In our last set of readings we looked at the tips for successful social media monitoring on Mashable. From there I was surfing around on Mashable and found an article about fashion designers who started flocking to Tumblr and why. I was certainly interested, since I have not found Tumblr to be particularly intuitive (but maybe that’s just me.)
The article said that Kate Spade New York used Facebook mainly to field customer inquiries, Twitter to chat with customers and put out information on certain campaigns, and YouTube for branded videos. The advantage of Tumblr is the ability to use photos. Kate Spade is about bold colour and design, and Tumblr can showcase that.
For me, that was a really good explanation of how a company can use the different social media to reach people effectively. I now follow Kate Spade, a brand that I was aware of, but did not know much about. I do find many of the photos to be gorgeous, with the added advantage of having photos of celebs with Kate Spade accessories. (I’d say I’m a soft core celeb watcher, sometimes only reading entertainment magazines while standing in the supermarket checkout line.) The photos may even look nicer viewed on the dashboard than actually going to the blog.
I’m not sure that I will continue to follow, but the company’s use of images on Tumblr made me look, and now I am more aware of the brand. I’d say that is a win for them and for Tumblr.
Now, let’s see if I can figure out how to load up one of my photos to my blog. I may have to Google it.
…..
Ok, looks like my theme does not support photos. Will keep checking, though.
I just got an e-lert from the IABC Toronto chapter announcing the next munch ‘n’ mingle that the association is organizing. I am pasting the entire content of the munch ‘n’ mingle announcement below. For all the job seekers and freelancers, IABC is a good way to network. I’ll be there, as I am helping to organize it, so I hope to see some of you there. More to come on the location.
FYI, I just read in the Communicator, the newsletter IABC produces, that the Toronto Chapter is the largest chapter in the world, with most of the head offices of the big Canadian companies here in the GTA.
Save December 1st for the Holiday-time Munch ‘n’ Mingle. Join us for some fun, networking and seasonal cheer
Save the date (December 1, 2011) for some holiday cheer with your fellow IABC Toronto members old and new. We know the lead-up to the holidays can be a busy one - so please make sure to mark the date in bold in your calendar now!
As always, we promise an evening of good food, drink, networking and socializing, all wrapped in the festive spirit! In keeping with the theme of giving that pervades this time of year, we’re asking you to bring a toy and/or book donation for the Hospital for Sick Children to brighten the faces of young patients. Please don’t forget the older kids too, DVDs, art supplies and gift cards will be a big hit with tweens and teens.
Stay tuned for updates on the venue location and door prizes - including a $100 dollar gift certificate to Brooks Brothers - coming to you from IABC next week!
We look forward to seeing you on December 1 for some seasonal munching and mingling with your fellow IABC members !
If you want to see what is trending on Twitter, consider Topsy. You can type in the topic that is of interest to you, and Topsy will show you the number of tweets and retweets, but also allow live links to any urls that might be contained in the tweets. You can also see how the topic has been trending in the last hour, day, week, month, or a time period that you can specify.
Twitter is where people are expressing their views, I imagine because it is so easy to do so. Topsy is useful to have a real time perspective on what is being said about your company or brand or product, or even your company executives in comments on Twitter.
I went to topsy.com and typed in Nestle at 8:22 pm on October 23, and saw that there were 31 tweets about Nestle in the past hour, and 547 in the past day. But these tweets were in several different languages, so I chose English on the menu down the side and got 14 tweets in the past hour and 260 for the day. Nestle has a promotion going on, and is launching a luxury chocolate line, so Topsy could be useful for the company to see if people are talking about these campaigns.
Klout (http://klout.com/corp/kscore) measures power and influence on Twitter. People who read and respond to your tweets measure your True Reach. Those who are retweeting it and starting up conversations about it are showing how much influence you have on your followers and this is measured in Amplification. And conversations that are being carried over to other social media and other media show the influence of your network, called Network Impact. I think Boyd talked about it in class, and had a score of 49. Since I only lurk on Twitter, I didn’t bother to measure my Klout.
Boardreader (http://boardreader.com/) is similar to Topsy in that you can see how a topic has been trending in forums. So I typed in Nestle again, and narrowed my search down to posts for the last week in English. I got 946 hits, most of which seemed to be posts in forums commenting on an article about Nestle in a newspaper, or a forum of mommy bloggers. The newspaper articles were mostly financial while the mommy bloggers were talking about coupons and products. Narrowing it down to thread instead of posts, there were 450 hits. I had hoped I would see a unique topic of conversation in each one, but didn’t.
I think the better and more specific the terms of your search are, especially in Topsy and Boardreader, the better the results.
The paid tool that I looked at is SAS Social Media Analytics. SAS identifies comments from publication. Hover over the headline to read the full text. Details like author and date of the article are also shown. SAS can also identify any negative discussion in any medium, and can identify how key performance indicators change over time. It can also identify influencers and popular topics of discussion. Check it out at http://www.sas.com/offices/NA/canada/en/software/customer-intelligence/social-media-analytics/?gclid=CMb1tY7BgawCFZAAQAodeRPROA.
