Peter Thiel’s Zero to One is one of the most talked about business innovation books of 2014. It’s a serious book full of big, interesting ideas. But in many cases the data don’t support his conclusions. In this critique for Medium I provide the evidence.
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With over 1,000 companies trying to sell some type of marketing technology in over 40 categories, it’s not surprising that the most common word that marketers use to describe themselves is “overwhelmed”. In my guest post for the Harvard Business Review blog, I suggest a Marketing Technology Starter Kit: 7 programs that every company’s marketing team should be using to generate more leads and revenue.
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At the Sales 2.0 Conference in Boston on Monday, Heartland Payment Systems CEO and Chairman Bob Carr (on the left) said that there is no stress.
We live in the age of the customer. Never before have customers had so many options, so much information, and so much power. Continue reading
Sales reps are busy people, right? We need to be spending all of our time researching, cold calling, and meeting with prospects, right? Continue reading
Michael Sam, the Southeastern Conference Defensive Player of the Year, came out on Sunday. If he plays professionally, he will be the first openly gay player in the NFL. Continue reading
This is the conclusion of my five-day series on Google. Previously I’ve looked at Google’s #1 position in search and search advertising, display advertising, mobile search and advertising, video ads, YouTube, and its rising presence in social media (YouTube is both a video and a social media site), and analytics. Continue reading
OK, I feel really stupid about this. It’s not like I don’t know about hashtags, and haven’t used them on Twitter for years. (They’ve more recently been added to Facebook, the MeToo Network, but it’s
ial-media/why-do-we-hate-facebook-hashtags/”>not clear that they’re very popular or effective there.)
In general my feeling was that they were best used for events so the people at the event, and those who couldn’t make it, could see what people felt were the most important comments by speakers. There are also a few top level generic hashtags that might be useful. And then there are the “comment” and humorous hashtags like #fail, #justsayin and #firstworldproblems.
So why haven’t I been using them while tweeting out my new blog posts?
I started regular blogging almost a year ago. But my blog has had low readership – just several people a day. It was a nice thing to point people that I’m talking to for more insight on my thinking, but clearly it wasn’t bringing my thinking to the attention of many new people. (I jokingly thought of it as The Least Read Blog in the World.)
And then last week I started using hashtags such as #sales and #marketing when tweeting about particular posts. And this is what happened:
The number of people reading my blog increased almost 10X.
Now, the numbers are still not huge, but I’ll take that free increase of readership anytime.
The interesting question is whether this is the fallacy of small numbers in two ways: (1) my only sample is my own blog, and (2) if I was already getting, say, 1,000 visitors/day without hashtags, how much would it have increased by adding hashtags to my tweets? At the very least I imagine it would add dozens of incremental visitors a day, which can help build a following.
What’s been your experience? Are you using hashtags to promote your blog and posts? Sometimes execution is more important than originality.
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