calls to action Archives | Ian M Rountree

7 Reasons I Don’t Care If You Tweet This Post

April 28, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

When I published 5 Ways to Make Every Blog Post Count two days ago, I knew it’d get retweeted. In fact, I believe I said this:

And it did. But I didn’t get more traffic than I normally do – for a lot of reasons. Specific to the post; I knew it was linkbait, but it was helpful as well. I truly intended to write a useful post, and I’ll be referring to it several times in upcoming work. However, as effective as the title was at getting a few extra mentions from people who don’t normally interact with my stuff, there are some reasons I’m less concerned with the effect the article – and the title – had on Twitter.

1. Not all of my traffic comes from social media.

A decreasing amount, in fact, comes from Twitter. Yet I have more followers now than I have in the past, and I’m actively working on writing better headlines. So what’s happening to the traffic that’s supposed to come with tweets?

2. Twitter is for conversation.

While a lot of people use Twitter for sending links back and forth, and information traffic control, I’ve had a better time using it as an ongoing chat. I’m a chat person, not a forum person, so this works for me. I don’t use twitter for sharing, but this might change, as my habits change; with any platform, there are bound to be reasons to use the tool one way more than another, but leaving yourself open to change is a good idea.

3. Twitter is not the only network I care about.

Lots of people consider Twitter the penultimate location for networking. However, Facebook, LinkedIn, and even other blogs, also have a lot of power. Considering I spend most of my time using Twitter for conversation, rather than linking, I’d be happier with blog comments, reactions, or other kinds of interaction than just sending another headline into the broader stream.

4. Not every post needs to be read by everyone.

Maybe you already knew how to make each blog post work harder for you. Just like you already know how to measure the effectiveness of tweets – if that’s the case, you’re not going to care what I have to say. You don’t need it. Instead, you could be reading about being awesome somewhere else. Any of this means that one more post on single-blog-post efficiency is just going to float by, and you’re not going to click. And that’s fine.

5. It’s just another list!

There are so many lists! Yes, it’s effective as linkbait, but more importantly if a list doesn’t contain actionable information (or at least informative entertainment), passing it on won’t help anyone. Granted, I do hope this list is helpful – but speaking broadly about link tweeting in general, passing nothing but links without the benefit of meta conversation or commentary only provides so much benefit to your followers. Tell me why it’s important, in a tweet, or don’t endorse it.

6. Linkbait retweets don’t work anyway.

Yes, the link mentioned above got retweeted – the trouble is that I know – and you do too, let’s be honest – that most of the time people bump articles with good titles, but don’t read the article itself. Whether it’s the headline, the tweet wrapping the link, or the person sending the tweet – there are lots of reasons to hit the “Me Too” button that don’t involve appropriately curating and endorsing things you pass on. And that’s ok. But it doesn’t make me care more about Twitter than I do already.

7. Getting a retweet isn’t my highest measurement of value in social media.

It’s really not!

There are many ways you can encourage reactions in social media, and gain traffic or further conversation. Things like:

Retweets (mediatrope: Me Too Button)
Facebook likes or comments
Trackbacks
Comments on the blog post itself, or
Even better off site blog reactions

… All contribute to a blog post’s effectiveness as a communication tool, beyond being just another publication. It’s up to you, as a content creator, to know – and appropriately rank – which of these is most important to your own measurements of value, and acceptance of success where you find it.

If we don’t decide on what matters before we hit publish, hindsight cannot help is.

Join the Conversation – SEO for Bloggers Part 6

July 24, 2010 by Ian 1 Comment

I want to hear your story, just as much as you want to hear mine.

It’s not creepy. It can be – but inherently, keeping up with people is not creepy. Community is about sharing. We need things to share – they have to be worth something, and we need to give people permission to get more. But at the end of the day, there are basically three modes of communication we have access to.

Listening – where we take things in
Broadcasting – where we put ourselves out there, and
Conversing – where we do both.

Broadcasting is very mechanical. Throwing information over the wall requires effort, which is good. However, when nothing comes back in – or when we create the expectation that we’re only encouraging others to listen – we’re not engaging in community.

Listening has a similar problem. You can aggregate all the data you want, but if you don’t allow for analysis, for communication back to the data’s sources about it’s meaning, you’re still not engaging in community.

Conversation is an ongoing exchange that’s impossible to mimic by only listening or only broadcasting. Eventually, to converse, you have to switch between the modes, and play with the results of reversed flow. And, in order for the conversation to continue, the party you are engaging must reciprocate and reverse their own flow at the same time. Otherwise we’re either listening in mutual silence, or broadcasting toward each other. Not constructive.

Businesses are accustomed to broadcasting. For years, it’s dominated how they get in front of existing and potential customers. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this – except that it’s limited and limiting for both parties involved.

