10 things Seth Godin taught me about social media marketing

Neal Schaffer has a great post here on Seth Godin's insights on social media marketing. You should go to the original post and read the whole thing, but if you don't have time, here's quick summary:

1. Social Media and Experimentation

Sure, go ahead and test what’s testable. But the real victories come when you have the guts to launch the untestable. – A Culture of Testing

2. Building Your Tribe (Through Social Media)

Building a tribe is reliable, it’s hard work and it’s worth doing. – No Knight, No Shining Armor

3. Content is the New Search Engine Optimization

I resist the temptation to optimize this blog for traffic and yield. I’d rather force myself to improve it by having the guts to write better posts instead. – The Non-Optimized Life

4. Embrace Social Media and Become a Leader, Not a Follower

Are you chasing or being chased? Are you leading or following? Are you fleeing or climbing? – Running Away vs. Running Toward

5. Engage with Your Customers, and You Shall Increase Your Engagement

The customers you fire and those you pay attention to all send signals to the rest of the group. – Train Your Customers

6. Don’t Forget about the “Social” in Social Media

The experience I have with you as a customer or a friend is far more important than a few random bits flying by on the screen. The incredible surplus of digital data means that human actions, generosity and sacrifice are more important than they ever were before. – The Blizzard of Noise (and the Good News)

7. Let Others Broadcast Your Message for You

Anil Dash has discovered that having ten times as many Twitter followers generates approximately zero times as much value.

The goal shouldn’t be to have a lot of people to yell at, the goal probably should be to have a lot of people who choose to listen. Don’t need a bullhorn for that. – Bullhorns are Overrated

8. You Have to Be Bigger Than Your Brand in Social Media

Great brands represent something bigger than themselves. You can create this accidentally if you’re lucky, but you can create it on purpose if you try. – Represent

If you only talk about yourself in social media no one is listening. Social media was made for people, not brands.

9. Use the Social Media Tools at Your Disposal and Stop Looking for New Ones

The hard work that we have to do is to not use Twitter and Facebook to entertain ourselves and hide from the art. And the hard work that we have to do is not go to yet another meeting with yet another boring boss who’s going to have yet another boring project for us to do.

But the hard work – and we’re seeing it over and over again in every field I can imagine, not including bringing vaccines to the developing world – the hard work is to look at the status quo and say, “Well, they built all these tools for me. They built all this leverage for me, and it’s not here to entertain me, it’s here to permit me to put myself at risk, to maybe have someone look me in the eye and say, ‘You’re not good enough to do that.’” That’s really hard.

And then what we have to do as trainers or as managers or as people who can spread ideas is somehow put in front of people that what we need them to do is to solve interesting problems. And what we need them to do is lead. And then if all they’re prepared to do is make widgets, we have a long slog ahead of us. But if we’re wiling to race to the top and do work that matters, my bet is that a few of us will do it often enough to actually make change. – Transcript of the First Linchpin Session

10. Use Social Media to Build Your Own Unique Tribe, 10 People at a Time

Instead of speed dating your way to interruption, instead of yelling at strangers all day trying to make a living, coordinating a tribe of 1,000 requires patience, consistency and a focus on long-term relationships and life time value. You don’t find customers for your products. You find products for your customers. – First Organize 1,000

Real relationships vs Facebook Friends

How important is it to have "good numbers" on social media? 5000 facebook friends? 5,000 twitter followers? If you have these kind of numbers many social media experts would say you are a success.

Seth Godin says not. He says what really matters is how many people you have real relationships with. By real relationships, he means how many people would go out of their way to help you. Could you email three days in advance and say, "I'll be in town" and they'd offer you a place to sleep. I think Godin has it right, again. Maybe the best number is "how many real conversations did you have?" or "how many real relationships do you have?"

Don't send important emails hastily

Lesson 1 of social media. Don't send important emails from the coffee shop as it's closing, and you are trying to get finished before the doors close.

Just re-read an email I sent, introducing myself to a literary agent. There's a TYPO in the first paragraph! GAG!

Lesson: take your time, save as a draft, reread the next day before you press SEND on an important email. (Duh.)

Caitlin Kelly and Malled

I accidentally met Caitlin Kelly by email the other day, through a writer's group I belong to. I was grousing about writers and their love-hate relationship to marketing, and Kelly referred me to the wonderful social media writer, Kristen Lamb.

After a couple email exchanges I Googled Kelly, and was shocked to realize I was talking to a New York Times writer and the author of the new book Malled: My unintentional career in retail.

Small world.

Kelly writes about what it's like to work retail for $7 to $10 an hour, after a career as a highly paid and successful print journalist. She explores the whole retail chain from the Chinese factories to the people who sell us things in the local mall. Malled is coming out on April 14. You can order your copy here.

Writers Need Kristen Lamb!

Kristen Lamb is the best writer on social media for writers that I've found in two years of researching the subject.

In her best-selling book We Are Not Alone she tells writers how to use social media to build a circle of relationships. These relationships are the basis of the "platform" that publishers and agents now want writers to have.

I can't say enough good about her book. She demystifies social media, tells writers how to succeed, and she does it with laugh-out-loud humor. Buy. Read. Use.

Kristen Lamb's blog: Good idea to subscribe to her blog posts.
We Are Not Alone: If you are a writer, independent film maker, or artist, you should stop what you are doing, buy this book and spend the next two days to reading it. It is that important.

Research tools for writers and filmmakers

A few useful research tools and resources for writers and documentary filmmakers.

HARO
ProfNet
ExpertClick

Quora

Wikipedia
Facebook
LinkedIn

The Truth About Traditional Publishing?

Amanda Hocking is selling thousands of ebooks without a traditional publisher. (h/t to Carl King of Carl King Creative for telling me this story.)

Read this article from business insider first.

Then read her response to the press on her blog.

And finally, read "how I did it."

At one point in "how i did it" she says she thinks her books sell well because:

"-the books are in a popular genre
-the covers are enjoyable
-the price is good
-the writing isn't terrible (although, believe me, some people would argue that point)
-book bloggers recommended it
-accessibility - I'm on Twitter, facebook, goodreads, Amazon, KB. I'm anywhere I can be. I always try to respond to readers..."

And I'd add to what she said...
- writing 7 hours a day for about 10 years before she ever published a word.
- choosing really great titles. Titles that "stick" in your mind, things like "my blood approves"
- working obsessively on marketing
- writing the same kind of book that she reads, writing in a genre she likes.
- starting small, dashing off novel after novel quickly (call them beta versions)
- finding and working with an editor (she's still looking for a better one)
- being willing to fail repeatedly and keep going. Sounds like her mantra was something like:
"OK, learned something. Good! Keep going, try something else."
- shipping stuff. She finishes the novels she starts and then submits the finished work for publication.
- damn luck. All the planets were in alignment, at the right time, in the right place, and significant book bloggers liked her stuff.

More power to Amanda Hocking! I truly hope she becomes a zillionaire. I applaud her success. She sounds like someone I'd like to have coffee with and talk to about writing.