Today I’ve been trying to find out what motivates people to hit the plus one button, and based on several conversations I’ve had with plus-one’rs I’ve concluded that there are four primary motivations behind why people ‘plus one’ content:

• To share & recommend information with their followers on Google Plus and Google search
• To bookmark content for future reference
• To have their name & face pop up next to content (personal branding)
• To increase sales and traffic through increasing rankings, click through rates and conversion rates.

The latter motivation only really concerns people who ‘plus one’ their own content, so if we were to ask ‘what motivates people to plus one other people’s content’ there are only three key motivations – to share and recommend, to increase personal branding or to bookmark.

That said, my gut feeling is that the majority of ‘plus ones’ outside of the Google Plus network are driven by people with a vested interest in promoting their own content – I cannot prove it, but I did run a poll that suggested that trend might be true (although based on a small sample size).

It could be said that if you don’t use G+ as a bookmarking tool or to share content with your followers, your +1s are probably a form of self-promotion. I’d be interested in hearing any counter arguments against that statement in the comments.

For me personally, I prefer to use automated services like Trunk.ly to aggregate and bookmark the content I like, and I don’t have a particularly engaged audience on Google+, so the benefits for me +1ing a page are very minimal, other than marketing benefits and helping people within my circles find great content when they search, of course.

Can any web page get naturally +1’d?

Ask yourself, what might influence someone to ‘plus one’ a page like this or the one below?

This type of page does not lend itself naturally to being shared, therefore the most likely motivation for someone who does not have a vested interest in increasing the page’s visibility online is to bookmark it for future reference.

Highly searched-for useful services also attract +1’s. In this case, the benefits tend to be either for personal branding reasons or to help people in your circles find better content when they search for related services in the future.

If there’s anything I’ve missed or if you can think of other reasons why people plus one content, I’d love to know!

A big thanks to Mike Essex, Pritesh Patel, James Carson for sharing ideas!

Early this week I wrote a blog post on the SEOptimise blog giving away everything I know about effective blogger outreach. For those of you who missed it, here’s a summary and link to the full post.

Image Credit: ekai

What I Learnt About Blogger Outreach From Marketing Get Noticed

A 5 second meeting in person is worth 100s of e-mails

When contacting high-profile bloggers, a five second in-person introduction has an incredible impact on increasing the likelihood of that blogger helping you out. Busy people tend to use ‘filters’ to manage their time efficiently, and one of the major filters that busy people use is ‘have I met this person in real life?’

I cannot emphasise enough how beneficial it is to attend blogger conferences as a means for improving your outreach campaigns. Second to this, a simple tweet telling the person that you dropped them an e-mail seems to significantly improve response rates as it suddenly presents you as a real person in their world. Being ‘real’ to someone outside of their inbox is effective for outreach.

Scalability is awesome IF combined with quality & selectiveness

It’s common sense that sending 100 e-mails is more effective than sending 10 e-mails, but there are two other parts to this equation: quality + selectiveness.

E-mailing 100 bloggers is pointless if your product or offering isn’t good enough. The key to getting a good response rate in an outreach campaign is to give the blogger an irresistible offering. I personally like to sit down with a pen and paper before writing an e-mail campaign and list every possible benefit that I can offer to the blogger, so that my e-mail naturally becomes focused around them and not what I want.

Also, being selective can be very beneficial. Rather than e-mailing 100 Average Joe blogs, could you use the time spent contacting them to get featured on five or six major blogs that would then influence 500 bloggers to write about your product? If your product or offering is awesome, you should be able to get featured by high-profile bloggers.

Picking up the phone is the most effective way to get what you want

A pretty simple concept that I’ve talked about before; a phone call can sometimes take a little bit longer than an e-mail, but it gives you the ability to adapt to the blogger’s immediate response, which is not something you are able to do over e-mail.

If a blogger doesn’t have a phone number listed, I’d recommend dropping them a tweet asking if it’s okay to get in touch by phone with them.

Busy people are better at time management

I remember reading an interesting concept in the book Predictably Irrational, which suggests that busier people tend to be better at responding to e-mails. The theory behind this is that busy people tend to be better at time management and actioning opportunities.

When contacting people for pre-publication reviews of Get Noticed I was shocked to see the first replies come in from CEOs of major corporations and various New York Times Best-Selling Authors.

Don’t be afraid to contact the A-list bloggers just because they’re ‘out of reach’, you’d be surprised at how accessible they are.

What I Learnt About Blogger Outreach From Writing Get Noticed

Be in the right place at the right time, all the time

One of my favourite chapters in Get Noticed is ‘How to Be in the Right Place at the Right Time, All The Time’. Most of us assume that when we we’re supposedly in the right place at the right time, it was a stroke of luck. There is in fact more science and probability at work than we might immediately recognise. Lets break it down:

• You were prepared either subconsciously or consciously with specific and clear objectives about the type of person you wanted to meet.
• You were both in the same place (either geographically, or virtually)
• You were perceptive enough to make the connection with them.

