Lately, I’ve been thinking about how social media has been a part of our overall marketing program. I started to realize that our definition of marketing and advertising is slowly evolving.

In my mind advertising was the driving force of a marketing campaign. The idea was to create something interesting and broadcast it with advertising.

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Advertising was more important than the actual campaign. If you spent enough money and as long as it was marginally interesting, you could be successful.

Nowadays, there’s seems to be a tip in the scales. Marketing is becoming more important and is being supported by advertising.

No longer can you just spend money to be successful. Your campaign needs to be interesting, exciting, and buzz worthy. Without being unique, the campaign doesn’t spread itself.

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I’d love to know what you think. Do you define marketing and advertising as I have? Do you think that marketing is becoming more important than advertising? Leave a comment with your thoughts.

Are You Marketing or Advertising? is a post by: Samir Balwani

More talk about social media ROI and measurement? You know it.

This time Mitch Joel of “Six Pixels of Separation” wrote a post about measurements and metrics. As much as I like Mitch (his articles are great and I highly recommend his blog), I really disagreed with his take on social media ROI.

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He states that…

“Thinking about business objectives instead of ROI makes the whole strategy that much workable and doable. In the end, instead of looking for the ROI in Social Media, maybe the smarter thing to do is to focus on what the business objectives are, and then figure out if Social Media is an effective means (from both a strategic and budgetary point of view) to help you and your business accomplish your goals.” [Source]

He uses two phrases that stand out: “business objectives” and “effective means”.

Here’s where I disagree with Mitch. I don’t agree that business should be run by “effective means”. It should be run based on decisions that lead to the most “efficient means”.

What’s the difference? Well, imagine my business objective is to build awareness about my product. I could do a number of things.

Picking up the phone and going through the phonebook would be extremely effective. Nothing beats a personal connection. But is it the most effective? Most likely, no.

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Without being able to assign an ROI to marketing efforts, managers can fall into the trap of allocating resources to measures that do not efficiently achieve business objectives.

The Problem:

If we agree that determining the ROI of social media is a necessary evil to making intelligent marketing decisions, then how do we measure it? Therein lies the problem.

Currently people have measure social media loosely, if at all. We’ve been using metrics as indicators of succes.

I hate to use the Dell example because I think they’re doing a great job with social media, but the response they gave about ROI (“Binhammer responded that ROI was nothing more than an accounting term and probably has little to no place when it comes to measuring the success of any Social Media marketing initiative”) seems unsustainable.

Dell is also well known for there announcement, stating that they “surpassed $3 million in sales via links from one of its Twitter accounts”. It’s important to note that this figure is slightly disingenuous. You don’t know how much they spent on social media. How much is spent to have a team dedicated to social media? What is the profit?

A second form of anecdotal “ROI” that doesn’t actually tell the whole story is when managers say “Company x is making more money and they’re using social media, therefore social media must be making money”.

It seems logical at first, but when you delve into the statement you realize the hole. How are you to assume that it wasn’t consumer interest, a by-product of more efficient marketing, or just being lucky? Without examples or data, you can’t prove or disprove that social media helped the business be more profitable.

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Without data and without being able to clearly track sales, social media can’t be proven to work. It requires a leap of faith, which businesses should not be forced to make. Efficiency is dictated by testing, by data, and by understanding.

The Marketing Mix Model:

One of the most important tools a marketing manager will have at his disposal is a marketing mix model. The model, an equation, helps marketers “optimize promotional tactics with respect to sales revenue or profit.”

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Social media marketing doesn’t fall within the model. Because of its dynamic and fluid nature, social media becomes an outlier. But, without being able to measure social media’s effectiveness, we won’t be able to assign it a value in the marketing mix model.

Herein lies our goal. We must identify a way to measure and assign social media efforts a value in terms of sales revenue or profit.

Finding a Solution:

There’s no point in complaining about social media measurements without offering some kind of solution. The first step is outlining exactly what we need.

To accurately measure the effectiveness of social media, we must be able to:

• Identify users that have engaged through social media
• Assign the appropriate value to social media interaction in the click-stream
• Determine if the user converted to a sale

In my mind the best way to achieve these measurements is through a cookie.

