Ello? What's all this talk about ELLO?

Welcome to maximize your social, actionable 10 minute advice on how your business can maximize your social media presence. Now, the host of maximize your social social media author, speaker, consultant, founder of maximize social business, and soon to launch Social Media Center of Excellence. Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody, this is Neal Schaffer. Welcome to another exciting episode of maximize your social. I'm coming to you today from Boston, Massachusetts. We're actually spoke earlier today at the marketing profs b2b conference here in Boston. It's been an incredible conference, Scott Stratton did the keynote. It's been filled with just wonderful, wonderful people thought leading marketers, and thought leading sessions, I actually did a joint talk with Jason Miller of LinkedIn, on LinkedIn for b2b marketing, which hopefully was well received. And I'm actually going on the Social Media Success Summit being put on by Social Media Examiner. Within the next hour, I posted up on Facebook that I'm having a doubleheader today. So in between my doubleheader with what limited voice and energy I have left, I thought, hey, I need to do another podcast. And today I want to talk about something that's been on the top of a lot of people's minds over the past several days, which is the new social network called ello, E L, L. O, if you type in L o.com. And you're confused as to what the heck ello is, well, first of all, ello, its URL is E LL. o.co. So maybe that's the first way of clearing up the confusion. But I've already had all these people contact me, what do you think about ello? Do you know should brands have a presence there? What do you think's going to happen? And I tell everybody, hey, slow down, right. We're still in the first few weeks, literally, of this network, gaining any prominence you know, the leading people in the network, maybe only have, you know, 1000s of followers, maybe some have above 10,000, but not many people. And while yes, it is growing in certain circles, we have to take a and remain you know holistic about our approach to social media. Now, ello is a great example of a social network that Jeff's book just starts out gets a little buzz, a lot of people sort of check it out to try to figure out what it is a lot of people are going to drop off, some people are going to say, hey, I want to be the ELO expert. And it really is going to depend to see what ello does in order to bring value to businesses who want to leverage it for marketing, even though ellos already said we are going to be an ad free network, which makes sense, I still think that they could offer, you know solutions for businesses. Now, let's take a little step back here. And you're trying to figure out what ello is ello is is you know, a fledgling social network that just happen to be picked up by the LGBT community, as well as a lot of creative types, a lot of artists and what have you, over the last several weeks, when Facebook was starting to crack down on drag queens, and others that had fake profiles, or I shouldn't say fake profiles, they were real profiles, but they were not using their real names. And Facebook was saying this violates our policy. And you know, we're gonna close down your account. And it's interesting, because just last week, Facebook announced, hey, we're going to relook at that policy and allow you to come back to Facebook, which was obviously in a direct response to ello, gaining a little bit of steam. But basically, ela was a social network that was picked up by all these people, for whatever reason, right. And that's really where it's come from, I think it still has a very obviously, organic feel. There's a lot of artists, a lot of creative types that are on the platform. And it's it's a beautiful network, it's just another avenue to engage with people. You know, it's sort of like when Google Plus emerged, that a lot of people were saying, Well, we have Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, we don't have time for another network. And you know, your friends that you're already engaging with, you're already on these other networks. If you want to meet new people, you go over to Hello. So I think as a matter of experimentation, just to get familiar with the network, I don't think it can hurt to actually acquire an invites, which you will need, every user can only invite five people to the network. I've already used up my five invites, I'm sure as it gets bigger, just as Pinterest did, it will open up to the public. But you know, for those of us that have never been on ello, If I could describe it, it's very similar to Twitter, you follow people and you basically have two buckets for the people that you follow. You put them as friends, you put them as noise. And then you have two news feeds one for friends and one for noise. And the other person doesn't know which one you've put them in. When you post you can add a link, you can add an image. And you can obviously add text, you can add emoticons, which a lot of people like doing if you do a search for you know, ello emoticons, you'll get a whole list of things that you can easily input into your posts. But so far, a lot of the conversations on ello have been about ello and trying to figure out what ello is and how to use it. And it's very, very similar to the early days of Google Plus, in fact, I still find the common Decisions about Google Plus are some of the most engaging conversations on Google Plus. So it's no different than any other social network. But obviously, social media is about being where your audiences, your audience, unless you're selling to that specific community, to the LGBT, or or the art community, just in general, your audience probably really is not on ello, or might not be that active on ello. Compared to other networks, everybody I see Anello, with the exception of those drag queens who were kicked off Facebook, probably still have Facebook profiles, they still have Twitter profiles, they still have LinkedIn