The reaction people have to the word ‘evangelist’ is very peculiar given the religious connotations, however its description is precise with regards to marketing or in this case social media marketing. As the Chief Evangelist of Alltop, I did just as I described above. I shared the good news of Alltop from Hawaii to Texas and across the globe to Spain, Japan, India, and just about anywhere I could connect with someone.

I did this through attending three major new media and business conferences: BlogWorld Expo, SobCon, and SXSW. I armed myself with a good attitude, the acceptance that some people may not like Alltop, and a lot of swag! So much swag that Co-Founder of SobCon, Liz Strauss correlates me with “sticker bombing.” Yes, I will make sure you and your entire family, even your cousin twice removed would have or at least offered free Alltop stickers. Soon after, she named me an SOB.

But, how did I become the Chief Evangelist for Alltop? In other words, how did Guy Kawasaki find me? One word, Twitter. There’s a great story behind this, but I’ll save it for another time. Fortunately, Sanjay Shetty founder of Communities R US has a list of 17 different sources to find your evangelists. Before you dive in and begin building an external community, be sure to identify your internal evangelists first.

• Loyalty program members. Customers give their information and present their member’s cards to receive discounted items or perhaps free gifts, but are you leveraging their loyalty?
• Social Media. Umm, I just shared that I connected with Guy via Twitter. You never know the geniuses that are among your followers, fans, or in your circles until you engage them in sincere conversation.
• Followers of A-Listers. No, I didn’t say follow A-Listers, but harvest their followers. Too often, an A-Lister might be busy doing A-Lister things to notice the geniuses in their own followers or fans.

Read more on SmartBlogs.

1. Definitions: How do Gen Y women define work and work-life balance? How do their definitions relate to their workplace values?
2. Intergenerational Workplace Dynamics: How do Gen Y women interact with and benefit from older colleagues? How can older colleagues benefit from Gen Y women?
3. Gender in the workplace: What gender differences do Gen Y women observe in the workplace? How is work different for men than women?

As you can see, anyone interested in marketing or in my focus, building communities, would find this report useful.

Above is a screen shot of a brief conversation with First Insurance Company of Hawaii. I published my wall post after declining an invitation to a “social media” event co-hosted by First Insurance and Good To Grill restaurant. FICOH’s reply took me by surprise, “Happy shopping.” It triggered some questions, but mostly a shrug that they weren’t interested in my business. For the record, we’re looking at purchasing auto insurance for two vehicles and business insurance for three companies by the end of the first quarter of 2012.

Let’s examine the invitation.

“Sample the delectable creations of Good To Grill; test your auto insurance knowledge in fun games; learn how you and your friends and family can get a Good To Grill gift card simply by getting a free auto insurance quote from First Insurance; be one of the first 30 attendees and receive a special First Insurance gift bag!”

I’ve dined at GTG on Kapahulu and can attest that their food is delicious! It looks like they have new items on the menu since I last dined there and a new location in the First Insurance building. Sampling “delectable creations” would be a dealmaker for me to attend or at least now it’s on my radar to dine the next time I’m in the area.

Games are a great way to engage attendees and gift bags for the first 30 creates urgency. Smart marketing. These two things alone will gain them at the very least free content from attendees that post their experiences (and gifts)  through their personal Twitter and/or Facebook accounts.

Attendees and their family and friends will learn about an opportunity to receive a GTG gift card by getting a free auto insurance quote. Another smart marketing tactic. I mean, who doesn’t want something in exchange for data? If you participate in any social network, you’re giving up your data for free. Why not get a gift card to a great restaurant?

Lessons Learned

If you’re a business owner of any size, here are some lessons to learn from one brief post on Facebook:

1. Everyone has a circle of influence. My mentor Guy Kawasaki has coined a new phrase in social media, “Nobodies are the new somebodies.” Technology has empowered people from usual consumers to publishers of media. This is very impacting on the future of communication.
2. Outsourcing content may not be the solution. Surely, an insurance salesperson would not have missed the opportunity to sell me a package. Raise up and train your internal evangelists!
3. The maximum characters for a tweet is 140. It may not seem like a lot, but the reply I received was less than 40-characters and quite possibly cost them a few thousand dollars. And, don’t forget…everyone has a circle of influence.

