Why I Left Empire Avenue

I just closed my Empire Avenue account.

First, I want to explain why I joined Empire Avenue to begin with. Within a 3 day period, I had 2 major companies ask if I could do Empire Avenue related work for them. I was not on EA myself. I believe in personally mastering something myself before I work with clients on it. And so, I spent the next 10 weeks or so learning how Empire Avenue worked.

Over these past 2+ months, I have learned a lot. Here are some of the good/bad points:

Empire Avenue as a Social Network

As a social network, Empire Avenue has been fantastic for me. I’ve met a lot of extremely bright people. I’ve made more genuine friends through Empire Avenue in 2 months than I have in over 2 ½ years on Twitter.

I’ve hired several people I connected with as a result of being on Empire Avenue.

I’ve gotten business as a result of being on Empire Avenue that has more than substantiated the time I invested in it.

Empire Avenue as a Measurement Tool

In an ideal world, share price, network scores and dividends paid would have some kind of correlation to actual “value” people are bringing to the world of social media.

The reality is that there is very little correlation. This is partly a flaw on the side of Empire Avenue itself, partly on the side of the networks measured.

I’ll explain a bit about how Empire Avenue works:

• You buy shares in individuals/brands on Empire Avenue at their current market price. In return, you are paid daily dividends based on the number of shares you own and the “performance” of that stock.
• Empire Avenue uses some mystery formula to assign activity earnings for each network. These activity earnings, in conjunction with some secret sauce, result in dividends paid to shareholders.
• The networks Empire Avenue currently tracks are: Twitter, Facebook personal pages, Facebook pages, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube and Empire Avenue itself. In addition, up to 5 “blogs” are counted.
• Empire Avenue will only count the top 5 networks towards activity earnings/dividends.
• Every day, Empire Avenue pays out dividends during the 2 hour period starting at 4:15 AM EDT. Dividends are paid out on accounts based on sign-up date.
• When dividends are paid out on an account, there is also an end of day adjustment to share price that takes place based on activity changes during the previous day versus previous days. An upwards adjustment will be reflected in green numbers. A negative adjustment will either be yellow or red.

Along the way, I have discovered a lot of flaws with Empire Avenue. The biggest ones are these:

• The system rewards activity over engagement and responsiveness. The more you output, the higher your dividends. There is no quality standard for output.
• Empire Avenue has activity earnings limits for each network. All of these limits can be reached without actual engagement or responsiveness. Some of the highest earning tickers on Empire Avenue show little or no engagement on their networks.
• Empire Avenue “scoring” is reliant on being able to pull data from the various social networks’ APIs. I hear daily of people having issues with this. Connections need to be reset.This is not an EAv issue but one due to the networks being measured.
• From a strictly gaming perspective, many people feel compelled to do things in order to produce higher dividends just to “win.”

I’ll give you an example of the impact: I normally have a really high engagement on Twitter. From day one, my Twitter mentions were not counted. Some days, I get as many as 2,000 mentions. The logical thing is to think this would have a significant impact on my dividends paid out. My mentions were fixed recently and it had zero impact on dividends. This is likely because without them being counted and other Twitter factors (my followers/friends, tweets and Twitter-based retweets), I was probably at the maximum activity level for Twitter. I really hate to admit this, but while my mentions weren’t being counted on EAv, I felt my desire to engage drop along with it. (As an aside: a bit of irony is that as I engaged less and less on Twitter, my Klout score increased.)

Conversely, the last week, I uploaded a bunch of pictures to Flickr – from the park across the street to me, pictures of my cats, to loads of scanned pictures. What happened? My dividends shot up just by increasing my output without increasing engagement.

My Conclusions

I’ve realized that Empire Avenue is 2 things:

1. A superb tool with a great deal of potential for networking and keeping your personal/business brand in front of people. It is social network itself.
2. It’s a game that rewards activity over engagement/interaction.

