AEP-OU-social media-04-24-13

Social Media for the
Practical Economic
Development
Professional
By

Mark J James, CEcD
American Electric Power
mjjames@aep.com
http://twitter.com/AEP_EconDev

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2010 © ED Solutions, Inc.
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18%

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5 Ways Social Media has changed
economic development

1. Even less control about what‘s
being said about our place.
The ―democratization of Audiences
information‖
2. Exponentially enhanced our
marketing reach.
3. Able to create communities
within and between our
communities
4. We can now crowd source
ideas/initiatives
5. Social CRM and Social SEO

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What does all this say to
the practical economic
development
professional?

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Just What does all this say
to the practical
say economic
development
professional?
no
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Depending on organization,
a reasonable inclusion
of SOME
social media applications
What does all this say to
the practical economic
development
professional?

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The Practical ED‘r Starts with a
Social Media Strategy
• Consider-
– Objectives
– Identify your audience-key leaders, stakeholders, etc.
– What calls to action will you use?
– Identify some benchmarks
– Keyword/SEO analysis
– How Will You Measure Success?
• Visits
• Followers
• Return on conversation?
– (Last) Best Tools for You

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Some Typical ED Goals

• Brand awareness
• Program/
practitioner
credibility
• Drive traffic to web
• Create community
• Connect resources
• Lead development

Case Studies-
Strategy
Round Rock, TX McAllen, TX Cobourg, Ontario
Provide add‘l channels of Promote programs and Enhance tourism
input for citizens events
Increase the Disseminate timely Fully utilize all platforms
transparency information
Reach new audiences Engage with wider Integrate into overall
audience marketing strategy
Facilitate a sense of Tell our story
community
Create relationships

What‘s missing from these?
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What‘s Your
Strategy?

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Social Listening

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Social Listening
…community

…existing employers
About
your …State/Province

…prospective employers/
targets
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Social Listening
How?

-Google Alerts
-Hootsuite (or
Tweetdeck)
-LinkedIn

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Social Media Integration

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Websites have a crucial new role
Old view: New view:
Destination Content Engine

Source: Mark W. Schaefer Slideshare-
http://www.slideshare.net/Rialta/social-media-best-practices-for-economic-development

Social Media for Practical ED Pro

Get “Social” Easily

addthis.com
or
sharethis.com
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Check this out…

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SEO & SMO

• Social media optimization (SMO) is a set of methods
for generating publicity through social media, online
communities and community websites. Methods of SMO
include adding RSS feeds, social news buttons,
blogging, and incorporating third-party community
functionalities like images and videos. Social media
optimization is related to search engine marketing, but
differs in several ways, primarily the focus on driving
traffic from sources other than search engines, though
improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful
SMO.
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Deeper Dive
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Flickr
• Slideshare
• YouTube
• Twitter
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Using Facebook
• More than a billion monthly active users as of
December 2012.
• Approximately 82% of monthly active users are outside
the U.S. and Canada.
• 618 million daily active users on average in December
2012.
• 680 million monthly active users who used Facebook
mobile products as of December 31, 2012.
• 50% of active users log on EVERYDAY
• 30 Billion Pieces of Content
• 1.5 Local Business Have Pages
• People install 20 million apps/day
• Daily over 10,000 websites are integrated with FB
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Nearly one in four page views in US

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Using Facebook
- Who’s Your Target Audience?
Prospects
Existing Business
Investors
- Find Your Voice
Business
Community
Stakeholder
- Post Current Relevant Content
Discuss the organization
Push traffic to your website
Engage your community
Create “Super Fans”
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Using Facebook

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Best Practice- Hudson River Valley

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Best Practice- Richmond JobsNet

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Beginning to
see third party
apps

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http://www.insidefacebook.com

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LinkedIn

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LinkedIn

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LinkedIn

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Don‘t forget Keywording…

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www.waynealliance.org

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―Maps,
maps, my
project for
a map!‖

Mark M. Sweeney
Senior Principal
McCallum Sweeney Consulting

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Facebook/Flickr-Project 365

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• We moderate uploads
• As a community builder
• As a resource for free pictures –
our Terms of Use allows us to use
submitted photos in City
promotional materials. In return,
we give credit to photographer

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Where does Twitter “fit in”?

