Social Proof
We are influenced by the attitudes and behaviors of others

Liking
We are influenced by people we like, and we like people like ourselves

Authority
We are conditioned to obey authority figures, regardless of context

Consistency and Commitment
We go to great effort to be consistent in our actions — especially commitments

Reciprocity
We are conditioned to give, to accept, and to repay

Scarcity
The more scarce an item is, the more we want it

I remember when we first started developing on WordPress it was not a well-known tool — like Apple products ten years ago. Just like Apple products, WordPress has gone mainstream: 1 out of every 6 websites these days in built on WordPress.* This popularity is well deserved, but it comes at a price: every year WordPress sites become increasingly appealing targets for hackers because of the sheer number of targets they provide. With the dramatic increase in botnet attacks on WordPress sites, I thought it would be useful to provide our four easy steps to improve your WordPress site’s security. By implementing these steps, the risk of your site getting hacked drops dramatically.

1. Change the Admin account username to be something other than “admin.” 90% of brute-force attacks use this is as the username.**
2. Select a strong password. Please, please just make it anything other than admin, password, 123456 or any of the other most common passwords used online. WordPress has a good set of effective password guidelines available.
3. Update WordPress to the most recent stable version. Upgrading WordPress sites, especially those with significant customization or numbers of plugins, can be fairly time intensive, so the best way to manage this is to be on the last stable version of WordPress. I.e., once WordPress 3.6.0 comes out, upgrade to the last version of 3.5.x.
4. Be selective about installing plugins, and periodically check to make sure they are up to date.

If you take these steps, you will be more secure than 99% of the WordPress sites that are out there.

*Statistics on the popularity WordPress
http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress/all/all
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2012/09/05/the-internets-mother-tongue/

**Data on usage of “admin” in brute force attacks
http://blog.sucuri.net/2013/04/mass-wordpress-brute-force-attacks-myth-or-reality.html

Additional Resources
http://ithemes.com/2013/04/15/ongoing-wordpress-attacks-details-and-solutions/

While that First Moment of Truth is critically important in how someone perceives your company (whether it’s in a shopping aisle or in how long your sales team takes to respond to a new lead), the old model of a stimulus that the company controls being the beginning of a relationship with a customer is outdated. Google reworked the model to explain how many customers are engaging with companies through a Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT).

Not sure how your company could have a Zero Moment of Truth?  One of the most common comments I hear is that “my business isn’t like other people’s businesses.”  Check out this data on how many ZMOTs consumers have in different industries:

If that doesn’t make the point, I don’t know what will.  We ALL have a ZMOT in this world…lots of them, in fact.

Here’s a great process to start to see into what your company’s Zero Moment of Truth looks like:

1. Search for “[company name]“
2. Search for “[company name] reviews”
3. Search for “Best [location] [product category]“
4. Search for “[product category] reviews”

There are fundamentally four types of activities that I see a small or midsize business engaging in to improve its ZMOT:

1. Asking existing customers for more more reviews.
2. Updating SEO tags (meta description and title tags) for search results that are outdated or incorrect.
3. Improving search engine results for “yellow page” search terms (such as “New York Accounting Firm”) through traditional SEO.
4. Reaching prospects earlier in their buying process through “problem” search terms (such as “business tax changes in New York”) that engage them before they have targeted the solution that your product or service provides.

As I was putting this post together, I revisited PixelSpoke‘s ZMOT for the first time since we launched our new name.  Here’s an example of an odd result I found that was easy to correct but that could have been completely unknown to us:

Oops.  I’m glad that’s fixed, and that’s one of the more minor results you could have in your ZMOT.

One last thought on your company’s ZMOT: people don’t go online to just confirm basic information.  They want to find information about your product or service that will help them to make a decision before they ever have to go into a store or talk to a human on the phone.  These are the three questions they are trying to answer:

1. Will it save me money?
2. Will it save me time?
3. Will it improve my life?

If your prospects can’t answer these three questions in your ZMOT, there’s a good chance a competitor’s ZMOT will.  Happy selling!

People buy on emotions and they rationalize their decision with logic later. Here’s a simple framework to turn often bland website testimonials or online reviews into stories, courtesy of Andy Paul of Zero-Time Selling. Ask your customers these four questions:

1. What was your problem (and how did it make you feel)?
2. Why did you become interested in my company?
3. Why did you buy from us?
4. What was the value you received (and how did it make you feel)?

