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Update on our Non-profit Case Study: ACCION USA

10 June 2009 in Case Study by Kate | Comments

Back in April, we posted up a case study on the use of social media in ACCION USA as part of a panel discussion that I was moderating for TiE Boston on using social media for your social enterprise.

Well, we have an update on their social media program, which seems to be moving along swimmingly. Great! Julie Soforenko writes:

At the time of the TiE-SE event I was just starting to learn the concepts and tools of Web 2.0, and ACCION USA had yet to make a dent in the online space. Fast forward two months and the picture looks different. After copious amounts of reading, researching and diving into some of the tools, such as Twitter, the landscape looks different.

Our blog launched a little over a month ago and we’ve had at least two posts a week by rotating staff members of the organization. The blog focuses on domestic microfinance and small business topics and gives a person-to-person tone to the topics. It is currently in the top 15 most viewed pages on our website. Following the blog launch I jumped into the Twitterverse and started growing our following to its present number of 658. Twitter is now one of the top 15 ways to click-through to our website, and steadily growing. Additionally, I’m tracking the analytics from a handful of analytics sources so that we can learn understand the ROI and learn where improvements can be made.

ACCION USA also established an organizational Social Media policy to give the staff guidelines and a framework for how they can participate in the online space as representatives of AUSA. I then presented to the company an introduction to social media. This included how it benefits the organizations, explanations of how to use certain tools like RSS Readers and Google Alerts, and tips on contributing to the blog, Facebook, etc. Everybody is getting excited about these new ways to increase the number of people AUSA is able to serve.

Although things have been going well, we are still in the nascent stages of social media. Through more reading, listening, and experimenting we will continue to find spaces online where our services, both in lending and financial education, resonate.

Twitter fTags and Social Media Outlets

2 June 2009 in Explanation, Toolkit by Tyler | Comments

After reading the recent Mashable article about Twitter fTags, I’ve got one concern: Is Twitter turning into Facebook?

These new Twitter fTags are an alternative to Twitter hashtags. Hashtags are keywords that allow users to find relevant tweets on a topic of interest, and also if desired, to have their own tweets easily found by others seeking discussions on that topic. Simply entering a hashtag into the search bar pulls search results from other tweets containing the same hashtag, similarly to organic search results from a search engine.

This is obviously a good feature, as social interaction is the very essence of being a social media outlet. When I first joined Twitter, I was surprised at its simplicity. Unlike Facebook, which provided personal information, pictures, quotes, favorite movies, groups and countless other applications, Twitter didn’t have those search options, so it was more difficult to find discussions or people of interest.

Before hashtags and trending topics on Twitter, you could search for specific terms, but if that exact phrase did not show up in any tweets then the search would not pull any results. This would be further limited by tweet context; say you were looking to tweet about photography tips, a search for “photography” would pull results for anyone who had mentioned the word “photography” in a tweet, name or description.

Hashtags bring it one step further, allowing a search term to pull results from other tweets that authors deemed relevant by putting in that hashtag to their tweet. Twitter fTags are even better than hashtags. fTags are real-time streams about any topic (already created or an original discussion), but is best for niche discussions, as the fTag discussions can be very specific.

fTags are also great because, unlike a hashtag, which is usually a keyword related to a topic, fTags are labeled so it is not obvious what the discussion is about. This way, in order to participate, a user must actually understand what the stream is about, and as a result, fTags can help cut down on spam tweets, where every word is preceded by “#.”

Despite the obvious interactive benefits of fTags, I think there is a potential vulnerability. While it is good to be able to find specific discussion topics, these advancements are very reminiscent of Facebook Groups. Are these fTags eventually going to have the option of private discussions or invite only scenarios? Will these fTags evolve into Twitter Groups, as this author has pointed out. What originally set Twitter apart was the openness and lack of privacy; not a lot of personal information was asked for, but the whole point was that everyone sees everything. Facebook too, has been blurring the lines between the different social media platforms with their addition of “status updates,” which is very similar to a tweet.

I am curious to see how fTags and subsequent applications are received. fTags are a great application because the discussions are still interactive and communication based. Twitter and Facebook have not yet lost the fundamental essence of what makes them social media outlets, but they need to be cautious about maintaining the qualities that keep the social media platforms distinct. We are able to do so much with social media today, because there are many channels to go through, but if they all eventually have the same exact capabilities, we will not have accounts for more than one platform. You will either have Twitter or Facebook, not both, which could undermine the growth of social media and limit its user potential.

