Ardara Media

Last week Patricia Redsicker wrote a piece published in the Social Media Examiner blog which provided a wonderful summary of the 2012 Nielson Social Media Report. The summary listed the seven key findings from the report as:

• More time invested in Mobile
• Pinterest Usage Continues to Rise
• Social Networking Generates Positive Sentiments
• Twitter Drives Social TV
• Social Care is the New Customer Care
• Mixed Feelings about Social Ads
• Social Listening a Key Consumer Activity

If you’re interested in how social media will continue to drive customer engagement, the post is a must-read!

A client had recently asked me to recap a conversation on how elements of a social media marketing campaign can come together to build a buzz around an event. There are a number of tools that can be used in concert to help build interest and sustain interest after an event. Many of these tips are widely used already, but I’ll give you my spin on how things can come together. If you try these and have particular success or see lessons to be learned, I’d be eager to hear about it. These technologies and their uses are always evolving!!

One theme that will run through all of these points is the concept of the event owner. That can be the venue or the group organizing the event – but in my opinion, the owner should be an entity, not an individual. Group involvement always makes an event seem more substantial.

Facebook

There are some who say it’s falling from it’s pedestal, but Facebook still the king of social media – so it’s almost essential to create a presence and event notice here. The event owner should post the event on their page and invite as many or all of their followers. Then, everyone associated with the event should publicize it on their walls and timelines.

Twitter

Twitter can be great for generating a buzz before and during an event. It shouldn’t be the same tweet every time, but as people are going about the business of getting ready – buying supplies, contracting with artists, etc – tweeting about it keeps it present and makes it searchable. Have the event owner launch the first tweet – and make up a hash-tag for it – but also include regional hash-tags like #yourtown and #yourregion. People who are involved should re-tweet that initial tweet once each over a period of time (not all at once, though that could be amusing). Then, when you tweet about the event on your own, @ reply the event owner and use as many hash-tags as your message & character limit will allow.

Tumblr

Tumblr is a great way to aggregate images and then tweet about them. If there are samples of things people might see at the event, have the owner post them (or re-blog them) to their Tumblr page – the tweet from Tumblr.

We’ve covered the creation of the event (Facebook) who’s involved (Facebook & Twitter), and what’s happening (Tumblr). How do we branch out further?

Flyers

Yes, old school paper. Put things up in store windows, on telephone poles (if you can), on apartment building bulletin boards. Have the flyers reflect the tone of the event and the kind of crowd you want to draw. In concert with these flyers through, you want to easily draw people into your virtual planning space, so here’s where we leverage…

QR Codes

Quick Response codes are starting to show up everywhere; in catalogs and magazine ads and in store windows, anywhere people might be passing with a smart phone. They’re easy to create too – I use the QuickMark app on the iPhone, but there are web apps as well. A QR code can contain a text message, contact information, calendar events – it’s a way to put your event directly into someone’s phone and schedule without them having to remember or write it down. QR codes are still new enough where people think it’s fun just to scan them. So why not let them scan your event?

Pinterest

All that Tumblr content? Share it here too!

FourSquare

Sure – people will check into your event on FourSquare, but how does that help ahead of time? Have the event creator generate a tip, or have the venue owner create a special and attach it to their FourSquare presence. Don’t forget to share your venue checkins on Twitter with your hash-tag.

Epilogger

This one is new to the virtual space. It allows an event owner to create and curate an event over time. Epilogger aggregates everything about an event and tracks it before, during, and after it’s happened. The great thing about this is you can use the buzz and success from a previous event to build an audience for the next one. I just heard about Epilogger this week – so it’s pretty new to me, but it seems like it can fit in this conversation.

I know there’s a lot here, and this was kind of a brain dump – but I hope you find at least some of it helpful. Above all – have fun!!

It’s my personal experience, that GoDaddy is the most confusing web development service out there! Even when you know what you’re doing and what you’re looking for, the setup is cumbersome. But perhaps even more irksome than the convoluted design to the site, is that everything is set up to steer the user to spend more money. If it’s tricky for an experienced web tech to navigate through what to purchase or not, I can only imagine how many basic users are suckered into spending much much more than they need!

 

My personal preference is Downtown Host. Their sales are remarkably clear, without any hidden fees! Their staff is incredibly helpful, responding to my emails at all hours of the day and night. When there were some glitches with the server being used for my shared hosting, they notified me immediately (before I noticed any problems), and I happily accepted their offer to change servers for maximum uptime.

 

My colleague has had an equally satisfying experience with Blue Host, and recommends them as another user-friendly option with excellent customer service.

 

Do you have a favorite resource for domain and hosting services?

I had decided I wanted to add a favicon to the site. A favicon is the small graphic that appears either in your bookmarks or next to the URL in your web browser. For me, it makes it easier to find a site among the many I have bookmarked.

For my favicons, I usually prefer something simple.  I created the graphic using white space in a text editor, then used a screen capture utility to create a GIF file. I then renamed the GIF to favicon.ico and the image was created.

The trick then became uploading the image to the site. In most cases, with custom built websites, you can just places these files in the root directory. When creating a favicon for a site that’s a WordPress blog, it seems a little coding is necessary.

I edited the header.php file for the active WordPress theme (wp-content/themes/[yourtheme]/header.php) and added the line:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”favicon.ico”>

There may be some WordPress theme that alread include the “shortcut icon” link – if this is the case, just replace their href with your own.

I’d been told this is all that’s necessary, and that the graphic would be found once placed in the root directory. For my hosting provider, that didn’t work as my favicon was replaced on page-loads by their favicon. I got around this problem by creating a custom folder in my site root directory, placing the favicon in that folder, and replacing the href tag described above with an absolute URL path. As you can see above, this worked!!