Social Media 101 with Kyle Snarr

One of the great things about working at the University of Utah (and there are many) is the collaboration between professionals within the campus environment. Mark Woodland in University Communications oversees a monthly Communications Council. Communications practitioners from around the campus come together to discuss experiences and learn new things.

Today, we had the opportunity to get a Social Media 101 from Kyle Snarr, director of new business at StruckAxiom. Here's a recap -- with my own editorial comments! -- of Kyle's 101:

These "one oh one" sessions tend to still start by asking "Why Social Media?" You know I find this question very "2009" and the question should be "how can I effectively use these tools?" But, Kyle clearly laid out some more "why" fodder:

- Marketing is about relationships. Social media is about tools that facilitate building relationships. And, as we know, these are different types of relationships. These tools enable us to create two-way interactions with our constituents, enable us to demonstrate that the people who make up our organizations are just like -- or connected to -- our constituents and patrons. Or, as Kyle quoted Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh, these tools enable us to "be one with the customers." (If you don't want to be one with your customers, well, that is another issue altogether.)

- According to research Kyle shared, currently

• 78% of consumers trust recommendations on products, services, and "things to do" from their peers.
• 14% trust traditional advertising and media.

In other words, content generated by users and known peers outweighs organizational messaging by a factor of five. If we limit our organizational marketing and pr to traditional self-generated content, we are speaking to only a share of the audience.

- The social media conversion isn't about the tools, but about the ways in which people (consumers, constituents, citizens) seek and share information. According to Kyle's data, "in the near future, we won't search for products and services -- they will find us."

So, if you believe that the entire supply chain is changing to "on demand", then it is incumbent upon communication practitioners within non-profit organizations to build a social media/new media channel that finds our potential visitors, constituents, members and donors. That is a game changer.

So, when you make the leap from "why" to "how", the next step is building the social media mix that is right for your organization, your objectives, your constituents or audience, and your desired outcomes.

Kyle stressed: In building your right social media mix, know where your customers are, and invest in the tools that you will actually use. And use frequently.

Now to Kyle's Top Six Rules of Social Media:

#1 Focus on the customers. Social media provides an unprecedented opportunity to connect the people of your organization with your public. Kyle gave a great case study of Zappos.com, a powerful online retailer who started selling shoes and has recently expanded other products to their now loyal customer base.

Tony Hsieh encourages -- uh, expects? -- his employees to actively participate in social media. He is an active Twitter user (@zappos), encouraging them to Twitter personally. They even go so far as to link a combined Twitter feed of all Zappos employees on their company website. Why? Because Hsieh believes that at Zappos, they staff need to "be one with the customers". Using Twitter, they can demonstrate that Zappos is run by real people, people with common interest and values as the customer base.

It would be interesting to know more about how Zappos manages their brand and corporate identity through the individual online identities of their staff. But the point it: use social media to create personal connections with your customers.

#2 Be the Authentic You Social media tools are not a place to push one sided (however well intended) organizational messages. It's about personal connections. And, in order to do that, you must be real.

Kyle gave a great example of how Shaquille O'Neal uses Twitter (@The_Real_Shaq) in an authentic way, all the way to calling for a "Tweet up" recently in Portland. StruckAxiom has an office in Portland. The team in Salt Lake saw the Tweet, notified their colleagues in Portland, and, within minutes, the Portland folks were hanging out with "the Real Shaq". What relevance does that have for non-profits in our community? Well, think about the potential to authentically connect with our audience...

#3 Deliver valuable content We've talked about this before -- social media is NOT a place for rehashing press releases. But has non-profits we have all sorts of content, information, expertise and perspective that can be valuable to our audience. Don't think so? Well, we at least have coupons...

Kyle gave some celebrity and for-profit world examples of valuable content delivered via social media: Tony Hawk using Twitter to give clues to signed skateboards hidden around local communities; Amazon.com (@ GoldBox) and Whole Foods (@WholefoodSync) offering specials to Twitter followers; and a local community of BrunchBox in Portland offering lunch specials to customers.

#4 Engage in the conversation Social media is, by its nature, two-way. If people are talking about your organization, content, programs or service within social media, join the conversation!

Kyle gave a great personal example of Tweeting about his enthusiasm for Tillamook Merry Berry High ice cream that he just purchased at Winco. Within minutes, he had a response from @TillamookCheese and was in conversation about his love of their product. His assessment? The conversation with Tillamook was personal, relevant, not trying to sell anything, and fun! The interaction left Kyle with increased enthusiasm to talk more about their product. (And, now I'm sending my husband to Winco this week to check out that Merry Berry ice cream!)