From a strictly gaming perspective, I’ve learned what I want to. I understand enough about how the gaming part of it works.

I’ve made a lot of solid friendships as a result of Empire Avenue. I’ve gotten to know some new people. I’ve gotten to better know some other people. From that perspective, I’ve won and it’s made every minute spent on the game worthwhile.

I have talked with a few trusted friends about how I was feeling about EA. Although it is just a game and it is virtual currency and not real money, I didn’t want to just let my share price nosedive and negatively impact people. I felt the best thing to do right now was to simply delete my EAv account and start over when I've gotten some work projects dealt with and after a long vacation.

I’ve played EA as a game. When I come back, I want to play it for strictly networking. I don’t want to make my success in EA about my share price, dividends paid or what my net wealth is. But I want it to be about real connections made with real people. If EA is a game based on rewarding activity level, so be it. But I want to measure my own success based on being the signal and not the noise.

Is Empire Avenue the Cure for Social Media Procrastination?

Are you following me on Twitter?

I joined Empire Avenue a few days ago. Oddly enough, I hadn't really heard much about it before last week. I am trying to secure a gig for my company to provide social media training for a large media company. I was asked last week if I was on Empire Avenue myself and if I could incorporate this into the proposal I am working on. I had planned on doing this legwork over the weekend, then I saw a tweet from a Twitter follower mentioning Empire Avenue and decided to dive in. I was addicted within minutes.

If you aren't yet on Empire Avenue, I'll get to explaining the benefits of it in a bit and provide you with some tips on getting started. If you are already on there, you can buy shares in me at (e)SHARONHAYES. After all, you know I'm a social media junkie and a fairly solid investment :-)

What Is Empire Avenue?

Empire Avenue is a virtual stock exchange where you can buy/sell shares in individuals and organizations who are active in social media. You build your own portfolio and make eaves (e= Empire Avenue's currency) based on your own social media activity, dividends earned on the activity of those you invest in and profits (or losses) by trading in shares.

Social media activity that is currently tabulated are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Flickr. Blogs are also taken into account but scoring is not made public as of yet. Of course, your activity on Empire Avenue itself generates a score.

Is This Just A Game?

No.

From a business/organizational perspective, it's a great way to get additional exposure.

From a personal perspective, it's provides a great networking opportunity.

For me, the biggest benefit is in timing. You see, I've been pretty consistent in social media with Twitter. But outside of Twitter, I've not been "good" at doing the things I should be doing. Since the year started, I've been stalling on formulating and following a solid plan to work on my own social media marketing more consistently. Empire Avenue has been the key that has finally made me make the plan I should I have created a couple of years ago - and start to put it into action. Take this blog for example. Whenever I have had a post to it, I have gotten anywhere from 5,000 to 20,000 visitors. Yet this is my first post since December 2009!

Since your activity earnings on Empire Avenue are calculated on a daily basis, if you are a procrastinator like me, it is a great way to make sure you stay on track with your social media marketing efforts.

Some people do play it as a game. Some play it as an ego booster. There are some that do things just to manipulate their numbers. Since your home page shows the collective feeds of those you buy shares in, some people are using it as a content aggregator.

I'll be posting tomorrow some tips about getting started on Empire Avenue. If you want to set up an account there, you can use this link and you'll get 2,000 extra eaves. Make sure to follow my blog so you won't miss the tips!

'Til next time!

Sharon

How to Measure Social Media's Effectiveness

Are you following me on Twitter?

I've followed many debates on how the term "ROI" is being misused in social media. Josh S. Peters (one of my partners on Branded Tweets) has written a couple of posts about ROI. In the first, he explained why it was being inappropriately applied to a campaign The Gap had run. Josh followed up with a post that concluded the use of KPI's (Key Performance Indicators) is a more relevant way to measure the effectiveness of social media usage. I was originally going to comment on his latest post, then realized it was worthy of an entire post on its own.

