Hot and cold water
It’s 95 degrees out. Hot food and drink are the last thing on my list of desirable sustenance. I’m pouring ice cold chocolate hemp milk into my coffee solely to bring the temperature down so that it does not heat up my body. And yet, every time I turn on the water at the sink, I turn on the hot water. It’s a bad habit. I keep correcting myself, but not before I feel hotness on hands. It costs money to heat water. Granted, it’s not much, but when you wash your hands as often as do I (yeah, I’m sort of a germ freak), it adds up. I’m teaching myself to turn on the cold water first, but years of badness are hard to undo.

This one isn’t bad, but it illustrates the point well
I eat a lot of soy yogurt. Heaps. I usually buy the 4-serving tubs, but sometimes they are sold out, so I get the 1-serving minis. The tubs come with a re-closeable lid, the minis with a foil peel-away lid. Every single time I get the minis, upon finishing the yogurt, I search the kitchen in vain for the plastic lid so I can recycle it. But there isn’t one, I realize eventually. My mind believes there is a lid because so often there is indeed a lid. I know that I must recycle that lid. Each time the product availability changes, I must change. If I do not change, I waste my effort.

Bad marketing is habit forming
Every week, it seems, I talk with agents and sales professionals who are trying to find easier ways to connect; ways to put less effort into their marketing, and ways to procrastinate from implementing tried and true marketing methods that work.

Procrastinating is habit forming. Bad marketing is habit forming. The more you invest in bad marketing habits, the more your business will flounder, and the more you will ask yourself when will it all turn around? Blaming slow business on the economy is a form of procrastination. Stop blaming and start marketing. When will it turn around?

It will turn around when you turn around.

Turn it around now!
Here’s a simple yet extremely effective exercise. Take a look at your marketing methods. List them out on a sheet of paper (or in Excel if you just can’t bring yourself to use paper and a pen). List out everything you do during your day that could possibly be categorized as marketing, and add it to your list. Now, write the time you are spending on each item on a weekly basis. Next, write the positive outcome in a third column, and finally, write the negative outcomes in a fourth column. It will be very easy to see what is an effective use of your marketing time. This exercise will take you all of about one hour.

I’m going to be totally honest with you here. This exercise might make you feel bad about yourself. It might make you wonder why you’ve been wasting so much time on facebook or twitter. It might show you that your blog posts are ineffective. Or, it may show that all of these are wildly effective. (I hate to say it, but in most cases, they’re not.)

There are some side benefits of this exercise. In addition to giving you a bird’s eye view of your bad marketing habits, you will get a good sense of how much consistent effort you have actually put into each method, and ultimately, how much you are willing to invest in your success. It will tell you if you can effectively manage your own marketing, or if you really need a marketing manager to keep you focused and on task. Finally, it will help you discover your strengths and weaknesses, which can be applied to your personal brand development.

Things can change, but first and foremost you must stab those bad habits in the heart with the sharp end of a highly motivated goal. You can do it. You just have to do a little hard work. Meanwhile, I’ll be hunting around for a nonexistent yogurt top.

This is a quick screen shot from my Twitter home. Good for a small chuckle. 15 minutes always seems to take about 19 minutes in real time. Livestrong.

You can’t realistically think of your Twitter followers as a known entity. They’re more like magazine subscribers. You likely have little or no idea how many of them comprise those people who are likely to become clients, regular readers, or even legitimate “fans.” In all likelihood, some of your followers are simply collecting followers, with no real intent or purpose.

Lance Armstrong and 50 Cent each have more than 300,000 Twitter followers. In their cases, we can legitimately think of their followers as fans because we already know they have massive amounts of fans, but how many non-celebrity people have that? It’s a fair bet to say that the vast majority of Twitter users do not have a fan base in real life, at least not one that extends beyond their family and friends.

So, what’s the point? The point is that unless you already have celebrity status, a Twitter following is not going to help you build the strongest of quality audiences. Gaining followers on Twitter is popular simply because it requires little effort, but the vast majority of followers you will get are not terribly focused. Here are five better ways to build an audience.

5 Ways to Build A Quality Audience

1. Hands down, the best way to build an audience is with a good old fashioned marketing plan. Marketing is hard work, but it consistently yields positive results, particularly when you surround yourself with a solid plan devised by people who can objectively see what you may not. The first step here is to decide what kind of audience you truly want. Have you ever thought about that? It’s a simple rule: Begin with the end in mind.

2. Do something remarkable, and people will seek you out and follow you. Make your product or service outstanding. Become known for premiere customer service, a la Zappos, or make a name for yourself in any number of unique ways.

3. Look for a large targeted audience, such as you might find in an online or print magazine, then advertise in it. There are thousands from which to choose, with several for nearly any target market. While advertising costs money, there is simply no other way put strong messages in front of a large, captive audience as quickly as you can with advertising.

4. Build or buy a list. Building a quality list takes elbow grease, research, and time. If you are buying a list or lists, you can drill down on very specific characteristics, and it is important to take the time to do just that.

5. Stick to your guns. Once you set a plan, stick to it! Believe in it. Be agile, yet, do not let naysayers deter you from the path you have set for reaching your goals. How many times have you set a plan, followed the first few steps, then let someone steer you off path until you lose focus? Trust your gut, trust the people you work with, and stick to your plan. It’s the resulting consistency that breeds trust and confidence in you and your brand, and leads to a high quality audience, mailing list or customer list.

Steve Rubel says you should spend 15 minutes a day scanning the internet for unusual stuff that people may want to read and cannot find on their own because they don’t have the time. Do you have the time? I mean, really, do you?

