C Words: Creative, consistent, constructive, community-minded and use case studies

What marks out good engagement in social media? Some of the Cs of social media are in the title of this post. A while back at the EU NGO event we were asked about methods of engaging online and I thought that these were relevant.

Creative
There are only so many flash mobs, viral videos, blogger launches, hashtag polluting tweets and phototagging campaigns you can take and that can be cloned and redone again and again before people become sick of them and starting generating negative sentiment towards them. Do a Princess Bride night, do a Tweasure hunt.

Consistent
Update your Facebook Page on a regular occassion. Update your blog. Respond to questions and replies. Be around on Twitter and if you are interacting, answer questions even if they make you uncomfortable. Don’t selectively answer positive questions or broadcast out happy clappy stuff while people are tweeting you and having issues with your service.

Constructive
Add to a conversation. Earned media. If you know the answer to something, share it, share your experiences and insight. If you are worried about giving away knowledge and your IP, just how empty is your playbook? A few blog posts, tweets or Facebook updates shouldn’t make the smallest of impact on your body of earned knowledge. If it does, worry more about why, not about hiding it away.

Community-minded
Do stuff to make the overall community better. Do you necessarily need to wait to be asked? The more you partake, the more you are part of the community and the more you’re respected and loved.

Use case studies
Case studies are stories. We like stories. We put ourselves in stories, we make things up and wrap them around the words in the case studies. Telling a good story is important for any product/brand but having someone retell that story and add their own personal bit of magic to it is more powerful.

The above are a bit like the “Be” Tweet I sent out months ago on how to use Twitter well: Be useful , Be interesting, Be first , Be around, Be supportive

Some useful online marketing links – Jan 18th 2010

Nice idea. To promote media uses of xbox instead of just the gaming aspects, they’ve been putting on free concerts with bands that will appeal to the teen demographic. Earned media.

Social media people in Ireland on Twitter. At least according to their bios.

Google allowing businesses to post context sensitive promotions on Google search results. Lovely idea.

Nike iPhone App takes colours from your photos and then designs a shoe with them.

Duarte’s blog posts are always insightful. When given an excel file full of numbers, how do you present it? Here they show you.

Social media internetty webby linky things – November 16th

*tap tap, is this still on?*

Some links worth checking out:

A blog post from Drew gives some foundations on how another blog post of his with some interesting numbers got trending on Twitter.

Employers using social media to recruit. Sidestepping recruitment companies.

Facebook and local Governments. Some good examples.

A webcam and software and you can model anything in 3D.

A list of Social Media Agencies around the world. Rockstars there. Real genuine agencies. Be good to see more agencies out there like that.

Boingo working with local businesses with their hotspots. Free access in return for watching a video.

Hotel Marketing using earned media – Montenotte Hotel photowalk

Last weekend Donncha hosted a photowalk with photobloggers. Pat O’Neill of D4 hotels fame brought Donncha and Montenotte Hotels together for this. (I helped slightly)

Hold Still...We
Photo owned by M. Burrows (cc)

This is a nice example of earned media: Bring photobloggers to your hotel, give them content (this time a view) and enable them to do what they like doing (taking photos). Lots and lots and lots of photos and good sentiment and blog posts circling around your hotel. When SEO and Google Ads start to fail or become more expensive than the cost of a room, you need to up a gear or do something different. Course if you have a speedboat that some photobloggers can hop on, even better!

We’re a while yet from the idea of earned media in Ireland as extolled by Graham Brown, Helge Tennø and others but we’re getting there.

What fucking R word?

Hello hello. It’s been a while since this blog was updated. Mulley Communications is currently banging out the hits 12 hours a day, 7 days a week and has gotten to the stage where the Inn is full, workwise.

So we’re busy, very very very busy and will be for the next 3 months at least. Please don’t be offended if we turn you down for work. If you have something really interesting though, sure one of us can sleep less so we won’t slam the door in your face.

Meanwhile, there are a small number of people we recommend to have a chat with if you are looking for help with your online communications/marketing/PR.

Keith Bohanna is an Internet Consultant. He was there when it started, not saying he’s old or anything like…

Nick McGivney is also someone very much worth chatting to in anything online marketing/pr related. He also scares the hell out of the advertising industry and sometimes doesn’t even charge them to do it.

Hopefully it’ll mean we can do more blog posts too!

