Selling with Content

Content Marketing Lessons of the Top 10 Retweets of 2010

  In social media circles, retweets are great currency. If you can create content, even if it’s under 140 characters long, and retransmit it through hundreds or thousands of individual Twitter accounts, it is communication gold.

The top 10 retweets of 2010 give insight as to what magic the top performers contain. Many are from celebrities, but that alone is not the secret sauce considering the thousands of tweets from celebs that did not make the cut. 

First, let’s look at the basic nature of the content contained in the top ten tweets:  

 

• Average number of characters per tweet: 69, less than half of the 140 character limit
• Average number of words per tweet: 13, short and sweet
• Used humor: 5 of the 10
• Personally connected: 5 of 10, here the tweet only made sense if you know the person (or celebrity) involved.
• Offered wisdom: 3 of 10

So personal connection, humor, and wisdom, ruled the top tweets. Tweets about a personal mood, personal experience, real time experience, or news item, did not make the cut. 

Here are the top ten tweets of 2010:
1. Stephen Colbert: in honor of oil-soaked birds, 'Tweets' are now 'gurgles.
2. Drizzy Drake: We always ignore the ones who adore us, and adore the ones who ignore us
3. Lil Wayne WEEZY F: aaaaaaahhhhhhmmmmm baaaaakkkkkkkkkk
4. Justin Bieber: te quiero mucho mi amor
5. Al-Qaeda: Just noticed Twitter keeps prompting me to "Add a location to your tweets". Not falling for that one.
6. joe jonas: I cry because I love Justin Bieber!!!
7. Lady Gaga: I'm beautiful in my way, 'cause God makes no mistakes. I'm on the right track, baby. I was Born This Way.
8. Kanye West: I'm sorry Taylor.
9. Rihanna: Justin Bieber just flashed me his abs in the middle of a restaurant! Wow! He actually had a lil 6 pack! Sexy,lol!
10. shitmydadsays: Don't focus on the one guy who hates you. You don't go to the park and set your picnic down next to the only pile of dog shit.

But there were more ingredients.

Each of the top tweets, in their own unique way, captured a universal feeling, moment, idea, or bit of wisdom for many. 

Stephen Colbert used humor, but his “tweets are now gurgles” quip defined the frustration we all felt about the BP oil spill. Lady Gaga’s tweet defined her whole unique performance attitude that has mesmerize millions, while the fake Al-Qaeda tweet poked fun at Osama Bin Laden, something we all like to do.

In conclusion, be universal.  

Share humor or wisdom. Both universally appreciated.

Find a way to make a universal personal connection. You do not have to be a celebrity if you tap into a universally known person or personal experience. Few know the Tweeter behind "Shit my dad says," but everyone has a dad. Few know the identity of the fake Osama from Al-Qaeda, but everyone knows who he or she is pretending to be.

There is nothing like a good universal tweet to bring us together.
Happy Holidays!

Official list of top ten retweets from Twitter

Are blogs the new buyers guides?

Before you invest money buying advertising in a buyer’s guide consider that a recent research study suggests that online blogs may be replacing the buyer’s guide function for many customers.

A study from BuzzLogic and JupiterResearch that focused on the behavior of heavy blog readers found them relying on blogs for information previously thought to be in the benefit list of search and buyers guides.

Before I present findings from the study let me say that I am skeptical of studies like these. If you ask a respondent if a blog influences their buying deicsions it is easly enough to say, "yes." If the next day a survey asked the same respondnet, "Does the kind of breakfast you ate affect your buying deicsions?", many would say would also say, "yes." The bigger point is that there are many factors now inplay where buyers guides once ruled.

From the study:

"Blog readers do not appear to rely as heavily on search as a means to find new blogs as compared to consumers of traditional online media. According to the survey, one in five general blog readers (defined as consumers who have read a blog in the past 12 months) use blog links to discover new blogs. Further, the study suggests blogs are not consumed in isolation, but experienced as part of a connected conversation – nearly half (49 percent) of blog readers and 71 percent of frequent readers read more than one blog per session.

