tools and strategies for social businesses
DESCRIPTION
A 45-slide presentation to the Girls in Tech Retreat in Santa Cruz, Calif., on Oct. 10, 2009, with sections on 6 steps to social businesses' success, best practices for the social Web, successful and unsuccessful social media campaigns, Twitter, widgets, metrics and the sharing economy.TRANSCRIPT
JD Lasica [email protected]
Social media bootcamp! Tools & strategies for social businessesGirls in Tech retreat, Santa Cruz, Oct. 10, 2009
Relax!
http://delicious.com/socialmediacamp/git
Creative Commons photo on Flickr by Nattu
(all sites in this talk have been tagged for later retrieval)
http://slideshare.net/jdlasica
Today’s hashtag
Tweet this talk! Today’s hashtag: #git09(Our goal in this talk: 3 takeaways)
Creative Commons photo on Flickrby Prakhar
Handouts!
Glossary for this new stuffhttp://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?
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
Women active in social media
Participation is widespread
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
42 million women do it
Kinds of participationWeekly participation by women by social media activity
Source: (c) Compass Partners
Shifting time to social mediaShift by women away from traditional media continues to increase
Source: (c) Compass Partners
Topic areas with biggest impactWhen 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
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
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
“In 2009, you canʼt build a $2 million destination site and use marketing muscle to drive traffic to it.”
— David NeffAmerican Cancer Society
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 worldCrate & Barrel’s CEO sent 18,000 $25 gift certificates to their
customers on behalf of DonorsChoose.org
Corporate social responsibilityCrate & 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 workSkittles
• 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
In March 2009 Skittles launched a social media campaign with these features:
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
http://www.twittersheep.com/ for GIT on Twitter
Twitter ecosystem
• 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
Make Twitter work for you
Omar GallagaAustin American Statesman
3 conversational tweets for every ‘broadcast’ tweet
JD’s 75-25 Rule
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
• 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
Essential Twitter tools
At left, widget found at: http://journchat.info
• 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
Use hashtags to join conversations
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.
The power of widgets
Real-timeconversations
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
Take the community’s pulse
Avert registration fatigue by giving commenters more ways to sign into your site.
Enabling conversations
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.
Social news services
Metrics!
BlogHer’s stats on Quantcast
• 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 integrated social media campaigns:
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
Track your success
Monitoring services
• Radian6• Techrigy• Spiral16• ScoutLabs ($99/mo.)• Compete.com• Chat Catcher• Quantcast
Paid monitoring services:
• Google Alerts• Technorati• Bit.ly• Backtype• Feedburner• SamePoint• Socialmention• PostRank• Facebook Lexicon/
Facebook Insights• trendrr• Addict-o-matic
Free monitoring services:
Beyond traditional 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
Engagement metrics
Free content:
Don’t do all the heavy lifting!
Creative Commons photo on Flickr byJason Means
Tap into the sharing economy
• 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
Free content:
Creative Commons
WordPress & its plug-insDrupalJoomla & other open source platformsKaltura
Free content! Free resources!
Free content:
Free platforms!
Free photos Free videos (TED Talks, etc.)Free music & audio
Socialbrite.org/sharing-centerCreativecommons.orgMeetup.com
Free expertise!BarCampPodCampWordCampSocial Media Club
Leverage the ecosystem of free
Sorry!
• Facebook (but see handout)• LinkedIn • Video sharing• Photo sharing• Reputation management
Didn’t have time for ...
http://delicious.com/socialmediacamp/git
http://slideshare.net/jdlasica
email: [email protected]
twitter: @jdlasica
Thank you! Let’s talk!