I know, I know, most of the social media stuff has been going on on my personal blog at JanetFouts.com but I thought I’d post this one here just in case you missed it. I’ll be putting on my social media coach hat for a Social Media Bootcamp on August 17 in Sunnyvale to do some of the hands on work I’ve been wanting to do to really help people get social media and put it to work for their business. The cost is only $41 if you sign up before August 1st, so get over there and sign-up!
The Exploratorium is one of our favorite San Francisco museums and it was a pleasure helping them create a shiny new press site with a lot of social media features built in. The site is built entirely in WordPress so staff can add, edit and tag posts as they go up, and use the powerful content management and search attributes of WordPress.
We did a bit of custom code here and there as well to make it even easier for them to manage.
We built a custom template for the site so it fits right in to the current Exploratorium website, maintaining the user experience.
Custom post templates for the press releases allow the staff to easily create a release with video or images and include content directly from exhibits on-line or link to them for reference
Custom press kit templates allow the staff to pull together a list of press releases, video and images on the fly and create a full press kit on any exhibit easily
Featured releases get their own space and an image on the home page using custom fields
The whole home page is widget based, so staff can edit content without having to get into the code
A series of galleries were constructed to highlight selected images from the museum’s vast collection
We did on and off site training for staff and supplied them with video tutorials for reference
Take a look at the new site and give us your feedback, we’d love to hear it!
If you are interested in learning more about social media and how to make it work for your business, you should sign up for my up-coming Webinar: “Putting Social Media to Work for You” .
This is the first in a series of Webinars about social media and social media marketing.I’ll take user feedback to create the next in the series to make sure everybody gets what they are looking for out of these Webinars.
Length
This is a short session, just 30 minutes and no experience in social media is required. I’ll start with the basics and then quickly get to the good stuff.
What’s it all about?
I’ll cover the following topics:
What is Social Media?
How can it help my business?
Overview of social media tools.
Examples of social media use – the good, the bad, the unfortunate.
Where to find data on growth and social media usage.
Creating an effective social media strategy.
5 steps to get started.
When Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh posted to Twitter Serena Williams was going to be in the office and to send questions for her, I thought, hey, good idea.
It’s just another example of how this company gets social media marketing. It’s fresh, it’s innovative, it’s real and we like that.
Hsieh is a great evangelist for Twitter. See the Twitter page on the company site to hear more about his views on Twitter, see links to company employees’ Tweets and public mention of Zappos’ on Twitter.
and then read his blog to get an idea of the company values and how those values carry over to staff and how this company has grown with this kind of thinking at the helm.
Social media participation like this can really pay off in interesting ways. When compeitor DSW decided to let Zappos know about a lawsuit for service mark infringement, Hsieh told us about it on Twitter. He spoke openly and privately to many of his followers on Twitter about how he felt about the way the lawsuit was revealed to him and the community definitely rallied around him to lend support.
The parade of apps that support Twitter never ends, and that’s probably what both brings Twitter to it’s knees and keeps people using the app. All these shiny new toys cannot be ignored. TweetDeck is the newest of these, and, as usual, it was irresistible to sign up for the beta.
I’m a big fan of Summize for keeping track of topics that pop up on Twitter, and I’m also a big fan of Adobe Air clients that make my life easier, so beta testing TweetDeck is a no-brainer.
One of the things that drives me bonkers about Twitter is that when they start to get a heavy load they turn off pagination, or even replies. This means if someone replied to an interesting Tweet last night you’re going to miss it. Using clients like Twhirl let’s you view these older tweets, but you have to scan through a pile of content to get there, and in a pretty small window. This can be painful.
TweetDeck archives up to 168 hours of Twitter traffic in their databases, allowing you to see what you missed while you were offline.
Even if Twitter is offline, you can still follow the tweets that happened before the outage.
You can see your Twitter results in multiple columns, All Tweets, Replies, Group, and Search, making it much easier to quickly scan for what you wanted to find.
The group tab allows you to select Tweeters you want to follow relative to a topic, your friends, or whatever else you’d like, making it a lot easier to see what’s going on in particular areas of interest.
You can perform global Twitter searches using Summize, or local searches of just your friends, and the results stay in the search window, updating automatically.
Remember, this is still in Beta, so there are a few glitches. I noticed that some of my friends didn’t show up in the group lists (This may be because they hadn’t posted recently?), but overall it’s a solid app and a welcome addition to my toolkit.
Maybe you don’t want to hear every single detail of the conference one of your Twitter pals is going to. Or you’re tired of hearing about the new iPhone? TwitterSnooze to the rescue. Tune out those annoying Tweets without having to un-follow or block the user. TwitterSnooze allows you to filter out a Twitterer or topics or subjects with a few keystrokes, all without tipping off your friend that you’re tired of hearing about their trip to Tahoe.
