucks.

That much-maligned rite of passage for anyone hoping to make their way in the communications world.

It’s a bit like that inevitable bin-dunking you get on your first day of junior school (just me, then?) or learning to drive: Painful and a bit degrading at the same time.

But hopefully you emerge from the whole sorry mess a better, more enlightened person (or, alternatively, a snivelling shadow of your former self).

Those bewildering weeks spent shackled to the photocopier, the tea-making, the media-list compiling, the general skivvying – and without being paid – that’s all a massive favor, isn’t it?

No, not on the intern’s part, silly! It’s an act of kindness from PR agencies, giving career-thirsty twentysomethings extremely valuable lessons in the workings of the illustrious communications industry (and hot beverage-making too, of course).

If anything, these interns should be paying PR agencies for such an enlightening induction into public relations, right?

Wrong.

My cheeky’ness aside, unpaid internships can potentially be harmful to your business. At the very least, you’re probably not going to get the very best. And they could prove detrimental to your business.

Unpaid Interns Can’t Do it All

Here are five things you can’t expect from an unpaid intern.

1. That they get out of bed on time. We aren’t all morning people. It takes a wildly irritating alarm clock and the comforting reassurance that Starbucks will be open to deal me out a triple shot latte to get me out of bed on time each morning – and I love my job. If you’re not paying someone to get to work on time every day, chances are they won’t. And while punctuality may seem a bit nit-picky, rocking through the office door at 9:15 just isn’t cool – it massively de-motivates everyone in the team. Hitting the ground running at 9 o’clock sharp is crucial if you want to maintain a professional working environment.
2. That they give it their all. Okay, so your new intern might start out all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but anyone who seriously expects them to arrive with a smile on their face, ready to bust a gut every morning when they’re not getting a dime in return, probably needs their head examining. If you’re not offering your intern money or job stability for their efforts, you can’t really get shirty when they dedicate some of their working hours to finding someone else who will. Or to Whatsapping their mates, or playing Candy Crush. When you’re paying your interns, it’s not an unreasonable expectation they’ll put a decent amount of effort in. The result? You’ve got someone who’s genuinely adding value to your business rather than sitting twiddling their thumbs. Go you!
3. That they’re going to be a team player. Your intern might be as altruistic as Robin Hood, but working day-in day-out with people who are getting paid when they’re not earning a cent isn’t really going to make them feel like part of the team, is it? No matter how much they smile and laugh when you give them another media list to compile, chances are on the inside they’re resenting you something rotten. When everyone’s hard work is being recognized and remunerated fairly, it’s more likely they’ll feel more team-spirited and you’ll be free of office bad vibes.
4. That they’ll hit the ground running. Having an ‘extra pair of hands’ around the office it might be, but an intern is another person to manage (this is particularly true if they haven’t been through the company’s full selection process). I think I’ve banged on enough about how paying your interns will encourage them to work harder for you. It’s inevitable any intern will cost you dear in management time – why not invest this time in someone who is bringing actual value to your business rather than someone who doesn’t feel like they owe you anything?
5. That they’ll be the best of the best. Unpaid internships make the whole PR industry silly and elitist. Sorry, but they do. Effectively they say “You can only work for me if you (or your parents) are willing to fork out for food.” Which is nearly as absurd as saying “You can only work for me if your surname begins with Q and your dad’s called Nigel.” You’re shooting yourself and your business in the foot because – as we all know –  being rich or influential doesn’t make one good at managing public reputation. Justin Bieber is walking proof of this. Give your interns enough to live off and you’re likely to attract the talented ones, not the ones whose mummy and daddy own a stately home in the countryside and will let them crash at their city center penthouse rent-free.

So hopefully I’ve hammered home my point here. Not paying your interns is tempting, for sure, but it’ll ultimately damage your business and prevent you from finding those hidden gems who could prove to be your best next hire.

What are your thoughts? Are you pro or con paid internships?

The post Five Things You Can’t Expect from an Unpaid Intern appeared first on Spin Sucks.

I’m here to tell you, the very best way, particularly for business-to-business organizations, to generate leads is through content…and it’s also the most fun.

I want you to think about your content in two ways: Free and paid. The paid doesn’t necessarily mean money is going to exchange hands. Rather, they’re giving you something in exchange for your content. Something such as an email address or phone number.

