I found these two videos on YouTube yesterday and want to share them.
In a very lighthearted way, the videos depict the current issues and problems between most traditional Advertisers and their Consumers. The ads are very well done and were created (interestingly and surprisingly) by a group called Microsoft Advertising Solutions. The only reference to Microsoft is at the very end of the presentation where a short URL is presented to their “Get Inspired Here” website.
Microsoft is not well known (at all) for connecting to their customers, so it’s a little amusing they created and are using these videos to inspire marketers to embrace to online media and their consumers. The two bloggers listed on the About Us part of the website are based in EMEA and Southeast Asia – and not at headquarters in Washington – which is also curious.
In any case, both videos are quite entertaining and highlight the issues of advertisers and marketers just wanting to talk at consumers instead of engaging them in a conversation and really getting to know them and their needs.
Tara “missrogue” Hunt posted a great presentation on Slideshare recently called “Happiness as Your Business Model” which is about “incorporating your human drive for fulfillment into your core business”.
Not only is the presentation visually pleasing, Tara makes several great points in the 197 slide presentation (don’t worry, it doesn’t really feel like 197 slides and you can flip through the presentation pretty quickly).
She starts out by comparing the theoretical “homo-economicus” to the more practical “homo-feelgoodomicus” and worked in Martin Seligman’s 1998 Positive Psychology study and humans’ need for happiness as a key to success,
Why is happiness important? Here are Tara’s 7 reasons that happiness is key to business success:
happy customers talk to more people about their positive experiences (see my SnagIt post)
unhappy customers talk to the most people about their negative experiences
happy customers are repeat customers
happy customers will pay more for an awesome experience
happy customers are loyal
happy customers will drive your marketing for you (see #2)
happy employees are more productive, creative and loyal
Following up on that, she launches into a discussion of the 4 Pillars of Happiness (autonomy, competence, relatedness and self-esteem) which are offset by the 5 Barriers to Happiness (fear, confusion, loneliness, lack of control and struggle for survival).
Ultimately, it’s about finding an “axis of misery” where people are unhappy with their experiences and turning it into a money-making opportunity by them happy (think Zappos, Zipcar, Southwest Airlines, and Moleskin, etc.).
I love SnagIt and use it almost every day. After Firefox, SnagIt is my most used application and one that I consider an essential tool.
SnagIt Screen Capture of the SnagIt Webpage
As a Social Media exercise, I’m going to share my thoughts on SnagIt and try to get some Link-love, Twitter-love and Facebook-love for my favorite product. I don’t work for TechSmith or know anyone there – and they don’t give me free software. But the point of Social Media is that they should know about me and want to cultivate more very happy customers like me who will go out of their way to trumpet their product.
So what is SnagIt and why do I love it?SnagIt is a screen capture utility from TechSmith. TechSmith also sells some other products that capture screen and presentation recordings, and that do media hosting and usability testing, but SnagIt is their “ubiquity product“. That means nearly everyone has a need for SnagIt, and will find it both useful and easy to use. What more could you want out of a product?
I primarily use Snagit to capture pictures and logos for blog posts, emails and documents and to crop pictures for profile pictures. You can also annotate your captures if you are using the screen shots to explain something to someone. Obviously, you can do a lot more with SnagIt – but for me, using SnagIt for these simple, everyday tasks makes the purchase price of $49.95 well worth it. (And sorry Mac users, SnagIt does not currently sell a Mac version.)
So what can you do to show your SnagIt appreciation? SnagIt does have a Facebook fan page, but there were only 161 fans when I checked it this morning. TechSmith does have a blog and their chief evangelist is very active in Twitter. But there is not a lot of SnagIt noise in Twitter – a simple search turned up about 75 mention of SnagIt on Twitter during the last 2 weeks and there is not a SnagIt-branded Twitter account. The SnagIt website does have a section called “Why will you love SnagIt?” with a couple of testimonials and explanations of how people are using it. But it seems like they could be doing more to reach out and tap into their user base to create more product evangelists.
In the meantime, I’m going to help them out a bit.
How much do you love SnagIt? To show your love, here are some activities you can do:
Upload a how-to or video commercial to YouTube (note that there are many SnagIt video tutorials already on YouTube and it doesn’t look like they were generated by TechSmith and there is no SnagIt)
If you’re a Mac user, implore TechSmith to come out with a SnagIt version for the Mac!
I’ll provide an update next week on my grassroots SnagIt Social Media campaign.
