SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING THAT WORKS 1 Robert Middleton Interviews

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING THAT WORKS 1 Robert Middleton Interviews Rich Brooks

Copyright ©2010 Robert Middleton, Action Plan Marketing - www.actionplan.com

Robert: Hello, everyone. This is Robert Middleton of Action Plan Marketing and the Action Plan Marketing Club. Today I’m interviewing Rich Brooks of Flyte New Media.

I’ve known Rich a long time. He’s a web developer and does a lot of other things, as you’ll learn. Welcome to the call, Rich. I’m really excited about talking about social media.

Rich: Me too!

Robert: You’re quite an expert on this. The name of the talk is “Social Media Marketing That Works.” Let me introduce you before we get started.

Rich Brooks is founder and president of Flyte New Media, a Web design and Internet marketing firm in Portland, Maine. His monthly flyte log email newsletter and company blog focus on Web marketing topics such as search engine optimization, blogs, social media, email marketing, and building Web sites that sell.

He is currently an Expert Blogger at FastCompany.com and a featured blogger at www.MaineBusiness.com.

He is a co-founder of Social Media FTW, an organization putting on conferences and events to educate small businesses and non-profits about the power of social media marketing.

He is a nationally recognized speaker on Web marketing topics such as search engine optimization, blogging, social media, email marketing and analytics.

He is the "tech guru" on WCSH Channel 6's evening news show, 207, and has been interviewed by the Channel 6 news team for technology reports. He also teaches a Web marketing course for entrepreneurs at the University of Southern Maine's Center for Continuing Education.



Let me start right off the bat with my concerns and interests in social media. There are a lot of things to do. You could spend your whole life doing it. There is Twitter, Facebook, blogging and a lot of other things.

For some people, it really works well, and for some people it seems to be a colossal waste of time. I’ve sort of swung back and forth. I’m not doing as much as I used to.

I’d like to really figure out how I could make this pay off and really work for me more productively. We’ll go into all these different areas. The question to you first is, Why do you think social media is important to service professionals and other business people?

Rich: I think social media is one of these things that is part of a whole. That’s what I tell people about.

Social media has been very successful for me, but I’ve kind of built it on a platform of other types of web and traditional marketing. I’m not somebody who says if you start up a Twitter account you’re going to become a millionaire overnight. That’s just not true.

The way I look at social media, which includes social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn and micro blogging like Twitter and YouTube and blogging and all these different tools, this is just another way for me to distribute my information in a way that my customer base or prospects want to hear from me, and also a way to engage and get some immediate feedback on what I’m doing.



I think there are so many people out there engaging in social media for both business and personal reasons that to ignore that audience is a mistake. Because more and more of us are becoming comfortable using some type of social media, even if we may not be engaging in every single website that’s out there.

Robert: Here is my main concern. My main concern is a lot of people are talking, i.e. writing and putting information out there, and not enough people are listening. You’re putting out your ideas, you’re blogging.

How many people really go to the blog and read it? What’s your answer to that? Is anybody really listening, or is everybody saying, “I don’t want to listen to them. I just want them to listen to me,”?

If everybody is doing that, we’re shouting into the void and nothing is happening. Obviously, that’s not happening with everybody, but that’s one of my biggest concerns.

Rich: I think, like with anything, you have to be willing to make a commitment in time and resources toward the success of your business in social media. For example, it may be that I find blogging, which I throw under the umbrella of social media, to be a very positive experience for me and my company.

I’ve really grown Flyte New Media because of the consistent blogging we’ve done. I now contribute to three blogs. I have a search engine marketer now. She’s got her own blog.

We’ve found that this has been very successful, but it wasn’t successful right off the bat. I remember I used to get 50 visitors to my blog a week. Now I get hundreds every single



day. For some people that may be a lot, and for some people that may be a little.

The point is that I made the commitment that I was going to do this a certain number of times a week and make the time commitment that blogging or social media is marketing time. It’s an investment in the success of my business. It is not a get-rich-quick scheme.

Robert: No, and it has to fit in with others things, with ezines and other marketing activities you do. People are just trying to figure out how much time and what to do. We’ll cover all of that kind of thing in this call.

I guess some people must be listening, or they wouldn’t go to your blog. That means they’re going to the blog, reading the blog and sometimes commenting on your blog. That often takes them to the website, and maybe then they subscribe to your ezine and something happens. That’s the idea right?

Rich: Exactly, and different blogs have several different kinds of purposes for different companies. For us, and for a lot of service professionals, the purpose of the blog, among other things, is to draw people in. It’s to attract people to your website.

You do that by putting out good quality content and answering questions that people have and they’re asking at the search engines. It’s warming up those leads at your blog and using your blog to then funnel people over to your website where you can have a conversion.

That conversion may be downloading a white paper. It may be buying a webinar. It may be filling out a contact form, or



it may be getting your phone number so they can call you and start a business relationship.

Robert: Exactly. The more you have the word out and the more you have information out there, the more you have value out there… Of course we’ll talk about how to point people toward this more effectively, but the more you do that, the more you’re ultimately going to get results on the back end, which I absolutely agree with.

What is the so-called business case for social media?

Rich: I often talk to people about social media, and it’s changed a little bit. They’re not saying, “Why are you hanging out with teenagers online?” There has come a realization that people from all walks of life are using social media.

When it comes to the business case for social media, I try and convince people that spending time on Twitter may be good for their business. It’s the four C’s.

Conversations. The bottom line is there are more and more conversations going on in the realm of social media, and if you’re not participating, if you’re not listening, you’re missing out on these conversations. These conversations are very important.

It may be that it’s a link to a resource you’ve never heard. It may be about two prospects talking back and forth, looking for a solution that you can provide. It may be that you can ask a question because you’ve been involved with a community.

The next C is Customers. We know that our customers are there. The fastest growing group on Facebook is women



between 35 and 55. A lot of older people are getting on their Facebook because it’s the only place they can see their grandchildren’s photos. People are posting them there as well.

We know that our customers are going there. And even though they may be going for social reasons, we live in a world where very often our personal life and our business life overlap, especially now that we’re using tools like Facebook and Twitter.

The other thing is that our competitors are there. I already see — I spoke a couple of years ago for the national Association of Professional Organizers. When I went down there, there were many 20 people who were already on Twitter. After we spoke about it, I saw 40 or 50 people more joining.

A lot of our competitors are already in this space, and if we’re not there, then all of those prospects are probably going to learn more toward our competitors.

I see this within Maine, which is where I live. There’s a closely knit group of people on Twitter, and we always are referring business to each other because it’s kind of like our own little networking group.

“You’re looking for an afternoon activity with the kids? Why don’t you head up to Breeden Path up in Freeport? It’s great for kids who love crafts.” It may be recommending somebody to do web design or asking questions about accounting.

Robert: How many people is that in that particular circle?



Rich: Well, the circle grows and fluctuates, depending on the day. I’d say we have these “tweet ups” which are basically Twitter in real life. We get together for drinks and activities. It’s like a networking event.

Last year, when we put on our first one, 12 people showed up. Now these days we usually get between 60 and 70 people. Maine is a small state, although I live in a more populous area.

This is something that’s an opportunity where instead of going to the same BNI meeting, no offense to BNI people, but I’m reaching out. I’m seeing some of the same people, but also more and more people are joining all the time.

Robert: That’s interesting, and it started on Twitter?

Rich: I got on Twitter just because I love technology, and I love to see how technology changes the way we live. I’ve just always been fascinated by that and I just happen to be doing a job where that happens to be an important aspect.

I just got on Twitter because I wanted to see how people communicate in 140 characters or less. I’ve gotten business out of Twitter, but I will tell you that I had probably put out 800 tweets, the short messages, before anybody said to me, “You do WordPress websites? Can I talk to you?” which then lead to a phone conversation.

Now when we look at our conversations on our website of the people who fill out our contact form, it’s not unusual to see, “How did you hear of us?” “Twitter,” was the answer.

Robert: As we go through this, I want to go more in depth about especially the big three, Twitter, Facebook and blogging.



We did a whole thing about LinkedIn, and I’m not sure if I want to go there too deeply.

Rich: Sure.

Robert: A bigger question, first, is how do you make it an effective part of your marketing? I want to preface this by saying that when I joined Twitter, I invited my subscribers essentially, so they joined. I have over 1,000 people right now.

