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

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.”

At Student Health Services Wellness Education, we use social media quite regularly. We know that the population we serve is connected to many platforms including Facebook and Twitter. We also know from the research that most people get answers to their health questions online or from a friend versus a health educator or medical professional. While this knowledge makes it difficult to dispel myths, it is helpful to get the word out to our students in this format.

About one year ago, we created the BU Student Health Facebook page and since then, we have added close to 2,000 friends. On our Facebook page, you will find a daily status update that varies from day to day. On Wednesdays, for instance, we provide a weekly wellness tip, while on Fridays we provide a weird body fact. We also create all of our events on Facebook and invite our friends — we have found that we can get the word out about what is going much faster this way than with large, costly posters. We also use Facebook to post interesting health and wellness news clips and to create surveys for students to participate in. Since approximately 85% of college-age students are on Facebook, we think that this is a valuable resource to our office.

In addition to Facebook, we use our Wellness blog quite regularly. We always post our upcoming events, Student Health news and programs, and other health and wellness information. Because we are able to update it ourselves, it is a little more user-friendly than the general Student Health website. We typically put a new post about something important every one to two days. We have noticed that certain posts get more attention than others. For example, just before an event, many students will visit the Upcoming Events page. We also notice that students seem to be very interested in articles related to the flu, stress, and the GTK campaign.

Lastly, we have started a Twitter page. We were reluctant at first because last year around this time, students were telling us that they didn’t actually use Twitter, but they did follow other people like celebrities. It seems, however, that there has been a slight change with more students making use of Twitter. Typically, we simply link our Facebook status updates to our Twitter page to ensure that we have similar message, and also because it takes much less time. We have found that writing quick, fifteen-word health messages are noticed by our students because sometimes our messages get retweeted.

We think that using social media can help us permeate our health messages in ways that may have been difficult previously. We think that the blog and our Facebook page have gained popularity and we hope that our Twitter followers will follow the same path. Because of our use of social media for health promotion, I was asked to speak at the upcoming NECHA (New England College Health Association) conference. I am very excited about this opportunity, and to continue learning about how social media can help increase health and wellness awareness among BU students.

We hope that guest posts like Michelle’s can help other social media practitioners at BU gain some insight into how different organizations on campus are using social media to their benefit. If you’re interested in writing a guest post of your own, please contact us!

After reading Beth Schillaci’s post this morning on the significance of followers, likers and subscribers, I was reminded of a discussion I had last week. I was consulting with a team on setting up a Twitter account for their program, and someone asked me, “How many followers should we aim for?” This is not a unique question — I hear it all the time. As a numbers girl, I LOVE to be able to provide concrete numbers that indicate success, and I wish I could say that “followers” is a solid measure of success, but it’s not. Here’s why.

Let’s break this down a bit. Grab a pen and paper (or a blank document), and answer these questions:

- In one sentence, what is the goal of your Twitter account? (e.g., I want to drive more traffic to our application form; I want to generate more interaction between our Dean of Students and the freshman class; I want to react to comments and answer questions from the campus community)

- Based on this goal, who is your target audience? (prospective students in their junior and senior year of high school; the class of 2014; undergrads and grad students, faculty, staff and influential neighbors)

- What are they most interested in hearing about? (admissions guidelines and SAT test prep; summer jobs for college students; free events around campus and the surrounding city)

Now tape that to your monitor. Be mindful of your end goal at all times. Based on these criteria, you can build a solid, meaningful presence on Twitter. Don’t worry — if you don’t know the immediate answer to question #3, go back to #2 and do your research. Follow 50 (or 20 or 100) people you’ve identified in your target audience and listen to them for a week. Talk with them; retweet what is interesting or relevant to you and your goal.

The number of followers you accumulate is nowhere to be found in these steps. As Beth points out, “I would much rather have 10 people come in my store and buy something than 100 window shoppers”.

If you want me to build your followers to 1,000 by the end of this week, I can certainly tell you how to do that, as can many other websites and “social media gurus” (for a price). Will it give you a more engaged community? Probably not. Will it bring you back to your goal and ultimately help you succeed? Probably not. Your goal should be to find your most rabid, loyal fans and get them excited about what you’re up to.

