Since the future begins with local engagement/involvement….

Image via Wikipedia

 

While large organizations are clearly delivering value to the public and private sector it is important that we do not lose site of the importance of small organizations, local governments, and their ability to drive positive changes.  According to census numbers and numbers published by SBA for the United States alone we know that:  

• There are more than 80,000 local governments in the United States.
• There are more than 27.5 million small businesses in the United States (http://www.sba.gov/advo/stats/sbfaq.pdf).

With these numbers in mind I have launched a brand new community, Our Town Talk.  This community will evolve as membership grows, meeting the needs of our members.   

The mission for this community is straightforward and summed up as providing a place for citizens, small business owners, local government employees and politicians to come together and share their thoughts on what is good and what is not so good in their communities.  Over time I would love to see this become a place where citizen 2.0 is standardized and becomes a reality.   

While these goals are worthwhile we will need to be patient and seek to grow this community to the point where a critical mass is achieved.  In the mean-time, note:  

• The community is absolutely FREE.  It is ad-supported and I want to keep it this way to make sure there are no barriers to entry.
• There are three members today.  As I noted, I literally just launched this.
• As new members join I will create areas for the towns they are from.  I expect this to be a very slow growth community and we should be able to keep up.
• If you have  ideas, share them.
• Invite friends and play to see how this can add value to your community.
• I am aggregating job listings  and daily deals from around the web and will continue to add to these to continue to give more value.

If you believe your town needs an easy to use platform stop by and give it a try.  

John  

My concerns with not feeding the trolls

Image via Wikipedia

 

One of the laws of social media that I regularly hear is “don’t feed the trolls“.  There is, to be honest, many good reasons for this, including, but not limited to: 

• They waste precious resources, often driving focus away from real issues, real goals.
• They can never be pleased.  They are people that simply want to complain about something.

Alright….  They are noisy, they waste time, and you’re simply going to ignore these trolls anyway….  

However, sometimes people confuse not feeding the trolls with not listening to negative feedback, with those that disagree with their message.  The next time you begin to turn your back on the trolls ask yourself if there is any truth in their message.  Good luck out there. 

John 

Success being demonstrated by going local with mobile

Image via CrunchBase

I came across two great articles today that give interesting statistics about the growth of mobile-delivered-value at the local level.  I would urge you to check them both out.

• Local Ad Revenues Showing 19.6% CAGR Through 2014
  • Traditional advertising continues to stagnate while online advertising continues to increase.  By 2014 the expectation is that 25% of ad spending at the local level will be digital.
  • 55% of all ad spending is with local media.
  • At the local level online spending has increased from 10% of the overall spend to 15% this year.
• 10% of consumers driven in-store by mobile coupons
  • According to this study people prefer (45% of respondents) to receive these coupons via text messages (SMS). 
  • However, when the study looked at just the male population that found that “51 percent said they would prefer to find coupons themselves via an application (28 percent of the general pop.) ”  Similar to driving men want to find it themselves as opposed to asking for directions.

Local businesses, chambers of commerce, and local governments need to stay on top of these trends and understand the need to shift from traditional to online means.  Services such as Google Places, GoWalla, and Foursquare will play a large role, helping businesses deliver mobile coupons to people in the area,or better yet, checked into their stores.

John

Centralize and share your identities with dandyid.org

Image via CrunchBase

Most of us, individuals and organizations alike, have far too many on-line identities.   If you’re like me you’re always looking for an easy way to keep them all organized so that your social media/networking communities will know how to find you within the various networks.

DandyID is a simple to use solution for this problem as it allows you to simply add your identities for dozens upon dozens of social networks and then share them using some prebuilt widgets.  A simple but important tasks, easily solved with this simple application.

The important points about DandyID:

• It is FREE to use.
• It supports dozens of networks out of the box.
• It has JavaScript widgets that make it easy to plug-in to most sites (although not hosted WordPress).  As an example, see the About Us page on The Lab’s site.
• At times I find the site to be a bit on the slow side, impacting the administration, not the widgets.

Give it a try.

John

p.s. I have no affiliation with dandyid.org.

Independent movies and Social Media

Low budget independent movies often struggle to find an audience beyond the friends and families of those involved with the film itself.  Thousands, perhaps millions, of directors, writers, and actors take part in these films, pouring in their love and passion.  I have to believe that many real gems are made even though few are ever fully appreciated.