Key takeaway: Turn customer reviews and testimonials into simple stories to better connect with your prospects.

Think about that for a minute. Every…two…days.

A few more content statistics:

• Each day, over 1 million new blog posts are created on WordPress
• Every minute, over 72 hours of new video content is uploaded to Youtube
• The average American hears or reads 100,000 words a day
• 88% of B2B companies are increasing their content marketing spend in 2013

With the unprecedented and constantly increasing amount of content being created, mediocre marketing content is getting completely lost.

The simplest and most useful tool I have seen for creating valuable content is from MarketingExperiments, a wonderfully simple formula you can apply to any type of content: blog post, video, infographic, white paper, etc.

Content Value = Exclusivity x Desire

Desire*: 0 – None; 1 – Possible; 2 – High
Exclusivity: 0 – Available Anywhere Else; 1 – Somewhere Else; 2 – Nowhere Else

If your score is less than 2, your content has little chance of engaging your ideal customer. Rethink your concept before you go to the work of creating it.

Key takeaway: Focus on creating great content, not great amounts of content
*As defined by your ideal customer. This is who you are creating content for, right?

Citations
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/04/schmidt-data/
http://www.distilled.net/blog/distilled/content/cutting-through-the-clutter-as-the-content-channel-clogs/

I’ve been shocked to observe firsthand how rapidly online leads go “stale,” and a number of other entrepreneurs I know have echoed this experience. If people don’t receive a response rapidly, they quickly lose all memory of who you are and how they engaged with you in the first place…ruining any chance of a sale.

Key takeaway: Examine how your sales team is handling your online leads to ensure that your marketing dollars are not being wasted by a slow sales response.

* To learn more about the Zero Time Selling concept, visit www.zerotimeselling.com. The creator of this concept, Andy Paul, gave an excellent Lunch + Learn on this topic on March 7.

** http://hbr.org/2011/03/the-short-life-of-online-sales-leads/ar/1

Tweets people like – Themes

People love tweets that were either informative (48% of tweets deemed worth reading) or funny (24%).  It was very rare that a tweet accomplished both of these goals, which makes sense given how concise Twitter forces users to be.

“Interesting perspective on something I know nothing about”
“It’s witty and snarky, worth the read”

Takeaway: aim to inform or amuse, but not both.

Tweets people like – Top 3 categories

1. Questions to Followers: “What should my video be about?”
2. Information Sharing: “15 uses of WordPress [link]“
3. Self-promotion (often sharing links you created): “Check out my blog I updated to learn about tuna [link]“

Tweets people dislike – Themes
People disilked tweets that were boring, repeated old news, were too cryptic or used too many # and @ signs.

“I’ve read this same tweet so many times”
“and so what?”
“Kinda negative ”

Takeaway: be concise, clear and original

Tweets people dislike – Top 3 categories

1. Presence Maintenance: “I’m back!”  ”Good morning, world!”
2. Conversation anecdotes: “Ha, did not expect John to make it to the 7am bike ride today.” “I won a steam iron at the competition Monday.”
3. Me Now: “I’m exhausted after my meeting!”  ”Tired and upset”

* Citations

Here is the PDF of their paper (it’s surprisingly readable):
http://hci.stanford.edu/publications/2012/wgat/whogivesatweet-cscw2012.pdf

Here is a PDF of the paper on categories of tweets (also surprisingly readable)
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~mor/research/naamanCSCW10.pdf

Here is a nice summary of the research from the Carnegie Mellon website:
http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/society/2012/winter/who-gives-a-tweet.shtml

So let’s talk about the basic and mildly advanced (not nearly as advanced as rocket science) use of the hashtag.

What is a hashtag?

Hashtags began on the IRC chat networks as a way to identify groups, topics, or channels. If, for example, you joined IRC and needed help, there’s a channel called #beginner for new users.

Twitter adopted and popularized the hashtag to identify topics, and now the hashtag is used on most networks including Facebook. So let’s say you confess your love of Christian Bale on Twitter. Your message can read “I’m saving myself for Christian Bale #darkknight”. Anyone who follows the topic “darkknight” (or searches for it or randomly clicks on it) will see your tweet.

