Of course, it is not as easy as two steps...what were you thinking!?!

However, here is my slideshare presentation about leverage social media conversations to create personas

Several weeks ago I read about Twitter's latest addition that was about to be introduced, Twitter Lists. I thought...hmmm that is going to be a lot like blog rolls.

For those of you who are new to social media, blog rolls are links to other bloggers that the particular author(s) of the blog you are currently on reads and recommends. Through the years blog rolls have been hugely beneficial to me when I begin researching online conversations for my clients. My first step is to identify a few influentual and relevant blogs and from there I begin to follow the link trail of blog rolls and incoming links. I identify who is involved in the community, who is most active in the community, who is most influential in the community and overall what makes the networked community click.

So, I have been anxiously waiting to see what new insights Twitter Lists would bring me.

Last week Twitter Lists was rolled out to all Twitter users. Last week I read a report that claimed 6.5 Million lists have already been created. To me, this is a lot of market intelligence data to sort through.

I have been watching the dozen or so lists that my accounts have shown up on and I find it intriguing when I have been categorized as PR or SEO. This tells me not only what information people have been seeking from me, but in what bucket they put Social Media. It is also interesting to see who is in that bucket with me...what kind of company am I  keeping.

As I began to create my own Twitter lists I began to get a visual of who I am following and why I am following them, what are my expectations of the people I pay attention to?

On my Corporate Twitter Account (@concepthubinc) I decided to create lists of accounts that are related to the ways I would like people to categorize my brand (Gaming, Government 2.0, Enterprise 2.0...)

Today I read on Mashable how the NHL got their followers to create their lists for them by asking their fans which team lists they should be included on. That is absolutely BRILLIANT. They just enabled their fans to self segment themselves into categories where relevant information can be sent to them, deeper relationships can be developed, and true communities of like minds can form.

The best thing about Twitter Lists is that Twitter has given us a reason to examine and question our Twitter habits and to identify ways to make Twitter a valuable and insightful resource that community members can resonably manage for the good of all.

Lens on Atlanta is an online community where we can work together to create change. To do this, we need to connect, collaborate and communicate with each other. In today's online world, blogging is central to our personal and professional expression, yet for many people,  how to write and maintaing a blog is still an enigma.

Below are a few answers to some of the most commons questions.

Who Should be the Voice of the Corporate Blog?

Employees are the human side of every organization and hence, the voice of the corporate blog. Bloggers can and should come from anywhere in the organization, but only if they can:

• Converse with customers and other stakeholders, rather than sell!
• Post frequently on topics that are interesting and relevant to customers
• Write on issues they care deeply about and on which they have expertise
• Have a good knowledge of other relevant blogs relevant and be willing to share their opinions in these blogs too

Who shouldn’t blog?

1. A command-and-control freak
2. Someone with a history of avoiding transparency
3. Someone who prefers monologue to dialog
4. Someone not likely to respond well to the “tough love” provided by other bloggers’  comments and links
   

When to Respond, When to Let the Message Play Out?

When playing in the blogosphere, expect to receive pointed questions, observations and remarks from time to time. Not all of the people will love you all of the time. These are the basics of being prepared:

1.    Do not ignore or hide from a negative comment, regardless of whether it’s true or false!!!

2.    Participate in the conversation and present your side of the story.

3.    Take responsibility for the problem and do something to fix it. Then explain on your blog and anywhere else online where the negative remarks are echoed, exactly how your organization is working to solve the issue.

4.    Seek out your allies and solicit their comments on the issue. Advise them on what your organization has done to address the posted problem, and let them know you are open to receiving their emails about the matter. This latter suggestion works in your favor by helping to diminish online retorts.

5.    Issue an official statement

6.    Tempting as it may be, NEVER create fake identities online for the purpose of supporting your position. If you are ever discovered, the consequences will be ugly.

The blogosphere etiquette for responding effectively to negative but false online comments is as follows:

• Politely, very politely actually, ask the blogger or forum owner to remove the incorrect information. Back up your request by providing correct information and supporting data.
• If the offender refuses to retract the incorrect information, ask them to consider publishing your rebuttal.
• Offer to keep the blogger or forum leader in the loop on any future developments.
• If all of these attempts fail, post correct information in the comments section of the blog. If the comments are on a board, reply with correct information and/or create a new thread on that forum supporting your viewpoint. 

 How Do You Create Thriving Online Community?

1. Creating Compelling Content

1. Be yourself – Your bloggers have chosen you for your personality, knowledge, and interest.

2. Be conversational - Blogging is about starting or joining conversations. People tend to respond better to informative but brief and passionate posts.

