Social Media

Spent the weekend at the American Marketing Association Leadership Summit. This is a training program for the chapter officers – part inspiration, part training. I’ve been to this before from the IH perspective and the experience was entirely different. Before, it was a chore. This was inspirational. Awesome.

Just for giggles, at a cocktail reception on the first night, George Couris (Chicago AMA President) and I started goofing around with ideas to set Chicago AMA apart at the conference. We worked it out over the dinner and keynote portion of the evening and launched the first Chicago AMA TweetUp, and the results were great.

A few lessons before I describe what we did and how it worked. First, it took 45 minutes to come up with a successful, Twitter-based marketing program. It was creative. It was fun.

It was a glorious mess of improvization the entire way through.

We launched the program without having an event destination in mind, and in fact it was 5pm on Saturday before I’d even settled on the methodology to get followers to the event.

The goal: Get a significant number of attendees to a “secret” event on Saturday night by promoting it virally through Twitter. Can we pull it off in just one day?

The tools: First, the #chiama hashtag – which we’d invented about two weeks before at a Chicago AMA board meeting. We had five or six people from the chapter at the event that night, a total of four available during the day Saturday, and only me for the evening because everyone else already had plans.

The program: A Wine Tasting at Vintner’s Cellar Winery presented as a treasure hunt. We’d spend the day on Saturday building an audience through teasers. Something was coming. It was going to be cool. That’s all they knew. (That’s because that’s all we knew too.)

By the cocktail reception at 5:45, we said we’d start dropping hints and directions to the event.

The Results: Out of an event that had maybe 300-400 people show up, we had a TweetUp with 35 attendees.

We got 10% of a conference to show up to an event that we pulled out of our asses 24 hours before.

Analysis: Wow. The biggest key to this was to rapidly recruit influential ambassadors. Of those on the Twitter feed, the most effective was @marybethonline. She has begun Tweeting with the #amasummit hashtag and we started promoting and using both hashtags. That expanded our audience greatly.

It grew virally from there. As the day progressed, more and more people already knew about it. Some would mention it to me first – “hey, you’re the Twitter guy! Where are we going?” People were posting to the #chiama Twitter stream with questions, promotions. They were reTweeting it.

When I first encountered Twitter six months ago, I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen. I’ve been slow getting it, but I’m starting to see this platform’s enormous potential.

I’ll never be bored at a conference again!

See the full Case Study write up of the Chicago AMA Tweetup.

I’m at a Chicago AMA event at the moment – Marketing to Small Business in a Slumping Economy – and I thought I’d Twitter some of the insights as we go. Interesting to see what results from that.

In theory, people who follow me should retweet some of my comments and this should yield a new batch of followers. The live Tweeting during my Marketing in Action event yielded 20 new followers – presumably from people at the event. This might go further.

[Update] About an hour and a half in, I’ve picked up seven new followers by Twittering insights from the speakers. The second speaker isn’t as useful, so I’m not getting as many Tweets out.

Just tried out a relatively new virtual networking site called Blitz Time (http://www.blitztime.com/). The idea is to replicate the good parts of real-world networking events and eliminate the bad parts. The concept is great, but like all of these things it depends heavily on the people who participate.

Real life networking events have costs. Sometimes that’s a cash cost, but it’s certainly a time and travel expense cost. With a good crowd, that cost is covered by making connections with new people. However, the “good crowd” is dependent on luck. If the right people are there and if you happen to introduce yourself to them – good networking. If either of those doesn’t happen – waste of time.

I’ve tried several methods with Chicago AMA events to set up some form of pre-networking – some way to know who will be there in order to make sure to meet the right people. There hasn’t been much participation. A big part of that is execution – you need to focus on the event mechanics before having time for the fancy stuff – but the fact is it hasn’t worked well yet.

For BlitzTime, you sign up for an event and go through the attendee list to indicate whether you’d like to meet a person, or not. The event itself lasts an hour, with about 10 minutes of introduction followed by “blitzes”. These are 6 minute conversation segments on the phone where you can interact with another participant. If you make a connection, it can lead to new business or opportunities. If not, the conversation is (mercifully) over in six minutes and you see what happens with the next person.

