[fr]
Leçons apprises lors de la promotion de Going Solo:
- communiquer directement avec les gens (messagerie instantanée, conversation offline, téléphone) est le mode de communication le plus efficace
- ne pas négliger l'e-mail, les dossiers de presse, le matériel imprimable: tout le monde ne lira pas le blog ou Twiter
- rien ne devient automatiquement "viral" parce que c'est sur internet: aider les gens à vous aider à passer l'info, par exemple avec un e-mail "forwardable"
- aller où sont les gens, les retrouver dans leur communauté (Facebook, MySpace, Rezonance, LinkedIn... partout)
- ça prend du temps... beaucoup de temps
J'ai été surprise à quel point tout ceci a été difficile pour moi, alors qu'une partie de mon métier consiste à expliquer aux gens comment utiliser les nouveaux médias pour communiquer plus efficacement. Une leçon d'humilité, et aussi un retour à certaines choses basiques mais qui fonctionnent, comme l'e-mail ou le chat. En récompense, par contre, un événement qui a été un succès incontesté, et tout cela sans le soutien des médias traditionnels (pour cause de communiqué de presse un poil tardif) -- mis à part nouvo, qui a répercuté l'annonce, mais qui trouvait que c'était cher!
[en]
One of the big lessons I learnt while organising Going Solo is that promoting and communicating about an event through social media requires a huge amount of time and energy. In this post, I’d like to share a few of the very practical things I (re-)discovered.
Even though part of what I do for a living is explain social media and its uses in marketing to my clients, I found it quite a challenge when I actually had to jump in and do it. (Yes, I’m aware this may sound pretty lame. By concentrating on the big picture and the inspiring success stories, one tends to forget some very basic things. Sending managers back to the floor every now and then is a good thing.)
The main lesson I learnt is the following:
- 1. The absolute best channel to promote anything is one-on-one personal conversation with somebody you already have some sort of relationship with.
Any other solution is a shortcut. And all shortcuts have prices.
This means I ended up spending a lot of time:
- talking to people on IM, IRC, and offline at conferences
- sending out personal messages on LinkedIn and Facebook.
Anytime you do something to spare you this time (like sending out a collective e-mail, writing a blog post, or even tweeting — situations where you’re not adressing one specific individual directly) you dilute what you’re communicating. You open the door to:
- imperfect understanding of what you’re trying to say
- people not feeling like it’s really addressed to them (lack of interest, or lack of awareness that their actions are important to you)
- people simply not seeing it.
I have many examples of this. I created a page with material people could use to promote Going Solo, in particular, blog sidebar badges. But not many people put them up spontanously, even amongst my friends. But when I started pinging people on IM and asking them if they would please put up a badge to support my event, they did it. They just hadn’t got around to doing it, hadn’t realised that them doing it was important for me, or it had simply slipped their mind. It’s perfectly understandable: it’s “my” event, not theirs.
Another example is when I started sending out my “forwardable e-mails” (lesson #3 is about them), most people stopped at “well, I’m not a freelancer” or “I can’t come”. It took some explaining to make sure they understood that the main reason I was sending them the e-mail was that they might know somebody who would like to come to the event, or who could blog about it, or help with promoting it. If I spared myself the personal conversation and just sent the e-mail, people were much less likely to really understand what I expected from them, even through it was spelled out in the e-mail itself.
And that was a big secondary lesson I learnt while preparing Going Solo: it’s not because people don’t get back to you, or don’t act, that they aren’t interested or don’t want to. The burden is on you to make it as easy as possible for them to help you.
Let’s continue on to the next lessons.
- 2. Blogs and Twitter are essential, but don’t neglect less sexy forms of communication: newsletter, press release, printable material.
The first thing I did for Going Solo was to create a blog and a Twitter account. Getting a blog and Twitter account off the ground isn’t easy, and it took quite a lot of one-on-one communication (see lesson #1) (and blogging here on CTTS) to get enough people to link to them so that they started taking off.