3. Stay on topic - You are the hosts of this site. It is important that the conversations stay focused on what the site is here to provide.

4. Add multimedia - Adding pictures enhances the experience of each post. Set up corporate Flickr pool to simplfy the process of sharing pictures within your posts as well as on various other sites. Videos provide an additional level of entertainment and brings the story to life.

5. Link to other relevant conversations - In any good conversation, people speak, listen and respond. Blogging on the site is equivalent to speaking. Reading other relevant blogs is equivalent to listening. Linking to other relevant blog posts is equivalent to a virtual handshake and a response.

6. Tagging – Almost all social media sites have tags. Tags are a way to categorize the content.

Tags are very powerful within social networks because it provides the community with a way to link to others with shared interest. Use relevant tags and use many tags. The best practice is to start with the general category such as Dining or Sports and then add tags based on the details of the content such as location, event, date, notable people, and so forth.

7. Titles – Since people typically are scanning through content to see what captures their attention, it is very important that your content has relevant and enticing titles. Try to keep your audience in mind when writing a title. When they read the title of your post they are asking themselves “what’s in it for me? Why should I invest time in this post?” So the title must answer the “what’s in it for me?” question.

Some ideas include:

1. List Posts

2. How To Posts

3. What Do You Think?

8. Frequency of Post - It is important for your time management as well as for creating trusting relationships that you decide the frequency that best fits you. If you start off with several posts a week and develop a following, and then slack off for a couple of weeks, you will lose that following. It is OK if you can only post once a week. The key is to set expectations that your audience can depend on and stay consistent.

How Do You Proactively Guide the Message?

First, let’s acknowledge that guiding “the message” is important for a few of reasons. Carefully crafted and well-executed messaging (done in a non-obvious way!) provides important opportunities:

•  To develop its reputation as an industry thought leader, which can lead to other press mentions and interviews,
• To develop a strong base of blogging advocates who will help promote the brand and spread the word about exciting developments
•  To create brand fans who will jump into the fray and defend the company should a false story or unfair criticism make its way into the public domain. 

Some tips for success include;

• Create a content calendar that is coordinated with other communication efforts. 
  
• Retell the stories that are being told through other communication channels, such as FAQs that come through customer service.
• Let your extroverts shine and give them a place to show what is happening behind the scenes. 

What are some basic blogging policy guidelines?

• The official company blog must have a uniform writing style even if there are several contributors.
• Blogs must not violate any guidelines stated in the employee handbook.
• Blogs must not include content that violates company or individual privacy. 
• Blogs cannot personally attack fellow employees, customers, vendors, or shareholders.
• Blogs must not disclose any sensitive, proprietary, confidential, or financial information.
• Blogs must not include content that is obscene, defamatory, profane, or libelous.

Blogging is not only a great opportunity to express yourself and connect with others, it is also a great responsibility that should not be taken too lightly. Blogging can be more than a journal, more than a conversation, blogging can be a platform for inspiration and for positive change.

by Sherry Heyl, 

I personally think social bookmarks are cool. In fact, when asked what my favorite social media site is, I consistently point to Delicious. However, I think social bookmarking gets the least amount of media attention and is therefore the least understood tools on the web. So this week I will review the whats and whys of social bookmarking.

Overview of the Adoption of Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is a way to save, organize and share links on the web. There are currently hundreds of sites dedicated to social bookmarking and almost all social networking sites enable their members to share links with each other. The following graph is from Compete.com, shows that there is a continuous growth in the use of social bookmarking tools. 

Currently Stumbleupon.com and Reddit.com seem to be leading the pack. However, in the world of social media, quantity does not always equal quality.

People are using different social bookmarking tools for many different reasons. The features and benefits of each site often determines how the site is used and ultimately who is using the site as well as the site’s culture. Primary uses for Social Bookmarks are:

➢ Save and organize links

➢ Search for content that has been “vetted” by the community

➢ Share content

 

One feature that seems to be universal to all social bookmarking sites is the ability for an individual to share content with their networked community. Considering the many various statistics suggesting that people are spending more time on social networks and trusting messages that are shared by their peer groups more than other sources, many online publications have developed ways to promote having their content shared within the various networking sites.

One popular tool is the Add This button which is easy to install on almost all platforms, provides the audience a one click option to bookmark content to all of their online communities and provides the content provider statistics on what content their audience is sharing and where.