The same debates about social media are ones that happened over a decade ago with online marketing in general. In the mid-90's, banner advertising was popular. Some people believed that all banner advertising campaigns needed to have an associated ROI. Others believed that banner advertising had to have a call to action otherwise it wasn't effective. The reality is banner advertising back then - and still today - can serve a variety of functions where ROI isn't even an immediate factor. The same kind of rhetoric is being spouted about social media today.

ROI has never, and will never be, the single most important metric that can be applied to marketing. This is true both offline and online. Consider Superbowl ads. The costs of producing and running an ad are enormous. Where does ROI come into play for Superbowl ads? In the short-term, it doesn't.

I agree KPI's are important - what I don't agree with is that KPI's are relevant on their own to social media. Benchmarks, metrics tied into business goals, other kinds of data that are quantifiable and that can be tracked back to social media efforts. But KPI's typically refer to the overall marketing efforts of an organization. Unless a company is *only* using social media for marketing and no other marketing methods, the metrics associated with the impact of social media are just part of the arsenal of what a company does to market.

Here's an example: let's say John sees your ad on TV for the Gizmo - a new product your company is offering. John uses Twitter and asks if anyone has used Gizmo. As part of your company's social media efforts, you have a monitoring campaign tracking mentions of Gizmo. You engage John, answer his questions and John buys Gizmo.

What metrics should you consider here? More importantly, what data should be gathered?

Where things become even more challenging is that it's rare that a company that uses social media will just have one objective. It's more likely that a company will have multiple objectives when using social media - some of which may not even come under the umbrella of marketing. Two examples: customer support and recruiting. Where it becomes even trickier is that business/organizational use of social media is becoming increasingly complicated.

We can compare the evolution of social media to how the Internet itself has progressed. Whereas ten or twelve years ago it was acceptable to just slap up a website - the build it and they will come mentality - things have changed and the same is true with social media. It's not simply enough to have a presence on Twitter, but you need to have objectives for using Twitter. Having a Facebook fan page isn't enough. There has to be some strategy behind it.

With an increasing number of Internet users and organizations looking to social media to get answers, conduct research etc, is it really even necessary at this point to consider social media in isolation when it comes to any kind of quantitative analysis? Would it not be better to look at things from an overall integrated campaign perspective where social media may be just one component? Then under the umbrella of social media, shouldn't we look at individual sites and applications and the metrics just as we would look at PPC advertising, banner advertising, etc?

Consider this question: what distinguishes "social media" from everything else that existed before? I first got started online when I was 16 years old - 25 years ago. What did I do online? I used forums on bulletin board services. Over a decade ago, I started to work with clients on ways they could engage prospects and customers. The term "social media" may be relatively new but what it means isn't.

What has changed is three-fold: 1. the speed at which information/news can be disseminated; 2. the strength of some very dominant presences not tied to specific companies (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc) and 3. the voice of the consumer has more impact. The end result is that consumers today are much more empowered than they were even a few years ago.

Where we are now is that a lot of traditional marketing/corporate folks are just plain confused about how to handle it. There is simply too much conflicting information about what social media really is and there's this unnecessary "push" to look at it in isolation - which is completely unnecessary. From an organizational standpoint, you should be defining what kind of social media presence you want to have. From there, you should then be looking at your use of social media in conjunction with everything else for individual campaigns - your website, your blog, your email marketing, your PPC advertising, your banner advertising, your online PR, your offline advertising, your offline PR, and so on. Now with this more integrated approach, reliance on KPI's is relevant - with social media being just one part of overall efforts yet with individual benchmarks being relevant to individual social media activities.

As more and more consumers become involved in social media activities, I think we'll see a natural progression where organizations almost automatically integrate social media into their business models. Whether this will happen in three, five or ten years - I have no idea. But it is coming. And sometime between now and then the accepted standards will evolve to where "social media marketing" as we know it will no longer be a catch-all phrase.

Are you following me on Twitter?

