<div style="clear:both"><a href="https://madlemmings.com/2014/05/19/10-pinterest-pros-best-tools-tips/"><img src="https://madlemmings.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/10-Pinterest-Pros-Share-Tips-Tools-MadLemmings.jpg" title="10 Pinterest Pros Tips Share Their Best Tips and Tools" alt="10 Pinterest Pros Tips Share Their Best Tips and Tools" border="0" /></a></div><div>Courtesy of: <a href="https://madlemmings.com">Mad Lemmings</a></div>

Rebekah: Well sure, I am a social media strategist, a consultant/trainer, and a digital marketing specialist. Basically what that means is I come in and I take a look at the overall online strategy of businesses and look at the health and the growth, to figure out where we can really optimize and rework their strategy, their current overall plan and then really put a plan in place to accelerate their efforts.

Ashley: Okay, so that’s actually – interesting you should summarize yourself like that because that’s exactly what I wanted to talk to you about today and you do talk about a lot of different things online and on a lot of hang outs and podcasts that I’ve listened to, but I thought one area which you really excel in and actually summarize really well in a lot of your posts and chats is how to do a basic strategy. I think it’s something that people don’t necessarily do or pay enough attention to and it’s something that if people haven’t done already, or they’re just starting out they could benefit from, and yeah, so let’s start into that. How would you begin? What would be the first things you would do in getting a strategy prepared for people with a business?

Rebekah: Well, and I think you said it; it is unfortunately one of those areas that’s often overlooked. You know, a big part of what I do is coming in and taking a look at traditional marketing. So, what have they been doing? What have they already established offline? And then how can we take that and translate that to the online world? And I think with that where a lot of businesses struggle is really understanding how to take all of that content that they’ve got and plug it into an online strategy and one that is fully integrated so one that really leverages everything, every tool that’s online out there. So whether it’s Google+, whether it’s Facebook, maybe it’s Instagram, really understanding your audience would be the #1 for me where to start because there are so many different places you can be, so many different places you can start, so my first suggestion always is, understand. Get inside the head of your potential clients, understand why they’re using social media, what are they doing online? Who are they looking to connect with? My guess is: it’s probably both on a personal as well as a professional level. And so from a business standpoint, really know what their goals are, what they’re looking to achieve, and why they would ever connect with your business. Because if you could be just truly laser beam focused, if you could really understand what motivates them, then it becomes much easier to create that targeted content, that content that they’re out there looking and craving every single day and that eliminates yet another hurdle which is that content creation. So, you know, #1 like I said is really understand your audience.

Ashley: So how would you go about – just some quick tips on that, obviously, it’s probably weeks of your time to fully understand such a topic, but how would you go about honing your channels, for example, like you said, you could choose any number of the big, what is it, five or six channels, and I’m just thinking of Africa here, and the big five; the lion, the elephant, but we have Facebook, Instagram, yeah, LinkedIn… and I know from my experience, of course, you’ve got B-to-B is great on LinkedIn and then personal consumer products is great on Facebook, and visual content is great on Instagram, and there’s a lot of different choices out there. But if you’re a business, what’s a couple of things you could ask yourself that would help you make a decision on a couple of channels to choose, and a couple of content varieties to use to approach this first step of creating a strategy?

Rebekah: Well, again, it’s like you said, understanding your company, so are you B to B, are you B to C? And then really starting to take a look at where are your potential consumers spending their time. Obviously, Facebook is still the biggest boy on the block as far as social networks are concerned, and the majority of consumers are definitely spending their time there. So it’s going to be a lot of trial and error, I think, is really starting to post some content, start that conversation, see what kind of interaction you’re getting, and then starting to do your reconnaissance work, getting out there, and looking at your competitors. Taking a look at what conversations are they having? What kind of content is really driving interaction, driving engagement, on, say, their Facebook page, or maybe it’s over on Twitter? I always recommend start in one place, so start where you’re comfortable. Where are you spending your time right now, and where do you really feel like you’re finding people to interact and engage with? Start there; work that strategy like I said as far as posting content, trying out different types of content. Obviously we’re all different. We receive our information differently, some people choose to read, some people really appreciate video, some people love podcasts. So repurposing your content and just sharing that in unique ways is also going to be important as you start to define where those people are spending their time, and then playing around with how you share that content to really get a feel for not only what kind of content do they want, but how do they want to receive that content? That’s – it’s always a challenge not only to understand where to spend your time but also what kind of content should you be spending your time on? Because you may find that, and maybe in your case, Ashley, this is definitely has become the case since you’ve got this podcast, is people are, they’re very auditory and maybe they would prefer to just simply listen to you talk as opposed to reading an article. So it’s figuring that out as well.

Ashley: Yeah, I mean it’s definitely something I’ve noticed a difference on as well and I think it certainly pays to vary everything you do at least a little bit. Of course, not everybody’s comfortable with doing a podcast or a video, but I think you certainly, as time goes on and you get comfortable with one medium, whether that’s writing or talking or whatever, you should try to move on to other verities. And how do you find that’s helped with your customers and their social media campaigns?

Rebekah: Well, I think its several different ways. First of all, doing something like this, where we’re just having a conversation on a podcast allows people to get to know you on a very different level. All of the sudden they can hear you; they can listen to your words as opposed to just reading your words, which we now how that goes. You know, reading, whether it’s an article or an e-mail, there’s always room for interpretation as well as misinterpretation where if you’re listening to somebody it’s pretty straight forward. So it definitely gives your audience the opportunity to get to know you on a very different level and I think with that there’s that opportunity to build trust, there’s always the ‘I know I can trust’ factor where you want your community to feel comfortable with you. You want them to feel as if you’ve just opened your arms and kind of drawn them into the fold of your company. So being able to give them just a little bit different insight into who you are, what makes you tick, what you do, why you do it, all of those things that are incredibly important to anybody looking to make an educated decision about your business. I think video is a great way, obviously, to engage a maybe otherwise unengaged audience and I do understand that not everybody feels comfortable. In fact, I would imagine that most people feel uncomfortable getting in front of the camera initially, but there are a lot of great ways to use video within your business without actually having to get on camera, so you can think about that too – how to use video within your business to connect people in a very different way but not necessarily have get on camera and feel that uncomfortable tug whenever you’re stepping into something that you haven’t done before. And then of course, as we’ve already talked about, there’s podcasting, where people can hear you but they don’t have to see you, so a lot of different ways to connect people to your business that are a little bit different maybe in methodology than you’ve done in the past which might just be traditional writing on your blog or posting to your social networks.

Ashley: Yep, for sure, it’s definitely something that I’ve listened to in the famous quote from Pat Flynn that everybody seems to use which is to be everywhere and I don’t think that’s necessarily the best choice. I mean, it sounds great to say that but I don’t know if everybody has the time to be everywhere, I think that’s a very, a very good aspiration but I’m not sure we all have that time. I think certainly mixing it up and I was just looking through your posts again this morning about this particular topic and that’s one of the things that you said in there was, “mixing it up,” now whether that is with content types and audio, video, info graphics, or whatever, I think it always pays to mix up even within one style the different kinds of content that you’re delivering and I’ve noticed also you’ve been doing that recently, and that piqued my attention because you do those kind of things really well and you’re now putting a lot more visuals in, more than you did before, and also some Slide Share, and what got you going on that particular topic… Slide Share’s become common in all of your posts I’ve seen.

Rebekah: Yeah, you know, it’s funny as I talk to companies on a daily basis about how to really make the most of all the content that they’ve got, so how can we get the most mileage out of that content, get that back in front of a whole new audience. I had a bit of a ‘duh’ moment for myself where we were using Slide Share and I wasn’t even using it for myself, I speak quite often, probably have hundreds of PowerPoint presentations I put together over the years, yet wasn’t actually taking the time to upload them to Slide Share on my own so just started to do that and follow my own advice of repurposing some of my content into Slide Shares and they’ve been very well received so it’s a great point that you bring up, Ashley, that it can be as simple as, one of them, there is a fabulous tool out there, if I can share a little tool tip, called Haiku Deck, which I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that but, just a very easy way to drop any of your content into a Slide Deck, they’re basically pre-created templates – you can either use your own images, you can use some from their gallery, as well, and within 30 minutes it’s really that simple, you can put together a very beautiful presentation that you can download and then upload directly into Slide Share, so very simple way to take your content, repurpose it, repackage it, and like I said, just get it out there all over again, but in front of a whole new audience because SlideShare obviously is catering to a very different audience then say, Facebook. The people that are spending their time over there are looking for something different, probably speakers or looking to become a speaker, and looking and doing some research, maybe, on the speakers within their industry or niche, so it’s a great way to get your content out there in front of yes, consumers, but from a B-to-B point of view, boy, to me it’s just a no-brainer.

Ashley: Yeah, I did it a while back and didn’t actually get as much traction as I’d hope, but I think maybe I gave up on it too easily because what I saw with how you had done it, which was really good and actually something in which I think one of the speakers was talking about in the content marketing conference and I can bring that into the conversation here as well, which was that when you create something, especially something reasonably big, whether it’s a big post or a small e-book which is also relatively big, thousands of words, you can either approach it from the finished product and then break it up, which is what I saw you doing, you break it out into a summarized SlideShare which you can then turn into multiple tweets or multiple sub-posts in social media, you can break that down into your blog posts into multiple sections or into multiple blog posts, so you can actually attack your content strategy with social media in mind as well as the multiple channels in mind. Whether that’s video, audio, SlideShare, images, Instagram, everything. So you can really attack this with the end in mind, which is getting most of your channels filled with content with just one particular thing that you create and I think that’s really an end that everyone should be trying to achieve and it actually saves you so much time… you create one thing and you get ten things out of it. It’s actually an amazing thing.

Rebekah: There you go, and that is, that’s the goal at the end of the day, it’s all about doing, being able to create a whole lot more content at the fraction of the time or the cost. Yeah, so it’s just maximizing all that you’ve got available and I think that’s where anybody from an entrepreneur to a start-up to a large corporation tends to over think how to create content, when in reality you just broke it down. You could take one post and for companies set up in a business for quite some time, look at your offline collateral. Think about that marketing you’ve put together over the years. You’ve got newsletters, you’ve got e-mails, you’ve got drip-marketing campaigns, you probably have just a wealth of information at your fingertips that could be repurposed into the content that you’re talking about where instead of constantly reinventing the wheel, you’re just going back through, just cull through all of that content you’ve created in the past… update it. Just freshen it up, give it a new life, and turn it into a SlideShare, turn it into maybe ten different posts for social media. It could be a tips post, so maybe you did a list of the Top Ten Tips, and you can take every single one of those and break it out into its own blog posts. You could take every single one of those and then turn those, as you said, into a hundred and forty character tweets, into a post for Facebook or Google+, so there’s just unlimited possibilities with what you can do with your content.

Ashley: Yeah, it’s once you get the ideas, basically, you get sort of the gist of how it all works and the different channels that you’re using. So if we bring it back to our original topic which was, which – how you would do your social media strategy so you start to get to know your audience, where they’re hanging out, what kind of content they’re consuming, how you’re making that content and repurposing all of your content. What would be the next step, you would say, in trying to get your customers somehow as leads to actually embrace your business or potentially buy something? How would you go about doing something like that?

Rebekah: I think there’s a few steps in there, I think obviously one is being very tactical, so very strategic in where you’re spending your time but also how you’re spending your time there. So when you’re on Facebook, are you just popping in? Are you just randomly hopping around from, you know, maybe one post to the next? Or do you find yourself in that rabbit hole and within an hour you suddenly you realize, you’ve wasted an hour of your time! And you haven’t gotten anything accomplished! So it’s really going in knowing how are you going to find those people and then how are you going to interact with them, so one thing that I’ve touched on is find your competition. Start spending some time on your competition’s social media and really start to get a feel for what they’re talking about, how those conversations are going, what are they doing well? And what are they not doing well? Where can you really capitalize on that conversation, and then how can you pull that conversation over to your website, your blog, and your social networks? So how can you leverage all that’s going on within your industry, a lot of times its topic topics, so it’s really keeping your finger on the pulse of what’s going on within your industry and the biggest piece is, as I mentioned, being strategic in how you’re spending your time. So let’s take Facebook for example, because you know, again, this is where people are spending quite a bit of time still, start to identify those places, as you said, Ashley, where your potential clients are spending their time. And then start commenting, start interacting on those pages, they’re – any industry that you’re in, you have people that are doing something very similar to what you’re doing. I never look at them necessarily as competitors; I look at them as opportunities for us to build a mutually beneficial relationship. My opinion? There’s always enough business to go around. So if you can start to begin to build those connections, you know it would be – let’s just use you and I as an example. Let’s say we were both offering the same product or service. And I could come to you and start to comment on your blog, start to interact with you on social media, start to really get to know you, because I’m willing to bet that you have a skill set that’s very unique to you, probably a little bit different from mine, and there’s a way that we can tap into that. There’s a way that we can start to build that reciprocity where I’m sharing your content, where we’re able to start maybe referring each other’s business. And if I were to start to get to know you, interact with you, say, on your Facebook page, allow your – those people interacting, fans of your page, to be able to get to know me just through my comments, through my interaction with you, you start to build a reputation. You start to allow people to get to know who you are. So there’s definitely ways to be strategic not only in your time that you’re spending identifying where your consumers are hanging out, but also getting to know that supposed competition. I see just enormous value in building those relationships within your own industry.

