In 2010, the Boston Marathon had 26,790 entrants and 22,721 finishers.  In 2011, registration closed in a record 8 hours, 3 minutes.  And those were people who ran fast enough to qualify for Boston (BQ)!  For every person who crosses the finish line, there will be hundreds who don’t.  (If you’re interested in reading more about the marathon, The Boston Globe has an entire section dedicated to it: http://www.boston.com/sports/marathon/)

What do you think: does not crossing the finish line a matter of failure?  Not running a personal best?  Not hitting ‘submit’ fast enough?  Not getting that qualifying time?  Injury, weather, unforeseen circumstances:  does the reason the goal wasn’t reached matter?  How about at which step it occurred: training, registering, racing?

Everyone’s heard the speech about how failure makes us stronger.  But how many of us really, truly, actually believe it?  It’s probably people who, at one point or another, didn’t cross the finish line.  (Me! How about you?) For some reason, failure’s this month's hot topic.

When "Failure is not an option" neither is innovation.  - @BreneBrown

Here are some recent articles worth reading:

1. The Failure Issue, Harvard Business Review, April 2011 (splurge for a copy, check it out from your library, borrow it from a friend.)




2. 9 Business Icons Who Faced Utter Failure And Came Back To Kick Ass, Entrepreneur Kelly K. Spors




3. Fail often, fail well: Companies have a great deal to learn from failure—provided they manage it successfully. The Economist,  Schumpeter, Apr 14th 2011




4. Anatomy of a Business Failure, BNET.com,  Mary Goodman and Rich Russakoff, April 14, 2011

Obviously, no one sets out to fail. Hey, we’re addicted to winning!

Knowing when you’ve missed the mark is relatively easy.  The data (clock, grade, bank account, termination notice) tell you.  Processing what went wrong is the tough part.  It’s much easier to fuggedaboutit and move on.  But it’s the deconstruction and evaluation that really will make you, your company, your goals stronger.  Trust me – I’ve learned this both the hard and easy ways.  You tried and didn't succeed. Do you understand what went wrong?  What did you learn from it?  What are your next steps?  How will you move ahead?

One of the great things about the rise in social networking is how easy it can make starting the evaluation process. There are countless resources available with just a connection, tweet or post.  (SocialGrow makes it even easier to build those networks!)  The possibilities and examples are endless – and almost clichéd.  A programmer found a job on LinkedIn.  A novice athlete joined a training group to prepare for her first triathlon.  An entrepreneur found investors.   And when things didn’t go right?  They had the resources and contacts to develop a new plan of attack.  At the end of the day, it’s not whether you succeed or fail, it’s how you proceed.

I hope your training goes well, that you get that qualifying time and finish with a personal record in whatever arena it may be.  And hey – if it doesn’t go as you’d planned?  Take a minute. Understand, learn, and recover. Now, what’s next?

This week, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by none other than America’s LinkedIn Lady, Carol McManus, on WGCH Greenwich. We had a lot of fun (full disclosure: Carol and I worked with each other at a previous company), and the half-hour went by in a flash. What really hit me, however, is that even people who are successfully marketing their brands on other social networks, are often completely flummoxed by how best to make use of Twitter.



The bulk of the questions I received contained elements of both confusion (”I don’t know what to do”) and fear (”I don’t want to damage my brand”).



To help both the people who want to start tweeting and have not yet sent their first tweet, and the people who have started tweeting but are not yet seeing the results they know are possible, I pulled together the following Twitter checklist.



Note that you are not going to get 10,000 new Twitter followers overnight by following these 40 guidelines. You will, however, increase your social influence, engage your target audiences, and grow your business!



Ken’s Fast Start 40: The Twitter Checklist



1. Download/Listen to our radio show from this week [30-minute .mp3 podcast].



2. Read my previous post on this blog on how to engage your target audience on Twitter.



3. Use the shortest, brand-appropriate Twitter handle that is available.



4. Use a headshot with you smiling as your Twitter photo/avatar.



5. Use a custom Twitter background [optimized for #newtwitter].



6. Identify your business’ top five keywords, write them down, and pin them up in the place where you normally tweet.



7. Use your business’ keywords in your Twitter bio.



8. Use an actual (i.e., not an URL-shortened) web address in your profile.



9. Make sure your Twitter profile is public.



10. Add Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/YourTwitterHandle to your e-mail signature line, your business card, your products (including packaging), your LinkedIn and other social network profiles, and ALL of your print, web, and voice (including your voice mail greetings) communications.




