I had a chance to attend a local Social Fresh event in Tampa. Social Fresh, founded by Jason Keath, is a one day conference targeted for marketers and small businesses.

The Tampa event had some well known industry speakers like Spike Jones from Brains on Fire and Rick Burnes from Hubspot to name a few. Maggie Fox from Social Media Group kicked things off with an excellent keynote presentation about “The Art and Science of Scaling Social Media”.

What I liked the most was exposure to some great thinkers in my own backyard like Jason Breed (INgage Networks), Mark Meyer (Digital Response), Griffin Farley (22squared), Tessa Horehled (Think Interactive), and John Ludwig (Push). The quality and the range of the work was refreshing.

Since I have been creating strategies and executional plans for clients around social media for the past year I felt like I knew a lot but I did walk away with some the following insights I wanted to share.

1. Create An Ecosystem – I sometimes call it “Your Brand’s Social Architecture” but it is basically the same. Listen and identify conversational hubs. Think about a seamless flow from brand experiences from one platform to another. This is the foundation.

2. A Strategic Plan and A Great Idea – Understand the target audiences’ passion points and develop a launching pad for a direct relationship with your customers by providing interaction and expression. Last, there needs to be a unifying theme to create relevance and value.

3. Measurement – Determine what is a significant value exchange. Is it influence, engagement, loyalty, share of voice, or specific actions or conversions?

4. Test & Refine – Use A/B testing to determine what platforms work for your brand.

The day was full of good tips and practices so I recommend attending if you find the conference in a city near you. It is affordable and the caliber of speakers are always impressive.

Also check out these links:
SPY – a browser based social media listening tool

#socialmedia – a weekly twitter based discussion around “The Business of Social Media”

It’s a new year, be daring, try social media to round out your existing marketing plan.

Despite what some people think, social media is a valid tool for serious-minded business owners.

Everyone has different marketing objectives and varied levels of experience with social media so we like to take a simple approach to keep things manageable.

In my opinion, these three concepts sum up social media objectives;
LISTEN, ENGAGE, PARTICIPATE.

LISTEN:
Listening is a great place to begin. You’ll gain valuable insight about your customers and your clients.

Start by creating a listening dashboard to begin monitoring conversations that are happening about your business or product. A simple and free way is to use Google Reader (you need a gmail account) or your current RSS feed reader (I use Netvibes).

Next you will need to do a search on Blogsearch.Google for any competitors, keywords or phases that pertain to your business. Based on the results you can subscribe by finding the orange RSS icon, then right-click and copy the link into Google Reader.

Next go to: Search.Twitter and do the same kind of searches and add those too.

For some, a 3rd party solutions like Radian6 and Techrigy maybe a more robust solution. Google is simple and free but may not be the perfect solution for you.

If you need more information I recommend these articles:
Grow Bigger Ears In 10 Minutes
How To: Create a Listening Dashboard for your Organization

ENGAGE:
Ready for more? Engage your audience, offer incentives, provide a platform for people to share and engage. Start a conversation…

Your tactics (application or tools) should offer offer facilitation with the following:
1. Communication
Email or survey tools are the more traditional approach to sharing& gaining information with a group of people. If your looking to go to the next level you could use Twitter or your Facebook Fan Page to send quick text messages to your group and/or customers. Ceo, Tony Hsieh, from Zappo’s insists Twitter and other forms of communication are required for excellent customer service.
2. Collaboration
With the use of polls and other tools it makes it easy to add collaboration to your web site or blog. Utilizing 3rd party tools like BazaarVoice, Rubbermaid discovered that adding customers reviews to their website, increased sales and decrease returns.
3. Education
By utilizing your blog and Twitter you can educate customers on updates and new product offerings. Podcasts and YouTube are great tools for in-depth education. Home Depot has How-To Videos for fixing decks and other projects.
4. Entertainment
YouTube and other video sites are great tools for posting videos for entertainment. Think of your favorite classic commercial. Blendtec produced numerous product demos based on the concept “Will It Blend?”

PARTICIPATE:
Participate back into the conversation. Rectify any negative comments and offer solutions to your followers. Become a “Trust Agent”.

