Apparently we can only maintain meaningful social interactions with 150-230 friends.

Does the same go for Social Media Marketing on Twitter?

We’re all human so there’s no logical reason to suspect we can handle more than 150-230 concurrent meaningful business relationships any better than we can personal relationships. And by all accounts we need to communicate meaningfully to make a commercial success of Twitter.

Thanks to things like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite, it’s good news for big brands and companies doing large scale, nationwide SMM activity. You’d go mad trying to interact meaningfully with all those followers without special SMM management tools.

It’s good news for local businesses, small businesses, sole traders and freelancers too, giving us the scientific green light to create small, relevant, intimate Twitter communities instead of feeling we ought to build and manage millions of followers like the big boys. Horses for courses.

Interesting times…

I love this. It’s the next big thing. And unlike most next big things, it’s a beauty. Likeonomics is predicted to take marketers by storm. And quite right too. So what’s it all about?

According to its inventor Rohit Bhargarva, “We all want to do business with people we like and choose products that we have personal affinity with”. Likeonomics taps into this simple yet revolutionary insight by consciously adding ‘likeability’ into the marketing mix for the first time.

Where has likeonomics come from?

Likeability has always had a role in marketing success. But it suits the Zeitgeist perfectly. Times have been tough for years. The economic landscape is bleak. Our trust in the way the world works has taken a massive knock thanks to the banking crisis. We’re feeling wobblier than we were before things went dog-shaped.  We want reassurance. We value genuine, warm human connections and commercial relationships with firm foundations. We want to be able to trust organisations not to let us down.

At the same time the MPs’ expenses scandal knocked our waning faith in politicians into a cocked hat. We’re sick to death of never getting a straight answer. Our appetite for a ‘say it like it is’ approach is stronger than ever.

How do you do make your communications (therefore your brand) more likeable?

Bhargarva gives three clear crystal clear clues:

• total honesty
• simplicity
• being human

Why do I love likeonomics so much?

As a freelance copywriter I’ve always erred towards the ‘no bullshit’ school of marketing communication. It’s never a good idea to pretend you’re a big business when you’re small. I always recommend sole traders use the first person on their website rather than ‘we’. I believe in being honest and straightforward because I know it has the power to disarm and differentiate at a fundamental human level. I ditch jargon, legalese, small print and any form of arse-covering, turning negatives into positives instead of hiding important information. I write the way people speak instead of sounding like a corporate manual. And I always use plain English.

Do I consciously use likeonomics to give my clients’ copy even more oomph and help boost their profits?

You bet!

Here’s a bunch of great stories with a marketing and communications slant.  

• Does the internet make us stupid? We get the same old debate every time a new medium comes along. Telly encountered the same kind of scaremongering when it first went mainstream. And the mobile phone / brain cancer jury is still half in and half out.

Thankfully new research proves the internet doesn’t affect our intellect. It shows that young people aren’t addicted to social networks. And it indicates social networking is not in itself a source of risk to kids. Nominet Trust research concludes there’s “no neurological evidence that the internet is more effective at ‘rewiring’ our brains than other environmental influences”. In fact using computers can help slow down cognitive decline.

• Computers that work the same way as your brain. The stuff that lets us record on DVDs has another astonishing property. It closely mimics the junctions between brain cells and the brain cells themselves.

So what? So it could be used to develop brain-like computers that only need a tiny amount of energy to run… which could learn, evolve and adapt without any external programming. Blimey.

• What makes someone re-tweet a tweet? Someone has apparently surveyed 2,000 British families to identify the typical family. 2,000 doesn’t seem like enough in a country with a population of tens of millions. So it’s good to see proper scientists using statistically valid and satisfyingly vast amounts of data  to identify why tweets get re-tweeted.