•    Blogs influence purchases: One half (50 percent) of blog readers say they find blogs useful for purchase information.
•    Blogs sway more purchases among readers than social networks: More frequent blog readers say they trust relevant blog content for purchase decisions than content from social networking sites.
•    Niche focus ups influence factor: For those who have found blog content useful for product decisions, more than half (56 percent) said blogs with a niche focus and topical expertise were key sources.
•    Blogs go beyond tech: Outside of technology-related purchases, for which 31 percent of readers say blogs are useful, other key categories include media and entertainment (15 percent); games/toys and/or sporting goods (14 percent); travel (12 percent); automotive (11 percent); and health (10 percent).

It’s Buy Time: Where Blogs Sit in the Purchase Cycle
According to the study, blogs factor in to critical stages of the purchase process, weighing most heavily at the actual moment of a purchase decision. When it comes to respondents who said they have trusted blog content for purchase decisions in the past, over half (52 percent) say blogs played a role in the critical moment they decided to move forward with a purchase.
Blog readers also replied around blogs’ influence as it relates to the following steps of the purchase process:
•    Decide on a product or service: 21 percent
•    Refine choices: 19 percent
•    Get support and answers: 19 percent
•    Discover products and services: 17 percent
•    Assure: 14 percent
•    Inspire a purchase: 13 percent
•    Execute a purchase: 7 percent

My take is that there now is a universal buyers guide. It's called Google.

This story has some traction, here is a link to a short summary of the that study that ran in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/22/business/22drill.html?_r=1

Read the entire Buzz Logic press release:
http://www.buzzlogic.com/press/news.html?postdate=1225203064

 

Is social media the small business equalizer?

One finding from the study I did for Social Media Today, "The Coming Change in Social Media Business Applications," documented that small business is using social media far more than big business. 

Comparing usage between companies with 100 or less employees against ones with over 1,000, the small companies are  twice as likely to use social media in lead generation, and a third more likely to use  it in branding and public relations.

Larger companies typically have bigger ad budgets, bigger booths at trade shows, more retail outlets, and a bigger PR budget. According to the study:

"Where larger organizations have more resources to touch their customers, such as corporate advertising, social media may not be as big a priority. However, with less money for outreach programs, smaller companies can make big inroads by focusing more on social media."

If you work for a smaller business...get social!

Download the study for free

Should your emphasis be on earned, owned, or paid media?

When I was a kid, there was one kind of milk you could spend money on only, the white kind. But now you choose from whole, skim, 1%, 2%, organic, and chocolate. Media is a lot like that. You used to spend money on it for one thing only: exposing customers to marketing messages. Now you choose from “bought media”, “owned media”, and “earned media.” The definitions:

Bought media: media you pay for like print ads and banner ads.

Owned media: media you own and control such as your company website and blog or newsletters and digital magazines your organization publishes.

Earned media: exposure you “earn” by posting content on social networks, forums, and websites that you do not own. Examples are comments posted on blogs, photos shared on Facebook, or videos uploaded to YouTube. Here is chart from a presentation from Alex Wong that illustrates this:

Conventional wisdom says each of these media has different strengths:

Owned media is best for reaching your current customer base. Since your organization should have the most complete list of your own customers, publishing a newsletter or digital magazine to that list should provide the best coverage available anywhere.

Bought media is best for reaching new customers. The weakness of “owned media” is that it reaches largely people who are already customers or inclined to become them, so it is less likely you will reach customers of competitors or new customer just coming to your market. “Bought media” strives for total market coverage which will include the groups you miss with owned media.

Earned media enables your biggest fans to advocate for you. Every company has customers who, if properly motivated, will advocate for you online. While this is basically an organic process that you have no direct control over, smart organizations find ways to encourage this process along. Many mistakenly think that earned media is free. While there is no charge for posting content on most social media sites, the task of doing this requires staffing for the function, and adding staff is never free.

Earned, owned, or paid media. Which should you emphasize?  
If your customer are heavily involved in social media, then earned media needs your attention. If you have not asked about your customers social media involvement in a year, you need to ask again.

 If you sell a utilitarian product like car batteries, or commodity products like toothpaste or paper towels, paid media might be best. When was the last time you saw a passionate bog post or successful newsletter about toothpaste?

If most of your business comes from repeat customers, you need to think more about owned media.

Different media work best for different situations. Along those lines, I prefer skim milk in my morning cereal, but 1 or 2% % for hot coca.

See Alex Wong's entire presentation on slide share