Author: Atlantic BT

First Post Went Viral Reaching 412,000: 5 Magical Do More With Less Curation Tools

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August 22 Update

5 Magical Tools Update – Value Of A Second Act

I learned an important lesson from my former direct mail employers: “Feed the bear.” It is easier to move something HOT to hotter than something COLD to lukewarm.

The extension of this logic in social media times is that when something goes viral you create a, “This Just Went Viral,” post. This is that post, the second act to our 5 Magical Do More With Less Curation Tools post.

Second acts help move more traffic to the original post. This post (original text below) drove 59,000 new followers from 12 new ReTweets to move the total follower count on the first post from 412,000 to 471,642, up 11% form the first act. This isn’t unusual. Getting more than 10% more out of a post that is past its halflife is hard. Remember, we received this 11% bump by posting another post ABOUT the first post.

Second Act Performance
The post you are about to read did very well on social media too, confirming my direct marketing bosses’ truth – feed the bear. This post, thanks to highly influential ReTweeters such as @Scoopit, @SmallRivers and @videoturf, has reached a following audience of 193,579 from 28 Tweeters. Combine the follower count from this post plus the 11% pickup on the first post and we’ve added 253,000 followers, or up 61%, from the first 412,000 follower set.

I’ve posted several other posts since 5 Magical Curation Tools. Some did well, generating  retweets with thousands of potential followers, but none of them came close to creating an Act II on a known viral post. When you have a post go viral, get a second act by being sure to FEED THE BEAR!

Total followers reached between First and Second Act = 665,221

Here now is the post about the post…

Our August 7th post on 5 Magical Curation Tools achieved something rare – It went viral, reaching  a potential audience of 410,620 via ReTweets. The post is about tools such as Scoop.it, Paper.li and Hunch.com. We may have hit two nerves: One, tools reviews are popular. Two, tools that help do more with less are VERY POPULAR.

Doing more with less is a common need, a large trend, a big wave. Social media marketing is exponentially increasing the work most Internet marketing teams must do. Skeptical management is NOT increasing headcount to fully address the social marketing opportunity. Internet marketing teams are working on social, because they know social media marketing and the social signals it creates help SEO, customer engagement and user experience (UX). The left hand of many Internet marketing teams is being smacked by the right hand, the hand in control of the money. Do more with less is a common demand.

We have recently had five posts “go viral,” reaching more than 200,000 via social support or SEO:

Facebook and Social Media Marketing (on Technorati)

Curation – The Next Web Revolution (on ScentTrail Marketing)

Biggest Multi Channel Marketing Mistakes ( #1 ScentTrail Marketing post and #1 on Google)

Social Media Marketing –  The Most Valuable ROI (on Atlantic BT’s Blog)

Top 5 Do More With Less Curation Tools (On Atlantic BT Blog)

This brings up a vexing question. What makes content go viral?

5 Magical Curation Tools Analysis

Let’s start by looking into why “5 Magical Tools” might have received so much social support:

• Power Twitter Accounts are Critical to Going Viral.
• Shorter is better (more of a gut feeling than in the data, but all 5 are on the shorter side).
• Visuals are Important.
• Scoop.it Plus Twitter is more powerful than either alone.

Power Twitter Accounts

“5 Magical Curation Tools” was supported by a handful of influential and powerful Twitter accounts, including:

@SmallRivers (Paper.li team) (50,878 followers)
@videoturf (17,762 followers)
@henrikboyander (10,097 followers Tweeted 2x)
@justmenga (9,995 followers and Tweeted 2x)
@mickgray (8,411 followers and Tweeted across several large accounts)
@davidrossblog (7,171)
@ ksmall1 (6,836)
@ffreedom_coach (6533)
@pam_strawberry (6445)

Why Viral #1: Power ReTweeters Are Critical
81 Twitter accounts ReTweeted “5 Magic Curation Tools” (so far). The average follower count for accounts who ReTweeted was 4,831. The average Twitter account has 126 followers, so most of the accounts who picked up “5 Magic Curation Tools” are POWER Twitter users with follower counts many times the average.  It is impossible to go viral without pickup from POWER Tweeters. Power Twitter accounts create buzz and following. Without at least a handful of power accounts, it would take too long to create viral numbers (greater than 100,000 followers). By the time you got to the Viral Village on the backs of smaller accounts, the event would be over. Power ReTweeters are key to content going viral.