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11. Go to Google Alerts and create a Google alert for your Twitter handle.



12. Go to Klout.com and get your baseline social influence score — note that it may be 0 to start.



13. Go to Twittercounter.com and get your baseline Twitter growth statistics.



14. Tweet at least three times a day (and no more than seven times a day), including weekends, spread evenly throughout the day.



15. Follow at least 20 people (and no more than 100 people) a day.



16. Once a week, use ManageFlitter.com to unfollow the people who have stopped tweeting (i.e., people who have not tweeted in over 30 days).



17. Tweet relevant, brand-appropriate content that shares your expertise.



18. Look for opportunities to tweet relevant, brand-appropriate photos, audio, and videos.



19. Avoid negative tweets, both in terms of the language you use and the emotions you express.



20. Limit your tweets to a maximum of 120 characters.




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21. Use URL shortener j.mp for all of your links (it's the shortest available with full metrics).



22. To maximize the number of clicks for a given link, use the full, non-shortened URL.



23. For your first 30 days, do NOT sell *anything* in your tweets, period. After your first 30 days, no more than one out of every 20 of your tweets can be a *soft* sales pitch for your products/services. Direct selling in your tweets will turn people off from following you, and will result in people already following you to unfollow you.



24. Avoid using tools that automate the management of your tweets or your followers as you can easily (and unknowingly) violate Twitter's terms of service, resulting in a suspended account.



25. Use your business' keywords [from #6 above] in your tweets.



26. Hashtag (#) the most important keyword in every tweet.



27. Create, and start populating at least three Twitter Lists (e.g., your current customers, your target/prospective customers, the experts you follow, your peers, people from your network, your competitors, leaders in your industry, etc.).



28. If you are tweeting as a business, brand, or organization, follow back *everyone* who follows you.



29. Acknowledge EVERY Twitter mention, retweet, and DM you receive.



30. Proactively/Directly engage at least one new person a day in a public [see #31 below] tweet.




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31. When you directly engage or reply to people on Twitter, always use .@TwitterHandle instead of @TwitterHandle at the beginning of your tweet (so that your tweet can be seen by everyone).



32. Credit the original author(s) when you retweet others' content, including the media source/publication if you have space.



33. When crediting someone, use /@TwitterHandle (instead of RT or via) to save characters.



34. Add your own comment when retweeting others' content.



35. Retweet "manually" (also called "traditional retweeting") -- i.e., do not use the Twitter retweet function, as it does not allow you to add your own comment.



36. Be yourself. Use your natural tone and voice, and fully leverage your own unique personality (i.e., if you're naturally a comedian, be funny; if you're naturally a data geek, geek out!).



37. Read each and every tweet out loud to yourself BEFORE you post it.



38. Read each and every tweet AFTER you post it to check that the @'s and links all work. Immediately delete, correct, and repost the tweet if you find a typo.



39. Once a day, set aside a few minutes of quiet time, free of interruptions and distractions, to read through your followers' tweets.



40. JUST DO IT! Start tweeting, not on Monday morning, not tomorrow, not later today, but NOW.



People like to say that there are no rules on Twitter, and I agree. These are my personal guidelines, from what I have found from my own experience to work best over time.



In the comments section below, please share with me YOUR favorite Twitter tips and guidelines. Also please feel free to let me know which of my guidelines you disagree with, and why!




Need more help with your tweeting? Check out SocialGrow's Twitter Marketing and Sales Engagement Training.

How much time a day do you spend listening?

How do you monitor, in real-time, what is being said about you, your company, and your products and services?

How do you find out about new, exciting ideas in your industry?



One great option is to create a social media listening post – a collection of RSS subscriptions sent to your feed reader program or e-mail. Creating your own listening post is one of the most effective ways to tap into the firehose of valuable, online information. Listening is the most important component of successful social media strategies, but is often the least used.