Ashley: Yeah, sure, and that’s what we’re doing here today. I mean, we’ve been – I’ve been on your show, you’re on my show, we get to know each other, we help each other, and it all goes around and I keep seeing that coming up again and again. I was just reading something about networking from someone the other day and they said, you know, the biggest thing that’s ever helped them in their business is their connections and when you’re not running your own business and you’re working for someone all those years before you start your business normally, you don’t realize that your connections are just your friends. But once you start running your own business you realize suddenly that having influential friends or connections is actually handy to have. And you don’t just rely on other people, of course you help people yourself, and yeah, and it goes back and forth in different ways and it’s – that’s one of the parts I think people forget. You’re looking for customers but you’re also looking for connections, and it’s not about meeting someone and straight away asking for something, people have done that to me recently on LinkedIn, and that leaves a nasty taste in your mouth. It’s kind of like, “Hi there! Connect with me, can you please help me do something?” … uh, no. But, really, it’s too fast. That’s something you need to remember, someone said that this morning to me in a podcast or something I was listening to, make those connections a year or two before you need them, not when you need them because when you need them you shouldn’t be asking, so, it’s the wrong way around but…

Rebekah: It really is, you know, I actually wrote a post a while ago about that exact issue. It was about your customers – are you wooing your customers, but it could – but the same is true for business relationships where you do, you want to be woo’d on a first date, and too often people are going, you know, trying to round second base on the first date and it does, it really leaves a bad taste in your mouth and instead of accomplishing what you’re trying to accomplish, which I think for some people it’s just awkward, they have a tough time explaining who they are and what they do and just kind of reaching out, and what it kind of ends up being is this ‘go for the jugular, let me tell you who I am, let me tell you what I’m all about,’ and ask for the sale, well, they never earned the right to even ask for the sales, so I think that’s a great point that as you’re out there, as you are building out this strategy, as you’re thinking through how you can tactically start to connect with those people who maybe are influential within your industry and also with those consumers, understand that you really do have to earn the right to ask for their business. You’ve got to take the time to get to know people, and Ashley, I’ll go back to you and I – I think our relationship is a great example where we met us bloggers, we got to know each other, mutual respect over our content, and then that slowly started to move into social networking, and we connected on Google+ and we connected on Twitter, we’ve just connected all over the web and I can see that what you’re doing is consistent everywhere and that really starts to build that rapport when we’re connecting, we’re engaging, we’re sharing each other’s content, and we’re truly taking an interest in that other person as opposed to me having just coming to you and saying, “Hey Ashley, I saw that you’re a blogger, hey, want to start sharing all my stuff?” I mean, really, come on, has that ever worked?

Ashley: Luckily I don’t get too much of that, but occasionally I get some e-mails and I’m just like, really, I mean I feel really bad for the people… I had one this morning, someone asked me – I mean it was actually reasonably well done, the e-mail for a change, which is quite rare but still – I’m kind of like, okay, just… it’s your first e-mail to me, maybe you should get to know me first, but anyway.

Rebekah: Take a little time!

Ashley: So getting back to our original topic again, and so we’re out there engaging with people, we’re getting involved in conversations, and this is something that I’ve been trying to do on LinkedIn because it’s good for me to be just chit-chatting, offering information, and I think this comes back to this presentation I saw from Jay Baer about being useful, and this is something that he signed into my book when I was at the conference, he’s just says, “be useful,” and I just thought that’s really, really handy to keep in your mind, even if you’re meeting people as we’re talking about, sort of peers, or whether you’re talking about meeting your customers, if all you’re ever doing to create business is finding the places where people are and helping them, I think that’s one of the best ways you can interact with your potential connections or customers.

Rebekah: Oh, I couldn’t agree more. And, be useful, my goodness, just think about that. If you simply went into your day, getting ready to post to Google+, to Facebook, to Twitter, wherever it might be, and thought about, ‘How can I solve somebody’s problem today? How could I make their life better, easier, what could I offer to them, what do I know?’ Because of course no matter what you do on a daily basis, you have a whole lot of information that somebody is dying to gain access to. So, you know, think about it in those terms. What can I do to be of value to somebody else? And I always think about it from that kind of servant point of view because as business owners, as entrepreneurs, no matter what line of work you’re in, if you’re running your own company, you are a servant to those people and if you come at it from that perspective, there is so much value in that as opposed to that feeling of that all you’re ever doing is take-take-take, you’re asking, you’re asking for that sale, you’re asking for that business, you’re asking for help, which certainly there’s nothing wrong with that, we’re all in business to make money, there’s no secret. But again, I’m going to go back to you, you’ve really got to earn that right and the only way that I know that you can do that is to be valuable to people and that means creating consistency in all that you’re sharing and that’s where it goes back to having a plan in place, understanding what kind of content you’re going to share on a daily basis. That’s going to be helpful. That’s really going to be useful to people that you’re going to want to take and either read over and over again, they’re going to want to share it, they’re going to want to pass it along, so it, you know, it all really does play hand-in-hand together in understanding what their needs are and then consistently sharing that just over and over and over again.

Ashley: That’s a, a great point, and that’s really, it’s all about sharing stuff which helps people, and they remember you for that, and that was something Jay was saying in his presentation. Who are you going to remember? The guy who had the big billboard on the highway or the guy who helped you solve a problem when he didn’t even ask you for anything in return, and of course that comes back that to having an app which helps you find a location or whatever. Oh, that’s something from a company I’ve never bought anything off of, that’s amazing. And you know, you really remember that, that really hits home and in this day and age, it’s the way we have to do business.
So if you’re sharing content on a daily basis, and I was just reading through your points on your post again, you’re saying here the rule of 70/30, and I think this is just something that most people tend to follow, and I’ve seen some people really get wrong with the 100/0 rule which is the exact opposite which is almost like shouting again – which is, of course, sharing yours and other people’s stuff.

Rebekah: Yeah, well, exactly, so the 70/30 rule, which – not a hard and fast rule by any means, this is going to be a little bit different for everybody, but it just basically means that you’re sharing 70% of other people’s content, 30% of your own, and again, it’s finding that happy medium for yourself. But I always like in this, too, in a social networking event, because sharing content is definitely all about networking and think about it this way, if you were to walk into a networking event and just storm into the room, a bunch of people in the room, all talking, and you just started shouting about yourself, telling them all about your accolades, your skills, what you’ve done in the past, who you are, and oh by the way, here’s what I do, here’s how you can send me a client – what would those people do? They’d probably turn around, walk away. Nobody’s interested in somebody that just stands on a mountain and shouts with a bullhorn. So, you know, it’s very similar within social media. You want to create conversations, and a great way to do that is to share your content, but also share other people’s content. There are plenty of people, and this goes back to what I was saying about identifying who those people are within your industry, that are really doing a great job sharing content. So network with those people, network with them to get to know them and then start sharing their great content as well and a lot of businesses that I work with will say, “Oh my gosh, why in the world would I share somebody else’s content?” Oh my goodness, why wouldn’t you? There’s just so many different reasons to do that. 1. It’s creating that relationship, 2. It sets you apart, because now you look like you are creating just a wealth of information and you’re sharing all of this information on a daily basis and you become that go-to resource for, you know, whether it’s on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, wherever it is you’re sharing, people are saying, “Well, pfft, I don’t even need to go anywhere else to get all the information I’m looking for because Ashley just shares it. He’s out there curating, he’s out there creating, he’s doing it all for me.” So it’s really positioning you as the thought leader, as that go-to professional, so there’s just tons of different reasons to want to share other people’s content .Again, back to the 70/30 rule, not a hard and fast rule, I think you really have to start to get out there, start to share other people’s content, know again how much you can commit to and how much creating of your own content. I post once a week. I know that’s my commitment to my blog, so you have to figure out how much can you commit to and then how much do you want to share on a daily basis? And then start to kind of weave other people’s content into that.

Ashley: Yeah, and I think that’s a problem that many people have in thinking that they have to keep up with the Joneses, if that’s a good enough expression for that, but –

Rebekah: It is.

Ashley: – you don’t have to do what everyone else is doing. Because once the people connect with you they’ll get used to what you’re doing, and they’ll expect that so I think the key is, and we’ve, I think, already mentioned this already but the key is consistency as opposed to volume. And if you’re on it once a day is probably not enough, there’s certain amount of times per day, especially on something like Twitter, maybe on Facebook it’s only a couple of times per day, and on Instagram maybe the same and Pinterest, again, you know, four or five times per day, whatever, but certainly if you’re doing it once a month people are going to forget you. So you need to find out kind of what the minimum standards are for each channel but certainly doing exactly the same as the big boys are doing or whatever, is not even your competition is doing, maybe they’re annoying the people who are following them, because they’re spitting out too much content, could be.

Rebekah: Yeah, well, and I think that’s a great point. I, you know, I talked about taking a look at your competition, and that by no means does that mean,mirror or mimic what they’re doing, I love what you said, we should all strive to do our own thing, be unique, get out there and set the tone for your business, your brand across your social networks, on your blog. To me, sustainable gets done and if you do not create a sustainable plan, one that you actually feel you can commit to, you’re going to get stressed out, you’re going to feel overwhelmed, and you’re going to start to let it slide, and that’s where the problems definitely do begin to crop up. Because then all of the sudden consumers are landing on your Google+ page and you haven’t posted in a month. Well, to me that looks far worse than not having a Google+ page altogether. So, you know, put a plan in place that feels comfortable to you, that you really feel like you can commit to and it maybe you work up to it. You start to share a little bit of content on a daily basis, and then you start to test the waters and see, ‘can I share a little bit more? Can I post a second time per day on my Google+ page?’ Whatever that might look like, just start to test it out, see how it’s received from your community and then move on. Then maybe bite off a little more. To me, it’s always baby steps. Don’t dive into the deep end of the pool and think that right out of the gate you’re going to have this enormous social media business plan or strategy that you’re going to be able to keep up with, especially if it’s just you and you don’t have a team. So, if I can give one big piece of advice, it’s really focus on maybe a couple of things. Focus on what you can commit to on your own blog, if you’re a writer, and you’ve got content on your blog, think about is it once a week, twice a week, what can you actually do, and then how much do you really have to curetting content – meaning going out there, finding other people’s content to share. Think about those two pieces, how many hours within a day or your week you have to do those two tasks and then chunk it down to, what does that mean? How many articles can you actually write, and how many articles can you actually curate?

Ashley: Mhm. Yeah I think that’s almost a perfect place to end, I was actually looking at the time and we’ve almost reached fifty minutes already, I can’t believe it. And yeah, actually, I think that’s almost a perfect place to end, I’m not sure, is there anything else you think we should touch on?

Rebekah: No, I think you’re right! I think that really does bring it full circle. I think the misconception that a strategy has to be lengthy, it has to be 20 pages, it has to be all encompassing, can feel very daunting to a lot of people, and so I would say, start small. Start small, and really know your limitations. Know what you can take on because understanding that, really knowing that from the get-go is going to allow you to put a sustainable plan in place.

Ashley: Yeah, I think that’s perfect because we’ve probably completely daunted or, I’m not even sure if that’s a word, but anyway that’s the problem of living in a German-speaking country, but anyway, ‘daunted,’ yes, I think that’s a word… but anyway, it’s daunting for people to hear all of this stuff. Multiple channels, multiple content types, video, podcast, Twitter, and you’ve just said, basically don’t do that; don’t bite it all off at once. These are all opportunities and options, they’re not musts and you don’t have to do 90% of them, you just need to do what you can, where you can, and where you’re comfortable, where your customers are, piece by piece, slowly implement, build it up, and that’s exactly what I did when I started and now I’m comfortable on multiple channels and I still can’t cover them all fully. And I just have to live with that, it’s something I can’t do, and yeah, that’s basically the way it is. And as you say, it doesn’t – you don’t have to copy everybody else. Do what you can but do something and try to engage with people and I think that’s almost perfectly covered it all, so these people should be creating a little bit of content wherever they’re comfortable on the channels that they can do that on. Awesome. I’m ready to go, even though I’ve already got mine in place. But I feel like I should’ve had that when I started out. That’s, yeah, that’s as you say, it doesn’t have to be complex, and that’s what I think people need to realize. It sounds really difficult when you say, “Social media strategy, oh my God, I need to write a book!”

Rebekah: Exactly. No, and you said it so well. Do what you can with what you have.

Ashley: Yep.

Rebekah: Don’t over think it; don’t stress yourself out over it, just figure out what you can commit to, and what you can commit to daily.

Ashley: And certainly if people go and follow you they’ll get lots of great tips, and let’s go there. What’s the easiest way to connect with you?

Rebekah: Well, they can find me on my blog which is Rebekahradice.com or connect with me pretty much anywhere social media-wise; on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ is probably where I’m spending the majority of my time, and that would be +Rebekahradice or @Rebekahradice over on Twitter.