• Link sharing, not trite sharing
• Offer twitter feeds to chamber members
• Search twitter to see if existing companies
in your community are tweeting
• Start conversations on Twitter- e.g., does
anyone know which skills their employees
need and aren‘t found in X.
• Celebrate newsworthy events
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Let’s Admit This….

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A Word About Followers

• Its not how many, its who
• Look for people to follow who have more
followers than they are following
• Beware of ‗someone‘ with very little
followers and lots of people they are
following. This = spam
• Check this out-
http://twittercounter.com
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Create A Custom Background

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How… http://www.ehow.com/how_4613303_twitter-
background.html

Step 1
• Create a Twitter account. If you haven‘t gotten around to signing up for
Twitter yet, what are you waiting for? Go to twitter.com and sign up for an
account. If you need a little more help, read How to Set Up a New Twitter
Account in the resources below.
Step 2
• Decide what type of image you want to portray. Part of the difficulty in
setting the correct background is deciding what you want your Twitter
page design to say about you. Many folks take any image or graphic and
upload it to their Twitter account without much thought. Take some time
to come up with something that speaks of your style, taste and
personality.
Step 3
• Consider the screen real estate. The important information to be viewed
on Twitter occurs in the center of the page. No matter how many images
or sayings you have on your background, the center of the screen
belongs to Twitter. Therefore you have to create a background that gives
Twitter center stage.
Step 4
•
49 Go large. Larger images and/or graphics reduce the necessity for tiling
an image. It gives the appearance of one large background specifically
made for Twitter. Try starting with an image as large as 1600 x 1200.

How…
Step 5
• Remember that all screen resolutions are not the same. The smaller the
screen resolution, the lower the likelihood of your image will have to repeat.
In other words, if you elect to use an image that has a flower located to the
extreme left of the screen, on a lower resolution screen (800 x 600 for
instance), the flower displays once. A screen with a resolution of say 2048 x
1536, the flower will display tiled on the screen several times.
Step 6
• Think about using a border. When creating an image, remember that a
small portion of the top of the screen is dedicated to the Twitter logo and
user navigation. It‘s a little easier on the eyes if the design included a
boarder over which the Twitter logo and navigation could sit without having
to fight against a busy background.
Step 7
• Upload your image to Twitter. Once you‘ve played around with the image,
upload it to Twitter to see how it looks. Log onto your account. Click
―Design‖ found under the ―Settings‖ tab. Once on the design screen click
―change background image.‖ Once you upload your image, check it out to
see if you like it. If you don‘t you can change it or use one of the Twitter
default images until you come up with something you like.
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Top Twitter Apps

http://twitter-client-review.toptenreviews.com/ 51


Create a Profile On…

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www.tinytwitter.com

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Keep Your Tweets to 120 Characters

Retweets!

RT@AEP_EconDev....

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Keep Your Tweets to 120 Characters

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YouTube Statistics

Viewership
• More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month
• Over 4 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
• 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
• 70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US
• YouTube is localized in 53 countries and across 61 languages
• In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views or around 140 views
for every person on Earth
• Millions of subscriptions happen each day. Subscriptions allow you to
connect with someone you're interested in — whether it's a friend, or
the NBA — and keep up with their activity on the site
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YouTube Statistics

1. Inventory the assets you have
2. Categorize them by audience
3. Identify your communications needs, and plot
how video could help you tell your story:
• About your program of work
• Virtual familiarization tours
• Industry specific presentations
• Expansion or relocation announcements
• Case Studies
• Company or stakeholder profiles
• Annual accomplishments
4. Identify a low cost production partner or invest
$2,500 to $5,000 in the tools 57