The benefits of a using a listening post are significant:

• It automates the task of monitoring online conversations and information

• It saves time by allowing you to focus on analyzing and using information rather than searching for it.

• It allows you to quickly connect and engage with people in your targeted audiences, including: key industry influencers, content creators, and critics of your products.



Four Easy Steps to Creating Your Own Social Media Listening Post



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1. Content

Finding good content starts with determining the best keywords to use for your listening post. Start with your name. If you have a common one, you will have to use additional keywords to make the search unique. Add in business terms, your company, competitors, industry, products, and services. Use Google AdWords to find additional keywords. For example, SocialGrow’s listening post keywords include “social crm software”, “web contact management application”, and “social media marketing”.



2. Monitoring

Now that you have decided on the most relevant keywords, you need to create your RSS feeds. Google Alerts is a good first option. Enter in your keyword phrases and choose the option to deliver your content through feeds or email. Twitter Search can be valuable source for getting real-time content, just scroll down to RSS icon on the right side.



3. Tools

While there are a number of RSS feed readers, Google Reader is one of the best. If you chose feed delivery in Google Alerts, your feeds will already be populated in Google Reader. Start by reading the content from the feeds and keep only those feeds that you find valuable. Use Google Wildcards to refine your searches.



4. Process

You may find it useful to categorize your feeds into different folders within your feed reader. You can name your folders by subject, or even day of the week, so you can organize your listening. If you want to share important content that you discover, tag these posts to create a new feed, to which others in your organization can subscribe. After a couple of weeks, you will be able to determine the best process to monitor and share your feeds.



Listening posts are truly for everyone, whether you’re just casually interested in something, or already a subject matter expert. Without the luxury of an in-house research team, it is virtually impossible to manually monitor all the online content and conversations that impact your business. If you don’t already have one, a listening post will quickly become the single most powerful tool in your social media arsenal.



Please share the processes and tools you use to listen for your business with us in our comments section below. We look forward to learning which tools you use to listen!



I told a new SocialGrow social media marketing consulting client this week:



Your decision is NOT whether or not to use social media in your sales, marketing, public relations, customer service, product development, and human resources.



Your customers, competitors, shareholders, analysts, media, and employees have already made that decision for you.



The decisions you now need to make are HOW best to use social media to achieve your specific objectives, WHEN to begin using social media, and WHICH outside expert resources can best accelerate the business results you want to achieve from using social media.



As Daniella stated in her post, rather than making the social media newbie mistake of immediately jumping onto all of the major social networks, businesses should choose the combination of social networks which best supports their overall business strategy, reaches their target customers, and [what makes social media different from many other marketing tactics] is sustainable for the long-term. Selecting the right combination of social networks will maximize the return on your investment, and help you to better engage your growing audience of followers, friends, connections, subscribers, commenters, reviewers, and likers.



The four things you should consider when selecting the social networks for your business are:

1. Your marketing strategy

2. Your target customers

3. Your competitors

4. Your financial and subject matter expert resources



One of the questions I am asked most frequently is “I’m a B2B [or a B2C] company, what are the most effective social networks for my particular business?” To help answer this question, I created the following two grids (click on each grid to see the full-size version), showing my social network recommendations for both B2B and B2C companies. As every industry and company are different, there is no one single “correct” answer, and I look forward to your sharing your ideas and opinions in our comments section at the end of this post.



My boss Marsh likes to say that because social media is a meritocracy, it gives you the opportunity — not found in any other form of media — to effectively and genuinely demonstrate your company’s thought leadership.



Adding social media will increase the effectiveness of your existing paid, owned, and earned media strategies, and give your business an incredibly viral and cost-effective new tool for sales, marketing, public relations, customer service, product development, and human resources. So when do YOU want to start?




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With the notable exception of Hawaii — where standing at major intersections to wave at passing cars is still a requirement for those seeking elected office — to win your campaign this November, you will need to engage your voters online. A large part of the 2008 Presidential election’s 40-year spike in voter turnout was fueled by both sides’, and their supporters’, increasingly sophisticated use of social media.