Ashley: Okay, and I’ll put all of those links on the show notes and that’ll be madlemmings.com/episode18, that’s the number 18, and all of the links there and I’ll the links a few of your posts on this topic too so people can get a feel of what you’re blogging about and get some more information and yeah, I just want to thank you again for having your first coffee with me.

Rebekah: No, thank you.

Ashley: And we’ll certainly catch up again soon, I’m sure, and yeah, have a great day and hopefully a great rest of the week, as well.

Rebekah: You too.

Ashley: Alright, thanks Rebekah.

Ashley: Welcome to the show, Susan. Thanks for joining me today.Susan: Thanks for asking me to be here, Ashley. This is fun.Ashley: It’s always great to meet someone new and have a chat about the things we love talking about, right?

Susan: Yes, absolutely.

Ashley: Just for everyone who doesn’t know you, can you give us a quick 2 minute spiel on your background?

Susan: Sure. My background is as an entrepreneur. I had a brick-and-mortar business in San Diego, California, and as a result of the growth that took place with that business, then I wrote a little gift book, and it’s really just inspirationally based, called The Land of I Can.

But then I did so well in the publishing world and did so well with it online that I started helping other authors and other publishers. So there came a point that I decided that I wanted to move to the Seattle, Washington area, which is where I am now, and I sold the business in San Diego – although I am the co-author of The Idiot’s Guide on how to operate and open a coffee bar, so that was my legacy.

Then moved up here and have been helping authors and entrepreneurs – because again, I’ve had a brick-and-mortar business and I can certainly help the solo entrepreneur. I had 55 employees when I had the five locations, so I’m not a Fortune 500 kind of gal. I really believe in paving your own path.

And then the topic we’re going to talk about here shortly is that I wrote a little Kindle book last summer on the topic of Klout, and I’m very passionate about that.

Ashley: And marketing, online marketing in general, you’re very active.

Susan: Yes, very, very active. Again, it comes as a result of I want to do it first and learn how to do it well, and then be able to help others. That’s what happened when I published The Land of I Can, and then on Walking the Talk.

I use social media and I use Klout because I’m always looking at how I can improve my own sphere of influence and what’s working and what’s not, and then I can bring that back home and help people, either through my coaching and consulting, done-for-you services, or in any books that I write.

Ashley: Okay, so on a daily basis, you’re working with a variety of people doing all these kinds of things.

Susan: Yes.

Ashley: We’re just getting onto the topic we’re jumping onto today, which is influence and Klout. Maybe we should first quickly just define what we’re talking about, for those people who don’t really understand this whole influence, influencers, powerful people online. Because it is, for many non-marketing people, quite a strange thing.

Susan: Here’s the way that I like to approach it, is that influence isn’t new. Influence has been around as long as human beings have been on the planet, and the official definition of influence is the capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone or something or the effect itself.

To bring it into at least the 21st century kind of thing, think about Dale Carnegie, who was the grandfather of people skills and talking about the power of influence when he published How to Win Friends and Influence People in 1937. So influence isn’t new. The new spin is that we now can influence people online, where in the past our influence was more person-to-person.

Ashley: There’s sort of an amplification going on, really, and also an ease of reach. You can reach influencers very easily, too.

Susan: The world has become our oyster, because we don’t need to do – like when I had my brick-and-mortar business in San Diego, I could only reach those people who were within a sphere of the location that were willing to come in. But it would’ve been very hard to sell them coffee and muffins in Switzerland.

But when you’re online, everybody is a potential lead, a potential customer, a potential JV partner. We’re not limited anymore.

Ashley: I don’t know how to place this, but is there a specific time when you’d say somebody becomes an influencer? Or would you say we’re all influencers in some way?

Susan: I think we’re all influencers; it’s just the degree of. That’s one of the things that Klout, which is this third party social media measuring system – and it’s not perfect, and we’ll talk about that, but it does work.

So what I like to think of it as is when you’re in school and you get a “C” on a particular topic, you know you have some work to do, right? If you have an “A,” you say, “Okay, I’m doing pretty well. Maybe I need to go work on that topic where I’m failing.” Everybody who’s in school is getting a grade, and anybody who’s online – in particular, having a Twitter account – has an influence score.

The question is, how influential and where are they on that “A, B, C, D, E” scale, so to speak, if we think about it in terms of a school and how well we’re doing. In my opinion, we always want to be improving.

Ashley: That’s the hard part, right?

Susan: Exactly. We want to be improving in anything that we’re learning or doing, and in business, we always want to be improving. With your web work, we use Google Analytics, we use tracking so we can tell what’s working and what’s not. Because if we’re not testing and tracking, we can’t improve it.

So that’s what Klout allows us to do, is to be able to measure our influence and how well we’re doing, and it does work. When I started, because I’ve always been active in social media, I came into Klout with a relatively high score. It’s bantered about, but I think if you’re over 45, you’re influencing people. If you’ve got a score of 18, you have some work to do.

When American Airlines opened up their Admirals Club a year ago, I believe they were looking at anybody with a score of 50 or above. And when I published the Klout score book last year, my Klout score was 64, and today it’s 83. So it’s just constantly using the systems that are in place to see how well it’s working. I mean, how did you find me? You found me online, right?

Ashley: I think we’ve probably touched base – I’m not sure if it’s been through – Triberr, maybe? Are you on Triberr?

Susan: I am, but I’m not really very active there. I think we just met on Twitter.

Ashley: It’s funny how it happens, because sometimes I can’t remember where I find people. It’s just through certain retweets, through certain hashtags. And that’s an interesting thing; it just kind of happens organically, and as you say, it’s a calculation of your reach. If you don’t have a big reach – because I have no idea who I’m touching. Yeah, it’s an interesting idea, you asking me that question, because actually I really don’t know.

Susan: That happens for me frequently. I did a speaking engagement in Denver at Author U the first part of May, and I used to go out and do a lot of speaking engagements when I lived in San Diego and around the country, but once I moved up onto my farm, it’s pretty hard to get me out of here. I like to stay here. But I had promised Judith Briles, the woman who puts it on, and she had interviewed me on Klout and other social media topics.

So I went out to Denver and did that topic, but I said, “I don’t need to do that,” because people find me online. My clients come to me through referrals or they find me online. And when I ask them – they reach out to me – “How did you find me?”, it’s always going to be one of those two answers.

So you really can market from wherever you are in the world, and if you are influential and if you are building a good brand online, then you don’t really have to go out and market the way we used to.

Ashley: Yeah, it’s an amazing thing. Actually, many of the people I have on the podcast, when I talk to them pre-show or post-show about their situation and what they’re doing, it’s usually the same story. It’s someone often in the middle of nowhere or in a very small place who has very little power or connections where they are, and online they appear as a complete other person.

Or maybe it’s no longer the case. We say that it’s not a separate thing anymore; it used to be. But it’s really, really interesting. It’s an amazing thing. Actually, I’m wearing a t-shirt now which I got many years ago which says “I’m famous online,” and I used to joke about it.

Susan: There’s a cartoon that shows a dog sitting in front of a computer that says “Everybody’s famous online or something to that effect, and I love that, of course, animal lover that I am. But yeah, who knows who’s on the other side of that computer screen, right?

Ashley: Yeah, it used to be a joke for me because it was always like “Oh yeah, yeah, you’re famous online” because you have a Facebook account or whatever, but now it actually becomes a point where people know people and they don’t even realize they’re known by those people.

You have followers, you have people reading your blog and reading your tweets and they never respond. You don’t know who they are, you don’t know who’s listening. You don’t know who your audience is, often. Only a small percentage of them. We have a huge amount of influence.

Getting back to Klout, which is what we were going to talk about, this came about as – were you using this from the beginning? Was this founded basically as a way of measuring online influence?

Susan: Being someone who’s been in social media almost from its inception, before it was popular – I used to use it for SEO and for ranking websites because the links would get spidered so well – so as somebody who’s always looking at what’s new, a lot of things come and go. They don’t stick.

So I got involved with Klout and Kred, another social media measurement company, I’d say about 2 years ago, and then finally decided to do the book last summer, because I really felt that Klout is here to stay, it’s not going to go away, and that Klout was the one that would be the leader.

And certainly with its acquisition from Lithium in March at $200 million in cash and stock, I do think Klout is here, and whether people like it or not, it’s better that you know how to use it and how to improve your business, because I don’t think it’s going away.

Ashley: I wasn’t aware of these examples; being in Europe, Twitter and these kind of things are not taken seriously. But if you’re saying that companies are using some of these measurements as a way of determining marketing and reaching people, then it certainly is something worth paying attention to if you are a serious online marketer.

Susan: Oh, absolutely. I had a wonderful conversation – and I’ve had it on my to-do list to do an article on it, and I haven’t yet – but a great conversation with the Head of the Social Media Department for American Airlines, and they love Klout. She shared a lot of the information, the internal documents with me from the promotion that they did.

And think about it: if you’re checking into a hotel and they have your email and they can pull up your Twitter account, and they see that you have a Twitter score of 83, do you think they’re going to put you in a room next to the freight elevator and one that needs repair? Or are they going to put you in a really nice room with a view?

Because they know that you have the ability to let people know when you like something, and you have the ability to let people know when you don’t like something. And we are the media now. We don’t need – although we do watch TV, we do listen to the radio – but you’re creating a podcast right now. So we have the ability to affect what other people think or know.

In fact, Dale Carnegie said that there are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contact with the world, and that we’re evaluated and we’re classified by those four contacts. It’s what we do, it’s how we look, it’s what we say, and how we say it. And we can do all of those things online.

Ashley: Sure. It’s really, really interesting, because I’ve never really thought about this stuff like that. Because as I said, here in Switzerland, social media is LinkedIn, basically. People are using Facebook and LinkedIn just for personal or CV-related tasks. There’s very few companies using Twitter. Slowly a couple are picking it up for customer service. So thinks like Klout are nowhere – at least as far as I know, nowhere on the horizon.

Susan: That’s fascinating, because watch out, it’s on its way.

Ashley: Yeah, I can believe it.

Susan: Like worldwide brands, like American Airlines, just as one, as they become more and more used and prevalent, it will spread across the world.

Ashley: Yeah, it makes sense. Instead of saying you need to recognize a face – “Oh, that’s Brad Pitt walking in; we’d better give him a good room.” I mean, he’s probably booked the top room anyway, but let’s just say he hasn’t – and now you’re saying, “Okay, I can now recognize someone from their details and realize that they’re more powerful than I thought, and therefore I should pay more attention to them.” That’s an amazing thing.

So what kind of things are going into a Klout score right now?

Susan: For the most part – I mean, there are lots of different connectors that you can use, but the Klout score really heavily depends on Twitter, Facebook – either your profile or your page; can’t be both, so you want to pick the one that you are most active on – LinkedIn, Instagram, and what made my score go from 80 to 83 is Wikipedia.

So you can connect things like Foursquare, if you’re very active there, a few others like Blogger and WordPress – the org, not the website. But in all honesty, the ones that Klout really pays attention to is Twitter, Facebook. Even Google+, I’m connected, but that really doesn’t seem to move the needle very much yet. I think that probably will change in the future.

But if you are active, and I’ll define what active means, in Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, you’re going to bump your score up.

Ashley: So even Instagram is having an influence on this? Because it’s still probably one of the smallest, right?

Susan: They love it. Yeah, it’s fascinating. There are people who are bumping up their Klout score significantly, just being more active on Instagram.

Ashley: So Pinterest isn’t taking any power right now.

Susan: Pinterest is not a connector yet. I don’t know why they haven’t; I think it should be. They haven’t asked me, so I don’t get to weigh in on that. But again, it’s kind of like where Twitter was in, what was it, 2007. It’s in its baby form now, and it’s going to grow into an adolescent and an adult, and I think we’re going to see a lot of changes as that happens.

Ashley: This company that bought them, what’s their deal? What do they do? Lithium you said, right?

Susan: I don’t know that I really understand what Lithium does. They say that they’re a provider of social customer experience solutions. I don’t really know what that is, but my guess is that they’re very tied to what we’re just discussing with American Airlines.

I’ll give you a couple of different examples. I was having a conversation with somebody on Twitter. It was around Valentine’s Day, and I had asked if she got chocolate from her husband, and she came back and said she’d gotten Brownie Brittle, two cases of it, and evidently she really liked it. I said, “Oh, I’ve never had Brownie Brittle,” and lo and behold, I got a box of Brownie Brittle delivered to my house.

Ashley: Nice.

Susan: So Brownie Brittle was paying attention. They were paying attention to who was mentioning them, saw what my Klout score was, and decided to send me a box. To me, that’s a customer experience solution. I think that’s where they’re coming from, but I’m surmising that. Nobody has told me that.

I’ll give you another example. I love HostGator. I’ve got several reseller accounts with them, and I recommend them as individual accounts for clients. No hosting company is perfect; we’ve all had our share of horror stories, and sites do go down, especially when they’re on shared hosting.

So I’ll go through the typical due diligence of opening up a support ticket for myself or a client, sending it in with what the problem that we’re experiencing is, and then wait an hour, 2 hours, depending upon the severity of the problem, and if I don’t hear anything, I go onto Twitter and go to the support – I think it’s @hostgatorsupport – and just say “Here’s my support ticket number, and it’s been 2 hours and I haven’t heard anything. Could you check on that for me?”

