Tag Archives: social media

Innotech and Social Media Awards

I just wanted to remind everyone that Innotech Oregon is in two weeks! I will be moderating a panel in the eMarketing Summit on the topic of Companies and Communities: Participating Without Being Sleazy on Thursday, April 23rd at 10:00 AM in Portland Ballroom 256. I’ll be joined on the panel by Kelly Feller, Social Media Strategist at Intel; Jake Kuramoto, Product Strategy Director at Oracle; and Dan Divens, Website and Community Manager at Tripwire.

Keep in mind that you have to register for the eMarketing Summit, since it is not part of the general conference fee. Other presenters in the eMarketing summit include: Rahaf Harfoush, New Media Strategist, Member of Obama’s Social Media Team; Carrie Bugbee, Kent Lewis, Ben Lloyd, and more. Speakers in other tracks include Jason Grigsby, Deborah Bryant, Brian Jamison, James Keller, Raven Zachary and many more.

Don’t forget about the  SoMe Awards: Your Social Media Awards brought to you by the Social Media Club of Portland, SEMpdx, the Software Association of Oregon (SAO), and InnoTech.

According to the SoMe website,

The Portland chapter of Social Media Club, SEMpdx and Software Association of Oregon are pleased to announce the first annual SoMē Awards to recognize outstanding Social Media projects and the people who created them.

Awards will be given in 7 categories based on factors such as originality, effectiveness and creativity. At least one member of the team who created the project must reside in Oregon or Southwest Washington to be eligible.

Award submissions must be received no later than 11:59 pm on Saturday, April 11, 2009 to be considered. The awards ceremony will take place on Thursday, April 23, following the eMarketing Summit & InnoTech conference.

It’s not too late! You have until this Saturday (4/11) to nominate your favorite social media project.

I hope to see you at Innotech.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

Social Media Training

I wanted to share a quick presentation that I used to train a client on general social media sites including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Monitoring / Yahoo Pipes, FriendFeed and more. I’ve embedded the presentation and included a set of links that were part of the demos provided throughout the presentation.

Presentation

Demo
The demo links for this presentation can be found on Agglom.

Contact me if you would like to have me train your company on online communities or social media.

Related Fast Wonder blog posts:

Business Leader NW Supporting Non-Profits

Are you on the fence about attending Business Leader NW here at the Oregon Convention Center on February 25th & 26th?

Here are a few things that might entice you.

$25 of your entry fee goes to a non-profit (if you use a discount code below):

  • SHS199: School House Supplies. A Portland nonprofit that provides free school supplies for teachers.
  • OFB199: Oregon Food Bank. Distributes food to regional food banks across Oregon and SW Washington.
  • CFF199: Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Provides funding for research to fight cystic fibrosis.

More details and links to registration on the BLNW blog.

Ask us questions in the BLNW Blogger Pavilion

From the BLNW blog:

The organizers are providing a 400 square foot space for a “Business Blogger Pavilion,” on the exhibit floor at the Oregon Convention Center. The pavilion will serve as a workshop for business people to meet with bloggers, web developers, technologists and a host of digital media and enterprise 2.0 experts. The goal is to connect the business community with bloggers and web experts. Bloggers will be featured in discussions at the pavilion on topics such as starting a business blog, marketing a business video and customer service 2.0.

I will be in the blogger pavilion, so please feel free to stop by and visit or ask us questions! I hope to see you there.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

Web Technology: Impact on Social Media and Community

In a recent Wired News Article, 6 New Web Technologies of 2008 You Need to Use Now, Michael Calore talks about several web technologies that are already important for social media and online communities, but will continue to be increasingly important in 2009.

Identity Management. With all of the buzz behind OpenID, Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect in 2008, will we finally be able to better integrate our profile data, friend lists, and other identity data to be able to better manage our information in 2009? While the big social networks have already been looking at ways to implement these technologies, smaller and niche social networks and communities (including corporate communties) will need to start thinking about them in 2009. How will you make it easier for your members to join a community while bringing any appropriate identity information along with them?