Any combination of characters can be a hashtag. #nopants is a hashtag, for example (which, strangely, a lot of people use: “I love no school. #nopants” and “I have a job interview over Skype in an hour, which means one thing and one thing only. #NoPants” are both real tweets using this hashtag). #q3vITB can be a hashtag, but you’ll be the only one to use it and chances are that no one is looking for it.

So … why do I care?

In the end, you might not care about hashtags. You might have an audience from the Cretaceous (yes, humanoids did not exist then; that’s why it’s funny), but chances are that you can at least use hashtags for the first usage below. And if you’re feeling adventurous, try out all four:

1. Create conversation around an event (conference, lecture, open house, etc.)
2. Join a conversation around a specific topic
3. Monitor your reputation
4. Express personality to your followers

One, three, and four are easy. The nuance lies in the second option.

1. Create a conversation around an event

Let’s say you are hosting the No Pants 2013 conference. You can begin a conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #nopants2013. You can publicize this hashtag to the attendees, create a Twitter campaign using this hashtag, and create a strategy to provide incentives for attendees to tweet (or Instagram or Facebook, etc.).

How important is this? Not very. But you can create a conversation around the event that keeps people engaged and gives them a voice, and this can help in a myriad of ways (feedback for future events, live tweaks to the event, etc.). You can create campaigns during the event that carry over to your sales and marketing efforts or simply create a community around your business.

I say that this isn’t very important simply because, for most companies, it shouldn’t be your first marketing priority. But it could be, say, your third (this number is completely made up).

2. Join a conversation

Hashtags trend on different networks. On Twitter, when you log in, you can see the top hashtags (currently two of the top topics are #whattosayaftersex and #30rock. Hashtags aren’t always frivolous. The 2009 revolution in Iran relied heavily upon Twitter and the hashtag #iranelection to spread news, rally support, and raise awareness.

For your business, you can use hashtags to follow topics pertinent to your products and services. This allows you to find new insights and join conversations in meaningful ways. You can even find the people who are looking for exactly what you provide.

If you publish tweets on Twitter without ever engaging in conversation, you are missing an opportunity. Twitter hosts millions of conversations every day, and you have the opportunity to join them, contribute to them, learn, and grow an audience of people who truly care about what you have to say. Doing this well takes some practice in the nuance of finding hashtags and conversations.

It also takes time. If you sign up for Twitter right now and start tweeting, it will take a few years at least before you experience the utility of this strategy. Combined with the right master plan, especially a content strategy or educational marketing, building a Twitter base could be useful.

3. Monitor your reputation

Many Twitter users complain about a brand online, much more often than they praise it. They’ll often use your company name as the bashtag, like this: “My anvil doesn’t obey gravity ARGH #acme”.

Monitoring your reputation online is relatively simple. Monitor messages that mention your accounts and monitor a few key hashtags that relate to your name, such as #acme, #acmeanvil, #acmeanvils, etc.

Since any phrase can be a hashtag, there are misspellings and multiple phrases. For the protests in Iran, the hashtag #iranelection became commonplace and widely known, but there have been tweets for the misspelling #iraneletion. For your company, track multiple possible iterations, so that you can capture almost all activity directed at you.

4. Express yourself

Your followers on Twitter or Flickr or any other network are actively receiving anything that you publish. Hashtags don’t have to be part of a master plan to rule the universe. Actually, they really, really shouldn’t. You can just make up hashtags willy-nilly and that is okay. It is okay to make up hashtags willy-nilly.

The actress Olivia Wilde does this pretty well, sometimes. On Christmas Eve, she posted this:

@oliviawilde 24 December: I spent 10 minutes of my life on this. #crapwrap #santahasslaves t.co/YrivCWhs

So she did just about the worst wrapping job since the Cretaceous, posted a picture of it, made up some hashtags, and posted. Three cheers for the Internet.

What does this have to do with tofu?

NPR published a nice interview about the hashtag and gave a great example of the unexpected exchanges that Twitter can create.

A woman named Katie completely flubbed her first attempt at cooking tofu, so she took a picture of her failed soy experiment, posted it on Twitter with the hashtag #tofu, and asked for help.