Then I didn’t follow everybody. It was too overwhelming to me. It was like, “I can’t handle all this.” Maybe we’ll get more into that in Twitter in a few minutes, but for the bigger pictures, how do you really make it an effective part?

Rich: Before we get to that, I did mention there were four C’s and I don’t want to leave people hanging, so I’ll just mention the fourth C very quickly, and that’s Cost. I’m not going to pretend that social media is free.

Obviously, signing up for LinkedIn is free, Signing up for YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are all free. But there’s a resource that you have to dedicate to this, whether it’s an employee or your own time.

Compared to print advertising or TV advertising, even some of the networking costs that are involved in going out to the same meeting every Friday or whatever it may be, social media has a very low barrier in terms of cost.

That was the last of those four C’s. Now your question, I believe, was how do we put social media into an effective marketing campaign? Is that it more or less?



Robert: Yeah, how do you really make it effective? Is there a plan? Is it concrete? Where is it going and what’s happening? I have 10 questions at once, Rich!

Rich: I’m balancing and juggling right here mentally in my mind. Talking about how I plan social media, the first thing you need to do and this is just Business 101, you’ve got to start with goals. You have to know what you’re shooting for otherwise you’re never going to know if it’s successful.

This being the beginning of the New Year or pretty close, maybe it’s just a matter of writing down all your goals for 2010, “I want to write a book. I want to bring a new product to market. I’ve got a new product that I think will be really good for women,” whatever it is. You have your goals. You start with your goals and put those on the top of the list.

Robert: Those goals are not necessarily social media goals, but just overall marketing goals.

Rich: No, business goals.

Robert: Business goals, what do you want to do?

Rich: If you’re in social media just to make friends and have a good time, you don’t need goals. Just go out and have a good time. There is certainly that aspect of social media. The next step after you’ve figured out what your goals are is to start figuring out some of the strategies that are going to get you there.

It’s thinking about, “If I need to reach a new audience, how am I going to reach that new audience? Where are they hanging out?” Or thinking about things like, “If I’m bringing a new product to market, do I need to educate the



market to show why my product is better, cheaper, faster than something that’s already out there that they’re used to?”

You start thinking about some of the strategies. Once you figure out some strategies, then it comes time to really start bringing in social media. What are the tactics we’re going to use?

For example, if part of it is to reach a new audience, then maybe it’s about creating a Facebook group around the concerns of that audience or even doing Facebook Ads to really narrowly target that particular audience.

Another thing could be about if you have something to educate people on. Maybe you start a new blog specifically educating people or a bunch of how-to videos that you then post up to YouTube.

We start thinking literally about the tactics that we’re going to us to get us there.

The next thing you have to do is you have to execute. How are you going to execute on this plan? Is it going to be that you’re going to do all this sort of stuff? Do you have some coworkers that maybe will take on some of this?

Do you bring in an intern, especially a college intern who may be comfortable with all these tools right off the bat and you just need to train them in getting your message across and engaging people the right way? Or do you hire an outside firm who will either help you on your way or basically do all this work for you? Of course, that’s an additional cost and there are some issues with that as well.



The last thing is measurement. You have to measure all this and I’m sure we’ll talk more about measurement. If you want to be successful, you constantly need to be looking at, “Is this paying off for me?” If we’re worried about a return on investment, we need to measure to see if what we’re doing is making an impact on our bottom line.

Robert: But how can you really measure the impact of social media? It’s a bit like electronic, online word of mouth in many ways. We’re having conversations with all these disembodied bodies that we really don’t know who they are.

We’re saying things. We’re commenting on things. We’re posting things, and we’re doing all this kind of stuff. Can you find out? Do you do that when you get a client? “How did you first hear about me?” Will anybody really remember that they saw you on Twitter first, or is there really a way to measure it well?

Rich: Some people obviously do remember because when we ask them as part of the contact form, “How did you hear about us?” they may say Twitter. Very often they’re coming from a link on Twitter, so they absolutely know that.

When I talk about social media metrics and what and how do we measure things, I usually divvy it up into soft numbers and into hard numbers.

Soft numbers should not be discounted. Soft numbers are things like how many people are following me on Twitter.

How many lists have I been added to on Twitter? If I have a Facebook fan page, how many fans do we have? How interactive are they? If I’m on LinkedIn, how many



connections do I have? How many recommendations do I have?

If I have a YouTube channel, how many views do I have for all my videos? How many subscribers do I have so I know that every time I upload a new video that they’re going to see that in their stream? How many subscribers do I have on my blog? How many comments?

These are all important, although soft, numbers. They don’t directly tell you how much money you’re going to make this year.

Robert: They tell you about activity.

Rich: They tell you about activity. They talk to a certain level about the influence you have in the community. There are also more detailed tools that will actually tell you how often you’re getting retweeted on Twitter, which is basically when somebody takes your tweet and puts it out there again. How often is that happening?

You may have 10,000 followers, but if nobody is listening to you and you’re not influencing anybody, what’s the purpose of that? Or you have 100 followers, but every time you say something, they all blast that out several times over. That’s a pretty influential crowd you have.

That’s the soft numbers. I tell people, “Don’t discount it.” It’s really important to measure this because it usually starts to lead to some of the hard numbers.

The hard numbers basically for me, and it could be different for other people, is website traffic and goals conversion points on my website. For example, we use



Google Analytics, a free traffic-reporting software from Google. It’s insanely powerful.

One of the things you can do is see where your traffic is coming from. Divvy it up usually into three different categories, search engines, referrers, when they come from another website to yours, and then direct traffic, which tends to be both when somebody has bookmarked you and also I noticed a lot of email marketing links get put in that category as well.

The referrers, when you take a look at those referrers, you can see where people are clicking on to get to your website. When I looked at the most recent month, excluding Google Image Search, because for some reason those end up in your referrers, I forget about those, out of the top 10 referrers, all 10 of them were either blogs or social media sites.

I see traffic being driven to my website from these blogs and social media, and then I can go further and see, “What percentage of that traffic is actually converting?”

For us a conversion is either signing up for an email newsletter, which means I can deliver emails. (You know. I’m preaching to the choir here.) I can deliver emails right into their inbox on a regular basis, or it means that they filled out a contact form on our website, which is basically an invitation to start doing business.

Obviously, not every lead leads to business, but certainly a certain percentage does. That translates to new business for my company, and I can keep the lights on and keep everybody happy and fed.



Robert: As I talked about with Linda on the call about ezines, that can be one of the biggest purposes of social media, to get them to come to your site and sign up for the ezine. We’re not going to get into all the ezine stuff, but the ezine should be an important part of this.

If they go to a site, you drive all this traffic there from social media. There’s no way to leave their name and email, or no way to respond other than picking up the phone. It’s not going to be very effective. These things all have to work in harmony.

Rich: Exactly, and some of the biggest names in social media right now, the Chris Brogans of the world and Coach Debs, they all have email newsletters as well. It’s not like they’re giving up on email marketing by any stretch, and I’ve said this before. We’ve had this conversation.

I love social media, but if I want to promote a webinar I’m doing, I always make sure that email marketing is part of it because I know I’m going to get more signups via email marketing than I am going to get through Twitter.

My Twitter followers and my ezine subscribers are almost the same number. My ezine is slightly bigger, but I get much more, I sell many more seats through an email that goes out than through Twitter. Because people may hear you on Twitter, but chances are they’re only going to see it if they’re looking at their screens at that moment. With an email newsletter, it’s delivered right into their inbox.

Robert: That definitely makes sense. Let me go back to the other thing you said about Google Analytics. We don’t want to overwhelm people here. The information is coming fast and furious!



You can go onto Google and click on “Business Services” or something, and you find Google Analytics.

You download it. You put a piece of code on your webpage, and then there’s a web interface that will show you exactly how many pages were visited, how often and all that kind of stuff.

I have an analytics page that I’ve been using from another company for like six years, so I’m keeping that one. It doesn’t cost much. It’s very good as well, but I don’t get around much to looking at where people are coming from. It gives me tons of information.

How much time do you really put into looking at your analytics? These things add up. After a while I’ve got 27 little things that each takes five minutes, and that’s a day.

Rich: Exactly. Robert, you are obviously very successful. You have built up things over time, so you may not need to monitor your Analytics with the same degree of attention as somebody who is just starting out or who is struggling with their success.

Sometimes things just work for you and you don’t have to worry about it, but occasionally they don’t. Or when you’re first getting started, you just want to see and get some new insights.

