Thinking Social Media Strategy

There are many resources available to help you develop your social media strategy. Here are a few to get you started:

http://www.slideshare.net/vaninadelobelle/social-media-strategy-392440

http://www.clickz.com/3634939

http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-marketing/develop-a-social-media-strategy-in-7-steps/

http://mashable.com/2010/01/14/social-media-strategy-needs/

What are your favorite resources?

Measuring the effectiveness of your social media campaign

So, you've gone to the trouble of setting up a detailed social media campaign. You've used many different tools, and offered your audience value in the form of diverse online content. But now, that you've put all the effort in, how do you know if you've achieved your goals?

Measuring the effectiveness of a social media campaign will be different for everyone. Free and paid tools alike will give you the raw numbers, but the numbers are completely useless without analysis, and the best analysis will be different for every campaign.

Avinash Kaushik is one of the giants of social media measurement. In this video he offers advice on social media measurement. Since he is very well known in the analytics industry, most professional analysts refer to his writing. The video and his blog provide invaluable tips for web analytics.

Looking for tools? There are plenty of free tools on the web to give you the raw numbers for your analysis. Google Analytics is the most popular, but if you don't want to use Google, check out Open Web Analytics and Piwik

Organizing without organizations

Here are two videos with radically different opinions about the proliferation of information and collaboration on the Internet.

First, we have Clay Shirky, he tells us we don't need organizations any more because web 2.0 tools allow for a new and revolutionary type of collaboration.

Next, we have David M. Levy. He is concerned that too much information leads to a reduction in creativity. The information overload facilitated by web 2.0 tools produces a decline in innovative thinking.

What do you think?

Why is this important for organizational communication?

Steps to SEO

1) Content: Identify appropriate ways to publish content for your organization.
Examples - Blogs? Wikis? Twitter? YouTube? Podcasting? Webinar? Press Release? Articles? Music? Real life Events combined with any of the above?

2)Distribution: Identify appropriate channels for distributing content.
Examples - Aggregators? Directories? Online and Offline influencers? Social Media Sites?

3) Directories: Sign up for directories - identify which are right for you - Technoratti? Del.ici.ous? Digg? What else?

4) Pitch your content to your distributors and update your site with the directories if applicable.

5) Start over - create new content - get it out there.

Interesting Videos to help us with our SEO

On SEO

This YouTube channel from WebBizIdeas.com has many informative videos about how to get the most from your SEO efforts.

XML

Sometimes it helps to have some basic XML knowledge. There are helpful videos about XML made by
Tutvid and IBM Developerworks. IBM Developerworks also offers this great video on why XML is useful for Web 2.0 applications.

Alone in a crowd...

So... now you've published the website for your company, and you've started a social media campaign including your blog, but you're just one voice among the multitudes so how can anyone find you? Some experts say the answer lies in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is supposed to help organizations get their web pages to the front page of the Google listings, which as we know from eye-tracking studies, is really the only page that people look at anyway.

There are three main (related) considerations when engaging in SEO:

Content (and whether anyone is linking to it)

Keywords

Source Code (including meta tags and XML)

We will address each of these factors in detail in our class this week, and conduct a critical evaluation on the benefits and shortcomings of SEO for a social media PR campaign.

How to make your website more mobile friendly

Here are links to some helpful tips on how to make your website more mobile friendly:

http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-usability/mobile-guidelines.shtml

http://carsonified.com/blog/mobile/make-your-site-mobile-friendly/

http://www.iphonemicrosites.com/articles/6-tips-to-optimize-your-current-site-for-the-iphone/

http://webaccess.berkeley.edu/developer-tips.php

And for those companies who have the money to hire someone else to do it: http://instantmobilizer.com/


Basic HTML

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_primary.asp

http://www.pageresource.com/html/index2.htm

http://personalweb.about.com/cs/beginninghtml/a/basic_html.htm

Now... go to your last blog post and use basic HTML to make it more mobile friendly...

Mobile Media and the User Experience (UX)

In this video Richel Hinman, a mobile user experience designer and researcher for Adaptive Path discusses the ways we need to think differently about mobile UX at the 2008 UX week conference in San Francisco CA.

