Zucks = done well

Love it or loathe it, with 800 million users, Facebook marketing has changed the the way we socialise, interact and market on the web.

With instant potential access to 800 million+ users, who have shared enough details about themselves that could make a market researcher wet themselves with joy, it’s little surprise that Facebook advertising is one of  the world’s most powerful digital marketing tools. However everyday millions is wasted on poor Facebook marketing

So how can we do Facebook marketing better ?

Over the past month I’ve been working with a Social Gaming Startup that we’ve grown to 3 million users (1 million MAU’s) in 6 months. One of our primary user acquisition methods is Facebook advertising. In this post I’ll share 20 of the most important Facebook marketing tips I’ve learned  and mistakes to avoid

As it’s quite a lot to take in, I’ll break this post into 2 parts, 10 today and 10 in the next post.

If you’re using Facebook advertising now, I’d love too hear if you put these Facebook advertising tips into action (and the results). If you do not use Facebook advertising right now, but might in the future – I recommededn bookmarking these posts, so you know where to find it when you do begin marketing on Facebook.

Should you have any specific questions – please add them to the comments on the bottom of this page.

1.  Focussing only on CPC

With Facebook ads you pay only when someone clicks on your ad – so it’s easy to only focus solely on your Cost Per Click (CPC). However your Click Through Rate (CTR) is also very important – as Facebook wants ads that are more engaging and will prioritise AND lower the Cost Per Click price of ads that have a higher CTR

2.  Applying your Effort in the Wrong Places

There are 3 main elements of a Facebook ad: Image, headline & text body – and not all are created equal.

-          The image has the largest impact.  I estimate 80% of the impact of the ad comes from the image. This is what does or doesn’t catch someone’s eye -> you can have a great image & crap text and still do well, but not the other way round

-          Headline – next most important à I’d give this 15% of the impact

-          Body test – least important à I’d give this 5% impact

The amount of time you spend testing and optimising your ads should be split in accordance with the above

 3.  Using Broad Demographics

Reason why Facebook CPC is so powerful – you can hyper target the users that will see your ads à meaning that only only paying when your target customers click your ads. These are typically:

Male/female

Age: 13 – 17, 18 – 24, 25 – 29, 29 – 24, 25-39 etc

Country

State (available for the US only)

Remember all that stuff the marketing teachers told you about ‘know your audience’ – this is it in action

You do know who your target audience is don’t you?

4.  Using Broad Interests

Another of the joys of Facebook ads is that you can also target psychographic information: What are your user’s interests? These are based on the pages that your users have ‘Liked’ or games they have played

Got a new Social Network for Carrot lovers you want to market? Try targeting these types of pages

 5.  Bidding too High

Facebook will give you a suggested CPC bid for your ad – do not use this bid price if you’re looking to get most value from your ads. My advice – begin 30% below the price Facebook suggest and slowly nudge upwards only if you need to drive more volume

6.  Using Dull Ass images

Remember point 2 – that 80% of impact comes from images? Well this is the moment

Use images that are bright, visually striking and stand out.

What works:

-          Close ups of people. Time and time again what achieves the highest CTR are close ups of smiling girls (however this might result in highest conversions, or CPA’s – see point 20)

-          Relevant Striking Images- time and time again, the images that resulted in highest converted click through was this image: Lessons – a close up image of a 3D football game à grabs the attention of football fans/gaming fans (our audience)

-          Ask your designer to brighten the face of who-ever is in your picture (almost a halo effect) this only works

What does not work:

-          Far away images of people – the image is small, unless it’s a close up it won’t engage people

What on earth is this picture supposed to be????

-          Dull colours

-          Logo’s, unless yours is very vibrant, it won’t catch people’s eye

Facebook ads: What NOT to do

7.  Not testing boarders

Putting a thick border around your ads can make them much more striking – try it! We’ve found it increases conversions.

Borders RULE!!!

8.  Not using consistency where possible

If you can have elements of your ad that reflect whatever you’re advertising it will result in higher conversions. People don’t like surprises. Surprises = clicks of the ‘back button’ which is bad bad. Take our game I Am Playr as an example:

We put a small logo in our ads

Goalie with logo ---> winning combo!