Let’s say you want to have a successful webinar you’ll host every month and for free, but people have to register to attend. This is both a free and paid model. They are paying you with their email address, which means they have given you permission to market to them.

But how do you generate leads with successful webinars? This is the fun part! You get to use traditional and new tactics to gain registrations. You’ll use media relations, email marketing, social media, direct mail, content, and advertising. In most cases, you’ll be marketing to prospects who haven’t made a decision yet to work with you, former clients, or someone new entirely.

Host a Successful Webinar

Following is a step-by-step list of how you’ll do this. Of course, this list could change, depending on your business and your industry, but it provides a good place to begin thinking about how to generate good, qualified leads from content.

1. Choose a topic and a headline that has great search potential. For instance, we did a webinar about Google analytics. Rather than call it “Advanced Analytics,” we called it, “The Lies and Truths of Google Analytics.” The difference is the second one is much more compelling to someone who doesn’t know what great content you offer.
2. Set up the webinar with your provider (brightTALK, GoToWebinar, Adobe Connect, and WebEx are some of the favorites) and grab the registration link they provide. You’ll include that in the email they get after they’ve registered.
3. Create a landing page on your website or blog (you can use Hubspot, FormStack, Impact, or Landerapp) that requires a name, company name, and email address to register and has all of the information about the webinar.
4. Create a list of tactics you’re going to use to distribute information about the webinar: News release, social networks, email, blog, Facebook ad, Google ad, and postcard.
5. Using the URL of the landing page (not the URL of the webinar software registration), create a different link for each of the tactics using the Google URL Builder. What this does is create a campaign in your analytics under traffic sources > sources > campaigns. When you open that tab, it’ll list the visitors per tactic. It will list in there, “March 28 Webinar from Newsletter,” “March 28 Webinar from Social Media,” “March 28 Webinar from News Release,” etc. This gives you data to use so you know which tactics work best for your audience.
6. Shoot a one minute video to describe what people will learn in the webinar. You can house this on your website and/or blog, distribute it through the social networks, and use it in email marketing. Human beings are visual creatures. You’ll be amazed at how well this one thing works.
7. One month before the webinar, distribute a news release (using your media relations URL in the body) on the wire (PR Newswire, PRWeb, PR.com, BusinessWire, or Pitch Engine, depending on your budget). Also upload the release to the newsroom on your website.
8. If you have a newsletter, include the webinar in the email one month prior to its date.
9. Now you want to think about email marketing, separate from the newsletter. If you have a newsletter, you’ll have three other emails. If you don’t, you’ll do four emails. Do one a month before, one three weeks before, one a week before, and one the day before. It will seem like a lot of emails to you, but most people get the information and sit on it and then register the day before the event. The URL you use in the emails will be different than what you use in the newsletter so you can track the effectiveness of each.
10. A week before the webinar, you want to think about social media and about a blog post (if you have a blog). Because we have a crazy, fun community at Spin Sucks, it is our most effective marketing tool for webinars. But most of our clients find success in the email campaign. Test, test, test and measure, measure, measure.
11. Using the social media URL you created, begin to post the webinar on your social networks. Ask your team to do the same. If you have a guest speaker for the webinar, have them share it. If you have a LinkedIn company page, share it there and ask people for recommendations so it rises in search results inside the social network. Fair warning: Most registrations do not come from the social networks so use this tactic with that expectation.
12. If you have a blog, write a blog post about what people can expect to learn if they attend. This is not a sales pitch. It’s valuable and educational content that motivates people to register. When we did the Google analytics webinar I mentioned above, I wrote a blog post about what *I* learned by watching it ahead of time and why I was excited to share it with our community.
13. If you want to test Facebook or Google ads, they’re both very inexpensive ways to see if you can attract new visitors who don’t already know about you and your business. Do this two weeks out.
14. You can also go really old school and send a postcard to your database. Because that’s rarely done anymore, it can be pretty effective. Do this a month out and make sure your URL is specific to direct mail so you can track whether or not it works.

15. If you have a speaker (or speakers), test your technology with them a week before the webinar. Most speakers get annoyed by this (I sometimes do), but it’s important to make sure everyone knows how the technology works and what their responsibilities are beforehand. Test your volume and Internet settings. Make sure the software works on your computer. Every time I log onto GoToWebinar, they make me download an update. You don’t want to be doing that last minute.