A cookie (also tracking cookie, browser cookie, and HTTP cookie) is a small piece of text stored on a user’s computer by a web browser. A cookie consists of one or more name-value pairs containing bits of information such as user preferences, shopping cart contents, the identifier for a server-based session, or other data used by websites. Source

Why use a cookie to measure social media? With a cookie we’re able to determine which social media profiles the user interacted with and when they finally converted.

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With this kind of data, marketers would better be able to understand and optimize all online marketing campaigns.

There exists two major problems with this potential solution: privacy and the social media sites themselves.

Addressing Privacy Concerns:

Most people want some kind of privacy on the web. I agree, I tend to clear cookies when I close my browser. I’m the person that Comscore and Quantcast hate.

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Nonetheless, being tracked online has become second nature. For example, social sites like Facebook and Twitter already cookie users to track engagement and other site metrics for themselves. Most ad networks use some kind of cookie to retarget users and show ads across the network.

Allowing individual brands to create and deploy cookies that almost “piggy-back” on the cookies already being used shouldn’t lead to a huge outcry from privacy supporters. The information is already being gathered, the question is how can marketers get it, and how can it spread across multiple platforms?

Concerns of Social Media Sites:
Another obstacle to overcome is the mere fact that most social media sites would never want to freely share this information. Data is their money and collecting it is extremely important.

It’s interesting that social media sites, the herald of change on the web, have maintained an old model for monetizing their sites.

Instead of using the data to target advertising, why not allow marketers to optimize their social media campaigns?

I know a number of brands that would pay for a “brand Facebook page” that allows for useful metrics. Throw in the ability to cookie users and an integration with Google analytics, and I wouldn’t even have to think about the decision to pay for a fan page.

Twitter has a unique opportunity too. Cookie users as they click links and give me click through rates. These kind of metrics and measurements help social media marketers allocate a value to social sites.

By not working together you hold back social media from growing and becoming a data driven marketing path. Which leads us to the next section.

Isolated data isn’t enough, it must be comprehensive. If we’re to create cookies that work across platforms, we need some kind of standard.

Proposing a New Standard:

So why do we need a standard? Well it’s simple really.

No successful social media campaign covers just a single social media site. Social media marketing thrives when multiple platforms are used in harmony.

It would do us little good if we could only track conversions through Facebook, but not Twitter. Also, it’s no help if we’re tracking Facebook and Twitter independently.

Marketers should be able to allocate each site’s involvement in the sales process. Imagine that a user finds a Facebook page, then follows the brand’s Twitter account. Next thing you know they buy a product that is Tweeted out.

Should only Twitter get credit for the sale? It was Facebook that originally introduced that user to the brand.

With a cookie that is standard across platforms, similar to OpenID, marketers would be able to properly identify the value of each individual platform.

A Short Term Fix:

The standard cross-platform cookie might be months, if not years, away. So what do we do in the mean time? How do you measure social media to the best of our ability?

When it comes to social media measuring right now, it breaks down into three sections.

• The first is measuring outreach effects.
• The second is measuring profiles reach.
• The third, and I think most difficult, is measuring the effect of status updates.

Measuring Outreach Effects and Profile Reach:
Before we can explore how to best measure outreach and social media profiles, there are a few things you need to have in place ahead of time.

The first is to be able to create virtual pages or 301 redirects. If you’re on Wordpress, you can use the Redirection plugin. The idea is to create a “vanity” URL that redirects to a “tracking” URL.

Secondly, you need to have Google Analytics installed on your site for this technique.

So how does this technique work? Well we can’t actually track the user through the entire social media funnel, instead we can track them as they jump from one profile to our site.

This gives us an idea of the final step of the process and if people are converting from the social media site.

The best way to explain the practices is to use an example.

Imagine I have a Facebook page. On the page I have a landing page that highlights my latest product, a new Dell Monitor (The Dell Ultrasharp 3008WFP to be exact).

