Tag Archives: SocialMedia

With the #RNC2012 (Republican National Convention 2012) kicking off this week, it begs the question, how do you take your politics, or social media for that matter. As one who makes a living from studying Social Media I love when anything major happens, because it gives us a chance to study elements of social media at an accelerated pace. A good TV show promoting their hashtag can have the same effect check out #AGT (America’s got Tallent) or #SYTYCD (so you think you can dance) on their respective nights, their audience is very engaged.

I watch the conversation using a few tools, and thought I would share them with you as this week is a great chance to test drive them and find your favorite.

TwitterFall This is one of my favorites, you can enter a few search terms, and each will appear in a different color. I often use this to observe the 45+ twitter accounts I manage personally. Their are simple options, and you do not even need to be on twitter to watch this one.

SocialBro, as I have mentioned before, I like. They are great for monitoring a Hashtag and seeing who the influencers are in the conversation or where the conversation is taking place. They also let you select people from the conversation for following or putting on a list.

Bottlenose is a newer tool in beta that lets you look at a great diagram around the topic, showing the other related tags and you can also tweak it to see topics and who is a leader in the conversation. This is great for spotting conversations that might be related to your primary hashtag. Check out the other tags, as there is a good chance not everyone in those ancillary tags are following the main tag also.

You can also view the data in a few formats, like live

Tagboard another new comer gives you a great newspaper style format. This one is simple to use and great for reviewing material.
SeeS.aw is like Tagboard, but will let you save searches and the stream keeps flowing where Tagboard seems to need to be refreshed (which has its own benefits). 

Geofeedia another Beta provides a map of tweets around a location, or a newspaper format. This helps you see also the conversation in the area of an event, when not everyone is using the event hashtag. I used the Tamp Times Forum as a location, even tho the screen shows St.Pete Times Forum (its name changed).

SocialMention offers a nice clean feed with highlights showing Sentiment, Top keywords, hashtags, users and sources. Great for seeing everything involved in the conversation.

Tawlk another beta is great for a live newspaper feed

Hashtracking is another favorite of mine, they are great for showing you the potential size of your audience as well as a ranking of those involved in the conversation.

These are still just a few of the tools available out there, feel free to share any I missed (my goal here was to give some tools you can use during the convention to follow the conversation).

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I was recently interviewed by Ryan Parsley from Cloud Plumbing a Linxter Production. You can hear the interview here…

Antony Francis, CEO of Head of Lettuce Media, talks with me about automation in social media.

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Often we have small businesses ask for assistance with their social media, but they find our one on one coaching to be to much, so we are glad to offer some group classes that will deliver quality education at an affordable price for small businesses. The first of these programs is being offered in our own backyard of south west Pasco ( Trinity, New Port Richey).

There are two options:

Option one is a two hour class where you will learn about the different types of social media and the cor principles that will help you build your following and connection with your consumers and future consumers. http://holmnpr1.eventbrite.com/

Option two is designed to follow what we deliver in our one on one coaching program, with the goal of you being self sufficient in your social media. We will train you over 4 weeks on what to do, and how to do it with each classes building on the previous weeks class. Our goal is to not overwhelm you, but share the love of social media, that so many have, and more importantly how to use it in your business. http://holmnpr4wk.eventbrite.com/

Keeping with our strong belief of giving back to the community, there are seats reserved in each class for charitable organizations, call us for details.

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Just recently we had about 10,000, that’s right ten thousand new follows in a 24 hour period of time. While we were trying to figure our what awesome maneuver we did that got so many people to follow us in such a short period of time, our experience and wisdom told us otherwise. We knew something was amiss. Well enter SocialBro one of our favorite tools for analyzing the following on a twitter account. After some tweaking on my searches I lowered the sliders to those with less then 25 followers, who have not tweeted more then .3 times a day and influence under 7. I was able to notice about 10,000 accounts who just followed us with each of the accounts never having tweeted, and each one having under 25 followers with over 1000-1500 accounts each was following. It made me wonder if this was the work of someone who guarantees so many followers in a certain time.  I digress, the point is that SocialBro is a great tool for analyzing your followers, or even the followers around a hashtag. If you are newer to twitter, save this and comeback to it later when you have a better understanding of what constitutes a good follower for you.

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• 4  broken into 2 pairs for the Heroes Salute Gala featuring Darryl Worley http://www.thenashvilleconnection.com/events/gala/
• 4 individual tickets for the Workshops  http://www.thenashvilleconnection.com/events/workshops/

The fine print stuff:

• Please be prepared to travel and stay in Greenville SC, at your own cost, contest includes tickets only.
• We will announce the winner of this contest June 22nd  at 5pm EST, submissions to enter are due by 11am the 22nd of June.
• If you want to win, you must leave a comment on this blog and also mention if you would want a gala or workshop ticket.

If you are on Twitter , Tweet this blog with the #tag #NashCon12 for an extra chance in the drawing.