And they will be back immediately and saying “Escalating.” Within 5 or 10 minutes, typically, they’re on it. Why do you think that they responded to me on Twitter faster than they did through the support ticket system?

Ashley: They see your account.

Susan: Exactly. It’s just like you used the example of Brad Pitt. He’s recognizable. Online, you’re recognizable based on your influence.

Ashley: I don’t have a huge following; I’ve got near 7,000. But it’s starting to have an effect, I notice. I’ve been getting invites from companies for free accounts, which I was never asking for, to just try out. Because suddenly they see a post – I think when I did this Pinterest experts post recently, that went nuts. I think it got something like 1,200 shares or something crazy.

Susan: Oh, that’s fantastic. And that’s the whole thing: people notice that. Now, let’s talk about your score a little bit so that you and your listeners understand how the score works. It’s not how many fans or followers that you have, or friends.

Ashley: Not at all based on that?

Susan: It’s really not based on the number; it’s of the number of friends, fans, followers that you have, how many of them are engaging with you? How many of them are retweeting a tweet, or posting a like or a comment on Facebook? How many are giving it love on Instagram? People can have a lot of Twitter followers that nobody pays any attention to at all. They don’t favorite anything, they don’t retweet anything.

So what Klout is measuring is your activity level. How many people are you actually reaching, which is not just the number of fans, followers, and friends. Does that make sense?

Ashley: Yeah, sure. Because you could have 10,000 fake followers, and that means nothing.

Susan: Yes. And a lot of people have real followers that don’t even see what they’re doing because they don’t care.

Ashley: It makes sense.

Susan: So the big thing with Klout is that you need to be giving people good content. This article that got all the activity, you gave them dynamite content, and people responded. That’s what Klout is doing.

They’re constantly changing, and it’s not perfect. When I got the Wikipedia page, what I found is that Klout measures my score differently now that they did. They put you in a different category. So what was really important for me to be active, and I was getting a lot of bang for my buck before, now it’s changed.

So it changed from that standpoint, and also I’m seeing changes now that Lithium – maybe they were changes that were in the works anyway, or they’re changes that Lithium is now putting in, but it used to be you’d have to wait a couple of days for Klout to pick up your activity, and now it’s almost in real time. They may not have the measurement that they’re going to give you for that post or tweet, but they’re picking it up right away.

I find that very exciting, because the more real time it is – like Google Analytics. We don’t have to wait a couple days to see what’s working; we can tell right away, and that’s now starting to happen with Klout.

Ashley: Being bought by someone and suddenly having access to money certainly will allow them to develop things that they’d only been thinking of or give them servers they didn’t have before and do this real time stuff.

Susan: Yes.

Ashley: That’s really interesting. As I said, I haven’t paid too much attention to it; I know roughly my score is, I don’t know, 64 or something. I had a look once. It hasn’t moved much, and it’s been like that for awhile, I think. As I said, I’m not sure exactly how that’s measured, but my Facebook is more or less dead. I don’t use Facebook much. I mostly use Twitter. Pinterest is big for me, but that’s not measured by Klout, so obviously that hasn’t been picked up.

Susan: Exactly. One thing, too, you want to log into your Klout account occasionally – well, I’ll tell you tow reasons you want to. First of all, because sometimes the accounts get disconnected. It happens often with LinkedIn, and it’s just they want you to re-verify, like reconnect it again.

So one of the things you might do is just log in and make sure that they’re all connected, anything that you want, and then play with it. Get active on Facebook or do something different than what you normally are, and watch what happens.

The second thing is that now that they’re providing what is curated content, they will provide content within your dashboard based on the topics that you have listed are your popular topics, the things that you know about and talk about, write about.

So you can go through – it’ll bring up, I always get Facebook, Twitter, social media – and then if I post that, because my profile – I got started in Facebook so early on that it was before there were pages, and so I used my profile for business. And even though I have Facebook fan pages, they never get the activity that my profile gets as a result. So that’s what I have connected to Klout.

With that connection, if I’m really active and it shows up on the account, then I see that I’m being offered more Facebook curation content. So there is a correlation. They’re tracking. They’re tracking what you’re talking about, where your activity is, and they’re feeding you the opportunity to schedule content to go out to either Facebook or Twitter or both.

What I have noticed is that when I’m curating that content, I get bumps – I mean, even though my score is 83, you know that it’s going to range from 82.83 up to 83.40, and at the point that it gets to 83.51, it’ll bump up to 84. So there’s a range within that score of 83, or in your case, 64, and you’ll start to see the shifts.

And it is much easier – I think getting over 50, getting to 60, it takes more effort to get to the 70s, and every bump in the 70s, like to go from 74 to 75 to 76, it just gets harder. So what you can do is connect a few things, like if you’re not active or haven’t been active on Instagram and you connect that, you’ll start to see some activity right away, and you’ll probably get up into the low 70s or higher. But every incremental step after that gets to be much more difficult.

Ashley: Yeah, it makes sense. Because you did also – I was also looking at that earlier on last week when we were talking about this podcast; you did that list of – was it Top 100 Klout People or something?

Susan: And they have discontinued that.

Ashley: Yes, I couldn’t find it anymore.

Susan: They have discontinued it. I was really disappointed, and I have sent a couple emails to Klout, and they keep saying “We have great things in the works.” So I just have to assume that they have things that will be even better, but I really liked being able to see who – and that’s a part of it.

If you are having conversations with people on Twitter that have a Klout score of 25 and you like them and you support them, that’s fine. They’re a person, and you like them, and you want to do business and have conversations with them. But you want to be looking for people who have scores that are higher, because then, when you interact with them, their people, at a higher level, are seeing it.

It’s the example of if you’re going to do an email blast, a JV approach type thing, and somebody has a 100 email list versus 10,000 email list, which one would you pick to do the blast with? And it’s the same thing. You might do it with a person that only has 100 because you like them and you want to do that, but you’re really going to look for the benefit to come to you with a list of 10,000.

So in addition to your activity on Klout, it’s really who are you interacting with? Because the way that I reframed Dale Carnegie’s four important things is that what we do is about positioning, so we want to position ourselves; how we look is our branding; what we say is our core message; and how we say it is what creates the influence.

Ashley: Also, an example of this kind of thinking as well, I’ve heard many, many, many times, which is the people you surround yourself with basically enables you or defines you in many ways. I also have that issue right now, because I don’t have many people around me in Switzerland who understand what I’m doing, can help me with what I’m doing. So I struggle with that and have to try to go online to get that ability. Find forums, find communities, and so forth.

This is a similar sort of way of thinking. If you always surround yourself with less influential people and people who aren’t in a position to help you, then you will struggle to develop and to grow.

Susan: Absolutely. You hit the nail on the head.

Ashley: And I’ve seen it over and over again. Example, this Pinterest post. A lot of the people I wrote to, I knew, and I knew because over the last 12 months, I’ve gradually, slowly built contact with these kind of people, and some of them have quite some power. For example, Peg Fitzpatrick was on there. I don’t know if you know her. I don’t know her really well.

Susan: I do, yes.

Ashley: I had contact with her, so when I wrote to her, she knew my name. It wasn’t a complete blind write. Because for her, I think she may or may not have otherwise responded, because she’s very busy.

Not everyone on that list was like that, but some of them were certainly more difficult to get to than others, and most of them I know already. I mean, not very well; as I said, I haven’t spoken to them, I haven’t podcasted with them or anything. But it helps to know people, and at least to have retweeted something, to have had a bit of a chat on Twitter or whatever the forum may be.

And that’s where this comes in. I’ve used similar tools like BuzzSumo before to see who’s been tweeting my top posts, what kind of people are responding to my kind of content, to see whether I’m really focusing on the right people or not. Because it’s sometimes really difficult to know, right?

Susan: Yeah, absolutely. Something I was thinking about, too, as you were explaining what you had done with your Pinterest article, is that I was selling computers way back when people didn’t have computers type of thing, so you can pretty much date me in terms of how old I am.

Ashley: We’re not saying anything.

Susan: Yeah. But the interesting thing is, if I cold called somebody, they either had to know of me because somebody said, “You should do business with Susan Gilbert,” and then they were open to the conversation, or, as I moved into the ranks of the corporate world and was working for AT&T, just working for AT&T was a door opener.

But now, people can go online and see who you are. They can tell, if somebody wanted to give you an interview or be interviewed, they’re going to go to your website, and the look of your website, the activity within your website, that’s going to speak volumes, just like when I introduced myself as being with AT&T.

So things have shifted, but yet they’re still the same. It’s just online.

Ashley: Different technology.

Susan: Yes.

Ashley: Or technology where there was none before, right? Yeah, when you talk about all of this stuff, as you’re saying, none of it is new. It’s all people being people all over again. When people say to you, “You’ve got to be personal and you’ve got to stop treating it like a computer and you’ve got to stop hiding behind your computer,” it’s basically a wake-up call to this whole effect of what you’re saying about Dale Carnegie’s book about having relationships and forming relationships and being a good person and being nice.

Because if you approach someone cold on email – and we get that all the time, and I get it every day as well, “Can you help me out with a plug-in?” Can you sell my plug-in? Can you retweet this?” I’m like, “Who are you?” It doesn’t work.

So Klout is really becoming a way for brands to use all of that stuff, because now we’re talking about influence and marketing and all of these kinds of things, blogger outreach, and these are all becoming very popular topics.

Susan: Absolutely. And as we reach out and we’re doing it online, then we are influencing other people, and that influence, typically, while it starts online, will often go offline. I know that doing a podcast, are we doing online or are we doing offline?

But I’m talking to you in real time, and it started at Twitter, but here we are now. I have that, and I’m sure you have that happen all the time, where it becomes much more personal after some social media exchanges take place.

Ashley: Yeah, it’s almost like a very online version of meeting someone. Like someone says, you can’t go straight to the bedroom; you have to take the person to dinner first. I think that’s social media. Get to know someone, send them a few tweets, retweet something, maybe write them an email. And then maybe in a few months’ time, you can ask them for something. But it’s just crazy. It’s crazy the way people approach it.

Susan: Yes. Yeah.

Ashley: I’m the exact opposite. I never ask. I rarely ask. I feel really bad for asking, and then I get all these people who ask without even knowing people. I find it just really rude, but that’s just my upbringing.

Susan: Well, and it is. It’s really marketing gone wrong. There’s always going to be spammer, and that’s the category that I put that into, because anybody who’s a real professional will act exactly the way that you do.

It’s kind of like in the old days, when you’d go to a networking group that was all together in one room, there would always be the person that would run up and stick their business card in your face and say, “Buy your insurance from me.” Well, that’s as rude there as it is when someone is reaching out to you when they don’t know you and they haven’t built a relationship with you.

So that networking meeting is great to get to know somebody, and maybe the second or third time you’re at the meeting, then you decide to set up a one-on-one meeting. So everything that we’re doing really is the same. It’s just we’re doing it online.

Ashley: And now it’s being measured by Klout, but still, ultimately, if you’re not doing it correctly – as you say, they’re measuring things, and just having followers doesn’t cut it. You’ve got to actually have interaction. And you’ve got to have genuine interaction.

I saw that BuzzSumo did something similar; they also measured influencers, and they showed you specific columns. It’s probably a similar breakdown to what Klout does of saying “Okay, this person has influence, but have a closer look: what is that influence? Are they getting retweets? Are they retweeting? Are they mentioning? Are they talking to people?” I think it’s very important with that.

I’ve also noticed – you’ve mentioned a couple of these things but maybe people haven’t picked up on it – Klout is expanding. You’ve now got almost a Buffer-like interface where you can share curated content, right? That’s one of their latest…

Susan: Yes, and if you do that, Klout likes that. When it measures on a scale of 1 to 5 dots how much influence, as long as a couple people retweeted or like it, you get a really nice bump. So there is a correlation there.

Ashley: Of course, they’re liking people using their own system. I don’t know how new this is, because as I said, I’m not really a Klout person, but you also get these perks, right? That’s really interesting.

Susan: Yeah, the perks have been around from the very beginning, but of course, as more and more people get involved, there are more perks that are being added in. The perks are – I don’t even know how they randomly choose who gets what, because when I look at all the listings of the perks, I don’t get every one.

But when they send me a perk, then I accept it, and then I’ll give them feedback about it. One of them, I got a baby thermometer. I don’t have a baby, but I have a friend whose daughter had a baby, so she got the baby thermometer.

So it’s odd, some of the things that they come up with, but if you only do it for the perks – and to me, the perks aren’t really the perks that Klout gives you. The perks are some of the things that I mentioned to you before: being able to reach out to HostGator, knowing that I’m probably not going to check into a Hyatt or a Westin that they’re not going to know what my score is and be benefitted from it. To me, those are pretty big perks.

Ashley: Yeah, and it’s becoming more of an issue, whether people realize it or not, but if you’re working in our kind of community, building up your expertise and how that’s seen and measured, and we have to face it now. It’s going to be measured. I mean, it’s measurable. It’s an online interaction, so you should probably start to take it seriously if you’re serious about your online profile.