Lifestreaming. Most of us have accounts on dozens of different sites, so services like FriendFeed have been popping up to help pull our updates and those of our friends into a single stream where they can be more easily consumed. Does your niche social network or corporate community have an rss feed of each member’s activity and have you encouraged them to add this feed to their FriendFeed account?

Location Awareness. I spend quite a bit of time thinking about interesting ways to use location information as a part of my work with Shizzow. For me, location awareness is all about merging our online identities with real world interactions with real people. While it might be interesting to know that a friend of mine is visiting some exotic far away city, I am more interested in being able to find friends right now to get together for coworking, tea, or a couple of drinks at happy hour. How can you use location information to help your community members get together in the real world for meetups?

I hope this provides a little food for thought as you think about your social media and online community plans for 2009.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

Community Manager / Social Media Jobs are Still Hot

ReadWriteWeb’s Jobwire site has been keeping up with who is being hired, while many other sites are focused on layoffs and the downturn. It’s exciting to see them publish their numbers showing that people are still hiring community managers and social media specialists.

I’ve been seeing a similar trend anecdotaly, and so far at least, I’m still getting clients who want me to consult with them to help build online communities, new blogs, or improve their social media presence.

They have some other data available in their full post, which you should take the time to read. It’s just nice to see a little good news about people getting jobs now and then.

Analysts Writing about Online Communities and Social Media

I try to keep up with the latest research and ideas about online communities and social media, but I find myself occassionally missing some good research only because it gets lost in the sea of information streaming across my screen. I decided to set up a Yahoo Pipe to pull all of the analyst blogs together and filter it down to the keywords of most interest to me. As with many of my Yahoo Pipes creations, I wanted to share it with others who might find it useful. Here’s how it works …

It takes blog feeds from the following analyst firms:

It filters for keywords in the content and titles of the blog posts. The keywords searched include: social media, online community, social network, collaboration, and a few others.

Usage:

  1. Go to the Analyst Research Blogs Filtered for Social Media pipe
  2. Grab the RSS feed output

Unlike many of my other pipes, this one is not user configurable. However, you can always clone the source of my pipe and tweak the analyst blog feeds or keywords for filters to make it better for your needs.

My Question for You:

Am I missing any key analyst firms with blogs who cover the social media / online community space?

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts

Yahoo Pipes for Social Media Monitoring and Business Benefit

Many large companies can afford to spring for expensive software packages that monitor what people are saying about your company, industry, and competition online; however, for those of us looking for an inexpensive solution, Yahoo Pipes can be an important tool.

After I published the 2 minute Yahoo Pipes demo on Monday, I realized that I have done many posts about Yahoo Pipes without ever writing about why people should care about the technology and how it can used. I decided it was time to devote a post to explaining how people can use Yahoo Pipes and get actual business benefits.

Using Yahoo Pipes can help you understand what people are saying about you, your industry, your competitors and more through smart filtering of blogs, news sources, Twitter, and other online sites. Your customers are talking about you and your competitors are revealing information that you want to know online. Can you find it quickly and efficiently now?

A few business benefits from using Yahoo Pipes:

  • Become more responsive to your customers by knowing when and where people are talking about your company and products on blogs and Twitter. Find and respond more quickly and efficiently.
  • Use what people are saying about your company and your products to improve your products / services, marketing messages, web content, documentation and other communications.
  • Get insight into your competitors.
  • Keep up with important information about your industry by focusing on keyword filtering to find the most relevant content for your situation.
  • Monitoring dashboards will help you disseminate the information from Yahoo Pipes throughout the rest of your organization.

While I think that monitoring is always important, I usually emphasize it when I am working on blogging strategies with clients. Knowing what people say about your organization, your industry, and your competition is an important element of a blogging strategy. All of the information found via Yahoo Pipes for the purposes above can then be used to generate ideas for blog posts or other communications.

What business benefits do you get from Yahoo Pipes?

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts

Are More Companies Turning to Social Media in this Economy?

Certain social media activities (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) can provide tremendous value to companies for very little cost, especially when compared to traditional advertising. If done right, social media can give your company a voice that people will pay attention to because they want hear what you have to say, and the costs can be significantly lower than some of the other options.