Establish a YouTube Channel

1. A place for all of your community’s videos
2. Can include multiple organizations in your community,
such as economic development, tourism, workforce,
and more
3. Develop a profile
4. Invite others to subscribe
5. Subscribe to other channels
6. Solicit comments
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Get your video indexed-
http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2010/03/videos-indexed-by-google/

1. Put a video on your page : I mean a real video, hosted on your site, not on Youtube
or DailyMotion. You need a .flv file (or .mpg, .avi, .mp4) and a video plugin that
supports this kind of video formats. Jing is perfect to record onscreen action and
make nice video tutorials.
2. Create a thumbnail of your video : that‘s the thumbnail that Google will display on
its search results page, so making a good quality thumbnail out of your video is an
important step. Personally, I‘ve found that 160 120 gif or jpg works well for that
purpose….and they actually don‘t need to be extracted from your video. Any image
pertinent to the content of your video will make the trick.
3. Create a video sitemap : Video sitemaps are XML files similar to usual sitemaps but
using a different syntax. See an example below.
4. Submit your video sitemap to Google : Video sitemaps can be submitted in
Google Webmaster Tools exactly as a standard sitemap. If you had not yet registered
your site in Google Webmaster Tool, that‘s the perfect occasion to do it now.

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Social Media Metrics

• Not mature yet- things like;
– Return on Conversation
– Followers
– Impressions

• There are a few things
which you can and should
do
– Monitor what‘s being said
about your community
– Measure the numbers
– Regularly go back to the
strategy
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A
Wonderful
Social Media
Report Card!

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Social Media Metrics

• Some interesting metric tools-
– Compete.com
– Google Alerts
– Xinureturns.com
– Bit.ly
– search.twitter.com
– Twittercounter.com

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Wrap up
1. Social media extends the reach and influence
of you and your organization.
2. It allows you to reach and connect with
people/companies in much deeper ways than
has been possible with traditional ‗marketing‘.
3. By cutting through the confusion on focusing
on the right tactics, you can save time.
4. It can be done for low or no cost (other than
the currency of time).

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Read These…
http://www.socializedpr.com

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Our web sites
need to be about
COMMUNICATION,
not marketing

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The Rule of

• Home
Page

• Content

• Format
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Home Page

• Orient to Geography

• Who the site is for and
what can be found
there

• Drive to Contact
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www.TeamNewEngland.com
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Try one yourself…

Also…

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Economic Development Websites

Place Page

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What can be found on the site?
• Who the
organization is-
what do they
do?
• Where do they
do it?
• Keyword
density… www. SouthwestIndiana.org

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Content

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Drive to Contact…

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www.ChooseNEIndiana.com

The Rule of Format
HTML

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Print this page
Cascading Style Sheet

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A Word about Mobile
versions
-Not sure we need to invest in
entire site

-Same content as Home page

-Yet another reason to put
contact information in TEXT in
upper left or right

www.m.southcentralKY.com

www.choosecincy.com

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Content Management Systems
• Add/edit/delete
pages
• -Manage digital
media
• -Updates
weekly
• -Eliminate
dependency
relationship
with design firm

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Evaluating Your Own Site

Check your site www.netmechanic.com

How’s it rank? www.trafficzap.com

How many www.websitegrader.com
linked to you?

SEO (and SEM) www.searchenginewatch.com

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Hiring a Web Developer
– Programming
The RFP is EVERYTHING language
– How many design
schemes do you want
• Specify- basis for selection
– Audience – Who will do what-
– Do an outline ―nav‖ • Graphics
– Functionality • Copy writing
• Data tables
– Performance criteria
– Estimate (if you can)
– Timing
the # of pages
– References

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Most important Formula for
Success
• Get a great content
management system

• Create ―best fit‖ equilibrium
between-
– Business goals
– Audience expectations
– Financial Resources

• Revise, revise, revise
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mjjames@aep.com

Thanks for your attention!

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AEP-OU-social media-04-24-13

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