Social Mediarology

Twitter and Facebook have changed the way that many of us communicate. Not only do we communicate with our friends and family differently now, but we consumer news and other media differently. We interact with current and potential customers differently. We get breaking news from Twitter and Facebook, not from the evening news. It’s because of this that it’s so important to know how to best share that information. Twitter and Facebook are the two largest social media sites in the country and each site has created simple ways to communicate important information with your friends or people who follow you.

Sharing on Twitter: Retweeting

On Twitter, there are a few different ways to share, or Retweet, information. The first way to do it is through what I’ll call the “classic retweet.” Seen below, the “classic retweet” simply consists of copying and pasting the message that someone else posted, and adding an “RT @username” to the beginning of the message to let people know you’re sharing someone else’s message. In this case, both @VisitIndy posted the message and @TCMIndy retweeted it before we did:

This “classic retweet” has been around nearly as long as Twitter has and was a practice that grew organically from Twitter’s users. Recently, Twitter implemented an official Retweet function, seen in the image below:

You can see the underlined Retweet link in the image above. If you wanted to retweet the message that @ThisIsIndiana posted, simply click on the Retweet icon and you’ll share that message with your followers.

You can see the Retweet icon () next to the status update. In this case, @VisitBtown clicked on the Retweet link to share @IIB‘s message with their followers.

However you choose to share information on Twitter, retweeting is a useful way to share important updates with your followers. You can use these retweeting techniques to spread the word about different events going on in your area, sales going on at local establishments or state-wide promotions to help inform your followers about what they can see and do in Indiana.

Sharing on Facebook: Shares and Mentions

Sharing information on Facebook isn’t always as easy as clicking a Retweet button and being done, but in some cases, it can be!

If you like Visit Indiana on Facebook (see Quick Update below), you can easily share any of our photos, blog posts, links and anything else that has the share link as seen below:

When you click on the share link, you’ll be presented with an overlay window like the one seen below. You can then insert your own message and when you click the Share button, the message and link/image/post you shared will show up on your wall.

Sharing content in this way is extremely easy and can dramatically increase the reach of your content. Once your page has 10,000 fans (I know, that’s a lot of fans!) you’ll be able to see detailed sharing statistics in addition to the information you can currently view with Facebook Insights.

One last feature I’ll talk about is the use of Facebook Mentions. Similar to the way you can mention @VisitIndiana in your tweets on Twitter, you can also now mention people you are friends with or organizations you like through Facebook.

Quick update – Right when I was in the middle of writing this post, Facebook changed the way they refer to organizations’ fans. From now on, you can “Like” pages rather than become “A Fan”. This appears to be merely a semantic difference, but we’ll start referring to our fans as people who “like Visit Indiana”. For consistency’s sake, we’ll also refer to “Fan Pages” as simply “Pages”

In the image below, you can see I mentioned both Tastings Indianapolis and Conrad Indianapolis. This message was posted on our Visit Indiana Page, but since it mentioned Tastings and the Conrad, it also showed up on each of their pages! This is a great way to spread the word from your official page, rather than from your personal profile.

The only caveat here is that in order to mention an organization, you have to personally “like” their page. In other words, if you manage the Madison Indiana Facebook Fan Page, buy you haven’t personally “liked” the Visit Indiana Fan Page yet, you won’t be able to mention us.

It’s really easy to mention another organization or person in your status updates. Simply type the @ symbol then start typing the name of the person or page and a list will pop up for you of all people you’re friends with and all pages that you “like”. You can see in the status update below that it’s very easy to include mentions in your Facebook status updates.

It’s really easy to share information via Twitter and Facebook and these techniques will give you even more flexibility to share the information you want with the people you want.

One of the most frequently asked questions about Twitter since it became popular in 2008 has been “How will Twitter make money?” People have made across-the-board speculations, including selling out to Google or Microsoft, charging for business accounts and selling ads. It seems that Twitter’s first step toward fiscal solvency is to begin selling “promoted tweets”.

Mashable is now reporting that the first of Twitter’s Featured Tweets are live as see in the screenshot below courtesy of Richard Nevins and TwitPic:

For now, it appears that all Promoted Tweets will be located within Twitter’s search function. In effect, the promoted tweets work a lot like the sponsored ads you’d see in a search engine. Some big names are among the first to get involved with Twitter’s Promoted Tweets: Starbucks, Bravo Network and Virgin America.