First of all, I set up Google Analytics so that it emails me what I think are the five or six most important reports. They’re delivered to me once a week so I can see them. Although usually when I get that, since those are static reports, I usually click on the link and go look at my Analytics. It’s more of a reminder for me.



Robert: That’s a cool thing. It’s a reminder. It pings you.

Rich: Exactly. It sends me a PDF report which I immediately delete, and then I go into Google Analytics so I can see that stuff live. You can compare it to a year ago at that time or compare it to the previous month. “Is my traffic up or down? I see a spike here. Why did I have that spike? Oh, it’s because I did this webinar or I sent out an email newsletter.”

I’ll tie it into social media. What it also tells me is right now five of the top 10 results that drive traffic to my website are questions about Twitter and business.

I wrote an article kind of a little bit ahead of the curve called “How to use Twitter for business.” I rank well for that search term, and it’s driving people to my website who are struggling and trying to figure this out.

That then tells me, “I need to create more content around this.” Maybe I need to create a paid webinar. We’re always talking about how you can create additional streams of income.

Maybe I create an ebook. Maybe I write a book. I’m getting information about what the market is interested in here. Now it’s telling me, “You need to create additional content around this and you will be successful in that area.”

Robert: Another thing you’re telling us here is that you’re not looking for immediate, fast results. You’re looking for long-term results.

Rich: In terms of social media, I consider it to be an investment in the future of my business.



Robert: For instance, I do this one-year program that I mention all the time called the Marketing Mastery Program. No one is going to go from Twitter to signing up for that program. It is not going to happen.

These are people that have known me for a long time. They’ve been on my list sometimes for years. They’ve bought a lot of my products, but that doesn’t mean that I couldn’t talk about high-end marketing a lot to build. People are interested and then they come to my website. They sign up for my ezine, and then they go through that process.

I really need to be patient and think, “If a few people come and sign up for my high-end program, it’s going to pay for itself many times over the time I put into it.”

Rich: Absolutely.

Robert: Just like networking. Really the closest thing to social media is networking with your body not leaving your desk, in some ways.

Rich: Exactly. You can wear anything and still be networking. You don’t have to put on makeup or a nice shirt. You can just be networking in your pajamas.

Social media networking is one aspect of it. I’ve definitely had conversations with people who say, “I just don’t think my product, service, widget is right for social media. I can’t imagine anybody wanting to tweet about it or ask questions about it on Twitter.” Sometimes they’re right.

I talked to some people who manufacture products for people who barely have email. Social media is probably not



going to be right for them. Or I should say social media networking isn’t going to be right for them because their audience isn’t engaging on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn.

But what you can do in social media is still create content that may engage people as they do searches. You create blog posts that help these people because ultimately they do get on Google and they do a search .

Or you start putting up videos to YouTube, which also ends up in the Google search results as well. And that’s how you start engaging people. Maybe they read your blog or see the video and leave a comment, so now a conversation has started.

Robert: Like anything in marketing, there are a lot of moving parts to this. It seems to me, if someone doesn’t have a good website, they don’t have an ezine yet and they don’t have a good foundation for their marketing, all the social media they do probably isn’t going to get the kind of results they want. You’re tying those things together, right?

Rich: That’s the way I recommend it. Anybody who succeeds in social media without having a website or an ezine or search engine optimization is the exception, not the rule.

There are always people who are going to jump onto Twitter or jump onto Facebook and just go bananas. They have really nothing else going on, but those are the stories that ruin it for the rest of us.

For most of us, it’s, “This is an investment in the future of my business. And I’m putting this time in and I’m paying



my dues to build up my expertise, to build up my audience, to build a community around what’s important to me.”

Robert: It’s interesting. When I was more active in Twitter, I clicked on someone’s profile and that should usually take people to the webpage. That’s one way to get directly to the webpage from someone’s profile.

On their webpage, there was hardly any information and zero contact information, no phone number, no email, no nothing. She was really posting a lot. I thought, “This person is not getting it.”

Rich: She was missing an opportunity.

Robert: Why are you doing it in the first place? There’s no connection point. Maybe they just want to talk, I don’t know. It can be social.

I don’t think social media is the best word. I kind of think that “online networking” is a little more accurate, but whatever the word is, some people can be purely social. There’s a social aspect to business as well, but if it’s only social, that’s not going to do it.

I’m not sure what to ask. I have a number of questions to ask you. I’m just trying to look at this. Since we’ve been talking so much about Twitter, let’s just get into that, and then let’s get into blogging later.

Let’s lay out sort of a reasonable, doable, engaging, fun practical way to use Twitter without driving yourself crazy. It can kind of drive you crazy.

I told Rich that I was going to be a bit of a devil’s advocate. What I often find with Twitter is you’re posting stuff, but



you’re looking at other people’s posts. You say, “There’s a link to something,” and all of a sudden you’re down a rabbit hole that maybe you don’t want to be going down.

Then that leads to something else, and all of a sudden you’ve found that you’ve used an hour and a half of your time checking things out and doing things, which is ridiculously unproductive.

How do you balance that? How do you keep it from being a time suck? How often should you Twitter for effectiveness, and the big, big, big question is what should you Twitter and what’s the balance? I know that’s a lot of questions, but...

Rich: Yes, let’s see if we can make sense of this stuff. First of all, you’re right. Twitter can be overwhelming, as all these social media sites can be.

I definitely, especially when preparing presentations on social media, will see that one of my friends posted a link, which brings me to YouTube, where I watch a video that I hadn’t seen since I was a kid. Then all of a sudden, I start clicking and, you’re right, an hour and a half has gone by.

Robert: It’s a lot of fun, but it can be a time waster.

Rich: Exactly, it’s a lot of fun. I try not to kick myself about it if I don’t do it too often. But the bottom line is I have lost hours of productivity because the web is so full of interesting stuff.

There are a few techniques. Some work for me, some don’t, but have worked for other people.



I know somebody who ran a restaurant. He seemed to be very active on Twitter, but if you looked at his tweets, he was only active two or three times a day for 15 minutes at a time. He would just be looking at anybody who was talking to him, then responding to all those people and putting out a bunch of tweets. And then he’d go back to work.

He dedicated about 45 minutes a day, which for some people would be a lot and other people not so much, where he was in front of Twitter and engaged without any distractions and having as many conversations back and forth.

Part of what he used Twitter for was to get people in the door. He was able to do that. He built up an audience locally. If he was a little bit slow, like halfway through lunch, he would tweet out a discount and say, “Anybody who comes in and mentions Twitter gets 20% off a burrito.” Boom, he would his numbers every single day.

That’s one way.

Robert: He was selling burritos?!

Rich: He was selling burritos, and he just built up a local audience of people who liked to hear from him. He’s a funny guy, so he was engaging in social media and people wanted to support his business.

Robert: I know the story of a guy who had a coffee cart or a sandwich cart or something like that who grew his business dramatically with Twitter.

Rich: There are certainly people who’ve done it and of course, after somebody’s done it, it’s always a little trickier to get



that same kind of emphasis because somebody has already done it. You can start to say, “Look at what somebody did in another industry. How can I use that same idea, but bring it to my industry?”

Another thing that I recommend is a couple of good tools. Part of Twitter is finding the right people to engage with. You can go to www.Search.Twitter.com and search on any topic.

A famous story is of a guy who did BlackBerry repair. That’s generally a localized business. The local people, when their BlackBerry breaks, will bring it to the BlackBerry repair person. He would get on Twitter and do a search for “frozen BlackBerrys.” People are always screaming and angry about their “frozen BlackBerry.”

He would basically respond to them in 140 characters or less, trying to tell them what might be wrong. Maybe he’d send them a link of something he wrote up to reboot their BlackBerry, or maybe it was a physical defect they’d need to get fixed.

He established his expertise. And people started shipping their broken BlackBerrys from across the country and he was able to grow his business that way.

You can use www.Search.Twitter.com to listen to the conversations that are going on and then engage with people.

Robert: And then would you start following those people?

Rich: The first thing, I shouldn’t say the first thing, but yes, absolutely follow the people having the conversations. The



knee-jerk reaction when somebody follows you is for you to go check them out.

I always say the best way to set up a Twitter account, and it’s never too late to do this, is to make sure it is as interesting as possible before you start following anybody and before you start doing anything.

When you sign up for your account, you skip through all the stuff they tell you to do. And then you go into your profile and you upload a nice photo of yourself, not of your dog, not of your kid, not of your favorite sports team. It’s of yourself if you’re using this for business.