How to Share Music With Blip.fm

Music really is life for me. It's what keeps me smiling through stressful work days and the ups and downs of regular life. It's what pulls me through a tough work-out. It's what gives me inspiration. If you're already one of my followers on Twitter, then you'll know that I enjoy sharing music with others. I feel Blip.fm makes sharing super easy to do & it fits well with the social aspect of Twitter too.

I haven't always blipped on Twitter. One day, I set up an account at blip.fm & didn't realize that the song I blipped would be broadcast through my Twitter account. Oops! I then started to blip on a regular basis. Some days now, I'll blip 20-30 songs through the day. I also host all-request Twappy hour Fridays at 5 pm Eastern/2 pm Pacific. In the first few days of blipping, I lost several hundred followers. Many long-term followers said they didn't "get it." That's okay - social networks like Twitter are there for us to use in a way that best serves our needs. It's not odd that people share music via MySpace and other social networks, why should it be any different with Twitter? Blipping has allowed me to connect with some great people that I'd likely not have met through normal Twitter usage.

I've had a few hundred followers that have joined Blip.fm because of my using it. I am now getting daily questions from people asking how it works, so I thought I'd take some time to explain some of the basics & give some tips based on personal experience. 

Create An Account

http://blip.fm - If you've managed to create a Twitter account, you'll likely find it as easy to do so on Blip.  Here are a few suggestions/tips:

1. Use the same user name that you use on Twitter. This will help you to avoid confusing people like me :)
2. When I joined, it made suggestions of recommended DJ's to listen to (Blip's equivalent of "following"). I ended up removing them within a few days since I found their tastes to be very different from my own. I prefer adding DJ's as I come across them.
3. To link to your Twitter account, you can go to "services".  Although all songs you blip will be broadcast on blip.fm, you do have the ability to turn broadcasting to your Twitter stream on and off.
4. You can add a profile pic/avatar like you can on Twitter. The size requirements are a bit larger than what they are on Twitter. A friend added a border to my Twitter avatar so that I could use the same one on Blip.
5. Go through all of the tabs under "settings" so that you can decide whether to receive email notices, add your location, add your URL, etc.
6. If you opt to receive email notices (like I do), I suggest setting up an email filter in your email program so that the emails will go to a folder. I have my blip emails go to a Gmail account with the following filter:  from:(noreply@blip.fm) Skip Inbox, Apply label "* Blip".

Basic Terminology

Blip: to share a song - similar to tweeting :)

Props: If you like a song someone else has blipped, you can give them props by clicking on the thumbs up icon (on the far right hand side under each blip) If someone blips you a song, it is polite - although not necessary - to give them props as a way of saying thanks. If you've opted for email notifications, you'll get an email when someone gives you props on a song. When you are logged in, you can also look at your Props list - this will show you who has given you props on which songs. This is useful for knowing what music your listeners like (if that matters to you).

Reblip: the equivalent of Retweeting. Unlike Twitter, credit isn't needed. If you reblip someone's song, they get credit for it. If you've opted for email notifications, you'll get an email when someone reblips your blips.

Playlist: You can create a playlist by clicking on the playlist icon in a blip box. (Unfortunately you can't search for a song and then add to playlist without blipping it first) A playlist is something more for personal use, although, like with any blips, you can reblip them.

Replies: When someone blips you a song (this is done by simply including your @username name), it will show up in your replies list. If you have opted for emails, you will also receive email notification of it. There is a replies link once you are logged in so you can see all of your replies.

Listeners: These are the people on Blip who are listening to your blips.

Favorite DJs: These are the people on Blip who you are listening to.

Note: If you blip someone and they use the same username on Twitter, they will see the song in their mentions at Twitter. Conversely if someone blips a song to you as a reply, it will show on Twitter in your mentions.

How to Blip

There are 3 basic ways you can can find music to blip:

1. You can search for songs using the search box. The format to use is to enter in the artist name followed by the song title. It does not need to be precise.