I think this is actually a great way for Twitter to introduce ads, and try and generate some revenue, without seriously detracting from the platform. The fact that many of Twitter’s power users update and view their Twitter account from third-party applications like Hootsuite, TweetDeck and various mobile applications makes traditional banner advertising next to useless for Twitter.

Not only do search-related text ads make sense for Twitter, but they can be useful for users as well. If you’re searching Twitter for “coffee” and Starbucks’ Promoted Tweet is the first thing that pops up, it could remind you that a Starbucks Venti Americano is sounding really good right about now.

I have no idea exactly how Twitter plans to integrate Promoted Tweets throughout their site, but the real usefulness for this functionality is how it could align with mobile users. Say you’re visiting Indianapolis and you’re looking for a place to have some locally brewed beer. You type in “local beer” in Twitter’s search on your iPhone and Scotty’s Brewhouse has a sponsored tweet letting you know about their assortment of locally brewed beers. Wouldn’t that be great if Scotty’s Brewhouse purchased a Sponsored Tweet for the phrase “local beer” in Indianapolis? Geotargeting Sponsored Tweets would fit right with my recent posts on Foursquare. Only time will tell if Twitter heads in that direction.

Here are a couple of other great articles about the new Promoted Tweets program:

• Mashable
• New York Times
• Ad Age

This is the story of a small indie-pop band from Chicago. OK Go formed back in 1998 and released their first album in 2002 with little fanfare. Although they had become well known in the local Chicago scene, they hadn’t yet broken through to become a big nationally-recognized band. This all changed in the fall of 2005 when OK Go created a makeshift music video for their song A Million Ways. The video features the band performing a choreographed dance filmed in a single shot in their backyard. Nearly as soon as it hit YouTube, the video became a sensation and spawned countless imitations.

OK Go – A Million Ways

After the success of their video for A Million Ways, the band released a video from Here it Goes Again, another song from their album in the spring of 2006. This video featured the band doing another choreographed dance on treadmills and soon became the most downloaded music video ever with more than 9 million downloads.

OK Go – Here it Goes Again

After the runaway success of OK Go’s Here It Goes Again video, the band spent time working on their 3rd full-length. Meanwhile they became more and more popular. By making creative and fun videos, OK Go has been able to separate themselves from many other similar bands in the country. They found a formula that worked for them and have done a great job of continuing to create new and, for the lack of a better word, viral videos for their fans.

This has translated into more than 39,000 Facebook Fans, more than 350,000 Twitter followers and millions of music video views. More than a few of these fans and followers have translated into customers, buying albums and merchandise and attending concerts. The biggest clue to me that OK Go has found success through social media is the fact that they just left the label (EMI) they had been with for years to start releasing their albums independently.

Below is OK Go’s most recent video. You really have to watch the video to appreciate the amount of work that went into this one.

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass

So, what’s the takeaway from this case study if you’re not in the music biz? In addition to making sure to utilize social media, be sure to think outside the box. Social media allows you to try some things out without having to spend a lot of money. If OK Go’s first video didn’t turn out as well as it did, they would have moved on to something else. Keep trying, keep getting creative and find what works for you and your customers.

If you’ve already created a Twitter account, a Facebook Fan Page and a WordPress blog for your organization, you’re on the right track. Now that you have accounts at a handful of social media sites, how do you manage them all?

There are dozens of social media management platforms out there, including some great ones like TweetDeck and Seesmic. Both are great applications, but they need to be installed on your computer. One of the many great things about Hootsuite is it’s 100% web-based. You simply visit Hootsuite.com, log in and you can manage your social media initiatives from any computer with an internet connection.

Hootsuite Screenshot

Hootsuite originally launched in late 2008 as a dedicated Twitter client. As you can see from this screenshot, it’s evolved into a powerful social media management platform. In addition to Twitter, you can now manage Facebook (including Facebook Fan Pages), LinkedIn, WordPress and the lesser-used Ping.FM.

Do you want to post the same message to your Facebook page and your Twitter account? Do you want to set up your blog to feed through to your Twitter and Facebook accounts? Do you want to set up multiple accounts so different people at your organization can help manage your social media strategy? Hootsuite lets you do all this and more.

Hootsuite Stats Screenshot

Hootsuite also automatically shortens links using their Ow.ly URL shortener and gives you detailed stats about each links posted through Hootsuite. You can look at link stats from the past 24 hours, past week, past month or any other timeframe.

I’ve been using Hootsuite as my primary social media management tool for the past several months and I’ve been extremely impressed. There is a Hootsuite App available for iPhone and I’m waiting for the Blackberry app that will hopefully follow.

Have you used Hootsuite?