The Open Source Marketer

Today I got an email update from Twitter and some of the featured links they provided highlighted Twitter profiles for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

The 2008 presidential contest has been probably the most interactive political event in history with videos being posted on YouTube, debates being held on CNN/YouTube, bloggers speaking out, and new forms of social media growing like crazy. So it only seems appropriate for these candidates to have Twitter pages and that those pages would say something from a marketing perspective.

I like following politics like some sort of whacked out Nascar fan so I ran over to check them out and here is what I found from a purely Internet Marketing perspective. These are only the things I noticed and not my political views so try to hang with me as I point things out. Remember, we can learn things from what others are doing and then apply what we learn to our own marketing projects.

Barack Obama’s Twitter Page

The first thing I noticed about Obama’a Twitter page is that he has over 6,700 followers and that he is following over 6,000 other Twitters. At first I was focused on the number of followers and then I realized, “Wait a minute, he’s not keeping up with 6,000+ people and running for president.”

This was the first thing I noticed, but not the last thing. More on that in a minute.

I decided to follow his Twitter and see what type of messages I would get, how often they would come in, and other little bits of information that might be interesting. What I got, almost immediately, was a message letting me know that Barak Obama was following me.

At first I didn’t understand what was going on. Why would I get a message letting me know that he was following me when I just signed up to follow him. I have my email open all the time so I know it happened immediately, or at least in under a minute.

Hillary Clinton’s Twitter Page

Next, I decided to visit Hillary Clinton’s Twitter page to see what she was up to. This time I noticed that she had just over 1,200+ followers and she was following no one.

I signed up to get Twitter updates from her and this time I didn’t receive an email telling me she was following me as I did with Obama. I even waited for a few minutes and no email message.

I can only guess that Obama’s campaign is running a Twitter script to automatically follow anyone who follows him and Hillary’s campaign is not.

Even though an automated script would not seem very sincere, there is a powerful psychological trigger going on here. By following you Obama’s campaign is trying to send the message that they understand how things work, they want to communicate, and they want to hear from you. They also have the added bonus of acquiring all the tiny twitter thumbnail faces along the side of the page which carries an element of social proof. We might think if all these people are following him then there must be something to it. There is almost a sense of community which is another psychological trigger.

On the other hand, if you look at Hillary’s Twitter page she has no faces, she is not connected to anyone (other than the one way communication with the followers she has acquired so far). We might think that she is interested in pushing information to us, but not getting information back from us. No community, no trigger.

More Triggers

The other element I noticed is that at the bottom of each Twitter sidebar is the ability to block a user or view all their followers. Because Obama has a list of people he is following on his side bar, the words “View all” appears before the words “block BarakObama”. As for Hillary, she only has the words “block HillaryClinton”. This is another trigger that is subtle but important.

Now, look at the other differences between Barack Obama’s Twitter page and Hillary Clinton’s Twitter page. He has a bright campaign background and she has a flat dark blue background. He has a campaign icon as his form of branding, she has her face. He has a light green sidebar, she has a heavy yellowish sidebar. These are all things that add up to quiet triggers that communicate a message. The message might appeal to some. It might not appeal to others, but there is a message being transfered in all of these things.

Choosing 140 Characters

Another thing I noticed is the language of the Twitter posts. Barack Obama’s posts are filled with words like encourage and friends. Most sentences start with an action word and include a place, date, and time. Every post has a clear call to action.

But on Hillary’s, most posts start out with “I” or “I’m” and while upcoming events are mentioned, there is no clear statment of place, time, or date. There is very little call to action being communicated.

As I am writing this I am thinking about how odd it is that we can be measured by as little as 140 characters. If you don’t think so, read both their Twitter pages and see what you think.

John McCain’s Twitter Page

You might be wondering what John McCain’s Twitter page looks like. Well so did I so I searched him out by name in the Twitter search bar. Honestly I don’t know if this is his official Twitter page. It could be a Twitter squatter for all I know. But since, John McCain’s campaign website doesn’t have any social media references on it, apart from his closed McCainSpace online community, I couldn’t confirm it.

But, if this is his Twitter page then he’s making no effort to even appear connected to the online crowd. This might be a good thing, it might be a bad thing. I guess it depends if the online crowd is the same crowd that shows up at the polls.

I know I’ll be looking at Twitter in a new way from now on. It’s these types of real world examples that help to highlight how an online tool can be used and how proven psychological triggers can be applied to get a message across.

What does your Twitter page say about you?