What are your thoughts on fTags?

Other Side Group Welcomes Tyler Putterman

29 May 2009 in Company News, From the Field by Kate | Comments

We want to welcome Tyler Putterman to the Other Side Group. Tyler will be working with us over the summer as a marketing associate, working primarily for one of our main clients. She will be posting on Ad Your Comments Here throughout the summer, and we look forward to hearing about her thoughts on the field. For more information, check out her full bio.

Below are her initial thoughts as she begins her work with us.

Growing up in a technological boom has always been something I felt lucky to be a part of. From the very first IBM my dad got for his business, to the big blue Mac desktop (my friends made fun of me in high school for using a Mac…now who’s laughing?), computers have always brought something new. During college, it was a Dell laptop and now I am back to a Macbook. My point is not to showcase all the computers I’ve had, but to make the point that my generation has literally always been around computers. At a certain point, it was no longer just the wealthy that owned home computers; it became a necessity in this advancing climate.

Right now, it’s very difficult to imagine life without the internet. This means, no email, no YouTube, no Googling, which basically translates to isolation. However many of us forget, the internet wasn’t available to the public until 1992, so this explosion of technology has been unimaginably rapid, and in my opinion, it isn’t slowing down, but hurdling forward with new technologies and the endless possibilities of social media.

My first real experience with new social media was when I joined Facebook after being accepted into college. I have always known Facebook for being purely for sport, and was even warned against joining because employers didn’t want to see you on Facebook at all. Now, just a year later, I’ve come across many jobs that require a candidate to be involved in some sort of social media. Twitter also has been receiving a lot of recent attention, despite being around since 2006.

I believe these social platforms are becoming so popular because we are stepping away from tweets about what you ate for breakfast, which few people care about, and it’s become more about using those same platforms to make connections with people you don’t know, and to share ideas and information, regardless of your ultimate agenda.

We now are at the point of no return; we live in a technological age whether we’ve been keeping up with it or not. Working closely with Kate and Anya over the next few months has me very excited to learn from two gurus in such a new area. I am particularly looking forward to seeing how these social platforms, which I have been familiar with in a different regard, are transitioned from personal to professional, and how they can be used in different ways to bring increased awareness, attention and ultimately increased ROI.

Defining Twitter because you have to

13 May 2009 in Explanation, Toolkit by Kate | Comments

: Image by luc legay via Flickr

I was having a Twitter conversation late last week with Conner McCall about the definition of Twitter. Is it social networking? Is it a social network? I had asked:

“Twitter – Social Network? Still just microblogging? Somewhere in between?”

Conner wrote a follow-up post on the topic, in which he brought up some good points about why defining Twitter just shouldn’t happen.

Under most circumstances, I too shy away from defining and corralling social media tools into categories. Honestly, what’s the point sometimes?

However, I’m involved in some research through DigiActive concerning the use of digital tools in activism efforts around the world. When it came time to coding qualitative data on how people use their mobile phones for their advocacy work, I had separated out Twitter from all of the other social networks such as Facebook.

While going over the survey coding with the research team, someone suggested that several of the responses get combined in some way, and one of those ways was to lump Twitter in with the social networks. In fact, it was more like “Twitter is a social network so let’s put it in there.”

I really needed to push back on this because I see some key differences between the two, at least in terms of this project. Firstly though, some important similarities:

One-to-many communication
Everything is public within your “network”
Information/data sharing

Aside from those major similarities, there are some differences that are too important to overlook for the purposes of trying to define how people use these tools to disseminate information and communicate with people.

In Conner’s thought process came one of the very reasons I needed to have a definition of Twitter. He said:

“It’s a free eco-system that allows you to talk about what you want, but by limiting you to 140 characters it keeps conversations clean and neat. E-mail, instant message, and social networks will all be around for a long time, but you get messages that take minutes to read where Twitter’s messages take seconds. This enforced brevity let’s you interact with a lot more people on a daily basis. Twitter just takes online communication and adds what events like Ignite add to presentations.”