16. Make someone responsible for the technology side of things the day of. He or she will start the program, make the recording, and even introduce the main speaker.

Now it’s time for the webinar. Make sure you record it because a good 50 percent of those who register will show up. After the webinar (we like to do the next day, but many do it same day), send an email to everyone who registered with a link to the recording. Put the recording on your website so you can track who visits and downloads. You can also put it behind a landing page so anyone new has to enter their email address to download it.

For the most part, the people who register for your webinar are qualified leads. Some will be competitors because they want to see what you’re up to and will want to copy you, but most will be people who want to do business with you.

At this point, you can decide if you hand those leads over to your sales team or, if you have a lead nurturing program, if they go into your system for follow-up content to push them through the marketing funnel to a decision.

A version of this first appeared on Convince and Convert. Thanks to Jay Baer’s community for adding a couple of additional steps.

The post Host a Successful Webinar with These 16 Steps appeared first on Spin Sucks.

It went something like this: “The first time I see a blog post titled ‘What I learned about business from the Boston Marathon Tragedy’ I’m going to gouge both my eyeballs out with a dull spoon.”

I’m paraphrasing, of course.

I’m pretty sure there were lots of swears.

Event-Jacking

Whether it’s a high profile death, a world tragedy, the Oscars, a sporting event, or a political firestorm, you usually have about .02 seconds before it’s time to get that spoon out of the cutlery drawer and commence gouging. Let’s call it event-jacking.

There are many reasons it’s done. And yes, some are sincere. Many people find writing cathartic after hearing bad news. But if I were a betting man (er, woman?), I’d bet money the majority of the people writing those posts have something to sell, and are capitalizing on the raised profile of certain keywords, as well as the increased share’ability of any content relating to the current calamity du jour.

Readers are getting pretty fed up with them. As one online commenter said about a recent Boston themed post: “Analogies are only good when they are accurate. Linking…this terrorist bombing to some silly social media scare is disrespectful and insensitive, but it’s also a testament of what’s wrong with the SEO-driven conversations.”

Real Business Lessons Learned

One post I haven’t seen yet is ‘Three Business Lessons Learned From Bell’s Palsy,’ so I decided to write one (ok, there’s probably one or two out there, I didn’t actually do a search). It’s not disrespectful, nor insensitive, and I figured it was just kooky enough to work. I also figured most of you wouldn’t come down too hard on me for writing it. Because, hey, you can’t make fun of a gal with Bell’s Palsy, can you?

So, without further ado, and for a bit of fun, here are three business lessons learned from Bell’s Palsy:

1. You never know what a new day will bring. Bell’s Palsy is a sneaky little ailment. You just…wake up with it. You go to bed thinking everything’s hunky-dory. And you wake up  having lost movement in half your face. Business can be exactly the same. For argument’s sake, imagine this scenario: You’re humming along, tickety-boo, only to wake up one morning to find your latest ad campaign has tanked overnight.

It hasn’t only tanked, it’s causing outrage across all digital channels. Do you sit there, paralyzed? No you don’t! You deal with it – immediately. Not tomorrow. Not later in the afternoon. Because like Bell’s Palsy, there’s a very narrow window of time when it comes to addressing a problem. And the faster you ‘medicate’ it, the faster it will heal.

2. Go public as soon as you can. The minute I realized my face was oddly disabled, I posted a snappy status update about it. Because I’m a card-carrying hypochondriac, I was about 99 percent sure I wasn’t having a stroke. I know all the symptoms of stroke (doesn’t everyone?). But, it was helpful to have people showing concern, giving guidance and advice, and recommending a course of action to take.

In business, it’s no different. Your social channels will help you respond and react to a brand fiasco directly and in real-time. Heck, FedEx might be the all-time winner of the “fall on your sword” award, when their senior vice president of U.S. operations took to YouTube to apologize for a rather creative delivery method. It was real, honest, and spoke directly to their customers. Responding quickly to online negativity soothes the savage beast consumer – you might even find some folk who are on your side and want to help. It will also buy you a bit of time to get your disaster plan up and running.

