Sometimes, when I see something like Why You’re Fat: Where Dreams Become Heart Attacks (warning: not safe for the queazy), I think about how hard it would be to get such an elegantly simple, yet deep-fat fried idea past all the committees and lawyers and boards of a business or organization devoted to preventing heart disease.
But one look at it can make anyone (and by anyone, I’m thinking of some teenage boys I know) start thinking more about what I eat.
Lesson: Using conversational media is not all talk.
(Sidenote: The site is being run on Tumblr.com, the same platform used for PassionCreatesCommunity.com, some similar — but much less graphic — story telling.)
[Cross-posted in RexBlog.com.]
Though dead these 11 years (as of Feb. 20, 2009), the Nashville Banner, Music City’s conservative afternoon daily, enjoys a resurrection of sorts at the “Nashville Banner RIP” Facebook page. With 56 members as of this posting, the site helps staffers keep up with colleagues and also to meet Bannerites from other eras.
Though deeply conservative in outlook, the Banner made history among major unsegregated Southern newspapers when, in 1950, it hired Robert Churchwell to cover the African-American community. I never knew him, but had heard of him and was sad to see he recently passed away.
Most of us have discovered life after the Banner, which served as a training ground for many aspiring, ambitious and scrappy young journalists, and as a career for quite a few who stayed on. You don’t have to look far around Nashville and Middle Tennessee to find Banner alumni in prestigious positions. Some still work at the Banner‘s erstwhile liberal, Democratic competitor, The Tennessean, though as newspapers writhe in the new communications era, more of them are moving on to other places.
I was at the Banner from July 1982 until late August 1987, moving from a night beat (which included covering Metro Council meetings sometimes and newly discovered corpses a lot more of the time), to the federal courthouse beat to a slot as an assistant editor on the city desk. We had three deadlines a day and most of us (except the night beat) rose in the dark and were on the phone to groggy public officials long before decent folk should be awake.
For a time I shared a desk with a chain-smoking writer who could have been in the Spanish Inquisition — he never let someone go without a comment. I met celebrities, though the person who most impressed me was Dr. Albert Sabin, inventor of the oral polio vaccine, who in his 70s came to a Rotary International convention here to kick off a world-wide effort against the paralyzing disease. Stars and politicians were easy to come by, but a man who had saved millions of lives?
I also wrote an article about the arrival in Nashville of the first Macintosh computers, whose descendants have served me well for more than 20 years. This was shortly after their introduction in 1984, and I thought at the time, “that’s cool, but who needs a home computer?”
Today, the question is, “who doesn’t?” and my Macs make possible the pleasure of communing with my old Banner buddies via Facebook (and playing the occasional game of Wordscraper or Lexulous with them).
I left the Banner a few years before its last edition, with its classic “End of Story” screamer headline.
I don’t know who owns the rights to the Nashville Banner name and eagle logo, but it might be fun to put the Banner back together again, online. But dear God, not to get up at 4 a.m. every day.
A recent article on Kiplinger.com says that the number of adult Internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled since 2005 — from 8 percent then to 35 percent now.
But as author Amanda Lenhart of the Pew Internet Project points out, using social networks online is still a phenomenon of the young: 75 percent of adults 18-24 use these networks, compared to just 7 percent of adults 65 and older.
The findings also show some other very interesting facts:
Ahh, to be 26 again.
See: Jamie’s posts
from the
Inauguration
See: The
rest of us
back at the
office.
Our Jamie Roberts is “on the ground” at the Inauguration festivities and is blogging her impressions of the event. She and millions more are adding their individual voices — and photos and videos and maps — to the conversation of this historic event. In addition to listening to Jamie, here are some other ways to monitor the online conversation related to the inauguration of Barack Obama, 44th President on the United States.
The Official Inaugural Committee is using conversational media: The Presidential Inaugural Committee‘s website is covering all the events, officially, on their site and on YouTube, Twitter and Flickr.
CNN.com:They are trying to integrate as much conversational and social media as possible using their “iReporters” and a Facebook app that will stream video and chat w/ your friends during the speech. One big experiment to check out is: “The Moment,” which will use Microsoft’s “Photosynth” to morph together into a single image the thousands, or tens of thousands, of photos from all different angles of the moment at which Obama in sworn in.
The ‘Tag’ for monitoring the Inauguration conversation: On all the social media sites, i.e., Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, etc., people who are creating content and talking about the inauguration are being encouraged to tag their content with inaug09. For example, on Twitter, you can go to Search.Twitter.com and search the tag, “inaug09” (with or without the “#”) and see a steady stream of “tweets” from around the world. (We’ve created the widget on the left that displays the most recent “tweets” displaying such a tag.)
Flickr: In addition to the inaug09 tag, there is an Inauguration 2009 Group that is filling up with photos taken by those attending the inauguration. (I’ve embedded above a widget that display recent photos posted to it.)
Mashups: There are lots of interesting Google maps user-created mashups. Here’s one that displays on a Google map the location of YouTube videos being posted. The person who created it also produced this drive-through of the Inauguration parade route using Google Earth (and some really bad music).