Why Viral #2: Scoop.it + Twitter Are More Powerful Than Either Alone
@SmallRivers, the great team behind Paper.li, one of our 5 Magical Do More With Less Curation Tools, rolled out their support. I met Liz Wilson in Scoop.it and liked her curation and comments. Liz asked if I would write a post about how to learn to love social media for Paper.li. I was glad to write a two part series for Liz and @SmallRivers. Doubt Liz and I could have become friends over Twitter: It’s not impossible to become friends over Twitter, but it’s harder at 145 characters. One of Scoop.it’s strengths is its active community of SMART Internet marketers and content curators.

Why Viral #3: Topical
Every day there are new waves to surf. There are also BIG waves left over from the last set. Big waves right now include:

• Social media marketing, especially ROI, and understanding how it works.
• Resurgent focus on Google – Panda and Penguin algorithm differences change SEO 180 degrees.
• Mobile and mobile commerce – All of a sudden your traffic will be 15% mobile, and it will hit like a truck.
• Hyper Local – Smart phone penetration in the US of over 50% means location is now in the mobile marketing game.
• Gamification – A subset of creating sticky content, the kind of content a new Google algorithm wants.
• New Ecomm – Ecommerce is one of the few growth areas for many companies, so ecommerce is getting investment and creativity.

Note how the Viral Marketing graph (red line) is dropping as social media marketing (gold) gains and dominates. Curation and gamification are small but trending in the right direction. When your content touches one of these big waves, pickup is easier. Four out of my five viral articles have been either directly or indirectly about social media marketing. I need to rewrite “Biggest Multichannel Marketing Mistakes” to include more about social marketing. Social is clearly an important Internet marketing channel now.

Why Viral #4: New-ish — Not Bleeding Edge
I’ve written bleeding edge content, and it never goes anywhere fast. Something too new needs to cook and gain acceptance before bleeding edge content gets pickup. I wrote Platforms vs. Websites months before Phil Simon’s book The Age of the Platform was published in 2011. Good example of being too far out on a trend to gain social support. It is important to publish when ideas happen, but don’t look for a strong viral response on bleeding edge content. Bank bleeding edge content against the swelling wave to come. When the wave begins to swell– when Tom’s book was published, for example– then pull the content forward into NOW by writing more content that refers to it. Early publication dates reinforce authority and legitimacy, which may help it go viral (or not).

Viral content needs to be a new spin on an existing hot topic. The bigger the wave, such as social media marketing, the easier it is to carve out a unique path. Think of the law of large numbers. If there are already a million people interested in something, 1% is 10,000. Your content only has to carve off a small piece of a larger trend to get viral treatment when large numbers are at work.

Why Viral #5 – Places Posted
ScentTrail Marketing, my personal blog, only has 2 of the 5 viral posts despite much more content. ScentTrial only has a PR3. Atlantic BT and Technorati have higher PageRank and more daily visitors. It is harder to get something to go viral from ScentTrail Marketing, but not impossible. ScentTrail Marketing has to have everything just right to generate a viral response. There is more room for content to go viral on a power platform such as Technorati or Atlantic BT.

Here are some interesting graphics about how “Top 5 Do More With Less Curation Tools” went viral to show the importance of Power Retweeters and Men vs. Women and Companies:

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I’ve been an Internet marketer since 1999. Most of my friends are ecommerce Internet marketers or software developers. The other day at one of our regular “web design roundtable” lunches in Raleigh, a friend noted that, between the five of us, we’ve made more than $400,000,000 online.

He calculated $400M since our start all those years ago (1999 for me, some at the table before that). One FOM (Friend of Martin) runs a company specializing in ecommerce sites between $5M and $50M. He had the lion’s share of the money made online, but everyone at the table had millions in sales to their credit.

At $30M over 7 years I was the “baby” merchant at the table. I’d earned my way in by being a good student, and I was buying lunch in downtown Raleigh (lol). Since I was paying, I challenged my friends to agree on five things “e-commerce pros” look for when reviewing web design. Before I share these 5 “how to look at ecommerce websites like an ecomm pro” tips, it is important to know the backgrounds at the table:

• Programmer / entrepreneur running a company controlling a little over $30M annually in a wide range of retail sites across several business verticals ( not Atlantic BT ).
• Designer, entrepreneur and branding expert who has worked with Fortune 100 clients creating identity and every nature of campaigns whose graphic designs you’ve probably seen without knowing it.
• Entrepreneur who was one of the first to explain social media marketing to me long before anyone knew what such a thing was, now working in B2B.
• Friend and former designer who was now running a massive ecomm niche site, doing a little under $6M in online B2C transactions, and who was getting ready for another busy season.
• And Me, former Director of Ecommerce running a site my team built to $6M annually generating over $30M topline over 7 years, and I was the “baby” at this lunch.

