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“Social media isn’t a fad. It is a fundamental shift in the way we communicate. ” Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Alexandria is full of associations and while they all serve a wide variety of industries and individuals, they all have a lot in common. Namely the way they communication with their constituents; or sometimes don’t communicate. I have worked for associations as large at the Mortgage Bankers Association in its golden age when there were departments of ten or more for Marketing Communications, Events, and Education. I have also worked with much smaller associations like the Solar Energy Industry Association who only has a handful of in-house people on their marketing and events team.

Large or small, there are some fundamentals of communication that can be enhanced by using today’s technology strategically:

1. Your members look to you for industry best practices, advocacy, and all around good free information. Share your expertise far and wide. Syndicate through RSS feeds, use every applicable social media outlet for additional exposure, repurpose materials for audiences that want to view asynchronously on their desired media, aggregate and tag information so audiences can find the long tail information, and allow your readers to give feedback that will be used.
2. Events take a lot of effort, so maximize your exposure and inbound marketing during that effort. With some incremental changes to your approach to events, you can expand your “mailing list”, create conversation pre- during- and post-event, and enhance your attendee’s experience while they are at the event or viewing online. Setup social media outlets properly and promote your event and topics well before and after the event itself. Be sure to include a hashtag and how to use it for Twitter followers. Engage your cloud and webinar audiences by allowing participation in session discussion. Include all cross-promotional information in ads, program guides, eblasts, postcards, etc to leverage on- and offline assets. Engage booth visitors and bring them into the variety of ways they can connect online later.
3. There are times when you need to mobilize your members for advocacy, fundraising, participation, or just new educational opportunities. Establish a solid online and social media virtual community that offers value and interaction between members, vendors, and the association for a consistent following. By using an internal and external community approach that is fully integrated using social media APIs, you can go to your constituents where they already do business and aggregate the collective knowledge in one place allowing you to monetize and cross-pollinate the information. Having immediate access to your influencers and influencer toolkits to guide them through your desired actions will transform your discussion community into a well-oiled team of active advocates.

I hope to be presenting “Brand Management through Social Media Channels” at the Meeting Professionals International Mid-Atlantic Conference and Expostion later this year. I am working on the presentation with Linda Hagopian from Hagopian Marketing, a seasoned association marketer. It should be great.

On Friday, April 17, I attended the latest Web Managers Roundtable event “Making Online Video Work: Lessons from the PBS Web Experience”. It was a showcase of their efforts over the last year to create an online video experience that benefits viewers and local stations alike. We got a sneak preview of the system and were asked not to reveal any details until the embargo was lifted last night. So that’s why this post it late.

PBS Video by Topic

With YouTube and Hulu (which PBS has partnerships with) being the biggest video buzz online right now, it is easy to forget that for a lot of companies, having a proprietary destination still makes a lot of sense. PBS (who everyone knows) works with a wide variety of producers and regional stations, and wanted to create a unified video strategy that would standardize their processes, make their brand experience consistent across all touchpoints, cross-promote their television series’, and incorporate viewer feedback into forming their future programming. The culmination of their extensive planning is their video “ecosystem” which has been rolled out to their pbs.org site (check out the new video beta: pbs.org/video/), pbskids.org/go, and 14 pilot stations maintaining their own sites with varying resources.

Some of my favorite features are:

• You get the familiar carousel of programs, but they are stacked so you can see each episode underneath
• You can also segment the content by topic, so if you are interested in history, you get a list of episodes across all programming series’ that are related and can drill down to subcategories like American History 1800s
• They provide lesson plans for teachers and enhance the programming with assets like the drawing techniques used by Parthenon creators
• For the kids section, targeting the reading ages, they have enhanced the videos with an optional game overlay that ties in a related interactive game while the kids watch the program (talk about multi-tasking!)
• The share the infrastructure with local stations so they can inject their local programs as well as brand the interface
• And it is all SEO friendly and 508-compliant via closed captioning, and transcripts if they are available

Since this is in beta, you can expect that they will be reviewing user behavior and feedback, and making improvements overtime.

BTW, I also had a wonderful conversation with Betty (@BettyPBS) who is part of their interactive team and helping to manage their social media communications for @PBSengage. I was inspired by their internal culture of trust and collaboration. I also loved the way that they ask their producers and SMEs how they plan to “activate their networks” to bring awareness to an episode/series that is about to air. What a great way of using existing networks in conjunction with traditional promotions.

Follow the Web Managers Roundtable Discussion on LinkedIn.

As always, thank you to Julie Perlmutter for coordinating these wonderful events. And thank you to our speakers: Gary Arlen, Angela Morgenstern, Joshua Kinberg, Eric Freeland, and Silvia Lovato. Wonderful presentation and wonderful work!