Different Features and Benefits

Each Social Bookmarking site offers a variety of features and benefits for their community members as well as content producers. Some of the more common ones the extend across most sites are listed below. Features and Benefits for Community Members

➢ Ability to save articles of interest

➢ Ability to organize content by different tags or categories ➢ Ability to post comments on saved links

➢ Ability to discover new and relevant content from “like minds”

➢ Ability to leverage the benefits of RSS Features and Benefits of Content Producers

➢ Content is optimized for organic search

➢ Content is discovered by like minded community members

➢ Gain insights into your audience content consumption behavior

➢ Build a trusted relationships with community members

➢ Ability to leverage the benefits of RSS

Increase Traffic to Your Site

There are many sites and services that promise to significantly increase traffic to a website by submitting content to various bookmarking services.

The first question that should be asked is “is this relevant traffic, our target audience?”

The second question should be “is this traffic sustainable?”

Often times a site will experience a significant spike in traffic, such as the FinalFantasySeries.net site below.

However this is because the bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon have recognized new content (fresh blood) and is testing the content with various members to see how they will respond. If the response is good, more people bookmark the content in their account, content from the site will continuously get ranked high. If the response is not so good, future content will not get ranked very high.

The best way to build and sustain traffic from the various social bookmarking sites is to join the communities, get to know your audience, and create content of value that they are eager to share. Below are three key steps to creating sustainable traffic and viral distribution of your content.

1. Focus on Keywords. Because content producers have the ability to see how relevant content is being tagged by the community, they can leverage the insights of those tags to enhance their own tagging strategy and keywords to enhance their chances of increasing their search results. This is also a great way to join the community. Other community members of the social bookmarking sites can see the content that has been recently tagged and view those pages that interest them.

2. Enable and encourage your readers to bookmark your content in their various selected communities through tools such as Addthis.com

3. Join relevant networks and develop relationships based on sharing content of value. Be sure not to submit only your content. That comes across as self-serving and spamming.

Truly share content that is of mutual interest from various sources.

Identify Communities of Like Minds

In the mid-nineties the way we discovered new content was revolutionized by Amazon.com’s recommendation engine. Amazon.com’s technology “learned” the buying behaviors and preferences of their consumers and provided recommendations based on what similar consumers were buying as well as provided a platform for their consumers to rate and review products. Social Bookmarking sites work on the same ideas of connecting people who share common interests and providing a platform for them to rate and review, not books, but web content. Community members are able to “friend” people they know as well as people they do not know but have identified as having similar ideas and interest. This network of “friends” are able to view what each person is saving, subscribe via RSS feeds to each others accounts in order to be alerts when new content is saved as well as push content to their network. 

The Unique Culture of Each Site

No Social Bookmarking site is created equal. Each site comes with unique features and functions which determines how the site is used, as well as who uses it. Also in consideration is when the site went live and what their “go to Market” strategy was. When Concept Hub, Inc researches the social media landscape for a client, we check every main social bookmarking site to identify if relevant content is being shared and which site has the greatest share of our client’s target audience. Although sites like Compete.com shows reddit with a significant lead in audience, Concept Hub, Inc has found Delicious is the favorite site among people in Atlanta. We have discovered Digg is still the favorite site for technology enthusiast and reddit is a favorite among the financial community. However we all have seen how fickle the online community can be and each new site makes it easier for community members to import their links over. It is important to always keep your finger on the pulse of what the community is doing and who is being active in which sites

On Friday I had the opportunity to speak to a packed room of artists anxious to learn how leverage social media to increase attendance and reach new audience members.

At one point during the presentation we compared email with social media. One attendee was willing to use some of her numbers as an example.

Her Facebook Fan Page has a few hundred fans as well as her Twitter account. Her tweets are often retweeted by a few media Twitter accounts, therefore potential views of her updates grows exponentially each time it gets retweeted.

However, even with exponential growth, her reach via the social media channels that she has been nurturing is not even close to the reach of her email list of over 15,000.

So is that a knock out hit for email?

Many organizations have spent a lot of time and effort to grow and nurture their email list over many years. Of course email will have a greater reach than the Twitter account or Fan Page that was set up this year. Does this mean we should just stick with what we already have significantly invested in?

Consider that Social Media is rapidly becoming part of the everyday routine for the majority of the population.