The key is to create value in the last part of the discussion cycle. This is an opportunity to rectify any negative comments and offer solutions or offer a whole new place to interact or become a member.

Depending on your business and customers, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and MySpace may be enough or you can venture out with other social media tools like Ning, CrowdVine, and OneSite.

CONCLUSION
Not everyone is ready for the new world of social media but if you take small steps like spending a few months listening you start to understand the whole ecosystem. The ecosystem is changing frequently with new tools and networks to participate in but like learning to swim you just master one stroke at a time and then all of a sudden you realize it is not as daunting and foreign as you thought.

Image: Laurel Papworth & Gary Hayes

Below is a overview of key membership and usage statistics for LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter from a great article on Social Media Today. The numbers support how these networks have grown and how influential they are in today’s business.

LinkedIn: LinkedIn has approximately 50 million users worldwide in 200 countries. The membership on LinkedIn is growing at roughly one new member per second. When LinkedIn launched in 2003, it took 477 days, almost a year and four months to reach the first million members. The last million took only 12 days. Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are LinkedIn members.

Facebook: Facebook has over 300 million members with 150 million that log in at least once per day. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook are 35 years and older and according to Facebook more than 2 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared across the network, each week.

Twitter: Twitter has more than 32 million members with the segment of 45-54 year olds being the top demographic and 25-34 year olds following closely behind at second. It has been found in other studies that baby boomers and senior citizens are more likely to join Twitter than their grandchildren.

These findings are from The New Symbiosis of Professional Networks study. If you want to learn more I recommend reading the whole article:

The Big Three Social Networks Have Emerged as Professional Networks: LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

I recently found this good article on “Measuring Engagement”.

The article discusses engagement goals (what you want people to do) and what key performance indicators (KPIs) are good to measure.

Every client/company may have unique goals but I thought the final list was a good example.

1. Register for Alerts by RSS feed – to get new content
2. Views (videos, rich images, design concepts)
3. Use the design widget
4. Put the widget on their blog or Facebook, etc
5. Feedback (via the site)
6. Email subscriptions
7. Favorites (add an item to favourites)
8. Feedback (via the site)
9. Forward to a friend
10. Invite / Refer (a friend)
11. Social media sharing / participation (activity on key social media sites, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Digg, relevant design forums, blogs etc)
12. Time spent on key pages
13. Time spent on site (by source / by entry page)

By tracking and measuring your user’s actions you then can start to focus on the user’s needs, likes and dislikes. In the end you give your audience the right tools and content they are looking for.

Branding can be a confusing topic. A simple definition is building a “look” using fonts, color schemes, graphic devices, imagery, and a logo that all combine to represent a corporate “personality”. That personality should ultimately reflect the kind of business that you do and the values that you hope to project to the consumer.

I often get questions like, “Why does my logo have to be in the same place on everything?” or “Can we change the logo color to yellow, just in the Powerpoint templates?”.

There is no quick answer for either of these questions but if you keep in mind that you are projecting a “personality” and that everything created should advance that objective and be in a consistent “language” then these questions become a little easier to answer.

Let’s take the first question, Why does my logo have to be in the same place on everything?
Putting the logo in the same place on everything sends the subconscious message that you and your company are consistent and well organized. You also get the benefit of recognition and expectation when you send your client something new. Over time, a quick glance is all that is needed to alert your audience that this piece of business collateral is from you. Which may make the difference between being read or being tossed in the garbage. That being said, for every rule, there is an exception. When consistency is the norm, a break from that can shock the consumer into taking a second look. The trick is to make the rules work for you by being aware of them and always using them to your advantage.

“Can we change the logo color to yellow, just in the Powerpoint templates?”
Of course you can, but do you want to? Go back to the “personality” filter. What does it say about your company that you arbitrarily change the color of your logo to suit your short term needs? You did not plan ahead for all of your logos uses when you were designing it, you are not that organized, your attention to detail is not your strong suit, your into quick and easy fixes… you get the picture.

Designers are not here to make your life harder and more complicated, we want to make things easier and help you project the right “Corporate Personality” for your business. We do that by creating a set of guidelines that safeguard your “look” and “personality” and actually make future marketing easier by choosing the “language” that we use to describe your company and sticking with it.