Ahhh the bliss.
If you’re new to social media marketing the first logical question is “How will we measure the return on our investment?” right?
It depends on what the goal of the campaign is.
Are you looking to:
Expand your brand’s visibility?
Connect with your user base on a more personal level?
Collect business leads or user profiling?
Drive traffic and see larger sales?
Create a relationship with users who will evangelize for you?
Maintain, repair or enhance your public image?
All of these can be done with social media if you know how to use it. The difficulty of measuring the value of relationships is the key issue with measuring the ROI of social media. How do put a number on consumer interaction or relationships? How do you sell it to the board when you can’t put a $value on it?
Actually it’s done all the time in advertising. Let’s take the millions of dollars spent on a Super Bowl ad as an example.
Skip the beer commercials, because we know there are obvious relationships there.
But why would GoDaddy, Audi or Kraft spend over 2 million for an ad spot?
It’s not about sports. They want to be associated with the success and power that the Super Bowl represents. They want the attention of several million people focused on the event.
Over simplification? Maybe, maybe not. But by comparison the same amount of money spent on social media marketing could actually reap bigger rewards in the long run. While an ad on the Super Bowl might get talked about for a few months afterwards, it’s quickly eclipsed by the next year’s ads.
Creating a loyal following online can lead to a network of traffic coming from sources you never dreamed of, and can continue to build on itself for years. As social media networks and lifestream sites become more popular, word of mouth campaigns will take off with a simple 140 character statement. (Oh, and believe me, if you’re not in the thick of things the anti-sentiment could take off just as fast without you ever knowing it.)
OK, but where’s the ROI measurement tool?
There isn’t one.
Sure you can watch your traffic, and see a spike when a discussion about you or your products begins, but the ripple effect of a post on Twitter about how great your customer service is can’t be measured. How do you measure the long term brand awareness and the good will from a group on FriendFeed or Facebook that supports your company values and encourages conversation?
You can watch your click rates on your ads but remember that now people may click on your ad and then go onto their various lifestream sites and tell everybody their impression of what they found. They may not look at those links they got from their friends for days or months. Google may pick up a Twitter post and put it into the search engine results.
Check your logs. Are you seeing traffic spikes your can’t relate to tv, radio, live events or print campaigns? Are you getting a load of traffic from Twitter? Plurk? FriendFeed?
Time to get busy.
But what tools to use? It depends on what your goals, available time and tools already integrated into your business are. We’ll go over some of those tools in future posts. In the meantime, get out there and see what’s going on in social media. Don’t know where to starts? Friend me on FriendFeed and you can see posts from me and from my friends who work in the social media space. It will give you lots of food for thought.
So many of us have been frustrated with Twitter’s server issues that we’ve been casting around for alternatives. The thing is, there’s nothing quite like it. Sure Friendfeed has more features for integration, Pownce is prettier and has more features, and Plurk is… well, it’s just quirky enough to be sorta interesting.
But how do you choose from of all these options?
Let’s talk about “Lifestream Aggregators”. These are sites that pull together some of your feeds or personalities and let them mingle together, offering you a much easier way to keep on top of the various services. Lots of Twitterers have migrated to FriendFeed. Scoble could be considered the leader of the migration but I hate to compare myself to a lemming so let’s just say it was a logical choice.
FriendFeed allows you to pull in your friends’ Twitter feeds as well as over 35 other sources, so you can be knee deep in their lives and businesses pretty quick. It also let’s you build “rooms” as a place where your friends can hold threaded discussions.
But FriendFeed doesn’t satisfy that micro-blogging urge. so what else? Well there’s Jaiku, (now owned by Google) which offers micro-blogging in 140 character increments just like Twitter, but it also lets you comment on your own messages as well, so if you need to be verbose you can (please, just don’t). Jaiku also lets you add icons to your discussion and import your own web feeds.
Then there’s tumblr Tumbler is really great for sharing the little snippets of goodness you find as you wander the web looking for really useful stuff. You can add graphics, video or audio files, and customize your template to give it your own style, and they’ve done a great job at creating ways to interface with tumblr. You can post via IM, with a "tumblet" dashboard widget, from your phone wiith Vimeo or SMS. Importing your feeds from other life-streams is a snap.
Tumbler allows you to create groups too, so it’s a good environment to set up for group projects or user groups. tumblr is clearly where the designers hang out, among others.