Instead of posting on Facebook the URL [http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/products/Monitors/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04&sku=223-4890] that is the exact product page, instead we create a vanity URL. The new URL we use can be http://promotions.us.dell.com/fb/dell-3008wfp. This vanity URL will redirect to the product page URL, but with a few additions.

The additions come from the URL builder from Google. Paid Search Marketers have been using this tool forever, to tag and identify campaigns. Social media marketers can do the same.

In this instance, because we’re posting the link on Facebook we name the Campaign Source – Facebook, the medium is our Landing Page and the Campaign name is Social Media.

So let’s walk through the user workflow. The user comes to Dell’s Facebook page. Sees the landing page and clicks on the link, http://promote.us.dell.com/fb/dell-3008wfp.

This link redirects to:

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/products/Monitors/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04&sku=223-4890&utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=landing-page&utm_campaign=social-media.

Google analytics tracks this as a Facebook sources referral with a campaign assigned as “social-media”.

It becomes powerful because as people share the vanity URL, we’re still able to attribute any conversions to the original promotion and effort.

The same can be done for blogger outreach. When recommending a page bloggers link to, the link could be a vanity URL which redirects to a UTM encoded page. This allows you to track the overall effectiveness of your blogger outreach campaign, as well as conversions from these links.

Although not perfect it gives us a basic idea of outreach and profile reach. Mixed with advance use of goal funnels and event tracking in Google analytics, you can get a better understanding of the ROI of the social media campaign.

Measuring Effects of Status Updates:
I stated before that tracking the effectiveness of status updates is more difficult. The reason for that is because it’s so open.

A link shared on Twitter can easily spread to Tumblr. Also, the life of each individual link is so short that it’s difficult to gather a comprehensive amount of data.

We can’t perfectly measure the effect of status updates, but with a few tricks we can attempt to gauge a campaign’s success.

The previously mentioned technique of “vanity” URLs could work for status updates, just as it does for profiles and outreach campaign. Awe.sm is an application which lets you use your own domain to create shortened URLs and automatically add the UTM code.

Another trick is to use coupons to gauge conversions. Sharing Twitter or Facebook specific coupons via status updates allow you to track the number of coupons used and measure the status update’s reach. The coupon needs to be published multiple times to take into account variables such as time and overall Twitter noise.

Finally, another quick way to gauge overall effectiveness of status updates is to create a specific landing page for the status update. Let’s use the Dell monitor again as an example.

The goal is to test the effectiveness of our reputation and clout. The first step is to create a landing page separate from the current product page. Next, we tweet out a link to the page with a message like “Just sat next to my new dell monitor, it’s nice and bright! [link]”. Now we track click-throughs to the page, but also over-all traffic to the page.

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More than likely, the number of click-throughs will be less than the the traffic the page gets. The reason is because people re-shorten links, or use different tools, like ow.ly to retweet the link. By creating a separate landing page for this test we’re able to collect the total data.

Also, we test our “clout” by not pushing the user to actually buy the product in the tweet. The only thing influencing the consumer to buy the monitor is that the Dell account stated it was a bright monitor.

We’re looking to track impulse buys that are based solely on the fact that the product was tweeted by the account. The number of conversions will be extremely low. This shouldn’t be disheartening since the goal of status updates isn’t to create large conversions, but to slowly convince a consumer to buy product over time.

As you can see tracking status updates can be a difficult task. Instead of attempting to continually measure it, we’re forced to spot-check the success of campaigns to gauge effectiveness.

Conclusion

It’s clear that social media measurements need to mature. The problems are numerous and obstacles great. The question is, will we pass this phase where marketers are saying “Social media works, trust me…” and enter a paradigm where social media is measured and optimized thoroughly.

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Until social media sites work together to offer full tracking and data, we’re forced to using incomplete metrics as indicators of success. We’re using snapshots to track entire campaigns.

Social media metrics must mature to a point where smart social media marketers can clearly track ROI so they can make informed data driven decisions. Most large brands are risk-averse, and without clear data, social media becomes a huge business risk.

For social media to continue moving forward its effectiveness to build a business profit needs to be proven. Otherwise, why would I invest in social media when I know a TV ad will net me a profit?