Social Media Expert or Jester

These are my personal opinions and not those of my employer, oh hang on…

Lots of people are now social media experts in Ireland. Twitter is overflowing with them. I got reminded of this by Fergal’s post. Are these social media experts all experts or are they jesters?

Jester
Photo owned by time4coffee (cc)

Some things to consider:

Are they a jester because they are now twitter consultants, yet are on it just three months? This tool is handy for finding that out.

Are they a jester because they tell companies to follow the influencers?
Be they on blogs, Facebook or Twitter. Social media means everyone is an influencer because everyone is connected to the rest of the world in a few steps. Gunning for people with good blog traffic, good blog subscribers and thousands of Twitter followers means you will miss the ones at the edge that start the trickle that start the flood. Go for quality, not quantity.


Are they a jester because three months ago they were Web 2.0 experts?

9 months ago they were business coaches, 18 months ago they were business strategists and two months time they are going to be cloud computing experts?

Are they a jester because they call Twitter users Tweeps and use all these new names?
Using made up words can sometimes be a sign that they can’t evangelise themselves in existing business segments. I’m not too comfortable myself even with social media, beats Web 2.0 though.

Are they jesters because they insist on “managing” your presence?
Why don’t they trust you to run your Facebook, Twitter or blog?

Are these social media ninjas jesters because they are afraid to offend in case they might lose a lead?
Standing your ground means some people won’t like you. Reputation management is not about making everyone like you.

Are they a jester because they are also a coach?
Aren’t coaches people that work in sports or those that tell politicians the best way to lie? A coach is someone who trains someone but never lets them out of their control, right? A coach works with zombies, no?

Are they a jester because they write bullshit posts like this?
Hiiiiiiiiiii!

Online Marketing tidbits – June 29th 2009

Nike+ fascinates me. The amount of data it gathers and shares and the way it connects people together is utterly fantastic. A great example of community building. Bring people together and give them the tools to share and they’ll inform you of what you can do for them. This Wired article goes though great detail about it.

Nike has attracted the largest community of runners ever assembled—more than 1.2 million runners who have collectively tracked more than 130 million miles and burned more than 13 billion calories.

And you can upload your jogging data to Twitter.

Top 5 PR sins.

How Edelman works with Mommy bloggers.

Looks like your Facebook status updates will now be world-public. Expect ads showing up in your profile based on them too.

Here’s how to get your Facebook username back.

Knowledge is Power – June 25th 2009

Some more stats from Facebook via Nic:
Facebook’s 200m members add 4bn pieces of info, 850m photos and 8 million videos every month.

Via Rory in the Beeb:

Google says video uploads from mobiles to YouTube up 400% due to iPhone 3GS

The Social Media Quiz for Govt orgs.

Habitat totally fucked up by hijacking Twitter discussions about Iran to pimp their products. How utterly damaging.

Facebook Profile results in Google now give more details.

but when a Facebook user’s profile is returned in Google’s search results, you can now see the user’s location (or network) and a random selection of their friends, as shown on their public profile.

SEO tips for building your personal brand. Personal brand, eugh what a phrase.

Numbers and new thinking in social media – Monday June 22nd 2009

A new academic paper on ReTweeting on Twitter. 8,000+ words about ReTweeting. That’s 50,000+ characters which is about 364 full Twitter messages. Uhm, overkill anyone? If you ignore the awful academic language and the stupid opinions about no proper rules, there are some good stats there:

  • 52% of retweets contain a URL
  • 18% of retweets contain a hashtag
  • 11% of retweets contain an encapsulated retweet (RT @user1 RT @user2 …message..)
  • 9% of retweets contain an @reply that refers to the person retweeting the post

Value is king. Helge hits the nail on the head when talking about the future of marketing. Add value, don’t get in the way of someone, don’t broadcast. Helge once again shows why he’s at the cutting edge of online marketing.

Foreverism.

Foreverism encompasses the many ways that consumers and businesses are embracing conversations, relationships, and products that are never done. Driving its popularity is technology that allows them to find, follow, interact and collaborate forever with anyone & anything.

Ad recollection stats. Ads that run on websites with related content are 61% more likely to be recalled than ads running on sites with unrelated content.

The study also revealed that social network, shopping, and food sites generate the highest recall levels (29% to 39%)

Making sense of search positioning. Harder than it looks, right?