Her talk brings to light many interesting questions about how we as users engage with mobile technologies and how we as social media experts need to allow for different types of user engagement. Questions worth thinking about include:

1) What non-standard ways do we regularly engage with our mobile devices?

2) What is missing right now from our ideal mobile interface?

3) What type of questions should we be asking users before we create new mobile applications?

4) How can we take advantage of the tools already easily available to us to add value for our clients who choose to engage with us using a mobile device?

While mobile technologies are becoming more popular every year, studies show that most Americans still connect to the Internet mainly on a wireline. This means that there is tremendous growth available in the areas of mobile technologies, but also tells us that we can do a better job at reaching the users. Think about what your ideal mobile experience looks like - what do you need to help you achieve your goals? Now how can you provide that for other users? What can your company do to reach out to people and provide a richer mobile experience?

Podcasting and video links

Audacity - a free audio editor: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Our Media - Focuses on providing tools and community for developing media, including video, streaming audio, and podcasts: http://www.ourmedia.org/

Jamendo - a place to get Creative Commons licensed music for your audio or video presentation: http://jamendo.com

Creative commons - to find out about different some rights reserved copyrighted artistic works: http://creativecommons.org

The open source cinema project - to remix video: http://www.opensourcecinema.org/projects

Video and social media

Interestingly enough, it seems many companies, are jumping on the social media bandwagon with campaigns that include youtube channels.

Are these companies (such as coke) really late to the table? Youtube videos are nothing new? Are they afraid to engage in actual social interaction online, which includes allowing your audience to speak and is thus more risky? They are taking advantage of the public's desire for funny and interesting entertainment, and sites like Youtube allow them to engage with this desire in a similar way to the television advertising that they are used to. But has anything changed? Or is Youtube just television 2.0?

In contrast to my blog or facebook page, my habits concerning Youtube are remarkably passive. I download the videos I want to watch, and I watch them. Occasionally I read the comments other people have posted, but I rarely post comments of my own. As far as Youtube is concerned, I am a media consumer - not a producer. This flies in the face of usual assumption about the nature of participation on web 2.0 social media technologies and is worth considering when we ask questions about why companies like coke are moving online.

What do you think?

Product placement in Rockband

I am a weekend drumming warrior - I excel at the "medium" setting in rockband, and my "band" has played many different venues in many different cities around urban America. We play hits by all my favorite bands from the 80's 90's and 00's - the crowds love us - they sing along at every opportunity and pack the clubs we play at.

Every so often, we're asked to play for extra money or fame. These challenges are sponsored by instrument companies - Zildjian or Ibanez to name but two.

Is this a realistic depiction of life as a professional musician? In some ways it is, musicians, like other professional entertainers and athletes compete for sponsorships so that they can afford to keep plying their trade. On the other hand, however, my no name band in real life is less likely to be offered a sponsorship from a large instrument company, and more likely to play in a small dive bar, half packed with an audience who could care less whether we are there or not.

So rather than adding to realism, I would say product placement in games like Rockband reinforces a fantasy and provides companies with a new captive audience for their product. Not that this is necessarily a problem, however those who insist that products are necessary for the realism of the game should examine how realistic the game is as a whole apart from product placement. Rockband is certainly not an accurate description of the life of a musician's life.

Thoughts?

Gaming

Here are some interesting links about gaming:

http://www.torontosun.com/news/world/2010/01/21/12555591.html

http://www.pewinternet.org/Presentations/2008/Teens-Video-Games-and-Civics.aspx

http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2008/Adults-and-Video-Games.aspx

http://www.pewinternet.org/Presentations/2009/28--Teens-Mobile-Phones-and-Video-Gaming.aspx

http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2006/1881

http://www.mycoke.com/index.jsp

http://www.joyitforward.ca/joygles/

http://zone.msn.com/en-us/home

http://us.blizzard.com/store/browse.xml?f=c:6

http://usmilitary.about.com/od/armyjoin/a/armygame.htm

http://www.americasarmy.com/

http://www.eamobile.com/Web/CA/en/mobile-games

You can post pictures to your wiki profile page

It's easy!

To do this, when you're in editing mode, click on the icon of the picture. This will take you to a screen where you can upload a picture from your computer to the wiki. When the picture is uploaded, double click on it to insert it into the page you are editing.

This works with other files as well, for example if you want to post a power point file to our "Presentations" page