Archive | November, 2023

You’ve got a forum or a Facebook Group or some sort of social media platform that is keeping you super busy. So what do you do? You ask a couple of your most loyal members or followers to act as moderators for you.

Or maybe one of them even volunteers. “Hey there, I’m on this forum all the time and I know you’re busy… how about I act as a moderator to help you out?”

Wow, that’s awesome, right?

You get free help from one of your biggest fans – someone who knows your stuff and wants to help you tell the world about you and your products.

Except…

Except sometimes these helpful moderators are really wolves in sheep’s clothing, ready to take you down, get you banned and even put you into legal trouble.

Yes, I know I sound like a crazy, paranoid doomsayer, but this really happens. In fact, it costs companies millions or possibly even billions of dollars a year in lost revenue.

Take the case of Bob’s* Facebook Group account. Bob runs his own online marketing business, teaching people how to use social media to get new customers.

Bob is a social media marketing expert, and the last person you think would lose his business because of a social media marketing mistake. But that’s essentially what happened.

Bob sold his highly acclaimed $1,997 social media marketing course to someone we’ll can Suzie. Suzie turned out to be something of a pain, pestering Bob several times a day with questions and demanding far more attention than any of his other 300 students combined.

Rather than watch the course and implement what Bob taught, Suzie seemed to think she was entitled to one-on-one teaching 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Essentially, there was no pleasing her. Exasperated, Bob refunded her money and politely told her that the course was not for her.

Suzie was furious. She sent out numerous messages on social media telling anyone who would listen that Bob was a fraud, his course was a waste of money and so forth. But apparently this wasn’t enough for her.

Unbeknownst to Bob, she joined his Facebook Group with an entirely different identity than her own. Keep in mind that his Facebook Group was how Bob communicated with everyone who purchased the $1,997 course.

This identity seemed very friendly and helpful towards Bob and everyone else in the group, so much so that Bob eventually made this other identity a Group moderator. And once she had moderator status, she immediately began subtly undermining Bob and his social media course. She managed to personally contact everyone in the group and lure many of them to her own Group while gaining their confidence.

Long story short, she used her authority as Bob’s moderator as well as her authority within her own Facebook Group to cast doubt on Bob and his course. Refunds began skyrocketing and new sales plummeted. Her final act was to make several posts that were completely against Facebook’s terms of service, thereby getting Bob’s Facebook Group and Bob himself banned from Facebook.

Bob has asked Facebook to investigate and hopes to restore his ability to be on Facebook but restoring his good name and reputation will take a great deal more than that. By becoming one of his Facebook Group moderators, this woman managed to virtually destroy Bob’s business.

And this is not an isolated instance, either. I’ve heard horror tales of social media moderators doing things that created lawsuits, lost sales and put businesses in trouble with government agencies.

If and when you allow anyone else to have moderator control on any of your social media type accounts, you need to KNOW who they are and that you can trust them, because it only takes one moderator from hell to potentially ruin everything you’ve built.

*I changed Bob’s name because the poor guy’s been through enough already.

Why is it when we want to be at our most creative and innovative, we resort to using the most worn-out cliché at our disposal? “We need to think outside the box on this one!”

Ugghhh.

First of all, that ‘box’ is there for a reason. It gives us boundaries and guidelines on what we want to accomplish. For example, if I say I want you to write an article on new ways small businesses can use social media, I’ve just given you a ‘box’.

But if I tell you to get to work and give you no idea what to do, you’re going to be totally and utterly lost.

Second, if we want to be more creative, let’s start by abolishing the “think outside the box” phrase and make a pact, just between you and me. From this point forward, if you or I say or write ‘th*nk o*ts*d* th* b*x’, we owe $5 to our favorite charity payable immediately.

Agreed? Good.

Now then, what can we say when we want to express our desire to think differently, get off the beaten track, search for an innovative approach, break new ground and take an imaginative leap?

Seriously, I’m asking you for your help on this one. Even the phrases I used in the previous sentence sound worn out and tired.

I did have one thought, but if you’re a Star Wars fan then you might not like it. For whatever reason, people seem to either gravitate towards Star Wars or Star Trek. I’m told Star Wars is for dreamers and Star Trek is for science geeks. This might be wrong, but I can see some truth to it.

Here’s what I do know: In the very first Star Trek series during the opening credits, we hear Captain Kirk saying…

“Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its 5-year mission: To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before.” What do you think?

Can we boldly go where no one has gone before?

It beats thinking outside some cliché box.

Whoops! That’s $5 I owe… now where did I put that checkbook… 😉

CTA stands for Call to Action. When you’re talking about an email you’re sending to your list, the call to action is when you say, “Hey Reader, click this link to get a once in a lifetime deal” or some such.

The more you can get your readers to click the links you put in your emails, the more traffic you send to your offers. The more traffic you send to your offers, the more sales you can make. Usually.

Okay, there is an exception to this rule, and it’s if you don’t set up your email and your offer to be congruent. Like if you say in your email, “Click here to discover the best fertilizer for roses” and then you send them to a page that is advertising a cleaning solution for rubber duckies… you’re not going to make sales.

But let’s assume that your email sets up your reader to know exactly what to expect when they click the link. The more people who click the link, the more people you have who can potentially purchase the product and the more money you can make.

Thus the question becomes, how do you get more of your email subscribers to click the links without holding a gun to their head?

By using the CBS method:

•   Command
•   Bolden
•   Soften

First, you’re going to COMMAND them on what to do. Don’t be subtle here. Don’t slip your link in there and assume they will click it just because it’s there – they won’t.

You’ve got to TELL them to click it.

•   “CLICK HERE NOW”
•   “Go HERE now for full details”
•   “This is the link to click NOW”

Next, you’re going to BOLD keywords. People tend to scan emails just like they scan sales letters. By bolding the keywords, you can stop a scanner in their tracks and get them to do your bidding.

“The price will double at midnight so to get the discount go here now and check this out before it’s too late”

Read just the bold words above and you’ll realize it’s everything the subscriber needs to know they should click the link NOW.

Finally, you might want to sometimes SOFTEN the language you use.

If you only say, “CLICK HERE NOW” it seems kind of pushy or bossy.

But if you say, “CLICK HERE NOW and see if this is for you” then you’ve softened the language and made it more friendly.

“Click HERE now and see if this can double your income”

“Click THIS LINK now and find out why 2,926 reviewers give it 4.8 stars”

“Go HERE NOW and discover for yourself why grown men blush when they see this”.

Remember CBS to increase your email calls to action: Command, Bold and Soften.