Robert: Right.

Rich: Then you fill out your bio, and you fill out where you come from, which is one of the lines as well.

I know I follow anybody from the great state of Maine, in part because I want to know what’s going on. I follow those people so I can hear about music coming to town or new speaking opportunities or a new restaurant opening up and just to keep a pulse of what’s going on.

Then you have 160 characters to write up your bio, so I say to make it as interesting and compelling as possible because people like following interesting and compelling people. And then put out five to 10 tweets at a minimum.

When you’ve done that and your page looks interesting, then you start following people. But you don’t start following people until, just like you said of that woman who didn’t have any contact on her webpage, you have to make your Twitter landing page compelling as well.



Robert: Yeah, I put a lot of work into that. I did a nice background. I put my logo in. I put a decent picture, so I did all that stuff. That wasn’t too hard to do.

Rich: You were able to leverage your huge community of ezine subscribers as well, which isn’t a bad tactic at all.

Robert: Getting followers was actually not the biggest issue for me because I’m actually up to 2,000 followers or so, but I’m only following 256. I think this thing of following the right people so you can connect with them is important.

You follow people in Maine, I think that’s interesting. It’s a small state. I’m going to look for that. How could I find people in the South Bay Area or SF Bay Area through Twitter and start checking those? It’s www.Search.Twitter.com, and then would I put in “SF Bay Area” and that would do it?

Rich: You can do an advanced search in www.Search.Twitter.com that brings in the area, but there’s actually a website that I love for just what you’re talking about. It’s called www.NearbyTweets.com.

It usually will know where you’re coming from, based on your IP address. But if not, or if you’re searching for somewhere else, you can just put in a city that you are interested in, the range, the miles and it will just bring up all the people who are tweeting around that area at that given moment of time.

A lot of the people I work with, and I’m sure a lot of the people who follow you, have businesses that are localized. Maybe they’re massage therapists or doctors or whatever it may be, but they can’t do business all over the world. They



should be following people locally. That should be a big part of the Twitter campaign that you run.

Every week or so I do a Nearby Tweets. And if I see somebody who I don’t know locally, I just check them out and usually follow them and add them to a list of followers I have called “Mainers.”

You can even, on www.NearbyTweets.com, search for a very specific keyword phrase. Let’s say you’re opening up a day spa in a new area. You’re trying to build up your audience, so you can do a search on “Columbus, Ohio” or “Portland, Maine” and see all the people who are talking about spas or nails or hair or haircuts. You can start searching for people talking about those phrases.

This works better in bigger areas where you have a lot more people talking. Then all of a sudden start following just those people. You can follow by interest and geography. And you can really start to filter that down and really start to use Twitter as a research tool and a marketing tool, more than just a fun way to stay in touch with friends.

Robert: Let’s bring this down to the kind of clients that we work with, the people on this call. A large percentage of the people in the Marketing Club and in my ezine are independent professionals.

They’re a lot of coaches, a lot of consultants, trainers, speakers and some of them offer professional service business. They are pretty clear on their target market, whatever that is. It might be Fortune 500 companies to other coaches.



Is there a way for me to zero in on the ideal clients for me? I just talked to a fellow this morning from South Africa who’s looking at doing my Mastery program.

A quarter of my applications were in Europe and outside of the country, so geographics are not that important to my business. But it is to people with professional service businesses. Is there some way I can find more of those, start following them and checking out what they’re doing?

Rich: There are so many tools and websites that surround Twitter.

Robert: I know it’s overwhelming. For Twitter, there are hundreds of little sites that do little nifty things that interface with Twitter, like www.NearbyTweets.com. What are some other ones?

Rich: One is if you are looking to kind of burrow down into a category. www.WeFollow.com is one that I occasionally check. You could go to www.WeFollow.com and one of the sections is “Celebrity” and “Music.”

I have a cousin who actually works specifically with minor league baseball players in a certain area to help them find housing and stuff. So maybe there’s an athlete section that they would list themselves under.

“Entrepreneurs” I see. “Bloggers” I see. There are these categories of people. These are usually self-identifying people. They’ve listed themselves and www.WeFollow.com isn’t the only one. It’s the one that pops to mind. Using these tools will also help you find the right people on Twitter.



It may be that your audience or few of your audience is actually on Twitter, which means you might have to take a look at something like LinkedIn or one of the other tools that are out there.

Robert: The other piece is, as I say, I’m only following about an eighth of the people that are following me. Should I go in and follow all those people? If I go through every one of them and then look at their profile and see what they’re doing, the time to do that is…

Rich: It will destroy you!

Robert: It will destroy me. It’s impossible.

Rich: You will be in a ball curled up in the corner. That’s what happened to me because I write a lot about Twitter and some of the social media. These articles get published and, of course, there’s always a call to action to follow me on Twitter.

I was averaging like 30 people a day for a while. I would just quickly go through and check them all out, and what I realized was it took me about half an hour, which doesn’t seem like a lot. But I thought, “Does that mean I have to dedicate half an hour of my life every single day until I die for this?” That just seems pointless to me.

At that point I tried something called www.SocialToo.com. What that will do is automatically follow people back. If they start following you, you automatically are following them back. For some people, I know a lot of very powerful social media users who love that. I decided I couldn’t stand it.



I couldn’t stand it because so many of the “people” on Twitter are not really people. They’re bots, just basically there to follow you to build up numbers and that sort of thing. I don’t want to give those people any love by following them back, so I changed my process again.

Now my process is, outside of people from the state of Maine, I generally don’t follow people back. I use a tool called TweetDeck, and we can talk about that in a minute.

I have a column set up in TweetDeck that shows me all my new followers, and I can quickly see with just a quick glance, “Are they interesting enough that they jump out and I follow them?”

But mostly these days I wait for people to reach out to me. They’ll follow me. I don’t pay attention to that, but if they reach out to me, they use my handle, which is “therichbrooks” and say, “Hey, @therichbrooks” and ask me a question or say something or respond to something that I’ve tweeted out.

Then I almost immediately follow them back because obviously they’re in it for having a conversation and building a network. And, to me, that’s what I’m using it for, too.

Robert: Those are the connections you make. The other issue is if I’m following 2,000 or god knows how many people, then in the tweet roll that is on my page, there are more and more people. It’s a bigger crowd you’re looking at.

I felt if I was looking at a smaller crowd, at least I’d get to know some of these people. There’s Jason Alba, who I know, Don Crowther and some people I really know here.



Isn’t it a problem if you have too many followers, you just cannot keep up? You’re not really going to get to know most of these people, and you’re going to miss most of their tweets most of the time because they just sort of go on a rotating basis. If they tweet a couple times a day, you might not be looking at that time of day, and you’re going to miss more people than you see.

Rich: That’s absolutely true. It’s especially true if you just go to www.Twitter.com to see what people are saying.

What you can do now through Twitter is create lists so that you can just pull it. This is all about signal to noise. I follow about 3,800 people currently, but I pay attention to only a couple hundred of those people.

The way I do that is a couple things. One is I’ve started to use a lists tool on Twitter, which allows me to self-select people. I create a Mainers list or an industry leaders list or people I think are funny list. It’s whatever it is that may be good for me, and I can just manually drag people in there as I add them.

I also use a tool called TweetDeck. Most of my day is sitting in my office, and I have two computer screens set up. One of them is basically TweetDeck, which I also use to monitor Facebook. Although I don’t use it, it could do MySpace and also LinkedIn.

What I do is I have created filters. So maybe it’s a search on a term that people are talking about that I just want to see anybody that talks about that term, or I can set up groups.

Like I said, I’ve set up a group called “Core.” I pull in all the industry leaders, the people who usually have the best links



and the newest insider information that affects my industry. That’s one of my columns.

I also have an “Everybody” column, but I never pay attention to that because, like you said, it’s almost like a torrent. It’s like this raging river, and I’m just trying to get a sip of water. It doesn’t really help me.

Robert: Yeah.

Rich: Instead, I create these subgroups like the Mainers group. I’m always checking out what the Mainers are saying because a lot of times it may be about something going on locally that I want to be aware of. Or I might see somebody locally who has a problem or a question, and I can answer those kinds of questions.

Robert: You manually put people into groups through TweetDeck?

Rich: Yes, you have to manually do it. Now TweetDeck, the newest version of TweetDeck, can accept Twitter lists so you’re not doing twice as much work. You can just create a Twitter list or the other interesting thing is you can subscribe to somebody else’s Twitter list.

