Five Social Media Tricks to Grow Your Audience - for Colombia 3.0 Conference

1 Billion people all on Facebook at the same time
…that’s a lot of procrastination
Last week 1 billion people were on Facebook
AT THE SAME TIME

Owned Media is any media produced by a
company about, or in support of, it’s own
product
Sales up 13% worldwide

1. Plan. Take it seriously. (No interns!)
2. Use Professional-grade tools.
3. Be creative – use a “voice” that fits.
4. Measure what you do, using analytics
5. Use social grooming as a reward

You cannot rely on accidents and luck to build
an audience.
1. Planning for growth

Understand who your
audience is

If your social media manager
looks like this …

… maybe you should hire
someone like this.

3. Creativity –find a voice that fits
The point of using social media is to get people’s attention

Craft viral headlines/content
There is no “one formula to rule them all”
But
There are no rules – but there are general
guidelines
No “One Strategy to Rule Them All”

10 techniques to
use to get
people’s
attention

1. Curiosity
• Is social media worth paying attention to?
• Would you do THIS for money?
• This sucks, you lose.
• What’s your problem? Do you HATE
money?
• Why does everyone love my content?

2. Offer
• Here’s my presentation – free!
• I have a gift just for you
• Copy and paste this business plan for free
• Steal my best offers and use them to build
your audience

3. Flattery
• I’ve always wanted to tell you this…
• Your site is amazing
• You have everything you need to succeed
already
• Here are some people who are saying
nice things about you

4. Social Proof
• This guy is just like you – and now he
makes $1 million a year!
• This company followed our example - and
now they’re crazy successful
• Read how this guy took a useless website
and just sold it for $188,000

5. Utility
• The best tools to build your social media
audience are…
• A complete guide to how to use Google
AdSense
• Here’s my cheat sheet on how to build the
best social media community

6. Urgency
• This offer disappears at midnight
• Flash sale! 51% off ends tonight!
• You have ONE day to watch this video
• This is your last chance!
• You forgot this during today’s training
session

7. News
• Have you heard what happened
yesterday?
• Latest report: your company is headed for
trouble
• New study shows that your best
customers are finding someone else

Story
• “It was midnight, and the car was running
low on gas. I could hear the zombies
chasing me…”
• “Male birth control pills could end human
life on Planet Earth…”
• “I looked at the shadowy figures on the
video screen, and then pulled the trigger
on the drone…”

Sentimental
• This little girl walked 300 kilometers to
bring this to her father
• Why this dog never stopped searching for
his master for 12 years
• Baby pigs saved by mother tiger

Funny/Cool
• Crazy Russians use tractors as race cars
• Monkey uses skateboard to deliver pizza
• Playing new video game will make you
stronger than a bull (sort of)
• Cat riding a Roomba dressed as a shark,
chases baby duck

4. Analytics – what counts
• Measure what you are doing
• Find “influencers”
• Find what platform people are talking on
• Find the most popular subjects/keywords
• Find what people HATE (and try not to do it)
• Know when your audience is online

Google Trends-
http://www.google.com/trends/

This will steal your brain…
http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends/visualize?nrow=5&ncol=5

Alexa – to judge site popularity
See what your competition is doing – and is it working
R&D = “Rip off and Do it better”

• If you have a Twitter feed with no @ or RT
in it, you are doing it wrong
• If you have a Facebook feed with no
replies or conversation, you are doing it
wrong

• If you have an Instagram account with no
Likes, you are doing it wrong
• If all you do on YouTube is publish your
videos and never comment or share
others’ works – you are doing it wrong

SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT ABOUT A
ONE-WAY CONVERSATION.

I’ll tell you a secret…
PEOPLE
HATE
ADVERTISING

6. TROLL-KILLING BONUS TIP
Don’t be a ***hole.
Someone is going to say
something on the internet
that is going to enrage you.
PUT THE PHONE DOWN.
Print out the nasty
comments on paper, put
them in the driveway, and
run them over with your car.

Is anyone else sick of these guys?
Social Media Ninja Social Media Guru

CAN WHAT IS SAID ONLINE
REALLY HAVE AN IMPACT
ON THE ECONOMY OF AN
ENTIRE COUNTRY?

Costa Rica: Social Media to sell coffee

So
what is
the
overall
effect
of this?

GREAT. NOW HOW
CAN WE BUILD AN
AUDIENCE USING
SOCIAL MEDIA?

Exercises:
1.Go to the following sites.
2.Type in the name of your
organization.
3.Share results

Once we’ve found a
conversation – how do we know
that the people who are having
it are real – and not “sock
puppets” or trolls?
Or what they are saying is real?

• Politifact.com
• Snopes.com
• Truthdig.com
• Opensecrets.org
Fact-checking sites

Compare their use of social media on various
sites to see if they are using the same “voice”
Compare their public messages with the ones
that appear on their official site
Confirming Identity

Look for email address in their name if that is
possible
Verify that it is them in the photos. This is a
quick and easy way to discover if a profile is
false, especially in Facebook
Verify the list of their friends that they are
actually people that know this person
Confirming Identity

Is there a consistent phrase or expression they
use? Is that something that seems familiar?
Is their use of language consistent with their
country of origin? Or their region?
Are all the messages general commentaries, or
something you can find easily in the press?
Pay special attention to their words:

