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!

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!

Sibs N Kids Promotional Project

For my Marketing 4000 class with my friends, Allison and Emily, we had to do a "Social Media Team Promotion." Our group chose to promote BGSU's Sibs N Kids Weekend.

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:

1. 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)
2. 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.
3. 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.

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!

How to add photos to your post and link your photos with Blogger:

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!

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!

Here are some of my favorite recent posts from Scoutie Girl:

• 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

Current Event Link

Click on the link below:

You will go to the CE game login page. You're welcome.

shortcut

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?

"Everything Ages Fast: Update!"

I found these "Vintage Social Media Posters" from here and I loved them and thought I would share.

One of the things that really caught my attention was the sticker on the side that said, "Everything ages fast: update!" which really got me thinking about how much twitter, facebook, and other social medias have been "ebbing and flowing." We talked in class about how some of these platforms become "plumbing" but what if the "plumbing" becomes outdated? The best example I can think of for this is MYSPACE. remember what THAT was all the rage? Now ... not so much.

It just goes to show as social media professionals, we need to STAY ON TOP of these different sites and applications, so we're ALWAYS up to date!

Social Media and Marketing: Some resources

We're always talking about CONNECTING businesses and social media, and how each can influence the other. The most important "connection" that we discuss between the two is MARKETING.

There's a lot of "buzz" out there about smart social media practices. Here are some of my favorite articles today:

Beware Social Media Marketing Myths

The Social Media Marketing Blog

This review of the e-book "Smart Marketing"

20 Best Social Media and Marketing Blogs by Women

Online shopping options... and social media?

A lot of what we do in my social media marketing class is discussing how businesses can use social media platforms to promote businesses. I think one of the best ways that this is show is through small, online businesses. As early as 10 years ago, online businesses really just didn't exist--especially widespread like they do now. If you wanted to order something that a local store didn't have, your only option was to order it from a catalog--and then you had to order by phone! Now there's hosting sites like:

These are sites that are not only online marketplaces, but have also become mini social networks themselves. For example, amazon has "lists" that you can share with anyone on Amazon, and get feedback through discussion:

On etsy, you can have friend "circles" and then share treasuries of some of your favorite items.

Not only have some of these sites changed the process of shopping in general, but they have become their own social media sites! How cool!

Visual Inspiration Boards

I've been thinking a lot about virtual inspiration boards lately. We've been discussing delcious and stumbleUpon in class, and I also have a favorite "visual virtual inspiration board," in pinterest.

Its' hard for me to directly relate these to "How can businesses use this for marketing?" since I use them all in a completely different way--as a collection of inspiration for my own creative work and business.

The more I think about it though, I have purchased things from etsy sellers BECAUSE of their work that I saw online, through places like StumbleUpon and Pinterest.

I think the key for getting your name out there through these "bookmarking" sites is to know your audience and what they like, become connected to them, and then "tag" your sites appropriately, so they they will easily "stumble" onto your product or website.

Interesting...

I've spent some time this weeking thinking about social media stats. I know how much my life revolves around social media (I'm a little addicted) but is the whole world like this too? Where is everyone else posting? How many people are on these sites?

Here are some interesting articles and "thoughts" that I found, while doing my "wonderings"

10 Ways Social Media Will Change in 2011

10 Ways to Change the World Through Social Media
Top 10 Social Media Blogs

del.icio.us bookmarking

Today, in my social media class, we were introduced to a "social media" platform called Delicious. It took some getting used to for me, but in the end, I liked it. I definitely think it's something that I could use in the future, if only for personal use. It's like a bit more organized "Stumble Upon" (which, if you haven't checked it out, it's worth checking!!).

Since this is a "business marketing" class, of course we had to make a connection to how businesses could use this to market themselves. I don't see businesses having as much control over delicous as Twitter or Facebook, but it might be good to see what people bookmark you with, how they tag you, or help find competition. Maybe I just need to do some more 'exploring' and figure this out a bit more!

Until then, here are some articles that get me thinking about how delicious could be used for business marketing:

Are your business bookmarks del.icio.us?
How to Use Delicious for B2B Marketing
5 Ways to Use Delicious.com in Your Business
Can using Delicious help the popularity of your website?

Social Media and Business

While social media (Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, etc) has been used for years as purely "social" communication tools, companies are now starting to see the benefits of using social media. Social media can be used to update "followers" and "fans" of the business on new stock, upcoming sales, to receive customer feedback, and to keep the business in the "top" of the consumer's mind---especially when they are interacting with their social media platforms.

So why should businesses bother with using social media to promote themselves? Here are my top 3 reasons:

1. It’s (mostly) free. Almost all of the social media sites are free—the only cost involved is the cost of the time it takes to update the sites. Many companies just add this to the marketing personnel’s job, or even hiring an unpaid marketing intern. When the costs of advertising (print, radio, television, etc) keep skyrocketing, “free advertising” in the form of social media is very valuable to small businesses who may not have a large advertising budget.

2. Everyone is “on” social media. Twitter currently has 175 million users “tweeting” and Facebook 600 million active users. While not everyone on Facebook or twitter may be in your small business’s market, the exposure of that many users is worth it.

3. Customers can easily “Tell their friends.” When a customer “likes” or “friends” posts and updates from your company, all of their friends can see—and then “click through” to your company. Even more exposure!