Your social media icons/links are missing!

One of the most basic oversights a lot of organizations are making is that they don’t include their social media links/icons on their websites. I know this because as I was preparing for an industry conference, I was checking out the social media pages of more than 100 associations and I noticed that about HALF of them either didn’t have these icons on their sites at all or they had one (e.g. Facebook) that was put there years ago and hadn’t updated them. It makes it SO much harder for people to find your YouTube account. Your Twitter page, etc. And it’s such an easy fix. Just ask your web people to include the links/icons in a prominent place on your home page AND your contact page.

The only REAL way to get more Twitter followers

A few times a week, I’ll get followed by someone on Twitter and will check out their profile. They’re a marketing person. Usually from the US. They don’t look familiar at all. But they have 162,000 Twitter followers. Impressive at first glance, right? Well, not to me. Not anymore. If you dig a little below the surface, you’ll find that it’s all smoke and mirrors. BS. They’ve purchased fake followers to make themselves ‘look’ like an authority on a topic. One of the ways to tell is to check out the engagement on their tweets. For an audience of that massive size, their tweets will have very few likes, comments, retweets, etc. This is the WRONG way to get followers. It’s empty, it’s shallow, it’s short-sighted and it makes you look like kind of a desperate social media loser.

In this video, I talk about the way I’ve grown my audience. Today it stands at around 3,200 followers or so but I’ve grown it one at a time over the course of the last 10 years. No bots. No purchased followers. They’re real people - people I’ve met through my client work, speaking at conferences, speaking at colleges, etc. And after every one of those talks, I spend some dedicated time connecting with every single person. If you don’t believe me, go to ‘tweets and replies’ on my Twitter page and scroll down.

In my opinion, this is the only way to create a real, true, authentic audience. One at a time.

Your video doesn't need to go viral to be a success

Just a quick post to help manage expectations when it comes to producing/sharing videos for your company or association. Don't obsess about hits, clicks, views and shares. If you put out great video content on a consistent basis - video that's useful to your audience - those metrics will follow.

Funny moment from a social media training session

Flip phone?? 

I was going through some video from the summer and found this clip from the very beginning of a talk to a group of divorce lawyers and mediators in Niagara Falls. I was trying to figure out which kinds of phones everyone was using (as context for the talk) and there was an unexpected exchange with one of the audience members. Videotaping your talks means you get to preserve funny little moments like this one.