Wide range of salaries - The survey showed a wide range of salaries for community manager positions. The low-end represents volunteers, part-time staff and people in start-up environments working on developing communities. While people earning more than $125,000 represent only 16% of total respondents, my sense is that this is the sweet spot for companies that are serious about social media and community strategy – and recognize that these are the salaries that the people filling these roles will command based on the depth and breadth of their experience. (see my Community Managers and Quarterbacks blog post for more information on that topic.)
Derived from Forum One Aug. 2008 Report on Community Compensation
Disparity of experience levels – The report pointed out that people with less than 3 years of experience accounted for 34% of the total, people with 3-5 years of experience accounted for 19% and people with more than 5 years experience accounted for 47% of the total. The Forum One conclusion was that “the body of respondents generally represents a senior and seasoned body of practitioners. The dip in responses in the 3yr to 5 yr range likely represents the general waning of interest in online community during the 3 years after the Internet bubble.” I also think that the large number in the under 3 year category represent employees who are getting involved in community at companies that are just entering the experimentation phase with community and social media – and that these employees had related jobs in marketing, but not specifically community jobs, before getting involved in community. That is definitely my situation. I was involved in various product marketing, product strategy and consulting roles before getting assigned a project to develop and launch the Catalyze community.
Variety of job titles – There are a wide variety of reported job titles in the survey including:
CEO, Managing Partner, Community Manager, Director of Community, Director of Product Management, Manager, President, Community Host, Intern, Moderator, Intranet Coordinator, Professor, Social Media Strategist, Social Media Manager, and VP of Community & Social Media, VP of Interactive Development, Director of Knowledge Management, Executive Director, Head of Communities, Social Media Evangelist and VP of Marketing
This may be a self-serving comment, but I think we’ll be seeing more titles like the VP or Director of Social Media and VP or Director of Social Media Strategy as the space matures. These titles describe how social media is the overarching description of what’s going on and that online community is just a component of a larger strategy. There will always be community manager roles, but they will report into the Social Media and Social Media Strategy positions.
The entire Community Manager Compensation report can be purchased for $295 from the Online Community Research Network. You can also download some free research from the Online Community Report website.
BTW, I am in the market for a “sweet” social media strategy and management position. Check out the About Tom Humbarger tab above if you want to hire an A+ social media person.
Communities walk a fine line when they are trying to get people to register for their site. On one hand, community managers and sponsors want to know as much as possible about each member as possible. On the other hand, most people are reluctant to part with their data or do not have the patience to complete a long registration form or submit to an arduous process.
The bottom line is that you don’t want your registration process to stop people from joining your community or start out their community experience on the wrong foot.
Some of the easiest registrations include just an email address and password. While that is simple for the enduser, it does not provide much in the way of member demographics.
In the community I used to manage, we started out with a very onerous registration process. Prospective members had to complete 15 required fields and after pressing the enter button, we would send them a confirmation email with a registration code. Many members never received their registration code and others were stymied by the process which limited our conversion numbers.
In the end, we knew that we had to change the process and eliminated the confirmation code part of the process. We also streamlined the required fields to the following:
First name
Last name
Email address
Company name
User name
Password
Country
Additionally, we had a section of the registration page that was clearly labeled as optional. The registration fields in this section included: company industry, address, phone number, job title, years of experience, role, topics of interest, and professional memberships. About 50% of new members filled out some or all of the optional fields.
We also explained why we were collecting the information in the optional fields which probably helped with our conversion rates:
We would like you to complete some or all of these fields when you register, but they are optional. These fields help us to better understand our members and serve you better. You can also re-visit your profile and update or review your profile at a later date (using the View/Edit Profile link in the top right corner).
Finally, here are some simple tips for community registration:
Keep your community registration “simple and easy”
Look at the process for many different communities and incorporate the best ideas into your process
Examine and re-examine your registration process from a new member standpoint
Use drop-down boxes or check boxes to simplify and standardize input wherever possible
What data do you collect during registration for your community? Are you happy with your process?
I was the community manager of the Catalyze Community – a B2B niche community for business analysts and usability professionals – from its inception in early 2007 and oversaw its growth to over 4,000 members in July 2008. During the 18 months under my leadership, tracking and analyzing metrics was an important part of my job.
I tracked a number of metrics on a weekly basis. Half of the stats came from Google Analytics and the other half were derived from a standard report from Mzinga, our community vendor. Using Excel, I created a spreadsheet to track all of the stats on a weekly basis in one place. It is critical to track these statistics on a weekly basis in order to have the necessary information to monitor the trends and health of your community. Sometimes it felt like a pain to pull the numbers, but it really only took 15 minutes or so per week to pull the raw numbers and then some additional time to study what it all meant.