As the first thing people see after clicking the ad is our logo on our accept app screen à this gave consistency of the logo to people.

the first thing someone sees

Result? A slightly lower Click through Rate, but a Higher Click to Conversion rate – which is the ultimate goal (increased ROI)

 9.  Having a Lame Headline

After the image, it’s the headline that’s most important. What works well here are clear requests – questions work particularly well. When you see a question, your subconscious reaction is to answer it = increased engagement with your ad

As do celebrity names (if you have the authority to use them)

I love what Appsumo doing with this headline

Awesome headline!!

10.  Not using the word FREE

People like Free – If you’re giving away something free, frickin say so!!!!!

I’ll post the second 10 Facebook advertising tips later this week

If you have any questions – or anything you’d like me to cover in the next post – please add it to the comments below

Good news is that it’s not just for creative geniuses, but being creative is a skill that can be learnt by us all.

In this interview I’m joined by Jonah Lehrer, writer for Wired magazine, The New Yorker and author of many books including recently released: Imagine: How Creativity Works - and he shares with us how we can become more creative.

Before you email me/laugh OR email me while laughing – yes I’m aware that you can only see half my head in this interview, unfortunately the tripid slipped a little just before I pressed record. The GOOD NEWS is that you can still make out everything  Jonah says and it’s just TOO GOOD not to share with you just because half my head is missing – Enjoy!  

In this interview you will learn:

• What is the no.1 most important trait scientists have found to predict success? (hint: it’s not what you think)
• How to be Creative
• How choosing easy buy playing hard is so important
• Why failing fast is so important
• Why you should never brainstorm and why you should criticise!

 Check it out:

Checkout Jonah’s Book: Imagine: How Creativity Works

Check out Jonah’s Website

Jonah in Wired:

Jonah in the The New Yorker:

Jonah on Charlie Rose (note how Charlie has his whole head in the shots – I must try that sometime

 Your Turn: What did you take away from this video? Share it in the comments below

Data overload = brainmelt

What Startup Metrics do you measure?

In God we Trust – everyone else bring data – W. Edwards Deming

In our online and tech world we now swim in an ocean of data – we could literally spend all day analysing it. I’ve spoken with some successful entrepreneurs about the importance of this in the past, but not all data or metrics is created equal

– so which of these numbers actually matter?

Well there’s no shortage of metrics you could be looking at each day: Coo-ing as they go up, and rationalise if they flat line or fall. Some classics for these are: Reach, page impressions, Facebook likes, Twitter followers.

Now I don’t want to say that these don’t matter a shit, as they do – a little. But the point is that you can experience hockey stick growth in any of these and simultaneously go out of business.

Therefore they are probably not the most important metrics you need to be looking at.

Most startups fail – this is a fact. This is not because most startup founders are not smart,  – most startup founders are smarter, more dynamic and more driven than their corporate counterparts – in my opinion it’s because their lack of focus on the things that really matter.

The following 5 key metrics are the things that really matter (however few startups looks at them). Have a relentless, lazer focus on these startup metrics, and you won’t go far wrong.

These 5 startup metrics are as follows:

1.  Acquisition

At what price can you acquire a new user? Every business needs new users – and the lower you can acquire them for the better. This can be vastly different across product segments and user demographics – for example the cost to acquire a for a blog will typically be lower than for an ecommerce store (due to increased value of a user in the marketplace)

By optimising your acquisition (typically on a Cost Per Click basis) and decreasing the cost of user acquisition – you increase your profit margins.

 2.  Activation

Not all users that land on our website or app will signup. Activation is the % of users that move from the landing on your site/app to a predetermined point where where they have interacted more deeply with your business (usually becoming a registered user, playing a game, doing a first check in, personalising their profile, signing up to your email list, installing your app etc. )

Even if you’re marketing department is acquiring customers really cheap – if you’re not converting them into activated users – your Cost per Acquired user (a number infinitely more important than Cost per Click) will be too high

This is where the famous ‘funnel’ comes into play: visualise your activation funnel with conversion percent at every step – and optimise.

 3.  Retention

Retention is simple. It is also the single most important metric of them all.

What % of this week’s new users return in the next week.

This is the single most important signal to tell you if your product rocks or sucks. If your retention is too low (it will be when you launch) – you have to keep pumping an ever increasing number of newly acquired users into the top of your funnel to keep growing.  This is an expensive tactic.

Chances are you’ll run out of money that way.

If you can achieve a weekly retention rate of 20%+ – you’ll do well.

How to increase this key metric: Make your content/product more awesome, and sprinkle in some retention mechanics (emails etc) for good measure

4.  Revenue

Pretty self-explanatory – what’s your average revenue per user (ARPU)?