3. Sh*t happens. ‘Such is life’ is pretty much my motto: So much so I’ve inked it on my left wrist, as a daily reminder. When something happens to upset the apple cart, deal with it, learn from it, and move on. With Bell’s Palsy, I decided to just maintain perspective – I’m not dying! – and attack it with humor. I encouraged people to laugh at my expense, and joke with me. Yes, I was embarrassed, and felt I looked and sounded hideous, but the only option was to face it head on, be open and upfront about it, and share the process.

Same with a PR nightmare. It happened, it’s ugly, but now you need to quickly deal with it, learn from it, and move on from it. Humor helps (as long as you’re careful). Rally the troops, get support and advice from friends and peers, talk to other people who’ve been through the same thing, be open and upfront about what happened and why, and share the steps taken to address it with your customers and others.

The healing process involves being patient (which I most certainly am not), and waiting it out. It might take awhile for your particular marketing mistake to heal, and your brand to recover, but be patient, the tides will soon turn. In my case, improvement has been slow but steady. And slow and steady wins the race.

The post Three Business Lessons Learned from Bell’s Palsy appeared first on Spin Sucks.

The birds are chirping, squirrels (I hate those little rats with fuzzy tails) are running across the telephone wires, and people are beginning to walk their dogs.

As is my ritual, I start my day reading, particularly if I don’t already know what I’m going to blog about, which is the case this morning.

Sure, I could write about the absolute disaster that is Amy’s Baking Company Bakery Boutique & Bistro, but I think the way those business owners are behaving on Facebook is completely on purpose (they’ve been known to behave the same way on other sites, such as Yelp) so I won’t give them more than a…it really is worth reading because the meltdown is epic.

The PR Industry Needs Better PR

So I opened an article Roula Amire sent me and went down the rabbit hole of clicking on all the links in the story.

Titled, “The PR Industry Needs Better PR,” I rejoiced and began to read.

The author, Martine St. Victor (such a great name!) tells the story of how Samantha Jones, the “promiscuous party-hopping commitment-phobic PR professional” from Sex & the City set the stage for the stereotype that is the profession.

Not to be outdone, of course, by PR Girls and Lizzie Grubman, who was arrested and jailed in 2002 for backing her car into a crowd of bystanders at a nightclub.

But what struck me the most about the article? Are you sitting down? This is going to hurt.

In a recent article entitled “How to Apply PR Skills at Networking Events,” the article’s author writes: “The best female publicists know how and when to reveal a bra strap.”

So, of course, I clicked.

PR Skills at Networking Events?

The article, written a couple of years ago, talks about how to use your PR skills at a networking event (I still haven’t figured out what PR skills those are, but we’ll go with it).

The author suggests things such as: Listen and interact, make eye contact, “it’s not about me; it’s about you,” and dress the part.

I’m still trying to figure out how those are PR skills, but still going with it.

1. Listen and interact. “The worst publicists talk to you and ask few questions. The best publicists know how to drive conversations.” First of all, PR and publicity are not the same. I feel like I’m going to say that until I’m literally blue in the face, but they’re not the same. Secondly, these are not skills of publicists. These are skills of human beings who know how to listen.
   
2. Make eye contact. “This is a common sense rule, but many people at this networking event failed to make consistent eye contact.” OK. I’ll give him this one…sort of. When we do media training, we teach executives not to look around the room while they’re talking to a reporter. Just like it does anyone else, it makes a journalist feel like you’re looking for someone more important. And, if you make a journalist feel that way, they’re surely to write a story about you that isn’t so flattering.

   That said, it’s not the skill of a PR person. I was recently at a fundraising dinner and a woman asked me a very specific question. While I answered her, she was scanning the room and, right in the middle of a sentence, she put her hand on my arm and said, “I’m so sorry. I see the Alderman over there.” And she bounced away. I felt like an idiot and now I have zero respect for her.

3. It’s not about me. It’s about you. “In publicity, I tell clients we need to think of what the media needs – not what you need. It’s no different at networking events.” Again, not a PR skill. It’s a HUMAN BEING SKILL.
4. Dress the part. But here’s the kicker: “The best female publicists know how and when to reveal a bra strap. The best male publicists know when a touch on the elbow is appropriate and how long to hold on during a handshake.” I have no words. NO. WORDS. The kicker? The people in the comments agree with this statement.

