Yesterday (April 15 2010) was Social Media 201 held at Microsoft in Redmond. This conference was for businesses who already have a presence in Social Media, but want to amp it up to the next level of engagement and profitability. I was asked by @MikeWhitmore to be on the Monetizing with Social MediaPanel. This was quite an exciting experience as at this time there are very few Social Media conferences held at Microsoft. I was able to share with others valuable tools for most businesses. Such as…
I shared the value of Ning to those who may not have the resources and have larger funds to start their very own online communities. Ning usually cost under $50 US a month. Rather than 10-50k for a website built on Drupal. The function of Ning is so far unmatched by any other company for the price and function. You can allow users to have their own membership profile pages, upload videos, upload photos, create their own blogs and much more. This community building software is really valuable for those who can build there own community around their brand or product.
Some great Ning networks :
- PeopleVancouver.com (My own Ning)
- http://community.ellentv.com (Ellen DeGeneres)
- http://www.thisis50.com/ (50 cent)
.
The second tool I talked about was Wibiya. This product is a social toolbar that anyone can add to any website. This bar connects users to different social networks right on a webpage. Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Flickr and there is more functionality such as translation, how many users are on your website at that time. You can see this fully customizable social bar implemented on one of my sites : www.VancouverAccess2010.com (placed on the bottom)
The third tool I talked about was Tweet Adder. This is a very useful tool to find people who you want to engage with. You can search recent tweets, location, profile data and more. This comes in really useful when you are looking for people. For instance I can search for users who have the word Microsoft in their profile data, then add in Redmond in the location field. Tweet Adder will then give me a list of all the user that meet that criteria. Now I can follow these people to my Twitter automatically and engage.
Here are some photos of the panel:
The next topic I touched on was Social Media Contest. I stressed that it’s very hard to conduct a successful video campaign.
Why?
- People are Lazy
- Not everyone has the skill to edit videos
- People don’t want to spend time creating videos on something they are not assured
People also think about their ROI on the work they put in. It’s much easier for someone to RT a tweet then spend hours creating a video.
The amount of work is much less for someone to tweet than to create a video – and this is more the evident with current contest you can look at.
This is the case for many many video contest that are put on. You can see yourself on Youtube and other video contest sites that there are very few people who enter these contest. Thus companies are paying way to much money for user-generated content.
This money can be spent elsewhere for many other purposes. Like a Twitter contest.
Making sure that your contest aligns with your goals is very important. You want to align your contest method with you goals.
For instance an RT Twitter contest.
This sort of contest can really help grow your Twitter community. This is a great goal to have – if spreading awareness about your business or product is part of your overall goals. This is a fun and easy way for users to engage with your brand/product. Not only that …it’s easy! All the user has to do is follow you and RT a tweet. Simple… takes a few seconds. Your community can grow quite quickly with this method. On top of that now you have a larger amount of people that hear your voice.
If conducted properly these sorts of contest can be fun and worthwhile.
That was mostly what I covered during the panel.
After we all headed over to Bellevue for the after conference Tweetup:
It was great to meet the keynote speakers and panel members. Along with the very excited and motivated audience. We mingled over some extremely tasty food and drinks.
The hash tag that we used was #sm201 – go ahead and search on Twitter for some great tweets around the event
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