Creating Mindshare & Market Share in Tough Times (Tech Coire Event Review)

I went to my first networking event in the Sacramento area last night sponsored by Tech Coire. I recently joined Tech Coire on the advice of a HR recruiter. I am glad I took the advice. The group was very well rounded. Not everyone there was a techno geek. There were the techno geeks there for sure, but there where bankers, businessmen, VCs, CPAs, and geeks. Good mix of people and the networking opportunities where great. About 100 people there at the event which in my mind is just right for networking.

The guest speaker was the primary draw for the night. I think if the guest speaker was Linus Torvalds the bankers and CPAs would not have shown up. But the guest speaker (Libby Gill) had something to say to everyone. "Branding, Branding, Branding". There was a good interaction with the group and her presentation. She knows how to involve the group in her presentation which made the presentation very informative, hands on, and fun.

Libby first showed us several brands and the characteristics of great brands. Then she gave five strategies make brands great: Live and breathe your Brand, Stand out from the Herd, Craft a "Sticky" Message, Blast your Brand, and Expand your Brand.

Characteristics of a Great Brand

• Authenticity
  
• Reliability
  
• Consistency
  
• Deliver your Message, Make it clear
  
• Confirm Credibility
  
• Connect Emotionally
  
• Motivate the buyer
  
• Create consumer habits
  

Live and breathe you brand

You need to figure out what the core business purpose is and make your brand shout that message. This is not a trivial task for many people. It takes time and introspection. You need to write down your values, beliefs and passions. What is your real purpose of the company. Once you do that take a survey. Ask someone you trust will be honest with you. Ask them the following question, "Describe me to someone that does not know me." The hardest part about this is just keeping your mouth shout, your ego at check and your pen moving.

Stand out from the herd

Identify your ideal customer. Now how do you reach you ideal customer. What motivates them? Next who is your primary competitor? What differentiates you from your primary competitor? What are your unique selling points? You need to stand out. Take your uniqueness and flaunt it. Make the forefront of who you are. Take your liabilities and create assets from them. A great example was what Libby did for Dr. Phil. At first his handlers wanted to diminish his big bald head. Her idea was to create an asset from the liability. So the brand became a close up shot of him and his big head.

Craft a "Sticky" message

You need to have a good elevator pitch and tagline. This is when the talk became interesting as she let people interested in putting themselves out there give their Tag Line. Everyone then got to guess what they did. No company name just the tagline. After a minute or so of guessing and comments, you then got to give a short elevator pitch to see if your tag line matched.

So how did "Get Social Centered" do? Not to bad. Many people picked up that Yoly was a social media aggregator. After the presentation and several people came up to me and talked about the idea. So in those terms it seemed to have worked.

Make sure the your website fits the brand. The website should be visually appealing, clean, simple, one message and give the visitor a call to action. Testimonials on the site are great and you need to be boastful about you/your company.

Blast your brand

Social Media (Yoly's sweet spot J ) is where it is at now. Use the social media sites don't let the social media sites use you. Check out the previous post about Engage PRs webinar. She basically said many of the same things that were said in the eBig webinar. Although she did bring up knowem.com. It is a place where you can reserve names on several social media sites. Looks like another tool to integrate into the Yoly technology.

Expand your brand

This last strategy I think is what many people forget. You cannot ignore your brand. You need to continually improve on your brand. Kaizen your brand. Follow the customers' needs as they change and adjust to their needs. Another great example of a disaster of thinking they were following the customers' needs was Coke/New Coke. Need a say more.



This was great event with good conversation and great mix of people. If you are in the Sacramento area next month come and join the next Tech Coire meeting. I know I will be there.

PR and Social Media (EBig Webinar review)

I attended an EBig webinar today on PR in the age of Social Media. It was given by Jeannette Bitz from Engage PR. The presentation was enlightening. She documented a strategy on how to integrate Social Media into your PR Strategy. Most of it is common sense, but if you are not familiar with social media it would be very foreign to you.