Now, I am not saying Gotta Find Barry deserves an Oscar.  I haven’t yet seen it but the story line is definitely that of a light-hearted comedy that has the makings of a funny and relaxing night out.   Rich Camp is hoping that social media will play a role in building an audience for his movie, just as it did for his last independent film titled Lumberjacking.

Rich Camp is the owner of  Rich Camp Entertainment.  He is also the writer, director, and lead actor in Gotta Find Barry.  I chatted with Rich and David Graziano this week to learn more.  David is helping Rich with the social media aspects of the production (yes, he is also in the movie with a small part I believe).

In Rich’s last movie, Lumberjacking, social media was used to both build awareness of the production as well as to raise money to support the effort.  Through a mix of traditional and new media means they raised around $1000 for production and grew a Facebook presence of more than 1500 members.  Throughout the production of this movie they updated the Facebook page with information on what was happening with the movie.  For example, checking out a theatre, shooting this scene today, and on and on.  The Facebook community was engaged and Rich had an audience of 1000 or more people attend the movie’s showing.  Not a bad audience for a small film. 

For Gotta Find Barry Rich and David are making minor changes to how they are using Social Media.  For example:

• While they are still fund-raising on the site they also held a traditional fundraiser.  They used the Facebook page to promote the event, and had somewhere between 100 and 150 people come to the fundraiser as a result.
• While they have updated the page with information about the production of the movie they will deliver a trailer of the movie also.

Twitter is also getting use more for this  movie.  While they have been primarily pushing out updates about the movie they are soon going to launch an interesting campaign where accounts will be created for each the movies characters.  Each character will tweet out, conversationally, to other characters, using the personalities of the characters from the movie.  The hope is that people will get to know the characters, love them, and have even more reason to see the movie, translating those tweets into ticket sales when the movie premiers in Rhode Island this November.

Will the approach work?  Yes, the Facebook work is going well and this new Twitter experiment is something I love and feel strongly will work well for any movie or book release.

Oh yeah….  A couple of other points:

• The branding, the messaging, across all channels is in perfect alignment.  What you find on Facebook matches what you find on their website.
• The plot?  Two ghost hunters go to hunted house to find their old buddy Barry, who is a ghost, in order to hang out with him one more time. 
• No, I am not in the movie… Maybe I’ll have to audition for whatever movie Rich comes up with next.

John

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Social Media in Politics, 2010

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Hopton House Bed and Breakfast on using social media (via Chefforfeng’s Weblog)

You can never find enough case studies or interviews about people successfully leveraging social media. Check it out, worth the read.

 This will be first in the series of Inns and Lodging using social media to help their businesses. It occurred to me, that while I can help and try to convince innkeepers I work with, that using social media can help their businesses, it’s even more helpful and relevant as well if information and examples of how lodging is using it and how its helping their businesses, comes straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak. I forget exactly when I firs … Read More

via Chefforfeng’s Weblog

If you need help from The Lab, drop me a note. If you would like to view more case studies and interviews, or just want to read about The Social Ecosystem, click on the links and let me know your thoughts.

The Social Ecosystem: Developing Social Usage Guidelines

Rules….   Guidelines….  It does not matter if you are in the 38% of companies blocking social media (in the United States), are leaving social media access wide open, or are looking to strategically leverage The Social Ecosystem.  Guidelines about what is, and is not, acceptable, are critical to the success of your Social Organization.

There are hundreds of great examples of real-world Social Usage Guidelines available across the web.  This post is providing you with a template that you can use to create a set of guidelines for your organization, your Social Organization.

Note that any set of organizational guidelines need to be regularly enforced. I would recommend that Social Organizations review these with new employees and give regular, quarterly is best, training sessions for all employees.  The use of social media is too much a part of how people live to simply train once and expect people to remember your rules.

Also note, only 20% of companies worldwide have a policy for their employees (according to Manpower, see below).  Do not make this mistake.

Without further ado, here is our template.

OVERVIEW

You should make it clear, at the top of your guidelines, that the document applies to both internal and external usage of social media strategies and tool.   Helping people understand that different expected behaviors on both sides of their home/work life is critical for establishing guidelines that make sense to everyone.

Clearly note that this guideline document is supplemental to other existing employee guidelines such as the employee handbook.

LICENSING

Clearly state ownership rules for content created by your employees.  I favor the use of Creative Commons, as used on my blog, but what you use is dependent upon your market, your business, your legal team.  Whatever model is used simply make it clear in the licensing section.

Note that you may also have exceptions in place worth noting.  For example, perhaps research information follows one licensing model while marketing information follows another.  The rules are up to you, of course,  just make them clear.