But the lesson here is that not everybody is on Twitter, and not everbody reads blogs. We highly-connected types tend to forget that. It didn’t take me that long to get the feeling that I had “exhausted” my immediate, social-media-enabled network — meaning that all the people who knew me directly had heard what I was talking about, linked to stuff if they were going to, or registered for the event if they were interested.
So, here are some less “social media cutting-edge” forms of communication I used, most of them very late in the process (earlier next time):
Some comments.
Our press release came out so late that we got no coverage at all from traditional media, bar one exception, which focused on how expensive the event was. This means Going Solo Lausanne is a great case study of successful event promotion entirely through social media.
When I created the newsletter, I spent a lot of time following lesson #1 and inviting people personally to sign up, through IM most of the time. I sent out invitations through the Google Groups interface, of course (to the extent that I got flagged as a potential spammer). But I also went through the process of inviting people directly through IM.
A word of warning about newsletters: don’t add people to your newsletter unless you’ve checked beforehand that they were OK with it, or if you have a very good reason to do so (they are the speakers/attendees for your event) — but even then, it can be risky. I was recently added to a bunch of mailing-lists without having asked for it, rather than invited, and I find it really annoying. It’s way more impolite to unsubscribe from a newsletter than refuse an invitation to subscribe, so adding people can put them in an embarrassing situation (be impolite vs. be annoyed at getting newsletters one doesn’t want).
- 3. Don’t expect “viral” or “organic” spreading of your promotion to happen, but prepare the field so it can: the forwardable e-mail.
There is so much talk about the fact that social media allows things to spread all by themselves (and indeed, there is an important potential for that, and when it happens, it’s very powerful) — that we tend to expect it to happen and be disappointed when it doesn’t. And let’s face it, it’s not something that we can control (sorry for stating the obvious again, I’m doing that a lot in this post) and it takes quite a bit of skill to create the right conditions so that it may happen.
So, now that we’ve set our expectations, what can be done to help things spread? I mentioned having exhausted my immediate network higher up, so I needed to come up with a solution which would help me reach beyond it. How could I get my friends to mention Going Solo to their friends?
Of course, our use of social media in general allows that. Blogs, Facebook Groups and Events, sidebar badges… all this is material which can spread. But again — what about the people who aren’t bathing in social media from morning to evening?
Back to basics: e-mail. E-mail, be it under the shape of a newsletter, a discussion list, or simple personal messages, has a huge advantage over other forms of online communication: you’re sure people know how to use it. It’s the basic, level 0 tool that anybody online has and understands.
So, I started sending out e-mail. A little bit of push is good, right? I composed a rather neutral e-mail explaining what Going Solo was about, who it was for, giving links to more information, and a call to action or two. I then sent this impersonal text to various people I knew, with a personal introduction asking them to see if they knew anybody who could be interested in information about this event, and inviting them to forward the message to these people. Nothing extraordinary in that, right?
I of course applied lesson #1 (you’re starting to know that one, right?) and tried as much as possible to check on IM, beforehand, if it was OK for me to send the “forwardable e-mail” to each person. So, basically, no mass-mailing, but an e-mail written in such a way that it was “forwardable” in a “here’s what my friend Steph is doing, could interest you” way, which I passed along as a follow-up to a direct chat with each person.
In a more “social media” spirit, of course, make sure that any videos you put online can easily be shared and linked to, etc. etc — but that will be pretty natural for anybody who’s familiar with blogging and “being online”.
- 4. Go where people are. Be everywhere.
Unless your event is already very well known, you need to go to people, and not just wait for them to come to you. If you’ve set up a blog, Twitter account, newsletter, then you have a place where people can come to you. But that’s not enough. You need to go where people are:
- Facebook
- Upcoming
- LinkedIn
- Xing
- MySpace
- Pownce
- Seesmic
- Existing communities big and small… (blogs, forums, chatrooms)
Again, this is a very basic principle. But it’s not because it’s basic that it’s invalidated by the magic world of social media. Where you can create an event, create an event (Upcoming, Facebook, Pownce, Rezonance — a local networking thingy); where you can create a group, create a group — I waited a lot before creating a Facebook group for Going Solo, because I had a fan page for it already, but as you can see the group worked much better.