Before the strategy there are some interesting statistics. 2/3 of publications are now vender and user generated content (Sam Whitmore Media Service 2008). Wow, that is lots of self-serving generated documentation. This is good and bad as customers now have a very large soap box. So having a strategy to working with social media in your company is important. Even if you ignore it you are participating. One of your customers will blog or tweet about your company, services or products. So you and your company are participating whether you ignore it not.

So on to the strategy – Five Steps to integrate social media into your Marketing campaign: Develop Strategy, Identify your Social Media Audience, Solicit Support, Get Started, Measure and Evaluate.

Develop Strategy

You need to determine the message that you want the world to see in social media. Remember that social media is like anarchy. The rules are established by the mob. So you need to have a plan or your message will get blown around like a ship without a rudder. Establish a communication process for employees or your social media voices.

Identify your Social Media Audience

You already have a social media audience. You may not think you do, but you do. You need to find out who is your audience, your competitors, who are the social mavens (key influencers), what social media sites are best for you market. Once you wrap your head around that you need to identify what social media networks you will be going after and who you need to build relationships with.

This may seem like an insurmountable task, but it has to be done. Back to the boat analogy. You have a rudder now, but you need to know where to navigate the ship. When the winds of change come and you get attacked it would be good to know who is there to give you points of reference and protection.

Solicit Support

If you cannot tell already, working with social media is not something you do once in a while. It will take time and effort. You need to prepare your resources for the time it will take. Spread the love. Make sure you don't drop your social media work on one person or one department. It is good to have a cross section of functional organizations participate.

Once you have established a virtual cross functional team ( I love buzz words), you will need to feed the team periodically. Periodic brainstorming session keeps the team fresh as well as adding and removing team members periodically. It gives people a chance to get involved and have a break if they are getting burned out.

Get Started

One of the biggest problems to getting started is knowing where to start. Here are some tips that Jeanette gave in here presentation.

• For blogs develop a list of topics
  
• Create a library of videos prior to making a YouTube Channel (3-4 minutes tops)
  
• Have some kind of internal review and approvals for linkedIn pages and twitter accounts.
  

  
   

Now that you are generating content, you will find that people will comment. You need to respond to the comments. Nothing tells a customer that you care when you respond. Ask Toyota. Who decided to ignore problems and not communicate with their customer? Look where they are now. You should respond to posts within 24 hours. Remember that it is a community. Much like the community yellers in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, we have it again in cyberspace.

Measure and Evaluate

Now that you have things running you need to measure and evaluate how you social media strategy is going. Easier said than done. Every social media site has different types of measurements and ways they interact with users. You will need to analyze what social media outlet is working best for you, and which ones are liabilities. Time is important to all us and we don't want to waste time working on a social media site that 2 or 3 people are looking at.

The Shameless Pitch

I really liked the approach that Engage PR is using to work with companies. I really see a sweet spot for Yoly. Yoly helps people and companies get socially centered. In the initial planning Yoly can be used to find the social media key influencers, most influential social networks and blogs, and competitors. Once their strategy is working, Yoly can monitor and measure the effectiveness of their campaign.

Electronic Minutemen Fire a New Shot Heard 'Round the World

Social Media gives the Power of the Pen to Everyone

Social Media has become an important tool in American Politics. In an increasingly super-charged political atmosphere, a campaign's social media strategy can make or break a candidate. The Brown verses Coakley campaign for Senator Ted Kennedy's seat is a watershed example of how social media impacts the outcome of a race. We can learn a lot from how these campaigns used Social Media, how effective their use was, and the ultimate impact Social Media had on the outcome.

Both candidates used the most popular social media tools: Flickr, Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter. Both campaigns appear to have understood how the tools work and what they had to offer. However, what is clear is that understanding how to use the tool and how to leverage the tool effectively in a campaign are very different things and the Brown campaign had the advantage and won the election.