See also:

• 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business (Chris Brogan)

• The Numbers Obsession (video) (Gary Vaynerchuk)

• 7 Social Media Truths You Can Ignore and Still Be Successful (Social Media Examiner)

• How Twitter increased my blog’s traffic by 300% in one week (Mack Collier)

(Image courtesy losgofres on Flickr)

Twitter in Plain English: Common Craft’s video is a perfect companion starting point to understanding the basics of Twitter. It explains the way Twitter works in “plain English”, and is a quick way to indoctrinate your team members if they ask you what Twitter’s all about.

Kevin Rose: 10 Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers: Though I’m always cautious when someone asks me how to grow their followers the fastest (as we discussed yesterday, it’s about quality, not quantity) Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, has some great suggestions. I think the title should be “How to be more interesting on Twitter”. The article is over a year old but every point still holds true.

Gary Vaynerchuk’s Talk and Q&A at the 140 Characters Conference in April 2010: Another great video — Gary’s talk begins about 3 minutes in. His networking skills on Twitter and UStream helped Gary build his wine business into a web sensation, and helped him to get a 10-book deal with HarperCollins. Warning to sensitive souls: he has a bit of a foul mouth.

How to Run Successful Contests on Twitter: Something you might not need to focus on right at the beginning of your Twitter experiment, but once you start thinking about giveaways or other contests for your network, this information will be useful for you. Shortly, we’ll also share our experience with contests toward the end of this past school year.

Grow Bigger Ears in Ten Minutes: Chris Brogan gives some concrete steps to increase your ability to listen to what people are saying about you online — and listening is the whole point of this exercise, right? I highly recommend Chris Brogan’s blog — his thoughts on the purpose and execution of social media are spot-on.

While you’re thinking about Twitter, you also want to think about how your page will look (and tie in to the rest of your brand’s messaging and visual experience). Boston University’s Marketing & Communications group has recently created guidelines for social network icons and backgrounds.

What other articles or videos would you add to this list?

BUniverse

Ben Agoes (of the Creative Services group) presented on BUniverse, a video portal for the BU community (students, faculty, staff, alumni and our editorial team at BU Today) to share content. The BUniverse project is headed up by himself and Scott Dasse (New Media), and is currently in the beta phase. While full-scale promotions will launch in the fall, BUniverse has been integrated in many locations including the Dean of Students site, BU Today content and the BU homepage, and has been quietly gaining a following on Twitter and Facebook.

BUniverse fulfills the need for a video portal that can be tailored to BU-related content, while still tapping into the power of YouTube’s resources. Videos can either be uploaded through the site (which then uploads the video to BU’s official YouTube channel) or can pull metadata from an existing YouTube video. Tags can be added to categorize videos based on courses or colleges, which have already been populated in a smart search field to help categorization.

Contributors require a BU login to upload content and comment on videos, but anyone can view, share and embed BUniverse content. The community is moderated by Nelia Ponte (Editorial) and staff to ensure that videos and comments are within BUniverse’s Terms of Service. The top video on BUniverse has nearly 5,000 views as of 05/25, and there are currently more than 20 videos on BUniverse with over 500 views. Agoes encouraged all departments to upload their content (lectures, event videos) to BUniverse to further populate the library.

Daily News Digest

Jo Breiner (Public Relations) spoke with the group about a recent change she’s made to the Daily News Digest, a collection of news articles concerning Boston University that is sent internally to just under 300 staff and faculty members each day. She has begun using bit.ly for most of the URL’s so that she can track the number of clicks in an e-mail and gain insights on which pieces are of most interest to the internal audience. She also advised everyone to be mindful and not share videos of news coverage from our tracking service outside of the university. She stressed that while we may pass around the videos internally as much as we’d like via e-mail, we do not have the rights to distribute them externally on websites, Twitter or anywhere else.

Other Issues

Mary Tunney (Public Relations) advised the group of Public Relations’ plan to be visible at orientation and work with parents to connect with BU on Facebook and Twitter accounts (and help them get set up on the services if needed). She also updated everyone on the status of Boston University’s new Community Page on Facebook, and that we hope to know more of Facebook’s direction with Community Pages and privacy standards in the coming week. For some background on how Facebook Community Pages are currently affecting higher ed, read Michael Fienen’s “Facebook Hates Your Brand” on .eduGuru.

Next Meeting

Our next meeting will take place on Tuesday, June 29th, and a couple of our Communicators will present on their trial experience with social media monitoring software Radian6. Mary requested that the Communicators e-mail her with any other topics they’d like to discuss at the next meeting.