Update: 

drodio from Point About was kind enough to post the transcript and video of the event on their post PBS Interactive: New Website Launch (1 of 3)

Related articles by Zemanta

• PBS Launches New Video Portal for Its Shows (readwriteweb.com)
• PBS Launches Hulu for Public Broadcasting (mashable.com)

HubSpot just finished a great webinar on using Twitter for business. It was well-run and very informational for both newbies and those advising on the topic like me. There were a few things I learned like:

• some url shorteners track click thrus and some don’t (Ideek, hoottweet, owl.ly, longer list to come hopefully)
• www.twitter.com/replies shows every tweet that includes @yourusername
• tip from me: include the hashtag for your event during the pre-event correspondence
• you can register your hashtag at www.hashtags.org
• tracking ROI on Tweeter use on visitors, leads, conversion to sales is real proof of marketing validity

You can also ask the participants questions related to the event like I did, “how many people watching the #hubspot webinar have people dedicated to social media marketing vs “spare time”?” and get some great responses.

All the responses to the questions I posed through Twitter during the #hubspot webinar.

Ok, I admit that sometimes I can be gullible…but is there really a Firefox crop circle?

This is what the Zemanta link takes me to on Google Earth. Impressive if it is true!

Like most people, I am sitting here trying to cram 30 hours of to-dos into a 24-hour day. Most people that know me, know that I’m a working mom and so my do-to list consists of family duties, work duties, staying on-top of my industry activities, networking, marketing, paid consulting, free advice, family fun, and occasionally time for me. I’m sure I forgot something in there…oh yeah, pet care. Ugh.

My plan for the next three days.

Of course, I try to simplify where I can and I can cook a weeknight dinner in under 15 minutes, but you can only get so efficient. What I find really helps is a multi-pronged approach:

1. I use Microsoft Outlook’s Calendar to map out everything I need to do for the week including personal, work, and reminders of what I’d like to do for the future.
2. I use Microsoft Project to plan long term consulting projects and break it down each week for my Outlook schedule. Not to mention highlighting the tasks on my gantt chart.
3. My Firefox browser has all the important home page’s up:
   1. ExecTweets is first so I can see what the Top Business Executives think is worth tweeting about
   2. iGoogle is next for my RSS feeds, stocks, widgets, and search of course
   3. Then my Belmont email account which I have yet to setup in Outlook
   4. Next comes all the web pages of information that I found yesterday and need to read or research further. Right now, it is FusionCharts documentation, Flickr API documentation, and Facebook Pages changes.
4. My startup desktop applications include:
   1. TweetDeck for following my colleagues and their industry adventures
   2. AIM for keeping in touch with my virtual work teams
   3. Outlook with personal and BPM inboxes for “traditional” email correspondence

And then I have three phones that sit on my desk: cell, home, and work.

I think this is a pretty good system for keeping in touch with my ever-changing virtual network, and filtering through the glut of information in an attempt to find what is relevant or interesting. I still would like to have another six hours in each day.

If you have any tips for keeping organized or getting to the information that you want with little effort, I’m always looking for new options.

I attended the DC Ad Club’s event on how the Obama campaign used social media to truly change the way America participates in politics. Andrew Noyes, a reporter for Congress Daily, had some intriguing insights as an outsider covering the use of the media. I think he had the best perspective on the whole campaign because he was not part of the push, but followed it intensely. Andrew followed the campaign from campaigning for the presidency through the transition team through to the white house ongoing communication to the public.
The main approach seemed to be getting the Obama brand to infiltrate every communication channel possible, and to constantly be integrating with its audience. While there were some technical challenges during different segments of the campaign—there was freedom to make decisions quickly and use all forms of technology during the campaign, but the white house places specific rules and processes around what they can do/who they can outsource to—their team (led by Chris Hughes) of over 80 people on the web team stayed consistent.
Some of the highlights include:

• A large mobile component. Phones have mass audience penetration and have high engagement. People read txt messages within 15 minutes of receipt and have a 60-90% open rate. They also usually respond within 60 min. Source: Jeff the third speaker (sorry Jeff, missed your last name)
• Using the website as a hub, including mentions in speeches and off-the-cuff remarks
• Blogging by the team, supporters, and the candidate
• Lots of web video (my sister-in-law sent me a YouTube video back in 2006)
• This got the younger generation that isn’t watching traditional TV as much
• Facebook and MySpace pages
• iPhone app that let you organize your address book by battleground state and call them if you saw their state was losing ground. And ringtones of course.
• Txt message VP announcement (this was huge)
• Change.gov provided “your seat at the table” which allowed everyone to see which lobbying groups were meeting with the transition team and what they talked about. All searchable and categorized.
• The Citizen’s Briefing Book explained Obama’s position on topics and had over 800 people providing feedback. Andrew wonders what was done with this feedback, as do I
• A common theme was “connect…inspire”. Very appropriate for social media.

