Tools and Strategies for Social Businesses

Social media bootcamp! Tools & strategies for social businesses Girls in Tech retreat, Santa Cruz, Oct. 10, 2009 JD Lasica President Socialmedia.biz jd@socialmedia.biz

Relax! Creative Commons photo on Flickr by Nattu http://delicious.com/socialmediacamp/git (all sites in this talk have been tagged for later retrieval) http://slideshare.net/jdlasica

Today’s hashtag Creative Commons photo on Flickr by Prakhar Tweet this talk! Today’s hashtag: #git09 (Our goal in this talk: 3 takeaways)

Handouts!

Glossary for this new stuff http://socialbrite.org/glossary “Social media: Any online technology or practice that lets us share (content, opinions, insights, experiences, media) and have a conversation about the ideas we care about. ”

Types of social media • Blogs • Social networks • Microblogs (Twitter) • Online video (YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler) • Widgets • Photo sharing (Flickr, Photobucket, etc.) • Podcasts • Virtual worlds • Wikis • Social bookmarking • Forums • Presentation sharing

What we’ll cover today 1. Overview 2. 6 steps to social businesses success 3. Best practices for the social Web 4. Social media campaigns 5. Twitter 6. Widgets! 7. Enabling local conversations 8. Metrics! 9. Sharing economy

Overview: Who’s participating? Women active in social media More than half of online U.S. women report doing a “social media” activity at least once a week. Of those, more than half do so on a daily basis. Survey of 2,821 women conducted by Compass Partners, March 2009. www.blogher.com/press

Participation is widespread 42 million women do it Some 42 million U.S. women participate in some form of social media at least once a week. Activities include: • social networks • reading blogs • posting to blogs • message boards & forums • status updates on Twitter, etc. Source: 2009 Women and Social Media Study by BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners

Kinds of participation Weekly participation by women by social media activity Source: (c) Compass Partners

Shifting time to social media Shift by women away from traditional media continues to increase Source: (c) Compass Partners

Topic areas with biggest impact When asked, “Which sources do you rely on for information on the topics you’re interested in?,” surveyed women responded: Source: (c) Compass Partners

State of social media 2009 Whenever someone opens a computer, 60% of time it’s for social reasons 5 of 10 top websites are social sites 125 million-plus blogs Facebook: 300 million members Twitter: 50 million users Flickr: 3 billion-plus photos YouTube: 1 billion-plus videos served per day Blog growth continues. Women are most engaged social media users. Social media continues to supplant, and supplement, traditional media

6 steps to social business success 1. Define your target audience 2. Define business objectives • Increase sales? • Increase membership? • Build reputation for new brand? • Customer feedback on new product? 3. Define your strategy • Identify internal champions • Set out rules for interaction • Assign responsibilities • Establish measurable goals • Identify tools & platforms

6 steps to social business success 4. Launch! 5. Measure results, track analytics, reﬁne 6. Be patient. If no results after 4-6 months, move on. In identifying projects or campaigns, be realistic, but don’t be afraid of blue-sky thinking. Silicon Valley mantra: Fail often, fail fast. Photo on Flickr by jonrawlinson

Best practices for Social Web • Listen long and hard. • Then: Share. Engage. Participate. • Build relationships. It’s all about the conversation. • It’s not all about you. It’s really not. • Empower customers, don’t market to consumers. • Be authentic and transparent about who you are. Disclose your relationship to the product or service you’re promoting. • Don’t be defensive — be open to critical feedback. • Establish your own ethical policies. Enforce them. • Successful campaigns engender authentic enthusiasm. Social media still comes down to the product or cause.

Social media campaigns American Cancer Society “In 2009, you canʼt build a $2 million destination site and use marketing muscle to drive trafﬁc to it.” — David Neff American Cancer Society

American Cancer Society, Web 2.0

morebirthdays.com

Creating a space for ‘us’

Leveraging sharing culture

CRS in a Web 2.0 world Crate & Barrel’s CEO sent 18,000 $25 gift certiﬁcates to their customers on behalf of DonorsChoose.org

Corporate social responsibility Crate & Barrel not only received positive coverage but showed a 12% increase in merchandise sales by gift certiﬁcate redeemers.

Becoming a brand Gary Vaynerchuk has become well- known brand with • daily wine video blog Wine Library TV • extensive use of Twitter (850,000+ followers) @garyvee • new book ‘Crush It’

Campaign that didn’t work Skittles In March 2009 Skittles launched a social media campaign with these features: • All Twitter tweets with the word ‘Skittles’ landed on the Skittles website home page • Clicking on ‘videos’ on home page took you to Skittles’ YouTube page • Clicking on ‘images’ took you to Flickr photos tagged with ‘Flickr’ • Clicking on ‘friends’ took you to Facebook Fan Page for Skittles