And really, how much unusual stuff can you find when all of it is readily available to anyone with a connection? If we are all reading tweets about the same unusual stuff, how unusual can it be?

Add up 15 minutes a day, factoring in an extra 15 minutes per day of distracted reading time, and it is pretty easy to see that becoming a tweet star is going to cost you 2.5 hours per week. I can design a good logo in that amount of time, or write several blog posts, or even write a book chapter.

Can you be more productive with 2.5 hours of work time per week?

P.S. The genius in Steve’s article, IMO, is in setting up your iGoogle page in the way he recommends.

Twitter is an advertising medium. It is very similar in nature to a magazine or blog.

It would be a stretch to call all tweets advertisements because advertising usually has a specific purpose, whereas a huge percentage of tweets serve no purpose whatsoever. Savvy Twitterers tweet with strategy and purpose, looking for a specific outcome.

Twitter purpose usually revolves initially around gaining more followers, much like a magazine attracts subscribers. Useful tweets help with that, much like great writing helps a magazine gain regular readers. After a user has amassed a large following, tweets become more focused on advertising a product, blog, site or other business.

Twitter’s problem as an advertising medium is that it usually provides a relatively small (less than 250,000), unfocused audience. You get what you pay for, which brings us to Twitter’s advertising advantage: it’s free. And that’s a large part of what makes it so popular.

People have been looking for the holy grail of cheap or free advertising for years. Sadly, it doesn’t exist. Even with all of today’s great social media tools, there is still no free shortcut to massive wealth. Twitter, although free in theory, is not a medium that typically generates direct sales. And the amount of time you spend on it compared to that of traditional advertising is enormous. Inevitably, that means the return has to be smaller than any other media with a larger, more focused audience, of which there are many.

You really have to be careful to limit your time on Twitter because you can waste a huge amount of time. It adds up fast. I recommend my clients spend a maximum of 20-30 minutes per day total on Twitter unless you are a social media consultant. If you spend 30 minutes on it, consider that your news-reading time for the day.

If you go into your Twitter time with realistic expectations, it can be a great advertising medium. Of course, Twitter is much more than an advertising medium.

I prefer to seek solutions. Advertising is a great solution that works better than most other mediums. If you consider that nearly every communication is either advertising or marketing, it’s pretty easy to see which ones are the most effective in terms of improving sales or reaching an organization’s goals.

Advertising mediums include websites, microsites, blogs, videos, Twitter, print ads, direct mail, email, and a host of other methods. Is social media advertising? You bet it is. In the coming days, I’ll explore why all of these methods are considered advertising, as well as examining which methods work the best for increasing sales in the shortest time possible.

In the mean time, try thinking about advertising like you never have before. Toss out the idea that advertising is a waste of money, because that’s simply flawed thinking. Advertising works exceptionally well when it’s done right. And it isn’t too hard to get it right. The problem is most companies just do it wrong.

I strongly suspect that conversion measurement will become a big part of social media, but we are not yet there. I posed this question on twitter, on which I have several well-known social media expert followers, and not one person responded. I asked, “Who can tell me how you are tracking social media to sales revenue?” twitter silence followed.

I had the following conversation with a friend recently:

“I feel like I have to add social media to some of my clients’ marketing plans,” I told him, “Yet I can’t quantify it. There is no way for me to say, ‘Social media can increase your sales by XX%’ because I honestly have never met anyone who made money with social media.”

My friend was quick to reply with, “I’ve made money with my blog.”

“Oh? How did you do that?” I asked.

“Well, I have advertising on my blog,” he said.

“So you made money with advertising. Social media was just a medium, much like a magazine.” I replied.

“The advertising was on the blog though.”

“Ok, but without the advertising, the blog would just be a blog. You wouldn’t have made any money. It’s just like a magazine. Without the ads, most magazines would lose money. The advertising sales pay for the production. Are you selling anything on your blog?”

“No. Maybe I should.”

“What would you sell?” I asked.

“Um, I don’t know. I don’t really want to sell stuff.”

There’s nothing wrong with making money from the ads on a blog, but that’s not the point here. Social media is a great addition to a marketing plan, but it’s not the cornerstone of it unless you make sales specifically from engaging in social media. Again, though, this is not the point. So what is the point? Companies have to justify their marketing efforts, and it’s currently very hard to do that when it comes to social media.

With nearly any other form of marketing, including websites, identity design, branding, advertising and direct mail, we can track response and resulting sales, or at the very least, increases in sales. I can objectively provide clients with realistic expectations for how their company might benefit from traditional branding and advertising efforts. With social media, I simply cannot do that.

On the one hand, I feel an obligation to help clients get involved with social media, to open up the dialog between the company and the customer, but on the other hand, it sends us back to the dark ages of advertising when nobody tracked results. When people start tracking their efforts in earnest, I’ll bet they will see some great numbers.

Social media is really something that should be handled by a different department entirely. Task editorial with it, or research, or better yet, sales people. Sales people have the most to gain from social media interaction. They are uniquely qualified to lend a unique, genuine personal voice to a corporate message in a way that can directly influence the sale at hand, and they are likely to get to know their customers much better than they ever could from focus group research, where responses are almost guaranteed to be totally off the mark. The trick for them will be in understanding that they cannot sound at all like they are selling while engaging in social media. That’s a tough sell to a good salesperson! Teach the sales team about the company’s brand, and once they have a deep understanding of it, give each sales person a social media plan to be integrated into their overall sales regimen. Regular meetings betwixt sales and marketing would help too. Then we could measure the results of their efforts.

How are you measuring your investment of time in social media?