Was Mom wrong with her advice: “Don’t talk to strangers?”
Ann Handley in her opening talk contradicted Mom, reminding us that we should go out of our comfort zone and talk to strangers and learn from each other.
Go forth and learn we did -
From “The Magic Combination of Rich Content and Social Media Can Land You On ‘Page One’ of Google”
If you think about creating great content - if you build it, will they come? Maybe if you make it easy for them - the “crazy viral” content doesn’t have many barriers to access. A registration form is an example of a barrier for your users. When creating content, also think about usability - something that is easy to consume, read and share will be so, especially if the content is quality.
Different media types serve different purposes. Of course, you might want to collect email, contact information and names. If you explain why you ask for that personal information to share survey results, you might realize response rates as high as 95% as Michael Stelzner did, the author of Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged.
Some other quick tips:
- Develop relationships with key influences before you need to make an ask - hint - offer interesting, unique insight or value.
- Think about your signal to noise ratio - what content should be open and public, and what should be more private?
- Retweet buttons or links that allow people to share your content
- Video tools to use may be Screenflow for those who use Mac and Camtasia for those who use Windows
- Check out Sexy Bookmarks if you use wordpress
Life moves quickly, at the speed of Real Time. So what about business - how can business engage in real time? How Big Brands Engage in Real Time Conversations with Customers provided case studies of how both B2B and B2C brands leveraged online interactions to develop relationships with their customers.
- Hansen’s soda used Twitter in conjunction with street teams to grow their brand
- Intel used social media to discover the desire for the Ajay Bhat t-shirt from the Ajay Bhat commercial.
However, incentive-based contests are great for launching programs and products, not for building sustainable relationships. Social media is like a long term relationship, not casual dating. Speaking of relationships, what do you do when you screw up? You can address problems by figuring out what the problem is and addressing it. Apologize for your mistakes and ask for forgiveness.
Have we moved past the it’s-about-the-conversation/it’s-about-the-community chant? Social Media Measurement: Metrics, Impact, and Value addressed how we can measure our efforts in social media.
After a brief talk by Amber Naslund (available on slideshare) about what metrics to track and how to make meaning of so we can drive the ultimate metric.
While you can automate data gathering and visualizations, you can’t automate insight and analysis. Research will inform which social networks to participate in and lack of success provides opportunity to get customer feedback about the type of content they want to see.
Just like laundry, social media measurement only gets harder the longer you wait. Some free listening or measurement tools to investigate:
- socialmention
- backtype
- netvibes
- search.twitter.com
- GOOG Alerts
- boardtracker
If you’re really geeky, look at various APIs and RSS tools and pull together an iGoogle or Yahoo Pipes dashboard. Filtrbox also provides a more robust free social media monitoring tool than Google Alerts.
After packing my brain so full of information, it felt like both carry-ons packed under the seatback in front of me, it was time for some leiderhosen and chatting in real life with those I’ve chatted with online for a year or more.