This is How You Measure Social Media ROI is a post by: Samir Balwani

Social media… what a buzzword. It’s grown, exploded, and ushered in a new paradigm in marketing. Kind of.

It seems like everyday there’s a new social media guru, someone to tell you how to use your Facebook, when to Tweet, or berate you for not having a FourSquare.

The social media industry, in its current form, is not sustainable.

Why do I say that? Well, two main reasons stand out.

First, it’s not easy to assign or forecast ROI from social media. Without being able to at least estimate return, managers have a hard time justifying investment.

It’s not a large issue right now because social media is still new, it’s exciting, and everyone’s doing it. Once the allure wears off and people will begin to ask about profit.

For social media to continue to grow we must find a way to directly relate investment to sales.

Secondly, social media is full of “experts”. There’s not enough actionable research and too much chest beating.

The number of fans you have is not an indicator of your ability as a marketer. Your ability to sell products, increase brand awareness, and achieve profitable goals is what differentiates a good marketer from a “social media expert”.

This explosion of experts is detrimental to the industry. It muddies the truth, over-hypes what’s possible, and hurts everyone’s credibility.

Thankfully, I foresee this being less of a problem soon. It ties in directly with the first obstacle – accountability. People were drawn to social media because of the lack of accountability. Since you can’t prove ROI, you didn’t have to prove success.

As more and more people demand proper metrics and tracking, less people will be able to fake social media expertise. Hopefully, this change will happen sooner rather than later.

I really want to know what you think the future holds for social media marketing? Will it change marketing? Or is it just a flash in the pan? How do you plan on using it? How do you plan on making differentiating yourself from other “experts”?

Will Social Media Survive? is a post by: Samir Balwani

Investment is a word that rules business decisions. How much do I need to invest? It’s a question I hear on a near daily basis.

So why is it that when it comes to social media, many focus on money and ignore the cultural investment?

Everything you do has a cost, whether it is monetary, time, or some other abstract resource. Social media although not the most expensive, requires a cultural evolution.

For many of the largest companies, a cultural investment can be greater than a monetary one. To change a business culture requires a form of dedication and collaboration rarely achieved.

But what exactly is a cultural investment? It would behoove us to answer this short yet not-so-simple question.

As businesses begin to shift their focus to the online world, so too must they shift their culture. This means creating a company that is nimble, lean, and efficient. Where these adjectives were goals for a business, they now are requirements.

A company must be able and willing to take risks, optimize campaigns, and work together efficiently.

Although an overly used example, Zappos embodies the idea of a web culture. Marketing, customer service, and product delivery all overlap. Each department works with an understanding that the ultimate goal is customer happiness and satisfaction. That this satisfaction will equate into returning and new customers.

Most businesses don’t achieve the success that Zappos has and for many it’s not even a possibility. Companies, especially luxury companies, tend to be too far on the spectrum to embrace the openness that the web requires.

Identifying where your business lies is the first step in evolving your identity. Using the above indicators can help you plot a course. The graph will not perfectly define every company, but it can act as a guide for most.

With an idea of the current overall culture and a goal in mind, an employee must take lead. Sadly, although the change must come from within, no single person can have both the drive and power to bring it to fruition.

The change, to have the most effect, must come from a group of individuals of power. Department heads and C-level executives can lead the charge, yet the revolution must be company wide.

For this to occur, social media and web culture needs to be sold to the company. It cannot be a policy demanded, it must be ingrained and incentivized.

For many, the first step is to identify employees, company-wide, that embrace the web culture.

Look for those that want to work together, share knowledge, and are leaders. Another group to include are employees that blog, have a Twitter or Facebook, or are active on social sites and forums.

These employees can be a jump-start and example for others. Create a task force that is comprised of employees from each department to identify ways to shift the company culture.

This task force should answer questions such as:

• “How can we better share information between departments and consumers?”
• “Is the company making the most out of each customer interaction?”
• “Has the business defined and identified an online brand strategy?”
• “What can be done to spur culture shifts?”

Answering the above questions should help create a plan and goal for the culture change.

Similar to almost any other, a cultural investment hurts profitability in the short-term but begins to show returns in the long run. The loss of productivity from employees as the transition occurs can be recouped as the new culture inspired collaboration and togetherness.

