1. Social media bootcamp!
Tools & strategies for social businesses
Girls in Tech retreat, Santa Cruz, Oct. 10, 2009
JD Lasica
President
Socialmedia.biz
jd@socialmedia.biz

2. Relax!
Creative Commons
photo on Flickr
by Nattu
http://delicious.com/socialmediacamp/git
(all sites in this talk have been tagged for later retrieval)
http://slideshare.net/jdlasica

3. Today’s hashtag
Creative Commons
photo on Flickr
by Prakhar
Tweet this talk! Today’s hashtag: #git09
(Our goal in this talk: 3 takeaways)

4. Handouts!

5. Glossary for this new stuff
http://socialbrite.org/glossary
“Social media:
Any online technology or practice that lets us share
(content, opinions, insights, experiences, media)
and have a conversation about the ideas we care about.
”

6. Types of social media
• Blogs
• Social networks
• Microblogs (Twitter)
• Online video (YouTube,
Vimeo, Viddler)
• Widgets
• Photo sharing (Flickr,
Photobucket, etc.)
• Podcasts
• Virtual worlds
• Wikis
• Social bookmarking
• Forums
• Presentation sharing

7. What we’ll cover today
1. Overview
2. 6 steps to social businesses success
3. Best practices for the social Web
4. Social media campaigns
5. Twitter
6. Widgets!
7. Enabling local conversations
8. Metrics!
9. Sharing economy

8. Overview: Who’s participating?
Women active
in social media
More than half of online U.S.
women report doing a “social
media” activity at least once a
week. Of those, more than half
do so on a daily basis.
Survey of 2,821 women
conducted by Compass
Partners, March 2009.
www.blogher.com/press

9. Participation is widespread
42 million
women do it
Some 42 million U.S. women
participate in some form of
social media at least once a
week.
Activities include:
• social networks
• reading blogs
• posting to blogs
• message boards & forums
• status updates on Twitter, etc.
Source: 2009 Women and Social
Media Study by BlogHer, iVillage
and Compass Partners

10. Kinds of participation
Weekly participation by women by social media activity
Source: (c) Compass Partners

11. Shifting time to social media
Shift by women away from traditional media
continues to increase
Source: (c) Compass Partners

12. Topic areas with biggest impact
When asked, “Which sources do you rely on for information on
the topics you’re interested in?,” surveyed women responded:
Source: (c) Compass Partners

13. State of social media 2009
Whenever someone opens a computer, 60% of time
it’s for social reasons
5 of 10 top websites are social sites
125 million-plus blogs
Facebook: 300 million members
Twitter: 50 million users
Flickr: 3 billion-plus photos
YouTube: 1 billion-plus videos served per day
Blog growth continues. Women are most engaged
social media users.
Social media continues to supplant, and supplement,
traditional media

14. 6 steps to social business success
1. Define your target audience
2. Define business objectives
• Increase sales?
• Increase membership?
• Build reputation for new brand?
• Customer feedback on new product?
3. Define your strategy
• Identify internal champions
• Set out rules for interaction
• Assign responsibilities
• Establish measurable goals
• Identify tools & platforms

15. 6 steps to social business success
4. Launch!
5. Measure results, track analytics, refine
6. Be patient. If no results after 4-6 months, move on.
In identifying projects or campaigns, be realistic,
but don’t be afraid of blue-sky thinking. Silicon
Valley mantra: Fail often, fail fast.
Photo on Flickr by
jonrawlinson

16. Best practices for Social Web
• Listen long and hard.
• Then: Share. Engage. Participate.
• Build relationships. It’s all about the conversation.
• It’s not all about you. It’s really not.
• Empower customers, don’t market to consumers.
• Be authentic and transparent about who you are. Disclose
your relationship to the product or service you’re
promoting.
• Don’t be defensive — be open to critical feedback.
• Establish your own ethical policies. Enforce them.
• Successful campaigns engender authentic enthusiasm.
Social media still comes down to the product or cause.

17. Social media campaigns
American Cancer Society
“In 2009, you canʼt
build a $2 million
destination site and
use marketing
muscle to drive
traffic to it.”
— David Neff
American Cancer
Society

18. American Cancer Society, Web 2.0

19. morebirthdays.com

20. Creating a space for ‘us’

21. Leveraging sharing culture

22. CRS in a Web 2.0 world
Crate & Barrel’s CEO sent 18,000 $25 gift certificates to their
customers on behalf of DonorsChoose.org

23. Corporate social responsibility
Crate & Barrel not only received positive coverage but showed
a 12% increase in merchandise sales by gift certificate redeemers.

24. Becoming a brand
Gary Vaynerchuk
has become well-
known brand with
• daily wine video
blog Wine Library TV
• extensive use of
Twitter (850,000+
followers) @garyvee
• new book ‘Crush It’

25. Campaign that didn’t work
Skittles
In March 2009 Skittles launched a social media campaign with
these features:
• All Twitter tweets with the word
‘Skittles’ landed on the Skittles
website home page
• Clicking on ‘videos’ on home page
took you to Skittles’ YouTube page
• Clicking on ‘images’ took you to
Flickr photos tagged with ‘Flickr’
• Clicking on ‘friends’ took you to
Facebook Fan Page for Skittles