Recommendations to FICOH

Providing feedback without solutions is simply complaining. I’m not complaining. Here are a few solutions for FICOH:

1. Review your social media policy and standard operating procedures on handling replies. Both should be very flexible and allow for case by case management.
2. Pause and focus. Managing social channels can get overwhelming very quickly. Don’t forget to take a break and a breathe, then return to replying.
3. Be sincere in your efforts. Do you really want me to be happy while I by pass your insurance company to become your competitors customer?

Again, this is not a complaint, but to bring awareness to all businesses and organizations opting to use social media as part of their communications and marketing plans.

This Spring semester I’ll be once again teaching my six-part Social Media Primer workshops as follows:

• February 18, 2012 — Introduction to Social Media
• February 25, 2012 – Sorting Through the Puzzle Pieces of Social Media
• March 17, 2012 – Productivity and Publishing with Mobile Applications
• March 31, 2012 – How to Use Social Media to Build Your Professional and Personal Brand
• April 14, 2012 – How to Measure Social Media
• April 21, 2012 – Social Media Case Studies

Each class can be taken separately, however I recommend taking them all because I’ll refer back to previously discussed content from time to time. My philosophy on social media is that it’s very personal and intimate. Course content is geared towards understanding people (social network users), sharing from your authentic self in order to build an engaged and sustainable community.

Register today with Pacific New Media.

Providing Value

Provide value is probably the most overused phrase in the social media industry, but it’s also a need. Think about it. In all media whether print, radio, music, movies, or social content; we consume media that provides value to our intellect or entertainment. Knowing this, what value are you providing to the conversations on social channels?

As I mentioned above, I focused my Twitter content on social media content. In order to do this, I grabbed the RSS feed from the Social Media topic on Alltop (Disclosure: I am the Chief Evangelist of leading news aggregation site Alltop.) and auto fed it into a campaign set-up on Email Vision’s Campaign Commander Social Edition. I scheduled three posts pulled from the feed and published to @NEENZ every hour, every day.

Doing this required a lot of trust on my end. Trust that the writers and bloggers aggregated on Alltop would give valuable content. This wasn’t blind trust as I just mentioned I am the Chief Evangelist of Alltop which means I aggregated the news sources listed on the site. So, I don’t recommend you auto-tweet posts from sources you are unfamiliar with. Alltop is a starting point to find your valuable resources.

Twitter Statistics

In the month of January 2012, I tweeted 2,124 posts with links to articles and blog posts from others’ news and blog sources. It is very important to mix in content not only from your own blog, but from others in your industry. In this case, I published tweets with links to this blog only 40 times last month. The 2,124 posts generated the following engagement statistics:

• 261,489 click-throughs
• 285 retweets

The average daily click-throughs on links tweeted from my personal account ranged between 6K – 7K. The top 3 highest days were:

• January 29, 2012 — 11,797
• January 26, 2012 — 11,055
• January 15, 2012 — 10,412

Most posts averaged more than 100 click-throughs, however some climbed as high as 300+ with one post garnering 495 click-throughs.

Click-throughs are only a starting point into the insights to develop a strategic plan, however I will continue this process through the first quarter of 2012. Once I have all the data for the quarter, I’ll check, analyze, and share insights into my strategic decisions for the second quarter.

One key insight in retweets are the community members that found my content valuable enough to reshare with their respective communities. The top three accounts are:

• @jmacofearth
• @GhostWriter556
• @MediaTip

Combined the above three accounts increased exposure to dozens of stories by more than 16K community members. Note, I don’t know how many of the 16K have mutual followers as my account. I’d also like to point out one particular retweet from @teedubya:

In addition to the #socialmedia campaign, I also tracked the activity for #ATOSM. Here are the statistics:

• 40 total posts
• 3,456 click-throughs
• 10 retweets

As I mentioned earlier, the retweets are valuable insights. I recommend creating a Twitter List of these community members so that you can return the retweets of their shared content, engage to learn more about them to create even more valuable content, and as a result of these simple steps continue to build an engaged and sustainable community.