As the world becomes more Internet savvy and consumers evolve, business culture becomes more important. Consumers are looking to buy from companies we enjoy, those that they are connected to, and the businesses that make them feel special. It may not be a conscious decision, but it’s one that influences the buying process.

How are you investing in a culture that aligns with your consumers? Do you talk about company culture? Are you prepared for the transition?

Social Media Requires a Cultural Investment is a post by: Samir Balwani

It’s January, the month where the gyms are packed, fitness rules, and ad campaigns take an odd turn towards diets. But as much as we’re trained to make weight loss resolutions, your business should be looking to lose excess baggage as well.

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I’ve written fairly extensively on how most brands tend to shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to social media.

Almost always, the largest culprit to online marketing failure is bureaucracy. It’s the reason why small businesses can excel at social media, while adoption is slow for large brands.

Online marketing requires a company be nimble. Your ability to make changes, react to online trends, and keep up with technology will forecast your success. The Internet changes, technology grows. Moore’s Rule states that our technological advances will double every two years. Can your marketing keep up?

The larger a boat, the longer it takes to turn. Similarly, the more bloated your company, the harder it is to adapt.

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I titled this post “Welcome to 2010… Now Trim the Fat” because I wanted to make a point. Employee bloat is holding back your business. Processes that are long and drawn out, hurt your marketing. Being unsure is no longer an option.

A by-product of the paradigm shift towards online marketing is that decisions can be made with data. We can test what works and what doesn’t work – we can do it quickly. Avinash calls it failing fast.

Every decision doesn’t need to go through a committee. The Internet has made it easy to make educated decisions quickly.

Want to figure out which product you should promote? Ask your customers what they like.

Need to know whether something on your site is working? Run a eye tracking test.

When your business isn’t nimble, isn’t quick to adapt – you fall behind. You lose opportunities to better your product, your business, and to retain your consumers.

How is your department, business, or team streamlining for 2010?

Welcome to 2010… Now Trim the Fat is a post by: Samir Balwani

Recently I wrote a post about what I would tell a social media professor. After publishing the article, I’ve spoken to a number of professors about how they teach social media.

What I realized is that so many of these teachers are using social media, are interacting with students online, and sharing their thoughts. They might not have the most followers or be the easiest to find, but they share valuable information.

I’ve created a “Professors” Twitter list to help compile these instructors in one place.

So in true crowdsourcing fashion, I’m asking for your help! If you know a professor that is teaching a social media course or a marketing course that talks about social media, leave a comment. In your comment please leave the professor’s name, twitter name, and college!

Let’s see how comprehensive we can make this list!

Professors Teaching Social Media is a post by: Samir Balwani

Thank you everyone! I wanted to take a moment and thank each of you for making this year amazing. I hope you have an amazing holiday season.

I’m looking forward to a great 2010. I hope we can all learn more and grow together.

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A special thank you to some of the people that have helped me achieve all that I have:

• Tamar Weinberg
• David Harry
• Angie Haggstrom
• Steve Gerencser
• James Morris
• Justin Parks
• Miss CJ
• Mike Wilton
• Charles S
• Tim Nash
• The Dojo Community
• My Friends at Mashable
• All the Great Commenters, Twitter Followers, and Facebook Fans!

Happy Holidays!

Sincerely,
Samir Balwani

Thank You My Friends and Community is a post by: Samir Balwani

Obviously I’m a huge fan of social media. I know it has the power to revolutionize how we market to consumers – in fact it already has. As powerful as it might be, it has a major shortcoming: tracking.

Tracking is a major issue because right now, we really can’t quantify the power of social media. We’re able to identify a community, show pages with large numbers of fans, and create campaigns with interaction – but how does that relate to sales? Sales is the only metric that matters, everything else is just a potential indicator.

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The Problem With Indicators

In social media, the most common indicators we use tend to be engagement metrics. The hope is that if a user is going through the site or returning more often than they must be part of the community.

On Facebook and social media sites, we look to fan counts and interaction. Examples include comments and retweets. These are supposed to indicate a growing and more dedicated community.