Here are the tips we came up with for how and why we look at websites:

• Brand, Tag and Contact.
• Golden Triangle.
• People and Lines of Sight.
• Calls to action.
• Nonverbals (mine).

Brand, Tag and Contact

Brands, once established, are shorthand for larger messages and emotional connections. Prior to a brand owning a position in your brain, brands must be explained and understood in order to create the shorthand. The ideal brand interaction, my “branding” expert friend explained, is an ever tightening spiral loop.

“Ideally you get more and more meaning with less and less interaction,” my friend shared. The idea is to drip water into a crack, let it freeze and widen the crack over and over until the crack is won over. We don’t play for cracks in cement, my friend explained, we play for hearts and minds, but the process is similar. Create more and more connection with less and less exposure, interaction, overhead and cost.

One of the important and easy to get wrong ideas is an easy way to contact without the web. “Few use the physical address or the 1-800 anymore, but having information that doesn’t require a computer to access makes computer users more trusting,” my programmer / entrepreneur friend shared.

Golden Triangle of Website Design

In western culture we read from left to right. It isn’t hard to understand why the most powerful portion of a webpage is the upper left. Eyes rest in the upper left for longer periods and they start there, so guide them well. Guide eyes and minds with images, text and calls to action.

People and Lines of Sight

I’ve written about the importance of people in web design (People Not Things Sell), and my friend brought this article up. He was the inspiration for my post, so he likes to remind me (lol). He is the champion of using people in web design. He sees people as the most important way to warm up web design, encourage conversion and get new visitors comfortable with a website fast. He has specific rules about how he uses people, such as avoiding stock photography.

His sites use stock sometimes, but they use stock in some unique way (by changing angles, filters or combining with other imagery). His great designers share something with Atlantic BT’s web designers. Both know how to blend stock into web design so it doesn’t feel so Stock photography-like. We all agreed this was a mission critical skill, since stock is FAST and therefore CHEAP, but stock photography should be used like a loaded gun (carefully).

Calls to Action

When people come into a new site, they want to know two things. They want to know if they are in the right place (called “Scent Trail”). Next, they want to know what YOU, the wizard behind the curtain and the website designer, want THEM to do. If your site is unclear, hard to find the answer to either of those questions, then you, your company, brands and products are seen as confusing and not a website visitors want to buy from.

Website Design Nonverbals

When a site is a clean, well-lit place, it helps visitors feel comfortable and trusting. We look for certain clues and meaning to know if we can trust a website. These judgments are made in the time it takes to blink three times, and they may last forever.

Next, I challenged my friends to comment on some example websites, shared as plates were cleared. I pulled up a few examples from a recent Scoop.it post: 30 Excellent Website Layouts, via Flashuser.net. Here is the design that got the most energy and response:

1. GeoTime5

The energy on this design was around more clear communication about the 5 W’s (What, Who, When, Why, Where). The lack of both a brand tag (usually put directly below the brand name in the upper left) and a creation story hurt the design. “The site assumes I know more than I do,” my designer friend said. The other Internet marketers at the table agreed that GeoTime5 needed to explain what they do and who they are, better and faster.

They should move the ‘see movement patterns’ tag under the logo to create a relationship to the name. Proximity is a constant theme with these guys. They hate it when someone breaks proximity rules. I shared my recent Ecommerce Audit Post featuring high-end ear buds manufacturer Etymotic. On the Etymotic site, the brand tag was right justified and so far away from their name, not unlike GeoTime5. One of my friends pulled up my Ecommerce Audit post on his iPad and sent his iPad around the table.

“The location of GeoTime5’s tag in a ‘hero’ position is confusing and creates ‘cross talk’.” My friend went on to explain that “cross talk” in this context meant that the brand’s message, “see movement patterns”, didn’t help much, since it is located in a position where offers are traditionally made. He did like that there was a call to action in the hero, but here was his take on the language: “Saying ‘see how we do it’ is not the point. The real POINT is to see how customers use and love GeoTime5. We know the team at GeoTime5 loves it. The real question is, how does everyone else feel about GeoTime5?”

The best way to sell ideas to customers is to NOT “sell” yourself. Use specific, tagged and non-anonymous testimonials, tweets, reviews or other sources of legitimacy curated from the social web about how your company is impacting the world. When your customers SAY you are great, THEY are believable.

We Internet marketers can speak to our vision and values but not how anything we do is great or good. “So we get to speak to aspirations and facts but not to recommendations or suggestions?” I asked. The table agreed, some lines can be crossed. One of our roles as Internet marketers is sharing opinions grounded in expertise and appreciated by the mob, so clearly identified “Staff Reviews” is one of the favorite “selling” content almost everyone at the table uses. “Clearly labeled Staff Reviews can’t be the only review on the page, or it looks like you are trying to sell again,” my designer friend pointed out. He doesn’t bring in staff reviews until there are at least 5 reviews on the page and a sense of the product already being formed by those reviews.

