1.)    Shine your light: Once you master a skill or a task, move on and share that aptitude with a different account team or your co-workers. Everyone wins when you learn from each other.

2.)    Connect with causes: This shows you care, and it’s not just about the money.

3.)    Reconsider metrics: Look at what type of analytics you’re using, if any, and see if they are the best way measure what you’re interested in.

4.)    Listen: Hear what consumers, employees and bloggers are saying about your company/product and incorporate that into your business plan. This also means responding to your online following (very important!) Public relations is still about customer service.

5.)    Media training for everyone: With social media, everyone is able to speak on behalf of the company, whether it is the C-suite or a junior-level employee, so make sure they’re ready.

6.)    Bring the legal department in early: Make sure that legal is involved with social media strategies from the beginning. That way, everyone is on the same page and can act proactively, instead of cleaning up after a crisis!

Chris emphasized that having a blog or a Twitter account is not just about exposure. It is about using these tools to leverage relationships with your audience and create influence.

Becky Loya is a senior at Boston University studying public relations. Follow her @BeckyLoya.

To be honest, when Eric Stoller, higher ed technology expert, brought up the subject of accessibility, I wasn’t really sure what that meant. “Ensuring our websites are usable by people of all abilities and disabilities is a legal and moral obligation many higher ed institutions have failed to live up to,” Eric writes on his blog. When building a school building, you would always think to make it wheelchair accessible, but the same logic usually is not top of mind when thinking about the web. The Internet is a valuable resource, and students who might have auditory, visual or cognitive disabilities should be able to access it too. In addition, making the web more accessible naturally leads to better SEO. Sounds like a win-win to me. The easiest way to get accessibility on the agendas of IT departments, technology vendors, administrators etc. is to start talking about it. Social media provides excellent channels for creating hype, so let’s get this initiative going!

Next up is student engagement. As a student, it was interesting to hear how higher ed professionals are trying to get my attention online: contests, iPads, blogs, etc. Social media is a very successful way to communicate with students, but only if you’re doing it right. The first step is to have a plan. Creating the accounts is a start, but a long-term plan and a lot of manpower is required to make those accounts successful. Part of this means giving students opportunities and content they wouldn’t receive elsewhere. You need to give a reason for your school’s community to to follow or fan you. Keep content fresh, engaging and be helpful. If a student is tweeting about limited seating in the library, offer them a different place to study or offer to petition for more seating. Become a trusted source for students.

I learned a lot at #satechBOS and if you’d like to check out more of the discussion, visit the Google Doc for lots of great resources and coverage.

Rebecca is a senior at Boston University studying public relations. Follow her @BeckyLoya.

The panel included:

• Scott Kiekbusch: Director of User Experience, Digital Influence Group (moderator)
• Janet Aronica: Community Manager, oneforty
• Zach Hofer-Shall: Analyst, Forrester
• Kathy O’Reilly: Director, Social Media Relations, Monster.com
• Ben Boardman: Marketwire and Sysomos

Some of the key takeaways from the discussion:

Your strategy around using social tools should be solidified first before assessing which tools can fulfill your needs. Developing that strategy should first involve a good deal of listening only, and using web analytics to determine where your audience is spending the most time.

When choosing tools, keep four main categories in mind: Discovery (listening and searching for your brand & competitors), Publishing (the platforms themselves: Twitter, Facebook, WordPress…), Measurement (what was your return on investment for participating?), and Database (social CRM). Some tools address some of the needs, but you likely will need a combination of tools to cover all of them.

Keep in mind that a large part of your social strategy will involve educating your internal team (more broadly, your employees). Policies should be in place to guide your team on how they should participate, rather than just what they can’t do. Employees are often your best brand advocates — identify them and make use of their talents, but also emphasize that your brand comes first (above individual personalities).

A plethora of tools were mentioned in this morning’s panel, so to quickly compile them, I’ve hand-selected the best takeaways and links to all of the tools mentioned using Storify (see below). If you are currently using any of these tools within your own group, or would like to examine them, please let us know in the comments or reach out to me directly.

[View the story "#SMCBoston / #SMB22: Evaluating Social Technologies 03/24/11" on Storify]

Image courtesy Intersection Consulting on Flickr / Creative Commons

I’ll be covering South by Southwest Interactive 2011 (SXSWi) over the next several days. Visit BU Now for a preview and introduction to the happenings in Austin, TX.

Highlights:

• Blogging is a cornerstone to SM campaign
• Focus on “combined relevance” which should tell you the reason your content matters – also, “personal relevance” which is why content is important to your specific audience
• Content should, first and foremost, be audience focused and not vehicle to push information about one’s self (on blog as well we other SM platforms)
• Potential audiences are looking for a “point of view” on blogs
• Use “Social Proof” to verify your content by embedding SM buttons and prove to audience the relevancy of posts
• Grammar and writing quality matter
• Weekends are ideal for sharing content
• Custom designed formats are ideal
• Make blog post titles descriptive to drive appeal on SM sharing sites
• Multiple blog authors, with profiles, is preferred
• Limiting categories can help page organization
• Avoid “TLDR” (too long, didn’t read)

Want to watch the webinar yourself? Dan’s talk is hosted in its entirety on HubSpot.

Photo courtesy vincentgallegos on Flickr

Last Thursday, I had the opportunity to attend TWTRCON SF 2010, much due in part to Anne Weiskopf, Dean Elmore and Kat Cornetta (thank you!) I’d like to share with you some takeaways I gathered from some of the great sessions I attended during the one-day conference. Please feel free to reach out to me in person if you’d like to talk more about these notes, or better yet, visit the blogs and websites of the speakers noted below — they have some very valuable knowledge to share.