Flickr

Flickr allows for the storage of photo albums with the feature that people can see the photos and write comments on them. Flickr has become the new way of sharing pictures with friends, family, and strangers all over the world. Both the Brown and Coakley campaigns uses this tool to show themselves with the common people.

Brown

Statistics for Brown's use of Flickr:

• Uploaded – 137 pictures no galleries.
  
• Comments from people – 18
  

At a high level, Brown's team appeared to use Flickr as a repository of pictures. It did not appear that the pictures were well and there were not very many pictures. However, one thing that they were able to do is to get comments on pictures, which indicates there was an active community reviewing their pages. This is a critical issue in Social Media - active communities.

Coakley

Statistics for Coakley's use of Flickr:

• Uploaded – 6,648 pictures in several galleries
  
• No comments from people.
  

Coakley's team seemed to have a good understanding of how to use Flickr. The pages were very well organized and easy to navigate, which was important due to the significant number of pictures. Despite this, there were No comments and therefore no active community.

YouTube

YouTube has become as well known as TV in today's society. As such, as certain as candidates must have media spots on television and radio, they must also have media spots on YouTube. Evaluating Brown and Coakley's YouTube results give us a interesting picture of how Social Media impacts a campaign. In order to understand YouTube statistics, a few terms need to be defined:

• Number of Videos – Number of videos loaded by the campaign into their YouTube channel.
  
• Comments – Number of comments from people on the channel
  
• Followers – Number of people registered to automatically receive updates when new videos are uploaded to the channel.
  
• Channel Views – Number of times the channel has been visited by people.
  
• Upload Views – Number of times a video has been seen on the channel.
  
• Ratings – Number of people that have left ratings of the channel.
  

YouTube Statistics for Both Campaigns

		Number of Videos		Comments	Followers	Channel Views	Upload views	Ratings
Brown		59		935	1,037	135,353	1,368,575	518
Coakley		71		2	115	13,944	158,734	336

With regard to the Number of Videos uploaded to the respective channels, Coakley used YouTube more than Brown with 71 videos compared to Brown's 59. But just as with Flickr tool, more does not appear to mean better. In this campaign, the number of Channel Views and Upload Views are overwhelming in favor of Brown with nearly ten times more views than Coakley. The key statistics are the nearly ten times the number of followers and the significant number of comments compared to Coakley. This demonstrably shows that Brown had an active YouTube community. Coakley, again, did not appear to have a community at all.

Brown

Clearly, the Brown campaign built a community within YouTube and promoted the site with comments and downloads that created a buzz around the candidate. Another interesting technique that Brown's team used was automatically play one of the videos when the channel was clicked. This increased the Uploaded Views dramatically, which moved the video to the front of the search list on YouTube and other search engines.

Coakley

As with Flickr, Coakley appeared to have the content, but her team was not successful in building the community. It's not clear whether they didn't understood the need for community or didn't understand how to build one. Either way, with very few followers and very few comments, there was no vibrance in the community. Rather than a vibrant community, the YouTube channel appears to have just been a storage area for videos.

Facebook

Facebook is currently the undisputed king of Social Media. However, it only recently surpassed MySpace in usage and there are many competing Social Media sites coming on line everyday each with a unique set of features that attract new ways of interaction. Understanding each tool how it is used and how it can be leveraged to get your message out and get your vote out is critically important.

Brown

Brown had over 150,000 fan page followers, 2,223 links, 212 discussion threads, and over 948 fan pictures including some not too flattering photos of his earlier modeling career. But the important thing was that there where a significant number of photos indicating a vibrant, active community. This leads to an important consideration in Social Media communities. Brown's campaign appeared to have a kind of "wild west" mentality and it appears that they did not control, or couldn't control, the community as much as Coakley appears to have done. Additionally, the famous thumbs up "likes" icon and comments on each post was always in the multiple thousands, which is further evidence of a very active community. His following was significant, active and as a result evangelized the candidate, promoting his ideas and encouraging others watching the community to get out the vote.