Susan: Absolutely. When I first was writing the Klout book, I used the example of our credit scores, and that seemed to resonate so much for people. But to me, it’s the same thing. You can not pay your bills and have a bad credit score and then have to pay higher interest on your mortgage or a car or be declined for something that you might want to purchase. You have free will, and you can’t get mad at the credit score company, because they’re just doing their job.

Or you can work really hard on always paying things on time, as you should, keeping your credit limits in line, and having a good credit score. There are companies that, if you’re going to go buy a car, they’re going to reach out to one or several credit scoring companies to see what your score is and determine whether you’re a good risk or not.

That’s what Klout is. So you can say that you don’t like it, you can say that it’s not perfect – and it’s not, just like there are lots of mistakes that happen on credit reports. But it is a system that’s being used in order to determine the risk factor, and I do believe that Klout is being used as a scoring system to determine how big of reach do you have and how influential can you be, and how could this be helpful to my company?

Ashley: As I said, if that is what you do, if that is your business, if your name is your brand, then I think people really need to take it seriously. It’s like LinkedIn. If you apply for a job and your LinkedIn profile is a mess, it may stop you from getting an interview.

Susan: Absolutely. Exactly, you’re absolutely right. We are, like it or not, an online world. So learning how to work with it rather than being a naysayer – because it’s not going to go away.

Ashley: No, that’s for sure. I think if anything, as you say, it makes more sense to me, when I hear the story of American Airlines, it makes more sense to me that it’s only going to get stronger, because we’re becoming more computerized. We’re becoming more interlaced through the internet. Everything is becoming internet. There’s a wave coming of this so-called – what to do they call it? Internet everywhere. There’s a special term for it.

But a friend of mine’s husband’s working on a project. I don’t know exactly what he’s doing, but having devices hooked up – for example, fridges or whatever that can order your food when you run out of milk or this kind of thing.

Susan: Oh, I like that.

Ashley: Yeah, that’s where it’s going. That’s where the internet is going, and I think it’s only a few years away. And like houses that you can unlock remotely; when a friend comes to visit, you let them in. That’s basically what’s happening with this influence. You as a person are now hooked in online through your social media accounts. People are monitoring you, so somehow, be careful.

Susan: Yes, yes, yes. And if we use the credit score where it measures – I’m not that familiar with credit scores, but I know it measures over a time period. In other words, certain things stay on your credit report longer than other things, and it’s measuring do you have a credit card that’s maxed out or is it paid off in full? So it’s monitoring it.

Klout is updated every 90 days, so when you log into Klout, you’ll see what your score was 90 days ago and where it is today. It’ll also show what your highest score has been within that timeframe. So as your Klout score goes up, your average goes up, and so that average gets computed into your current day score. Does that make sense?

Ashley: Yeah, sure. So it’s basically like a 90 day average is somehow influencing the current.

Susan: Yes. So know that as your score goes up, because it’s over 90 days – in other words, it’s not going back to where I was a year ago; it’s only going back to where I was 3 months ago. So as my score goes up, that average goes up and impacts the score.

Ashley: So if people are wanting to take this seriously, or at least take a look, what would you recommend they do? Pop onto Klout and connect everything up?

Susan: Make sure it’s connected. If you have a Twitter account, it’s there. You just want to log in with either Twitter or Facebook, and make sure that at least the properties that you’re active in are connected. I’m pretty much of the mindset – I don’t think everybody agrees with me, but I’m of the mindset that if you’re not active, don’t connect it.

Ashley: Yeah, have it on the side.

Susan: It’s not going to affect your score. I’m not a Foursquare person, so I disconnected it. It’s there if I ever want to go back and become active, but because of my lifestyle, I’m not checking in and out of places all the time. I’m just working in my barn. So I disconnected it.

But the ones that you are active or you want to become active, connect those, and then start engaging with your audience and watch what happens.

Ashley: Yeah, people should be doing that already. If you’re not, if you’re just one of these people who jumps on Twitter and blasts everybody or never actually interacts with anybody, then this might be a good reason to start doing that.

If you’re serious about your online behavior and your online influence and the way you’re seen online, I think this might be a good way to measure how you’re doing. Are you improving your interaction? Maybe take a look at it every month and see how you’re doing. Why not, right?

Susan: And because I’m somewhat of a fanatic, I’m logged in every day because I’m curating content from there every day, and I’m always watching what post or what tweet or what photo did people like? Because you learn. You learn what your audience wants and you give them more of it.

Ashley: Just to give people an idea, if you log into Klout and you give Klout some topics that you’re interested in – and they also look at what you’re interested in as well, right? And then they give you suggested content from the day from top other influencers or stuff that they found online, and you can then share that. Is that more or less correct?

Susan: Exactly. And here’s the really fun thing. I’m not sure if you’ve had this happen yet, Ashley, but they’re paying attention, because they list my articles sometimes from my blog.

Ashley: You can tweet yourself.

Susan: I was curating, and it was like, “Oh wow, there’s one of my articles.” So I’m getting traffic from Klout now. So another reason – they’re paying attention to who’s out there, and there’s just a lot of ways to benefit, and getting started is Step #1.

Ashley: And then the stuff that you share through there, you can then go back and look what got engaged with.

Susan: Yes. And they score it 1 through 5. There’s dots next to it. It’s in your dashboard; it’s not viewable to someone who’s just looking at your Klout page.

Ashley: It’s your internal, private…

Susan: Yes, it’s internal. And they will list, either by the property, the frequency, or the most activity, and you’ve got little tabs to choose from that, and they’ll give you dots, 1 through 5. So of course, if it’s 5, then they scored that high, and if you’ve got 1 dot or if it didn’t show up at all in the feed, then that wasn’t something that your audience was interested in.

Ashley: So that’s three things you can basically do: log in, start using it as a way to share good stuff with your audience – if you’re not using another way to do that already, like Feedly or whatever else people are using, or Buffer is now starting, I noticed, to do something similar – and then the third thing is, of course, if you don’t care about anything else, you also get freebies. You get perks.

Even if you don’t care about the rest, there’s stuff in there. Like yesterday, I was looking through it before our interview. I thought, “I’ll have a look and see what’s going on in Klout,” and there was an offer from – I don’t know if you know Moo. They do these really cool business cards.

Susan: Yes.

Ashley: And that I was interested in. But there was some really random stuff, and I’m not even sure if they’ll send me it in Switzerland, because I’m guessing a lot of it is States-oriented. There was some really unusual categories. I could choose from all sorts of health, fitness, whatever crazy stuff, and I’m thinking, “Why do I get these perks?”

Susan: It’s amazing, some of this stuff. And again, this is only going to get bigger and bigger and bigger, because the brands know this is a way that they can get out into the hands of the people that have influence.

Ashley: Have influence, exactly. Which is exactly – we’ve come full circle. So that is influence, and if you’re on there, you become influential. It’s a way to get products which maybe you can even review on your blog or get a relationship with the company through that as well. So win-win-win, everyone can win. They should give Klout a go.

Susan: That’s right. There’s nothing to lose. If you log in, you don’t like it, you don’t believe in it, you can always delete your account. But it’s kind of like people laughed when we were using Twitter and Facebook, and look where it is now. So I think it’s here to stay.

Ashley: Yeah, sure. Give it a go. I think if people are serious online and they’re looking to get their name known or even just to get a few freebies for fun, they should at least give it a go. I’ve been on there a few times, and it’s always interesting to see what’s going on.

And it’s changing constantly, and now with Lithium having bought it, who knows what’s going to happen? I just saw another article from someone today about Klout, so people are still talking about. I think everyone should take a look, at least.

Susan: That’s a big buyout. I mean, for a young company, $200 million? And I get that it wasn’t all cash and there’s private stock in that $200 million, but still, that’s pretty amazing.

Ashley: Yeah, not everyone’s WhatsApp. They’re not all going to get billions of dollars for a small piece of software. All right, I think we’ll end our discussion there. Is there anything you quickly wanted to touch on before we go? You’ve got your book on Amazon, of course, which I’ll put a link to in the show notes.

Susan: Wonderful.

Ashley: We’ll put that in there, if people are more interested in that.

Susan: And I’m going to check out your Pinterest article.

Ashley: All right. I’m surprised you haven’t seen it yet; it went everywhere. It was crazy. I think it got 350 tweets and 700 pins. I’ve never done anything like it. I just found a really small little niche of a topic, basically, and it hit home.

Susan: That’s great.

Ashley: And the best place to find you online? Is Twitter the best place to connect with you?

Susan: Sure. My website, SusanGilbert.com, I publish articles there Monday through Friday on social media and promotional work online. And then certainly Twitter; it’s @susangilbert.

Ashley: Easy.

Susan: Yeah.

Ashley: All right, thanks, Susan. I appreciate your time, and we’ll have another chat about social media in the future, I’m sure.

Susan: That’s wonderful. Thank you so much, Ashley.

Ashley: Thank you, too. Ciao.

Susan: Bye bye.

Ashley: Welcome to the podcast, Ian. Thanks for joining me today.

Ian: No problem. It’s good to be here.

Ashley: After many months of tweeting online, we finally meet, like many a podcast guest.

Ian: I know, it’s been awhile. We’ve been chatting on Twitter and various social networks for – I don’t know. It’s certainly been months and months and months. Probably over a year, and we’ve not actually had a chance to speak to each other yet.

Ashley: That’s why I love the podcast. It’s a selfish thing; I get to meet people, I get to talk to things I love talking about and learn things with people, and we get to produce some great content at the same time. So it’s a win-win-win-win-win.

Anyway. I asked you to come on the podcast today because you’re also really big into Twitter and social media. Maybe we should quickly first just do a 2-minute spiel about your background and what you do.

Ian: Oh dear, put me on the spot. Yeah, I actually trained as a musician, so I’m a professional singer. But I’ve always been involved and interested in technology. About 12 years ago, I set up a small web business with my dad, and I’ve been doing that ever since.

About three or fours years ago I started a blog at iag.me, and I’ve been dabbling in podcasting as well. Yeah, I’ve just been fascinated by the psychology of social media and I enjoy blogging and meeting people online. Well, just what we’re doing today. That’s a little bit of a background on me, I think.

Ashley: One of the things that I’ve noticed over the last month, and one of the reasons I wanted to have a chat with you today, was that everyone’s doing the same thing on social media, and after awhile it gets a little bit dull, shall we say. I mean, it’s never dull on social media, but you know what I mean; you start seeing the same kinds of tweets and the same kinds of promotions.

In the last – I’d say it’s probably been 6 months, you’ve been throwing a few things out there that have really gotten my attention, and one of those was the “Stop Saying Thank You” post. What was your inspiration for that?

Ian: Well, it was an article by Mark Schaefer, and Mark Schaefer is a digital marketer based on – I forget where in the States, but he’s somewhere in possibly Tennessee. I met him at a conference in Wales last year, and I just was fascinated by the way he didn’t just take everything as read on social media. He really thought things through.

He wrote an article about why, when he reached a certain number of followers on Twitter, he unfortunately – he was trying to thank everyone for mentioning him or linking to an article, and he got to a point when he just physically couldn’t thank everyone. He just didn’t have the time to do that.

So he made the decision not to thank anyone. I won’t go into the full details of what he was saying in that article, except it really made me think. It made me think “Why do I spend, why do we all spend that time, when people link to one of our articles or mention us, why do we spend that time saying ‘thank you’ on its own?”

Now, I believe that manners are really important; I’m a polite person, and I do say thank you, and I do believe that it is important. But I was really analyzing this and thinking I’m saying “thank you, thank you, thank you” all the time. What am I actually saying? Am I just going through the routine of doing that, or am I actually engaging in a conversation with this person?

That’s what this article was about. It’s got a rather provocative title, “Stop Saying Thank You on Social Media.” I’m not quite saying that, but I’m saying don’t just say thank you. It’s a case of say thank you, but then carry on the conversation. Maybe share something else with them. That was really the point of the article.

Ashley: Okay, that’s really interesting. Basically, I’ve seen the same kind of thing, and there are a lot of people doing this “thank you” exercise, and I certainly did it for a long time, whether it’s a bulk “thank you” or an individual “thank you.”

Some of my more recent articles have had over 100 tweets, so then you’re getting kind of crazy. You’re getting a stream of “thank yous,” which is another issue, of course. Do you really want a stream of just constant “thank yous”?

But I think what’s behind that, and what you wrote further on in that article, is really interesting, which is that – yeah, what are you doing? “Thank you” in itself is almost like a minor acknowledgment or a placeholder. Are you really actually acknowledging that person? Are you starting a conversation? What are you doing there?

I really liked some of your ideas there. What were some of the other suggestions you had there?

Ian: Yes, I was really trying to give people ideas of what else to do instead of just saying “thank you.” Because I see, almost like when people say “How are you doing?” – which we all do, we all say “How are you?” as a greeting, and if we’re honest, most of us are probably not expecting the person to say “Well actually, I’m having a really bad day. My granddad has died.” Which I think is a shame, because that’s where we are.

But on social media, I think we’ve got the opportunity to be interested in more people, how people are, and just to be genuine, because thus is the power of social media. We can find out more about each other, even in the 140 characters. It’s an ongoing relationship.