GeoTime5’s tiny Calls to Action saying, “view video”, got the ire of our keyword SEO specialist and the designer. The SEO expert wanted more keywords in the CTAs. The designer wanted a big orange or red button with the ability to do an A/B test against a blue button.

I chimed in to ask, “Where is the site’s story? Where are the founder’s sweat, hopes and dreams? Where were small children looking up to their father asking about movement patterns?” A half eaten roll was thrown at my head as I finished that statement (lol), but my friends agreed that the site was thin, confusing and not very welcoming or engaging. Finally another friend suggested I send my post about People Not Things Sell to the company (something I would never do, and he knew it). The person making that suggestion was who taught me about people as design elements, so he was really complimenting himself (I pointed that out too, LOL).

Geotime5 didn’t set the hook very well, the table decided. They might have a great product, but we weren’t intrigued enough to do the work to find out. “Like all sites, they have two choices,” my designer friend said, “They make it EASY to learn, or they plant the emotional hook deep enough I MUST learn.” The consensus was GeoTime5 did neither.

“Don’t even get me started on their SEO,” my Google Panda and Penguin expert friend said, dismissing the site completely. I pressed, asking what he meant. “The title is keyword weak, there are no keywords in the CTAs, and the CTA setups are keyword weak too. And I can say that without having done one hour of research,” my friend noted, and that is where we left GeoTime5.

Since most of the table spend most of their time working on and creating ecommerce websites I asked about favorites. REI was on everyone’s list:

REI

Well designed heroes, great uses of people and line of sight (where people look at the call to action you want visitors to do). Another friend noted how they used video. “I love the small video box inside the hero,” he said. Video is so powerful, it gets so many clicks, and REI doesn’t oversell it. Subtle but powerful was the consensus view on the party visual.

Everyone’s favorite of the rotating front page images was the runner (see below). “There are two brilliant intertwined triangles here,” my designer friend pointed out. The first triangle is the famous golden triangle that starts upper left and extends into the body of the hero (hero is web designer speak for largest image on a page).

“Note how the golden triangle in the runner image takes your eyes to the runner and then directly to the Call to Action,” my designer friend said, drawing on my screen with a toothpick. The murmurs of approval told me my ecommerce friends had great respect for such a clean jump to the main point of the page – promote the click. Another friend pointed out my Amy Africa notes from the conversion conference. “It was great to hear a researcher confirm what we believe and have tested,” my friend said, meaning the way he uses people to look at CTA’s or straight out at the visitor to increase engagement. Lest you think my friends read my posts all the time, they do NOT (lol), but this friend was scheduled to go to Conversion Conference in Chicago with me and had to stay home and attend to an emergency on one of his websites instead. He was the reason I liveblogged the conference.

He went on to explain that his take on the REI runner page was, yes her view was directly into the “Maximize Your Fun on the Run” headline, but her eyes are also directed out toward their red sale button. “The right is a real gutter ball area,” my friend said, “We have trouble getting any clicks out of the right side of the page.” He went on to explain the gymnastics necessary to get eyeballs to the right side of the page with the one exception – an ecommerce site. “Your note about people’s eyes going immediately up and to the right in an ecommerce site is why we ALL have cart icons there,” he pointed out (as does REI).

The cart icon in the upper right is a form of scent trail, a confirming signal. Same friend pointed out the large Free Shipping, with a price trigger, believing that information was bold enough that even if it wasn’t in the direct line of site, it would be seen and noted in the visitor’s peripheral vision.

I chimed in with how the clean lines, fun outdoor scenes and action created great nonverbals. The site is selling its benefits, making it clear that they can be trusted and are a fun, well-lit place. Another roll was thrown at my head as I paid the bill and thanked my friends for tossing things at me and sharing their expertise.

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This conversation with Brian Yanish from @MarketingHits started on the Ecommerce Revolution on Scoop.it. Read the original Search Engine Watch article 10 Old SEO Methods You Need to Stop.

Search Engine Watch tease to their article:
Article submissions and reciprocal linking. Ignoring social signals and too much focus on ranking. Optimizing only for Google and creating content that’s thin. These are a few of my least favorite SEO things.

