Arié Moyal

Making business about relationships again

HOW TO: Find your social media sweet spot

We all know that social media is a big deal in terms of how brands interact with their communities, generate revenue, and gain insight.

So how does a brand make that social media magic happen?

The first thing to understand is how to reach the right people with useful, relevant content in the correct context(s). Let's call this your social media “sweet spot.”

There are four elements involved in reaching that sweet spot: brand identity, goals for social media and business, the expertise and passions that exist within your organisation, and the needs and interests of the people you are trying to reach.

Let's look at each element in turn.

Brand Identity

Your brand is a representation of your organisation as a whole, with which people create a relationship in their minds. 

Your brand is the lens through which all communication should be filtered, and it’s crucial that your brand be represented accurately.

Imagine your brand is a person. Understanding who this person is makes it easier to define the “tone of voice” and boundaries of the brand. This ensures that communications sound authentic and deliver on your brand promise.

Goals

Understanding what your organisation's goals are will help you understand why you're in business and what you've come to social media to achieve.

Using these two elements to frame your social media activity, you can define what your interactions look like. Examine the people involved: your employees and your customers.

Employee Expertise and Passions

When you understand what your employees (from the C-level on down) know and are passionate about, not only do you know who to go to when you need information for your customers (as well as content and stories to share), but it also helps you understand your employees' motivations and work to make them happier. After all, they're your most important assets, right?

Needs and Interests of Your Target Communities

The most important part of using social media business (and engagement overall) is understanding the people you are trying to reach. Knowing which needs you are fulfilling and what is of interest to them informs which parts of your employees' passions and expertise to share with them and which partnerships you should form in order to fill the gaps in your content and expertise because, in the end, the first rule of social media is be helpful.

So that's how you find your social media sweet spot. Does this make sense? I'd love to hear what you think.

Why a hashtag is the first thing you need for your event

I was speaking to Bill Boorman at #trulondon this year and just a few days later my friend Ane Howard asked me about social media best practice for event planners. Bill had said that social media is a great place to get events off the ground (and he should know) and as I was talking Ane through my thoughts, I realised that the most important thing an event planner needs where social media is concerned is a good hashtag for their event.

What is a hashtag?

A practice that is common on twitter but that has spread to other social media sites is the hashtag. Yo may have seen people include them in their posts. They are used to categorise status updates and follow this format #<topic>.

Here's an example from Wikipedia:

#RealAle is my favourite type of #beer.

I use them to add sentiment to my tweets (#fail, #facepalm, #happydance), to discuss certain topics (#csr, #green, #socent), to participate in tweetchats (#blogchat, #IMCchat, #tweetdiner) to comment on TV shows I'm watching, and last but not least to discuss or share content related to events I'm attending or wish I was attending!

On twitter, you can actually click on a hashtag and see the latest tweets containing that hashtag.

So why is this the most important thing event planners need? Well for one thing, once you've chosen a hashtag you can start sharing content and tracking conversations around your event on twitter and it can also be used to tag videos, photos and blog posts on other sites.

But there's more to it than that: You can find out where and with whom your event is resonating, you can display tweets using the hashtag during the event, monitor feedback on speakers and venue issues in real-time and see which relationships have been formed through your event be it online or in-person.

All in all, hashtags are a great way to maximise the returns of your event through social media. The earlier you assign one the better, because if you don't someone else will. In fact, don't just choose one and broadcast it - register it at whatthetrend.com and let me know how your hashtag is working for you!

HOW TO: Evaluate a social/digital/new media candidate’s twitter account for know-how

*It is important to keep in mind that not everyone uses twitter to “talk shop”*

There are quite a few people out there – including myself - looking for work in new/digital/social media.

Many of them are calling themselves “social media experts”. In fact, according to this post by B.L. Ochman, there were over 12,000 self-proclaimed digital or social media gurus/experts on twitter in June 2010. While some of them may indeed be experts, you’ll probably want to check out their credentials. You’ll often find that it is the ones who aren’t calling themselves “experts” who know what they’re doing and have the experience to prove it.

Since recruiters have told me they have difficulty separating the wheat from the chaff and not all of them have gotten their heads around twitter, I thought I’d do a short “how-to” to help them out.

One good way to tell if someone “gets” this medium is to have a look at their twitter profile to see if they know how to use this platform. Surely if they work in digital marketing, they’ve at least got an account right?

 Here are a few things to look for when evaluating a twitter profile for know-how:

 

Bio (and link):

Have a look at what they say about themselves and where they link to. Is it believable? Is the link a blog? A LinkedIn profile? A MySpace page? Unless they’re in music, linking to a MySpace page is probably not a good sign since MySpace has very much fallen out of favour.

 

Following/Followers:

The numbers here aren’t nearly as important as the quality of the accounts a person is connected to and the quality of the connections themselves.

Personally, I have a wide range of interests so I follow a lot of people and a lot of people follow me. While I get that this probably means I know how to use twitter, there is no guarantee that my numbers aren’t inflated by spammers. It’s probably safe to say that at least a quarter of the average twitter user’s followers are spam and it’s not terribly realistic to expect that one sustains contact with each and every one of the accounts that they are connected to.

A good way to tell is just have a look at the accounts involved by clicking “following” and “followers”

For a more in-depth look at why some numbers mean nothing on twitter have a look at this post by Glenn Lesanto with that exact title.

 

 Lists:

 Lists give you an idea of what someone’s interests (and possibly areas of knowledge/authority) are.

You can see the lists a user creates (listed below Favorites) and the lists others put them on (click “listed” to view).

 

Favorites:

Have a look at the tweets they have marked as favorites. Are they funny, interesting, relevant? All of the above?

 

 Tweets:

Most importantly, look at what they’re tweeting. Are they using @ replies to have conversations? Are they sharing other people’s ideas and content by retweeting (RTing) it? Are they participating in offline events or online chats by using #hashtags? Or are they just tweeting “get more followers”/”make money online” links?

 

Search:

You can search twitter for the candidiate’s username to see what people are saying to or about them. This is also a useful tool for seeing the kinds of conversations they have on twitter.

 

Tools:  

There are other tools outside of twitter that will help you evaluate a profile. However, their methodologies are not necessarily foolproof and may not give you an accurate picture of how the person in question uses twitter. If you want to use tools oneforty.com, a great resource for twitter-related applications, lists some analytic ones here.

 

Was this helpful? Please let me know! My personal twitter account is here: http://www.twitter.com/amoyal and my microblog for advice to brands on twitter is here: http://www.twitter.com/DearBrands

 

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Thank you to Lindy Asimus, Charlie Southwell and Lynne Gray for their help!