Having this kind of reach translated to record-breaking fundraising from individual donors. 3 million donors giving an average of $95 each. They didn’t stop at virtual networking though; they also created synergy in person by fostering the idea of having house parties in your neighborhood around campaign ideas. Volunteer supporters could get a phone list in their state and make calls for support on behalf of the campaign.
Some things to remember:

1. The “product” was good. President Obama was/is a great brand with a lot of natural personal magnetism
2. The topic was hot. Not only was the election the talk-of–the-town in America, but the world was watching too.
3. The message was clear. Change.
4. Online communication tools were an integral part of the dialogue. Visit the site to show your support…twitter your thoughts as we’re talking…txt HOPE to ###.

At a minimum, I’m beginning to appreciate Twitter (and my new fave tool TweetDeck) as a better-than-delicious RSS feed. It is showing me what people that I personally know are smart and on-the-pulse of online activity are doing right now. Assuming they choose to share.

Case in point: Katherine Maynard (@KMaynard_SCC) tweeted about ClickZ’s article on measuring social media metrics: Social Media Sites Force Analytics Tools to Evolve. I was very excited to start reading the article because one of my main roles on the Army’s FOS project was to track and analyze all of the campaigns activity…not just log files and Google Analytics, but what we could learn from visitor activity on Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr. I was disappointed once again to learn that the samples they cited were either 1) just tracking referrers or PPC Facebook ads, or 2) built their own app to track visitor lifetime value/interaction over time. Another point that caught my attention was that Experience Project gets most of their referrals through organic search.

Learn more about the Army Faces of Strength Campaign.

We found in the FOS project that our external social media destinations were covering about 50% of the first page of Google for our key phrases. We also discovered that half of our campaign activity was occurring on the social media channels we set up and that the statistics available from each varied and had to be manually aggregated with the others to create a monthly analysis report that allowed us to create completely educated recommendations. I got pretty quick at it and produced some insightful reports, but I also know that we will be doing this for every client we can. And I don’t want to do it manually each time!

So starts my quest to automate the aggregation. Awhile back, I learned of tools/companies like ComScore, Quantcast, BlogPulse, Converseon, and BuzzMonitor but have never had the time to conduct research on them that wasn’t directly tied to a paying client project. Now, I have the opportunity to look into this periodically to see what is already out there without paying an arm and a leg, and what could be built. I know that we can use APIs like Facebooks to pull their Insight Statistics and Fan/Group data, but run into issues like Facebook not indexing their FQL page_fan.page_id field which means that it isn’t easy to pull data on your fans through a custom PHP application.

So anyway, I’ll keep you updated on where this goes and what I learn.

One of our clients was receiving a lot of 500 errors (5** errors are a variety of server errors) in their log files so we included an error trap so we would receive an email each time one occurred. Originally, it was setup because their XML file feeding their career search kept breaking and because it was coming from a third-party, we needed the heads-up. Now that that is fixed, we started getting some new ones.

These server errors were all happening on pages like this “/instmsg/aliases/*” where the asterisk was someone’s email alias. Turns out that when Microsoft Exchange opens an email sent by this site, it automatically looks to see if there is an instant messenger (IM) alias tied to the email address that sent it. Since Exchange isn’t on this server and there is no IM tied to the email address anyway, it resulted in an error. Thanks Microsoft.

No harm, no foul, but here are the details if you are interested: http://www.linkedin.com/answers/technology/information-technology/computers-software/TCH_ITS_CMP/164342-6857609

It is an ever-changing race to find statistics on online communication. While it is very helpful in deciding who is viewing what and what technologies you might want to use, the gathering of visitor data is not an exact science. Sure, it is better than using distribution number of a magazine, but there are so many variables, that you don’t always get them all. For example, Twitter publishes their user statistics, but doesn’t account for those that twitter using their cell phones or PDAs. This is probably a large percentage because of the short, text nature of Twitter communication.

That said, we are compiling useful statistics in a new category here for your viewing pleasure, our need to archive this stuff for reference, and because I love stats. Maybe it will be a widget someday.

Facebook

• More than 110 million active users (people who have accessed Facebook within the past month)
• Facebook is the 4th most-trafficked website in the world (comScore)
• Facebook is the most-trafficked social media site in the world (comScore)
• More than half of Facebook users are outside of college
• The fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older

LinkedIn

• More than 25 million experienced professionals from around the world,
• More than 150 industries listed on LinkedIn

Twitter

(Only includes website users. Cell phone and Twitterrific users not included)

• Total Users: 1+ million
• Total Active Users: 200,000 per week
• Total Twitter Messages: 3 million/day

Source: Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter respectively. Compiled by http://thebabyboomerentrepreneur.com/261/social-media-statistics/