I’m with Martine St. Victor…the PR industry does need better PR.

Let’s start with those who call publicity PR and then move to those who think a bra strap revelation means you’re networking like a PR pro.

The post The PR Industry Does Need Better PR appeared first on Spin Sucks.

While giving comfort has always been around, the ability to comfort strangers is still new.

Let’s call it human social media.

When my daughter was born 16 years ago, I was young, exhausted, and often alone.

Like my daughter, the Internet was also still in its infancy.

Although there were forums or chat boards for mothers (remember them anyone?) they were new, people were cautious, and it was easy to be skittish about interacting with a stranger online. And yes, there were idiots out there even then.

Then Came Social Media

As its popularity grew, social media began to connect humans globally. We all know it changed how we receive information: Go on Twitter and search for breaking news, such as #Boston, #Bangladesh, or #AnyCountryUndergoingACrisis. You will find human emotions a plenty! But something else happened. People made friends around the world. And a real human side to social media began to evolve, where people would share their most intimate thoughts, and most personal emotional struggles. One of those struggles was dealing with death.

Human Social Media

You’ve seen them. The tweets about death. Some say we are becoming desensitized towards death, but I would argue the opposite. The loss of a loved one cannot be overlooked when it’s shared online. And death and loss are shared regularly nowadays on people’s walls and feeds.

The Memorial Tweet. You have likely seen these tweets yourself. They have lost a family member, friend, child, husband, or wife, and want you to hug yours extra tight. Some stranger sharing their (or someone else’s) pain allows you, as the online voyeur, to engage with them, no matter who they are and what country they are in. Heart-felt blog posts about losing a loved one to cancer have probably led to more than one call to the doctor’s office the next day.

Commemorative Websites. We even have websites that commemorate last tweets. ‘The Tweet Hereafter’ indexes the last tweets of celebrities or well-known individuals. Is this morbid or is it the equivalent to bringing flowers to a gravesite or memorializing where a tragedy took place? As humans, we naturally want to grieve, and usually we prefer to do so collectively. Social media helps us.

The Last Tweet. Sometimes the person who has passed away is remembered by others who share or retweet their last online post. A journalist I follow shared a ‘memorial tweet’ of a fisherman lost at sea to recognize his last online post was of his love for the sea. Her memorial tweet celebrated his life, and the passion he had for fishing.

Be Grateful

It is a fact that nothing beats an ‘in person’ hug as a way to provide comfort. However, I believe the human face of social media, the one that allows us to provide compassion to total strangers, cannot be overlooked.

Social media is making us more empathetic to global issues; bringing to light the injustices in the world and giving a voice to those who’ve previously suffered in silence. It cannot fix everything, but it provides a valuable way for the disenfranchised to have a voice. It shows us daily that we should appreciate the good that we have in our lives. There are many people who forget to be grateful. Some will never appreciate what they have, but I have learned to complain less. Surely we all have a moment of ‘there but for the grace of God’, every time we hear of another’s suffering.

The next time you feel these massive social platforms have decreased our ability to interact or feel emotion, look for human social media. You will find it in the heartfelt mentions of loved ones now gone, posts asking people to give blood after a tragedy, requests to send prayers to a mother who lost her child, to help find a lost child, friend, or pet.

Humans bring social media to life and I believe we are better because of it. Look online and you will find the face of humanity.

The post The Comfort of Strangers: Human Social Media appeared first on Spin Sucks.

As I begin to think about what I’ll present during that hour, I’ve been thinking about our community here and how proud I am of each and every one of you.

Last week, we had a situation where you came to the rescue. I hope she doesn’t mind my telling this story.

A Little Story

Yvette Pistorio – who is one of the very brightest colleagues I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with – had her turn here on the blog. Her topic?  Why introverts make great community managers.

It’s not a new topic. Whenever a business leader asks me who they should put in charge of social media, I always tell them to find the most introverted person in their organization.

Social media allows the human interaction we all need, but for introverts, it removes the awkwardness we feel the first time we meet someone. By the time we finally meet someone in person, we already know them and that ice breaker isn’t necessary.

It’s also something I’ve blogged about many times, which is easy to find if you do a search here for “introverts.”

If you spend any amount of time here, you also know we’re extremely ethical – ethical to a fault, I’m sometimes told.