This commercial about Occupy Wall Street outlines some of the issues that are important to the organisers and speakers. It is one of the first commercials done for the movement. It was uploaded by USAmericansWakeUp on Oct 14, 2011, and produced by Glenn Grossman & David Sauvage.
Before I get into the meat of this article, I have to admit that I have been following the “Occupy” movement mostly on TV, in the newspapers, and online on YouTube. YouTube gives us the flexibility of seeing professionally shot video, as well as video captured by regular folks, and for me, visual images are very powerful to tell this story.
The “Occupy” movement has moved worldwide, but I focused on the New York movement, on Wall Street, and the use they are making of social media. The movement follows the “unconference” style of convening, where those in attendance bring forth ideas to be discussed and can set the agenda. People who want to speak are put “on stack” which is an ordered waiting list of those who want to speak. Items that do get on the agenda are discussed and feedback is given verbally, but also with a set of gestures. Being heard and having your opinion considered is of great importance to the group and organizers.
The movement is officially known as the New York City General Assembly, if I am to believe the website at www.nycga.cc, which refers to itself as the official website. There you can find all of the traditional elements of a website: Who we are, Calendar, Resources, etc. And in this case, there is also a tab for donations.
There are several Facebook pages set up to look at the issues discussed, and they provide an events calendar, photo gallery, comments from those in attendance, and news coverage of the movement.
The movement also has a presence on Twitter, reddit and YouTube, as I mentioned earlier. What I have not been able to locate is a blog, whether it be for simple comments, or for discussions of this issues, and progress on them.
A blog reflecting how discussions are progressing in each of the topics, I think, would be very useful for a movement like this. People need to see that progress is being made.
It made be too early yet to start surveying, but this is something that should be kept in mind. An assembly like this that is less conventional and structured can surface great ideas, but the real measure of success for many will be whether they can be implemented. The organizers may also just want to gage how well known the movement has become, and whether it is supported, and by whom.
I will keep looking for a blog. It may be out there.
“See it. Film it. Share it.” That’s the motto in the banner of the community site The Hub (http://hub.witness.org/en/share/groups/all). It is a place where human rights activists can share video about an incident or event or movement to address some injustice. The site has both amateur film and professional ones. It is associated with the blog Witness.
I liked what I saw. It is clear from the moment that you land on the site what it is about, and what the purpose of it is. Three tabs in the home page make this clear: The See It tab shows people which films have been popular using several criteria; the Share It tab lists human rights groups and lets you start your own group, and; the Take Action tab lists event and provides tools and resources.
So using The Hub as my litmus test, I started looking for Canadian sites that did a good job inviting in a community, engaging them, and getting them to take action. This took longer than I thought it would.
Some success at last was found at the Plan Canada site (http://plancanada.ca/home ). It is similar to The Hub, in that it is immediately clear what it is about. Tabs take you to information about what Plan does, where it works, and what you can do to help. And the help tab has a drop down menu offering choices of how to make a gift and how to get involved. What draws you in, though, are the big photographs of smiling, wide-eyed children, who clearly live in difficulty, but smile all the same. However, the site does not have a place to have an interactive dialogue.
Dynamic Conditioning Centre (http://www.dccentres.ca/community), a Toronto based fitness and nutrition centre, has a community wall, a photo gallery, a section for testimonials and a blog. There does not seem to be extensive activity, but it does have interactive elements.
I had some success with The Active Network, which is an international company with an office in Vancouver. The Active Network has a customer portal with a community network section and an e-Marketing section providing tips, tools and resources for the company’s customers. However, this is not really a Canadian Company.
So after hours of searching, I was not really able to find a great example of community management in a Canadian company. I think I just did not know where to look for it.
“Think globally, act locally” has been a call-to-action for decades now, usually associated with the environment and keeping it clean. It also has been adopted by big companies to recognize that a campaign that works in, say, Toronto, might not work in Quebec City. Cities, boroughs, and neighbourhoods have unique identities.
So now we have these location based services (LBS), which get people thinking locally for every service and product. I’m not sure that LBS will catch on with big companies for public relations campaigns for some time. They would have to give up a lot of decision making to their local managers. And I struggle to see how it will be used.
I think YouTube and citizen journalists already make good use of local phenomena and trends that can be later used in a wider ranging campaign for a big company. (Think of the Optimism is Contagious girl in the Maxwell House commercial a few years back http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kKswLd65Ws ) There may be some value in that for LBS, but I can’t see how it could have more impact than YouTube.
For small businesses, though, I see a lot of use. Knowing where the best place to eat in the neighbourhood, or where there is a services station if your car has just broken down, is a great help. Giving rewards to loyal customers and planning events or campaigns around them to get them to bring you new customers, helps build a good mutually-beneficial relationship. LBS might even be helpful to identify who is talking about you a lot in case you ever needed to do a focus group or survey of real users/customers.