Session: Twitter for Business 101 (Laura Fitton, Founder, OneForty.com)
- Four keys to social media success: Listen, Learn, Care, Serve.
- What does Twitter disrupt? Attention. Traditional media distribution channels. Human isolation.
- The most important thing to remember when using Twitter: Be helpful, even if this means sharing content that isn’t your own.
- Laura’s session slides: http://slidesha.re/9pLtw1

Panel: The Bottom Line on Real Time
- Certain areas of the business may not be completely socialized due to sensitivity/privacy issues
- “If a customer needs to talk about a sensitive banking issue, we are NOT going to solve that problem on Twitter, but we’ll get them to the right place.” (cust. svc./funneling) – Kimarie Matthews, VP, Social Web and Customer Loyalty, Wells Fargo
- Twitter: great way to start conversations. “It’s a pickup line, not a way to foster a full, meaningful relationship.” – Eric Mantion, Social Media Sherpa, Intel
- “The #1 way links get shared is by e-mail, but #1 way links get clicked is by social media.” – Brian Solis, Principal, FutureWorks
- Remember that sometimes, all a customer wants is to be acknowledged. Remember this as a priority before you venture to find them a solution to their problem. – Mark Yolton, Senior VP, SAP Community Network, SAP

Interview: Show Me the Money (with Adam Bain, President, Global Revenue, Twitter)
- Three current offerings: Promoted tweets (sold in 24-hour blocks), promoted trends, promoted accounts
- Still working on rolling out proper advertising offerings (“The important priority is getting the platform right, rather than getting it right now. Making sure our users are delighted with the platform.”
- Advertisers have moved beyond “WHY Twitter” and are now focused on “HOW.” 50 advertisers contracted currently with a goal of 140.
- On trends: “We actually do have a product now which shows activity 1) before 2) during 3) after for the trend.” Ex. Old Spice campaign had 3 states that were well-defined. When the trend ended, it didn’t shut down all conversation (3). “They paid us to help light the match.”
- On wrangling the firehose of data from Twitter: Working on a platform to allow third-party developer partners to more easily perform analysis for Twitter’s ad clients.
- Adam’s suggestions on using Twitter for your brand: Be polite, delight, be newsworthy and relevant.

Case Study: Airlines in Real Time (Linda Rutherford, VP of Communication, Southwest Airlines)
- Deciding on the message first, then figuring out, can Twitter help us? Can other tools help?
- “You can’t solve customer service issues in 140 characters.”
- Turning fans into fanatics – taking customer experiences and turning them into something remarkable
- Remember to use the “Aunt Maude method” – make sure that no matter what social strategies & tools you roll out for your organization, it’s simple enough that even your Aunt Maude can do it (or explain it)
- It’s about 1) discovery, 2) willingness to experiment, 3) taking the necessary time to help the executive team understand
- “Our employees feel empowered when they’re able to tell the Southwest story.”

Analytics: The Value of Being Social (Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist, Google)
- “HITS: How Idiots Track Success” – point being, there are more effective ways to track success on Twitter
- Beginner’s Guide to Web Data Analysis: Ten Steps to Success (blog post) – short link: http://bit.ly/aVuyRJ
- “I’m not interested in activity, but in the actions that came of it – did you visit my site? Did you buy my book?”
- Arrow has changed over the past 5 years into much more of a two-way conversation, rather than just shouting.
- The world of marketing has changed even more – Social web revolution, back and forth and side-to-side (btwn. customers) – we’re not even present/in control of this part. THIS is the new marketing – customer to customer. It’s going on without us. If you don’t understand this, your business will die.
- Don’t get hung up on # of followers. Justin Bieber has millions of followers. Is his message more important than yours?
- Better metrics to track success on Twitter:

• Message amplification: # of RT’s per 1,000 followers.
• Conversation: What does your Twitter stream look like? @ replies? Providing value that might not be sourced from you – maybe even your competitors. Did what you shared add value to the world?
• Conversation Rate: # of replies sent/day against index of Twitter accounts (and #of replies received/day). Outbound msgs. vs. inbound msgs.
• Focus on the size of your second-level network. Your active readers/retweeters/regular interacters and THEIR network.
• Sentiment Analysis: Don’t get caught up in measuring the positive, negative & neutral. Tools are not sophisticated enough yet to understand sarcasm & other nuances. An agency can help you with this if you’re really concerned.
• Words surrounding mentions of you: What words do people use most before mentioning your name? What words do they use after? What do these words say about your brand? Are there opportunities here?

Panel: Search Goes Social
- In October, Twitter did 1 billion queries/day; Google did 88 billion. Twitter is not the biggest in the search game, but holding up as a contender for real-time.
- When Yahoo gets the Twitter firehose, it has to index it in 10 minutes or less to be effective. Only counts queries from actual human beings typing in queries. Weeds out bots, spammers & click fraud.
- How to SEO in real time? Create retweetable content.

Keynote: Business in the Fast Lane (Scott Monty, Head of Social Media, Ford Motor Co. – and a BU alum!)
- “People don’t trust what corporations have to say anymore. They trust people.”
- The Woody Allen theory of social media: “Ninety percent [of social media] is just showing up – it’s the other half that’s hard.”
- With rollout of new social channels for Ford Fiesta campaign, 6.2 million views on 600 videos, 40 million impressions on Twitter, and got the attention of a brand new demographic.
- The results prove it’s working: 83% of the customers reached by social media campaign for the new Ford Fiesta (including a fan-driven video creation campaign) were new to Ford.
- “If you wish to persuade me, you must think my thoughts, feel my feelings, and speak my words.” – Cicero (The point? You have to understand your customers before you can begin speaking to them – listen before you speak.”
- Transparency is key, particularly in crisis communication situations. “We’re training our people to talk like humans again.”