(For more ways to follow the inauguration online, visit RexBlog, where I’m keeping a running list of inauguration-related online activities that are making me go Wow!)
We’ve shared with you five social media resolutions for this year, and now here are three follow-up questions every association executive should consider, whether your association is new to social media or you’re a Web 2.0 veteran:
1. How will you incorporate social media into association events?
Events provide associations a perfect opportunity to leverage the power and excitement of social media. There are so many ways an association can engage its members before, during and after an event with social media tools.
We recently received an award for the event work we did for our client the National Federation of Independent Business on their 2008 National Small Business Summit website. We used tools like Flickr, YouTube and Twitter to engage the Summit attendees and non-attendees through the creation of a dynamic site. We took unique advantage of social media and also provided a central place for all event-related content.
2. How will you measure the effectiveness of the association’s social media marketing efforts?
It’s great your association is experimenting with social media, but how will you know if your efforts are successful or what tweaks you need to make? Are members participating? Are there certain member groups that are more receptive to social media than others? Are you providing incentives? Are you connecting with potential member groups?
Just like your other marketing and communication campaign, an association’s social media efforts must be measureable. If you haven’t already established metrics, set some now. If you need help, contact us.
3. Should you partner with an outside media company to help meet your association’s social media goals for the year?
The economic environment we are in presents many associations with numerous challenges. Some of you are struggling with limited internal resources, tight budgets and employees without social media expertise. Meanwhile, your association has lofty communication and social media goals for the year. To solve these problems, many businesses and other associations are looking to partners like Hammock who can help you meet your goals for 2009.
Many of us here at Hammock Inc. have known about Twitter (and have been using it) for close to two years now. When we first signed up back then, we weren’t sure what it was, what it would do or where it would go.
Nowadays, you can probably throw a rock out of your window and hit someone who knows at least that it exists; maybe your target is even using it. (But please, don’t throw rocks out of your window.)
Many of us “tweet” as individuals, and Hammock Inc. (@HammockInc) also tweets as a company. (A tweet is your 140-character-or-less answer to the question “What are you doing?” It has also become a verb for Twitter users.) Over the last couple of years, we’ve picked up a couple of tips — from followers and those we follow, and from each other — about making the best of our tweets:
Good conversation goes both ways. Try to avoid simply throwing information out there, but be sure to join in on conversations that are already happening. If someone asks what movie they should see this weekend or what they missed in the latest presidential news conference, take 20 seconds and jump into the discussion.
Follow us on Twitter and join in on the conversation, whatever it may be about today…
At the end of last year, we used a Hammock tradition, our annual Hammock T-shirt, to celebrate our passions—and yours. What do T-shirts have to do with passions? The work we do for our clients helps them connect with the passions of their customers, members and others, and so we wanted to use our T-shirt project to show how personal passions create communities. We created a community for our clients and friends to share their passions: PassionCreatesCommunity.com. We invited them to send us a link, photo or video that would help encourage readers and viewers to learn more about their passion.
If you are an association or corporate marketer who has decided that 2009 will be your organization’s year to join in the conversation taking place on the web, we suggest putting your toe in the water before diving into the deep end. But definitely get wet. Here are five resolutions to get you started:
1. If you haven’t already, set up accounts on these services: YouTube.com, Flickr, Twitter, GMail, FaceBook and LinkedIn. In later posts, we’ll be discussing each one in-depth, but for now, just make sure you have registered a username that is consistent across all of those services. Also, in later posts, we’ll provide you with about 15 other services to register on.
2. Purchase a digital camera small enough for a pocket or a bag: We’ll get very specific in a later post about which cameras to consider. But for now, just make sure you have a small digital camera that is always within arm’s reach. We have a saying here: “The best camera is the one you have when the picture appears.” The more bulky a camera is, the less likely you are to have it with you. Notice we didn’t say, “take some photos and upload them to Flickr.” At first, just resolve to carry a camera around with you.
3. Discover a wiki other than Wikipedia: We love Wikipedia, but unfortunately, it is so popular that many people think the term “wiki” means Wikipedia and therefore they miss out on the tens of thousands of other collaborative resources developed on a wiki format. Most wikis share some things in common, but they can differ drastically as well. Here are a couple of fun ones to explore: WikiHow, a collection of how-to articles and videos, and our favorite, SmallBusiness.com.
4. Write a review on Amazon.com: At some point, you’ve got to start viewing the web as something you don’t just read, but write to as well. We could suggest commenting on a blog or posting a “tweet” to Twitter, but around here, we believe the most meaningful content comes from your passions. If you love a book or song, write a few sentences why. You’ll feel like a champion when you hit that submit button. Promise.
5. Learn to search the World Live Web: One of the major challenges of explaining conversational media and the tools of social media is the notion that the Web is a “place” where people live and not a “medium” that people read and watch. We’ll be posting at length about “listening” to the web, but here are a couple of suggestions:
Subscribe to this blog, or visit often, as we’ll be sharing with you ways in which you can most effectively add your voice to the conversation.