Focus relentlessly on increasing this figure.

5.  Referral

How many new users does each user bring to your business (virality)?

This is normally measured as a viral co-efficient.

If your viral co-efficient is 1 or above it means every one of your users brings another new user to your business – you will grow exponentially (note: this is very hard to do, some companies that have achieved this are – Skype and Hotmail)

These 5 startup metrics are commonly referred to as AARRR (Startup Metrics for Pirates)

See more about them here:

 Your turn: What numbers of metrics do you monitor?

I love inspirational quotes – they’re an eternal source of inspiration to get you fired up with a sense of purpose. Here are 37 of my all time favorite motivational quotes to get you fired up (My all time face the last one – check it out)

Hope you enjoy – please feel free to add your favorite inspirational quotes in the comment section

1.  You have to think anyway, so why not think big? – Donald Trump

2.  A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. –Winston Churchill

3.  You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future – Steve Jobs

4.  Try and fail, but don’t fail to try. – Stephen Kaggwa

5.  Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does. – William James

6.  Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing. – Thomas Jefferson

7.  Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

8.  Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people. – Eleanor Roosevelt

9.  So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable. – Christopher Reeve

10.  Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them? – Abraham Lincoln

11.  All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

12.  God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. – Reinhold Niebuhr

13.  Don’t find fault, find a remedy. – Henry Ford

14.  Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment. – Jim Rohn

15.  Waiting is a trap. There will always be reasons to wait. The truth is, there are only two things in life, reasons and results, and reasons simply don’t count. – Dr Robert Anthony

16.  At some point you have to be more afraid of not trying than you are of failing – Carrie Wilkerson

17.  Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.– Mark Twain

18.  To live an extraordinary life, you must resist the ordinary. – Frank McKinney

19.  You can’t learn to swim, exercising on the beach. – Ronald Cohen

20.  All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them. – Galileo

21.  Do. Or not. there is no ‘try’.  - Yoda, Star Wars

22.  Success comes when preparation meets opportunity – Henry Hartman

23.  The results you achieve will be in direct proportion to the effort you apply. – Denis Waitley

24.  Don’t start your day until you finish it. – Jim Rohn

25.  Make the decision. Without the decision, there is no action. Without action, there is no results. Without results, there is no success. – Frederique Murphy, Mind-set coach

26.  Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action – Benjamin Disrelli,

27.  Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination – Oscar Wilde

28.  The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. - George Bernard Shaw

29.  Get greedy when other people are fearful and fearful when other people are greedy. – Warren Buffett

30.  Once you say you’re going to settle for second in life, that’s what you get. – John F Kennedy

31.  Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall. – Confucious

32.  Formal education will make you a living. Self education will make you a fortune. – Jim Rohn

33.  The tragedy of life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goals to reach. – Benjamin Mays

34.  Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life’s about creating yourself. - George Bernard Shaw

35.  Once you’re facing in the right direction, all you need to do is put one foot forward. – Zen Saying

36.  It isn’t what the book costs. It’s what it will cost you if you don’t read it. – Jim Rohn

And my all time fave………….

37.  Remembering I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. – Steve Jobs

 Hope you enjoyed – please feel free to add your favorite inspirational quotes or motivational quotes in the comment section below

So I decided to take personal branding a little more seriously. And given that I now receive job offers regularly through my Linkedin profile, I guess something worked.

Recently a good friend of mine Marc, founder of Graduate Job Tips blog, interviewed me about Personal Branding – and we spoke about what’s required to grow a personal brand and get noticed by the right people.

In this interview we discuss:

• The best platforms to use to grow a personal brand 
• How to make LinkedIn really work for you
• How to get recommendations on Linkedin, without asking for them!
• The importance of creating an opinion based blog when branding yourself
• How to integrate a multitude of platforms and create one interconnect online resume

Your Turn: Got any personal brand secrets ? Share them in the comments below

Check out Marc’s awesome site Graduate Job Tips

He was getting into it

Gamification. It’s one of the ‘buzz phrases’ of the last year (along with ‘Pivot’ etc) – and, although overused, – much of its popularity is for good reason. 

Since beginning working with a Social Gaming startup about 6 months ago – I’ve had my eyes opened to the wonders of ‘game mechanics’ and the impact they can have on a website, business or game. Considering that before this I hadn’t played a computer game since a Match Day II addiction in the late ’80s,  I believe my ‘freshness’ to this gaming has allowed me a certain awareness of these game mechanics that others, perhaps in the industry a longer time, may take for granted.

