I struggle to do social media well. I hope you struggle too.

If you struggle with it that means you really care about understanding this new medium.

It also means you're trying and you want succeed even if you're not entirely sure all the ways to define success.

It means you recognize that you've failed somewhere along the way but you keep doing it anyway.

It means you don't assume social media has stopped evolving and you therefore always have more to learn.

It means you expect you're going to mess something up again but it's a risk you're willing to take.

It means you understand this is not the Internet as it used to be, marketing as it used to be, or advertising as it used to be. It's something different and still relatively new.

It means you're not afraid to ask for help and not afraid to give help when asked.

I know I struggle with social media.

I hope you do too.

$300,000 in sales over a weekend - In this SocialMediaExaminer.com case study we see how a Bible software company generated $300K in sales over the Black Friday weekend last November using nothing but social media to promote its offer. Pretty interesting stuff here.

58 million mobile Facebook users - This Research Brief article has some good stats about how much mobile use is growing beyond phone calls and text messages. In December, 2010, there were 109 million American mobile users accessing mobile media. Almost 58 million mobile subscribers accessed Facebook in December, 2010. That's 56% growth from the previous year.

67% of negative retail comments are changed - The data from this survey shows that when people complain about a retailer in social media and then receive a response from that retailer, the majority will either delete the original negative comment or follow up with a positive comment. The data also showed that 18% of complaining customers also turned into loyal customer and then bought more from the retailer.

One word: impressive! His nickname is "The Living Camera." You can see why in this video:

At my local gym the exercise machines overlook a pair of basketball courts. Yesterday I noticed a gym employee walking back and forth on an empty court. He was holding a rag in one hand and bottle of cleaning solution in the other. As he walked slowly around the court I noticed every so often he would stoop down and wipe a scuff mark off the floor.

I started thinking about how tedious and time consuming this man's job was. Cleaning scuff marks must be one of the least interesting, least glamorous, least enjoyable jobs available at the gym, but think about how obvious his neglect would be if he took a few weeks off?

Scuff Mark Cleaning: Work Meant To Go Unnoticed
Scuff mark cleaners will probably never get much respect. The very nature of their work is to make sure you don't notice something. In other words, the best scuff mark cleaners will have the most ignored floors by the people who use them. Dirty floors get noticed but clean ones usually don't. Social media, like a gym floor, gets its own share of scuff marks and you need a scuff mark cleaner too.

Social Media Scuff Marks
A social media scuff mark would be any mention, comment, reply, or response to your brand on a social media platform (like a blog, Twitter, Facebook, video, podcast, etc.) Some of these may be positive like when a happy customer raves about her experience with your product on your Facebook page. Other scuff marks will be negative like when a customer Tweets about a bad encounter with one of your customer service reps.

Social media scuff marks are happening every day. If you haven't found any for your business yet, don't worry, they're coming soon. The question then is this: who's your scuff mark cleaner? Who's the person responding to people with bad experiences? Who's thanking happy customers who talk about how much they love your product? Who's reaching out to the people checking into your business location? These are scuff marks that need to be tended to.

Responding to comments sounds tedious and it's not glamorous, but if you ignore it long enough you're tainting your brand. Once your brand is tainted it's a lot harder to clean up than if you had been keeping it clean all along.

Getting Started
Starting doing the slow, diligent work of looking for scuff marks. Identify someone to do it and if you can't identify someone then you're it. Start monitoring social media content and conversations with tools like Google Alerts, Twitter search, Facebook search, and video search.

Also, respond to every comment on your blog or Facebook page. Thank people who mention you on Twitter. Better yet, follow up with a good question or interesting and helpful response.

Be kind to the people who say nice things about you. Be kinder to the people who don't have nice things to say about you. It's possible to change a customer's negative experience to a positive one...but only if you start paying attention to the scuff marks.

Today I'm launching a new series on the blog called The Monday Stat List, which as you might guess, is a list of stats I find interesting through the course of the week. Here's the first installment:

1 Billion: The number of Tweets per week. As a way to celebrate their five year anniversary, Twitter posted some stats last week that give some insight into how people are using their service. One of the interesting stats reveals that each week there are one billion Tweets posted.

80%: The percentage of children 5 years old and younger using the Internet weekly. An interesting new report talks about how much young children are getting access to the Internet. Also in this report was a stat showing that the average child watches three hours of television daily.

41%: Percentage of people who get their news online. For the first time the Internet has beaten newspapers a leading source for news.

70%: Percentage of people who bought the iPad 2 and were first time iPad owners. There are some very interesting stats about the people who bought the iPad 2 last week. The overwhelming majority were not upgrading from the first iPad, rather they were getting one for the first time.

2 million minutes: The combined amount of time people spend playing Angry Birds daily. Yeah, that's a lot of birds flying around.