If somebody else has already put together all the CEOs who tweet from the top 500 companies, you can just subscribe to their list and be able to see those people. Even if you’re not following them, you’ll see their tweets unless they’ve marked their tweets as private.

Robert: That’s whether it’s a private or a public list. I’m just seeing that. That’s new on Twitter. The advantage of TweetDeck is you can see these in columns. Whereas in Twitter lists you



have to click on whatever list to see that roll, that particular Twitter roll.

Rich: Right, and with TweetDeck you can also pull in your Facebook friends and your LinkedIn friends to separate columns.

For a while most people were in on Twitter, but a lot of my family still used Facebook. I would at least be able to keep up with what my cousins and nieces and nephews were doing. I could use that same tool I was using to look at Twitter, but they weren’t on Twitter.

Robert: Right, I have to say this. I tried TweetDeck and hated the look of the interface so much I couldn’t stand it.

Rich: There are some other competing products.

Robert: It was black. I could not bear it for more than five minutes.

Rich: Okay, you can change the colors on that, just so you know.

Robert: You can?

Rich: Yeah, you can swap them to anything you want. Make it white with black text.

Robert: Maybe I’ll try it again, if I’m going to do that. Everybody listening is probably totally overwhelmed by now, but you can listen to this again and get a sense of it. It doesn’t make a lot of sense until you go in, set it up, try it out and do some of these things we’ve been talking to.

Perhaps the even more important question is “To tweet, or not to tweet? What shall I tweet?” Sometimes, at the beginning, Twitter was, “Well, I’m going to bed now,” and I



was like, “Who needs this?” I don’t need to know the little dumb things that people are doing.

This has kind of evolved over time and people are really getting what works and what doesn’t work. Can you categorize the different kinds of tweets, what’s more effective and what kind of a mix of things you do, etc?

Rich: Different people have different opinions on this, so I can only speak to what’s worked for me. I find a lot of social media is about being authentic. And the thing about being authentic and being fairly truthful is it’s nice because it’s easier to keep your stories straight.

If you’re out in social media pretending to be something you’re not, it becomes very difficult to do. That being said, I know some people who are at the top of their game. They have huge followers. They’ve made a lot of money off of social media. They only tweet business stuff. All they do is just tweet business stuff.

I follow some of them because I think they have some interesting things to say. But for me, personally, and maybe this is just my nature and the fact that I’m an entrepreneur, my private/personal and my business life often overlap.

I tend to, if you follow me, during the business day it’s mostly tweets about, “I just read this great article on Google Analytics.” Or I use Twitter to promote my blog posts, “I just posted on something on how to segment your email lists in Constant Contact.” I tweet out that with a link back.

If you follow me on the weekends or in the evenings, I might be talking about the snow conditions at Sugarloaf, or



I might be talking about a zombie video game I play. That’s who I am, and people either like that or they don’t like that.

But I’ve developed an audience and built up a community of people who kind of respect my slightly irreverent take on a lot of things. That’s not going to work for everybody.

Robert: When we were in the middle of our heavy rains here, when our power was up, obviously I can’t tweet when the power is down unless I go to a café or something, I could tweet, “River has risen four feet. If it goes up more, our house is floating.” That’s probably 140 characters or so.

People actually do love that kind of stuff because it’s personal, they can imagine the house floating away, blah-di-blah, and so you’ll get responses, “I hope you’re okay,” etc, etc.

It’s true putting some of that in is good. Actually, I’ve found that got more response, that kind of stuff, than any, “Check out the new blog I just posted,” although I did that as well.

Rich: Right, and I do a mix. But part of it is I think I attract an audience because I’m not always on message, on point, all the time. I talk about the things that are important to me and that may attract some people. It will discourage other people, but I feel like at least I’m being authentic. I’m being who I am.

I also have another account for Flyte New Media, my company, and that one is strictly by the book. I basically use it for retweeting or promoting things that we’re doing. It doesn’t have nearly as many followers.



If you like to get the information from me, but you don’t like all my comments about video games and zombies, okay, great. Then you want to follow just Flyte New Media. It depends. I’m sure I have an audience of people who are tired of all my comments about drinking Red Bull and are like, “Let me just get the facts.” So maybe they only follow me at Flyte New Media.

Robert: You’re giving me an idea here. One thing I see that I could do is as I’m going through the Twitter roll a couple times a day is I could say, “I really like that guy’s tweets,” so I put them in a list called “Tweets I Like” or whatever I call it. Those are people that I can learn from and emulate. What are they tweeting, and why am I attracted? Then I try to not exactly copy them, but emulate them.

Even though that is what personally got me interested and made me like that person or this person is always leading to really useful, practical things for me. So I might only have 20, 30, 40 people on that, but that will give me ideas of how I can tweet myself. I can model myself after those really great tweeters.

Rich: Absolutely. That’s a great idea. I hadn’t thought of it like that, but maybe I did that without quite formulating it the way that you did. But I think that’s a great idea.

Robert: It’s good to study success. I have this principle that if I like it, probably a lot of other people will like it. If I found this is difficult for me, it’s probably difficult for a lot of people.

There is always that commonality. Just connecting that way will get you... Instead of, “There’s another thing that I’m totally disinterested in. Every time they tweet, it doesn’t do too much for me.”



Rich: Exactly, and there are people who are very successful who I just can’t stand their tweets. They’re always so boring, or they’re always so on message. I ignore those people. I don’t tell them that because I run into them at networking events all the time.

Find the people that you like. There’s not one right way to use Twitter, just like there’s not one right way to use the telephone. It’s a marketing tool. It’s a communications device, and you have to figure out how it’s going to work best for you. Again, with your eye on, “I’m using this for professional reasons,” if you are.

Robert: Okay. You’re giving me some good reasons to get back into this, and some strategies that I can use so I don’t go insane with it.

It seems to me I have to find times of the day that really work for me. Most of the time my schedule is open enough that I can spend half an hour or 15 minutes or so, maybe a couple times a day. How often do you tweet?

Rich: For me, it’s pretty flexible. I don’t have hard and fast rules. There are days when I’m just in the zone and I think I’m being very funny and clever. Or we’ve got a lot going on at Flyte where I need to help promote these things and I might be doing 20 or 30 tweets doing the day.

Then there was yesterday, when I had a bunch of proposals and a couple of work agreements that needed to go to the door before I left, and I think I had three or four. For me, it’s kind of like, if I’ve got something to say... I put this in every presentation, and I always make it red, italicized in bold, it’s “Provide value.”



Provide value at every opportunity because just like somebody can unsubscribe from your email newsletter, they can unfollow you on Twitter or unfriend you on Facebook.

If you’re using these tools for business, you want to continually provide value in every single tweet. If you don’t have something interesting to tweet, then don’t tweet. You don’t just have to fill up space. Nobody is going to care. Nobody is going to miss you if you go a day or two without tweeting.

Instead, wait until you have something that’s going to provide value, at least you think, to the people who follow you. Providing value differs in industry.

Sometimes it’s good to provide information or feedback or in terms of somebody asks a question and you answer it. Or maybe it’s about being funny or irreverent, whatever it is. Whatever your personal brand is, you need to let that shine through.

Be providing value at every turn, and that’s one way that over time you are going to build up the right kind of audience.

Robert: That makes sense. A more specific question is what percentage of your tweets tend to contain links back to your site or somewhere else or to something else online that’s valuable?

Rich: I would say about every other or every third tweet of mine has a link in it. But of those links, I follow the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule), the social media Pareto Principle of



I try and create links to other resources, other than flyte’s, four out of five times or eight out of 10 times.

Maybe this won’t last forever, but there’s kind of a thing that goes on in social media where if you’re only there to promote yourself and what you’re doing, people don’t want to hear from you. But the people who are most successful in social media, the people who everybody is drawn to, tend to be the people who put everybody else in front of them.

My experience has been not just in social media, but ever since I started my business about 13 years ago, is the more free information I put out there, the more educational information, the more I put out and try to help other people, it comes back to me two or three times over.

I’m not trying to be cynical about it, but it’s just you put out this stuff, it comes back to you twice as much. It’s the Dale Carnegie approach. And it’s been very successful for me, and I find it works perfectly in this age of social media and transparency.

Robert: I agree with you. I have an adage, “The more I give away, the more money I make.” Basically I give a lot of information through the ezine, so I do my ezine weekly.

