Social Media–Week 5 readings

The Digital Handshake, pages 97-114  (Niche Online Communities)

Online communities are not like social networks, they are niche-specific.  A major difference is the way that profiles are displayed.  In a niche community, profiles are peripheral to what goes on, in social networks, they are the important thing. 

Why do online communities?

• improve customer relations
• search engines can index them
• useful for feedback
• users can give positive feed back through it
• gives stakeholders a sense of ownership

Sites can break down into 3 categories:

1. Customer support - customers come to it to get support for a manufacturer's product
2. Customer engagement - customers come here for education and interaction with manufacturer.
   When created there are things to think about:
   Research and understand the targets interest
   Form a coalition with related/non-competing products
   Create non-branded content and tools 
   Use experts to give credibility to site
   Use social engineering tools to encourage sharing 
   Passively put coalition product information up, also banner ads for more direct.
   Syndicate out the content for use on other sites
3. Employee communities and/or Vendor/partner communities - encourage people who have a stake in the company to share insights among themselves.

Common community mistakes:

1. Lack of adequate planning and research - follow the '5 Ws and H'. While it takes minutes to make a site it takes a while to plan.  
2. Putting an undue focus on technology - the people make up the community, not the technology
3. Not putting resources where they are best utilized - put someone in charge who knows how to run a community, not just some part time staff. 
4. Making the company fit the company not the other way around - the user defines the community not the company
5. Measuring the wrong things - you can not use traditional metrics to measure ROI

Online communities need a personal (pastoral) touch

There needs to be some glue to hold the membership together - a vision maybe.  Remind people every month or so what that vision is. A 'shepherd' is needed to guide the community, this requires a person who can apply a lot of TLC.  There must be a regular flow of content so that people will come to the sire.  Active participation by users should be encourages.  They will need to be paid with time, attention and rewards.

Society of Word of Mouth

Case study -

• Ensure that there is already a community that is undeserved and itching to meet
• Have an annual meeting
• Keeping the online community juices flowing requires large amounts of content
• Think education -- webinars draw people
• Kick out the polluters quickly  - you do not need a place for criminal actions to take place (spammers, etc.)

Twittermoms

Case study

• Starting a social network you set the tone
• Find people who have common interest and connect with them
• Have guidelines in place for spammers
• Make sure you offer high quality content

Tools for creating your own community

Ning:

This a website for people to create communities for any subject they choose. Tools are available (blogs, podcasts, calendars, etc. ) to customize the community to your liking. It is free with Google ads running through it. 

KickApps:

Like Ning it is hosted but you can put widgets from it into your own pages. 

CollectiveX Groupsites:

Hosted site that lends itself to professional network groups.

Open Source Options:

Drupal and Joomla are two platforms for building community.  These do take some time and effort.

WordFrame:

For larger firms it is more suited for B2B and is Blog-centric.

Mzinga:

Also for larger businesses, it is focused on learning, marketing and customer support.

Awareness Network:

Large industry branded communities are the focus here. 

Jive:

For enterprise business, focus is collaboration.

Lithium:

Larger company hosted support site.

Social Media - Week 3 Reading

Digital Handshake pages 77-96 (Social Networks)

Chapter 8 Social Networks Strengthen Your Social Graph

While social networks have existed since man existed, but the Internet has allowed us to make our networks larger faster.  People now take participating in these networks as a matter of fact. 

• You never know where leads may come from, keeping a presence on many social network sites makes sense.
• The more profiles you have the more it seems like you are everywhere and have a feel for what is going on.
• Search engines now give results from social network sites so they can help people find you when they search for your company.
• Your profile (business or personal) should be created with the intent of your audience finding you and on places that they would find you on. (Make sure you complete your profile before contacting others on the network however).

Best Practices

• Your profile and your photo are you
• Just as you work the room in real life networking, do so in on line networks.  Post comments and write posts, but do not pitch
• Friending some one is the equivalent of asking for a business card.
• Figure out who you can connect with (not everyone) and figure out how you can be helpful to them.

The more individual connections that you have to a person the stronger the relationship will be.  The big three for these will be:

1. LinkedIn
2. Facebook
3. Twitter

As you connect with a person on one of these, the others will come along.  You should connect as you see the need to.

LinkedIn is Your Business Suit

LinkedIn is designed to be a place where you can find, be introduced to, and collaborate with qualified professionals to help you accomplish your goals.  The first thing you should do is create a detailed profile that summarises your professional expertise and accomplishments and then begin to build relationships.
Try not to pimp yourself or your company. Be yourself and be sincere, you will attract people who are similar to you. See how you can help others, and they will want to reciprocate to you.

