I recently gave a talk to a 4th year university art class that will be curating an art show and wanted some background information to carve out a social media strategy for the event. I figured the best way to introduce social media and choose a strategy, would be to run through all the major platforms and tools, and decide based on the available talent and needs, what would be the best approach for their particular event. In case there are any similar groups looking to socialize their event, but feel a little overwhelmed with the options and tools available, here are some starting tips.
Choosing the Right Blog Platform
In my slideshow embedded above, you'll find a brief overview of some of the major social media tools and platforms available. When choosing the right platform, you want to think about who your audience is, how you want to interact with them, and the skill set of the team you're working with. Also, depending on the project, you may want to take into consideration customization and the aesthetics of your site.
Project background: The class I was working with had little knowledge of the social media space, wanted something simple, wanted to launch quickly, and didn't want to have to work with any code whatsoever. The project they're working on is an art show, which a small group of students were curating, and they wanted to be able to blog about the event, promote it, and potentially continue the site as a resource for that particular type of art.
Who is your audience? It's important to choose a blogging platform that suits not only your needs, but your target audience. Blog platforms can be differentiated in terms of technology, but also in terms of community. For example, Tumblr has explicitly stated that they're focusing on the arts, fashion and creative community. Posterous on the other hand, has been successful at attracting tech celebs, which has possibly contributed to its co-founder leaving for Y-Combinator. Some notable geeks with Posterous accounts include Steve Rubel, Guy Kawasaki and Jason Calacanis.
How do you want to interact with your community? Depending on how you want to interact with your community, you may want to select one type of blog platform over the other. For example, Tumblr does a great job of sharing within the Tumblr community, but has very little in the way of socializing your posts and spreading them out to the Twitter and Facebook ether. Posterous does a great job of integrating with lots of social features, so if maximizing community exposure is your goal, you may want to go with it. Wordpress is fully customizable, and therefore completely plugged in to any social pipeline you want. Blogger does a great job of offering widgets, but it isn't quite as networked as Posterous. All blog platforms give you the ability to add comments, but depending on your skill sets, you should choose a platform that comes out of the box closest to fitting your needs.
What skill sets are you working with? Certain blog platforms can take you as far as you want to go. For example, Wordpress is highly customizable, and if you're able to hack a Wordpress layout, or theme, you can do just about anything you want with your blog. If you're just starting out in social media, you probably aren't ready to start writing HTML and CSS code (those acronyms probably gave you a headache), so you should choose a platform that comes as user-interface-friendly as possible. Blogs platforms like Blogger, Tumblr and Posterous are incredibly easy to set up and would be ideal for beginners.
Are aesthetics important to you? In terms of ease of use, Posterous takes the prize, followed by Tumblr and then Blogger. Just because Posterous is the easiest to use, and features the ability to post without even creating an account, that doesn't mean it makes it the right choice. Sometimes the look and feel of the blog are important too. All blog platforms have templates that you can apply to your blog to change the looks and feel. Wordpress has an incredibly large market for free and premium (paid) themes, so if aesthetics are of the utmost importance, Wordpress is a must. Posterous doesn't have much in the way of templates, and neither does Blogger. You can always Google around for free templates, which can usually be installed outside of what's given to you in your dashboard. Be sure to check out the themes available for your platform, and make sure you can find something that's suitable for your target audience.
Always Be Tweeting
Now that you have a blog for your event, you'll want to promote the blog as well as the event. Twitter is an ideal platform for doing this. Twitter can connect you locally with real people and lets you search for them based on what they're talking about. Imagine you're running a poker night at a local bar in Ottawa, you'll probably want to search for people in Ottawa who are talking about poker. To do this, make sure you are sharing your location and search "poker" at Twitter.com and select the tab that says "Tweets near you". Currently, there are no nearby results, so I might consider widening my search to just "Ottawa" and finding some influencers.
Understanding Twitter talk: Twitter is one of those social networks that everyone has heard about but few actually know how to use. One of the reasons for this is that Twitter's 140 characters creates a barrier to entry as users have to learn what looks like a new language. Here are some basic tips to learning the Twitter language:
"Hi @joeshmoe" - this will show up in your timeline and everyone who follows you. This is the least private of messages.
