Propagation Planning

LiveFyre

I'm excited for the launch of LiveFyre. I think it will become the place to go for hot topics like the Iran Elections when so many people had passionate things to say. If you want to join the beta team sign up before December 7th at the link above.

Brands that have strong narratives, advocacy or debatable topics might have a place in the LiveFyre universe.

Facebook Post and Share now customizes by Location and Langague

New press release from Facebook came out yesterday that has huge implications for those that manage Facebook communities for brands:

Now you can publish posts, links, photos, and videos to fans based on location and language. A post that is published to Facebook users in a specific location or language will only be visible to those users. All other users will never see the post in the News Feed, on your Page, or anywhere else across Facebook.

This feature has been frequently requested by Page admins who have fans spread out over multiple cities, states, and countries. Now you can now tailor your communication to be more relevant. This means your fans will be more interested in what you have to say and more likely to take action or share your posts with friends.

Some examples of Pages that may find this useful are:

Global brands: Starbucks, who has over 5MM Fans across the world, may want to talk about a new drink currently only available in the U.K.
Musicians & Celebrities: The Foo Fighters may want to announce to fans in California that new tour dates have been added across the state.
Local: Red Mango may want to let fans in Palo Alto, California know that a new frozen yogurt shop is opening locally.
Celebrities: Roger Federer may want to separately thank his English-speaking and French-speaking fans in their respective languages.

To use this feature, click the 'people' icon next to the Share button, and click Customize.

HBO. It's More Than You Imagined.

I finally had some time tonight to sit down with the HBO. It's more than you imagined story and after watching some of the presentations from Power to the Pixel I think HBO did a very good job of capturing my attention and taking me through the story. I wish the audio messages were sent to my real life phone to create a cross-media or transmedia story.

The best part of this experience was the map of the story which told me where I was in the narrative and how to track it. Each part of the story had a unique URL and a Share button that invited viewers to propagate the narrative with rabbit holes that they found interesting. My favorite was when the Mime was drowning and the midget (or little person) says, "Loose Lips Sink Ships."

 

I also love the invitation to become a part of the story and upload my own videos that might add to the narrative.

Blogger Outreach Tool - Traackr

Art + Search

PhotoSketch: Internet Image Montage from tao chen on Vimeo.

10 Steps to help you become a Social Media Ninja

The Blog eConsultancy has a great post by Jake Hird that I wanted to share here on 10 Steps to help you become a Social Media Ninja:

1. Preparation

You need to do your homework. It’s no good rushing in, without a clue about what your overall business goals are. 

Once these have been established, then you can figure out what place (if at all) social media has in helping reach your objectives. Leading on from this, it will also become easier to identify key areas of engagement and therefore allow you to focus on the areas that will be of greater benefit. Econsultancy’s Social Media Template Files contain a strategy guideline that you might find useful as a starting point. 

2. Patience

As the adage goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day. The same thing applies to any social media activity: it generally takes a fair bit of time to establish a positive presence. 

In creating any online presence, levels of trust need to be established. Especially given that social media generally requires a two-way engagement between users and your organisation, it could take a while before you begin to see your objectives being met. 

Be patient and don’t panic. If your strategy is solid, then you’ll start seeing results. 

3. Weapons

Your chosen social media weapons should be selected by your strategy, objectives and overall business structure. Don’t use something just because it looks cool. For example a blog may be a lot more beneficial than using Facebook in delivering regular updates to your users, or Twitter as a customer service platform may be more help than user-reviews. 

There’s a lot of choice out there, but more importantly, there’s also a lot of advice to help you chose what might be best and how to use it effectively. 

4. Stealth

Sometimes it works to your advantage to keep things quiet. If you’re planning to engage in social media, it can often help to start off small and find your feet, otherwise you might end up looking extremely silly. This is why it’s important to treat social media as a process of evolution. Why spread yourself across twenty different channels badly, when you can easily manage only a couple with great results? 

5. Honour

Protect your organisation. Carefully monitor what people are saying about you both directly and indirectly - and think before you act. This applies to both responding to users and to your general social media activity. 