Facebook is Business Casual

Face book is a social utility to connect you to other people.  It combines both business and personal sides.  By using a 'public profile' a business can set up an identity similar to a personal profile. Fans can express themselves on your wall.  The public profile is open to search engines indexing as well.  Events can be used to promote something your business is doing.  Groups can tie you in to other people that share a common bond. 

Facebook dose have ads, but the  click through rate for them is very low.   Applications (Apps) can be created that can give your business some name recognition.  

Facebook Lexicon looks through all the wall posts and returns aggregate data of what is trending. The share button can be put on your site so that people can share a page of yours and drive traffic to you. Facebook Connect allows people to log into a web site using Facebook credentials.  

It is essential to have a personal presence on as well.  Not all your networking will be business like and people will want to connect to you, not the business.  

Twitter is the Social Networking Cocktail Party 

This is the place to casually interact with others. 

Other Business-Oriented Social Networks

Plaxo - cross between LinkedIn and Facebook that has a business feel to it. 

Ecademy - similar to LinkedIn, strong in Europe, not so much the states, face to face networking

Biznik - business networking for people who are not job seekers

MySpace - entertainment focused social network. 

Ten Commandments of Social Networking

1. Pull, don't Push - do not heavily push your product
2. Win the right to be heard - you are judged by what you contribute to the community
3. Content is still king (conversation is queen and conversion is the prince) 
4. Authenticity and Transparency are social networking cornerstones
5. You do not have to be on every social network - be where customers are
6. Give and you will receive - help other and you will help yourself
7. Do not throw the marketing baby out with the bath water
8. Social media is a mindset, not a toolset
9. Be yourself
10. Social media is not a religion

Social Media Marketing, pages 53-76 (Social Networking)

Social network is a website where people connect. It had its start in the computer bulletin board systems of the 1980's. Later content providers like AOL allowed for more than just the local content of the bbs.  As the Internet increased in popularity web sites started to create the community feel.  In 2002, Friendster started as a non dating dating site, 2003 brought about MySpace and Facebook. 

Protocol - common elements across all social networking sites

• Profiles
  Profiles are for people and contain information about them as well as pictures, etc. 
•  Connecting
  Social networks were created to make connections to real people.  
• Private Messaging
• Public Messaging
  Don't share anything you would not want to send to your boss or your mother. 
• Groups 
  Collection of People who share a common interest
• Photos
  Marketers can use this to create campaigns about their product by having people send pictures of themselves using the product the company makes.
• Applications
  Sites create and 'application programming interface' that allows third parties to add things to the site.  These can be used to market business but make sure they have value to the user. 
• Status Updates
  Tells people what other people are doing
• Privacy
  Be aware of the age of the group that you are dealing with.  Older people tend to be more concerned,  younger not so much, and children should not be encouraged to give up information at all.  

 Facebook
Facebook is currently the dominate social network site. 

• Pages - Public face of your business on Facebook, it is the centrepiece where all other parts come from. Blog and Twitter feeds should also be added here by use of apps that will let you do so. 

LinkedIn
Social network site for business professionals.

• Introductions - ways to meet people who know people who know people.
• Recommendations - short endorsements of people they know that become referrals.
• Answers - people ask questions that you can answer and they can be answered by you to show where you specialise in things.

MySpace
Frist of the social networks to allow customisation. Appeals mostly to teens and musicians.

• MySpace has Blogs that allow for people to easily post information about self or businesses. 
• Bulletins are announcements that go to all your 'friends'
• MySpace for Musicians - MySpace has extensive tools that allow musicians to connect with their fans. 

Site recommended for review by instructor.

Social Media Week 2 - Readings

The Digital Handshake, pages 55-76 (Business Blogging)
 
Blogs have been around the longest are a good base for other social media attempts. A blog is defined as an easy to use content management system. They should be written in an informal tone and be authentic. When done right they will stimulate conversation. 
 

Things to consider before you blog

1. Have your purpose for blogging figured out.
2. What tone will the blog have? What topics are covered?
3. Who will write the blog? Marketing people are not best qualified.
4. Control or converse? Best is somewhere in-between.
5. Establish a blogging policy with guidelines.
6. Monitor what is being said about your company.
7. Decide on a blog platform. Decide if it should be on your server (news updates), or externally (personal type).
8. How will you market your blog?
9. Figure a way to track statistics. Traditional methods are not always the best.
10. Know your keywords.  

 Blogs have morphed into lightweight Content Management Systems. They can be set up for a client who you can turn it over to so that the content can be developed by them. By adding social widgets to them they become a community.  