The group on this call was pretty small (seven, I think) so I wouldn’t say the results were great. With a bigger group I think it would work out better.

I’ve scheduled a call with co-founder Jeff  D’Urso to dig into the idea more and see if we might run an experiment with Chicago AMA.

I ran an event earlier this week for the Chicago American Marketing Association at one of Second City’s theaters. There were a lot of new ideas we were trying out, but I think one of the most successful was the event’s live Twitter feed.

We wanted a lot of audience-speaker interaction, so among other things we created a hashtag for the event (#smdama) and encouraged audience members to Twitter.

The feed was projected on a screen on stage (with some other information occasionally as well) and successfully drew several questions from the audience that the speakers handled on stage. There was some back-and-forth interaction with the Twitter feed as well.

Best of all, on a personal note, is that I seem to have picked up 20 new followers on Twitter from the event.

All around, good idea well executed. Yay us!

Even social media isn’t a magic time multiplier. Building networks takes a regular investment of time. It doesn’t take cash, which is a major plus, but often time is just as valuable a commodity.

I’ve found a tendency to view spending time on social media sites as “goof off” or wasted time. However, networking is a social thing. If I’m at an event and I’m talkign to someone about golf, that can be just as productive business-wise and throwing our elevator speeches at each other. Actually, it’s often more valuable.

I need to block out time every day to expanding the network and finding new people to connect with.

Very handy tip today from Lynn Hazan at a Chicago AMA MeetUp.

LinkedIn has an application that lets you share slide presentations. Apparently, only 6% of LinkedIn users are even aware of it. The nice benefit is that LinkedIn has some editors that review submissions and post quality presentations for about 20 hours or so.

Experiment for the next week – put some of my client presentations in my LinkedIn profile and see what happens.

Experiment for the longer term – put one together on MeetUp and social media that is purely informational and post it for myself.

All the major social media applications are working furiously toward some glorious center point.

LinkedIn, the stodgy business network, is adding more interactivity and (almost) fun.

Facebook, the cool hangout, is adding more business useful tools.

Today’s Facebook upgrade goes a long way to making it a viable business tool. If I were to bet, I’d say that Facebook is going to be the ultimate winner. It’s much more friendly to visual communications – photos, video clips, etc. – and in the current non-literate world, that’s what’s going to win.

Just noticed a new feature in the LinkedIn groups feature. That area typically turns into a lowest common denominator think with people posting free job listings and looking for a job.

Now there’s a jobs tab that makes it really easy to shift the inappropriate discussion postings to the jobs section where it belongs.

This seems to be the opening gambit to a LinkedIn based job board. There is also an ad to post jobs for $250 each. Curious how they’re going to balance the paid vs. free stuff.

I just noticed today that LinkedIn appears to have added some more interactive elements. The “what are you doing now” status is much easier to update, and is more conducive to the kind of back-and-forth play that makes Facebook so much fun.

It has a long way to go, but the convergence of these useful features is making social media a stronger and stronger marketing platform.

Each of the leading social media platforms has one or two things it does well, and a bunch of things where they are clearly playing catchup. The common observation is that it would be great if we could somehow take the strengths of each and mush it into one super-platform.

Well, I can’t. Cross Pollenation is the answer. So here’s what I’ve got so far …

1. You meet people at some networking event and come back to the office with a stack of business cards. Connect to those people via LinkedIn, because that is the easiest place to find and identify people. “We just met at XXX event” is good enough for a connection.

2. Twitter is the best place for ongoing communications (it forces you to be brief, for one thing). Twitter has a great tool to scan your gmail contact list and find people on Twitter. Therefore, export your LinkedIn list periodically and import to Gmail. Have Twitter scan gmail and follow all the new people on Twitter. Some will follow back.

3. Use Tweets (and your profile on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) to get people to connect to Facebook groups so you can connect with them there as well.

It seems to me that the more places you’re connected with people, the better chance you have to reach them.

All of this, of course, requires you to not be obnoxious.