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That’s right friends, as one of the event Sponsors and Speakers for @PRSATampabay, Head of Lettuce Media has scored 2 tickets to give away. These Tickets are for the Conference only. They do not include Travel and accommodations, and do not include pre-conference activities.

Simply comment on this post your intrest and you will be entered. Tweet the article with the #Sunshine2012 tag and you will be entered a 2nd time. We will be accepting entries until this Friday the 15th at noon EST. We will then choose 2 winners who will each be given one ticket. Winners will be announced by 3pm Friday here on this post as well as on Twitter.

This event is ideal for those in PR, You will Learn new and exciting methods for extending your own public relations practice while increasing your clients’ ROI.

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Earlier this week Techcrunch posted an article by Jeremiah Owyang, Brands Start Automating Social Media Responses On Facebook And Twitter.  In the article Jeremiah talks about the evolution of social media and the needs of companies to look to elements of automation. I liked the article and believe Jeremiah has made a very accurate assessment of the directions which things are going.

My own belief is that automation and AI in platforms like Twitter and Facebook are a foregone conclusion, it is the only way for a company to cost effectively scale their customer service on twitter. What cracks me up is how so many are acting like it will ruin their experience on those platforms and it is the end of the world. The fact of the matter is that “Social Media” is a result of the conversation on Twitter or Facebook. Is your telephone any less of a phone, because you deal with an automated platform in customer service, No, and twitter will be no less social. We at Head of Lettuce Media always tell our clients that the value of twitter is that you decide who you want to listen to, talk to and engage with. This will not change.

The greater issue in Jeremiah’s article is “what value can those elements of automation bring to the consumer’s experience?”. If I am having issues with a company, and I complain via twitter, do I care how my problem is resolved as long as it is resolved to my satisfaction?  No, I don’t, if it’s done properly, they can make me happy, compensate me for my inconvenience and even win me as an advocate.  The true challenge is in the writing and structuring of these accounts.

At Head of Lettuce Media, we do a lot of theoretical testing in twitter, trying to better understand elements of automation and artificial intelligence. Many of the tests are under wraps untill they have run their course. The interesting thing is that many people enjoy interacting with AI accounts as much as they do with an individual, and they don’t seem to notice or mind.  I believe part of the experience with a twitter account has to do with the account being true to its nature and well scripted.

The tale of Social Media RockStar: This past January while emceeing at Ignite Tampa Bay I ended up improving for about 25 minutes, because of technical difficulties in the beginning. Well I decided it was time to spill the beans on two of our AI accounts, Socialmedia_rs and UnfollowedYu.

Watch the Story here

While I want to focus on SocialMedia Rockstar, let’s take a quick look at what we learned from Unfollowedyu. Unfollowedyu tested two elements of interaction specifically to see what their value is on Klout he follows everyone using unfollowers to announce that people are unfollowing them (no idea why, it’s like screaming ”look at me, I am uninteresting, I turn people off), he then unfollows them to get them to mention him, and when they do, he sends them ways to cope with being unfollowed (side note: while I don’t agree with announcing it,  I do think it is a good metric to watch privately as it is an indicator of how your message affects your audience. See also TweetEffect).

Now for those of you rolling your eyes, stop and think for a moment of what we are learning here. He follows people, unfollows them, that causes them to mention him, he then sends them a message, and many still reply to that. This means he has a conversation with every single person he follows/unfollows. Today his Klout is a 34, not huge, but he shows us if you at least say hi, or find some way to talk to everyone who follows you, you will be perceived as engaging.

Getting back on topic, let’s look at SocialMedia Rockstar as he is one of our best functioning AI accounts, who I believe at times could pass the Turing test. Granted he is still a baby, but he is growing in his abilities. Most important, and I believe this applies to any account, he is true to his being, which means he tells you up front who he is (an egotistically self-obsessed “guru”).

Let’s break down what he does, forgetting about the silliness for a second;

• He finds his audience based on their conversation (he does not initiate conversations with individuals as I feel there is a line in the sand there separating him from spamming. Personally I hate automated “welcome aboard” and other messages).
• He puts out content that others find value in, how do we know, well in May this year, he was retweeted 296 times and mentioned 335 times, not great, but not bad either. His Klout is a 51 today.
• He talks to those who talk to him, staying true to his form.
• He is fun and entertaining.

Reading thru the comments with so many people talking like it will be the end of “social media” it made me realize that to many people look at Twitter and facebook as social media, this brings me back to my point, and that is; Twitter and Facebook are not social media, and not everything that happens on them is, but social media is that interaction that happens and flourish in those environments. Thoughts?

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Working on a social media audit for one of our customers here at Head of Lettuce, and it brings to mind how few companies know the answers to such important questions like: What percentage of the company is on Twitter? What percentage is on Facebook? How many have fanned the company page? These questions are necessary for any organization to know the answers to, and how to deal with the numbers no matter the mix.

