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.

Within Indiana’s Tourism Industry, I’ve noticed that most organizations have created Fan Pages, while a handful have decided to instead create Groups or even a Personal Profile for their organization. Hopefully this post will clear the air about the differences between the ways you can reach out to potential and current customers on Facebook.

Whether you decide to use a Fan Page or a Group for your organization depends on your goals for Facebook. One thing you should not do, however, is create a personal profile for your organization. Beyond being against Facebook’s Terms of Service, your organizational goals will be much better met by setting up a Group or a Fan Page.

Facebook Groups

Facebook Groups started out as the only way to interact with organizations and other groups of people. My college class has a Facebook group that is used to update members when reunions are happening or when something big is happening at my Alma Mater. A Facebook Group is a great way to keep a small group of people updated on what’s going on with your organization.

A great example of an effective group in the tourism industry is Travel Michigan’s. They recently shifted their industry communications from the standard email newsletter to a Facebook Group – Travel Michigan Industry News. This has the potential to be a great change for Travel Michigan, as they now can reach industry members in a medium they prefer. Also, by creating a group for the dissemination of Michigan tourism industry news, they’re also providing a place for industry members to have conversations and participate. A standard email newsletter doesn’t allow for this level of interaction.

That being said, the Facebook Group works great for groups like a college alumni class or an industry group, but it might not be the best fit for a true business to consumer (B2C) communication.

Facebook Fan Pages (AKA Public Profiles)

Facebook Pages were created as a way for companies, organizations, politicians, celebrities, non-profits  and others (basically, anything that isn’t an individual person) to have a profile on Facebook. Several years ago, before the advent of the Fan Page, the only way for organizations to interact with their customers on Facebook was through a group. Luckily, Facebook realized they needed to give organizations, celebrities, etc, a more robust and customizable way to interact with their fans. Thus was born the Facebook Fan Page.

At Visit Indiana, we use a Facebook Fan Page (also known as a Public Profile) to connect with our fans. Pages give you all the flexibility of a personal profile and (most importantly) provide you with in-depth statistics on your page and demographic information about your fans.

Pages also allow you to install different applications, like the FBML application I talked about in my last post, Flickr applications and many more.

One more great thing about a Fan Page. Once you have more than 25 fans, point your browser to http://www.facebook.com/usernames and you can create a vanity URL for your Fan Page. The Visit Indiana Fan Page URL used to be: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Visit-Indiana-Indiana-State-Tourism/42785429080; quite the headache to remember. Now that we’ve created a vanity URL for the page, you can find it at http://www.facebook.com/VisitIndiana.

All in all, there is a lot more flexibility available through a Facebook Fan Page than through a Group. In the end, you can decide what’s best for your organization, but here’s a quick comparison chart so you can see, at a glance, the differences between Facebook’s Fan Pages and Groups.

Facebook Groups Vs. Fan Pages

Now that you’ve seen the differences between Facebook’s Groups and Fan Pages, you can make an informed decision about which will best serve the needs of your organization. Let me know which one you’re using and how you came to that decision.

Click here to get started with your organization’s Facebook Fan Page.

Or click here to get started creating a Facebook Group for your organization.

One of the best ways to engage your Facebook Fans is to provide some “Fans Only” deals or content. Einstein Bros. Bagels gave away a free bagel coupon to all of their fans and they offer members-only discounts on a regular basis. This certainly creates good will with your fans and gives them the feeling that they are appreciated.

With a little bit of HTML knowledge, you can easily create “Fans Only” content and deals on your Facebook page. Your first step is to install the Static FBML (Facebook Markup Language) application on your Fan Page (see image below). This will allow you to create a new tab or box where you can display your Fans Only content.

Search for "Static FBML" and add this app to your page.

Once you’ve added this application, you can modify the name of the tab/box and customize it with your content. I’ve included a short example below to show you how to get started. You can put links, images, printable coupons or any number of things in the FBML box using standard HTML. In fact, many of the big name Facebook pages, like Honda and Einstein Bros. Bagels use HTML and FBML to spice up their pages.

Fans Only Coding on Facebook

Everything between the two highlighted bits of code is only viewable by your page’s Fans. Now you can really thank your fans and give them special content or deals. You can place images in the Fans Only portion in addition to standard text and links so you can truly customize your page for fans.