I’ve been a little concerned about my timing for starting a new consulting practice. I launched the consulting arm of Fast Wonder on June 23rd, and as everyone knows, the economy has recently taken a turn for the worse. As soon as the economy tanked, I had a couple of smaller clients pull out of deals; however, I’ve noticed an upswing over the past 2 weeks in people calling or emailing me to ask about my consulting services.

Yesterday, I came up with this hypothesis: Companies are pulling back and reassessing their strategies and spending in light of the economic situation. During this reassessment, some companies are deciding to increase their social media presence as a way to stretch already thin budgets. Even with consulting fees to help them get started, they are still spending a lot less than they would for even a single, small, traditional marketing campaign.

I put this question out to my Twitter followers on Friday:

Here are the responses:

  • PDXsays: @geekygirldawn Affirmative
  • wickedjava: @geekygirldawn completely think they are moving that direction because it’s more cost effective.
  • donmball: @geekygirldawn Maybe you’re just good at what you do. There’s always that!
  • MelWebster: @geekygirldawn Not sure, but as a small PR boutique, we have also seen an uptick lately in consulting opps.
  • unclenate: @geekygirldawn I certainly see the shift happening, PR 2.0 is making an impact. Most seem stuck on the ROI and value measurement question.
  • becnavich: @geekygirldawn I know i’ve seen a few blog posts on why companies SHOULD be turning to social media, but whether they will or not…?
  • msamye: @geekygirldawn Great topic for this afternoon’s @beerandblog.
  • jmelesky: @geekygirldawn i saw a move towards pay-per-performance in the ad space during the bust, so it wouldn’t surprise me if social is a new focus
  • Justin Kistner (on Facebook): I’m in talks with a company now is reallocating a large amount of their marketing budget to social media because they’re looking for more cost-effectiveness.

I also know that inquiries are not the same as deals, so the jury is still out on this question. I’d be curious to hear if other consultants have noticed the same trends? For those of you working inside of companies, is your company making any changes to their social media strategy in light of the economy?

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

ReadWriteWeb's Seven Social Media Consultants

Wow. I’m honored to have made Marshall’s list of Seven Social Media Consultants That Deliver Tangible Value on ReadWriteWeb today:

In this post we highlight seven social media consultants that consistently bring tangible value to the table. These folks aren’t full of hot air – they use their blogs to offer clear examples, links, tutorials and other resources you can put to use. If the goods you can see for free are so solid, that’s all the more reason to investigate paying for these peoples’ services.

The full list includes:

Specifically, here is Marshall’s assessment of my consulting practice (good and bad):

Dawn Foster is a relatively new entrant into the consulting world but her blog Fast Wonder is already pumping out the usable information and tools.

She’s built an enthusiastic community of supporters by delivering things like Brand Dashboards, Yahoo! Pipes and RSS Hacks and a review of a recent Community Manager compensation study.

While Foster’s work with research and tools is exciting, we feel less inspired by the parts of her discourse that are short on detailed examples. Her years of experience at Jive Software, Compiere and Intel are clearly helpful in consulting but we hope that with more consulting experience she’ll be able to offer a wider variety of examples to back up the advice she gives.

For a new consultancy, though, Fast Wonder is quickly gathering value through work with bleeding edge projects like the pseudo-stealth location-based social network Shizzow.

I’m OK with this assessment. I launched my consulting practice less than three months ago, so I think the criticism of needing more examples is fair. I’ve been working with communities in one form or another since around 2001 starting with open source communities on behalf of Intel. Later I worked for Compiere and Jive, and I am currently responsible for the Shizzow community. I also do quite a bit of community work within the Portland tech community through Legion of Tech by organizing local meetups and events. While I have great examples from these activities, it is still a relatively small number of companies. On the upside, my consulting practice is really starting to take off, and I hope to be able to offer more examples over the next few months.

Again, I feel honored to be included on this list, which includes several people that I admire and whose blogs I read regularly.