The first step to being in the right place at the right time, is knowing exactly what that place is. Who are the people you are trying to meet and where do they spend their time? If the answer is tech bloggers, then analyse where tech bloggers spend their time and be there. Attend technology conferences and meet-ups, write for the blogs they read, spend time in the cities notorious for tech blogging.

Being in that place ‘all the time’ requires you to analyse how your time is spent and replacing the ‘unsociable’ hours with sociable hours. I met a lot of great people by being ‘in the right place at the right time’ whilst writing Get Noticed by writing the book in cafés and restaurants (a sociable venue) rather than in a home study or office (an unsociable venue).

Broadly speaking, there are three main categories for how we spend our time: at work, at home, at hobbies. Working out how you distribute your time in each category and finding ways to make each aspect more ‘sociable’ can increase your odds of meeting more of the people who will help you.

Understand and be sensitive to a blogger’s accessibility

Just like celebrities, bloggers are both accessible and inaccessible in different places. Understand where it is that bloggers are most accessible and use that channel to cut through the competition and get their attention.

My experience has shown me that e-mail is relatively ineffective when contacting high-profile bloggers, when compared to Twitter and attending conferences, which are both channels where bloggers tend to be far more receptive.

Some bloggers will openly state on their blogs how they like to be contacted, some will consciously or subconsciously design their site in a way that pushes you towards their preferred channel of communication (i.e. if they have their Twitter link or phone number at the bottom of every post and only a fairly hidden link to their e-mail on one page, you’re probably best contacting them via Twitter or telephone!)

Utilise your existing network

When you do things for altruistic reasons it makes you feel genuinely good about yourself, especially if you’ve helped out a friend. Utilising your existing network is a powerful way to reach bloggers if your current network is likely to know the sort of people you need to meet. Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that I ask for a lot of virtual introductions to new people who are relevant to what I’m doing. This works amazingly well, as I always link to those who help me out as well as those who I virtually meet in the blog posts that I write.

If you need to meet sport bloggers, send a few e-mails to your friends or send out a tweet to see if anyone can help you out – don’t feel like you’re burdening your network, you’re not, in fact you’re helping them, too.

Be likeable, genuine, and understand a blogger’s motivations

I receive a fair number of outreach e-mails to my personal website e-mail accounts, and the #1 reason why I don’t reply to some of them is because they’ve forgotten to mention or outline what the benefit is to me.

Why should I waste half an hour helping someone I’ve never met increase their rankings and profile by blogging about them? There are plenty of reasons, such as: it gives me extra content, I could receive affiliate commissions, a free product to test, promotion from their company’s social media accounts or an invite to an exclusive webinar, but they rarely mention my motivations.

Also, remember that only 7% of communication between humans is ‘what you say’, 93% of what you say is non-verbal communication, which means that if you’re e-mailing someone, 93% of your communication is lost in translation as the recipient cannot see your body language, facial expression, and to some extent, tone.

This means that you need to make ‘what you say’ compensate for the lack of non-verbal communication by ensuring that your tone is likeable and that the core message to your e-mail is genuine and honest.

I’m halfway through reading Engage! by Brian Solis and just came across a really great quote from John Freeman that was posted in the Wall Street Journal about the impacts that consuming new media in real-time is having on our well-being and information digesting habits.

In the past two decades, we have witnessed one of the greatest breakdowns of the barrier between our work and personal lives since the notion of leisure time emerged in Victorian Britain as a result of the Industrial Age. It has put us under great physical and mental strain, altering our brain chemistry and daily needs. It has isolated us from the people with whom we live, siphoning us away from real-world places where we gather. It has encouraged flotillas of unnecessary jabbering, making it difficult to tell signal from noise. It has made it more difficult to read slowly and enjoy it, hastening the already declining rates of literacy. It has made it harder to listen and mean it, to be idle and not fidget. This is not a sustainable way to live. This lifestyle of being constantly on causes emotional and physical burnout, workplace meltdowns, and unhappiness.

I like what John is saying and agree that the overlap in personal and work life is becoming increasingly blurred, but I do not entirely believe the claims to the social web increasing the rate of illiteracy. I think the access to a larger variety of immediate news & information has made us better equipped to find and digest higher quality information throughout the day that in the long run benefits our learning. Of course, due to the nature of having to scour through fast-paced activity feeds, it has impacted how we read ‘real time news’, but I don’t think those short-term bursts of skim reading have any long-term impact on our ability to sit down and enjoy reading a long novel, slowly.

Here’s another great quote on how the social web is impacting attention spans is this one from Linda Stone, who suggests that the social web is causing more instances of Continuous Partial Attention.

Continuous partial attention describes how many of us use our attention today. It is different from multi-tasking. The two are differentiated by the impulse that motivates them. When we multitask, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. We’re often doing things that are automatic, that require very little cognitive processing. We give the same priority to much of what we do when we multi-task—we file and copy papers, talk on the phone, eat lunch—we get as many things done at one time as we possibly can in order to make more time for ourselves and in order to be more efficient and more productive.