Brian Yanish made an excellent comment on Scoopit:

« With Google’s personal search results other customer/visitor touch points are going to become more important than ever before. Be it Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest, getting the new visitor to your site from a source other than Google will play an major factor in that visitors future Google results. SEO just got harder! »

Marty
Yes, SEO got harder AND easier. Harder because the horse race for social touch points is ON. If your competitor gets 100,000 Facebook LIKES before you, that will HURT your SEO and organic traffic. SEO has become “easier”, because you can leverage social as a channel against Google. This “channel diversification” can protect your critical access to online traffic.

Here is how channel diversification idea works. Let’s say your current converting traffic by channel looks like this:

• Google Organic 30%.
• Google PPC 40%.
• Social 5%.
• Email marketing 20%.
• Other 10% (like mobile or affiliate).

You are not highly diversified if you have the distribution above. If Google hurts your organics with another Panda, Penguin, Lion, Tiger or Bear (oh my) change, you will need to increase PPC spend just to stay even. You may reach the dreaded “point of diminishing return” and see your PPC contribution to profits (if you are lucky enough to get any, net net) slide. PPC’s point of diminishing return is “dreaded” because you can spend more but you make less, and less and less, meeting my definition of “dreaded”.

Now think of a more diversified distribution:

• Google Organic 35% (because social helps with this).
• Social 20%.
• Google PPC 20%.
• Email marketing 20%.
• Other 10% (mobile and affiliate).

Your converting “portfolio” is more diversified and profits are up. If something bad happens (and it will), you have multiple ways you can make up the loss. You can double down on PPC without getting near the dreaded point of diminishing return or open the valves and flood your other fields with support. You aren’t dependent on ONE channel (never a good idea).

The Phase II part of your channel plan should be building your mobile list and making mobile 20% of your converting traffic, allowing a further reduction in PPC and being present in a profitable way on people’s phones and the future of commerce.

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Note: This post went so viral so fast I had to write a post about the post (lol). Viral Marketing – 5 Magical Curation Tools Reaches Over 600,000 gave this post 11% more followers and did well on its own with 193,000 followers added to bring the total between these two posts to 665,221 followers who’ve seen the article via Retweets.

Internet Marketing’s Squeeze

Internet marketers are in the classic squeeze. Demands are going up as budgets are tightened. Ecommerce and B2B Internet marketers are making money and growing, but belts are tightening as the longest recession since the depression grinds on. More than just a new, lower profit world: Things that trim margins, such as brutal “red ocean” competition and the new Social, Mobile and hyper-Local (SoLoMo) world, are gaining ground faster and faster (read More and More, Faster and Faster, Better and Better for more on this key content network marketing concept).

So we are under some serious pressure, we happy few Internet marketers. Before you jump off the roof, here are five “do more with less” tools that may help:

1. Scoop.it
I’ve written extensively about my love for this magic wand of a curation, creation and social content creation tool:

Scoop.it Rocks II

Likes and Dislikes of New Scoopit UI

Scoopit Rocks Here Is Why

The key to all “do more with less” tools is this graph (blue columns are my curation, white line is visitation):

Note how my curation can afford to actually be less and less, even as it generates more and more.

2. Pinterest
Pinterest is a magic collage of a tool. You don’t build followers as fast as Twitter, but they stay longer and contribute more. The SEO benefits of Pinterest come from the very long tail of the content you create. When a new-to-you follower joins and follows a board, you depreciate all that work faster and faster for more and more.

3. Paper.li
What a brilliant curation tool is Paper.li. If I could meet the geniuses at SmallRivers who figured out how to create the business rules to fuel the nuclear rods of this auto-publication tool, I would buy them lunch. Fair warning, I have a guest blog post up on the Paper.li blog right now, but that is chicken after the egg of love I have for this brilliant “do more with less” tool. The amount of Retweets, G+ and Facebook love you get for the amount of effort you have to put in is gold at the end of the rainbow worthy.

4. Hunch.com
Hunch is still my favorite looking “do more with less” tool. A fellow Vassar alum and a talented team created the curator’s art and the curator as artist. There is, bar none, no more beautifully functional lines taken to a higher level where Maslow meets Walter Gropius meets Kurt Schwitters. Hunch.com is an example of how a tool can awaken the artist in all of us.

5. Google Insights for Search

Use this tool well and it will save you millions of dollars and years of your life. It can be a little tricky to understand how the data is pegged to itself, forcing an ever renovating 5 words, but you will love it once the not very steep learning curve is overcome. Easiest way to get comfortable is download the raw data out to Excel, as it provides a view that explains what is happening behind the curtain.

Share Your Favorite Tools
There are other tools (Zite, Flipboard, Twitter, Facebook – especially the ad tool), but these are my top 5. What are your favorite “do more with less” curation tools?

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