Posts tagged social media

Having something go viral, is, intense(/fun).

Last Thursday at lunch I got bored and wanted to make a countdown for my Memorial Day beach trip to share with the group of us coming. I thought a map in the background would look cool so I Google’d how to do it, with no luck. Little did I know that the 45 minutes spent scrambling away at the keyboard rather than chomping down on food would become one of the most fun things I have ever done.

To be honest, I never thought once that my post would be seen really, and that my Dewey Beach countdown site shared outside the inner loop of my friends going. Boy, was I wrong. Since posting it here on my blog three days ago, and on Forrst (where it got tweeted about - thanks guys!) it has gone on a roller coaster ride through the social web.

Just some stats - in three days the blog post and the Dewey Beach Countdown site have seen over 11,000 page views combined (which is 1,364% my normal daily traffic), 250+ retweets combined (and growing alarmingly) and tons of awesome feedback and kudos. On Forrst, the same post has been liked over 110 times with just as much positive feedback.

All in all, I am glad that something I have done has struck interest in a community of people I love to be apart of. The designer/developer community has the reputation of being critical to most findings/implementations, but the positiveness I have seen on this post has been so refreshing.

Thanks to all who have reached out to me and are finding this little trick useful. I appreciate all of your feedback and responses. This has been the most fun couple days in my life!

3 things I have learned working for NERD Beverage

If you have checked out my resume or about me, then you know that I do social media and community management for NERD Beverage Corp. I started working for them Spring 2009 after I helped an employee at the time with twitter and Facebook.

It has been a very valuable experience and has taught me three main things about social media, consumers, and uses for twitter and Facebook.

1. Users like regular chatter and daily conversation.

This may go as a no-brainer, but some companies misuse Facebook and twitter. Some companies ‘fire hose’ daily deals, product info, and marketing adverts without any real interaction with customers.

At NERD, I really like sitting down in front of the computer and engaging our small but active customer base online. I use Facebook as a way to not only leverage deals and product info, but as a feedback forum to receive input on places to sell, which places need to be restocked, and to see what sparks people to buy NERD.

2. Facebook and twitter contests are huge hits.

When I started receiving a ‘product budget’ with NERD, I quickly jumped on Facebook and posted

The first two people who post a picture of them studying while drinking a NERD receive free 4-packs of their choice!

Within three minutes we had five pictures submitted and have now done this little contest weekly. It also gives us free photos of customers using NERD to use on our website, which is a huge plus!

Another contest, and much more overdone in the twitter world, was a ‘retweet this’ contest where we took all the names of the people who retweeted a special post we made and put them into a random name selector generator. We had over 100 people participate and it gained us a good amount of followers on twitter.

3. There are no days off with social media.

Probably the biggest thing I am learning is that you really can’t take a day off from social media. When I first started my manager had me working just Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. After awhile I started noticing each Tuesday I would have to work hard to wake up the few people we had following us instead of continuing conversations and working on gaining new fans/followers.

Therefore I told her I would work everyday. Should have asked for a pay increase but I just love the work!

So the key to good social media is engaging users, not flooding them. You have to also make sure that you do so on a daily basis to keep conversations refreshed and to really garner attention, offer promo items or product giveaways to entice users to spread your company or product by word of mouth!

What are some things you have learned by using social media for a company, product, or brand? Have you found some to be more effective than others?

What I learned from Twitter today.

While sitting in on the #techchat forum today on Twitter, I learned a valuable tidbit from a majority of users - they don’t feel there is a definition for an ‘expert’ of social media; however, they see people who are passionate, assertive, willing to live the new media, are the ones best fitting for a social media job.

Here’s a chart to prove it: (DISCLAIMER: I need a job!)

What are you thoughts? Do you feel there is a clear definition of an ‘expert’ of social media, or is it anyone who shows intuitiveness/passion to make a social media campaign work?

Would you pay?

A discussion started today (REAL early this morning – I need caffeine) on twitter between Handshake 2.0 and I, and it brought about a very interesting topic.

Would you pay for Foursquare or Twitter? My answer: NO. never. Why?

The fundamental quality of Foursquare and Twitter is the interaction caused by the masses participating with them. I fear that if these social networks were to create a paid service, or even a freemium model, the value I gain from them would be lost completely.

The whole point of these services are for people to use them. That is easy to create when nothing is lost, but everything is gained. You lose nothing using these services now other than a few moments of your life (or if you are me, more than that according to my friends) but you gain a vast amount of knowledge such as real-time news, information, data, and even get to stalk people’s whereabouts (sounds thrilling I know, just saying).

There is a thin line between charging someone for use, and that person getting a value out of what they pay. We all have noticed it, and I can’t even sit here and tell you what that is to a T exactly. But, it does take me back to college (ha, only a few months ago).

I learned about this great theory in school: the cost-benefit analysis. This analysis

finds, quantifies, and adds all the positive factors. These are the benefits. Then it identifies, quantifies, and subtracts all the negatives, the costs. The difference between the two indicates whether the planned action is advisable. – about.com

When I apply this analysis to a Twitter and Foursquare that you pay for, I find positives in more rich, relevant content, less clutter and (hopefully) more personalized features. The negatives I find are less user base = less networking capability, less use from those I would want to have using it, and more spam content from business (if you pay for something, you have more say in your usability).

Also, we have to take in mind the average user for such sites. In a recent article in the WSJ, Foursquare states that they are gaining 100,000 users every ten days, but only “half use the service by checking in at least once a month after signing up.” I find this number very low, and this in turn proves true why there cannot be a paid model: If users are barely using the service now (merely seeing what it is, testing it, etc.) then why would they pay to use it? This is the question (and also the thin line I stated) that web service start ups and apps are pondering now.

At the end of this analysis (and these pro’s/con’s are merely self opinion) I don’t see the value in paying to use these services. Keep in mind that I do use these two adamantly EVERYDAY. But value to me is defined as what will deliver the most, and to me, that is the interaction I can get with anyone, at any time.

I am not even going to tackle the view on paying for Facebook. Sorry. But consider it in your responses – would you pay for the largest social network on the web? Crazy to think about, huh?

What is your opinion, are you willing to pay?