Do they repeat the same words, phrases or links over and
over again? Then they are probably a SPAMBOT
Check if they follow a lot of people – but not that many follow
them
Verify if the account is brand-new, with few messages, or
most of the messages were posted recently
Maybe write a story about the fake famous people to alert
your readers that there are scam artists out there
Pay special attention to their words:

• Monitor across platforms (including Facebook, YouTube,
Twitter, Soundcloud, AudioBoo, Bambuser)
• Spot and understand trends (using tools like Hootsuite,
Tweetdeck and Trendsmap to create lists and identify trending
topics)
• Build a network of contacts before the story breaks and limit
the stress
• Use online tools to examine evolution of images (including
TinEye, Google Images and WolframAlfra)
• Verifying sources – speak to them and cross reference
answers with social data
• Verifying sources – look at social media history across
platforms
Verification Checklist

• Use Whois tools to verify websites
• Check for photoshopping or repetition in images
• Apply the Too Good To Be True test
• Harness online discussion boards and experts (use sites like Snopes to
spot urban myths and common hoaxes early on)
• Question edited footage
• How urgent is it – could more steps be taken to verify before you publish?
• Crowdsourcing – 'be judicious' about how you send out unconfirmed
information
• Consider any permissions and crediting which may be necessary
• Clearly communicate the level of verification a story has been given
• Made a mistake or new information come to light? Issue a clear and
networked correction
Verification Checklist

OK, these are not
even trying hard…

Test Yourself:
• http://area.autodesk.com/fakeorfoto

Attention in the virtual world is like money in
the real world; the very presence of it
attracts more of the same, producing what
might seem like gross iniquities.
A cat falling off a sofa is less important than
riots in Venezuela, yet we can now see how
our attention goes to one not the other.
Measuring how and what we read online has
become an obsession for all publishers.

The abundance of possible metrics now
available to publishers is not necessarily
helping either.
Using NSA-style techniques (although
naturally much more benignly), the
Guardian or any other publisher can track
every movement you make on an online
piece, where you come from, where you go
to, whether you are actively reading or
whether you have tuned out.

These metrics form themselves into the
basis of advertising sales and increasingly
inform editorial decisions too.
Morning news conference is more likely to
be an in-depth look at analytics than a
discussion of "what's on today" at the most
sophisticated news companies.

First, some bad news…
We used to think that
the internet was this
magic invention that
would open the doors to
everyone in the world to
all join together and
trade, share, collaborate
and make the world a
better place…

I’m not saying we were totally
wrong
But.
The popular conception is of young,
committed, passionate, freedom-loving
internet activists running circles around the
old, slow, bloated, repressive police state
regimes.
That may have once been true. But it is now
just a fantasy

Why is online opinion important?
Or THINK I
know…

Hundreds of Twitter accounts were documenting a
disaster right down the road. “A powerful explosion
heard from miles away happened at a chemical plant
in Centerville, Louisiana #ColumbianChemicals,” a
man named Jon Merritt tweeted. The
#ColumbianChemicals hashtag was full of
eyewitness accounts of the horror in Centerville.
@AnnRussela shared an image of flames engulfing
the plant. @Ksarah12 posted a video of surveillance
footage from a local gas station, capturing the flash
of the explosion. Others shared a video in which
thick black smoke rose in the distance.

As politicians and business
leaders have come to recognize
the power of online
commentary

The commentators are known as the
50-Cent Party, as they are said to be
paid 50 cents for every post that
steers a discussion away from anti-
party content or that advances the
Communist Party line.

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his political allies claim to be the victims
of a U.S.-sponsored campaign of diplomatic and economic aggression. Fortunately
for them, a lone voice from Washington has emerged to express steadfast support
for the current regime. Over the past several months, White House spokesperson
Jim Luers has been quoted by everyone from Venezuela’s state-run media to
members of its parliament. The only problem: He doesn’t actually exist.

From London, where al-Mahmoud lives, they
invented a fake Iraqi village called Shichwa, which
they claimed was situated just northwest of the holy
city of Karbala and just vacated by ISIS, thanks to the
martial prowess of the Iran-backed Hashd al-Shaabi,
or the Popular Mobilization Committees of Shia
militias, which are leading the ground offensive
against the Sunni terror group. They also doctored
screen grabs from CNN and al-Arabiya, the Saudi-
owned outlet, purportedly showing Anderson Cooper,
Wolf Blitzer and other news anchors discussing the
latest siege of Shichwa, complete with Photoshopped
chyrons.
“We wanted to bait the militias,” al-Mahmoud, an Iraqi
Shia who hates ISIS but is deeply critical of Baghdad
and its outsourced war to sectarian paramilitaries,
told The Daily Beast. “So my friend Firas and I said,
‘Why not invent a battle and a small village to see if
the websites or social media of the government pick
up the story, and this way we can assess how
desperate they are.”
Except the spoof should have been obvious: Shichwa
is actually the name in Arabic of a leather pouch—
really more of a bladder—used by Iraqi peasants to
churn milk into butter.

They also doctored screen grabs from
CNN and al-Arabiya, the Saudi-owned
outlet, purportedly showing Anderson
Cooper, Wolf Blitzer and other news
anchors discussing the latest siege of
Shichwa, complete with Photoshopped
chyrons.
…we’ll get to Photoshop in a bit…

Think of it as
“antibodies
fighting an
infection”

1. Search for person
2. Click on “Conexiones”

Five Social Media Tricks to Grow Your Audience - for Colombia 3.0 Conference

Five Social Media Tricks to Grow Your Audience - for Colombia 3.0 Conference

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