Through this tweet, Katie was able to correspond with Alton Brown, a personality from the Food Network. I love this example because Katie interacted with Alton Brown, someone who is mildly famous, but he also did not answer her question—which is to say, social media is a fast-moving mess. You can often experience surprising results and, by definition, they are not always the ones you wanted.

Key takeaway: You can use hashtags on Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, and other networks to join or create conversations meaningful to your business. You can also, apparently, contact a celebrity named Alton Brown.

Did you notice the person’s eyes zipping around like a two-year-old after nap time? This is incredibly common, because it’s how people view the Web. No one reads it like a book. People scan pages, looking for answers to specific needs and questions.

We know this because our job—are you sitting down? You should be sitting down, probably with a seat belt so the excitement doesn’t blow you out of your chair—is to watch people use the Internet. Yup. We watch people use the Internet. And what we find, 99% of the time, is that people only read a few words per page.

Your website should make it as easy as possible for different types of visitors to find different types of information. This is why, for example, your contact information should be in the header and footer of your site. Some people just want to call you. You also want them to call you. Many people will look in the header and footer for the phone number. Ergo, you put them there. People who don’t put their contact information in the header are silly people.

Alice Rawsthorn wrote about this fundamental principle in The New York Times, citing her difficulties viewing scheduled events at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris or booking tickets at Tate Modern. These are exactly the goals that a website should make extremely easy to accomplish. A beautiful site is useless if people can’t find what they need on it.

Curiously, Rawsthorn praises the news site from the Milwaukee Police Department. She writes, “As well as being an easily accessible source of useful information for local people, it presents a dynamic, yet realistic depiction of their police department in action.”

Here’s a screenshot of the site:

It’s beautiful, right? But there’s not a phone number anywhere. There are no instructions for what to do in an emergency. That information, in fact, resides on a completely different site. But when you search for the Milwaukee Police Department, the news site is the first or second result. Wouldn’t it make sense for an official police department site to include some basic contact and emergency information? Or, at least, a link to the department’s other site?

We chose phone numbers as our example, which may be misleading. Not every site should have its phone number in the header. The point is that, when you redesign your website, you need to make it easy for different types of visitors to find exactly what they need. It’s why your website redesign, or any marketing effort, should include a discover process with customer interviews.

Key takeaway: Beautiful sites are nice, but useful sites are nicer.

Let me explain.

As people, we often try to minimize or hide our flaws. We do it so often, so frequently, that we’re not aware of it. Men, for example, are rarely conscious of sucking in their stomachs when they’re trying to impress others, but many of them do it nonetheless. (Women may do this, too; I just haven’t asked.)

Companies often exhibit the same behavior: in their messaging, their website content, their online profiles, they make claims that reflect the ideal version of themselves.

A recent study, however, demonstrates that, at least in certain circumstances, this instinct actually loses trust. Leslie John and Michael Norton at Harvard Business School surveyed college students and gave them a choice: they could answer about a desirable behavior such as charity work or an undesirable behavior such as cheating. They were also told that another group of students would rank their responses based on trustworthiness.

More students chose to answer a survey about a desirable behavior, but those who disclosed information about their undesirable behaviors were scored as more trustworthy. This, hopefully, makes sense intuitively: we are less wary of those who divulge personal information than those who seem guarded.

To be clear, Harvard’s research doesn’t directly support that divulging a few inconsequential faults on your website builds trust in your audience. But it’s something I’ve unconsciously incorporated into how I speak with clients: I speak about the work I’m proud of, but I also mention small mistakes from which I’ve learned. By doing so, I’m implicitly setting a standard of honesty for our conversations, and, strangely, I’m communicating my competence to the client.

For me, I just happen to talk this way. I discuss my mistakes frankly, without apology, and I’ve noticed that people respond noticeably when I do. As a company, I don’t recommend that you air all your troubles, but a few small touches of human fallibility might go a long way to create trust in your audience.

For example, on your website you might claim to have a three-stage quality assurance system. That’s great, but you might try additional language like this: “Errors do occur, however infrequently. If you experience trouble with your Acme anvil, we’ll replace it without question.”

Key takeaway: As an individual or a company, there’s no need to air your dirty laundry, but try speaking honestly about how you’ve grown and mistakes you’ve made along the way. Your audience will probably trust you more.