There’s a movement toward communication with business, instead of communications from business. From an SEO standpoint, this is good – conversation means fresh content. Fresh content means food for the Great Index. Feeding the index means higher relevance.

All business – all people – want to be relevant. Conversation directly increases relevance.

So how can businesses – really, how can any broadcast medium (bloggers included) find opportunities to reverse the flow? Simple;

Listen for answers to the questions you will ask,
Publicize the answers for questions you are asked,
Engage with people at the same pace with which they engage you, and
Look for every opportunity to reverse the flow – from whichever direction you are currently taking.

In the case of communication beyond simple listening and broadcasting, adaptation is highly desirable. We need to take action on a consistent basis. Sometimes that means halting the broadcast, and listening to criticism. Sometimes it means listening to praise. Sometimes it means speaking up, getting your word out in a new area. there are opportunities all over the place.

Bloggers can take advantage of this in a lot of ways. I’d love to know some of your tricks. How do you encourage conversation? And, what do you do with what’s being pushed your way?

Image by woodleywonderworks.

Giving People More – SEO for Bloggers Part 4

July 22, 2010 by Ian Leave a Comment

So we’ve let ourselves write something on purpose, and made it fit into the schedule. We know we’re going to write more, because we’ve got purpose and a schedule – but how can we make sure that people get it when it comes out? Letting people know you want them to Get More of This is one of the three primary calls to action a blogger can take advantage of.

As much as we can ask people to subscribe or bookmark our things – sometimes just making it easy for people to do so is enough.

Even given the paradox of choice problem, providing options for people to take advantage of is one of the best ways to facilitate the Get More of This call to action. Does your blog have an RSS icon or a “Subscribe Now” link of some kind? Is there a form, on every page, stating you offer email updates? Do people know you’re using a Facebook app like RSS Graffiti to drop your posts into your Facebook page automatically?

Just set out the choices – don’t worry about a best option, people will engage on the level at which they are most comfortable.

What about non-blog connections? If you’re one of those intensely busy news feed kinds of bloggers, posting upwards of ten to fifteen articles per day – have you considered having a Twitter account just for your article headlines?

What’s your Mix of More?

While we do need to allow people to pick their level of involvement, it has to stop somewhere. Two dozen Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and SoAndSoOn buttons on your blog posts are fairly likely to annoy people. Similarly – if you’re on Twitter, but not Reddit, does your Reddit button need to be as big as your Twitter button? Making these choices isn’t about eliminating an avenue of connection for your audience – instead, it can serve as an indicator of the best ways to interact with you.

Narrowing in on the four to seven (or so, at most) options that fit your habits and your own involvement on the web – and never, ever forget that RSS button among them – will help your audience to understand where you are, add to your sense of personality, and develop an immediate connection with anyone of similar involvement.

The sufficiently savvy will know, and have means by which to share your things wherever they want to. However, giving permission in simple, understandable cues can make a huge difference to people’s comfort level regarding involving themselves with your ongoing progress as a writer.

Creating your appropriate Mix of More is just as important as building the unique value proposal for your writing.

Image by the measure of mike.

On Purpose – SEO for Bloggers Part 2

July 20, 2010 by Ian 2 Comments

Even when focusing on the work of creating great writing – and allowing yourself to just do the writing – divining a purpose for your work can be tough. It’s a deeper issue than just figuring out what to write about (the topic) or who to share the information you have with (the audience). Discerning the purpose for your writing is a chief part of creating truly lasting, worth-while material.

When crafting a work of words, allowing the purpose of those words to shine through is paramount to the writing’s success.

A lot of blogs talk about calls to action – big red buttons being big and red enough, carefully placed “Please subscribe” buttons being carefully placed enough. This is all flash in the pan without writing that illicits one of three reactions;

Get More of This – We want people to subscribe, bookmark, or otherwise give themselves permission to read more of our work.
Pass This On – Sharing, whether on a social network, by email, or just the impossible to quantify word of mouth.
Continue the Conversation – Whether through comments, reactive blog posts; at any level of synchrony or asynchrony.

When we’re talking about the purpose of a blog, these three categories (not topics) of response are the best indicators that we’re doing our jobs correctly. Our audience decides their own level of involvement, certainly, but it’s our writing that encourages or discourages this involvement. By considering the purpose we want to endorse with our writing on a piece-by-piece basis, we’re encouraging these responses.

When we back up our writing with an action-oriented flow, we’re much more primed for the response we receive.

Building content of any kind around a given subject is important – enough writers stress relevance and subjectivity that I don’t think it needs more discourse. However, semantic value only gets us so far. Thrust of purpose gets people moving, and because the web is becoming so much more heavily active and interactive recently, giving people a purpose for material is important when being considerate of their fractured attention.