What if you have a significant number of employees on social media, how do you monitor them? How do you protect your brand name? How do you prevent inadvertent slips? These are all important parts of a successful social media strategy. It is often said in management that you can not move forward without a true understanding of where you are, well you better figure that out.

I’ve noticed that once the executive team of an organization begins to understand the risk as well as the benefits of social media they embraces it and want to understand as much as they can. It is up to social media companies to help businesses realize this.

Social media is a disruptive innovation that is changing the way we do business and communicate with consumers. Much like e-mail made it easier and cheaper for an organization to maintain a large mailing list, Social Media is now creating relationships sought out by the consumer.

Consumers want to interact with businesses as they often feel like they are on the same team as the business. We saw a great example this week, where an overzealous fan of one of the companies we are working with, is using the company logo on their FB profile, making it look like they work for the company. This is a great problem, because this individual is that big of a fan of the company. Obviously a company can’t have this because of the inherent risks, but the intent of the customer is truly one we should all hope that all of our customers look to duplicate.

A good social media audit will uncover all kinds of “challenges”, but that’s the goal. Issues like the one I described going unchecked could result in a much more expensive result for the organization. Have a business that you are concerned about your social media interactions and employees involvement, contact us to discuss how we can help you.

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I know I know, I went and thought I would increase my number of blog posts, and here it has been almost a month since my last post #fail. What can I say, the doctors kids are usually the last to see the doctor:)

All I can say is what a busy month it has been. The Head of Lettuce has been shot out of a cannon and is accelerating to light speed, we are working on some amazing business alliances, products and services.

This month a common theme kept coming up in conversations and that is, We are not an advertising agency and we are not a PR firm, nor are they a Social Media company. Advertising agencies are specialist in broadcast messaging, one way messaging like tv, print and radio. PR agencies help you develop the message you would like out there. Social Media companies like us, well we help you enter the conversation about your brand, the key word being conversation.

Social Media companies, at least the good ones like us , work the different mediums and understand that there is a two-way conversation going on. They understand the etiquette and will translate it into understandable bite size pieces so that you will too. Weather or not you have time to do what is necessary is another issue, and that is where we come in. We have the experts who can do it for you, and if you have special needs outside of our staffs ability, we bring in the expert right for your needs.

One of my biggest pet peeves are the people entering into social media, representing themselves as an “expert” or even a practitioner, and yet they publicly make mistake after mistake. I’ve seen companies and individuals claim to help people with social media, and all they do is broadcast, broadcast and broadcast some more. How can you spot these impostors? simple, try to engage them, mention them, tweet them, see if they answer, see how long it takes. Have them explain social media to you, and trust your gut.

We offer free sit downs with any business considering out help, and more importantly offer no pressure, if we are right for you, you will know. One of my favorite sayings is “If you have a product worth selling, it will sell itself”.

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For a few weeks now I have obsessed over the applications of Swarm, herd and Mob behavior and how they might apply to social media, and I believe there is something there worth striving to understand. I believe that how people behave online might follow these theories.

Swarm behaviour or Swarm Intelligence discusses how working together the group is smarter and stronger than the individual. This is demonstrated by insect swarms, where the individual insect is not intelligent, but collectively they can carry out some pretty amazing/destructive things. I believe that swarming can be one of the causes of topics trending on twitter.

In April of this year we saw a swarm with the creation of #4SQDAY. Consider only 3 weeks before 4/16/2010 no one ever thought of a “Foursquare Day” see the story here. With 4SQDAY we saw an idea’s inception that was shared with a core group via twitter, that group then then focused their attention on getting this idea “out there” and the collective bit on it. We then saw this idea grow in 3 weeks to 250 cities throwing parties in at least 35 countries. Don’t find this impressive, try planning just 10 parties in ten cities in 3 weeks.

Herd behavior discusses how individuals act in a similar pattern to those around them, much like a flock of birds. This Herd behavior can be seen in the stock market where individuals look to see how others are acting, and without thinking about it, mimic their behavior. On Twitter, herd behavior would be one probable cause of people re-tweeting trending topics, causing them to continue to trend. “It’s what everyone is doing”.

Mob behavior however discusses people being motivated to act in a fashion outside of their character, because they are swept up in the moment with others demonstrating that behavior, this is accountable for why people buy impulse items when they see others buying those items, even if they never intended to buy those items. On Twitter, mob behavior may be an explanation for people who jump on board attacking a company or brand online. Today while researching a company that I am meeting with next week I noticed that they were promoting a “big announcement”; after the announcement I noticed a quick mob joined in after the first negative remark, people jumped in on the company, and my guess is that some of those people only jumped in, because they saw others doing it.

The question now, which I hope to investigate and find out, is can behaviors such as these be artificially created, can they be focused, once focused, can they be dispersed or redirected in a new direction. I am looking for any and all ideas on this, so please chime in. If you have any examples of any of these behaviors, add them as a comment. I hope to have a follow-up to this article, including what I learn.

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