"@joeshmoe what's up" - start your message with @user to message them. This is not private and will show up in your feed as well as everyone who follows both you and @joeshmoe. It offers a little more privacy as it isn't in someone's feed who doesn't follow you both.
"d joeshmoe" - this begins a direct message. Only joeshmoe will receive this. You can only direct message people who are following you.
"Hooking up with @joeshmoe for #sxsw" - The pound symbol is called a hastag. A hashtag, when clicked, will show you tweets from everyone who has also used this hashtag. While most hashtags are useless, they are especially helpful at events and conferences. For example, the #sxsw (South by SouthWest conference) hashtag, will let me find out who is at the conference and what's going on at that moment. When using hashtags, make sure to only use ones that are relevant and constantly updated. When creating hashtags, be sure to keep them small and easy to remember.
Read this article from Twitter's support page to learn more about @replies.
Read this article to learn about Direct Messages.
Learn about Twitter hashtags here.
Followers to Following: A question that comes up a lot when discussing Twitter is the appropriate ratio of followers to following. When it concerns a personal brand, the generally accepted practice is to maintain a golden ratio of more followers to following. For events, you can probably get away with something closer to a 1:1 ratio of following to followers, as it's a brand account and people appreciate the follow. They may unfollow you after the event, but continue to follow them as a thank-you for attending.
Getting RTs: Twitter is such a success as a content discovery portal because of its viral and exponential growth factor. Through ReTweets (republishing someone's tweet), your message can reach more users and your blog more traffic. It's not obvious how to get RTs and some people who are very influential rarely get them. The best way to get people involved and promoting your account, is to be more concerned with interactions. Send out messages, reply to everyone who messages you (even if it's just "thanks!"), and get dialogues with people going in direct messages. The more people you meet and interact with, the more likely they will be to promote your account and attend your event.
Use Hootsuite to Monitor the Campaign
Hootsuite is a great product because it allows you to manage all your social media outlets from both your desktop and your mobile. When managing an event, you'll surely have several people working on your social media strategy, and Hootsuite allows you to collaborate and manage them as a team. Be sure to bookmark this and get the app for your smartphone as it will help you monitor your campaign.
Why I Never Mentioned Foursquare
For those unaware of what Foursquare is: it's a location-based service that lets you tell your friends and contacts where you are. The service does this through "checkins" where you find a store, restaurant or place on Foursquare, checkin, broadcast it to your social networks, and if they're in the area, they can stop by. The value for the user is that if you checkin the most, you become the mayor, and venues can register with Foursquare to offer deals to mayors or people who checkin. In a small city like Ottawa, these deals are rare but they're prevalent in large cities.
Foursquare and its competitors are generally part of a social media strategy but it's not necessarily something you have to manage. For larger events, Foursquare is an interesting promotional tool, because you can offer prizes for checkins and encourage attendees to discover all the event has to offer. For smaller events, a Foursquare strategy isn't necessary but you can be sure that some of the attendees will be broadcasting the fact that they're there. It's just important to note that the service does exist, and you should check out your venue on Foursquare to see if anyone has checked-in during the event.
Measuring Success
Now that you have your basic social media strategy in place, how do you measure its success? I recently attended a talk by Michelle Kostya of RIM (makers of BlackBerry), who says that they measure success in interactions and reduction in call volume to support. It's important to decide ahead of time what you consider a goal and a measure of success. Here are some ways to measure how effective the campaign has been:
Interactions - How many people did you connect with on Twitter and your blog? Discussions on either platform are of value and worth noting.
Blog traffic - Don't expect big things in this department but it's worth looking at how many people visited your site. Adding Google Analytics to your blog may be out of your programming capabilities, but many blog platforms offer basic widgets that let you track simple stats. Browse through the widget library and see what's available.
Surveys - At the event, you can always leave survey cards that ask if anyone has noticed your social media efforts. It's difficult to quantify how many people came as a result of Twitter, but even knowing a few came makes it worthwhile.
Contacts - How many people have you met through social media that you connected with on a personal or professional level? Even meeting just one helpful person can be a worthwhile investment.
Getting into social media and blogging should be fun so don't stress if you're not getting amazing results immediately. Brands and awareness takes a long time to build so just enjoy what you're doing, do it for a long time and let the results trickle in at a manageable pace.
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