The image above shows what your fans will see when they view your page. If someone who isn’t yet a fan, they won’t see the “$119 – Sundaes & Smiles Hotel Indigo – Columbus, IN” link.

Special thanks to John Haydon’s How To Create an Incentive for Visitors to Fan your Facebook Page post for the inspiration to write this one.

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?

So, is social media just a fad?

There are plenty of people who still dismiss social media as useless. In fact, there are studies that show that 40% of all ‘tweets’ are pointless babble. Even though that may be true, that doesn’t diminish the power and usefulness of social media in marketing and PR today. There will always be people who don’t understand new technologies and how they can be useful, and social media is no exception. The video below has been circulating online in the past couple of weeks and it does a fantastic job of highlighting how much a part of our lives social media has become. No longer can you ignore social media, in fact, in a recent survey of Indiana Tourism entities, nearly 30% of respondents use Twitter on to promote their destination and more than 90% use Facebook.

My favorite quote in the entire presentation is:

Social Media isn’t a fad – it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.

That’s such a true statement. Social Media isn’t just a way to waste time and talk with friends about useless bits of trivia, it’s truly a new way to communicate directly with consumers, with your customers.

Some other encouraging news for the use of social media is that more 80% of US adults use social media on a monthly basis. For more information about the different types of social media use check out these posts on Groundswell):

The video below is the precursor to the other video in this post. While this one doesn’t focus on social media exclusively, there is still some pretty amazing information in here.

Social Media Landscape - fredcavazza

You might look at this image and feel completely overwhelmed at the idea of social media and how you’re going to implement it for your business. Don’t be! Social media can appear overwhelming, but there are easy ways to break into it without breaking the bank. To be honest, this image only shows a tiny sliver of the social media networks online today, but it gives you a good idea of how important social media is now and will be in the very near future. Don’t be intimidated by thinking you need to be involved everywhere right away, know that you can slowly build your social media presence, one network at a time.

One of the best things about social media networks, especially in this slowing economy, is that the vast majority of social networks are free or offer at least some of their services for free. That being said, don’t be lulled into the false assumption that creating a good social media presence will be easy. It CAN be easy, but you have to devote some time to it.

Hopefully, you’ve created a Flickr account (if you haven’t, head over to Flickr.com, create an account, upload some photos and join the Visit Indiana Photo Group). If you haven’t and you want some more information about Flickr, check out this post (a Flickr primer), this post (getting the most out of Flickr) and this one (about launching into social media) from the Tourism Tech Corner. Flickr is a great place for any DMO to begin their Social Media Footprint (here is a great post from Travel 2.0 that explains how to protect your social media footprint). Create a page, post some photos and spread the word.

The best way to get your foot in the social media door is to see what others have done. Please take a look at what we’ve done on some of the following social networks:

• Flickr: Visit Indiana Photostream, Visit Indiana Group
• Twitter: Visit Indiana Tweets
• Facebook: Visit Indiana Group, Visit Indiana Fan Page
• YouTube: Visit Indiana Videos
• FriendFeed: Visit Indiana Office Stream
• Blogs: Indiana Insider Blog, Tourism Tech Corner Blog

Even if you’re not quite ready to jump head-first into social media, it’s a good idea to go ahead and create accounts at these sites and some others. The last thing you want is someone who is not associated with your DMO to create an account and create an online presence in your name. If you create your accounts but aren’t ready to start creating content, go ahead and set your profile status to invisible or private. No one will be able to see your accounts until you set them live again, but at least you won’t have a blank page sitting out there and no one else will be able to create that account in your name.

Over the next several months, I’ll be creating posts that will give you a primer on each of the social media sites mentioned above and any others that I come across. The best thing for you to do now is get in there and start experiencing these networks. Create a personal account, play around and have some fun. Get a feel for what these sites are and what they can do, then create an account for your business.

I’ve got one more suggestion for a social network that you, personally should join. It’s called SmallerIndiana and it’s an Indiana-based social network. Created as a place for Indiana’s best and brightest to collaborate, SmallerIndiana has members from throughout the state in countless industries. It’s a great place to become involved. With helpful members, most questions you ask will be answered quickly. So, join SmallerIndiana (and the Visit Indiana group) today! And if you’re interested, there are many active discussions in the SmallerIndiana Forums.

As always, I’d love to see your comments and thoughts about social media. Any benefits you’ve seen, any challenges or fears. Also, please feel free to send me a note or say hi on any of the social networks we’re involved with above.