It wouldn’t hurt for me, on Tuesdays, to say the title of the ezine, which is on my blog, and send people to that. But that’s just once a week, so that’s not a big deal.

Rich: Right. You also might post questions via Twitter asking people what they want you to write about and engage them that way too, especially since you’re creating free content.



People might see some of the conversations around you because people they’re following are following you. And so they see these conversational pieces, and then they learn more about you.

They’re like, “Wait a minute. I’m a service professional. I should be signed up for Robert’s ezine as well,” and then check out some of your other stuff as well.

Robert: Exactly. When you were really tweeting like mad on that day, between 20 and 30, what was the combination of things that you were sending out that day, just to give us a sense?

Rich: That was probably a combination of some of the regular work links that I do. “I’m reading such-and-such an article. I think it’s important.” But I’m guessing on the days that I do tend to get more busy, I get more conversational.

Sometimes those conversations are about business. I’ll go back and forth with some people trading ideas publicly using Twitter, and then sometimes there’s also what’s called a “meme” or an idea that gets passed around.

Even though there is a whole wide world of Twitter, there’s also my Maine friends who are on Twitter. We may just have the equivalent of a running joke, but we’re just out there, and we’re having fun with a tool that we also use for business.

Robert: I got it. You’re not trying to be significant every time and make a huge marketing impact. You’re just having a conversation and connecting and sharing ideas.



God knows, don’t you sometimes get an idea from someone in Twitter or something sent to you somewhere that can be the seed of a great idea you could use in your business?

Rich: It happens to me at least once a day. That’s one of the reasons I’m a big fan of blogs. I think they’re a great way to get and give information.

I used to subscribe to a number of RSS feeds, which is one way, without getting too geeky or technical, to subscribe to a blog so I could pull all my blogs into one page. I never go to that page anymore.

I’ve found that by following my industry leaders on Twitter, I see the posts that they’re putting up and they’re recommending to their followers faster than in the RSS feed, and it’s already been culled by a human being. It is almost like you’re putting a whole bunch of the smartest people together to create a newspaper for you that you can quickly check out.

That’s where I get some of my best ideas. I see Copyblogger and ProBlogger and Chris Brogan and some of the other people out there. They’ll say, “There’s a great blog post here,” or “I’m reading this great article,” and they’re usually right.

And everybody has their industry leaders and very often some of those industry leaders are on Twitter, sharing information, establishing their expertise in your industry.

Robert: Right. Boy, this is good stuff. Let us leave the land of Twitter for a bit here. I want to talk, probably not as long, about Facebook. I see Facebook as somewhat similar in some ways, but how do you use Facebook, if at all?



Rich: I do use Facebook, not quite as much perhaps as I could or should. The way that I explain Facebook to people is we all know Facebook is a place where we can meet and greet and connect with old friends and old flames. That’s your profile. That’s fine.

It was actually after speaking with Shama Kabani, who you actually know, Robert. She was the one that, after seeing her present, I realized I should be using Facebook like I use LinkedIn, which is kind like a networking tool and not just a place to connect with old friends.

I now accept every friend request that anybody sends me and I built up my network on Facebook. In addition, I set up a Fan Page, and I don’t like that name but that’s what it’s called on Facebook, for my company, Flyte New Media.

Just like I’m trying to build an audience on Twitter, just like I’m building an audience through my email newsletter and my blog, I’m trying to build a similar audience at Facebook. I give incentives for people to become fans. I give discounts on my webinars, whatever it’s going to take.

We just created a new landing page for new people, which will hopefully get them to engage us and check out some of the things that we’re doing online. Then we can build up an audience of people who are interested in learning how to market their businesses better online. That’s how we’re using it.

Robert: Rich, tell us what the Facebook address is for that.

Rich: You can find me on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/therichbrooks because “Rich Brooks”



has been taken and there are too many famous people with that name, so I’m just “The Rich Brooks” everywhere.

Then our company is at www.Facebook.com/flytenewmedia.

Robert: That’s your fan page, right?

Rich: That’s my fan page, right. Another thing that we don’t really do yet, in part because we’re doing too many things already, but I have seen work. A friend of mine is a social media manager for Goodwill of New England, Northern New England.

They buy Facebook ads, so they know from research that most of their audience is female of a certain age group. What they do is, whenever they open a new store, they start promoting it by selling ads that only show up on people within 50 miles of Ellsworth, Maine, to women of a certain age group. And they just advertise very inexpensively on Facebook.

From what Calvin Gilbert, my friend, tells me, he’s been very successful, and they’ve had some of their biggest openings ever since they started using Facebook.

Robert: Really?

Rich: Yes. Not everything is going to work for every type of company. But if you are trying to target a specific audience, like men of a certain age or people who like Guitar Hero or people who watch “Oprah” in the middle of the day, you can find people who describe themselves like that. And then your ads will only show up on their page.



Then it’s, “Do you want to get them to write on your Facebook fan page? Do you want to drive that traffic to your website?” You need to make a decision based on that.

Robert: Right. Something that I did with Twitter is I created a link to Facebook, so when I put something into Twitter it showed up on Facebook.

I hear that can be a problem if you’re posting a lot of stuff. That can be a little too much for Facebook. But since I didn’t post a lot, what I found was I got more discussion and response in Facebook than I did in Twitter, from the posts that I did.

Then you can do sort of a threaded conversation. I would get 20 or 30 people interacting with a particular idea, and then I could post more information.

Do you do that? What are some of your recommendations as far as the interface between Twitter and Facebook?

Rich: I agree with almost everything you said there, or I agree with everything.

First of all, Twitter and Facebook are slightly different. On Twitter you can post much more often without annoying people. With Facebook, people don’t want to hear too much from you. Most people don’t want to hear too much from most people.

I don’t match them up exactly, but I use another service called www.Ping.FM, which will update my status across all my social networking sites that I’ve registered with it.

Robert: It’s www.Ping. What?



Rich: It’s www.Ping.FM. There’s no dot com, it’s just dot FM. Go there and there are like 20 sites that it will automatically update for you. You just have to put in your information.

When I want to promote something like an event or there’s a link or we have a new blog post, I often will go there and just promote it that way because I want to reach my Twitter followers, my Facebook friends and all those other people.

Robert: Okay. By the way, we’ll put all these links into the transcript so people can check them out.

Rich: That sounds good. The other thing that you were talking about or kind of what I’ve seen is we have our blog automatically synched to our Facebook Fan Page and to my profile.

If I write a new blog post, it automatically, using a tool called “Networked Blogs” which is an application in Facebook. It automatically brings that content over to our blog page, to our Facebook Fan Page and my own profile.

What’s interesting is some days I get more comments on Facebook for a specific blog post than I do for my blog. Part of me wishes that I could pull all those comments over to my blog.

Then people finding my blog would be like, “Wow, there is so much conversation going on here,” rather than behind the gated walls of Facebook. But at the same time I’m like, “I’m engaging people. I’ve said something that got them to take an action that they took time out of their day to respond to, and that’s pretty cool.”



When you break through that attention, the block that everybody walks around with all the time, and you break through that, that’s when you can actually do some business with people or at least start exchanging ideas, which is another great thing with social media. That’s how I use Facebook now.

Robert: That makes sense. Let’s go to the next piece, which is blogging, in and of itself. I’ve done other interviews about blogging, but I’m interested in how you use it.

Here are some of the big questions about it. What do you write about? How long do you write? How long are the articles or posts? How do people get to that blog page? How do people find it?

Rich: That’s a great question. If I forget the questions, you’ll remind me. But the first question was, “What do I write about?” I often get the question, “What does one write about on the blog?” and I think the answer is, “What are your customers interested in?”

Whether we’re talking about search engine optimization, blogging or social media, really what you’re trying to do is develop a content strategy. You’re trying to figure out what are the pain points because, for better or worse, we as human beings are more motivated by pain than we are by pleasure.

“What are the pain points that my audience experiences that I can help them with?” and then start to create content around it. The reason why I love blogging for this is, once your blog is set up, it’s so easy to put your content up. You’re not worried like on your website about where it’s



going to go. Then also the blog has three different distribution channels built in.

Every time you create a new blog post, you get a new web page, and every web page is a new opportunity to rank well with the search engines. In my mind, writing a new blog post is pretty much like printing money.

You’ve got a new webpage that people can read and link to and also that in six months when somebody asks a question that you answered in your blog post, and it may still be a relevant result.