26. Why it didn’t work
• On the upside, Skittles received a temporary bump in traffic to
its site & coverage in LA Times, USA Today, Financial Times
• On downside, most people saw it as a blatant PR stunt.
• Mars-owned Skittles did not release a new product, content or
message
• They made their site inaccessible to children
• They encouraged false conversations
• Racial slurs & obscenities appeared on their
home page, which could have been prevented.
• Skittles did not engage in a conversation with its customers, and
most commenters did not talk about the candy
• Instead, it merely held up a mirror and let Twitter users make
funny faces

27. Twitter ecosystem
http://www.twittersheep.com/ for GIT on Twitter

28. Make Twitter work for you
• Train your staff on how to use Twitter
• Not a broadcasting medium to just distribute press releases or
your headlines
• Start by listening & observing
• Be human, be conversational, lose
the marketing jargon
• Use it for research, soliciting ideas, customer
support, to announce events, to
recommend articles, to identify experts
• #1 traffic driver: retweets
• Use calls to action; use ‘Please RT’ strategically
• Tweets with a URL are 3x more retweeted
• nytimes.com: Twitter drives 10% of its traffic

29. JD’s 75-25 Rule
3 conversational tweets
for every ‘broadcast’ tweet
Omar Gallaga
Austin American Statesman

30. Identify & engage influencers
• Scope out Twitterers in your business area with large
# followers. Engage them, don’t sell them.
• Learn about how people in your business community
use social media
• Connect with social media influencers through
Advanced Twitter Search & tools in handout

31. Essential Twitter tools
• Dashboard apps: Tweetdeck, Seesmic Desktop or
Hootsuite (Web-based)
• Real-time Web search: Twitter Search, Tweetmeme,
TwitScoop, OneRiot, Scoopler, SearchMerge
• Mobile apps: Tweetie, Twitterific, Twitterfon, Twittelator,
Tweetstack
• Metrics: Bit.ly, TweetStats, Twitterholic, Twinfluence,
TwitterGrader, Twittorati, Twitalyzer
• Video chat from the field: Twitcam lets you tweet
while live-streaming & enables live chat with users

32. Use hashtags to join conversations
• Find relevant hashtags through
hashtags.org or Twitter Search
• Join (but don’t spam) conversation
threads
• Start your own hashtag
• Some hashtags to latch on to:
#women #health #latino
#education #democracy #politics
#Obama #news #media
At left, widget found at:
http://journchat.info

33. The power of widgets
World news widget
Widgets are prettified RSS
feeds. It’s easy & free to turn
your existing feeds into
widgets.
Create widgets for specific
sections of your business’s
website. Two benefits:
• slick packaging of content
• enlist users to distribute
content
Services: Widgetbox,
Nervibes, Yahoo Widgets.

34. Take the community’s pulse
Real-time
conversations
Turn Twitter
conversations into
widgets. Tap into the
conversations that are
already taking place in
your community:
Widgets let you post
discussions tailored to
specific topics or
geographic locations.
Monitter widget on
Socialbrite.org

35. Enabling conversations
Avert registration fatigue
by giving commenters
more ways to sign into
your site.

36. Social news services
Digg: 35 million monthly unique visitors; 80
million outbound links per month; home
page story on Digg will send 20,000 to
200,000+ clicks
Facebook Connect: Each story shared on
Facebook is seen on avg. by 40+ friends.
Use it to authenticate comments.
Google Friend Connect: Just beginning,
with same potential for large network effect.

37. Metrics!
BlogHer’s stats
on Quantcast

38. Track your success
For integrated social media campaigns:
• Monitor social media activity
• Optimize content, try to make it viral
• Interact with target audiences
• Use customer feedback loop for product
research and development
For ongoing brand monitoring:
• There’s no single ‘best metric’ for social media
• Track the benchmarks & goals you set down
• Decide on a set of measurement tools

39. Monitoring services
Paid monitoring services: Free monitoring services:
• Radian6 • Google Alerts
• Techrigy • Technorati
• Spiral16 • Bit.ly
• ScoutLabs ($99/mo.) • Backtype
• Compete.com • Feedburner
• Chat Catcher • SamePoint
• Quantcast • Socialmention
• PostRank
• Facebook Lexicon/
Facebook Insights
• trendrr
• Addict-o-matic

40. Beyond traditional metrics
Engagement metrics
• Direct metrics
- Comments on company blog post
- Number of conversations engaged
- Number of members who engaged
• Indirect metrics
- Increased traffic from referral links
- Views on social site like YouTube
- Number of links posted to client site
- Page views of postings

41. Tap into the sharing economy
Creative Commons
photo on Flickr by
Jason Means
Don’t do all the heavy lifting!

42. Creative Commons
• Rich source of free
commercial material.
• Flickr: 25 million+ Attribution
& ShareAlike licenses
• Use them for your blog,
website, email or print
newsletter, presentations, etc.
creativecommons.org
flickr.com/creativecommons

43. Leverage the ecosystem of free
Free content! Free resources!
Free photos Socialbrite.org/sharing-center
Free videos (TED Talks, etc.) Creativecommons.org
Free music & audio Meetup.com
Free platforms! Free expertise!
WordPress & its plug-ins BarCamp
Drupal PodCamp
Joomla & other open WordCamp
source platforms Social Media
Kaltura Club

44. Sorry!
Didn’t have time for ...
• Facebook (but see handout)
• LinkedIn
• Video sharing
• Photo sharing
• Reputation management

45. Thank you! Let’s talk!
email: jd@socialmedia.biz
twitter: @jdlasica
http://delicious.com/socialmediacamp/git
http://slideshare.net/jdlasica