Why it didn’t work • On the upside, Skittles received a temporary bump in trafﬁc to its site & coverage in LA Times, USA Today, Financial Times • On downside, most people saw it as a blatant PR stunt. • Mars-owned Skittles did not release a new product, content or message • They made their site inaccessible to children • They encouraged false conversations • Racial slurs & obscenities appeared on their home page, which could have been prevented. • Skittles did not engage in a conversation with its customers, and most commenters did not talk about the candy • Instead, it merely held up a mirror and let Twitter users make funny faces

Twitter ecosystem http://www.twittersheep.com/ for GIT on Twitter

Make Twitter work for you • Train your staff on how to use Twitter • Not a broadcasting medium to just distribute press releases or your headlines • Start by listening & observing • Be human, be conversational, lose the marketing jargon • Use it for research, soliciting ideas, customer support, to announce events, to recommend articles, to identify experts • #1 trafﬁc driver: retweets • Use calls to action; use ‘Please RT’ strategically • Tweets with a URL are 3x more retweeted • nytimes.com: Twitter drives 10% of its trafﬁc

JD’s 75-25 Rule 3 conversational tweets for every ‘broadcast’ tweet Omar Gallaga Austin American Statesman

Identify & engage influencers • Scope out Twitterers in your business area with large # followers. Engage them, don’t sell them. • Learn about how people in your business community use social media • Connect with social media inﬂuencers through Advanced Twitter Search & tools in handout

Essential Twitter tools • Dashboard apps: Tweetdeck, Seesmic Desktop or Hootsuite (Web-based) • Real-time Web search: Twitter Search, Tweetmeme, TwitScoop, OneRiot, Scoopler, SearchMerge • Mobile apps: Tweetie, Twitterific, Twitterfon, Twittelator, Tweetstack • Metrics: Bit.ly, TweetStats, Twitterholic, Twinfluence, TwitterGrader, Twittorati, Twitalyzer • Video chat from the field: Twitcam lets you tweet while live-streaming & enables live chat with users

Use hashtags to join conversations • Find relevant hashtags through hashtags.org or Twitter Search • Join (but don’t spam) conversation threads • Start your own hashtag • Some hashtags to latch on to: #women #health #latino #education #democracy #politics #Obama #news #media At left, widget found at: http://journchat.info

The power of widgets World news widget Widgets are prettified RSS feeds. It’s easy & free to turn your existing feeds into widgets. Create widgets for specific sections of your business’s website. Two benefits: • slick packaging of content • enlist users to distribute content Services: Widgetbox, Nervibes, Yahoo Widgets.

Take the community’s pulse Real-time conversations Turn Twitter conversations into widgets. Tap into the conversations that are already taking place in your community: Widgets let you post discussions tailored to speciﬁc topics or geographic locations. Monitter widget on Socialbrite.org

Enabling conversations Avert registration fatigue by giving commenters more ways to sign into your site.

Social news services Digg: 35 million monthly unique visitors; 80 million outbound links per month; home page story on Digg will send 20,000 to 200,000+ clicks Facebook Connect: Each story shared on Facebook is seen on avg. by 40+ friends. Use it to authenticate comments. Google Friend Connect: Just beginning, with same potential for large network effect.

Metrics! BlogHer’s stats on Quantcast

Track your success For integrated social media campaigns: • Monitor social media activity • Optimize content, try to make it viral • Interact with target audiences • Use customer feedback loop for product research and development For ongoing brand monitoring: • There’s no single ‘best metric’ for social media • Track the benchmarks & goals you set down • Decide on a set of measurement tools

Monitoring services Paid monitoring services: Free monitoring services: • Radian6 • Google Alerts • Techrigy • Technorati • Spiral16 • Bit.ly • ScoutLabs ($99/mo.) • Backtype • Compete.com • Feedburner • Chat Catcher • SamePoint • Quantcast • Socialmention • PostRank • Facebook Lexicon/ Facebook Insights • trendrr • Addict-o-matic

Beyond traditional metrics Engagement metrics • Direct metrics - Comments on company blog post - Number of conversations engaged - Number of members who engaged • Indirect metrics - Increased trafﬁc from referral links - Views on social site like YouTube - Number of links posted to client site - Page views of postings

Tap into the sharing economy Creative Commons photo on Flickr by Jason Means Don’t do all the heavy lifting!

Creative Commons • Rich source of free commercial material. • Flickr: 25 million+ Attribution & ShareAlike licenses • Use them for your blog, website, email or print newsletter, presentations, etc. creativecommons.org ﬂickr.com/creativecommons

Leverage the ecosystem of free Free content! Free resources! Free photos Socialbrite.org/sharing-center Free videos (TED Talks, etc.) Creativecommons.org Free music & audio Meetup.com Free platforms! Free expertise! WordPress & its plug-ins BarCamp Drupal PodCamp Joomla & other open WordCamp source platforms Social Media Kaltura Club

Sorry! Didn’t have time for ... • Facebook (but see handout) • LinkedIn • Video sharing • Photo sharing • Reputation management

Thank you! Let’s talk! email: jd@socialmedia.biz twitter: @jdlasica http://delicious.com/socialmediacamp/git http://slideshare.net/jdlasica

Tools and Strategies for Social Businesses

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