Some recent statistics show:

• 3 out of 4 Americans use social technology

• Visiting social networking sites is the 4th most popular online activity –actually ahead of personal email

• Time spent on social networks is growing at 3x the overall Internet rate, accounting for 10% of all Internet time

• Estimated 100,000,000 videos are viewed on Youtube per day • 13,000,000 articles are available on Wikipedia

• 3,600,000,000 photos has been received on Flickr since June 2009, that’s 1 photo per every two citizens of this planet

• 5,000,000,000 minutes spent on Facebook each day

• Total amount of time spent on Facebook increased by 566% between December 2007-December 2008

• Facebook’s greatest growth in global audience numbers has come from people aged 35-49

• 93% of social media users believe that a company should have a presence in social media

• 85% of social media users believe that a company should interact with its customers in social media

Resources: Nielsen, Global Faces and Networked Places, 2009 Forrester, The Growth of Social Technology Adoption, 2008 DiggitalBuzzBlog.com Wikipedia.com

So does the above statistics and accelerated trends mean we just throw out our email list and start focusing on our social media efforts?

You do not need to look at your marketing efforts as an either/or situation. The reality is many people still want to receive email newletters. However many people are also opting out of email newsletters in favor of RSS feeds from their favorite blogs, or to keep up with their favorite brands and organizations through Facebook, or to get real time updates via Twitter or SMS.

We are at a time where your audience wants to be able to choose what information they get and how they get it and they expect to have those options.

As communicators, we not only can leverage social media channels to provide those options to our audience, but we can also leverage our social media channels to increase viral word of mouth marketing and to get better insights into what people are interested in and responding to.

Here are five steps that will help you evolve your email marketing list to the growing world of social media. 

1. Let your email audience know that special discount codes are available via Twitter or on your Facebook Fan page.
2. Highlight the hot topics on you social media sites on your email newsletters.
3. Virtually introduce your email subscribers to your most engaged community members.
4. Only provide an introduction to your stories via email. Provide a link to your blog were your audience can read and respond to the rest of the story.
5. Social Media is still new to most people. Provide tips and tricks to your email audience about how to use Facebook and Twitter. 

Have you seen or used other tips and tricks that blend email marketing with social media marketing? Please share.

Each Tuesday I will be posting social media tips and tricks. To start with I am focusing on RSS and Tags. I have often referred to RSS and Tags as "the Math equation you HAVE to learn to go any further in Social Media." Remember in school there was the one equation or formula you had to learn because everything else from that point firther relied on your understanding of it? RSS and Tags are the same thing. Your understanding of RSS and Tags will help you organize your content, share content on various sites, have selected content delivered to you, and enable your audience to get the content they want through the channel they want it.

RSS, RSS Readers, and Tags are “the math equation” a person needs to learn to go any further in the world of social media. The conversations within the social web are organized and discovered through the use of Tags. A simple definition of a Tag would be to say that tags are keywords, category names, or metadata. In essence, a tag is simply a freely chosen set of textual keywords which link related content together throughout a site, a network, and ever throughout the web.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds contain information from frequently updated websites that can be subscribed to using a RSS Reader (also known as an RSS Aggregator). By subscribing to RSS Feeds instead of email notifications, you can stay up to date on the latest news and other information from the web quickly and easily without visiting each site to check if they have been updated and without creating too much noise in your email inbox.

The feeds go into a single interface (RSS Reader), and can be sorted and scanned through quickly.

Tags are categories or metadata that users freely chose to describe their content. Almost all social media sites enable users to “tag” or categorize their content. Most sites enable the users to freely create the tags they would like to apply to their content. Each piece of content can be tagged with multiple categories.

Most of the time tags that have been used are displayed on a site. Tag clouds, as pictured above, is a growing trend on site. Tag clouds provide a visual description of the volume of conversation around a specific topic. The large the tag the higher the volume of conversation around that topic.

Tag usage is growing.

28% of internet users have tagged or categorized content online such as photos, news stories or blog posts. On a typical day online, 7% of internet users say they tag or categorize online content

Taggers look like classic early adopters of technology. They are more likely to be under age 40, and have higher levels of education and income

The number of posts with tags or categories has grown past the 100 Million mark since Technorati began tracking tags in January of 2005

47% of daily blog posts that Technorati tracks (about 560,000 posts out of the 1.2 Million postings per day) have one or more tag or category associated with the post

Sources: Pew Internet “Tagging” Study – January 2007

By choosing the appropriate tag, not only can a user properly categorize their content, but they also optimize that content for various search engines.

Tags also link to other content with similar tags throughout the network sites as well as throughout the entire web. By being linked to relevant content, traffic to the site becomes more relevant thus increasing the “stickiness” of the site.

Below is a link to a great video by Common Craft, RSS in Plain English.

http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english

For more in-depth, hands on training, feel free to contact me at Sherry@ConceptHubInc.com