In this post I explain what game mechanics and gamification is, as well as sharing some gamification examples

But first: What are game mechanics or Gamification? Game mechanics are items used in games that make them addictive, makes you want to win and makes you want to tell your friends about them. They’re the activities that happen in a game that make it fun, and make you want to come back for more. Sounds good yah! Using these game mechanics in non game type businesses = gamification. Make sense? Awesome

There are some really high impact game mechanics out there – some of which resulted in our startup acquiring literally hundreds of thousands of users in a matter of weeks for zero cost (nice!). I will go into the specifics of these in later posts – but the purpose of this post is to introduce some of the fundamental game mechanics that any business/startup could implement pretty easily.

Before I begin – I’d just like to make the note that introducing any of these game mechanics to your business will almost certainly have a big impact on……..something. Just make sure it’s making the right kind of impact (I’ll share an example of it going wrong at the bottom of the post).

5 Gamification Examples You Kneed to Know

1.  Points

Rewarding people points for participation – points give people feedback on how well they are progressing through the game, and allows them to show others how good they are. So simple yet so effective.

Behavior influenced: Retention & increased engagement (more you come back and play – better you get)

Examples of points are everywhere – Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin are all examples – the more followers (points) you have – the more influential you are – supposedly. (and there is now an companies that help people game these game mechanics to look more influential - oh the irony

And once we have points, we can create………..

2 – Leaderboards

The ostentatious collection of the above – leaderboards by their very layout, makes us competitive and want to win = increased engagement

Behaviour influenced: Retention, increased engagement & acquisition (the game is more fun, when your friends are involved)

Examples of leaderboards: Any Business development chart that shows performance of sales staff

3 – Collecting

Collecting rewards us for repeated behaviours. We like to be rewarded if we do something well – and we like others to know how good we are. One of the most common examples of how this is displayed is through ‘badges’ e.g. get 50 instore points to receive a gold badge

Behaviour influenced: Retention & increased engagement

Examples of Collecting: Unlocking the Mayor of Starbucks badge 

4 – Customizaton

Once you put your personal touch on anything – you want to spend more time in it, and have others see it. This is the same for your house, your car……or your myspace, Facebook or Linkedin profiles!

Behaviour influenced: Retention (once it feels like home, you want to come back and visit as often as possible)

Examples of Customisation: The entire industry that popped up around pimping myspace profiles OR how 37signals prompt you to customise your profile in Basecamp before anything else – why do they do this? I bet $$$$ it’s because they tested it and saw that leads to increased retention

5.  Exchanges

Another simple yet stupidly effective mechanic – we all use exchanges every day. It’s one of the most basic human behaviours – it;s your tuen, it;s my turn etc. Conversations: I speak, then you speak etc

Exchanges work particularly well on the web as it brings in that lovely psychological factor called ‘reciprocation’  = which is a much proven behavior that if someone does something nice to you – it is in our human DNA to want to give them something in return. It’s a powerful piece of persuasion and many marketers take advantage of this.

Behaviour influenced: Retention

Examples: of Exchanges: Just check out the hottest new game to hit the market in the past 2 months. OMGPOP’s Draw Something. This game is built on this principle or exchanges – and they’ve had 50 million downloads in the past 50 days. None too shabby!

See them in action

If you’d like to see obvious examples game mechanics in action – go to Zynga or Wooga - they are absolute masters at this stuff, and rest assured that anything they have live on their site, has been A/B tested and optimised to its most effective state (just don’t get too addicted when you‘re there)

Example of it used badly:

When Yahoo launched Yahoo answers, they rewarded people for submitting answers to questions. It worked – in as much as they recieced a HUGE number of answers to questions. Thee trouble was, they were rewarding users for submitting answers, but not on the quality of the answers.

The game mechanic (points & badges) worked – but it was driving the wrong behaviour!

Your turn:
Have you experience with game mechanics? – or know any examples of businesses that use game mechanics well in everyday life? Please share them in the comments below:

I’m sitting in a café in Durham, North of England – the frosty air sweeps in whenever the door opens, it’s snowing outside but nice and snug in here. I take a sip of my strong expresso.