2. You can reblip others.

3. You can reblip your own songs.

Once you have chosen a song to blip, you will see a text box come up. You can enter what you want in that box. The format I generally follow is to include the artist - song title - and often usernames of others.

Important: Blip allows you to enter in more characters in the text box than what Twitter allows. It's important to make sure if you are also tweeting your blips to leave 39 or more characters otherwise the end will get cut off when it makes it's way to Twitter.

Basic How To

1. Your blip home page is located at http://blip.fm/username - for example mine is http://blip.fm/sharonhayes
2. You can see in your stream either all blips (all DJ's) or just your favorites.
3. To add someone as a favorite DJ, just click on the "listen to" button where their avatar is.
4. There is a bookmark & share icon in each blip box to use across many different social networks.
5. You can delete your own blips & remove blips from your playlist by clicked on the X (delete blip). I suggest doing this when you are aware that a song is no longer available.

Advanced Tips

1. Song availability & quality varies. Please make sure to test a bit of a song (using preview or play button) before blipping. You'll also find that many songs end prematurely. Some songs are also incorrectly labelled. There are a lot of covers that are labelled as if they are the original song.
2. There's a neat software tool called Blipster that makes blipping loads easier. It allows you to queue up a number of blips at one time. You can see length of songs and the file type so you'll have less chance of errors. 
3. You can embed blips into web pages.
4. Blips can also be broadcast to FriendFeed & other services. You can set this up by going to Settings -->> Services. 

Whew, I think I've covered all of the bases. Please feel free to leave comments below.

Don't forget to listen to me on Blip & follow me on Twitter

10 Things I Love About Twitter

Are you following me on Twitter?

Haven't you noticed how the media & bloggers simply love Twitter? Even if many (most?) haven't figured out how to use Twitter effectively, they have discovered that any article or post about Twitter will result in traffic. Until recently most of the coverage surrounding Twitter has been positive. However lately it seems that about 1 in 3 are now harping on the negatives of Twitter without a true understanding of the awesome potential it offers people & organizations. I wanted to take some time to share some of the "good" stuff.

10 Things I Love About Twitter

1. The friendships. I have been able to make some amazing friends who I know I'd want to keep in my life even if Twitter disappeared tomorrow. For all that many say about friendships forged through social media being shallow & superficial, I have to strongly disagree.

2. So many interests, so little time. I have a voracious appetite for new information on a variety of different areas. I'm also a news junkie. I've been able to share information I come across with others. I've been able to connect with experts in areas which I'd never have otherwise had access to. The older I get, the more I realize how little I know, how precious time is and how much more I want to discover. Twitter helps fill a void in this respect.

3. It's there when I need it. When I have time between work & real life stuff, I can go to Twitter. Some days I have very little time to tweet. But it is there when I want it.

4. Getting answers & input fast. I've had at least a dozen cases where I've needed to get input on something or find out how to do something. Within minutes someone on Twitter has been able to come to the rescue.

5. Making an impact on others. I'm a firm believer that we are what we put out there. I try to live my life by doing "something" each day to brighten up other people's day. Twitter makes this very easy to do. Let's face it - there's a lot of negativity in the world. Every one of us has a rough day from time to time. Reaching out somehow to others to do something nice not only helps them feel better but also can make us feel better too. It's helped make me happier on a day to day basis because I really don't waste time now on the small stuff. Twitter flows with positivity.

6. Connecting with personal heroes. I've been followed first on Twitter by a number of people I consider to be personal heroes in business. One is a bit of a funny story. A few years back, I was at a dinner with friends. The dinner game of - if you could have dinner with anyone living or dead started. Someone before me mentioned Richard Branson. My next choice was Michael Tchong (he was a tremendous influence for me during my early years doing business on the Internet). I was excited to see he had followed me on Twitter and in my overabundance of enthusiasm, I tweeted about the dinner story. Michael responded, we've stayed connected & hopefully soon I'll be actually meeting him. Another personal hero of mine is Scott McKain. Scott is a business strategist with a unique take on what drives true customer service excellence in organizations. His best-selling books have had tremendous impact on the way I create and manage my businesses. I now regularly communicate with him because of Twitter.