Honestly, I didn’t think I’d spend weeks doing nothing else but send e-mails, update Facebook pages, blog, send e-mails, talk to people, IM, tweet, e-mail again… to promote Going Solo. It’s a huge amount of work. It’s so much work that one could imagine having somebody full time just to do it. So when you’re (mainly) a one-person shop, it’s important to plan that a significant amount of your time might be spent on promotion. It’s easy to underestimate that (I did, and in a major way).
Working this way doesn’t scale. At some point, one-on-one communication takes up too much time and energy to compensate for the benefits it brings over more impersonal forms of communication. But that only happens once your event is popular enough. Before you’ve held your first event (which was the situation I was in with Going Solo Lausanne), you don’t have a community of advocates for your work, you don’t have fans (you might have personal fans, but not fans of your event) or passionate attendees 
, you don’t have other people doing your work for you.
At the beginning, every person who hears about your event is the result of sweat and hard work. Hopefully, at some point it’ll take off and you’ll start seeing more and more people blogging about the event you’re organising — but even then, it might take a while before you can just sit back and watch things happen. But in case this moment comes earlier than planned, you’re all set: you have a blog, a Twitter account, a Facebook group and a newsletter. Until then, though, you’re going to be stuck on IM and sending out e-mails.
A few last words
I hope that by sharing these lessons with you, I’ll have contributed to making things a little easier for somebody else in the same situation I was. You’ll have understood that I haven’t tried to be exhaustive about how to use social media for promotion — indeed, I’ve skipped most of the “advanced” stuff that is more often spoken about.
But I think it’s easy to get so taken up with the “latest and greatest” tools out there that we forget some of the basic stuff. I, for one, was guilty of that initially.
Also, one thing I haven’t spoken about is how to talk to people. Of course, some of what you’re doing is going to be impersonal. Own up to it, if you’re mass e-mailing. Don’t pretend to be personal when you aren’t — it’s hypocritical, doesn’t come across well, and can be smelled a mile away.
I haven’t quite finished reconciling my practical experience with how I believe things “should” work. I’ve learnt a lot, but I certainly haven’t figured everything out yet. I would have wanted to do a lot more, but time simply wasn’t available, so I tried to prioritize. I made choices, and some of them were maybe mistakes. But overall, I’m happy with how things went and what I learnt.
If you have had similar experiences, I’d be really happy to hear from you. Likewise, if you disagree with some of the things I’ve written, or think I’m wrong on certain counts, do use the comments. I’m open to debate, even though I’m a bit hard-headed .
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Digital Crumble
Ecrire pour un blog
[en]
A few tips on writing for a blog: don't advertise, be interesting, use your authentic voice, remember the media is conversational, and be a real person writing something. This is not easy to do if you've been formatted to spew commercial copy or marketing-speak, but it can be learned. Learning requires exercise, and often help from others (peers or a trainer).
[fr]
Hier, séance de formation chez un client. Deuxième séance, quelques mois après la première. Les bases techniques du maniement de WordPress sont acquises, on parle donc plus en profondeur de:
Voici quelques éléments intéressants qui ont émergé de nos discussions, et que je reproduis ici.
Publicité
En y réfléchissant bien, peu de personnes vont volontairement aller chercher du contenu publicitaire à lire. Toute l’industrie télévisuelle tourne finalement autour d’un but: attirer des gens devant un écran pour pouvoir leur enfiler de la publicité (oui, je suis un peu cynique). Mais sérieusement, la publicité c’est ce qu’on met sous les yeux des gens quand ils ne peuvent (ou ne veulent) pas s’échapper. Si on leur propose de s’abonner à du contenu purement publicitaire, peu de chances qu’ils le fassent.
Avec un blog, et en ligne en général (je pense aussi à Twitter), le public n’est jamais prisonnier. Il peut s’en aller d’un clic de souris. Si on veut utiliser un canal en ligne pour faire passer du contenu publicitaire, il faut le faire avec beaucoup de délicatesse — au risque de crier dans le désert.