No matter what, the mantra from the beginning of the web is still true, 'Content is key!' If there is not something to bring people back they will not come back.  This means if you have a partially filled or not at all filled niche, you can use a blog to become the expert people will turn to on the web.  


Blogs and search engines work hand in hand.  They have the things that search engines look for:

• Titles - each post should have one and search engines look for that title tag
• Keywords - make sure post uses the words that will draw people to your site
• Recent content - keep content up to date, update regularly
• Lots of content - search engines can not read flash, they can read text
• Links - search engines look for outgoing and incoming links
• Relevance - does your site match the keywords in the post, then it is relevant to the site

Creating a successful Business Blog:

1. Know your audience and write with them in mind.  Define who you are trying to reach just like normal marketing except here we are defining community.  Picture those people in your mind when you write. 
2. Write with Google (and other search engines) in mind. Put keywords in title and in the body (as close to top as possible).  Post at least 3 to 5 times a week and stay on topic. 
3. Find, follow, and communicate with influential Bloggers in your niche. Read their post, write comments and track back to them. They may return the favour and send traffic your way. 
4. Find out the people you need to influence. You do not need to be a rock star blogger to be successful.
5. On occasion write 'top ten' posts.
6. Write 'link bait' posts - ones that people will want to link back to.
7. Establish a Presence in the Social Mediasphere - use the other social networking tools to link back to your blog.  Also, make interesting comments on other blogs as well as respond to comments on your blog. 

Social Media Marketing, pages 9-30 (Blogging)

 A blog is a form of a Content Management System that is easy for every one to send articles (post) to. It is a hub for your other social media marketing efforts and should be conversational in nature. 

While people have been keeping journals for years it was not till mid 1990s that they did it on line, the hard way, by editing the HTML.  In 1999 LiveJournal and Blogger came on the scene. 

Features

Some common features to all Blogs are:

• Posts - Most important is to have consistent posts on topic. Long post structured so that they include scannable items like lists and subheadings. Short posts should be structured around a news events. Both styles are good and can be mixed together. 
• Permalinks - Since your article can be found many ways and places, you should make sure the title provides a permanent link back to it. Preferably it should be clean and have some keywords in it.
• Comments - To provide some feel of community, comments should be opened and maintained.  Do not delete negative comments, respond to them. If it is someone being disruptive or offensive, delete them.
  Spend some time looking at other Blogs and thoughtfully responding to them. Remember to maintain your comments as some spammers are seeing this as a good place to make quick links. Take time to put in a way to prevent this (CAPTCHA). 
• Themes - Customise the look of blog on your own or with may paid or free themes. Your look says a lot about you. 
• Archive and category pages - Make sure that it is easy to find previous posts as they will fall off the main page.  This can be done with dates or by tags put on posts that can be looked at in a topic list. 
• Blogrolls - Links to other sites are usually in the side bar of a blog. These would be sites you read regularly.  Try to link to popular sites in your niche.
  Links - The currency of blogging.  When you link to other sites it shows up when the owner of that site looks at the logs and they may start to look at you. 
• Trackbacks and Pingsbacks - A communication back to the blog you linked from. Have too much spam now so it is not used as much. 
• TweetMeme Button - Allows people to see how many people have tweeted about this post and give them a way to do so.  Can easily drive traffic to your site.
• Subscriptions - Allows readers to be able to get your posts in an RSS or ATOM format for use in a feed reader.  Another idea is to provide email subscritions.

Platforms
Hosted vs. Self-hosted? 
Hosted means that the code to run the blog will be on a server out of your control, often with the name of the host in the domain name (blogger, livejournal).
Self-hosted means that you will control where the software is, and you will maintain it. This may require a specialist if you are not tech savy. Try to barter for these services if you can.  

• WordPress
  Most widely used software to blog, free and open source. Easy to use but may require tech help to set up. 
• Moveable Type
  Most high traffic sites use this. It can be self-host or a domain like TypePad.
• Blogger
  Blogger is hosted software. It lacks many features in other software.
• HubSpot - Includes tools and blogging package. Paid hosted service lets your name appear in the domain.  

Content Strategies

• News - breaking news is the most popular of content but hard to come by, though it can be done. Publish it quick however, it does no good to be number 2 in the news. 
• Lists - Readers like bite sized information. Lists (like top 10) are ways to do this. Add pictures or video and do in reverse order if possible. 
• How-To's - Know how to do something, post it in your blog. 
• Controversy - It is easy to stir the pot but make sure that you have a good argument and this can work.  However, to do not make personal attacks, and do not make a habit of this type of post. 

Building an Audience
When no one comes to your blog, go to them.  What social network tools do they hang out at.  Also focus on links and commenting.