Whether you know it or not, there are people talking about you right now. Do you know what they are saying? Are you participating in the conversation?

#5 Plan for a Challenge (or Two) "Expect the unexpected." The case study Kyle gave here was what happens when your YouTube video hits the right (random) set of users who then send if viral. That was interesting, but I was hoping that he would talk about what happens when you are challenged -- or get negative feedback -- via social media.

The fear of the negative, or the uncontrollable, seems to be a large barrier for practitioners jumping into social media. But Kyle didn't address that in this session.

#6 Put in Your Time Of course, this is the other large barrier: How much time will it take? Who will do it?? This is especially relevant to non-profit organizations that are already overworked, understaffed and under resourced.

Kyle's point was that, if you are going have a social media mix, you have to be active and persistent in it. He gave the example of Comcast who has a Twitter page under @comcastcares. A recent check of their activity is, ahem, 33,201 Twitter updates. Now that's active.

Our @UMNH team plans out the types of things that will need social media coverage for the week so that we have a reason to post something about 4 - 6 times per week. Then, one of us (there are two of us who are active) will spend about an additional 10 - 15 minutes scanning what's in our feed: anything we can "retweet" from other local cultural organizations or any national natural science institutions that we follow? Anything that a user has posted that we need to respond to? Anything mentions or retweets of our content that we need to thank people for?? All in all, it's not a huge amount of time, but we do need to be consistent on asking ourselves "What should we be posting about this week?"...

So that's my take on Kyle's Six Rules of Social Media. He closed with some advice on building your own social media action plan:

• Find your right social media mix: things you will actually use and use frequently!
• Outline your objectives
• Define your audience
• Be authentic
• Engage
• Go for it! Every day you wait, hurts. Test some things out personally and do what you like!
  

Thanks, Kyle!

Social Media Marketing: Hype or Ripe?

I am honored to be part of a panel of local social media practicioners tomorrow hosted by the Utah Society of Fundraisers. The subject of the panel discussion is "Social Media Marketing: Is it hype or is it ripe?".

The event organizers, in true Web 2.0 form, conducted a pre-event survey in which attendees posed questions that they hope are addressed. In preparation for the discussion, I took some time tonight to think through these questions.

Remember, I'm approaching social and new media from a marketing perspective only, specifically in how to increase the awareness of, connection to and attendance at the museum where I work. We have not begun to experiment with fundraising through social media tools.

And, now to the questions:

#1: Is social media marketing hype or ripe? While the attention around social media tends to rest on individual tools ('who will win? Facebook or Twitter??') that is not really what it is all about. Social media is an emerging and evolving way of connecting to and gathering information. Bottom line.

While there is always plenty of hype around the tools, they will change, evolve, disappear and new ones will appear. But this new way of searching for and sharing information won't go away. And it provides an unprecedented opportunity for non-profit organizations to put a human and timely face on our work and mission.

#2: Should my organization get started in social media? As practicioners, we have to sift through the "hype" vs. the "ripe". But the question is not "Should my organization be active in social media?", but rather:

• How should we be active?
  
• What tools are my audience using?
  
• How can my organization establish a meaningful presence within those key tools to meet our audience engagement objectives?

#3: Is it worth it? Well, I guess that depends on what your foresee in your crystal ball about the future of communications. Again, social media is not about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, FriendFeed, etc. It's about the way we as humans gather, search for and share information. It's about where we look for authoritative answers (remember the 6:00 news and the encyclopedia?). And it's about the time frame in which we expect to get that information (remember reading the morning Wall Street Journal to see how your stocks did the day before?)

In a world in which information is talked about in terms of "on demand", "why wait?", and "crowd sourcing", I can't believe that ANY targeted investment of time and attention within some aspect of new media isn't worth it.

#4: What am I getting into? Because social media has grown out of both the technology sector and youth culture, it is very "buzz word" heavy. You can feel like Alice stepping through the looking glass with all the acronyms and fabricated words coming at you from every direction. Don't panic. What makes social media addictive is the social part, not the technology. Find your place. Find your voice. Focus on the people. Don't feel that you must understand it all.

