Measuring Social’s Impact (at AAF-ND)

Earlier this week, I crossed both North Dakota and Minnesota off my “states to visit” list, thanks to some new friends in Fargo. I spent Tuesday’s lunch hour presenting to the AAF-ND group at their monthly meeting. We talked about how social media is a skill, not a job. I wanted to emphasize how to unleash Social Media within an organization and positioned to identify and solve business challenges, and complement existing efforts. When social media is not siloed, and able to impact many parts of a business, including allowing employees to act as brand advocates, good things can happen.

The slides are below for anyone who would like to take a second pass. Please take a look, and if you have any questions, tweet me!

I encouraged the 80-some attendees to use Twitter and the organizer’s branded hashtag #AAFND throughout my talk, which you can see here. Nearly 40 tweets used the hashtag that afternoon, generating over 16K potential impressions. Using Postano’s hashtag analytics tool, we’re able to see what keywords and phrases caught the ears of the attendees. Its always fascinating to see what other hashtags are used by those who participated online. Hopefully whoever used #slowclap meant it in a good way!

Interested in having me speak to your group or organization on social media, measuring ROI or another topic? Drop me a note

A Lifetime with Apple

I was born in 1984. So was Macintosh.

Nearly exactly one decade ago (October 23, 2001), iPod was born. (I bought my first in 2004)

and today (October 5, 2011), the world mourns the loss of a visionary.

October 5, 2011

Steve Jobs was man who dared to dream about changing the world, and then did. My entire lifetime, Steve Jobs has been innovating across technology, computing, motion pictures, music, mobile…seems like everything I touch or rely on for my job today was somehow influenced or shaped by Steve. When we wake up tomorrow, it becomes our duty to act on the inspiration and dedication he brought to the world.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it by living someone else’s life. Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

— Steve Jobs, 2005

Altimeter Kicks Butt Again: Facebook Page Marketing Tips

Great post out this week from Jeremiah Owyang and the Altimeter Group, all about Facebook Page Marketing. Facebook & Facebook users are continuing to evolve and become more sophisticated on the platform, which means that brands who are just getting started with Facebook pages, or are doing the same thing they’ve done for a year or two, need to start playing catch up, and quickly.

I couldn’t embed the report directly into my blog, but here’s a link to 8 Success Criteria For Facebook Page Marketing: Jeremiah’s post (w/ embedded report)

Jeremiah and his team identified 8 criteria to determine success for marketing on Facebook.

1. Set Community Expectations
2. Provide Cohesive Branding
3. Be Up to Date
4. Live Authenticity
5. Participate in Dialog
6. Enable peer-to-peer interactions
7. Foster Advocacy (give value & a reason to share)
8. Solicit a Call to Action

When I see a list like this, I put my work front and center in my mind while reading through each item, as a way to grade myself. Thankfully, I feel like we’ve been successful at most of these steps, but certainly have room to improve going forward. Some are easier to cross off the list (setting up your expectations, providing consistent branding and updating the page regularly are low hanging fruit), while working your way down the list might require more effort, sweat & tears, and getting others on your team involved to do them well.

Which items on the list do you feel are most important for a brand to do well (even if its easier to do)? What do you find you struggle with the most (either yourself or inside your organization)?  For me, it’s 3 & 5 for the first — and 5 & 8 for the second.

Thanks again to Jeremiah, Alan & Christine from Altimeter who published the report and gave me something else to measure myself against.

Six Steps for Setting Up Social Media Strategy

I went through a “101” call a couple weeks back and it brought back the reminder of that, while some of us do this social media stuff 24/7, most marketers and small businesses are still just getting started figuring out what to do with their Facebook profile/group/page,  YouTube channel/video, Twitter thingy. A lot of people I talk to are hesitant to even set up social media profiles because they’re sure there won’t be much time to learn about how to use them effectively — much less actually see a return on their invested time.

I made a few notes while listening to these concerns and questions and afterwards followed up with the group with six steps to getting started with social media. I wanted to share it here too, to help you start building your toolbox.