The second channel is they can subscribe through something called an RSS, a real simple syndication. I’m not going to get overly geeky, but that basically allows you to subscribe to multiple blogs and pull them all onto one page, so you can go through all your headlines over a cup of coffee and stay on top of 25, 50, 100 different blogs within 15 minutes.

Also built in for most blogs is an email version. It takes your RSS feed and turns it into an email, so anybody who subscribes to my blob via email every day after I write a blog post is going to get that blog post delivered to their inbox.

That’s very powerful. That’s a lot of distribution channels I get, and all I have to do is create one compelling piece of information.

What I write about is, I write about what my customers are interested in. I tend to write about search optimization, about blogging, about the pleasures and pains of running a small business and being an entrepreneur, about email



marketing and about social media. These days all anybody seems to want to talk about is social media.

Robert: If you’re selling social media, social media is the best conduit for it, obviously.

Rich: Well, yes and no because a lot of the people who I want to reach are not necessarily following me on Twitter, because they don’t understand Twitter at all. In fact, last year me and a couple friends put on a conference here in Maine called “Social Media FTW.” “FTW” is short for “for the wind.”

One of the things we did was partner with the local newspaper because we know they could reach people we couldn’t. I wasn’t worried about reaching anybody who wanted to figure out how to use these tools that were already using them. I wanted to reach all those people who had seen Twitter on the cover of Time magazine or watch “Oprah” and know that she’s kind of on Twitter.

How do we get in touch with those people and say, “Listen, we’ve got a whole conference here that’s all about how to use these tools for business,”? That’s when we had to go old school. We reached out through our channels, but we also leveraged traditional channels as well.

Robert: Right. In some ways what you’re saying about blog content is very similar to ezine content. There are a million ideas. We’ve got ideas for people’s problems, solutions for the problems and things we’ve been working with etc, etc.

You don’t have to go into that in great length, but generally a blog post will be shorter than an ezine article, right? My



ezine articles are 750 to 900 words, in that ballpark. What do you find the length of your blog posts are?

Rich: For my blogs? I shoot for 500 words, sometimes they’re shorter, and sometimes they’re longer. A lot of other times, I try to vary them to be quite honest. I try to get ones that are maybe just a couple hundred words long if I feel like I haven’t blogged all week and I want to get something out there.

Then there are times where I write full-length articles just because I’m really motivated to write. I also will go back. Don’t think that the people who read your blogs necessarily read your ezine and vice versa.

I’ll often go back when it’s time to write a new email article and I’ll take a look at the previous month or two months of blog posts. Is there any unpolished gem in there that I can kind of turn into a more robust article that I then send out through email newsletters and I also put up on my website so I can attract the search engine optimization for that particular article as well?

Robert: Do you have a publication schedule, or is it more like, “That’s a great a idea,” and you jot those ideas down and try to come to the blog sometime during the week and get it? Is it very spontaneous? “I want to do a blog. Let’s see what I’m going to write.” How do you do that? How do you plan that?

Rich: I have a list. I don’t have a full-fledged editorial calendar. Although, we have started creating those for our clients because one of the things I finally had to give in on was some people just aren’t going to blog.



What we do for some clients is we actually blog for them. We write keyword-rich articles that they can supplement as well. They can add their own, but we deliver them once a week and create an editorial calendar.

It’s nothing so formal when I’m writing my own stuff because very often something will hit me and I’ll be just like, “This is going to be a great blog post.” Or we just launched a new website and we always promote new clients through the blog because that helps them with their search engine optimization as well.

I do have a list of blog topics when I do just draw a blank because sometimes, when I get writing I’ll be like boom, boom, boom, and I’ll have four or five different blog posts.

I don’t want to put them all out nor do I necessarily have time to write blog posts in a row, so I just have a little place on my computer where I keep my blog topics for a rainy day. I can bring those out whenever I need to.

Robert: Your goal is to blog how many times a week?

Rich: When somebody is starting or restarting a blog that they’ve kind of quasi-abandoned, I recommend that they blog two to three times a week and make a six-month commitment to the success of their blog.

There are some other things they should be doing too, which we can get into if we have time. But in a post, like we said, it doesn’t have to be long.

Maybe you read something in the local paper or The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times. Let’s say you help



people with employee retention and there’s an article in The Wall Street Journal about that. Great.

Grab a paragraph of that text, copy and paste it, under the fair use laws of these United States, into your blog post. Add your two cents and hit submit, or add your two cents and ask a question, “What do you think?” It’s always great to get people engaged.

You maybe want to write an article on a blog post that leaves a little something off and try to get people to add. I’ve often thought a good idea would be to create a series of Top 10 lists, because everybody loves Top 10 Lists, but only ever put nine and ask your audience to come up with the 10th. Try and engage them that way.

Hopefully that would work for some people in terms of trying to get some engagement out of their audience.

Robert: I like that. I tried to do once a day. I have no problem doing my ezine once a week. To a lot of people that’s impossible, but I dedicate…

Rich: I’m always impressed by how much quality content you can create. I swear to God, I’m just saying that straight up. Your stuff is really good week after week. I’m like, “Oh my god, I can’t write that much stuff.” I probably do through my blog, but I never think about it like that.

Robert: I dedicate Mondays. I don’t do any appointments on Mondays. I’m doing marketing, email catch-up and writing my ezine. Sometimes I know ahead of time. Sometimes I don’t have an idea until it just comes to me, like the one this week where someone called me and it was a great idea for a post.



I see it would be very similar to writing the ezine, but making it shorter, making it simple and giving up on once a day. I don’t think I can do it, but I could do little things.

I’m always thinking of ideas, and it’s like if I can capture those, I have more ideas than I can write ezines about. It’s sort of the crumbs of the ideas could be the blog posts, so to speak.

I’m always generating ideas, but they go into the ether. Why not take 10 more minutes and go into the blog, right?

Rich: Either to the blog or really, if you’re not even sure about this, throw it onto Twitter. Sometimes it’s interesting because you throw something up on Twitter and you think it’s brilliant, and you can literally hear the crickets after you tweet that.

Other times, I’m throwing something out there that I don’t think too much of, and it gets a huge response. And I’m like, “People want to know more about this.”

It’s the same thing. The blog is in the next test level up. Let’s say I write a blog post and see what the reaction is. If it gets a good reaction, great. Now I have email newsletter content. I can see that there is interest and momentum behind this idea.

I’ve read that comedians actually use Twitter to test out new jokes to see if they’re worth telling when they get up on stage because they get immediate reaction to it.

As businesspeople we can use the same technique. Throw some ideas out there. See what the response is. See what



the interest level is, and, “Hey, this might be an opportunity for us.”

Robert: Part of what you’re saying here is to be willing to be vulnerable. You don’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to be “totally professional and together.” It’s authentic. It’s you yourself putting stuff out there. I think a lot of people, Rich, are afraid of that. They don’t do it because it’s not perfect.

I see some people’s blog posts and I’ll say, “Wow, that’s great writing. It’s brilliant. It’s good stuff.” We look at that stuff and say, “I can’t do as good as that.”

What words do you have for people that hesitate to write, blog, ezine or Twitter, just in terms of, “I’m afraid to put my ideas out?” I don’t think that’s a big issue for you. Maybe it was in the past, but I’m sure you’ve dealt with people like that. What advice do you give them?

Rich: Sure, first of all, when you’re first starting off with a blog or Twitter, no one is going to see it. You don’t have a following at this point. You don’t have a whole lot of people subscribe to your blog.

It’s great to fail fast and often. That’s something they talk about in Silicon Valley all the time. And not that I’m trying to emulate that lifestyle, but I do like that idea of, “Let’s put something out there and see how it works. See what the reaction is, before we spend our entire lives trying to craft something.”

Maybe by the time we actually get it to that point, it’s beautiful, but nobody cares or its moment has passed. It’s better to put it out there and get some immediate reaction.



That’s the way business is really done these days, with the exception of Apple, that does everything behind closed doors. More power to them; they’re very successful. But most businesses now it’s about getting people engaged early on. Everything seems to be released in beta these days, and it stays in beta for almost ever.

That just means that, “Hey, we’re still working on things, but it’s working well enough. You work with us, and we’ll make it an even better product.” I think that’s a better attitude than what happened in the past.

If you’re worried about making a mistake, don’t worry. Try it out, but what I often will tell people is, “Take a look at some of the influential bloggers or tweeters in your industry. See what they’re doing.” Like you said, not copy, but emulate. Learn from the best.