Then there’s Pownce. Pownce isn’t Twitter either and they will be happy to hear it said. Although there is a pretty cool micro-blogging feature, you can use it to send files to your friends, and if you pay for your account you can send files up to 250 MB.
And last to the party, but picking up steam fast is Plurk. Plurk has a unique visual time-line that’s quirky but in a cute way. You can add images, icons or video to your posts, but rather than mingling with all the other Plurkers, you have the option of viewing your friends plurks or your own. It’s really intended to be more of an online journal than a microblog. Just like good ol’ IRC chat, you can get blocked for flooding, a control that Twitter could certainly use.Plurk also uses Karma to instigate frequent use (Like Reddit). The more you use it the better your Karma. The more Karma you have the more features you get.
To be honest I got on Plurk last week and found the interface and the chore of adding my friends to yet another micro-blog too much to face. The fact that it doesn’t work on my Mac with Firefox is an added headache. I could use Safari but I’m pretty attached to all my plug-ins, so fergeddaboudit. Who knows. Plurk may take off.(It’s just been acquired by pheltup) A lot of the Twitterati are Twittering they’e Plurking and vice-versa.
Thing is none of these sites can replace Twitter. It has it’s following for a reason and none of the other sites quite fit. It has it’s own simple style. Craigslist remains popular because they stayed true to the original simplicity and goals of ads and community. Hopefully the same will be true with Twitter. I think I’m going to wait it out a while and see. Frankly I’m up to my eyeballs in apps at the moment. I’ll let you know which ones I settle on for good, but in the meantime, if Twitter’s up I’ll probably be posting.
You know we love you. We care for you, we defend you at every opportunity. We tout your good points and how people have used your service to save lives, raise money for good causes, act as a customer service funnel and generally bring us all closer together.
But you’re letting us down.
Already we are just giving up for the day if you’re not there when we need you. We’re starting to meet new people on other services and finding other ways to network with our friends.
Every day more and more people are saying bad things about you, hosting Twit-outs and moving in droves to FriendFeed. Thing is, FriendFeed is not Twitter and we want to be loyal, we want to help.
It’s time for an intervention. We know you’re trying, and you are few, but we know you just got some funding to help you update. Add to the team. Get an evangelist (or an apologist?) who can put out some fires.
Cut off the API access for a bit, just until you get things under control. We’ll understand – for a while.
Here’s what some of your loyal users think you could do to fix it. Maybe they’re right, maybe they’re wrong, but surely you could take a look and see what they are saying?
BlogRovr is a pretty nifty blog aggregator, and when used with the Firefox Add-on it’s easy to see how it can become addictive. Though I miss the “Share” feature in Reader, being able to “Twitter this” right from the page is a viable alternative since most of the people I’d share with in Reader are on Twitter as well, and now they’ll be able to comment right back.
Another nice feature is the ability to import an OPML file of your feeds, either from Google Reader or pretty much any other collection of feeds.
Easily the best feature is the “related posts” that shows you related content on the blogs you’re watching. Surf your favorite blogs and as you read, related content pops up in a sidebar box. You can scan the related headlines, read an excerpt, and if you want to read it, BlogRovr opens the link in a new tab preserving your place on the previous site. BlogRovr also shows you a list of tags associated with a post, so you can quickly scan for tags you might want to follow.
If you spend a lot of time looking at particular niches, BlogRovr may help you find some new blogs, and it easily keeps you up to date on related posts on all your subscriptions, which makes researching or just plain keeping up to date on what’s new much easier.
Who am I reading? View my BlogRovr list here.
Data Portability? BlogRovr makes it easy to access your favorite blogs from anywhere, anytime and on any computer.
If you’ve been using BlogRovr for a while, odds are good you’ve got a lot of stored data about your preferences in sites, topics and browsing habits. This is convenient but it’s also got a lot of potential for BlogRovr to deliver you even more information like sites that you might like, or deliver ads for products based on your reading habits. This has some people asking questions about the recent acqusition of BlogRovr by BuzzLogic and whether or not you own the data about you, or if it can be sold to advertisers to use to target ads to your desktop based on your preferences.
There are a load of viewpoints on this out there. Should you be able to remove your data from the database or opt out of advertising if you don’t want it? Or is it finally a way for bloggers to monetize their level of influence? Should we just give up on privacy if we want the convenience of this kind of service?
The 
stuff. You can add graphics, video or audio files, and customize your template to give it your own style, and they’ve done a great job at creating ways to interface with tumblr. You can post via IM, with a "tumblet" dashboard widget, from your phone wiith Vimeo or SMS. Importing your feeds from other life-streams is a snap.
Another nice feature is the ability to import an OPML file of your feeds, either from Google Reader or pretty much any other collection of feeds.