On the surface that seems fine. But these indicators only look at the top level of interaction.

These questions remain to be answered: How often does someone in the community buy a product? How much did we spend on social media marketing for each consumer?

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Why We Can’t Track Social Media

Whenever I tell clients that we can’t actually track social media, they look at me like I’m crazy. It’s true, seriously.

I can’t attribute Facebook to a sale unless the user clicked through from Facebook and bought a product. But, how do you attribute Facebook’s branding impact on the sales funnel?

Without being able to track each consumers interaction on Facebook and Twitter, we’re unable to determine who bought and why. You can’t tag users when they visit your social media profiles (something you can do on your own site).

At first the thought is, who cares if you can’t track it directly. We know that social media has an effect; we’ve seen sales go up since we’ve introduced social media campaigns. But not being able to directly attribute a specific sale to social media, creates other problems.

Forecasting Becomes an Issue

Right now if you want to start a social media campaign, you need to take a complete leap of faith. You have to hope that you have dedicated enough resources without spending too much.

Since we use indicators right now and are not using the actual sale metric, forecasting returns on campaigns becomes messy.

Imagine the following scenario: You’re building a social media campaign that incorporates user-generated content. The site is almost complete, when your developer comes back to you and asks you if you want it to be embeddable on Facebook. The cost of adding this functionality is $1,000. Is it worth it?

The only indicator that you could use right now would be the number of sales that occurred due to referrals from embeddable content (possible YouTube videos or previous Facebook campaigns).

But even this indicator would include a lot of noise. It doesn’t take into account the number of consumers that saw your Facebook page or just heard of the campaign.

If you simply used the indicator to determine the value of adding embed functionality, you might disregard it as a bad investment. The truth might be that the functionality is actually really important and create a high ROI. Right now, we simply just don’t know.

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How Are You Projecting Return?

Armed only with indicators and little qualified data, how are you determining what is worth it and what isn’t?

I try to collect as much data as possible in the hopes of finding a true indicator – or at least a better one.

I’ve turn to marketing mix equations and econometric regressions to try and figure out what effect of each variable in the social media equation is. But so far, there just isn’t enough data.

So how are you assigning monetary value to social media marketing?

The Only Social Media Metric that Matters is a post by: Samir Balwani

Seriously, it’s probably you. Most campaigns fall apart because of the company itself. Don’t blame lack of interest, the medium, or your community. If you can’t convince your consumers to be interested enough in you to fan you on Facebook, how are you getting them into your stores to buy your product?

For those don’t want to keep digging their own grave look for the warning signs. Fix them and you’ll see how consumers clamor to be part of your community.

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PC Sucks – We Want Sensational

Being perfectly politically correct will kill your campaigns. It’s boring, bland, and hardly excites anyone. Sensationalism rules as people look to push the envelope and test the line of what’s taboo and what isn’t.

Common television is proof of this. Reality TV and shock TV rule the ratings. The question is “what can you get away with?”

Burger King is the perfect example. Their campaigns continually push the limit. Examples include their Facebook campaign that asked to you remove ten friends to now their UK campaign that has a showercam (semi-sfw).

They’ve embraced that idea that PC is boring and have tried to take each campaign to the next level. Do they have a backlash? Sure, people complain about their advertising and what they’re doing, but not enough.

You won’t make everyone happy, so might as well just appeal to your demographic and do something crazy. Get me excited and make me go “wow”. Then I’ll share your content.

Someone Should Kidnap Legal

If you’re ready to stop being PC about everything you do then the first step is to get rid of legal (not really, but god get them to lighten up).

It tends to be that legal is the scapegoat for any campaign that may be seen as unacceptable. Someone doesn’t like a strategy or is afraid of the backlash; more often then not they’ll send it to legal with strict approval guidelines.

Don’t let others use “legalities” (and I use quotes because it’s not that something is against the law, but more that the fear of being sued has spread to an uncontrollable paranoia) to keep you from launching a viral campaign.

Make sure your legal team understands social media culture and what works online. They’re there to keep you from being sued, but also to fight for the company when you are being sued. Give them some real work.