My friend Dave works for Griffin Technology, a company that makes all kinds of products to make mobile devices look better and live longer. About two weeks ago I saw him post a video testing the Griffin Survivor case for iPhones and iPod Touches. The case is so good it can really take a beating. Heck, they drop the iPod Touch off the top of a building and it holds up just fine.

In this particular video they show what happens if you were to drop your iPhone or iPod Touch into a vat of syrup. Will the iPod Touch survive? Well...they don't call the case the Survior for nothing. Check out the Syrup Drop video and enjoy!

I'm not really a numbers guys. Just ask my wife or my high school math teachers. I have, however, had a fascination with Pi (3.1415...) ever since I learned about it when I was younger.

That fascination meshed with some business interests back in 2007 when my friend Nathan and I created a site that lets people own their own "slice" of Pi. MySliceofPi.com was a crazy and fun adventure that still lives today.

Every year people around the world celebrate Pi Day on March 14 (3/14) so with the discovery of this video and the upcoming Pi Day upon us, it seemed fitting that this should be the video of the week. Enjoy "What Pi Sounds Like."

 

I'm now a few months shy of my five year anniversary of blogging. It's kind of funny to go back and read some of my old posts and the thing that stands out to me more than anything is that I didn't really know how important a good title was when I started blogging.

Why A Good Title Is Important
A blog post title is often the only opportunity you get to convince someone to read your post so you want to tell them what the post is going to be about rather than trying to be clever or creative. I didn't get that back then and you can see that for yourself below. Here are my top five worst blog post titles:

1. RSS Feeds Me - This post was a brief introduction to RSS feeds and clearly I thought I was clever with this little title. In hindsight I can see that it was a dumb title because if you didn't know what RSS feeds were then you wouldn't understand the cleverness of it and if you understood the title you didn't need to read the post.

2. Can You Digg It? - This post is obviously about Digg.com but for some reason I felt like a 70's jive reference would bring the masses flocking. It didn't work. I blame the post title.

3. Why Fi? - This post is about...yep, you guessed it: WiFi. Cute, huh?

4. Wiki What? - A post about wikis and a title that makes no sense at all.

5. Wii Got A Good Laugh At This - I reposted a kinda-funny cartoon here about the Nintendo Wii. This was back in 2006 after the Wii was introduced so it was still a new thing and a name we were getting accustomed to. Again, I thought this was a clever title but in hindsight the post didn't have anything to do with social media so I probably shouldn't have posted it at all.

The bottom line is this: Save all of your clever analogies and jokes for the post itself and keep them out of the title. Being witty will keep your readers coming if they find it in the body of the blog post. Being witty in your titles lacks context and meaning which is necessary to fully appreciate the clever title. Consider blog post titles like TLC's television shows. Be clear. Be direct. Tell people what they're going to see in the post and then give it to them.

It's hard to believe that I'm now in my fourth year of doing a video of the week every Friday. What started off as an experiment and a fun non-social media related series of posts has become a steady and expected component of my blogging efforts.

This week's video is a spoof on the TLC show Toddlers and Tiaras. You won't be disappointed with Tom Hanks in this very funny sketch from Jimmy Kimmel Live.

I have been fascinated by the thinking, writing, and example of Seth Godin for many years now. In fact, at one point I wrote a post called "How To Seth Godin Yourself" which was based on my observations of Seth.

When Seth announced The Domino Project (a new way to think about publishing) a few months ago I was interested to see what he was up to. The first Domino Project book came out this week and it was from Seth. The book is called Poke the Box.

Poke The Box = Start And Finish, Then Repeat
Poke the Box is a manifesto to provoke people off their mental and emotional pause buttons so they'll hit the "play" button instead. Rather than providing a total review of the book I'm going to highlight seven great quotes from the book. You'll get a sense of the book from these quotes and they do a better job of representing the quality and perspective you'll get than anything I can say.

1. "I define anxiety as experiencing failure in advance." (page 14)
2. "Employees wait to be picked for promotion, or to lead a meeting or to speak up at a meeting. 'Pick me, pick me' acknowdeges the power of the system and passes responsibility to someone to initiate. Even better, 'pick me, pick me' moves the blame from you to them. If you don't get picked, it's their fault, not yours. Reject the tyranny of picked. Pick yourself." (pages 24 & 25)
3. "The cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing." (page 29)
4. "It's hard to imagine Spock and Kirk landing on a planet and just relaxing for a month or two. Just hanging out has nothing to do with boldly going where no one has gone before." (page 35)
5. "Poking doesn't mean right. It means action." (page 42)
6. "Today, not starting is far, far worse than being wrong. If you start, you've got a shot at evolving and adjusting to turn your wrong into a right. But if you don't start, you never get a chance. (page 57)
7. "As you create a culture of people who are always seeking to connect and improve and poke, the bar gets raised. This increbibly prosaic idea, the very simple act of initiating is actually profoundly transformative. Forward motion is a definsible business asset." (page 81)