One of the things that I came up with – well, it’s something really simple – it’s just really a list of ideas of how to replace a simple “thank you.” For example, instead of just saying “thanks for sharing,” you can ask them what they thought of one part of the article. Of course, that is assuming that they’ve actually read the article, which…

Ashley: Isn’t always the case.

Ian: Isn’t always the case. But actually, instead of shaming them and saying “Have you read my article?”, they may think – they haven’t read the article, “Maybe I need to have a look at it.” You’re actually getting them to read the article, so that they can reply to you.

And that actually has worked really well for me. You can actually get into a really interesting conversation about certain aspects of the article that you’ve written.

The other thing could be actually, instead of talking about yourself – because I’m sure we’ve all met people who tend to talk about themselves all the time – is actually be interested in them. Ask them about what they do and their website, their article, and is there anything, how’s their day going, that type of thing.

It could be something a bit more tacky, such as – I’ve written an article recently about Lead Generation Cards from Twitter, so that’s a way of enabling that person to sign up to your mailing list really quickly, just by inserting a Twitter Card.

Which basically is you’ll get a “subscribe” button that they can click on, and they’re automatically added onto your mailing list, their email address. So that’s a bit more of a geeky way, but it’s quite a good one to do.

Or just – we all have stressful days; why not tell a joke or just share something funny? Or maybe say something encouraging about them, something that you’ve learned from them. Because I think we all like to be encouraged. I think that’s one other thing.

In a way, these are just lessons of life, I suppose. But I think when we get behind a computer and play with social media, it’s so easy to forget those things, and sometimes we need reminding. I know I do. Actually, quite often when I write articles on my blog, I’m actually writing to myself, because these are things that I need to remind myself of. Because I do the same.

Particularly if you’re using a platform such as Triberr, which is a way of getting other people to share your content for you, which is fantastic – Triberr has been such a powerful tool for my business – but when you get lots of other people sharing your articles, and you’re saying “thank you, thank you, thank you,” there is just this kind of – it’s really a fairly boring conversation. There’s so many of these lost opportunities, I feel, for building relationships and talking on the internet, on social media.

Ashley: Yeah, I completely agree. I haven’t taken it far enough, I think, but I’ve done the random opportunity when I remember I need to make it a habit of doing half an hour a day of this or half an hour a day of that, because it certainly makes a difference and adds up.

Just thanking everybody, I stopped, especially after it got too much, and after reading your article, I thought, okay, I’m not achieving anything here, and it’s just kind of annoying, I find, actually. I don’t really find that much value in it. The bulk ones, maybe, that’s okay; that’s less.

But then I try and just do three or four a day, or people I haven’t thanked before or people I haven’t seen before. Because people I know very well, I’m going to make an assumption that they don’t need to be thanked every time, because they know I’m thanking them.

Maybe that’s a silly assumption, but I try and go that way and say okay, this is a new person I haven’t seen before; I’m going to click on their Twitter profile, see what they do, say thanks, maybe try and write something quick like – for example, when I first met Jenn Herman, she was in San Diego. I’d worked there once, so I wrote to her and said “Oh, I see you’re in San Diego. Whereabouts? I worked in the north of this area. That’s really cool, blah blah blah.”

Just try and connect with something. Like in real life, what do you have in common, and what can you say to this person apart from how’s the weather? Because of course, that’s the easiest thing to do. But I think starting conversations is really crucial, because otherwise the connection doesn’t really get established. You have a follower; you follow them, they follow you, but it’s not really more meaningful than that. That’s a shame.

But yeah, I think that’s a great way, and I’ve seen Daniel – what’s his name – Sharkov I think is the last name, from Reviewzntips.com. And he does the same thing. He writes to me, and sometimes I’ve shared his article and haven’t read it, and he writes, “What did you think about this?” and I was like, “Oh, yes, better go and read that, Daniel. Good work.”

Ian: Yeah, that’s great.

Ashley: Because I have not read everything that I share, because I share people automatically that I know have good stuff, and then I try and read the ones that spark my interest, that are relevant to what I’m doing at the moment or look particularly interesting.

So I apologize if people think I’m reading all of their articles; I do not have time for that anymore. I used to, but I don’t anymore.

Ian: Thank you for being honest there, because actually, I think the majority of people that share articles, or share articles maybe on a regular basis such as yourself, we don’t always do that.

But I think this is where it comes down to trust. If I’m going to be sharing an article automatically – the way I tend to do it is selective sharing. I use Feedly, for example. I will subscribe to people’s RSS Feeds, and I look down, and if I see any articles that seem really, really interesting, I will share them, and then I will hopefully get the time to read them later. Not always, because we’re busy. But because I trust you, I will share that article.

So I think it’s important to say we’re not just sharing any articles, without any form of trust. But yeah, I think that works really well.

Ashley: It’s a balance, and as you were saying, the inspiration for this discussion from Mark Schaefer was that he doesn’t have time to even thank anymore. I’m sure he does still engage with certain people; I’m sure he has a little bit of time for it.

But what he’s saying is – and this was something John Paul touched on in our podcast last week, which, if you’re listening to this one, is actually then 2 weeks ago. But anyway, he’s going to get to a point where he can’t do that anymore himself, and he apologizes in advance for that.

But it’s going to get to a shameful point where you get so popular because you are so nice that you’re no longer nice anymore. It’s ironic, but yeah, it’s the way it is.

Ian: Yes, it’s hard. It’s a hard one. I would be really sad to get to that point as well. But I think it’s a way where you can actually – you’re maybe stopping thanking everyone who mentions you, and engaging in the conversations that matter more, maybe. You’re being selective in those conversations.

Ashley: That’s what I’m starting to do anyway, because I’m having to focus on other things to build my business, and you have to sort of take the 80/20, or the 80/20 of the 20 from the 80/20, as one guy once said to me. Which is some really small percentage of the things that are actually driving you further in what you’re trying to achieve.

Last year, when I first started blogging, that was being on social media and being active, and now, unfortunately, that’s no longer the case. I have to do other things, because I need money to pay my bills. And that’s just the sad reality of life, but that’s how it goes.

Anyway, moving on to the other post which you wrote, which is related but not, but also was really fun to read, and I think I’ve shared it a number of times. It was the “20 Steps to Being a Social Media Guru,” and that was a great – actually, at first I read it, I thought “This is serious. What is he saying here? This is crazy?” Because some of it was kind of touching on possible, but still ironic, and then some of them were just ridiculous.

And then I realized that the whole thing was a parody of sorts. You were basically saying “Do not do these things, which some supposed experts or gurus do, because it just annoys people to no end.” I’ll go through the points one by one and we can discuss them as we hit them. I just summarized some of the ones I wanted to touch on when I was reading the article.

The first one was something we just touched on quickly, which was automation and automating absolutely everything and never being present in social media. Have you seen that a lot from some of these guys?

Ian: Oh, absolutely. I shouldn’t really admit this, but all of these points are based on real life examples. There are many examples of this every day. If we’re honest, there’s probably a little bit of all of us in these.

And I struggle with this, because when I first really embraced social media – I’ve been using Twitter since it came out, but really the last 4, 5 years of really starting to jump into social media in a big way, I wanted to automate everything. Because I’m a geek, and I saw all these amazing tools that could solve all my problems.

There’s tools such as IFTTT, depending on how you pronounce it, Zapier, and all these tools that will enable you to cross-post from Google+ to Twitter. The problem with all of these, or the potential problem with all of these, is that you can end up “set it and forget it.”

I think that’s what I was trying to make the point in this section, was that – I’ve said here, “to be a true guru, you must learn to automate every social media task, and particularly at all times.” Obviously, that is complete rubbish. We’re going to come onto this in the next one, but all different social networks are different. They’ve got different people, different mechanisms.

There’s going to be times when it’s not appropriate to share something on a particular social network. When the Boston bombings happened – was it last year? I can’t remember.

Ashley: I think I saw an anniversary discussion recently about it, so it must’ve been just over a year ago.

Ian: Yeah, and there were a number of bloggers or people tweeting. And because they had it automated, it kept on posting out these perhaps – particularly at the time of the bombings, could be construed as inappropriate tweets. I can’t remember the example.

I think what I’m advocating is semi-automation. But obviously, to be a “true guru” in the ironic sense, then you need to do it all the time. That’s what I said at the bottom, “some less experienced social media people will use some of these techniques, but to be a true social media guru, you must practice them all the time.” Yeah, I’m sure we’ve all seen examples of that.

Ashley: Automation in itself – I mean, I remember when I first started writing about Twitter awhile ago, and people were saying “Automation’s just not good.” As we’re discussing now with the time issue, I totally disagree. I think there is a balance to be had.

I think maybe I automate a little bit too much, but that’s the way it is, and my followers are hopefully used to that. Or maybe they don’t listen to what I tweet; it could be. Who knows?

But full automation, there’s a balance. You can automate it so that every new blog post gets sent out once or twice; there’s nothing wrong with that, because you want to tweet every blog post. And I think you could also automate – and this is something I encourage, using things like Followerwonk to find out your best times to tweet, and then putting them in some kind of system so that when you do rack up tweets to send out, they’re going out at times where you know you’re going to get engagement. I think at least knowing what those times are is useful.

The tools can help you, but only being automated – and I’ve seen this with a guy who I was actually included on a post of his last year, and he contacted me, and now I’ve got him in some kind of list stream that I monitor. And I’ve noticed that he only posts his own stuff. So if you’re automating and you’ve got no filler tweets in between your posts, then it’s going to look really horrible to your followers, that the only thing you ever talk about is yourself. But that’s a separate point.

The second one you discussed was that all social media channels are the same. Some people make this mistake, too, which is why I’ve stopped buffering things like Facebook posts because it doesn’t work. It’s too different. The audience is too different.

What’s your experience on the different platforms? What are your main platforms, other than Twitter?

Ian: I’m really getting into Google+. I’ve been using Google+ for a long time, but recently I’ve really started to see the value in that. Despite what people are saying; there’s a lot of negativity from some quarters about Google+.

But yeah, I would say Google+, Twitter, and LinkedIn to a degree. I do use Facebook, but I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with it.

Ashley: Me too.

Ian: It’s great to keep up with friends some of the time. I’ll say some of the time. But from a Facebook page point of view, it’s not easy.

Ashley: Yeah, to me it’s a very personal forum, so getting that to somehow bind to your business I find a very delicate business. I never established it; I was too late getting into it. I never got enough followers, and now those followers don’t see anything I post, so it’s almost a dead platform.

Ian: It is possible. I do follow Jon Loomer, who’s a really great guy. His blog is always coming up with some really interesting ideas. But it does require a lot of time and investment, and money, really. Certainly initially.

But yeah, coming back to the social networks all being the same, I think some social networks don’t help this. LinkedIn is the famous example, where you can cross-post to Twitter from your LinkedIn profile. Some people automatically, everything they tweet will be cross-posted to LinkedIn and to Facebook.

But the thing is, on Twitter, we’ve got hashtags, we’ve got screen names, and until recently, until last year, Facebook didn’t have hashtags, and LinkedIn still doesn’t have them. And screen names don’t make any sense. I think it looks horrible, 140 characters. You’ve got – is it like 40,000, 50,000 characters now on Facebook? So if you’re cross-posting your tweets, it just is not engaging.

Also, the audience is different. My Twitter followers are very different to my Facebook fans, which are very different to my Google+ followers. So it’s not to say we shouldn’t cross-post, and I do on a frequent basis, but I just see so many examples of cross-posting and treating all the networks as the same. That was really the point of that point.

Ashley: Yeah, sure. Maybe LinkedIn, to an extent, maybe could, because I find – I think there’s two fields; there’s the main field, I don’t know what they call it, and then the description where you can put in more information. But most people don’t put huge amounts of information in LinkedIn posts.

So you could get away with almost putting a tweet in there, except for the fact that the “@yourname” or whatever and the hashtag looks a bit – it looks clearly like you’ve just cross-posted it.

Ian: Indeed. And not only that, if you use certain cross-posting tools, like for example HootSuite, although I haven’t used HootSuite in awhile, when you cross-post, it doesn’t always cross-post them terribly well. If you cross-post to Twitter and LinkedIn and you include an article, it’s not necessarily going to include an article with the summary, image, and photo, depending on how you do it.

And hashtags, if you’re using hashtags in Twitter, which is a good thing, they don’t make any sense on LinkedIn. It kind of looks – to me, it looks ugly. And obviously on LinkedIn, you’ve got a title and a summary. Well, when you cross-post, how does it work that out?

Now, interestingly, there are two social tools that are different here.

There’s Oktopost, which actually doesn’t let you cross-post; it allows you to tailor-make each update to each network and gives you some advice in terms of how to channel that.

The other one is Friends+Me, which is what I’m using a lot at the moment, which allows you to cross-post from Google+, and that does a really, really good job of targeting it and formatting it properly.

But yeah, it’s just coming back to the whole point that I think some people think that all social networks, or treat all social networks as the same platform. So that was the point I was trying to make there.

Ashley: Yeah, my experience also recently now, I’ve been getting into Google+ a little bit more and LinkedIn, is that the audiences themselves are different. Their expectations of what things get posted, how often, and what they look like.