If you are interested in learning more about Creative Commons check out their web site.

DEFINITIONS

Take the time to clearly define the terms being used by your organization.  The State Department’s Social Guidelines provides a good example. 

GUIDELINES

While the guidelines you define will reflect your Social Organization there are some basics that I feel you should add.  These include:

• There should be different expectations and guidelines established around the use of personal and organizational accounts.
  • Provide guidance on how to indicate if the account is private or organization owned.
  • Make it clear that personal accounts reflect personal opinions, not the opinions of the organization.
• Be clear about what happens if your employees fail to follow the guidelines.  No one wins if you are unclear.
• Note that employee goals and objectives, or equivalent, will go into more detail about how these tools fit into their job function and that achieving defined goals remains the number one priority.
• Provide guidance on the use of appropriate language
• Provide guidance on the types of information that can, and cannot be, shared.
• Provide guidance on how to respond to various request types (e.g. customer service or sales requests).
• Remind employees to listen first, respond second.
• Be clear that comments made are always on the record when responding through the organization’s accounts. 
• Be clear about ownership. If you respond to customer through a social channel the customer considers you the owner of their questions.  Don’t fail them.

Let me know if there are other pieces you would like to see added.

John

If you need help from The Lab, drop me a note. If you would like to view more case studies and interviews, or just want to read about The Social Ecosystem, click on the links and let me know your thoughts.

Have an iPad? You have to start using Flipboard

Do you have an iPad?  Do you use Twitter and/or Facebook?  If you answered yes to these questions you have to download the new Flipboard application.  This is the Twitter and Facebook application that you have always wanted,you just did not know it until now.

Flipboard bills themselves as the world’s first social magazine.  While not perfect, I love the first version of this app more than any other iPad app I amusing (except for Evernote which is in its own class).

Flipboard enables you to view, in a magazine-style format, your Twitter and Facebook feeds.  Here is why this is different, worth paying attention to:

• You can put Twitter lists, search terms, or individuals into their own sections and view these streams.  While Tweetdeck, and others, achieve the same results via columns the Flipboard experience is better.
• As you dive into the sections you have defined you see a mix of individual tweets and, the real win, you see the articles that people were tweeting.  You no longer need to click upon random URLs to decide if you want to view the content.  Instead, the graphics and text of the original article are right there in front of you.    Not happy with seeing the page rendered in Flipboard, just click “Read on Web” and you are off into the browser to view it directly on the original site.
• You can see who else has retweeted the article and choose to follow, if desired, as well as reply, RT, or share the article via e-mail.

Visually, this is a better experience than Pulse and others that have also taken unique approaches. While others raised the bar, Flipboard has gone i a direction that is intuitively better, “more right”.

Flipboard does need a few more features, however, before I could really live within this platform.  Here is a short-wish list:

• Allow an unlimited number of sections.  Right now I cannot find a way to go beyond 9 sections.
• Let me load in e-mail as a section.
• Let me pull in other channels like RSS feeds, YouTube, Flickr, and other platforms.
• You can also include your Facebook updates but the inability to further refine and filter results leaves me wanting more.

That’s it for now.  A really nice version 1.0 product, looking forward to seeing what comes next.

John

If you need help from The Lab, drop me a note. If you would like to view more case studies and interviews, or just want to read about The Social Ecosystem, click on the links and let me know your thoughts.

The State Departments Social Media Usage Policy

Need something interesting to read?  The United States Department of State publicly released its Social Media Usage policy today and it is worth taking time to check out as it will provide insights for other organizations looking to understand what needs to be in their policies.

While there are dozens of great details in the document here are a few highlights:

• The document speaks to the fact that these guidelines apply to both internal and external social media usage.  Understanding and then addressing this fact is important as these tools offer real value across the entire organization.
• Up front the document makes it clear that other policies are still in effect.  For example, your usage policies should note that items covered in employee handbooks still apply.
• Definitions and terms are defined at the beginning of the document.  Make this clear up front so that there is no room for confusion.
• The document does an excellent job noting the different guidelines for internal and external networks, for personal and professional accounts.  Great job including items like this:  “Department personnel may access and post entries to public, Internet-based social media sites, from OpenNet using their personal profile registered with a personal email address…” 

The document also covers important topics such as monitoring, archiving, and when you need to get approval to post.  While I will create a template as part of The Social Ecosystem effort this comprehensive document would make a great starting point.

John