Using Twitter for Brands or Corporate Identities

As most of you know, we launched Shizzow last week, and we began using the Shizzow Twitter account with it. I’ve been doing most (but not all) of the tweeting from the Shizzow account, and I wanted to share some best practices for using a corporate Twitter account effectively without being spammy.

Starting points

This post assumes that you are already familiar with Twitter and are using it for a personal account, but if you are new to Twitter, you’ll want to start by reading Tara Hunt’s Tweeting for Companies 101.

I am also assuming that you have already read my post about Social Media and Social Networking Best Practices for Business. If not, you might want to start there. It has quite a few tips for how to interact with social media sites and online communities that apply to using Twitter, but are not covered explicitly or in any detail in this post.

Best Practices

  • Know what people are saying about you. After you create your Twitter account and have the name reserved, but before you start using it, set up some tracking tools. You will want to know when people are replying and what people are saying about you on Twitter. Yesterday, I released a Twitter Sniffer for Brands pipe that will help you keep track of the conversations about you on Twitter. I’ve found that the Twitter Search (was Summize) actually misses some Tweets that will be caught by this pipe. This is a copy of the pipe that I am using to keep track of the conversations about Shizzow. I monitor the RSS feeds most of the day when I have time, but no less than 2-3 times per day. For extra credit, you should also be monitoring what people say about you on other blogs (Google Blog Search with RSS feeds or alerts might help).
  • Respond frequently and sincerely. Knowing what people say is only helpful if you actually use the information and respond to people. You will want to keep the responses public by using @replies wherever possible instead of DMs unless you are exchanging non-public info. Going back to my Best Practices post, you also need to be sincere and remember that it is not all about you when you respond to people. Be honest about what isn’t working well and how you plan to improve your products or services. Help people find information when you see them struggling or asking questions on Twitter. Respond to the tough, critical questions in addition to the easy ones.
  • Follow back. You will want to follow people back when they follow you on Twitter. It will help you listen and respond while allowing people to send you direct messages. See the ‘don’t proactively follow people’ section below for some cautions about following people.
  • Have a personality. Companies are made up of people, and you’ll want to show some personality in your tweets. Nobody wants to listen to a corporate drone or regurgitated marketing messages. Personalize the information and act like a real person in your responses.
  • Variety is Important. Include a wide variety of information in your Twitter stream without focusing too heavily on any one element. I try to shoot for a mix of informational posts (new features, blog posts), links to other people’s blog posts or retweets, @replies to questions, alerts about any issues or downtime for maintenance, meetups, and fun posts.

Things to Avoid

  • Don’t be a link spam account. This one is a little controversial, and some people will disagree with me here; however, I don’t think that you should use your Twitter account just to post links to blog posts. If people want your blog posts, they can get them via RSS. It is OK to link to informational blog posts, but I always put some text around it so that people can decide whether or not to click through. You should also be linking to posts from other blogs that are relevant to your company or industry as a whole. These should be a fairly small portion of your overall Twitter posts (see the variety is important section above).
  • Don’t go overboard. You should be providing information and replying to people, but you shouldn’t go overboard. I would say that posting no more than 5-10 times a day on average is a pretty good goal. Some days will have more and others less depending on the situation; however, if you post too much, you’ll start to lose followers who can’t keep up with the volume.
  • Don’t be too self-promotional. You should use your Twitter account to promote your activities; however, it should be a part of what you do. If every post talks about how awesome your company is, people will lose interest fairly quickly.
  • Don’t proactively follow people. People will find your Twitter account when you @reply them, and you can use your website / blog to promote it. You don’t want to start by following a few hundred (or thousand) people who don’t care about you or your product. It seems creepy to be followed by a random brand that you aren’t already following, and it just makes you look spammy. See the follow back section above for how to do this right.

For more information

Jeremiah Owyang just wrote a couple of interesting posts about corporate usage of Twitter: Why Brands Are Unsuccessful in Twitter and Web Strategy: The Evolution of Brands on Twitter. They provide some additional information and a slightly different take on how brands use Twitter.

Related Fast Wonder blog posts