Six-Step Process for Organizing Social Media Goals & Strategies

1. Set your objectives for using social media. There are no “wrong” goals, as long as they tie into your other business objectives. Some objectives may include driving sales, raising awareness, creating online buzz, connecting with your friends/fans/customers or using the channels as additional outlets for marketing.
2. Determine the resources you can dedicate to social media. If you have a team, great. One person, great. One half of one-half of a person’s time, sure. Just make sure that you’re allocating the appropriate amount of resources that are in-line with your overall business objectives.
3. Decide what social channels help you achieve the objectives you’ve set and align with the resources you have available. You don’t have to have a presence on every social media website to be successful. PGA TOUR player Stewart Cink only uses Twitter, but he does so really well and is the most popular golfer on Twitter. Each channel (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) is unique in how the users engage, who uses it and even where its more popular. Pick the channel or channels that will reach the people you want to reach, fit with the resources and content you can produce and the outcomes you want to achieve.  [Hint: the Groundswell Social Technographics Profile Tool is a great resource to help you identify who & what your audience is doing online.]
4. Don’t reinvent the wheel just for your social media profiles. Use the content you’re already producing for your website & newsletters (can go into Facebook notes, videos, photo galleries, etc). Make your social channels another extension of your plans for marketing, communications & digital efforts.
5. Use insights from Facebook (Page Insights) and YouTube (Insights), as well as third-party sites like www.tweetcounter.com and TwitAlyzer.com to track your growth and successes. Hootsuite.com and Bit.ly let you track clicks on links posted on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere. Measure everything and use the data to back up your gut instincts about what goes well or not as good as expected.
6. Try new things! and share your successes or hardships so we can create a better community to help each other.

What do you think? I welcome any comments, challenges or additional tips that will help others get more comfortable with starting out, or resetting their goals for using social media to connect.

When a Tiger roars on (bootlegged) video, everyone hears it

Time just released the Top 10 Everything of 2008 lists online. It’s no surprise that Tiger Woods’ putt on the 72nd hole of the U.S. Open was the number one moment in Sports in ’08. The producers of Time.com added a YouTube clip of Tiger’s putt to the article. The YouTube video, 2 minutes of the NBC coverage, was posted by the user “theslicegirls”. (When this post was first written, the video had 65,545 views.)

Courtesy of Golf.com

Alternatively, Hulu.com has the official NBC Sports U.S. Open highlights, which can be clipped based on user preference and then embedded [but not on WordPress, unfortunately].

I’m not sure why Time.com producers would use the bootlegged YouTube clip rather than the official highlights from Hulu.com, but it’s another example of traditional web behavior, by both producers and users. It will be interesting to see if NBC puts any pressure on Time to change the video on the page.

I’m personally guilty of accepting, using and sharing the first relevant video or photo I find, even if its copyrighted by a large media company. However, I’m now on the other end of the protected footage argument, professionally. Using appropriate or official content, and giving credit back to it, is not only the responsible thing for online producers and bloggers to do; it’s also the easiest way to build credibility.

From a brand perspective, this example also highlights how having an official presence on a video or content site is half the battle. The other half is telling media/bloggers that the channel and videos exist, and that the brands want content to be shared with the media or blogger’s audience.

On that note, the PGA TOUR’s official YouTube channel is at http://youtube.com/pgatour. I would be very happy to see more media, golf bloggers and golf fans sending, sharing and posting official PGA TOUR highlights and features! (If you have questions about that, shoot me an email or Tweet directly)

Be a NFL Highlight Editor!

NFL.com announced today the launch of the NFL.com Replay Re-Cutter, in partnership with Adobe Premiere Express. The new tool lets fans edit and remix video highlights of their favorite team, players and plays during the season with photos, graphics, and audio. NFL.com provides all the content, including music tracks you’ll hear in official highlight videos.
Fans can edit, remix, post and share their highlight mixes on the site, and also post links to them off-site through web sharing tools (ie: AddThis).  To create a remix or to rank the videos, you have to create a profile. Anyone can watch the videos without logging in.

With the Replay Re-Cutter application, the NFL joins the NBA in letting fans remix highlight videos and share them online.

I spent a little time this afternoon playing around on Replay Re-Cutter. I found it to be a little hard to use at first. The more time you spend with it, the more features you will discover. One of my favorite features is the ability to toggle audio levels for both the soundtrack music and the individual clips. I like to take short shots of sideline or close-up footage to intermix with the highlights. I was pleased that I was able to keep the announcing audio (nat sound) when I wanted and use just the soundtrack at others. It helps keep the video clean (if you want it to be).

You can’t embed re-cut highlight videos (though you can post them bookmark and share on Facebook and other sites no prob), so I can’t put mine on the page. But, if you want to see a short reel on Browns QB (and ex-Oregon State Beaver) Derek Anderson in the first two weeks of the ’08 season, click here.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: video, highlights, fans, remix, nfl, nba, cleveland browns, adobe

New: Favorite tool(s) of the week

In an effort to stop slacking on my blog duties, I’m going to start a weekly posting to highlight a “favorite tool.” These can be brand new or one of my can’t-live-without web tools (or applications) that I want to share.