Nasir Naveed and colleagues at Koblenz-Landau university analysed a huge dataset of 6 million tweets, by 4.5 million tweeters, to discover how a message’s content affects the likelihood of it being passed on. As it turns out, Tweets including these things seem to hit the sweet spot:

1. usernames
2. hash tags (usually denoting topics)
3. question marks
4. positive words
5. specific subjects – social networking, public holidays and the economy
6. urls

• A serious re-branding job for the planet’s most threatened ecosystems. Nobody gave a stuff about it when it was called ‘the jungle’. But the Amazon Rainforest is one of the world’s few ecological success stories. Everyone knows about it, most of us care about it and great efforts are being made to preserve it. So much so that it isn’t anywhere near as threatened these days as it once was.

What’s next on the conservation agenda? Threatened ecosystems aren’t always particularly appealing. Take the Paraguyan ‘Chaco’, an inhospitable, thorny place whose climate is amongst the planet’s most unpleasant. But it’s probably just as vital – if not more – than the Amazon Rainforest. And it’s disappearing much faster.

Time for a re-brand? New Scientist suggests re-naming the Chaco ‘The Garden of Eden’. Which, while dubious, might just do the trick!

…and apply what you learn to your website

There are loads of things you can do to optimise your website for visitors. But are you missing a trick?

Making assumptions is one thing. It’s also useful to think creatively about persuading people to buy.  

How? Here’s a simple exercise that’ll help you pin down unforseen ways to enhance your visitors’ experience and boost sales. 

• Every time you buy from a site you haven’t used before, make a note of the main reason you chose that site over the others you looked at
• At the same time jot down the main reason why you didn’t buy from the other sites you visited 

You’ll find, like all of us, that you respond well to solid practical stuff like great copy, clear navigation, good value, a choice of ways to pay, sensible layout etcetera. But you might also find yourself responding positively to things you didn’t expect and couldn’t have predicted. 

Eventually patterns will emerge. Persuade friends, family and colleagues to join in and you’ll have a healthy bank of data, potentially sprinkled with nuggets of sales conversion gold. Then apply what you’ve learned to your site and see if sales increase.

• The golden rule of marketing is – give your customers what they want
• The golden rule of targeting is – go where your customers go

Perfect. If you’d like to get a regular email from Drayton, each packed to the rafters with the best in direct response wisdom, just register on his home page here.

…and they’ll find it almost impossible to decide!

Last year New Scientist featured research proving how difficult it was for more than eight people to reach consensus. 

Apparently fewer than eight people can make decisions relatively efficiently and effectively. But the moment you hit eight things go dog-shaped.  

It makes sense to me. In the olden days when I was a financial services direct marketer, getting copy approval from big blue chip insurance clients was always a complete nightmare. 

Because copy and creative had to go through multiple departments and individuals for approval – invariably more than eight - we’d get trapped in a horrible Groundhog Day scenario. Every time us marketers thought we could go to print it’d embark on another spontaneous round of the same people and departments, all of whom felt they had to approve their colleagues’ approvals.  

OK, the campaign would eventually be approved. But the copy was almost always reduced either to gobbledegook or something so bland you might as well have sent wallpaper.   

Remember Kyoto, and more recently Copenhagen? In retrospect it seems naive to expect consensus from more than 100 heads of state…  

Conclusion: if you want solid, sensible consensus decisions that’ll benefit your business, don’t involve more than seven people in making them! 

Terms & Conditions can be a genuine force for commercial good… as long as they’re written with your customers in mind.

T&C are almost always legal gobbledegook, often lifted wholesale from a template. From a communications perspective they’re criminally poor.  

Which is a shame. Every communication is an opportunity to promote your business. In a world packed solid with dodgy dealers, positive, honest, transparent Terms & Conditions can be powerful marketing magic. 

The thing is, most lawyers would probably advise you to leave your T&C well alone. The solution? 