For local candidates without the luxury of dedicated social teams, the five social media strategies you need to use are:



1. Launch your online campaign headquarters

One of the realities of seeking office, is that throughout your campaign, there will be times when you feel you have lost control of the message. Even more frustrating, is that there will be times when you feel the media has distilled genuinely complex issues down to a single sound byte. Your website is your online bully pulpit. Your website allows you to share your platform in your own words in the level of detail you require to be understood.



The content on your website also empowers your supporters by giving them the text, image, infographic, audio, and video content they need to further spread your messages. Resist, however, the temptation to “broadcast”. By definition, social media is interactive. Ensure that all of your information is presented as initiating conversations. Finally, take advantage of the opportunity your website gives you to address all of the long-tail issues your voters care about, and speak directly to all of the diferent constituencies you want to represent.



2. Open up your online field offices

Once you have launched your online campaign headquarters, you’ll want to open up your online field offices on each of the major social networking websites. At minimum, you need to have an active, dedicated, and dynamic presence on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn, and iTunesU. Note that each site has its own unique culture, personality, and “rules”, and you will need a skilled and dedicated team to continually feed the hungry online beast with fresh, on-message content. Again, think engagement. Every site is interactive, so resource appropriately to ensure you are not just using these sites as one-way broadcast channels, and that your campaign is making use of the analytics and intelligence available on each site.



3. Actively listen to your voters

It is no surprise that campaigners, like their marketing counterparts, find talking comes easier to them than listening. Actively listen, and make the time to analyze what is being said about you, the issues, and your competitors to give you the immediately actionable feedback you need to make the best possible decisions throughout your campaign. Social networks also provide an excellent leading indicator of how voters will respond to your stand on any given issue as it pops up.



4. Participate in your voters’ discussions

Intellectually, you know that the many mall Santas you see each year are not THE Santa (as he’s pretty busy at the North Pole prepping for his big day). Likewise, while it’s fine for your staff to carry the day-to-day burden of voter engagement, find ways, daily, for you to directly communicate with people online. Just as there is nothing more powerful than people hearing you speak personally on an issue at a live event, there is nothing more powerful than people hearing from you personally on an issue online. The added bonus, is that by interacting personally with people online, you create immensely viral word of mouth.



5. Constantly create valuable content online

The issues in your campaign will run from the numbingly mundane to the blisteringly complex. Leverage social media to help all of your voters, including those predisposed to be against you, to educate themselves on the issues they care about most. You have consciously taken the stands you have on each issue because of your [hopefully!] thorough understanding of them. Use social media to both share what you know and continually learn. Not every voter will care equally about every issue, and each site’s analytics will help you to take the pulse of what different audiences’ priorities are throughout your campaign.



Nothing you can do online will take the place of traditional “press-the-flesh” campaigning, but social media matters because it gives you, your staff, and your supporters the opportunity to more deeply engage more people, more effectively, than has ever been possible with traditional in-person and broadcast media strategies. So the next time you kiss that baby, make sure your staffers tweet about it, upload the video of the kiss to YouTube, and appropriately tag the photo opp on your Flickr stream and Facebook page!




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Investment portfolios.



Airline seats.



Chocolate fudge cakes.



What do these three things have in common with the size of your online network? Big is good, bigger is better, and biggest is where you want to be.



As marketers, we have stuff to do, and failing to reach our objectives is not an option. Our brands and businesses require us to make things happen. Customers, sales, revenues… it’s up to us. Having large online social networks gives us the juice we need to make things happen.



Over the past few months, I have seen a surprising number of articles attempting to convince me that whether I’m a B2B or a B2C marketer, the focus for my portfolio of friend, follower, and connection-based online networks should be “engagement.” Hogwash.



Size matters. Size gives you power. Size gives you control. Size gives you leverage.



Everyone is an expert in something, but no one is an expert in everything. One of the reasons to be active on social media is to learn how to use cutting-edge and proven marketing strategies and tactics. If you follow one marketing professor on Twitter, you learn his/her approaches. How much better if you follow all of the top marketing professors on Twitter in the areas of B2B marketing, B2C marketing, public relations, corporate branding, and marketing research? The larger your network, the smarter you can be.