Plagiarism is a Fireable Offense

So you can imagine our surprise when Yvette was publicly accused of stealing someone else’s blog post in the comments of her own.

Plagiarism is a fireable offense here. I won’t stand for it, nor do I want our clients to have to endure what the UPS Store did when they outsourced their content development.

We took the accusation very seriously internally.

So we dug into it and we lined up all the facts to see if the accusation – even accidentally – could be true.

What we discovered, though, is not only did Yvette not plagiarize the guy’s content, she’d never even heard of him or his blog.

In fact, if you do a search for “introverts as community managers,” his blog doesn’t come up at all. If you do a search for “introverts in social media,” his blog comes up at the end of page two.

Face Your Accuser

We counseled Yvette to publicly face her accuser and be honest in how she got to her content. Then Allen Mireles stepped in and explained she had helped Yvette with the blog post and didn’t find an impropriety.

The guy said he didn’t buy it and went on flaming her.

That’s when I stepped in. I carefully, and professionally, took apart his argument and explained why we believed she did nothing of the sort.

Why a Blogging Community is Important

But here is where the magic happened: The rest of you stepped in. You took him to task in the comments, you tweeted at him, and you made him feel very uncomfortable.

That’s when he began copying and pasting his original statement to the top of the comments. And you kept pushing those duplicate comments down with your own comments.

It was a beautiful thing to watch.

Poor Yvette, though, was left reeling and feeling scared to write anything. I told her during our one-to-one meeting yesterday that the good news is she struck a chord. The bad news, of course, is dealing with the aftermath of striking that chord. It’s pretty easy to say not to let it bother you, but it bothers you. We are, after all, just human.

I counseled her, instead, to focus on how the community came to her rescue and how all of these people were willing to go to bat for her, even though they’d never met her.

That, my friends, is community. I’m very proud of each and every one of you who stood up for her and who had her back.

Thank you.

The post A Blogging Community: Why it’s Important to Have One appeared first on Spin Sucks.

Unlike Curly, I’m actually going to share it with you now.

The one thing to boost email marketing engagement is to be human.

At this point, it’s quite possible you are now standing up … shouting something like the following: “What? Really? That’s it? That’s the one thing? Be human? Thanks, Captain Obvious.”

While I agree “to be human” is obvious, it’s not something I see too many marketers practicing. When it comes to email marketing, or any marketing these days, much of the voice is still corporate: Cold, boring, and dull.

Who Talks Like This?

Much of today’s mail marketing copy reads something like this:

Who this email is from is not important. But take a look at the language. Nothing stands out. It’s all about them: “…world’s finest news site” and “award-winning news, opinions …” Who cares?

Now, contrast that with this email from Ann Handley at MarketingProfs:

Other than the “Dear Colleague” salutation, this email BLEEDS human. My favorite part?

“Just think of what that extra money could go toward instead—half of an iPad2, a new business casual outfit for Boston, or a round of top-shelf drinks at the hotel bar (oh wait, I guess I’d be the one to benefit from that).”

I happen to know Ann Handley – she’s a colleague (get it? ha!) and good friend. She’s also an amazing writer. I’m pretty sure she wrote this “human” copy. On top of the copy being unique and witty, it’s also a nice way to remind folks to register for the event – always a tough email to write. Instead of saying “REGISTER NOW!” the copy is more subtle, yet it still has three calls to action – all pointing subscribers back to the main registration page.

Human. Well done.

Not Just For Business

But human does not have to be limited to B2B emails (or B2C for that matter). Any email newsletter can be human. Take this example from Chris Brogan. A recent Sunday newsletter of his started off this way:

While I know that this is Chris’s weekly email that goes out to thousands, it sure does feel like he’s talking directly to me. And it works. In speaking with Chris, his open rates are more than 40 percent – well above industry averages.

To top that off, tons of folks reply back to Chris.

Bonus: If you reply, there is a pretty good chance he will reply back again. How’s that for human?

You can grab Chris’s Sunday (human) email newsletter here. Even his opt-in landing page is human. I just LOVE that video.

Three Tips to Writing More Human Email Marketing Copy

While there really is no silver bullet to writing more human email marketing copy, below are a few tips that may help you get started.