You can be as on-topic as you want, but if people can’t find a purpose for the material you’re giving them, you’re not doing everything you can to encourage their return or their continued involvement in your work.

The active web loves linkage – it needs it, craves it, and doesn’t get enough highly-considered sources for it. From an SEO standpoint, this means that anyone from the tiniest niche blogger to the biggest celebrity acting on your material (whether sharing, conversing about, or even passively subscribing to it) gets you points you wouldn’t otherwise have.

The little increments of points add up over time. As instant as the web appears to be, the spider’s crawl is a slow dance, requiring careful choreography to navigate. No one hits it big from their first post – no one. Optimizing your blog for search requires patience, purpose, and work.

But what intriguing work!

So – what do you think I’d like you to do with this post, now that we’ve spent so much energy talking about purpose?

Image by Eustaquio Santimano.

Do We Need Networks for Everything?

December 22, 2009 by Ian 2 Comments

I’m not asking a question about speed here; I worry that with the profligate new networks like Twitter (and its environs in the form of apps, API [ab]users and tools), LiveFyre (with its massive potential for both quality content and for trolling), and FourSquare and Gowalla along with other location-based get-off-the-computer social networks… I worry that the beauty of the centralised network, which I still feel is the best way this can work, is deteriorating.

There’s a speech in He’s Just Not That In To You, where Drew Barrymore is lamenting having to call a guy, leaving him a voicemail, to which he responds by email, so she Facebooks him – and so on, apoplexy. Is this really happening? I mean, I email people. Or I IM with them. If you have any of my four IM accounts, they’re always on because I’m a BlackBerry user and I’m a geek like that. People can pester me wherever they wish to, through whatever network, and are likely to get back one of two things: An email, or an IM. Because that’s what works. I like centralisation, even if I do enjoy being in the loop. I’m far from anonymous: Yes, I’m on LinkedIn, yes, I have a Flickr account, both of which are very disused, as well as a Fiend- I mean FriendFeed page which is similarly disused and mostly remote controlled by Twitter. I’ve even put up a couple of very low quality YouTube videos. I’m on Twitter all the freaking time. By all rights, I should be one of those people who’s all over the place and simultaneously impossible to get a hold of.

But I’m not. Because I think that practice is stupid. Still, businesses start up every day building new and diverse networks with new calls to action, innovating the methods by which we communicate with each other and leaving a startled majority of us wondering what happened to the email we used to be getting and no longer are.

Networks with plans have limits. They’re sort of like gods that way, the pick an element to be divine in, and sort of suck at everything else. If you want to kill a god, hurl its anathema at it and watch the sparks fly. Facebook? Clearly, Mafia Wars. Twitter? Probably spam bots. The thing is that these networks keep popping up, no matter how much damage the originals absorb, and whether these parent concepts survive the onslaught of abuse.

But do we need them?

For me to hold my interest in a given network, I have to treat it like a friend. Sure, my friends are on the network, and I interact with them, but the network entity itself has to have some meaning to me, I have to be able to get along with it, cultivate an interest in maintaining it. Since I started using Twitter in earnest, almost exclusively to connect with people otherwise entirely out of my reach, I’ve entirely abandoned FriendFeed – Twitter did a better job. Sorry, I’m a fair-weather networker. I’ve also scaled back on Facebook almost entirely – I haven’t posted a status update in days, and going to the web interface is a chore. I check statuses of my friends when I have thirty seconds at work, again on my BlackBerry. It takes energy to cultivate more than this, and I’m not scaleable and I know it.

So when I got introduced to LiveFyre, I decided not to do what I did with Twitter – which was get on, dive in, and then get annoyed that it behaved differently than Facebook, which at the time was my best networking friend, and subsequently abandon the thing for almost a year. I’ve taken a bit of time to analyze before diving in, and I’m not sure I like what I see. There’s nothing inherently wrong with LF itself, other than being a very directed outlet for specific kinds of content, which makes it more like a community blog than a social network.

The problem I’m having is with the idea that there must be all of these networks for everyone, and if you want to catch all of your friends, make sure you have everyone in your contact list accessible as often as you feel they need to be, you have to set up so many listening posts you’ll go into stack overflow. It’s a futile exercise. But it’s necessary one in a lot of instances, isn’t it?

But it brings me back to this:

One. How useful are global networks – I’m talking about the Facebooks and MySpaces of the world here, where the entire call to action is “Play Nice With Others” – when it comes to quickly and reliably getting accurate and succinct information from your contacts to you?

And Two. How much utility can there ever be in balkanized echo chambers when the limits of the available actions are so heavily built into the systems that no out-of-purpose use is possible?