profiles. But I will say that it's refreshing to be on a network where there's no ads, and where people aren't, you know, where you can have natural conversations and meet new people. It's sort of like the early days, like I said, of any other social network. So you might be able to meet interesting people there. And it's an experimentation, who knows what will happen, I see people, you know, they'll post a blog post on there like they would on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn, I personally have not been doing that. I don't think it's the right network to do that on. But others have been doing that. And you can see if you can generate any traffic from ello. As always, I podcast before I blog about the subject, and I will be writing a guide my own sort of first guide to ello. For those of you that are interested, hopefully, that'll come out in the next few days. But until then, that is basically what ello is, and what it will become, nobody knows and no one can predict the future. And it really, you know, comes down to, you know, sticking to your guns, sticking to your social media strategy. But you know, keeping an eye on Allah, and keeping an eye on sort of the leading people that are on our following a few and keeping an eye on the numbers as to how many followers they have. And I think that's going to give you a good feel for you know, how popular the network is becoming, keep an eye sort of on its Alexa ranking alexa.com. See if it starts to penetrate the top 1000, the top 500, the top 250 are the top 100 What have you look at the people that have a lot of followers, and most of them are actually the developers of ello. But look at the conversations they're having. And look at the engagement. One of the really cool things about ello is, every time you post it shows you the number of impressions you're getting. And this is similar to if you own a Facebook page, you can see the impressions of every posted you on Facebook. So that's the way I've just seen, you know, as you start posting, have seen just sort of, you know, how many people are actually seeing your post, if you are already on ello, or you are able to obtain an invite and you want in my advice, you know, experiment with it, try to post something different once a day try to connect with people at a human level. And look at the impressions you're getting. The other thing that you'll notice about ello is that it's sort of a closed network, and that it's hard to find other people that you might want to follow, there's a discover button. But ello doesn't really have the robust search functionality that other sites do. There's no option to upload an email data database to find people. So if you want to get found, you need to first you know, find people to follow and look for conversations that they're having. And find interesting people through the conversations. And that's one of the you know, another one of the cool things about it is it truly, it takes time to find people to follow. And that's really what social media should be about who they're talking to and what they're talking about. And should you be interested in that. So if you're looking at it from a social media marketing perspective, there's nothing for brands yet but you can have a profile as a company or as a person, it's very similar to Twitter in that way. So if you wanted to set up a profile as a company, you could, I don't see many that do it. But it's all part of the experiment, right? So that in a nutshell, if I was to give you where I see ello right now, and I'm recording this on Thursday, October 9 2014, that's where it is. Don't waste a lot of time on it right now. dip your toe in the water, check it out. But keep an eye on it. Once you sign up, you'll start getting their newsletter. They're updating their platform very, very rapidly these days, see what it evolves into. And as I said, keep an eye on those top people that are being followed, look at their numbers, look at the Alexa ranking and look at the conversations that are being generated. And in fact, if you're posting something on a daily basis, start to look at the sort of impressions and the comments that you get. And if you have a link in there, obviously, the traffic that you're generating from ello. And I think that's going to be really the best way of knowing if ello has any value to or not. And it could be the same as Pinterest that it could end up generating a lot more traffic than you thought, even though it's numbers are way smaller than Facebook. So that's my 10 minute little advice for today. I'm going to be signing out from Boston, Massachusetts. I do hope there's so many great people here. I do hope to have one or two interviews with some of the great folks here. I'll bring my C recorder my Sony IC recorder with me to the networking event that we have tonight. Hopefully we'll have some great Sam Adams lagger. That's what I came to Boston for. And I'm going to stop there. Hope you enjoyed this podcast. As always, thanks so much to all of you who tweet out to me, Hey, you know, or on Google Plus or on Facebook. I enjoy listening to your podcasts while I walk my dog or I go on a bike ride or I walk around the neighborhood. It really means a lot to me. Thank you so much. It's what keeps me going what keeps the field and my engine going. Even though I should be a lot more tighter than I feel right now. I'm going to keep going and prepare for my Social Media Success Summit. 45 minute webinar on how to find your ideal customer and social media and engage with them. Until next time, wherever you are on the world, make it a great social Day. Bye Bye, everybody. Thanks for listening to maximize your social. We appreciate your iTunes subscriptions ratings and comments. If you would like to appear on this show, or recommend content, please contact Neal Schaffer at Neal at maximize your social.com Please also make sure to check out Neil's new community this Social Media Center of Excellence at social media ce o e.com. Thanks again and make it a social day.