Moving Forward Into 2Q

The key insights gained from the monthly campaign report are:

• Based on the more than 261K click-throughs, publishing content from Alltop is valuable to my community.
• Using the #socialmedia hashtag expands my community to Twitter members that use search to find their news and not following.
• Followers increased by 40 new members.
• Increase in click-throughs from 2011. (Note: My personal account averaged 10K click-throughs per month, in 2011 it increased to an average of 10K per week, and based on this past month the average is about 8K per day.).

Based on the insights, I will continue the following strategies:

• Continue publishing 3 posts from Alltop every hour, every day.
• Continue using the #socialmedia hashtag.
• Create a List of community members that retweet content.
• Engage with community members and retweet their content, start conversations to learn more about what they find valuable.
• Begin looking at specific news resources that garner the most click-throughs and engagement.

There are more insights gained from the statistics, however I wanted to share the above to give my community an understanding of how I approach publishing content and Twitter campaigns.

Don’t waste anytime debating whether Google+ will have as many users as Facebook or Twitter. Instead, learn how to use the social network for communication, collaboration, community building, and more! I’ll be teaching a 3-hour hands-on workshop on Saturday, February 4, 2012 from 9am – 12pm at UH Manoa Kuykendahl Hall Room 305. Register today with Pacific New Media.

This list was compiled by Forbes contributor Haydn Shaughnessy for a study soon to be published using social audience measurement tool PeekAnalytics. Without knowing the algorithms and data used, I agree with this list. Well, not completely. It’s very difficult to rank these individuals in order because each contributes value to the industry in different ways. But, I do agree that these 10 are true influencers.

The article linked to each person’s Twitter account, however these are the power influencers of the social media industry and as such they’re strengthening their communities by using Google+. So, I’m supporting their efforts and linking to their G+ profiles.

1. Chris Brogan
2. Ann Handley
3. Guy Kawasaki
4. Gary Vaynerchuk
5. Scott Stratten
6. Robert Scoble
7. Glen Gilmore
8. Liz Strauss
9. Jason Falls
10. Mari Smith

Find out who made the Top 50 on Forbes.com.

It’s already February! Ask yourself, did you let any opportunities pass you by? Remember, social media is about being social, so add these events to your calendars too!

• February 1, 2012 — A Discussion on Foursquare and the Future of Geolocation facilitated by Aaron Landry and John Garcia from 6pm – 8pm at The Greenhouse Innovation Lounge.
• February 2, 2012 — The Hawaii iPad Users Group Meetup from 6pm – 9pm at the Greenhouse Innovation Lounge.
• February 2, 2012 — Search Engine Optimization workshop led by Rob Bertholf from 6pm – 9pm at UH Manoa.
• February 4, 2012 — Hands-On workshop on Google+ for communication, collaboration, and community building from 9am – 12pm at UH Manoa.
• February 7, 2012 — Social Media Boot Camp for Hawaii Human Resources, Recruiting & Staffing from 11:30am – 5pm at Amuse Wine Bar Cupola Theater.
• February 14 – 15, 2012 — PubCon Paradise 2012 at the Hilton Hawaiian Village Waikiki.
• February 15, 2012 — A Social Media Recipe for Success: Strategies for Wildly Successful Online Campaigns from 5:30pm – 6:30pm at Laniakea YWCA.
• February 16, 2012 — Web Analytics and Conversion Optimization workshop led by Rob Bertholf from 6pm – 9pm at UH Manoa.
• February 18, 2012 — Introduction to Social Media workshop from 9am – 12pm at UH Manoa.
• February 25, 2012 — Unconferenz 2012 from 8am – 4pm at Kapiolani Community College.

Looking for events on Kauai? Connect with Linda Sherman of Kauai Marketing. Looking for events on Maui? Contact Liza Pierce of A Maui Blog or Peter Liu of Kai Scapes. Looking for events on the island of Hawaii? Follow @CTarleton @KeolaDonaghy and @KrisBordessa on Twitter, they’re always doing something social and fun. Do you have an event to list? Send me an email.

“Social media is the use of technology to COMMUNICATE and COLLABORATE with people across the globe to build an engaged and sustainable COMMUNITY rich in CULTURE.”