6. Aggression

Don’t be shy. Be active, go to events, network online and offline, ask questions. Experiment (carefully – see point 4). If Rome wasn’t built in day, it was almost certainly built with a bit of backbone.  Being aggressive in social media doesn’t necessarily mean intrusive or threatening... It can equally mean being bold and dynamic. Which direction of aggression you take is up to you. 

7. Cunningness 

Be tactical. More often than not, organisations join a social media channel because they see their competitors there... But they fail to establish whether it’s working or not.

Observe where others are going wrong and step in with a better approach or side-step it altogether. For example, a financial institution is more likely to have better engagement through LinkedIn, than it by jumping on the Twitter bandwagon.

9. Skill

Practice makes perfect. Hone your social media skills by continuously educating yourself, reviewing your existing strategy and performance and by experimenting. (See point 6). 

9. Calmness

Things can go wrong. And they often do.

Not panicking is the key to success. It doesn't matter if a user is being negative (or even your own staff) or your social platform has crashed, things can be rectified. 

10. Style

Social media is pretty cool. And it can make an organisation or a business look good... But making a half-baked effort will backfire.

If you have all the right foundation points in place, you can carry off a stylish social media presence with ease: there's a lot of companies already doing it, so there's no excuse. 

Spreadable Media Checklist

Dan Zarella, a Social and Viral Marketing Scientist wrote a great post about his Viral Marketing Checklist. Like many of my readers, I hate the word Viral but the tenants behind the thinking is really strong. This is a great checklist when planning components of propagation planning. His list includes:

[ ] Goals Have you defined your campaign’s goals? Do you know what you’re trying to do (in an actionable and quantifiable way) and have you identified the metrics you will use to identify success? Keep in mind that certain, identifiable and targetable types of users tend to be more prolific in spreading content, be sure to target these people.

[ ] Vector Research Have you identified the demographic you’d like your campaign to “go viral” in and have you researched them to know what types of content they share and where they share it from?

[ ] Uniqueness & Novelty Is your campaign truly new? It can be a new take on an old idea, but there must be some kernel of novelty present because otherwise, who cares?

[ ] Utility Is your campaign useful, or will it improve user’s lives? If people believe they are helping someone by sending your content to them, it will dramatically increase your chance of going viral.

[ ] Incentive Have you provided some way for users to receive some kind of value by spreading your content? Freebies and product samples are an easy way to accomplish this.

[ ] Stickiness Have you included the ability for users who love your campaign to become engaged in a more long-term fashion with it? Email or Feed subscriptions are the obvious ways to do this.

[ ] Call to Actions Have you included viral calls-to-action that will trigger user’s desire to spread your content (which you should have identified in the research stage)?

[ ] Optimization Have you made sure that your content is easy to share? Is the URL short and permanent? Did you include tools for users to share it on social sites? If you’re using some form of video, can users embed the video on their own sites and profiles?

[ ] Remixing Have you made sure your content can be remixed by viewers? The process of communal recreation is important to “going viral” and you should make sure your campaign is a platform for users to express themselves with it. Think about things like personalization and customization.

[ ] Conversation Does your campaign have mechanisms in place to allow viewers to talk about it (both with you and with their friends)? Comments sections are the most common way to include this.

[ ] Seeding Once you’ve created your content, do you have a strategy for seeding it among users who are likely to share it? Don’t succumb to the “if you build it, they will come” trap, you need to place your campaign in the path of your target vectors.

[ ] Tracking & Analytics Do you have analytics systems in place so that you can track the spread and growth of your campaign as well as measure its performance against your goals?

[ ] Backup Plan Viral marketing success isn’t guaranteed, so typically I recommend clients plan to launch more than one campaign. Whatever you choose to do, make sure you have a plan if your first try doesn’t “go viral.” (Glen reminded me to add this in the comments, thanks!)

87 Things Google thinks are cool

When Google tells you that these 87 things inspire them... pay attention. These are the tools that power propagation planning.

Augmented Reality for Speakers

I'm surprised that the marker could be a 'face' but this video showcases how it works:

Johnny Chung Lee is a Rock Star

I don't work for Intel, but I do respect digital tinkers like the best of them and Johnny Chung Lee is a rock star in my book. Even though these videos came out in 2007, I love thinking about the possibility of using the technology for innovative and engaging marketing campaigns. Johnny is a Wii remote hacker and research for Carnegie Mellon University.