Etre intéressant
Du coup, la logique rédactionnelle d’un blog ne peut pas être purement publicitaire (ou purement “marketing”, au sens de “pousser à la vente, à la consommation, promouvoir directement”). On privilégiera du contenu véritablement intéressant pour le lecteur. Pour le lecteur — pas du point de vue de l’entreprise.
Qu’est-ce qui intéresse vraiment les gens, du coup? C’est ça la grande question, mais voici quelques pistes:
C’est assez vague, tout ça, et il est possible (malheureusement) d’aborder ce genre de sujet de façon totalement inintéressante… Ce n’est pas une recette magique garantie!
Un ton authentique
La clé réside le plus souvent dans le ton utilisé. Le language marketing, “communiqué de presse”, pub, ou trop journalistique est à éviter. Oui, me direz-vous, mais comment faire?
Ce qu’on cherche, c’est à parler comme des êtres humains. Il faut pour cela souvent se “dé-formatter” (beaucoup de professionnels de la communication sont des crispés du “je”, par exemple). Le ton juste, c’est celui qu’on utiliserait dans un e-mail à un ami, ou bien dans une conversation avec des amis autour d’une table. Bien sûr, c’est de l’écrit, mais on se rapproche de ça.
Pour faire ça, quelques trucs:
les chaussuresla peau du lecteur, ou du moins l’imaginer en face (“est-ce que ça l’intéresse vraiment, ce que je raconte?”)Un petit tuyau: quand on est passionné par ce qu’on écrit, ça vient plus naturellement!
Un média conversationnel
Le dernier point de la liste ci-dessus est capital: avec un blog, nous sommes dans une conversation. Bien sûr, pas dans une véritable conversation en face-à-face, mais quand même, dans une dynamique d’échange.
Vous avez déjà certainement dû subir des cours ou des conférences où l’orateur lit son discours ou débite un monologue assommant. Comparez cela au bon orateur, qui n’est pas en train de parler au public, mais de discuter avec les gens dans la salle (même si ce n’est que lui parle).
On cherche à faire la même chose dans un blog. Si on parle comme une brochure de marketing, personne ne nous répondra. Un être humain, par contre, c’est autre chose: on peut discuter avec!
Autre avantage d’un style informel et conversationnel: votre lecteur retiendra mieux ce que vous lui dites. En effet, il a été démontré que l’utilisation du “je” et autres marqueurs de la conversation dans le language écrit informel donnent au cerveau l’illusion qu’il est dans une conversation. Du coup… il est plus attentif! Kathy Sierra explique très bien tout ceci (en anglais).
Une vraie personne qui écrit
Bloguer nécessite de se dévoiler un tout petit peu. Pas de raconter ses pensées ou envies les plus secrètes, bien entendu, mais quand même de se livrer un peu. Si le blog “marche”, c’est qu’il met le lecteur en contact avec quelqu’un d’humain, d’imparfait, d’atteignable. Quelqu’un comme lui — pas une organisation ou institution désincarnée.
Il est important pour cela que le blog soit formatté de façon à ce que le nom de l’auteur apparaisse à côté de l’article — ou le cas échéant, que les auteurs signent leurs articles. Si c’est Julie ou Sophie ou Robert qui écrit, ce n’est pas la même chose! Je veux savoir qui me parle, et à qui je parle si je réponds.
Comment changer?
Le problème de beaucoup de personnes qui se mettent au blog, c’est d’avoir été “formatté” à écrire dans un language pseudo-neutre, impersonnel, journalistique, ou marketing/commercial. Il faut “désapprendre”.
Heureusement, on sait tous avoir des conversations avec nos amis, ce qui nous donne un point de repère.
Il vaut la peine de se mettre à plusieurs, de regarder ses productions et celles des autres avec un oeil critique et impitoyable:
Puis, si nécessaire, retravailler, récrire. Ça ne vient pas tout seul, mais ça peut s’apprendre.
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