Watching and waiting,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Another Interesting Site: Politweets.com/

What would happen if your newest post was Dugg and all your friends at BlogCatalog knew about it? And then what would happen if they Dugg it too, letting all of their friends know it. That would be pretty powerful, right?

That was the first few lines of an email that was sent out by the BlogCatalog Team at 3:30 this morning where they announced they will be adding a social dashboard to the BlogCatalog community. This dashboard will allow BlogCatalog members keep up with social contacts. When a friend uploads a new Flickr photo or submit a new article to Digg, you’ll know and then you’ll be able to share it with your network.

The email went on to say:

“In the next couple of days, BlogCatalog is launching Social Dashboard beta, a new feature that displays your latest activities across many social networks — Digg, Flickr, Last.fm, Twitter, YouTube, and many others. That means automatic cross-networking and promotion right from your personal profile page. It also means that the your post updates, Twitter comments, Digg submissions, and other activities will appear on the Social Dashboard of all your BlogCatalog friends, and maybe their friends too. This is the kind of networking that can make posts go viral. And that’s just for starters.”

BlogCatalog is counting that the dashboard will give other members a reason to visit your profile page where they’ll be able to check for blog updates, Twitter messages, Flickr photo updates, Digg submissions, your YouTube videos and whatever else you might want to share. And by sharing with them, your network might share with their friends.

The email also goes on to suggest that you use the BlogCatalog Social Dashboard to promote your own activities. I find this particularly interesting because I am noticing more and more tools popping up that allow you to leverage multiple social bookmarking sites and to exchange traffic using those sites.

This trend should continue to increase as the number and popularity of social sites increases. Remember, social bookmarking slash social networking sites are all still relatively young and there is much more opportunity and room for maturing on the horizon.

BlogCatalog is already a great social networking site for the blogging community, so it’s interesting to watch as social networks leverage other social networks to boost traffic, engage members, and effectively push for a competitive edge in the market.

Sites like StumbleUpon and Digg will have to start thinking about how to navigate in these interconnected environments to preserve their relevancy and offer value to their members.

Already sites like SUExchange.com and SocialMarker.com are pushing the bookmarking sites off course slightly by creating a secondary marketing of link exchanging and traffic swapping. The social sites might not like it, but the reality is they can’t stop it.

As for BlogCatalog, this is really just a natural progression because they already offer the ability to link your BlogCatalog profile to your other social profiles. But this could definitely step things up a notch by pulling the social networks into a place where the members benefit from promoting each others links and social connections.

Check out the Open Source Marketer BlogCatalog Profile for a good example of a profile that is connected to other social networks.

BlogCatalog has been a good place for me to get ranking in the search engines and the increased blog surface area on their site has helped to bring traffic to my site in the past. You can see how the Open Source Marketer blog posts are pulled into the BlogCatalog profile page which increases your blog exposure. I can’t wait to see what value the social dashboard will add.

According to the email, they’ll be rolling out a beta version in the next few days.

The BlogCatalog Team is asking for feedback after the initial launch so be sure to let them know what you think. And don’t worry. If you don’t like the new features, you will be able to opt, but I don’t think you will.

What do you think about the BlogCatalog announcement? What social tools do you use?

Watching and waiting,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Recently, a member of my blog monetization BlogCatalog group mentioned using a Stumble Upon Exchange to get website traffic and it peaked my curiosity.

In the past I’ve seen somewhat positive results from stumbling my own posts, so I decided to do a little experiment to see if using a stumble exchange could help compound the stumble effect and generate even more visitor traffic for a blog.

The actual value of Stumble Upon traffic is an interesting topic to me and something we might discuss in another article, but given that a page view is a page view, I decided to try out the exchange site from the simple perspective of raw numbers. I wasn’t looking to measure the quality of the traffic, just the quantity.

Specifically, I wanted to know these five things:

1. How much traffic can an exchange generate?
2. Can I find truly valuable sites in the exchange list?
3. How much time is required to participation in the exchange?
4. Could I be penalized for being a part of the exchange?
5. Do I have to continually participate to get traffic?

So I created a free account. It took less than thirty seconds to complete the signup and email based account activation.

Once my account was activated and I was logged in, I was prompted to complete my profile which included some basic information like my stumble upon username, a contact email address, a short pitch about me, and a url of the website I wanted stumbled.

It only took a minute to complete the form and I was on my way to looking for other sites to stumble.

