My Experience as a Social Media Strategist.

I recently began a virtual internship with a website called best5everything.com. I'm responsible for the Social Media program, including setting goals and strategies to gain followers on Twitter and Facebook and drive these followers to the website.


This is the website's mission:
To easily allow users to create short 'Best 5' lists on any topic. Advertising revenue is split with 10% going to charity. It's a win-win-win situation!

My initial goals for Twitter were:

1. To create a minimum of 1 post/day and a maximum of 2-3/day.
2. To generate at least 50 retweets per week.
3. To generate at least 50 @mentions per week.
4. To gain at least 100 clicks for the bit.ly url shared.
5. To gain 100 - 200 views for the lists created.
6. To create at least one press release per week and send them out to bloggers and journalists. Have at least 5 mentions in blogs and other relevant media.

The strategies to how reach these goals were:

1. To pick a charity to focus on weekly.
2. To use #best5 in all tweets.
3. To ideally use #best5 in context, particulary with respect to a list title.
4. If referring to the site in general, use this url http://bit.ly/be5ev
5. If referring to a list post a bit.ly link to it.
6. Research to know who are the influencers, and whether there's anything they are promoting themselves. Think about creating a list that they would like to share instead of expecting them to do a favor and share it.
7. Research to make sure the right hash tags are being used.

These were the ideas for posts and to how to begin the conversations on Week 1 (April 10-17, 2011):

1. One of the top twitter topics of the week is Japan (twitter users are sharing their feelings about the Sendai earthquake/tsunami). Relevant hash tags: #prayforjapan, #tsunami, #Fukushima.
2. To create a list of the 5 best charities and encourage people to do so as well.
3. This is a list of April's causes that we can create conversations about:

• The National Volunteer week, we could create lists about how to best help others
• The Earth day.

This is the first post created regarding the National Volunteer week:

best5everything Best5Everything 

#Best5 Ways to Volunteer During the National #Volunteer Week.http://bit.ly/gP0lpk #care #Volunteers @HandsOnNetwork@ServeDotGov

11 Apr Favorite Undo Retweet Reply

Finally, these are the measurements for week 1:

• Twitter Followers: we went from around 20 on Tuesday (4/12) to 193 on Monday (4/18).
• Friends: we went from almost none on Tuesday (4/12) to almost 850 on Monday(4/18).
• The total numbers of tweets (from all sources): From around 5 to 78 today on the same days.
• We had 15 @mentions from Saturday (4/16) to Monday (4/18).
• We had 15 retweets on the same days.
• Regarding bitly.com: We had around 80 clicks on the links created on week 1.

WHAT ABOUT YOU?

Do you have any personal experience of a campaign you worked on Twitter or Facebook?

JWT Panel Discussion

The JWT (J. Walter Thompson) agency hosted our Social Media class on Thursday, April 14, 2011. The panel discussion included: Kyle Monson (who is a director of content strategy), Chris Kooluris (who is an earned media specialist), and Libby Shaub (who is a social media planner). 


The discussion that resonated with me the most was Kyle Monson's "The Role of Social Listening" or "Brand Journalism." 


Social Listening consists of generating a daily report of what people are talking about the company/brand and what can we do about it. How can we monitor conversations related to our clients and what is the best way to react to them: to ignore, to contradict the conversation by publishing an article or to engage with customers? Kyle Monson calls these type of professionals Subject Message Expert (SME) and their work is to listen to the noise (there are too much noise out there) and to interpret these conversations and know what matters.


What I took out of the panel is that the role of Social Media in the Communication Strategy of a company is to monitor the conversation. And the best way to react to these conversations is no matter what we do, our job is to make sure these conversations are tied to the brands' objectives and mission in order to make them effective and beneficial to our clients.


There are three ways to monitor and listen to what's been said about our clients:

1. Basic Keyword Tracking: Google Alerts, Twitter search, Backtype, Social Mention.
2. Advance Tracking: Radian6, Sysomos, and other tools.
3. Super-Advanced Tracking: Radian6+, Subject-Matter Expert.

The goals of Social Listening are:

1. Listening for Intelligence: To use the web as your focus group. Is the audience responding the way you want them to?
2. Listening for Customer Service: He used the Time Warner example. How a company can improve its customer service by listing to customers' feedback in Social Media and at the same time how Social Media empower customers (they are finally able to complain about companies in a large scale and make the company take action).
3. Listening for Action: Things that are going to inform your strategy (not only monitor but respond to them). In order to take action we need someone credible (an expert) and the authorization of the PR team to send the message out. We may also need add support (pay Media).

By just showing up on Social channels doesn't mean that our brand is social. We must earn people's attention, engage with them, and make them talk about our clients. To make people talk about a brand is much more valuable than payed advertising. And the right way to do so is to make companies stop to talk about themselves and engage with customers in authentic conversations. In reality, companies are terrified of real-time conversations with customers. This is the role of the Social Message Experts: to guide companies and teach them how to listen and talk to customers.


WHAT ABOUT YOU?
Do you have any thoughts on the topic? How do you thing Communication specialists can use Social Media to make companies achieve their objectives and Mission?