7. Actual business. If you are one of my followers, you'll likely have noticed that I rarely tweet about my businesses. The only times I do are when someone asks me a question. Even then I try and have the courtesy to bring it to DM or an alternate communication method. In spite of this, Twitter generates a substantial amount of business for me. For one of my sites listed in my bio, I am getting anywhere from 5-14 new clients a day - just from Twitter. The lifetime value of clients gained from Twitter per day is averaging $3-4,000 right now. I've had over a dozen domain name sales as a result of Twitter. I've had several very nice size deals for various businesses I operate. The most recent of these is a $20,000 per month 1 year contract. I'm also working with a VC firm on domain valuations & acquisitions for companies they invest in.

8. Money connections. To date five venture capitalist firms have contacted me about investing in businesses I own. All of these contacts stemmed from Twitter. I'm not looking for investors right now, but to have these contacts for the future is invaluable. I've also made numerous contacts who are interested in passively investing in domain names.

9. New doors are opening. Some extremely exciting things have been happening that I could never have foreseen. I've been in talks with a large company to do a daily podcast. A radio station contacted me because of the music I tweet. They asked if I'd be interested in doing a regular show with them once a week. I've been invited to be a guest on many webinars/teleseminars. I have several interviews and guest posts for blogs lined up. I'm also working on a coaching program+workshop series to be held in a dozen different cities.

10. Deals get closed faster. When dealing with contacts made outside of Twitter, I'm finding that my Twitter reputation is enhancing my credibility - thus helping me close deals much faster. This goes both for prospective clients as well as partnerships/joint ventures. They know if I am "out there," I'm not going to risk my reputation over a single deal.

None of the above were benefits I had expected to get from using Twitter. They have all been pleasant surprises and definite reasons why I consider Twitter to be of high value for me. At the same time there are 3 reasons why I had wanted to become active on Twitter - all of which have materialized. I thought it may be worthwhile sharing these too:

1. Networking. I've been able to meet a lot of like-minded people, have traded business leads and have had some private "shop talk" which has been beneficial.

2. Recruiting. Finding talent is difficult. For both full-time and occasional staff, Twitter has proven to be invaluable. Like non-Twitter recruiting, not everything has worked out. But the ability to get an insight into the people I am considering hiring has been invaluable in pre-filtering candidates so that the relationship has a better chance of working.

3. Chronicling some of my life. Although I really don't micro-blog per se, I do share tidbits of what is going on in my life. I doubt I'll ever go back and read it all, but it's still "there" if I ever want to someday.

I'm not implying that anyone using Twitter will be able to benefit from these same 13 things as I have. That's the nice thing about Twitter - we each use it for our own reasons. How we use it helps define our own success. I just wanted to pull up the blind so you may have some idea of the potential that may be waiting for you.

One of the issues many people have about Twitter is that they feel it is too time-consuming. I spend a lot of time on Twitter. In under 4 months, I've accumulated well over 10,000 tweets. I probably average 15-21 hours a week on public tweets. I can appreciate for many small business owners that it is hard enough to find the time to do what needs to get done - never mind indulging in something as seemingly frivolous as tweeting. The key here is - to be able to leverage the power of Twitter, you need to have your business and life organized in such a way that taking advantage of an opportunity like this is possible. Personally, I have no doubt that the ROI on my time has been well worth it. This is part of the reason I will be conducting my upcoming coaching program & workshops - to help share with entrepreneurs & professionals how to strategize and systematize their businesses so that they can focus on what they do best in their business. Info on these programs will be coming up soon :)

Please feel free to share your own successes with Twitter in the comments.

Don't forget to follow me on Twitter too :)

P.S. I'll be posting a follow-up to this next week on the "bad" to provide some balance.