It’s worth noting that it’s possible to add more than one website to be stumbled, but for the initial testing I decided to use only one domain. If there was going to be a penalty for being in the exchange I didn’t want it to affect more than one website.

With a free account and about three separate ten minute sessions of hand picking sites that I wanted to stumble, I decided to sit back and see what would happen.

Stumble Upon Traffic Increase

Over the next twenty four hours I saw a definite increase in the raw traffic. The test site, which had previously been getting between two hundred and six hundred unique visitors a day, saw and increase by an additional twenty five hundred visitors. The total unique visits for the day was 3,287 and the total page views were 5,025. This is compared to the previous day’s numbers of 696 unique visitors and 1,204 page views.

Over the next six days the visitor numbers averaged out to be 2,595 unique visitors per day and 4,114 page views per day and the numbers are still strong as I am writing this article.

So, as a broad generalization I think it is safe to say that the exchange generated traffic beyond what was average for the site previously. Of course there are other off page factors that are mixed in like efforts to increase external linking from other sites, but given the over night change I will assume that a large portion of the increase was from the exchange activity.

Stumble Exchange Quality

As for finding valuable sites in the exchange, I did actually find several websites that I bookmarked with my del.icio.us account.

The other sites I stumbled because I either saw value in where they were going or I enjoyed the content of the site. But overall there was a good mix of creative sites and spam sites.

In general, I tried to stumble the websites I thought were of good quality so that I would add value to my Stumble Upon account. I try to consider that when making stumble choices because I like to think that a valuable stumble account carries more weight than a junk one and if the point is to be seen then you have to consider both sides of the equation to make sure everything balances out.

Time Requirements

Like I said in the beginning, it took very little time to get started and to gain the traffic. Given the free cost of the activity and the positive result involved I would say that this is definitely a productive activity provided you stay focused while you are doing it. It is also the perfect task to outsource to a high school kid in your area because it’s simple to do and the criteria is simple to define for someone else.

Possible Penalties

One of the remaining questions was, could I be penalized for using the exchange. I’ve put a lot of thought into this question and to this point I have to say I haven’t seen any backlash.

That doesn’t mean that someone couldn’t go too far and get slapped, but in my case I’m taking it slow and easy with the exchange and I’m stumbling sites outside of the exchange as well.

I have noticed a few of the exchange site listings that say they think their site has been banned, but at this point I don’t have a confirmation on those sites. I haven’t even tried to find out. Honestly, I think it might be to difficult to tell if they were banned for using the exchange or just because of some other activity that they were engaged in outside of the exchange. So, for now I’m just going to use a conservative approach to the process and see what happens.

Continued Participation

And lastly, I wanted to know if I would have to continually participate in the exchange to see a sustained benefit.

To answer that I must confess that other than my three, ten minutes sessions, I have only been back to the site one other time to award points and answer messages from other members.

In general I am continuing to see traffic from Stumble Upon on a regular basis. It might be that if left long enough this traffic would die out, but I have to imagine that the initial rush of exposure leads to more exposure as people stumble through to the site and therefore stumble it themselves.

If this is the case, then a good healthy push from the stumble exchange could spark a reasonable chain of traffic that could continue for some time. I will have to update this writing over time to let you know what the actual results are.

So, what’s my conclusion?

Well, as with anything, a little goes a long way and I wouldn’t recommend a stumble exchange as your silver bullet of traffic tools. But as another technique for getting visitors to your website, I would recommend it.

Of course, there is the disclaimer that you should only expose yourself to as much risk as you are willing to bare, but if you take a conservative approach and don’t try to abuse the system, then using a stumble exchange seems to be a good option.

What’s been your experience with Stumble Upon?

Stumbling here and there,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Without question, word of mouth advertising is absolutely and indisputably the best form of advertising that has ever existed.

This has been the case, good or bad, for a very long time. No one can deny that word of mouth advertising is, in it’s most basic form, free and highly effective.

In most cases the people who hear the advertising message are usually listening to someone they trust when they hear the message and because the person who spreads the word is usually unpaid, word of mouth rocks!

So why then are some bloggers running prize awarding contests to get attention? Darren Rowse at ProBlogger.net ran a Birthday Bash Competition where over $60,000 dollars in cash and prizes were given away. I don’t know about you, but that’s a heck of a birthday party.

So why then, if word of mouth is free and effective, do bloggers run expensive contests and give away cash prizes? Well, the answer is simple really. Its for attention.

The kind of attention I’m talking about isn’t the destructive self involved kind of attention seeking you might expect, but rather a highly focused, intense form of attention that captures an audience and drives them to take a specific form of action.