It’s been 2 years almost to the week that I graduated from my Masters degree in Durham University, a romantic ancient city with a castle and cathedral in the North of England – and I’m back in Durham for a visit. For me, University = good times. I matured, got fit, fell in love and got some brains. However I’ve learnt a hell of a lot in the short time since I’ve left – I wanted to share some of that with you.

Are you a student entrepreneur? Or in a student startup?  – this article’s for you.

I believe there are few harder transitions than when you graduate from the structured and secure world of university – to the unstructured and risky world of entrepreneurship. And you learn some big hard lessons, fast.

I previously wrote an article on why Entrepreneurs should not bother with an MBA. This article is different. It’s written for those currently in university and planning to pursue entrepreneurship afterwards. It’s a collection of the biggest lessons I learnt since leaving university and what I’d do if I was in your shoes and back there now.

Here’s my 7 lessons to

1. Expectation

Think you deserve to be successful because you got a 1^st, or studied hard, or went to a good university. This thinking might work if you’re going corporate – but not in entrepreneurship my friend.

When you start your business – you start from scratch again. Nobody owes you anything and your college degree means nothing. The guy who never finished school has the same chance of success as you do. It’s quite humbling when you realise this.

But if you had what it takes to do great in university I believe you’ll have the confidence & determination to make your startup business a success.

Top tip: Be humble – and be prepared to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty.

2. Think you know it all (you don’t, trust me)

Following from the previous point – just as in the world of entrepreneurship a degree doesn’t mean success – so too, knowledge of all the theory in the world, also doesn’t mean success.

Entrepreneurship is more about action than planning (or at least a healthy mix of both).

I never suffered too much from the first point of ‘expecting anything’ (see above) but I did suffer from thinking I knew it all (and probably still do to a degree – this is probably not a bad thing for an entrepreneur, but that’s a different topic).

I learnt all the theory in university, knew all the models to forecast growth and won 4 business plan competitions for a business I went on to launch in my final year of university – I was sure success was a formality.

The business went on to fail.

What I learnt is that this theory is good, but it’s not enough on it’s own – you need to learn just as much (probably more) on the practical side as you do on the theory side. The earlier you begin this, the better

Top tip: Mix theory with practice as much as possible by putting products on the market – even if your university course doesn’t require it

 3.  Wait till your finish college to startup your business

As a student, everyone wants you to succeed – and no one worries if you fail.

You’ll never a get a better opportunity to test things and experiment. Start a business and use every support resource available to you (there’ll be lots).

Top tip: Get started now – enter every business plan competition going (but just refer to point 1 above when you win)

4.  Believe that writing an amazing business plan means you’ll have a great business

It doesn’t.

Top Tip: Stop writing. Put your idea out there today and see if anyone will buy it

5.  Put your faith in advice from text books

If you’re interested in anything remotely to do with technology – by the time you’re reading a university approved, chances are they’re out of date.

Top tip: Instead read anything by Steve Blank, Eric Ries and Seth Godin

 6.  Ask academics for help

They mean well – but unless they themselves have grown a successful business, they’ll give you the wrong advice

Top tip: Only get advice from people who have done what you’re trying to do

7.  Not have the time of your life

All this does beg the question – why go to university at all if you plan a road of entrepreneurship? It’s a question I’ve grappled with frequently.

Would I be further in my entrepreneurial journey now – if I didn’t spend 4 years of my life, aged 25 – 29 going through university?

Ultimately that’s a question no-one will ever know the answer to.

However I firmly believe that university has given me the foundation to build something solid upon. I feel infinitively more confident in my abilities now than before I started University. And I had a great time too, which doesn’t hurt

Top tip: Enjoy it

Your Turn: Are you a student entrepreneur – what are you learning about Entrepreneurship?

Have you left university – What have you learnt since leaving? Tell us in the comments below

Recently I got the opportunity to connect with World Champion Skydiver Dan Brodky-Chenfeld, author of Above all else: A World Champion Skydiver’s Story of Survival & What it Taught Him about Fear, Adversity & Success. 

While training for national Skydiving championships, Dan Brodky-Chenfeld was involved in a plane crash that killed 16 out of 22 crew members (including two of his jump team), and left Dan seriously injured, with a broken neck. He was told he could never Skydive again. Despite this Dan went on recover fully and, against all odds, become a multi-world championship winning skydiver.

- I was so excited about speaking to Dan for this Interview that I stumbled over my intro – (nerves – yes I get ‘em sometimes!) – nevertheless, it’s one of my favourite interviews I’ve done to date – I’m sure you’d agree Dan is a really inspirational guy.