Defining social media continues to be a challenge for practitioners to convey to new audiences. Above is my definition, derived through countless discussions and explorations of our practice. Wikipedia has a different definition which indicates that there are disagreements in just what is social media. But, this definition works for the type of clientele, the type of communities we’re building here at Oceanit, for our clients, through our volunteer work, and for our personal lives. This is the second of a 4-part series highlighting each of the 4 Cs of social media. Read more about communication and collaboration.

As we discuss the importance of building an engaged and sustainable community, let’s remember the two key points about communication and collaboration in social media. First, communication is not how you want to communicate with your targeted audience, but how they want to communicate with you. Don’t ignore your targeted audience that still rely on traditional media sources and don’t underestimate those that use social networks and new media tools like text messaging to communicate. Second, collaboration, as I like to put it, is where the magic happens in social media. This is where dialogues turn into world changing revolutions. Collaboration requires the engagement with your targeted audience, consumers have found their voices on social networks and media publishing tools, is your organization tuned in?

If you are communicating and collaborating with your social network users, then you will inevitably build a community. But, your goal is to build an engaged and sustainable community, one that works with and for you because they believe in your cause, products or services. The way to achieve this is by providing value.

Value in social media is not strictly broadcasting your organization, its products and services. It’s about sharing information that your target audience finds valuable in your industry. For example, if you’re an auto dealership you want to share news and information about breakthrough technologies and industry trends that will empower your targeted audience. This information may be something your competitors are doing, however by becoming a resource of information for the industry, your organization gains credibility with social network users.

I find all of my news from one source, leading news aggregation site, Alltop. (Disclosure: Since 2008, I am the Chief Evangelist of Alltop.). Alltop provides current news in more than 1,000 topics, surely there are news sources for you to carve out a niche of value in the social media conversation.

Just remember, there are 4 C’s to social media: communication, collaboration, community, and culture. Keep it simple and in byte sizes, after all this is just a taste of social media.

It’s only the second day of the new year and calendars are already filling up! Remember, social media is about being social, so add these events to your calendars too and we’ll see you there!

• KITV4′s Yasmin Dar will be interviewing one of the leaders of the new media industry, author and principal at Altimeter, Brian Solis during her Social Wire segment. Tune in on Tuesday, January 3, 2012 at 6am to learn more about Brian’s new book, The End of Business as Usual and industry insights for 2012.
• On Wednesday, January 4, 2012 at 5pm Brian will be a news guest on Hawaii’s leading technology radio shows, Bytemarks Cafe. He’ll chat with hosts Burt Lum and Ryan Ozawa before heading off to…
• A Social Gathering for talk story and book signing with local social and new media leaders and enthusiasts from 5:30pm – 7:30pm at Tiki’s Grill & Bar.
• Join Kanu Hawaii for Forces of Good Symposium on Saturday, January 7, 2012 from 1pm – 5pm at the State Capitol.
• The Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii is hosting their annual New Years Ohana Festival on Sunday, January 8, 2012 from 10am – 4pm. Food, family, and fun all to celebrate culture.
• One of my students last semester was Susan Nakamura, Director of Marketing and Communications for YMCA Honolulu. Their Central location is hosting their annual open house and tweet up on Saturday, January 14, 2012 from 11am – 1pm. Space is limited, so please RSVP. Unfortunately, I’ll be in California, so I want to read all about it through tweets and timelines!
• On January 26, 2012 I’ll be attending my first lunch with the Hawaii Society of Business Professionals. Join me?
• Need to get hands on with Facebook? I’ll be teaching a class on Saturday, January 28, 2012 from 9am – 12pm at UH Manoa in Room 302 of Kuykendahl Hall. Registrationrequired and cost is $50.
• For years, Burt has organized a Bytemarks Lunch usually at the end of the month. Get on his email list to find out the details.

Looking for events on Kauai? Connect with Linda Sherman of Kauai Marketing. Looking for events on Maui? Contact Liza Pierce of A Maui Blog or Peter Liu of Kai Scapes. Looking for events on the island of Hawaii? Follow @CTarleton @KeolaDonaghy and @KrisBordessa on Twitter, they’re always doing something social and fun. Do you have an event to list? Send me an email.