It’s this quick, one-time communication aspect of Twitter that makes it very different than some of the longer-standing ways in which people interact on places like Facebook. You can have months-long campaigns on Facebook, where you gather fans and advocates for your cause. Or you can share photos or videos that can still be top-of-mind (read: in the first two pages of your friends’ Stream) the next day or several days. The interaction with information on a platform like Facebook is much more dynamic than it is on a platform like Twitter.

Twitter, on the other hand, is done-and-done. Information is disseminated real time, and often forgotten after that. This comes into play in any sort of activism effort because the length of time that Twitter is really useful is often much shorter than on social networks, and the reason that Twitter is used is usually much different than the reasons that Facebook is used.

Additionally, “this forced brevity [that] let’s you interact with a lot more people on a daily [or hourly] basis” is one of the reasons why people will use Twitter over social networks to mobilize efforts. Such was (sort of) the case in the Moldovan protests last month (note: the Twitter aspect of these protests was, in my opinion, overblown by much of the media).

The one tough thing about this question is that I’m not necessarily in disagreement with calling Twitter a social network. It is a network of people that you interact with socially, through social media (whatever that means), which is, at a high-level, what happens on Facebook and other “social networks.” I have a problem bunching them together when you get into the specifics of how those social networks work at a functional level.

In closing, while I like to also leave thing undefined a lot of the times and agree, for the most part, with Conner when he says that Twitter has no rules, there are times when the distinctions between these tools, like any set of tools, need to be highlighted. And usually these functional distinctions translate into at least small conceptual distinctions as well.

I would love to know your thoughts on how you might define social networks, or how you would make the distinction between Twitter and what everyone else considers social networks, or what you think about the whole definition thing in general!

What Is a Social Community? – Liz Strauss at Successful Blog … (jonggunlee.tistory.com)
Women Prefer Blogs/Facebook To Twitter (sociableblog.com)
Is Twitter really useless? (daniweb.com)

Why the Linking Disconnent? Why aren’t more universities getting serious about social media?

5 May 2009 in Explanation, From the Field, Random Thoughts by Anya | Comments

Universities seem to finally be getting the picture that use of social media is vital to reaching their core constituents, especially given that Facebook and other social networks have surpassed e-mail as the best way to reach many of the university’s core audiences: students and alums.

Yet despite the idea that Facebook and Twitter are gaining popularity, universities still struggle with how much prominence to give these tools. Brad Ward’s blog had a great post on this subject in February, with some intriguing preliminary research on how social media tools are built into university Web sites.

Of almost 1400 schools investigated, only 20% had any kind of social media component built into their homepage, alumni page or admission page. While that seems like a pretty good amount, consider the fact that that leaves a whopping 80% of universities and colleges that don’t have any kind of social media component on any of these three key pages! What is even more amazing is that only 56 schools… 4% of the schools… had a social media component on more than one page. That means if alums get to your site they see it, but potential students don’t, or vice versa. These schools have forfeited huge chunks of their visitor population.

Our question today is… why? If schools recognize the importance of online tools, why aren’t they using them better? And if they’re not using them, what is the main barrier to adoption? Are there more professors and admissions people using these tools but higher levels of administration don’t buy it yet, or are there perceptions of this being a fad and schools are hesitant to jump as far as including these tools where the primary core of their web traffic would actually see and interact with the tools?

How are you seeing social media being used in higher ed?

BOCN: Business of Community Networking wrap-up

29 March 2009 in Conferences & Events by Kate | Comments

Anya and I attended the WorldRG-sponsored Business of Community Networking conference in Boston last week. The setting was very intimate, and there was a great line-up of speakers. I’ve given a run down of several of them below, with some of the main takeaways.

Clara Shih on her thoughts on Facebook and Online Communities

Panel on how various online communities and community platforms have worked or not worked

Lena West on Viral Marketing

Liz Strauss on Successful Blogging

Michael Cayley on Social Capital Value Add

A panel discussion on ROI measurement

Susan Getgood on Social Media and Customer Service

Marketing, Branding and Community: How social networks are rewriting the rules of marketing, branding and community

Clara Shih, author of The Facebook Era

Facebook is a way for humans to interact with each other, it’s not just a tool.
How can collaboration/productivity tools be incorporated into Facebook? Can it be used as a CRM?
It’s now become a social norm to share personal information publicly. Facebook can be used as a channel to access information via “trusted online identity.” You can connect with friends about what’s important to you, both personally and professionally.
How do you as a company insert yourself in the conversation in a way that’s valuable and not invasive?
- Know your customer: use transitive trust, a personalized interaction. It’s up to the individual to share their information. Customers expect that you know them and that you’ve done your due diligence on them personally.
- Weak ties are very important in this setting, leverage them.
Facebook offers a personal contact database. A traditional CRM is uni-directional (companies push), now it’s bi-directional (the customer is empowered).

