Monday, April 25, 2011
Estimating your work (time)
I just found this great post about estimating the number of hours social media takes, and how that effects your pricing, etc. Very interesting read!
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Interesting Read
I'm loving this blog post about how to go from 0 to 2000+ followers in 90 days. A lot of it covers things that we have covered in our social media class. A good read!
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Sibs N Kids Promotional Project
What is Sibs N Kids? Sibs ‘n Kids is a weekend full of family friendly activities all around the BGSU campus for BGSU students, faculty, and staff to bring siblings and families for a weekend of fun.
Our Initial Plan and Objectives:
Who was our target audience? We anticipated our target audience to be BGSU students, faculty, and staff who wanted to participate in the activities, and have families who would like to come and enjoy BGSU and a weekend of fun. We were also anticipating that some siblings and younger family members would be following our social media promotions, because they would want to know what is going on.
Our Objectives: One of our objectives of this project was to answer the question, “What is there to do
during Sibs ‘n Kids weekend?” This included the times, dates, and activities going on during Sibs ‘n Kids. We would like to provide an up-to-date schedule of events available though all of our social media outlets. Another objective was to simply promote Sibs ‘n Kids and the locations and activities during Sibs ‘n Kids. We wanted to inform students and families what’s going on BEFORE the weekend starts, as well as inform students and families during the weekend.
"The Plan" and our original measures of success: We planned on using Twitter, Facebook, and a Sibs ‘n Kids blog to promote Sibs ‘n Kids through social media. We hoped to have at least 150 followers on Twitter, especially because we think that will be our most direct contact with our audience. We wanted to “tweet” a secret word (much like the company Sprinkles’ Cupcakes does) for extra prizes at the events.
On Facebook, we hoped to have at least 200+ fans of the “fan page” that we created, as well as create events for each of the individual events that are going on during the weekend. We plan on linking everything together. We also wanted to have a picture and a comment contest on facebook.
On the blog, we wanted to post full schedules of events, interviews with the event planners (some video interviews!), events updates, and pictures of past Sibs ‘n Kids events. The blog was linked to both the facebook and the twitter accounts.
One of our main objectives was to do a lot of "in the moment" updating during the weekend of Sibs 'N Kids, updating people about canceled or moved events.
What Changed After We Started:
We quickly realized that we had too high of expectations for such a short social media run. Our original objectives were to have 200 Facebook fans and 150+ twitter followers, but we quickly realized that that was shooting way too high. We ended up with 96 fans on Facebook, and 12 followers on Twitter.
Because of our smaller following, we also quickly realized that some of our original plans for contests and prizes were not going to be practical. Not only did we have a smaller following than planned, but the followers and fans that we did have were much more of the "lurking" kind--just people gathering information, rather than interacting with our facebook or twitter.
We also quickly realized how hard the "in the moment" contests were going to be, such as the "whisper a secret word," because of how many different organizations were putting on events. We would have had to do much more coordinating much sooner than we realized.
Another disappointing thing that changed was our planned interviews with event planners and "Featured Siblings." We had much fewer Featured Sibs than planned, and no interviews with event planners, for the simple reason of people not getting back to us.
Our Results:
Our Next Steps:
Since this was a yearly event, who's leadership is passed on from year to year, we will be passing on our "lessons learned" and advice to the current UAO president, and allowing her to pass the information on to the next leaders of the Sibs N Kids weekend.
Lessons Learned:
- We were too ambitious. We expected bigger, more impressive results than were actually attainable with the time we had to work with, and our "end users" didn't react the way we were hoping. (See below for more details)
- Social media users don't react the way we expected. We expected our followers and fans to be much more interactive than they actually were. While we had almost a 100 fans, they were more "passive"--simply taking in the information, rather than interacting with it, such as commenting back or liking posts.
- Passion plays a huge role in social media. While we all thought Sibs N Kids is a cool thing, Allison is the only one directly involved in UAO, who puts on Sibs N Kids. We found that not having a strong "connection" to an event or cause definitely decreased our passion and willingness to promote the project or event. This can also apply to the passion that the "end user" or social media user has-- if they don't feel passionate about the event or company that you are trying to promote, they will not interact, like, friend, or follow you. We found that this especially applied with the people that did not have Siblings or Kids, or Sibs N Kids who are the age to come to these events.
Friday, April 1, 2011
Blog design tips and tricks
A couple of people have asked me how to do this, so I thought I would write a tutorial. If you have any other questions on how to do formatting, etc in blogger, please let me know! I would love to make this a series!
Sometimes, you may want to link your pictures so that when someone clicks on the picture, it goes "somewhere else," either to the original source of the photo, perhaps to an etsy shop to buy the item, or even to someplace else on your blog. I'm here to show you how!
First, you need to make sure that you have a picture in your post. To add a picture to your blog post, go to the "picture" icon in your "new post" dashboard. (circled below)
That will bring up another window, like this:
From there, you can add pictures from your computer (circled), or you can link pictures from another URL (just make sure you have the exact URL of the picture, not just the website where you found the picture. That won't work.)
Or you can grab the HTML code from one of your photos from Flickr. Check out the picture below to see where I went to do that:
To insert the code that you found on flickr, COPY the code, the go to the "Edit HTML" tab on your post, and PASTE the code where you would like the picture to go. You can usually go back and edit where the picture is placed after you switch back to the COMPOSE tab.
**another note about grabbing the code from Flickr: the code is built in with a link back to THAT EXACT picture on Flickr. So if you only want to link back to the picture, then your work here is done! If you want the picture to link to something else, continue reading :-) **
NOW, to make the photos LINK to a source, the easiest way I've found to do this *without teaching you a ton of HTML coding* is to HIGHLIGHT the picture (while you're in the "compose" tab) and then click the LINK button, to LINK the photo, much like you would LINK a word, etc. If you need a visual:
Make sure you put the WHOLE link in the space when it pops up-- the whole link, meaning the http://www.xoxox.com as well, not just www.xoxox.com.
I hope that helps anyone that might have been confused before. Hopefully I didn't confuse anyone any MORE! Please ask any and all questions in the comments! If you want to know how to do MORE, let me know what else you would like to learn in the comments!
Friday, March 25, 2011
Follow Friday: Scoutie Girl
If you're on twitter, you know that every Friday, twitter blows up with #ff or "Follow Friday" where users suggest people to "follow." I'd like to start the same thing here, but with some of my favorite blogs for you to "follow"! I hope to make it a new feature, and I hope you like it!
The next "Follow Friday" that I'd like to "introduce" you to is the blog Scoutie Girl. Do you have a blog where, in your Google Reader, you star/favorite EVERY SINGLE POST? Scoutie Girl is that blog for me. I've signed up for the daily e-mails, the newsletters, everything, and reading all of her posts, for us "creative types" is completely inspiring and just makes me want to put all of those creative thoughts in my head in ACTION.
If you need a kick in the butt, or just want constant good advice streaming into your Reader or RSS feed (and e-mail, if you sign up for her e-mails and newsletters!) I would bounce over to Scoutie Girl if I were you! You WILL NOT regret checking out this awesome blog!
- This post on valuing your creativity
- This post on the "fear of being organized"
- This advice on creative living
Do you follow Scoutie Girl? What are some of your favorite posts?
Do you have a blog that you would like to nominate for a Follow Friday post? Let me know in the comments, or send me an e-mail-- abandgeek88ATgmailDOTcom
Thursday, March 17, 2011
The Social Network
While we're talking about social media, it would be silly to not include something about the somewhat recent movie The Social Network. Below is a trailer. Personally, I loved the movie. What did you think?
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