• provide a plain language version of your T&C for people to read in tandem before signing up to the legal version. Say something like: Because our Terms & Conditions are legally binding, they’re difficult to understand. We think it’s nice to know what’s what, so here’s a plain English version. 

or  

• summarise each term and condition in plain English above or below the legalese. Say something like:  Because our Terms & Conditions are legally binding, they’re difficult to understand. We think it’s nice to know what’s what, so we’ve summarised each section in plain English.

or

• Take the view that your T&C are a formality. Some terms and conditions are just common sense written in legalese. For example when you join a forum it is usually a condition that you don’t swear at your fellow members. There’s absolutely no need for simple concepts like good manners to be expressed in legalese.   

or

• If you’re 100% risk averse, say what the hell and get a good copywriter to create a palatable document that means the same as the legalese – but communicates it properly. 

It is best to avoid caveats altogether. Why?

• caveats interfere with your sales proposition
• reading is a challenge because your flow is constantly interrupted by irritating little swords and asterisks
• caveats make you sound negative
• and, contrarily, they make you seem less trustworthy

Is it possible to avoid caveats altogether?

Yes. It’s easy. Turn them into positives instead. Make them earn their keep. Here’s an example.

• Replace the caveat *Offer valid for  a limited time only with a sentence  in your body copy, loud and proud: Hurry, this great offer won’t be around for ever!

What if you can’t make a caveat positive?

There’s always a positive side. If there genuinely isn’t, think about making people a decent offer that’s worth accepting.  

What if you can’t bear to clear out the caveats?

Put them all in your Terms & Conditions or Agreement, where they’ll work their hardest to reassure people rather than scaring them off.  

Customer testimonials. Useful, right?

More useful than you might think! Here’s five top ways to make the most of testimonials.

1. Use a testimonal to introduce every web page, like this, and they’ll give your sales message a powerful little boost

• Header:  You deserve a brilliantly clean home!
• Subhead:  Brighton’s favourite cleaning company
• Testimonial: “I’ve used BrightInBrighton for a year now and they’ve never let me down. My home is always absolutely spotless!” 
• Body copy: BrightInBrighton deliver superb quality cleaning services (etc)

2. Use several short testimonials on your sales page, where they’ll work hard to increase conversion

3. Create a dedicated testimonial page and add new praise regularly. You’ll benefit from SEO juice, enhanced visitor interest and valuable extra credibility

4. Use a short testimonial to lend power to your email marketing campaign – we all enjoy knowing what other people think and we like to trust our fellow consumers

5. Include testimonials with the stuff you sell and hammer your quality message home. They’ll help you encourage repeat visits, increase sales, cross sales and up-sales…

• on the cover of your ebook
• designed into your product’s packaging
• printed on delivery notes
• etc 

6. Create a regular ‘what our customers say’ section in your newsletter. It’s a good place to display longer testimonials and entire letters full of praise without interfering with your core sales message. People like to read about their peers’ experiences and good news helps create a positive, trusted brand

PS. Dont forget you can use testimonials from peers and experts within your field as well as customers.  

Add a ’status’ line to your home page – a bit like Facebook – and you can update your website in seconds every morning.

Just add a simple line of code, like I’ve done on my freelance copywriter website helpinthecity.com. 

Why? From a SEO perspective updating your site regularly encourages extra visits by Google etc. It tells them you’re alive and kicking. But a status line can be a powerful little direct marketing tool too. It is a beautifully easy way to:

• tell visitors exactly what you’re doing every day – evidence that you’re present, correct and waiting for their custom!
• announce news via a prominent, powerful one liner
• inform people about new stock, new products, special offers…
• reinforce your brand by consolidating your website’s tone of voice – cheap, cheerful and effective brand building
• give visitors an extra insight into your business’s personality
• differentiate yourself from competitors
• encourage people to come back every day to see what you’re up to
• deliver cross-sell and up-sell messages
• let people know when you’re on holiday, useful if you’re a one man band!
• prompt response by asking a daily question
• make one off and time-limited offers – for one hour only etc… a great way to win repeat visits

That’s just a quick off the cuff list. Test drive a status line on your website’s home page, monitor your stats carefully and see what it does for your business.