Especially on Google+. People expect huge, 100 word, 200 word blog post summaries of the blog posts. If you don’t even put an effort in to put a few sentences in, then most people don’t even touch it. And then you’ve got the pictures; if you put a picture in instead of the link, and then the link just in separately, it looks better and you get more engagement.

There’s all these sort of fine tuning elements. On Twitter now, you can put images, and on some of them you can choose which of the images that it’s found that you want to use. If you automate all of that stuff, it just doesn’t work right.

Yeah, so be careful. Get to know the social media platform, I think is a tip there. And also, I think you don’t necessarily have to post on all of them. I don’t. I rarely post on LinkedIn; I try to just contribute to discussions and find that I actually get more engagement from that than just posting.

Because just dropping your link, more often than not, depending on the group and stuff, and your audience, doesn’t necessarily get it. It really depends on what you’re trying to achieve, and the reactions you get. If you’re not getting any reactions, then maybe stop and get to know some people first before you do it.

Ian: That’s great.

Ashley: I’ve found that. I used to do a lot of link dropping, because everyone said to do it in Facebook groups, in LinkedIn groups, and now I don’t even bother, because no one clicks on them. I can see in my analytics that no one’s coming from there.

I’m just thinking, “What am I doing here? I’m just annoying people, probably.” Because no one likes all these – I don’t know about you, but if you look on communities in LinkedIn and in Google, I now am dropping out of ones where there’s no engagement. I see just link, link, link, link, link, link, link. Not even a +1, not even a comment. So why even bother? Obviously no one in there is doing anything.

Ian: Yeah, there are groups – LinkedIn groups can be, depending on the one you’re a member of, can be just people just linking to their articles.

Ashley: Exactly.

Ian: But there are a few where they do work, and I would recommend actually not posting links. Or link to other people’s articles and generate discussion, because I think LinkedIn groups can be very, very powerful, but not if you treat it in the same way as Twitter.

On Twitter, sharing links to other articles can work really, really well. Works well for both of us, I would say. But you can’t do that on LinkedIn. People are just not going to engage with it. In my experience, anyway.

Ashley: Yeah, I’ve tried to find groups across the board, even groups not related to my groups, because I’m trying to find business contacts. But I’m trying to find areas where I can contribute, and in a lot of those groups, there’s no point even dropping any of my links, because they’re irrelevant.

Only if a discussion hits towards a specific area, then maybe I’ll say “Look, I’ve got a really detailed article on that if you want to have a read of it.” But that’s very rare. I don’t do that very often.

I think for establishing really concrete relationships in places like LinkedIn and even Google+, you’re far better off just engaging with the people on a discussion, and then they’ll connect with you, rather than putting a link in which no one will read, and no one will connect with you. Anyway, that’s just something I’ve noticed recently as well, and it’s really interesting to see the behavior on these different networks.

Anyway, moving on, next one. “Numbers are everything” is another one that I saw. I don’t know if that was the exact title of the bullet point you used, because I’ve just quickly jotted them down here. But that’s another realization I’ve had over time. It’s an interesting one. What’s your experience with that?

Ian: I don’t know whether it’s a human trait or a human condition, but we do tend to – because Twitter, the number of followers that people have seems to be kind of in your face when you go to their profile, it seems it’s the one statistic that we use in determining how popular somebody is or how influential they are.

Now, don’t get me wrong; it can well be the case. Obviously, some big celebrities have got huge numbers of followers. But I just think we need to think about other types of statistics.

For example, somebody with millions of followers may not really engage with anyone. Is that the person that you want to follow and engage with? Whereas somebody with 1,000 followers, or even less than that, they may respond to you, they may communicate. They may be posting articles that are really, really interesting, if we’re talking about Twitter.

So I think we have to bear that in mind. I’m not going to pour too much scorn on the likes of Kred and Klout. But I think there’s so much talk about trying to get the biggest Klout score, and yes, I think Klout can be useful; it’s a bit of fun. It can give you a rough idea of how you’re engaging.

But I’ve seen many examples of people who post – how can I put it in a nice way? Just absolute drivel on Twitter and Google+, just posting all the time and all the time. And then will use tools such as Empire Avenue to effectively pay other people to like their content.

It isn’t necessarily easy to do, but you can artificially get your Klout score to go through the roof so you can get 60, 70, 80 by doing all of that.

I just think there are better things to think about, really. Think about who is in your core community? How are you engaging with them? That’s a more difficult thing to define. Just let’s use Klout as a bit of fun, maybe take it with a pinch of salt. It’s fine. But numbers aren’t everything, basically.

Ashley: Yeah, it’s something in social media that I’ve noticed as well. It’s something I strived for in the beginning, and now I’m sort of ignoring, more or less, because I’ve also found the same thing. It’s not what I need and it’s not – in the beginning, I didn’t know what I needed, so of course, we all make these mistakes.

But yeah, numbers – and I’ve been listening to a few interesting podcasts on this recently, more about Google Analytics and site visits, another metric that I also look at too often. Yeah, you just get sort of bogged down with pushing numbers up and vanity metrics, as they call them. Metrics which make you feel good. You’re like, “Yes, I’ve got so many hundreds of visitors today, that’s fantastic.”

But none of these people are opting in, or none of these people are buying your products or whatever it is you’re trying to achieve. It depends what you’re trying to achieve, and I think this is where it gets more interesting.

And that’s where these guys were really putting a lot of dose of reality on this podcast, was you have vanity metrics, which are the ones that make you feel good, so every other metric, that’s not useful. And then you have metrics which show you how you’re doing, and whatever those goals are that you’re trying to achieve, that’s very personal.

But yeah, we all got bogged down in these kind of things. Kred and Klout, okay, they can give us an idea of influences, and whether you’re looking for some kind of blogger outreach program, they might be helpful for that. But for most of us, it’s not particularly relevant.

And that leads to the next one, which is the buying the reputation. It’s interesting; I have no idea who’s done that, but I get probably – I always look, occasionally every night, if I’m lying on the couch and I’m looking at Twitter, I look at who’s followed me recently, and then I look to see if they’re interesting, and then I follow a couple back if they’re in my area.

But there’s always one or two who have in their profile, “For $100 bucks I can get you 1,000 followers.”

Ian: I know. You didn’t mention one of my other points, which is fine, which was automated direct messages. Just about all my automated direct messages that I receive are “You can get 20,000 followers for $30” or whatever. We all get them, don’t we?

But the fact is, people are willing to spend that money to get all these fake followers. It is big business. And you can quite easily go to a website like Fiverr – I shouldn’t really be mentioning this, but you can go to Fiverr and for $5 get all these zombie spam followers which are not going to engage with you. They may boost the number of followers you have, but they’re not going to engage with you. And actually, you may find that later on, Twitter will block all these followers and you’ll be down to where you were, and you spent all that money.

Yeah, you can actually find out how many spam followers you or somebody else has, or particular fake followers, by the fake follower check. If you go to fakers.statuspeople.com, you can check how many fake followers you have or somebody else has. It’s quite interesting. That’s one tool you could use.

Ashley: I’ll make a note of that. We’ll put that in the notes. Was it fakers…

Ian: Yes, fakers.statuspeople.com.

Ashley: Okay, we’ll put that in the show notes, because I haven’t used that one before. I’ve used things like ManageFlitter and stuff. They do a portion of that; you can look for – but I’m not sure exactly what the criteria are.

Ian: I use ManageFlitter too, and it is kind of useful sometimes to weed out potential spammers, but yeah, this one’s pretty good. It’s actually quite interesting, because if you check some celebs, you can see that actually – there have been examples where 50% of them have been fake. They’ve obviously just bought followers.

Ashley: Okay, so that’s one for if you’re really trying to build your following for an actual purpose, other than just having a number and, I don’t know, selling your account maybe? I’m not sure how that would work. You can do that with traffic maybe? I read something similar this morning.

But anyway, if you’re trying to do it for that reason, then maybe it’s worthwhile. I can’t imagine why you would want to, but those people now know what to do. But the rest of you, who are trying to actually achieve something, don’t bother doing that, because it’s a complete waste of time.

Ian: Absolutely.

Ashley: And that will lead us to the next one. That was the direct messages one, actually. I just quickly touched on that. Someone wrote to me recently and said “I’ve sent you a direct message on Twitter.” I’m like, “I don’t read them.” Because I haven’t found one in the last months, I don’t think, that was actually a message. They’re all automated.

I tell people, if you’re trying to get hold of me, really, please, just email me via my website, because I read those. Whereas DMs – I read Google+ messages as well, and LinkedIn and all the rest, but DMs on Twitter, it’s just all “Thanks for following me. Now follow me on Facebook.” Okay.

Ian: Why?

Ashley: Sure I will. I followed you on Twitter because I love Facebook. Anyway, the next point we had was the using all platforms. Again, I might be skipping some here. I haven’t got the post open.

I think this falls back to more what we were saying before as well, which is that not all platforms are the same, and you can’t possibly achieve everything you want to achieve by being everywhere and posting everywhere, so be selective. What was your other point on there? I’m not reading the article.

Ian: This one was – I was actually writing this to myself, because I’m such an early adopter with all these. Anything new and shiny that comes, I have to sign up. I even have two App.net accounts. App.net is still going; it’s this niche social network where you pay – it’s come down in price, but it’s…

What I was saying there, just because it has been talked about, just because it’s new and shiny, think twice before you just jump on there. Because you need to be using your social networks effectively. If it’s just yourself, if you’ve got a small marketing team, then are you going to be able to use Google+, Facebook, Instagram, Vine, Path, Zeemee, SoundCloud, Last FM. Audioboo, blah blah blah blah. I could go on. Are you going to be able to use those effectively? Otherwise, just think why bother?

What I’d always suggest is always look at the new social networks and think “How best could I use this for my business?” But then just think very carefully about whether you have the resources to invest in that, because otherwise, I wouldn’t bother.

Ashley: Completely, and that’s something I’ve been looking at recently with my business as well, which is what kinds of people are on each of those audiences? You can find roughly demographics out, and also you can look at some posts that are out there analyzing the kinds of people.

For example, yeah, Pinterest is people who are looking to buy stuff, typically. I’m using it for social media, and it works, because many social media people are on there, but typically it’s people looking to buy stuff. It’s very good for products. People on LinkedIn are very business-oriented, looking to connect to do with business. People on Facebook, as we said before, are in there for fun. And people on Twitter are on there for – used in a lot of different purposes.

But it pays to know roughly what audiences are on there and what kind of things work well on those networks before you waste your time spreading yourself too thin. I think that’s something that I’ve really learned recently.

Ian: Yeah, definitely.

Ashley: And “follow everyone back”; we touched on that before. I follow some people back out of interest, but I certainly just don’t follow everyone who follows me. And I guess you don’t do that, either.

Ian: No. It used to be possible with ManageFlitter and other tools to do that automatically, but Twitter changed the rules last year. ManageFlitter had to change the way they worked. So you can’t automatically just follow all the people that follow you back. If you do that, if you find a tool that allows you to do that, then you effectively can get banned from Twitter, so it’s just not worth doing.

I would advocate what you’re saying, and that is to look at the people who followed you back and then look at who’s interesting, and selectively follow people back.

But there were many people in the Twitter community that were really upset by that, and it was a way that you could basically boost the number of followers. If you followed somebody, then they would follow you back, and then you’d unfollow the people that didn’t follow you back, and then basically, over time, that was how some people got lots and lots of followers.

Obviously, you can understand why they were upset by that, because they weren’t able to, in an automatic way, carry on with that.

Ashley: Yeah. I use TweetAdder occasionally. I used it a lot more last year, as I said, when I cared about those things. But I use it now just to look for people. It’s a very nice way to do some searching and stuff for specific niches, and even in specific cities. It has some quite nice search functionality. I could probably do it in Twitter, but I found it easier to just keep using TweetAdder. But they have the same thing, and they I think lost a lot of customers as a result of this change.

But I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I mean, I never had the tool when it had that available; I think I got in after that anyway. But automatically following everybody back, yeah, okay. Not really something I want to be doing. But anyway, some people obviously love that.

And another one, which I was chatting with Sarah yesterday, we were doing this week’s podcast about webinars, and she was saying that the killer of webinars – and it’s also the killer of email lists, and it seems to be also the killer of Twitter and so forth – is constantly pushing and selling and annoying people.

Ian: Yeah. It obviously works for some people.

Ashley: It must.

Ian: I just don’t understand it. In my dim and distant past, I worked in a music shop and I sold these digital pianos. We were forced to go on all these sales workshops, and what they wanted us to do was to pounce on the customer as soon as they walked up the stairs. We had to pounce on them, say, “What do you want to buy? You need to buy this one.”

Quite frankly, if anyone did that to me, I’d run a mile. I was never taught sales, but what worked for me was giving the customer some time to walk around the shop, go up to them, say “How are you doing?”, talk about anything other than the product, and then just make them realize that you’re not going to bite. You’re actually a nice human being.

I just don’t understand – when I come across these websites where an automatic video will play in a very sales-y way, saying that I need to buy this product, it just turns me off. Maybe I’m cynical; I don’t know.

But that’s why social media works for me, because we’re talking about ourselves, we’re talking about other people, we’re getting to know each other. And yes, obviously, occasionally we will talk about our products. But it’s on a much more personal and human level. And that always, for me, works – that has that long-lasting effect.