And don't be afraid to ask, "What, exactly, is a widget?," or whatever buzz word is being flung around. You'll find most people know by doing or what they see, not so much having a deep technical grasp. You can build a social media presence long before you must really have to know much about the technology and application layers behind the media.

#5: Should we be active in social media if we can't do it right? The thing is, I don't thing you can "do social media right" until you are active in it. And I don't think an organization needs to do a lot of intensive evaluation and planning, then launch a multi-channel social media campaign hitting all cylinders in all channels at the same time. That is fine for corporations with significant resources. But the opportunity in social media for non-profits is to put a human face on what we do. And that tends to be organic. And organic can start small and see what "sticks".

You can't determine what "doing it right" is for your organization until you:

• are familiar with how the individual tools work, and have established a certain level of confidence in putting forth your message in a natural, human, social way
• have found out where your known and not previously known audience resides in social media. Not all the tools will work for your organization in equal ways.
• experiment with putting forth your content, messages, activities in different ways, and have gotten feedback or responses (or lack of it!) from your audience.
  

#6: What IS right, anyway?? Hmmm, good question and one I work on every day. There are many ways to measure "right":

• number of "fans" or "followers"
• posting quality on your Facebook page
• web and blog traffic,
  
• analytics on your site, on online campaigns, etc.
• responses to invitations
• click through rates on email and ad campaigns
• attendance at events promoted through social media
• "mentions" or links to your site from others

And there are new tools emerging all the time to increase the quantitative "rightness" of your social media program.

Certainly, once you have built your confidence and are ready to be active in social media as an organization, you will want to strive to get to a critical mass of fans, followers, and/or traffic. But I don't think size, volume or quantitative analysis should take priority in (a) getting started or (b) determining if you have it "right".

You need to determine what "right" means to your organization based upon:

• how you see your audience present in the tools
• how you see your activities with the tools enabling you to meet your overall objectives
• how your audience is engaging with you via the tools

Here's a new question for you to consider: Have social media tools increased the constituent voice in your organization?

#7: How do we resource it? Mmmm, another good one, one we are working on all the time. I've seen some good charts that prioritize, "If you have one hour a week then spend it this way. If you have ten, then add these items." But since "right" starts with your objectives and your audience, I think you ultimately need to determine how much time you have to give it and what your priorities should be.

You need to figure out what social media replaces, what resources are going to one or two outdated forms of communication. Again, goes back to your audience, how you traditionally have reached them, how social media tools help you reach them more effectively and give them a voice back to your organization.

We used to communicate our programming primarily through a quarterly events calendar/brochure. It was published about 60 days before the first event. We didn't have any tools to send more targeted -- or more timely -- messages as we got closer to the events, as classes filled or were still available, or to respond to opportunities that arose after the brochure was printed. For us, investing in a suite of social and new media tools -- from our website and email program, to Facebook and Twitter -- has enabled us to promote and offer promotions in "real time".

We don't print very much anymore. And when we do, we print to catch attention but use our website to fill in the blanks. And by growing our email list and social media tools, we can add things, offer special promotions on classes that don't fill. So, to a large extent, we've resourced social media by behaving differently.

Social media also allows you to take communications out of the marketing department and create multiple points of access throughout the organization. Honestly, the first response to this vision has been, "What? You want me to do that too??" so I don't know that we've institutionalized social media in the way I envision. But we are working on it. I've found a couple of people who are catching the bug. And people have responded differently to different tools. Our curators are realizing that the blog is a great way to get a science message out. Our top-rated video on our YouTube channel was created by our education team on their own. And our PR specialist is becoming my Twitter-partner-in-crime.

My question: Are we having fun yet? Call me a geek, but social media at it's core is fun. To find how social media tools can put a human face on your organization, have fun with it. This is not your organizational website or a brochure. This is inviting people into what is happening, showing them the people or the subject matter or the concern or the human service need. This is emotional. This is social media.

For me the fun of social media is learning in public, along with the exchange with my audience and colleagues. There are many people who follow me because they want to watch me learn, experiment and fall flat on my face sometimes! And I learn from others. I follow some excellent blogs about using social media in non-profits and in museums (see the link on this site). And, I follow some great local social media practioners who are "doing it right" such as, in Twitter, Utah's Hogle Zoo, Girl Scouts CEO, Clark Planetarium, Visit Salt Lake (SLCVB) to name a few. In Facebook, Jerry Rapier from Plan-B Theater Company, SLC Councilman Carlton Christensen (when campaigning especially).

Any more questions?