You see for the most part our attention is competed for all day long. We have obligations, desires, and distractions that clamor constantly for our attention and action. So, sometimes it’s necessary to do a little creative advertising to generate a little word of mouth buzz.

If you’ve read the Rich Schefren’s Attention Age Doctrine then you’ll know that attention is as valuable as gold and in order to generate some buzz and grab our attention, sometimes that involves creative ideas. By running an attention getting contest you are effectively generating buzz worthy news that can be distributed to others by word of mouth.

Here are a few tips for running a successful contest:

• Make a very attractive offer, a juicy one even to encourage participation
• Clearly state the requirements for winning to avoid confusion
• Define a short participation window to create urgency
• Be transparent about the process to foster trust
• Announce the winners publicly to create a sense of community
• Prime the pump for the next competition to build anticipation

In Chris Walker’s case at BusinessBlogger.net he’s doing all of this in text book fashion, just on a smaller scale. For the entire month of February Chris is giving away $500 cash and a BFG NVIDIA graphics card as part of his blogging contest to promote his new business directory.

Chris does a great job of spelling out the details of the contest on his blog, but basically he is asking that people blog about his new project. During the whole month of February he is taking entries and the winner gets awarded a prize. If $500 interests you then check out his blog for more details.

Ultimately Chris is being creative with his marketing to get a specific response. He is also giving contestants an incentive to participate for a chance to get what they want, a chance to win some cash. Personally, I’d eBay the video card. So either way I’d go for the smackers.

So yes, word of mouth is free and yes it is highly effective, but don’t forget that it’s up to you to come up with creative ways to create something to talk about, and that sometimes can cost money.

In Chris’s case and in Darren’s I’m sure there is something working behind the scenes of value for them beyond the initial cost of the contest. In Darren’s case, I can only imagine the benefits of getting that kind of buzz going around such a large event. And for Chris I would guess that he has a long term strategy for his business directory. He is most likely willing to give away cash and prizes on this end of the business journey to accomplish some goal on the opposite end.

What’s your creative idea for generating buzz worthy word of mouth advertising?

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

When I die I hope my wife goes through my coat pockets to look for spare change, because I am notorious for leaving money in my pockets. I’ve found twenty dollars bills in coats I haven’t worn in two years.

Well, if she goes through my coat pockets, she should also go through my online affiliate accounts as well because just the other day I found money in one account I had forgotten about.

Several months ago I set up a one page website that offers to deliver inspirational messages via email. The site contains just one call to action and an email sign up form. The inspirational messages are delivered using autoresponder software and it has been on auto-pilot adding one or two new subscribers a month for the past several months. At the bottom of every automatically delivered email there is a simple text link promotion for an affiliate product. As new subscribers sign up for the free service they are effectively starting a chain of emails that will provide them with daily inspirational messages and a single offer for a product promotion.

This is a fantastic way to set up an automated sales force, but there are a few things to consider.

The balance is to not make a pushy offer because it will over power the positive effect of the inspirational message. You want your audience to look forward to your emails or they won’t open them. By not being pushy, but consistently providing an offer with every email I am playing on the nature of curiosity that we all have. Eventually, they are going to be curious about what’s behind that link and then they will check out the offer. If it is something they are interested in then they will check it out sooner than later.

It is also important to try and match the offer as closely to their interests as possible. The more relevant the offer is to the list member who is seeking inspirational messages, the more likely they are to take action. I have been using promotions from AzoogleAds with much success. You could use any affiliate network that has ad inventory to match your target audience.

I picked offers from AzoogleAds because I like what they are promoting and their reporting is easy to use and understand. They also offer a good selection of ad formats and creatives. That also helps me match ads to my list because an image ad is not always appropriate in every situation and sometimes a text link just doesn’t get noticed. So, I like to have choices when I am presenting an offer.

But basically that’s it. Aside from a few small promotional links on other sites I have not had to do that much promotion of the site. I did pick the domain name based on a few keywords and I have been sure to use keyword specific phrases on the homepage. This in combination with using stumbleupon and other social sites to promote the site has served well. And since the whole thing is on auto-pilot I am not pressed to manage it constantly, which of course is why I forgot about the affiliate revenue.

Maybe I should investigate some affiliate management software and report what I find. I know there has to be other affiliates out there with this same problem. Of course it is a good problem to have.

If you know of any good affiliate tracking software out there send me a message and tell me about it.

Forgetting to remember,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com