I’ll start with a preliminary list of what I use daily that you hopefully already know about. If you aren’t familar, go check ’em out NOW. I won’t describe here, but if you want more info feel free to email me or ask questions in the comments.

1. Twitter & Twhirl ( the desktop apps that puts my Twitter feed on my screen)
2. FireFox Browser (Version 3 is out now!)
3. Facebook (not just for college students!)
4. Meebo (congregates all your IM programs into one)
5. Pandora radio (the desktop app is HANDY)
6. PGA TOUR’s Live Shot Tracking and Live Leaderboard Widget

Another tool I use almost daily, and am a BIG fan of, is del.icio.us. I am sick of getting emails with “so and so has sent you a link”, losing bookmarked sites going between computers, or printing out every article I want to save for later. You too? Then go sign up for del.icio.us. Once you get past the strange URL, you’ll find its a great tool for personal and workplace use.

The site allows registered users to save bookmarks in a list online. For each bookmark, users can edit the title, a description of the link and add tags for future reference. del.icio.us also has “social” features including allowing users to create networks, save links for each other and see what other people have saved as bookmarks (much better than emails, huh?). For an example, see my personal links at http://del.icio.us/ltbeyer

Last thing — if you have favorite sites or web tools you can’t live without, tell me (comments, Twitter, email, etc). I’ll be happy to check them out and share them down the road.

Measuring Twitter’s Impact

When talking about companies & communicators jumping into social media, I’ve told (warned?) people that social media efforts should not be measured solely by the number of people who see the campaign. Social media is about building community. Yes, that means that you need a number of people to be part of that community. But more importantly, successful social media efforts should be engaging that community and letting it shape and share the content and the focus of the community.

In the same way, the impact of putting the 2008 PLAYERS Championship on Twitter can’t just be determined by the number of people who followed the updates or clicked on links between Twitter and PGATOUR.com. What I thought was successful about the efforts on Twitter (for external outreach) was how the community accepted and engaged with @2008PLAYERS. Internally, the ability to get buy-in on a brand new initiative set on an unknown platform in a very short time frame was also successful.

The golf community I found on Twitter is small, but active. 115 Twitter users followed @2008PLAYERS (more like 100 if you take out the PGA Tour and Turner Sports who signed up just to follow this account, but should really be tweeting more — @appgutt @davidplant @madamson @PatrickRegan to name a few). Our followers weren’t many, but they liked what we were doing. At least 20 different users used “@ replies” to share 2008PLAYERS with their own followers, welcome THE PLAYERS to Twitter, ask questions and give feedback about our updates. There were over 75 replies and a handful of direct messages sent to 2008PLAYERS in about two weeks, which I think is a great representation of how our community created the conversation. I made a conscious effort to respond to questions and thanked others for their feedback, even if I had to do so after hours — I was addicted to being a part of our conversation! Many thanks to @MrBusinessGolf @golfgirl @17fairway @danperry and @pabloherrero for that.

In comparison, @redsoxcast (play-by-play of the Boston Red Sox) gets plenty of replies from its group of 775+ followers. Through Quotably, I can see who, when and what those replies are. I can also tell that redsoxcast doesn’t respond to the replies, the questions or even the shout-outs from their followers. Red Sox fans are numerous and incredibly loyal, but the redsoxcast efforts are losing a prime opportunity to engage their fans on another level. I’ve learned, even more through this experiment, that Twitter followers can have huge amounts of passion and enthusiasm for the brands they follow. If brands are spending the time and energy to create a Twitter presence, they should be empowering their followers. See @RichardatDELL, @SouthwestAir, @hrblock, @comcastcares and @GMblogs for examples of how that’s happening in the corporate world.

Another reason that I’m counting the 2008PLAYERS experiment a success is that we got the PGA Tour on an emerging web platform. Almost more important than doing it well (which we did, IMO), was that we got on as Twitter is starting to gain more traction and momentum. I know that we won’t be first in many of our future social media efforts, but I think having experience on Twitter will prove to be more valuable later than we know now. It’s still a niche social network (200,000 active daily users) used primarily by social media geeks like me, but Twitter is starting to matter.

One little disclaimer: Sunday at THE PLAYERS should have been Tweeted much better than it was. I had technical difficulties with my technology (aka cell phone battery) and lost the ability to tweet from the course while following Sergio Garcia, espcially through holes 16-18 and the playoff. I owe a blog post on the experience of being there firsthand. I’ll post a link here when it goes up.