[Faceconnector demo]

There is a loyalty magnification effect in Facebook: Passive word-of-mouth (you can become a fan of something right from your own newsfeed. If one of your friends becomes a fan, it’s very easy to follow suit).
Facebook offers precision marketing with hypertargeted ads
- You can minimize wasted ads
- Leverage latent interest
- Test new segments and messaging
How do you reach them before intention sets in and get them to become intention-based buyers?

[Resources: You can install Faceconnect here on the apps page of salesforce.com and learn more about The Facebook Era here.]

Learnings from a Facebook Group in Business Investigation

Jenny Ambrozek, Victoria Axelrod, Francois Gossieux

You can now tap communities once only reserved for companies with deep pockets
Community development/management has to be considered a real investment
Facebook isn’t great for managing huge groups
Ning provides a platform for rich conversation (discussion threads, blogs, subgroups, etc)
Fundamentals
- Good content
- Allow for members profiles
- Don’t think market segments, think tribes
- Think about behavior, not demographics
- Don’t think of the tool as a channel, think about it as a conversation between you and them
- Content must be picked up to become part of the conversations
“Whether there’s an ROI or not, [social networking] is something you have to do.”
“We haven’t been able to assign a dollar amount to [social networking], but you still have to play.”
What is the relationship of new people coming to the site to those current members? How did they get there?
- Known name
- Known friend of a friend
- New face
- New member, source unknown
Align your activity measurements with network measurements and analysis
It’s about behavior, not attributes
Reciprocity in people is a reflex
We either behave in a market framework (contract, employment, cold, calculated) or a social framework
Provide structure and house rules (top-down) while nurturing the bottom-up interactions
Facebook ends up being a lot of work
- Much harder for B2B to get companies to interact
- People don’t want to necessarily go to Facebook to do business
- It’s still difficult to put a “face” to a company
Find out where your trive hangs out, go there, and deliver results

[Resources: Tribalization of Business Study (Beeline Labs)]

The Chicken or the Egg: The real deal about “viral marketing”

Lena West, Founder & CEO of Xyno Media

Viral Marketing is any marketing tactic/content that encourages “pass along” sharing, which then changes that messages level of influence.
3-7-3 Frameworks
- 3 Rules
  - Viral marketing is created, not born
  - People hate the term viral marketing, and probably always will
  - Not all viral marketing is good
- 7 Criteria
  - Free & short rule
  - Doesn’t force behavior change, but allows for it
  - It’s not just entertaining, but people can see themselves doing it
  - Feeds off how people work
  - Scalability is hardwired (support structure needs to be there)
  - Facilitates easy sharing
  - Leverage Other Peoples’ Social (OPS)
- 3 Imperatives
  - Listen/Monitor (if you don’t listen, you don’t know what’s going on)
  - Set the kill switch (how can you pull the plug if you need to)
  - Once your campaign goes viral, it no longer belongs to your brand

Understanding the Conversation Online Between Consumers: Focusing on blogging

Liz Strauss, Social Media Strategist and blogger at Successful Blog

Please see separate post complete with video for this presentation.

Social Media Reality: Achieving cultural shifts

Michael Cayley, Founder of Social Capital Value Add

[Video coming soon]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U[/youtube]

Two main points of this video:
- We’re going through exponential change
- Bandwidth is one of the key drivers
What’s In It For Me (WWIF Me) has become WIIF Them
There is an authentic connection and self-fulfillment found through organization
Would some companies survive if they weren’t aligned with CSR?
Shared perception is mediated
The medium is in the message
The scale of human beings has changed, so how we architect around that will change
Brand Valuation is an estimation of the future earnings of products and services
Social Capital in not based on a product line

[Resources: Introducing Social Capital Value Add e-book]