In this interview you will learn:

• What one of the most common traits of successful people are
• How to tell if you’ve chosen some thing you’re truly passionate about
• How to decide what the next thing to do is
• How and why mapping out your plan is so important
• Why visualisation is so important – and how you should use it
• How to have a great day – and replicate it whenever you want

Watch it here:

Buy the Book: Above All Else (It’s a really awesome read – highly recommended)

Check out Dan Brodky-Chenfeld’s Website

Your turn: What did you learn from the interview? Share it in the comments below

Want to grow your profile on Twitter? Want to grow awareness of your brand without spending a lot of money? Ever hear of a Twitterview but think it was a job interviewer with a twitch?

Maybe you should consider a Twitterview!

Recently I had the pleasure of being involved in my first Twitterview. Despite its buzz-termy sounding name, the concept is actually pretty simple: It’s an interview done over twitter. All questions & answers no longer than 140 characters.

So what’s the point of a twitterview?

Well the point is pretty simple too

Imagine you have a small, but growing twitter following, let’s say 500 people for example. Well that means that every time you send a tweet, it has the potential to be seen by 500 people (this is called ‘impressions’).

Ideally you’d like your tweets to have 500,000,000+impressions right?

Well what if you interviewed someone famous in your field who has over 100,000 followers?

And what if you asked them 50 questions, and both the question and the answer, carry your company branding?

And what if you asked 50 other people with 10,000+ followers to also tweet in questions (also carrying your company branding)?

Starts to sound pretty interesting doesn’t it? Oh, and it’s free.

This is a Twitterview!

So, recently for the football social game I work for, we decided to carry out a Twitterview involving a real life football star. This is how we did it and if it was worth doing:

Twitterview objectives

We had 3 core objectives for the Twitterview

1. Drive new users to our game I Am Playr
2. Increase awareness of I Am Playr
3. Increase our @iamplayr twitter following

All of these objectives were measured for success using real metrics (of course), by:

1. Deciding the correct metric to measure each by
2. Taking a pre-campaign baseline metric for each
3. Assessing the change in these baseline metrics after the Twitterview

I’ll go into detail into how these metrics performed a little further down.

Getting started – How to do a Twitterview

This was the first Twitterview I had been involved in, so I did a bit of research. There’s not a lot of good stuff out there about Twitterviews, but I found this article to be the best of a bad lot

Our Twitterview Plan

For our Twitterview we invited Lee Dixon – and ex Arsenal Football club legend, and current pundit on Match of the Day (the biggest soccer TV programme here in the UK) in to do a Twitterview.

We thought Lee was a good fit as:

• He had a strong Twitter presence of over 128,000+ followers
• He’s savvy media personality and people like to hear his opinions
• He’s an investor in our company, so we were able to persuade him to get involved

We put together a three step plan to get maximum benefit from the Twitterview to happen:

• Pre-interview (making sure people knew about it)
• During Interview (Making sure it ran smoothly)
• Post interview (prolonging the exposure of the Twitterview)

I have a step by step guide to exactly what we did during these three steps documented. If enough people request it I’m happy to share these here on the blog.

trending on #iamplayr

#I Am Playr

The core way the Twitterview worked was by people tweeting in questions using the #iamplayr hashtag on each tweet. This hashtag allowed everyone to follow the conversation, and worked as awareness branding for us as I Am Playr is the name of our game (I’d highly recommend you doing similar). Lee would then tweet replies to people who posted questions to this hashtag – meaning every tweet in the Twitterview was branded with our soccer game.

Throughout the Twitterview we dropped in messages to the conversation with links to our game. We used bit.ly tracking links to track click throughs.

We promoted it across all our channels a week before a few days before and on the day of the Twitterview to make sure enough people knew about it.

The Twitterview

We ran the Twitterview 90 minutes, lunchtime of the football transfer deadline day here in the UK. We had Lee in the room with us, he answered questions and I typed them up and posted to twitter using his twitter account. We used Tweetdeck for this.