Coakley

Coakley had only an 1/8^th of the number of followers Brown had. Comments and "likes" never exceded a couple of hundred and thus the community portrayed an unenthused, flat, and perhaps censured group. Coakley's message was very controlled, and with no real excitement or activity in the community there was no evangelizing. The key difference was the amount of participation allowed. Brown did not appear to censure his following, which appears to be a key factor in the vibrance his community had especially in comparison to Coakley.

Twitter

Twitter has become extremely popular over the last year with companies, state and local governments, news stations, and even some local bakeries finding useful ways to use Twitter to share information with their communities. The candidates did not ignore Twitter in their campaigns and appear to have used it to promote their message. Consider the following statistics:

		Posts	Followers		Friends	Lists
Brown		735	17,630		2,759	809
Coakley		600	4,241		2,774	355

Brown

Brown's use of Twitter was consistent with his overall Social Media strategy and his campaign was able to build a vibrant Twitter community. More importantly, it is also clear that the strategy crossed the tool boundary. In other words, Brown's community wasn't limited to one Social Media venue. It becomes clear that a Social Media strategy transcends the tools.

Coakley

Coakley's team appears to have understood how to use Twitter and used it effectively. They promoted their message with a good, steady stream of tweets and with a reasonable following. What starts to become clear in analyzing their use of Twitter is that there was a lack of cross tool promotion. Perhaps this was a result of the lack of community to promote with or it might be have been the result of a disjointed Social Media strategy that focussed on each tool independently. In other words, it is not effective to have a Facebook strategy, a Twitter strategy, or a Flickr strategy unless there is a overriding Social Media strategy that help promote community across the spectrum of tool choices. Viral social marketing depends on empowering the community to infect others with excitement for your message.

Ning

Brown used another popular social media site called Ning. Ning allows users to create their own social media network, and gives them controls, tools, and forums that they can customize and control. Brown's Ning network was very active and geared toward his foot soldiers. His team used Ning to coordinate the rest of his social media activities. Talking points, event coordination, blog posts etc... were all found on Brown's Ning site. The user's on his Ning network where the most commonly commented posters on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

Personal Web sites

Most campaign managers focus on the website for the campaign. This is still a key important aspect to the social media campaign, but it should not be the only focus. This most evident when you look at the numbers from Alexa. (Alexa gives many different statistics about website page hits, time online etc..)

 
As you can see in the pageview hits Brown's website that he more than doubled the number of page hits over Coakley. Not only was Brown's peak in Page hits higher it started it climb much earlier. But this only shows part of the story. The most interesting part of the website story is the amount of time people spent on each site.

 
The graph shows that Brown's campaign made adjustments to their site so that people did not spend as much time on the site. You would think that this would be bad, but it shows that his information was easier to get to from the typical user. I attribute this to summation of information being on his website and real-time dynamic data being on his social network accounts. This is evident when you look at the "clickstream" of Brown's website. The highest linked from site to his website was Facebook. He drove traffic effectively from Facebook to his website. For Coakley it was Google.

Another statistic that tells the story is the number of page views per user. At first thought you would think the higher the number the better. You want constituents on your website longer right?

 
Both websites matched pretty closely until mid December. Then Coakley's pagviews per user increased while Brown's decreased. Again considering that Brown had almost double the number of pageviews overall. This shows that the actual number of users was approximately 50% higher. Why the change? Information was easier to get to on fewer pages with Brown's compared to Coakley's website. And Brown was driving more traffic to his dynamic and active pages on Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook.

Summary

Brown may not have won because of his social media strategy, but his campaign strategy included effective use of social media tools. Coakley also used social media but her campaign used the tools as individual tools. And despite clearly understanding how to use the tools the strategy did not create or drive a community. Where there was some community, it appeared restricted and flat. On the other hand, Brown's community seemed to be more of a wild west, anything goes type of community. The people spoke in his forums and comments where authentic, or appeared to be. Understanding the balance of controlling the message while giving the community its voice is the way to propagate the message and increase involvement and vitality in an active community.