Understanding the ROI with Community Marketing

Chris Carfi, CEO of Cerado (Moderator); Myles Bristowe, President of Boston American Marketing Association and CMO of Commonwealth Creative Associates; Michael Cayley, Founder of Social Capital Value Add; Jenny Ambrozek, Founder of SageNet; Erica Farthing, Director of Social Media for Condodomain.com

[Video coming soon]

Anything in marketing is a risk
Measure everything you can
You can measure so much more now than you could
Give your members a reason to join your network (for AMA is was to communicate with professionals in their field and get relevant information)
Instead of just having events or a newsletter, an online community offers value from the association or company every day
For AMA, in order to convert people from community members to Association members, there needed to be someone who reached out to them, they needed to find continual value, and they needed to participate in order to convert to membership.
Integrate the back end of your community for data capture
Most measurements are happening ad hoc, but creating a company picture with the most applicable measurements is key
Set realistic goals

Examining Social Media & Customer Services

Susan Getgood, Principal of Getgood Strategic Marketing

Your starting point is your customer
Customers are online talking about you
It’s about the social part. The tool is just a medium and they’re changing every day
Public social netowkrs are where discussions are taking place
85% of social media users say that companies should be online in a social networking way
It’s not just about outbound marketing, it’s about engagement and what the customers do once they reach you
4 Ps of online engagement: Prepare, Participate, Pitch or Publish
Constistency, Honesty and Value

Craigslist and community

7 March 2008 in Uncategorized by Kate | Comments

I had a situation this week that brought up an interesting question. What do you do if you’ve built a great brand, a social community, and this very community begins to tarnish your brand? This question is very pertinent, especially when everyone who is anyone is making or joining social communities by the hundreds (social community proliferation is whole different topic for another posting…) and I’m getting invitations to a new social community what seems like every day.

Craig Newmark (…of Craigslist), has basically built an empire that people have been trying to duplicate for years. I myself have used Craigslist on more occasions than I can even count: roommates, buying a dresser, selling a camera, finding random jobs, even hiring for positions. And yes, there’s also the perusal of Best Of Craigslist posting and Missed Connections, which are too addicting for their own good.

For a long time, Craigslist was reliable, the people cooperative and the transactions smooth. But my past few years of Craigslist usages has witnessed a rise in negative experiences, resulting in the lose of a good deal of confidence in the network. It’s just not reliable any more. I’ve had people say they’re going to buy things and never show up, I’ve not been paid, I’ve had a roommate bail one week before move-in date (which was really fun), and yes, I’ve been scammed. Most recently, I had someone buy a full cabinet set from me, even signing an electronic contract of sorts, and call three days before they were supposed to pick it up (four days before my new cabinets were to be delivered), to say that “circumstances had changed and they couldn’t take them.” So I was stuck with a set of cabinets, no place to put them, and little to do. Isn’t there someone I can call about this?

But what can I say about Craigslist? Is it their fault? Or is the users fault? Is it ANYONE’S fault? Things have clearly gotten unwieldy. There aren’t any checks and balances. But should there be? It’s a Buyer-Beware network, we all know that. And it would be unrealistic of me to think that Craig should sit in front of his computer and double check each posting for legitimacy.

So I guess we just move on. We find our next Craigslist. It seems somehow unfair to Craig that his idea, his empire, falls because of the very people he brought in. But perhaps it offers a Lessons Learned for future Xlists, whatever lesson that may be.

At the very least, it points to potential (very potential) problems that can happen to anyone in this space. What to do when your masses are bringing you down and tarnishing your brand, not through slander, but just through misuse or abuse. Perhaps the industry as a whole will slowly develop management standards. People developing social network know (or SHOULD know) what they’re getting into. It’s the same deal: make sure you figure out how to keep your community coming back.

This again begs the question of whose responsibility it is to “deal” with it. I’m inclined to say things like this will remain in the hands of the community (and shouldn’t they though? Isn’t that the point?) and when that community starts to deteriorate, they’ll leave or they’ll change it, somehow (they always figure it out, right?).

I can’t and don’t expect Craigslist to do anything about this situation. Frankly, I’m not motivated to change it. I’ll likely give it a few more shot, and then move on if there’s a sour taste. Sorry Craig, I don’t blame you…..

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