The Results

It was great fun and the results spoke for themselves:

• Total 774 tweets using #iamplayr during the 24 hours around the Twitterview
• Total impressions with #iamplayr: 14 million
• Total audience reached: 540,398
• Click-throughs to the game: 505
• Increase in Twitter followers: 360
• We were 5^th trending topic on Twitter
• The day of the Twitterview was the 2^nd highest number of Google searches for I Am Playr, ever!
• Other celebs Will Carling (ex England Rugby captain),  Zoo magazine (UK lads mag) and some other professional footballers began tweeting in, all of which have big influential reach and added to the fun

So it’s clear that the Twitterview was a success. But leaving the ‘vanity metrics’(see impressions) listed above aside, the number that really matters most was the 505 click through directly to the game (all of which were highly qualified UK based users, who are expensive to acquire through advertising).

And What Went Wrong?

Ok so we learnt a few things. Three main things were:

• Tweetdeck wasn’t able to handle the number of tweets and was lagging up to 20 minutes behind real time & kept crashing. It was a clear case of ‘victims of our own success’. Next time will need to use a more powerful twitter client
• We originally began by RT’ing the questions and then answering it – but we got negative feedback from people, saying their timeline was being clogged up – so we changed to just @replying directly to answers with #iamplayr. People seemed to prefer this.
• Be prepared that you’ll get some nutters saying stupid stiff in the conversation. We (and Lee) thought this was funny, I wouldn’t take it too seriously – but something to consider if your client or company is uber sensitive

In Summary

Twitterview can be a really effective tool to raising exposure of your brand/cause and can drive real users through to your site. It was fun too.

If you have access to someone with a strong Twitter presence, I’d highly recommend it. However I’d be cautious about paying someone to do a Twitterview, as they’ll be receiving just as much exposure as your brand will be.

Your Turn:

Any further questions about how we did our Twitterview, or if you’ve any experiences to add to this – please post in the comments below.

Can I have them all? Photo: InaFrenzy

My eyes opened at 6.30 am, 30 minutes before my alarm clock was due to chime. Too early for me to get up for breakfast so I lie there. The first thought to pour into my mind was the decision I had to make this week.

It’s official – I was stressed. Know how this feels?

Every so often we’re presented with opportunities and we have to make a big decision which to take. Some of them are no-brainers to accept and some easy to dismiss. But some of them stop and make us think:

What’s the best thing to do?

They can be small, but interesting opportunities – like the chance to be involved in a cool sounding project for X number of hours per week. Or they can be big & risky, like an offer to work on a project that would mean lifestyle or income changes or even a move to another part of the world.

Both of these types of opportunities can lead to difficult decisions – particularly the latter.

And of course, just to make things interesting – the better you get at stuff & the more successful you become, the better the opportunities present themselves (this of course makes sense), and hence the harder the decisions you must make.

I’ve written before about opportunities that present themselves – such as one time I made a bad choice and started a PhD simply because it was a good opportunity rather than what I wanted to do, and how starting this blog leads to a lot of opportunities. To sum both these up – making the right decision is important because it gets you to your goals faster.

Thing is – sometimes deciding what is the right thing to do is hard. It causes you to really dig deep and think is this opportunity is right for you – and forget what other people think.

“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” — Bill Cosby

This can be easy in theory but difficult in practice, so I’ve discovered 4 questions that I ask myself whenever I’m present with a new opportunity. Before I share these 4 questions below, I want to show you the following video about life choices given by Steve Jobs in his 2005 commencement speech – he speaks about how to make big decisions (if you haven’t already seen it – I highly recommend you watch it):

To sum up his main points:

1. You can’t connect the dots looking forward – only backwards, so you gotta have faith that they’ll connect for you
2. You gotta love what you do – don’t settle
3. Ever morning ask yourself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to spend it doing what I’m about to do’ – if the answer is ‘No’ for too many days, it’s time for a change
4. Don’t let the noise of other people’s opinions drown your own inner voice
5. Have the courage to follow your own heart and intuition – they already know what you want to become

How to make the difficult decisions

Whenever I’m presented with an opportunity now – I run it by the following the following 4 questions to see if it’s something I should pursue:

1. Will it make me so excited that I want to get up at 6am each morning, simply so I can spend the maximum number of hours available in the day on it?
2. Will it being me closer to my life goals (as opposed to putting them on hold)?
3. Will I be learning new skills and challenging myself?
4. Will I be working with great and successful people?

If the answer to all these questions is an instant ‘Yes’ then I’d seriously consider it. If the answer to any of these is No – I’d think twice about going ahead.

And thankfully, once the decision is made you can go back to having a full night’s sleep.

To echo Steve’s send-off: Stay young, stay foolish

Your Turn: Any questions you ask yourself before making a big decision?