In the concept of six degrees of separation, all of us are, at most, six steps away from any other person. This is the heart of LinkedIn’s business model. If I have one connection on LinkedIn, I’m two degrees away from everyone my connection knows. Whether I need to buy or sell, I have a personal introduction to everyone in my connection’s network. As a marketer whose livelihood depends on your ability to get things done, would you rather have one connection on LinkedIn or 1,000?



What if you had a large mailing list of people who want to receive your communications because they’re interested in what you have to say? Each of your messages can reach more target customers. The larger your online network, the more people you can sell, real-time, 24×7×365.



As marketers, part of our value is to persuade our target audience to take action. If you’re Ashton Kutcher and develop the largest online network, you’re not just in the media, you are the media. You can directly broadcast to your five million-plus member audience anytime. That’s marketing. You want each and every one of your communications to command a level of credibility so high that other media outlets are forced to report on them.



As my boss likes to say, “Your message can only go as far as the size of your network.” Besides, as any five year old will loudly and unashamedly tell you when you’re standing in line with him at the bakery, “Who wouldn’t want the biggest chocolate fudge cake?”



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Additional Reading



“It all starts with having the largest possible audience.”

-Dan Zarrella, Hierarchy of Contagiousness



“Marketers must connect on social networks with people they don’t know, namely their customers.”

-Charlene Li, Groundswell



“I have always admired the way successful entrepreneurs put themselves in a position to ‘get luck’ by developing relationships with relevant people and taking advantage of promising opportunities.”

-Jeff Bussgang, Mastering the VC Game



1. Find that one thing that you do well, and OWN it!

Disney’s thing, like Zappos’, is delivering happiness. Disney’s theme parks around the world (currently Anaheim, Florida, Tokyo, Paris, and Hong Kong, with Shanghai coming soon) are branded the “Happiest Places on Earth”, and they excel at creating happy family memories.



2. Create a company culture that inspires ALL of your employees.

Without exception, each and every Disney cast member I met was happy, upbeat, and genuinely interested in what they could do personally to make my family and me happy, regardless of their actual job description. Disney may excel at hiring and training, but I believe it’s the company culture that Walt Disney created that continues to inspire employees to today.



3. Be ubiquitous in your customers’ lives.

I realize being a two-toddler household places me in the center of Disney’s marketing crosshairs, but take a look around you at how many instances of Disneyana you encounter in an average day. When I go to the Post Office, I’m greeted by Toy Story’s Buzz and Woody. Sorry Martha, but the term omnimedia applies to no one better than the world’s largest media and entertainment conglomerate with: animation and live-action film production, television, travel, theatre, radio, publishing, and online media. Every Disney hit, of which there are many, is aggressively licensed, bringing in not only substantial additional revenue, but helping to market the source material.



4. Empower your employees to satisfy customers, and give them the tools they need to do so.

Over the course of the week, I was never once told “let me speak with my manager”. No matter how small or large, the help I received was always immediate, facilitated by support systems which never appeared to be offline.



5. Engage your customers to continually improve your products.

I had been to Disney before, but was surprised by the large number of “new” attractions. Yes, the characters from my own childhood were still there, but they all of the latest characters were also front and center.



6. Give back to the communities in which you operate.

The city of Orlando is as much the house that Walt built as the Walt Disney World theme park itself. Arguably, Disney put Orlando on the map, creating an “anchor store” which supports thousands of other businesses. Disney is also an active supporter of Orlando-area charities, and gives free passes to children whose families cannot afford the admission fees.



To me, Disney is the most successful company on earth. Not in terms of the highest revenues or earnings, but in their ability to make the world a better place through their mission of delivering happiness on a daily basis to such large numbers of people around the world.



What’s next for Disney? I have no doubt Disney’s Imagineers are already testing ways to leverage social networking and geolocation to further engage their customers. I can see both kids and adults earning Foursquare badges for every ride and attraction (”Mayor (or should that be ‘Captain’) of the Pirates of the Caribbean!”), and knowing real-time where their friends are in the parks. On the last day of our trip, we ended up sitting next to my daughter’s dentist on the train. Had all of us been using Foursquare, we would have known the day we arrived that both families were visiting Disney at the same time.



As we continue to build SocialGrow, I will keep in mind what I learned from Walt, and an iconic little mouse.