Along with LBS we also looked at Quick Response coding (QR), Augmented Reality (AR) and discovery engines. All of these services have great appeal for individuals that are very social and are out and about. From a public relations perspective, the entertainment and travel industries would be able to profit the most from these services. Getting ideas where to go, or meeting real friends, Facebook friends, or like-minded people from other social or social media groups is great for leisure activities and services and products that cater to them.
These services may also be used in campaigns for charities and not for profit groups. We are accustomed to running marathons and climbing buildings like the CN Tower to raise funds. These events get a lot of media coverage. I can see where scavenger hunts and flash mobs and other new ways to get groups together to do something fun and altruistic will make great use of all of the services that we looked at.
A note about Oversharing
I saw this website which talks about the dangers of letting people know your every move. You may have already seen it. http://pleaserobme.com/
When and how to communicate is how I would sum up the assignment this week. In case there are readers out there who are not in my Social Media class at Ryerson, the assignment was to sign up for PR Blogs, tell why we decided to follow these bloggers, and discuss what we read. Straightforward enough, right? But the blogs this week got me thinking about something I’ve been struggling with for a few months. How can I be effective as a communicator if I send out regular messages with little relevance? What we say is important, but when and how we say it is even more important.
So, I chose these bloggers by typing in 25 Best PR Blogs, and then narrowing it down to the ones that were in North America. My PR study so far has shown me that a lot of literature is out of the UK and Australia, and since I am not at all familiar with those markets, I chose the ones that are closer to home. I had been to a couple of these sites before, for assignments in other courses, and I went back to the Dave Fleet blog out of interest because I had worked with him in our past working lives. Dave is a very funny guy, so I knew he’d have interesting things to say/ write. I found all of the sites informative.
The blog entry “When a Mea Culpa backfires” (Beyond the Hype, http://blog.loispaul.com/blog/ accessed September 26, 2011) discusses the mea culpa of Reed Hastings, co-founder and CEO of Netflix. He admits the company has made mistakes transitioning from DVDs to video streaming, but as the author, Lois Paul, points out in a more eloquent way that I’m about to, “so what?” People may have been inconvenienced and annoyed, but without having something to offer them in compensation or as a goodwill gesture, why open up the topic for discussion. He may actually just be giving these same customers (or former customers) more reason to be annoyed. The message was right and good, but the audience was wrong.
But the post that really caught my attention was written by Todd Defren. In his blog entry “Goal: Finding More Meaning in Social Media” (PR Squared http://www.pr-squared.com/, accessed September 26) he brings attention to a police brutality case in Fullerton, CA. This case, he believes, illustrates the value of citizen journalism made possible by social media.
A young schizophrenic man was beaten by police. The incident is videotaped by bystanders. We can hear the man calling out for his father. I found it heartbreaking. Later, the young man’s father photographs his son, with all of his bruises and injuries from the beating. To this point, police have admitted no culpability, no error in judgment, in this case. Defren credit citizen journalists with bringing this case to the forefront, and not allowing the police to bury the incident. He says “the use of Social Media led the people of Fullerton to question everything — with a fierceness and energy that can only rise from the bottom-up; from a fuller, more contextual perspective on the truth.”
And while I mourn the loss of context and fact-checking in the reports that are available all over the web, I can’t argue that citizen journalists can be a witness to some injustice that might otherwise go unnoticed or unquestioned. And that has value.
FYI, here are the other sites to which I subscribed:
Beyond the Hype http://blog.loispaul.com/blog/
Spin Sucks http://www.spinsucks.com/
Danny Brown Social Media Marketing http://dannybrown.me/2011/09/26/serve-yourself-ain%e2%80%99t-nobody-gonna-do-for-you/
Brian Solis http://www.briansolis.com/
PR Squared http://www.pr-squared.com/
Dave Fleet http://davefleet.com/
Peter Shankman http://shankman.com/
Communications Conversations http://www.arikhanson.com/
So it took this course on social media to get me to start blogging. I am a Generation x-er and this is my first post that will be read by someone other than myself. I am certainly out of the loop on this. When I read in Social networks transforming how Canadians get the news (http://www.mediaresearch.ca/en/projects/socialmedia.htm , accessed September 19) that 69 per cent of us get our news from social media, it supported what I’ve have come to think of the journalism profession. I’m realising that trained journalists are a dying breed, and that anyone who is an eyewitness can now be a reporter. I know this is not the point of the article, but it is in large part a result of the access and prevalence of social media in our society, and so relevant to the course. So I wonder if that means that as a society we are more interested in information and less interested in context. I’d appreciate feed back on that hypothesis.
Comments about PR blogs, microblogs, and other uses of social media.
Image source
This week our assignment in Social Media class is to identify and...