In 2009, I predict a lot of marketers will finally figure out that Twitter is much, much more than the confusing chaos of an online chat, forum, time-wasting thing they now believe it to be. I’m going to attempt to help them in that journey by using this blog to make simple suggestions on ways marketers at associations, companies or any organization can use Twitter and other conversational media (also called “social media”) tools to sell, promote and better serve customers, members, alumni, donors, backers, etc.
Lots of companies have already registered a Twitter username for their company. For example, I recently mentioned how Dell uses Twitter to promote special deals at its “outlet” . Dell has also registered many other Twitter accounts that are used in various ways.
Many savvy marketers have a designated individual or group of individuals who use Twitter Search to track any mention of their brand or product names appearing on Twitter. Unlike a typical search engine, Twitter Search is designed to provide “real time” results of a search query. Once a search results page appears, it continues to collect results as long as you keep the page open in a browser tab. It won’t automatically refresh, however, a message at the top of the page displays a tally of how may times users have included the search-term in a “tweet” since you last manually “refreshed” the page. Click on the refresh link, and the new tweets appear.
But don’t think of Twitter as merely a “tracking” tool or a “broadcasting” tool. It is a conversational tool. Here are a couple of examples (there are many) that I’ve personally encountered on Twitter during the past couple of days — days when many marketers who use Twitter had set up a “see you next week” message on their accounts.
The first example is an easy one for me to select, as it’s from a Nashville-based (my hometown) company, Griffin Techology , and the employee who maintains it is, separate from his job at Griffin, a highly visible member of the local blogosphere . I was trying to locate a place locally to purchase a Griffin product called the Clarifi that serves as a case or “skin” for an iPhone, but also includes a small lens filter you can slide over the phone’s camera lens for taking closeup photos of documents or business cards. (I want it to use it with what is quickly becoming the software I’m currently obsessing over, Evernotes — and thought it would make a good stocking-stuffer for, uh, Santa to give me).
When a phone call to the Apple Store led to a dead-end (you can purchase it online, they said), I decided to tweet a request for help. Within moments, (again, this was Christmas Eve) Dave @ Twitter, the person who is the “@” at @griffintech posted a “tweet” suggesting I check Best Buy. He then tweeted to me a coupon-code for a “stocking stuffer” discount if I couldn’t find it there and needed to order it online. Sure enough, it had sold out at the Best Buy closest to my house, so I used the coupon code.
The other example is a product called EyeFi . It’s a rather amazing product as it looks like a regular memory card for a digital camera, but it has built-in wifi that automagically (without any wires or docking) uploads photos to your computer or via your home or office’s wi-fi, to a web-based photo hosting/sharing service like Flickr. Yesterday, on Christmas morning, I mentioned on a tweet that I’d received and EyeFi for Christmas and within moments, @eyeficard was following me. The service was a little clunky on Christmas morning, but whoever was responsible for maintaining the @eyeficard Twitter account was responding to any tweets for assistance. It was impressive.
For customer service, these companies also probably use forums, wikis, knowledge-bases and a lot of people answering phone-calls. But yesterday, a 30-second tweet reassured lots of customers that help was within 140 characters and a few seconds away.
[Note: The post also appears on RexBlog.com]
Previously, I provided a practical way for retailers to use Twitter as a means to broadcast a text-message to customers. Another thing you can do with Twitter is tracking messages posted on the service by a specific group of people or on a specific topic.
To track people, you simply set up an account and “follow” the specific people’s Twitter accounts.
To follow a topic, you go to Twitter’s Search page and do a keyword search. After you land on the results page, you will have the URL to a page that will provide continuous updates to any message posted on that topic. But what if you want to track several terms, or want to narrow your search? Twitter Search allows you to use what are called “search operators” to accomplish that. Here is a page that explains how to use search operators like the one I used to set up a Twitter search with several terms about the Tennessee Titans that looked like this: titans OR “tennessee titans” OR “jeff fisher” OR “vince young” OR “LP Field” OR #titans.
You can make links to those two pages — the one where you are following a certain group of people and the one with results to the keywords search and be done with it.
Or, with a little bit of simple, simple work that any semi-geek (I can do it, so there) can accomplish, you can take the content from those two pages and display it on your own website or blog. (As these posts are intended to be “simple things,” I suggest you may want to enlist the help of someone who is familiar with how to use RSS feeds or the “API” of Twitter. You, personally, don’t need to know anything other than how to ask the question, “Can you help me hack the Twitter API to display something on my blog?” In this case, “hack” is something good.)
Here’s a great example of what I mean:
The group Sunlight Foundation has used the Twitter API to create a service called “Capitol Tweets” that collects and displays every new Twitter message shared by any member of Congress who uses Twitter.
So here’s an idea for you: Do you follow a specific group of lawmakers or public officials — say ones from a specific state or region? You can easily develop a version of what the Starlight Foundation is doing.
You can even develop a widget that allows other people to display what you’re doing on their sites — like the one above that is shared by the Sunlight Foundation, but that’s another post for another day.
[Also posted on RexBlog.com]
[via: Read Write Web]