Then after you get comfortable, then you start to develop your own style. It’s just like learning how to play guitar. First you follow all the notes that your teacher tells you. And at some point, if you’re a Carlos Santana, all the sudden you just start busting it out and play the way you want to play because you’ve found your voice.

Maybe that’s really what a lot of this is about, Start slowly, small, nimble, and then develop your own voice over time.

Robert: How do you branch out from where you are? Because, obviously, I’ve been doing my ezine once a week for 12 years, and that’s a heck of a lot of posts. And yet, I found it difficult to do the blog somehow, maybe because I was trying to do it too much to let it be “okay.”



An idea might come up that could simply go into the blog category. I could say, “Could I fit that in today?” and then just do it, as they say, instead of agonizing if it’s the perfect thing that’s going to do god knows what.

I want to get these ideas out of my head. There are too many kicking around my head. It’s an interesting thing when you get an idea out of your head. It creates a vacuum for a new idea to come in.

Rich: Absolutely.

Robert: It’s an interesting concept. If you’ve got a zillion things in your head and you’re not writing anything down, you will be recycling the same ideas over and over again.

Get them out of your head. The best way to do that is to write. Then you’ll go, “That leads to this,” or “That leads to that.”

I found just in doing that with the ezine, it changed my whole business. It changed my whole life because I started to articulate what it is I do, and I got clearer. Because I did it in writing, I could speak it better.

It just changed everything. I became more professional. I actually said almost exactly the same thing on the interview about ezines, so please forgive me. But it’s the same concept.

Rich: Obviously, if we do speak a lot like you do and like I do, we do start to say the same things over and over again. That’s something that often comes up. Somebody is like, “I don’t want to. I already wrote this in my blog. Why do I want to create an email newsletter for it?”



I tell people, “Listen, marketing these days is about coming up with a really good message that will help somebody, and then distributing it through as many channels as make sense because people want to get that information in a way that makes sense to them.”

For example, when “Lost” starts up again, whenever it’s going to start up, me and my wife, if we’re going to watch it and it starts at 9:00 p.m., we don’t turn on the TV until 9:20 p.m. We’ve got it DVRed, and that way we can start it at 9:20 p.m. and skip through all the commercials. That’s how we’re choosing to watch it.

Or if we miss it, we might spend $2 over at iTunes and have it downloaded to our laptop, and we’ll watch it together there. People want to get information the way they want.

Maybe you take some content and you put it into a blog, and you polish it up and send it out for your email newsletter. Then you read that email newsletter into a microphone and post it up as a podcast. Or you take that same concept with something that I love to do… Video is so important right now in terms of marketing and whatever you’re planning on blogging about.

Robert: We’ve got to do another one on video, maybe with you and some other guests because that I am resisting with all my might.

Rich: I certainly wish I was prettier now that video is becoming so popular.

Robert: Exactly!



Rich: But you can actually do video where you’re not part of it. You could do interviews with satisfied customers and put that up on your blog.

I do a lot of screencasts where I’m basically showing people how to set up a Twitter account. In fact, I created five or six videos on how to use Twitter for business and then put them all on a page with all the videos on one page. We can share that link after the fact, too.

It’s the same thing with Google Analytics. I had an opportunity, and I was trying to understand Google Analytics. I just starting creating screen captures, adding voiceovers to it, and I posted them to YouTube.

In the way that these things sometimes work, I got an email from the Google Analytics official blog saying, “Hey, do you mind if we feature your videos on our blog?” Aw, no! No, I don’t mind at all. I got so many subscriptions to my YouTube channel after that because basically I got the stamp of approval from God on that one. You never know where this kind of stuff is going to lead.

There are so many opportunities for video. I was talking to a community bicycle organization that helps kids kind of straighten out their lives by teaching them how to fix bikes. I said, “Let’s create a bunch of how-to videos by the kids where they teach you how to do it.”

We were trying to come up with a commercial venture for them. Without going into too many details, I’m like, “These kids have such strong personalities to begin with. Some of them invent raps on the fly. Let’s get them to create a rap about how to change out a bicycle chain or whatever it



would be.” The kids come up with better ideas than I just did.

Robert: I love it.

Rich: But create content and, again, you don’t have to spend $1 million on a camera. You don’t have to have professional lighting. Start with nothing. Start with a less than $200 Flip video camera that you get down at Best Buy or your local electronic store, and just start creating some video.

Make sure you give it a good, keyword-rich title. Post it up to YouTube, and then you embed that video back into your blog so the search engines even understand better what that video is about.

Robert: You can actually put that video into your blog, and YouTube gives you a link for that, right?

Rich: Absolutely, they give you a link, and then they give you what’s called the embed code. I use WordPress right now, so basically what I do is I post the video. I grab the embed code, and then I just post that embed code right to my blog, hit “Publish,” and now I’ve got more mileage.

I have the video up at YouTube so people can find it directly through YouTube. But also, all my subscribers and all the people who read my blog and all the people who do searches and find a blog post of mine, they’re all going to see that same video.

One extra tip for people who do want to use video, go check out a website called www.TubeMogul.com. It’s just like www.Ping.FM, except it’s for videos. You upload your video there, and it distributes it.



The first time you set it up, it will take a little time, but after that you just upload your video and it distributes your video to 15 different websites, including YouTube and then it gives you metrics in how many times it’s been watched in every single place.

Robert: Holy cow! You are a fount of information on this.

Rich: I know. It’s hard to get me to stop, isn’t it?

Robert: We want to leave people hungry. People’s minds are probably reeling with this. This is one of the interviews that you probably listen to a couple times and take notes.

Give us some links for your site, blog and other ways to contact you that we’ll also put on the web.

Rich: Sure. Before we do that, Robert, you asked one question that I definitely want to answer because I get it all the time. How do people find my blog posts?

The answer is the same way they find any kind of content on the web. They do a Google search. A blog is just a website on steroids. You create that blog content and it is quickly going to be indexed by the search engines.

When people are doing a search on, “How do I retain employees?” or, “How do I improve my lawn care or the value of my home?” or whatever question that you can help them with, they find your blog post. That’s basically how people do find the content on blogs, and we could talk more about that.

I could do a whole thing, as you can tell, just on blogging alone.



Where can you find me and Flyte New Media? First of all, there is our website at www.flyte.biz. There is our blog, which is www.flyteblog.com and at our website you can sign up for our email newsletter.

We’re on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/flytenewmedia. Also, like I said, I accept all friend invitations. So you can find me on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/therichbrooks. I’m on Twitter at www.Twitter.com/therichbrooks. You can become linked in with me. I’m at www.LinkedIn.com/in/therichbrooks.

If you find a social media site out there, you should probably type in “therichbrooks.” I’m probably there.

Robert: You’re there somewhere.

Rich: That’s probably the safest way. We’re also on YouTube at www.YouTube.com/user/flytenewmedia.

If you want to watch me learn how to snowboard, you can check out my personal YouTube channel. Again, my user name there is therichbrooks.

Robert: That’s great. I really had a lot of fun in this interview, Rich, I really did.

Rich: Thank you.

Robert: You challenged me. You got me thinking, and I always want to leave an interview with something I could do.

Sometimes I don’t need to, given the interview, but sometimes I resist it. You’ve given me some good things and a little more motivation to get back into Twitter in a



way that I think I could handle and also with blogging, so I’m excited about it.

It’s just the idea that I don’t have to worry about immediate results. I get a lot of results. I’m doing fantastic in my business, but getting more of the word out helps more people. It makes a bigger contribution and some ultimately will be clients.

The message I’m getting is, “Go for it. Have fun with it. Go in every direction you can. But try to control the time you put into it as well, or you can get burned out.”

Rich: Absolutely. I always tell people, “Start as small as you can start.” That’s true with everything. Just start small and nimble. There is no one right answer.

I generally tell people, “Start with a blog,” because it has so many search engine benefits as well and it’s a good stepping stone into full-fledged social media. But if you can, also leverage a Twitter account. Just start playing around with that.

We talked about some great tools like the Twitter search and www.NearbyTweets.com and using Twitter to also promote your blog. It’s a good way of finding good prospects, good vendors and just interesting people out there who share some of your same likes and dislikes.

Robert: Wow. Thank you very much, Rich! I really appreciated you taking the time.

Rich: My pleasure.

Robert: I can’t wait until this gets transcribed and we get it up. Again, thank you.



Rich: My pleasure, Robert. Thank you.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING THAT WORKS 1 Robert Middleton Interviews

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