1. Earn trust first. What makes both the MarketingProfs and Chris Brogan emails effective is they both built their tribes first. They provided value. They earned trust. This process enabled them to be more personal with their respective communities. Similar to the any relationship, you typically don’t lead off being overly personal. It takes time – and trust.

2. Ask for feedback. As you start to sprinkle your emails with “human,” check in with your subscribers and ask them if it resonates with them. Every so often in my weekly email newsletter, I’ll plant little nuggets like the one below, asking for a reply.

When a subscriber clicks on the “If so, tell me!” link, it pre-populates a tweet, that looks likes this:

Yes @djwaldow! I read (almost) every single word in your email newsletter this week.

— Matt McCabe (@SemiTechnical) April 16, 2013

Instant feedback!

3. Be yourself. It’s easy to spot fake human (and fake humans, for that matter). If humor is not your strength, don’t force it. It reminds me of high school when we used to grab a thesaurus (think: BEFORE they were online), and replace common words with ones that made us sound smarter. Most of the time, it was obvious and the output was not good. Be yourself.

While it may seem silly, remember this: You are human. Your readers are human. Write your email marketing copy with those two facts in mind and I promise you’ll boost your engagement!

What are your thoughts, fellow humans? Is ‘being human’ not suitable for more corporate organizations? Have you changed up your writing style and seen engagement improve?

The post Email Marketing: One Trick will Boost Engagement appeared first on Spin Sucks.

We had a back-and-forth discussion about what it entails: Conversation, shares, retweets, and shares of others’s content.

Brian said, “Okay, then. Why does Nestivity say the 25 most engaged brands on Twitter do none of those things?”

We looked at what he was describing and found the top three most engaged brands to be Notebook of Love, Disneywords, and ESPN.

First, let’s look at the numbers:

1. Notebook of Love: Klout score of 81 and more than four million followers.
2. Disneywords: Klout score of 81 and more than two million followers.
3. ESPN: Klout score of 99 and more than six million followers.

Then, for sake of understanding the engagement of each brand, we took a look at their Twitter streams.

See the problem?

Both Notebook of Love and Disney only share their content. ESPN does a little bit better by retweeting others, but there still is not a single level of engagement, in terms of conversation.

Best Engaged Brands?

What Nestivity says is engagement, however, is number of shares and retweets per post, meaning people are sharing their content, not the other way around.

When you look at it that way, you find:

1. Notebook of Love: 1,403 engagement per post and 1,574 post volume.
2. Disneywords: 1,000 engagement per post and 1,677 post volume.
3. ESPN: 898 engagement per post and 566 post volume.

What that means is, for Notebook of Love, nearly 1,500 people share their content every time they post something.

That’s great! But engagement it does not make.

Best of the Least Engaged Brands

Rather than take our word for it, though, we decided to ask research extraordinaire – Tom Webster – his thoughts.

My issue with the study is it’s less about the variable (and proprietary) definition of “engagement” here, though that does make the study a bit impenetrable. The central issue, as is the case with the vast majority of these sorts of studies, is with the sample set, and how the results are reported.

In this case, the researchers chose the 100 most-followed brands on Twitter. These brands have millions of followers, which by definition makes responding to those followers a scaling nightmare. The very act of simply  following back five or 10 million followers would be a full-time job. If you think about it in that light, that these brands engage at all is pretty remarkable, and expecting a brand with 10 million followers to engage the same percentage of those followers as a brand with 5,000 followers is a misleading and unfair yardstick.

To that end, I have no doubt, even considering the likely inscrutability of their “engagement” measure, the 25 brands they chose do, in fact, engage more than the other 75 brands in that sample set. But confining the sample to the 100 most-followed brands leaves out way too many brands (certainly in the tens of thousands) to make any kind of blanket statement that these 100 brands are representative of anything. There is very likely an inverse relationship between the number of followers a brand has, and the percentage of those followers a brand does (or can) engage with.

So, the real problem with the study? The headline. These are NOT the “Top 25 most engaged brands on Twitter;” as the infographic claims–it’s  more likely they represent the best of the least engaged brands on Twitter.

And there you have it, folks. This study shows these are the best of the least engaged brands on Twitter.

The moral of the story is this…be careful what you read. Pay attention to the details. Ask a lot of questions. And use your critical thinking skills.

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