Maybe it depends on the product that you’re selling. For me, I want to build long-term relationships with people, and so for me, I don’t want to quick sell. I want to build that long-lasting relationship. Yeah, I think I’ve probably said all I need to say about that. It’s just don’t shove your product in their face. Think about where they’re coming from, and build your relationship over a period of time.

Ashley: Yeah, it’s easy to go for the quick fix on anything, and that’s a lot of the points we’re touching on anyway, which is a lot of the problems are that you think there’s a quick solution, whether it be numbers or automation or whatever.

This is something I hate about the selling in the example I brought up, again in the chat with Sarah, was I’ve recently been bombarded by a very popular internet marketer for a new course they have, and it’s quite common. Some people do it all the time, and I’m off their lists very quickly, and some do it less often.

But when they do it and they continue to do it, and they do it for 3 weeks running with 3 emails a week, then I also start to get annoyed. Because it’s kind of like, “Okay, how many times do you need to remind me of your amazing course, ‘time running out’? And if I haven’t bought in by now, do you really think I’m still going to buy in?”

There’s a balance, I think. It’s okay that they’re trying to sell something, because ultimately, for those of us who are running a business, that is how you make your money. You have to alert your customers to certain things, and I have no problem with that. But I would rather that people gradually get to know me and understand what I have to offer and trust me, and then ask me for help, whether it’s through a service, rather than me having to constantly send them 20 emails.

Because like you, that’s not the relationship I want to have with people. If I want to build a website for somebody, it’s like, “Okay, they’ve seen that I can do it, they trust me” – and I’m working with a girl now in Canada, for example, and it’s almost a friendship. It’s actually quite funny. In some ways it seems too familiar, because you have to sort of draw a line, a professional line, of saying “This is the service I’m doing. I’m not your friend.” But you also become friends, and I prefer that. I think that’s a lot nicer.

But these people somehow are just trying to – I don’t know, make millions or…

Ian: I think you can do both. I think Chris Brogan, in his newsletter, I like the way he’s transparent about it. His famous newsletter that he sends out on a Sunday, he’s not really that sales-y, but whenever he is going to talk about one of his courses, he’ll put a big subject line in the email, I think something like “Selly sell, this is a selly sell email!”

There’s a bit of humor in that. I thought, it’s pretty blatant. And he says “You don’t have to read this email. If you’re not interested in my selly sell emails, just delete it. That’s fine.” I kind of like that technique, being transparent. But yeah, it’s just the in-your-face type marketing that just makes me want to squirm.

Ashley: Yeah, there’s too much of it, and it’s always going to go on. There’s not much we can do about it. But for those who don’t wish to do it, now maybe you have some other ideas.

Okay, the second last one I’ve got on my list is to not admit to mistakes. I guess that’s also something similar, being an all-seeing, all-knowing, selling machine. You never talk about yourself and you never admit that you screwed a podcast up, like I did yesterday, which was interesting. Whatever, it doesn’t matter. #10. It’s going to happen at some point. Yeah, I have no problem with that, because I’m not perfect. Never will be.

Ian: Yeah, it’s a funny one, this. I think maybe some of us don’t have an issue with this, but I think it probably becomes more and more difficult. The more popular you become, the bigger the name or the brand or whatever that you have, maybe the more difficult it is to admit mistakes.

But I think it’s really, really important, no matter how big you are, to show your human side. Because it is actually quite attractive to people to admit your mistakes, because let’s face it, we are. As you say, we are all not perfect, and we all learn from our mistakes.

Say for example if you blog about the fact that you made a mistake – I’m not saying that you should write a blog post about your podcasting experience yesterday, but you could actually turn that into a really positive thing and say, “Look, these are the mistakes that I made, the technical mistakes, and here’s what I’m going to be doing to stop that from happening in the future.”

Actually, if you look at the big brands out there that really get social media, they do that too. They admit when they get things wrong, and they say what they’re going to do to reverse that and to move forward. I think people really respect that.

So I think you’re going to get a lot of respect if you admit your mistakes, as long as you are putting something into place to move forwards.

Ashley: Yeah, sure. I like that kind of stuff as well, and the more I get involved in this kind of stuff, the more I meet people online, people who are famous or whatever. I haven’t told that story before where I stalked a magician. Because I’m big into magic, and I actually went to the hometown of my favorite magician and went to his show and met him there, and he was stunned that I’d flown from San Diego and come from Switzerland to meet him, because he didn’t think he was so famous.

You realize when you meet these people – he was kind of like, “I’m just this guy. You want to come over to my place for a barbeque?” I was stunned, because to me, he was on a pedestal. But he wasn’t like that, actually, in real life. He’s an amazingly humble guy.

I think this happens in everything you do, even brands. Behind the brands, it’s just a bunch of people working in an office, and they’re all bumbling around. Half the companies that I’ve worked in, really big companies, like one of the biggest banks here in Switzerland, and if you realize in the background, the mistakes they’re making and the kind of things that are just cobbled together with sticky tape – it’s crazy. Or just Excel sheets, things that should be automated that aren’t, or no one knows the answers to basic questions. But of course, these guys don’t want to admit mistakes.

But I think it’s nice when you go behind the scenes – and I’ve heard this in a lot of discussions and podcasts – show a bit of reality. Show what you do on the weekend. Show that you’ve been sick. It’s not a problem talking about that. Don’t harp on about it, but mention it. I think it’s really nice, and it’s something I’ve been trying to do more of as well, is put a little bit of a human touch to the things that I’ve been doing.

Ian: Yeah. I think that works really well with your newsletter. It’s interesting to find the person – to kind of realize that the person writing this is actually another human being. I know that sounds silly, but we forget that. And actually, people are interested in other people.

Ashley: Yeah, that’s what makes it all tick. People like Pat Flynn are really popular for that, because he’s personalized and made humble his experience with people, and even though he’s extremely famous, he doesn’t behave that way. So I think that’s really nice.

All right, last point before we wrap up, because I don’t want to keep you on the phone all day, and I don’t want to keep our listeners. As Rob Cubbon said, “Keep jogging! You’ve got another half an hour to go!” Because a lot of people listen to this when they’re on the go. I like my podcasts, because I can do a walk and basically fit a podcast in or something.

But anyway, the last one is hold back on your secrets. I’m not sure I fully understood this one. Maybe you can quickly expand this. I was just speed reading it all earlier.

Ian: The title is “Hold back on your mystical secrets.” I think the first sentence says it all: “Social media, SEO, and digital marketing are all dark arts, ones that require years of training and research from the University of Middle Earth.”

What I’m trying to say here is that marketing – we’re talking about marketing here, so marketing and most other – science, if you’re studying biology or chemistry, they all have buzzwords, these mystical, strange words.

In marketing, we’ve got words such as “clickability,” “big data,” “gamification,” “agile marketing,” “KPI,” “PPC,” “ROI.” When I first started reading articles, I kept on seeing these words written, and I didn’t have a clue, “What’s ROI?” I feel stupid admitting that now, but I’m going to admit it. I didn’t have a clue what ROI was. People assumed that everyone else knew what they meant.

So what I was trying to say there is just admit it when you don’t know. And actually, if you are writing an article, don’t just expect your readers to understand what you’re talking about, because there are bound to be people that are coming into this for the first time who really don’t have a clue.

I just think that quite often, we always want to build these inner circles where we share these mystical words with each other, with this kind of virtual knowing smile, like – not an in joke, but this inner circle. And I think that’s a shame.

What I was trying to say, the best thing to do here really is to build trust by giving away your knowledge. That is quite counterintuitive, giving away your knowledge, but if you give away your knowledge and explain things and don’t try and hold things back, then people will trust you. You’re building up trust.

If you’re a social media guru, of course, you’re not going to do that, and people are going to maybe think that you know everything about everything. But actually, probably, the truth of the matter is that you don’t, and you’re just trying to make it look like you do.

Ashley: This is actually an interesting point, the giving away of knowledge, because I was answering a question, or participating in a discussion in a LinkedIn group yesterday, and the girl’s question was “What is the line that you draw in terms of giving away your knowledge for free?”

I answered it in terms of my point of view, which is coming more from a blog post point of view, and I think potentially one of the other people who answered it was answering it from the point of view of people booking your time in order to pick your brain for free, which are two different things. I think you have to be really careful with that, of course.

But keeping all your knowledge to yourself and never giving anything away, or not even giving a lot of it away, I think is actually counterproductive. And it’s also counterintuitive to think that, because you think, “If I tell people everything, then why would they want to pay me for anything, or why would they want to buy my products?”

But the one thing I’ve realized from listening to people who do it and still are extremely successful is that people are lazy, and you may give away all your information, but that doesn’t mean people are going to know how to implement it or understood what you’ve written or have the time to do it.

So people are still going to come to you and say, “Okay, I’ve read three of your blog posts on building a website; I can understand that you know what you’re talking about, and I need a website. I’m not going to go and learn how to do it, so I’ll pay you to do it.” By showing that you can do something, you’re advertising that you’re the person to come to.

Whereas thinking that everyone’s going to read your blog post and go out and do what you just said is actually completely incorrect. Those people are never going to pay you anyway.

Ian: Absolutely. The thing is, if people go to your blog post and you hold back your secrets, do you know what they’re going to do? They’re going to go somewhere else until they find the answer to that, and you’ve lost them forever.

They may read your article and they may think, “Wow, this guy knows what they’re talking about. I’m going to do it,” and then a month later, “Do you know what? I can’t be bothered. I haven’t got enough time. I’m going to make contact with this guy and see if they can do it for me.” I keep hearing that time and time again, what you just said. So yeah, just give away your secrets, and you will find that you are busier than ever.

Ashley: Yeah, by not giving everything away, you may prevent, I don’t know, some small percentage of really enthusiastic people with a lot of time who are just starting something or have time on their hands, for whatever reason.

Ian: You were never going to have them as a customer anyway, probably.

Ashley: Exactly, exactly, that’s just what I was going to say. Okay, you’re preventing them – by not giving the information, you’re making them pay for it, but they’re either going to resent you anyway and not want to do it, or they’re going to go and find someone else, like you say. Because everything is on the internet somewhere, pretty much. There’s a very small amount of information that’s not out there.

And the nice thing, like what Sarah said on her podcast yesterday, was that she has a $7 eBook that gives you a kickstart into getting into webinars. She said, “Look, quite honestly, if you don’t want to pay that $7 bucks, you can go and find that information on the internet somewhere and go for it. If you don’t want to spend the money, then you can do that.” But yeah, it’s $7 bucks and it probably saves you hours and hours of work. That’s up to you. Time is money.

Ian: Absolutely.

Ashley: All right, that’s all I wanted to cover today. We’ve got tons of other stuff to discuss, and we’ll postpone that to another podcast on all the tools of social media, because you use a lot.

Actually, one I quickly wanted to touch on before we end was Commun.it. I think you use that as well. That’s a really good way of keeping your Twitter contacts in your mind. How would you quickly explain Commun.it?

Ian: It’s a community tool. It enables you to segment your Twitter followers, or the people you follow on Twitter, into different I suppose demographics, different groups. Obviously, you can do that with Twitter Lists, but this really helps you. It comes up with people that you should maybe follow, people that would be good to reply to, people who are in your – who engage with you. It helps you keep on top of that.

And it also helps you – I was talking earlier about this thank you replacement list that enables you to quickly respond to these people just by adding these replies in a more engaging way. I use that on a regular basis, and I find it really, really useful.

Ashley: Yeah, I only jump into it occasionally, but actually every time I do, I’m reminded how nice it is. Basically it does things like saying, if you’re getting a lot of tweets and you’re over the hundreds of followers, maybe into the thousand, you won’t notice all your tweets anymore. You won’t have time to see them all.

It’ll say “This person has more recently been engaging with you. You haven’t written to them for awhile. This person has tweeted a lot of your stuff recently. This person is in your circle of influence but you’ve never engaged with them, and they have a lot of followers. Maybe you should connect with them.”

I think that’s really cool. It actually summarizes a lot of really useful things you could be doing to advance your Twitter following in a very quick and easy format. I really like it.

Ian: Definitely. That’s good.

Ashley: Okay, so that’s basically it. Don’t go crazy on automation – I’m just going to quickly summarize – Don’t get on every platform; get on the right ones. You don’t have to be everywhere, as Pat Flynn says. Don’t buy your followers. Don’t follow everyone back; selectively follow people.

Be human, engage with people, try to write a few tweets to people who are tweeting to you or re-tweeting you and ask them what they thought of something or how their day’s going, just a couple of times a day, do that. Just make it a habit.

I haven’t done it myself, and I admit my mistake there. I should do that more often, but I’ve seen people doing it, and it really works. People even doing it to me and making me respond to them, and I think that’s really cool.

Yeah, be better on social media. Don’t just pretend you’re behind a computer all day long. Get relationships, and I think your articles are great there. That was really cool, and I really appreciate your time, and we’ll book in another slot in the next few months and we’ll do another one on tools for social media.

Ian: That’ll be great. I’ll really look forward to that.

Ashley: All right. Thanks for your time again.

Ian: No problem.

Ashley: Have a good day.

Ian: Bye.