Social Marketing Conversations

Equating a successful social media presence to a well-planned cocktail party is a common comparison.  When plotting a strategy consider a variety of techniques based around the cocktail party model.

One of those tactics is a drawing or door-prize that uses a contest model.  The conversation on how to develop an online contest has come often enough and over the holiday break, I took the time to use my favorite ideation tool to develop a model.

There are two legs to this model – one is low ‘hard cost’ and just requires a good deal of manual labor to implement, monitor and manage.  The second leg assumes most all of what is in the first, but allows for a more robust implementation assuming a funded budget for custom programming and monitoring tools.

What would be the results of this kind of a campaign?

• Increased awareness of the brand / message
• Increased followers / fans
• Some combination of the two

How would you determine the ROI of the effort? Begin with tracking the initial investments and setting the baseline of what’s happening now.  Establish what a success looks like and monitor measure and readjust as needed.

There are probably a few more aspect than I have considered here though – what would you add?

The model used MindManager from Mindjet to create the Mind Map of the Online Contest Model.  Make sure you are current with Adobe Acrobat8 and Flash9 installed and this mind map & player should work (MindJet requirements).  Mac users may have issues – contact me to send you the MindMap itself if you have the Mac version of MindManager.

FCC Disclaimer – TSMB Media is a registered reseller of Mindjets Mind Manager products and receives no remuneration / compensation

The first installment at www.BlogTalkRadio.com/StevenGroves has concluded on the topic of Web3.0.

Many, many thanks to the participants and panelist.  The interaction was lively and the topic engaging.

Jay Thompson / www.ThePhoenixRealEstateGuy.com, Tyler Hurst / www.TDHurst.com, Zane Burnett / www.HouseofZane.com and of course, the ultimate instigator of this whole event, Eric Bryant / www.MyRECoach.com.  Guys, just a whale of a good time and thanks for being a part of it.

I had a lot of fun using the Masked Mexican / Lucha Libre Wrestler theme too… Eric weighed in with a jump from the ropes about 1/2 way in and you could hear the crowd cheering or booing along with the ring bell. continue reading »

Jeremiah Owyang joined Twitter 1 month (December 2006) before me (January 2007) and Gary Vaynerchuck join in May 2007.

How do I know?  A sweet little application from Neville Ridley-Smith (@nev) called ‘When Did You Join Twitter’.  I wanted this data a few weeks ago when I wrote the piece about the success of Gary’s marketing tactics, but did not have a nice quick way to get it.  I tweeted my request for the info and now we can all get that little morsel of data whenever we want. 

Neville said he did it by using a bit of programming to find the first tweet in a users stream.

Cool… nice job Neville

Gary Vaynerchuk got me started on this… just giving credit where credit is due.

Gary’s site at  Cork’d got hacked and I was happy about the experience.  Not that he was hacked mine you, but I really enjoyed the video segment he posted at GaryVaynerchuk.com, where he shared a little about the hack; starting that it got reported on TechCrunch before HE even know it had happened.

His post is titled “I had a wild day, you? Turning negatives into positives!” and in it he shares the roller coaster ride he had in getting the site back and working as expected.  In it he also talked about compensating people with money, Whuffies or whatever to get the site back online quickly.

I do not believe that Gary is poor by any means, likewise I do not think he made a gazillion in selling wine at WineLibrary.com, but in the video he talked about offering on Twitter whatever people wanted to get the site back up quickly.  At the time I heard him say it, I thought I had an idea what he was talking about, but not certain.  I wondered how I might find out about this ‘Whuffie’ to make sure I understood where he was going with his story…  enter the power of Viddler.

Gary uses a the video service from Viddler.com, which allows people to make comments at specific places in the video and only by noticing the comments from the post did I get a link to Tara Hunt / HorsePigCow.com and where she is proposing the use of the term ‘Whuffie’ (her term) to refer to the ’social capital’ (my term), either of which comes from participating and sharing in the social media space.

Tara has refined the idea well enough that she has come out with a book ‘The Whuffie Factor‘ that is now in pre-order with Amazon(go to her site or use my link to get yours) and I admire her work in applying a word to it to make it memorable.  Turns out her use of the term was first proposed in the novel ‘Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom’ by Cory Doctorow, which portrays a world in which all your needs are met and the medium of exchange to build any kind of wealth, is your reputation, measured by Whuffies.

I suppose a Whuffie is fine by me, but my sense is we’ll not see the phases used in board rooms much – what I think will play is social capital.  Businesses understand the need for capital of all kinds, and the usage I saw coined back in June 2007 in an interview by the Washington Post about Twitter.  Social Capital and Whuffies might be about the same, but popular usage will dictate the day.

Which term do you like better – Whuffie or Social Capital?

I’ve been called a romantic before and when I got a newsletter from 24Hr Fitness with some of these I thought I’d share it! 

1. Who was the first to declare Valentine’s Day an official holiday in 1537?
2. What was invented by NECCO in 1866?
3. The city of Verona receives 1,000 letters for whom every Valentine’s Day?
4. What product was introduced on Valentine’s Day in 1929?
5. Who sent the earliest known Valentine’s Day card?
6. What US state became a member of the Union in 1912 and is known as the Valentine State?

Answers after the leap – more trivia here…

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