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Hire a Clown or a Funny Magician

Has your company ever tried to be funny? Has it ever worked?

Most businesses have a sense of humor, at the beginning of a campaign inception. Then more people weigh in and things start to morph. The campaign suddenly goes from hilarious to bland.

Be very clear that comedy is an integral part of online marketing.

When consumers are searching online, they have the ability to go to anything and see all kinds of information. We’re naturally drawn to media that makes us feel good. Why would someone take the time to watch or listen to what you have to say unless it makes us feel good?

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Online consumers are looking for specific things. Don’t forget you have to fight for attention and you need to compel people to share your story. Are you doing that right now? What’s stopping you?

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Have you overcome some of these obstacles? What did you do to take a bad strategy and make it successful?

I Know Why Your Social Media Strategies Keep Failing is a post by: Samir Balwani

When I first started writing my blog, everyone told me that leaving comments on other sites was a great step to building traffic. It’s true, commenting on blogs helps you become connected to the community, makes you stand out, and can drive traffic to your own blog.

For me, though, convincing myself to write a comment was difficult. I was considered a lurker – I’d read the article, have an idea, but never share it with the writer.

I worked hard to train myself out of that mentality. I now share my thoughts whenever possible. It not only helps build myself as a leader in the industry, but it also lets me help other bloggers explore new ideas.

So how did I do it? Here are some of the steps that I went through:

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1. Stop Being Afraid of Being Wrong

Seriously, the first step is to stop being afraid of being wrong. I used to be afraid of making a mistake, afraid that someone would jump on me for saying something wrong.

Whenever I felt like I could be wrong, I reminded myself that everyone is entitled to their own opinion. The worst that happens is that I’m corrected and I’d be better for it.

Share what you’re thinking. Someone might say that you’re wrong, but who cares? Learn from your mistakes and make yourself better.

Bloggers want to know what you think about their article. Don’t be afraid to share your ideas.

2. Start Small and Be Comfortable

I started small, by leaving short comments on my friends blogs. I knew that if it came to a point where I needed to change my comment, they would help me. This made me feel comfortable because I couldn’t make an egregious error.

The comments didn’t always add value, I just wanted to get into a routine of leaving comments. Sometimes it was simply “good post” or “I really agree with…*part of article*”.

It just takes this small step to get into a rhythm. Over time I noticed that instead of writing these short comments, I was writing in-depth analysis. I began treating my comments as mini blog posts. I realized, I just needed to start somewhere.

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3. Facebook and Twitter are your Friends

We’ve become used to leaving shorter comments. Look at your Facebook feed or Twitter replies. Most of these comments are no longer than 140 characters, it’s something we’ve gotten used to and it’s ok.

Translate what you do on Facebook and Twitter to blog comments. Publish what you feel, what you think, and don’t worry about length.

4. Keep a First Impressions Journal

When I read blogs, I tend to open up different tabs and read through the articles quickly. That’s great for getting through tons of content fast, but it’s not useful if you’re trying to leave useful comments.

Instead of jumping from one article to another, leave a comment right after you finish your article. You probably won’t come back to the post if you switch tabs. Be focused and don’t put it off.

I like to write notes in the comments field as I read the article. I keep notes on questions that arise as I read the post or how it made me feel. These notes turn into my comment once I’m done reading.

5. Use an RSS Reader

The best tool to make your content consumption more effective is a feed reader. I identified about 50 blogs that I like to read and setup a Google Reader account. In the reader, I can track when each of these sites published a new article.

I then setup a goal – before I can share or “star” an article, I have to leave a comment on it. I don’t always keep up with my goal, but it has definitely made me more efficient and more cognizant of leaving comments. (Oh, you can follow my shared items here.)

I think comments are an important part of the online community. It allows me to share my thoughts and grow as a person. It helps the writer explore his article from different angles and potentially make the publication more in-depth.

Get over your fear and take your first step – leave a comment here and tell me why you comment on other blogs. What drives you to share your thoughts? Do you set a routine for yourself? Has it been useful for you?

5 Ways to Go From Lurker to Leader is a post by: Samir Balwani