To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention—CONTINUOUSLY. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter. We pay continuous partial attention in an effort NOT TO MISS ANYTHING. It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis. We are always in high alert when we pay continuous partial attention. This artificial sense of constant crisis is more typical of continuous partial attention than it is of multi-tasking

Your thoughts?

Today I attended and spoke at SMM11, one of the UK’s leading social media marketing conferences. It’s been a really awesome day with lots of great people and I’ve learnt some amazing tips to take home. In this post I’m going to summarise a few of the key takeaways from my favourite talks of the day.

Note: I’m writing this from Social Media Marketing & Monitoring and am pretty exhausted! Apologies for any poorly worded sentences and/or spelling mistakes! I promise to revisit this when i’m back in the zone

First of all, a big shout out to Luke and the team who organised SMM11 – this was without a doubt one of the best digital conferences I’ve attended to date. I’ve been to a fair few digital marketing conferences over the years such as SMX, SES, and SearchLove, and what immediately stood out about this conference was the quality and variety of information being shared. All of the speakers I listened to had a really interesting and varied area of expertise – from gamification, to location marketing, and even expertise in defeating Simon Cowell – always good to know!

Beyond Engagement: Delivering Sales through Social for Captain Morgan
One of my favourite talks at SMM11 was from Marcus Dyer of Edelmen Digital and Mark Wheeler, global digital marketing manager of Diageo. Marcus and Mark talked through the success of a great social media campaign they did with Captain Morgan’s spiced rum.

The campaign was called ‘The Captain’s Island‘ and was essentially rewarding Facebook fans with ‘keys’ in return for various types of engagement on Captain Morgan’s Facebook Page. Interestingly, Mark pointed out that the brand predominantly use Facebook due to the responsible marketing policies to ensure that the company are only targeting people over the legal drinking age. Facebook is one of the only major social networks that asks for your age on signup, making it more accessible for alcohol brands such as Captain Morgan to use.

The success of Captain Morgan’s campaign was largely attributed to tying it in with the real world and thinking outside of the social media platforms that hosted the campaign. Captain Morgan promoted the campaign in TV adverts, in bars across the world, and on the packaging of the bottles of rum.

The What, Why and How of Social Local Marketing
In PJ Verhoef’s talk about location marketing, he talked about how to benefit from location-based marketing (beyond the check-in and Foursquare). He displayed some cool alternative platforms for location marketing and gave some great tips on how to link products to location based marketing, whether that ‘product’ is online information, a physical product, or even your staff members. PJ also gave some excellent ideas for location people using location-based marketing, listening to them using tools such as Geotoko, Valuevine, and Momentfeed, engaging with them, and encouraging transactions using things like Google Offers and Level Up.

How I Beat Simon Cowell Using Social Media
Jon Morter gave an excellent talk on how he used social media to get Rage Against the Machine’s song Killing in the Name of to Christmas #1. What I found particularly interesting about Jon’s talk was how he used his background in hacking to explore and ‘break’ social media conventions. For example – Jon pointed out that until recently, you could become the administrator of any groups on Facebook that didn’t have already have an admin and then message all of the members of the group. Apparently Jon used this method to become the admin of around 300 Facebook groups, which he used to message the members about his campaign!

Jon emphasised that the victory against Simon Cowell was largely due to reading the fine print and knowing the rules. Jon studied the official chart rules for weeks on end to find loopholes in the system. Some of the loopholes that played a large part in Jon’s success were that live track sales also counted as a vote for that song. Jon messaged members on the last day asking members of the Facebook groups to also purchase the live version of Killing in the name of – adding an extra ~70,000 sales of the song.

The key takeaway that I learnt from Jon’s talk was the power of creating big stories using smaller outlets. Jon mentioned that he took a small radio station’s servers down when he was featured, as a way of creating a newsworthy story. When interviewed on a national radio station, Jon deliberately cut himself off saying ‘Simon Cowell is a…’ to make it seem that the radio station cut him off – therefore creating another wave of PR. Jon continued this method until he finally received a call from Simon Cowell himself – who congratulated Jon.

bmibaby Case Study: Using Photo Based Networks to Inspire Customer Loyalty & Engagement
This presentation by Rabbit Agency and BMI Baby showed how BMI Baby used Instagram to engage with a large pre existing community of snap happy BMI Baby customers. It was really great to hear a case study of a brand using a niche social network successfully, as most of case studies in social media tend to focus around the major players such as Twitter and Facebook.

BMI Baby encouraged groups of ‘Instagramers’ (communities of people on Instagram who take photos of their citiy e.g. London Instagramers) to take photos of the destinations that BMI Baby fly to. The campaign received thousands of entries within just a few weeks and allowed the brand to create ‘visual inspiration guides’ using the photos that the Instagram community were creating.

Final thoughts
SMM11 was an awesome conference, and I thoroughly recommend future events. The people, presentations, and biscuits were all excellent and overall the experience was leaps and bounds beyond the other similar conferences I’ve attended.

I also promised that I would upload my presentation from SMM11, so here we go!