You should also keep in mind that the metrics you are tracking will change over time as a community evolves. In our case, we were totally focused on member growth and pageviews in year 1 of the community and were starting to swing the importance to member engagement for year 2 of the community.
Here is a picture of the spreadsheet I used for the Catalyze stats:
Catalyze Community Metrics
From Mzinga, we tracked information on member growth, posts to blogs, forums and resources and resource downloads and views. From Google Analytics, we tracked traditional website stats such as visits, pageviews, bounces, number of pages visited and average time on site.
I cannot say enough about Google Analytics. First, its free. Second, it allows you easily select the time period to analyze and the quality and ease of use for the interface is rare for Google. Third, did I mention that Google Analytics is free?
I also calculated a couple of additional metrics from the existing statistics. The most interesting one for us was “Visits as a % of Total Members”. I used this as a proxy for what percentage of our membership was visiting the community on a weekly basis. Our average % was 40%, but it ranged from 25% to 50%. The weekly variance was definitely impacted by the frequency of the bi-weekly email updates and by the quality of our content.
On a quarterly basis, I also took a complete download of our member data and created a series of cross-tab reports to analyze additional information about our member base. The data for this analysis was collected during our registration process, but most of it was clearly labeled as optional. Still, more than 75% of our members voluntarily provided us with their data. Using this data we were able to identify frequency of visits, geographic origin, size of company, interests, and membership in other groups. Using this information, I was able to create a special email update for members who had not re-visited our site since they registered.
Based on my experience with the Catalyze Community, I would recommend that you:
track key statistics on a weekly basis
turn on Google Analytics for your community site
never get too complacent with what you’re tracking
Of course, I was never satisfied with what we were doing with our community metrics and constantly pushed our vendor to make it easier to get to additional data. I will devote a future blog post to discuss my Community Metrics Wish List.
Congratulations on winning your 8 Gold medals this year and on your 14 total Gold medals. It’s definitely been an exciting Olympics this year. With all of the hype and hoopla around you and your record-setting achievements at the Beijing Olympics and your comparisons to Mark Spitz, I wanted to remind you about the greatest runner in Olympic track and field.
Paavo Nurmi (1987-1973), known as one of the Flying Finns, won a total of 9 Gold and 3 Silver medals in the 1920, 1924 and 1928 Olympics in distances ranging from 1500 meters to 20 kilometers. He set 25 world records during his career including one for the 10000 meters in 1924 that lasted for 13 years.
In 1925, Paavo toured America and competed in 55 events, winning 53 of them over the course of 5 months.
Paavo planned to run in the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles to compete in the 10000 meters and marathon, but was barred from running after being branded as a professional in a move conducted by some Swedish Olympic officials. This was unfortunate because the rules around professionalism were much stricter in 1932 and Paavo claims he would have won the marathon by 5 minutes.
Paavo was a vegetarian and one of the first athletes to bring systematic approach to training which I am sure you could appreciate. He always trained with a stopwatch in his hands.
In later life, Paavo ran a haberdashery store and lit the Olympic flame for the 1954 Olympics held in Helsinki. When he died in 1973, he was honored with a state funeral.
I visited Helsinki in 1998 and had my picture taken in front of the Paavo Nurmi statue at the Olympic Park. If you ever get a chance to visit Helsinki, I hope you take time to pay homage to Paavo. In Finland, they have a term called sisu which is roughly translated as “strength of will, determination, perseverance, and acting rationally in the face of adversity”. You definitely share the sense of sisu with Paavo.
More and more companies are turning to their customers and others to help with their marketing messages. One of the more recently popular vehicles is to hold a contest for the best commercial. Doritos has successfully held a contest for the past several Super Bowls. Other consumer-based (B2C) examples include contests from Heinz Ketchup, Dibbs ice cream, Klondike bars and Brighter Planet.
Using customers and others to help with marketing efforts is an example of crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is a term first coined by Jeff Howe in 2006 in a Wired magazine article. The Wikipedia link for crowdsourcing lists many examples of how organizations are using this new technique for their benefit.
However, not many companies have tried commercial contests in the B2B space. In my former job, one of my projects was to develop and manage a B2B user-generated commercial contest for a software company and I wanted to share some of the tips and tricks I learned along the way.
My Contest Background – The contest I ran was for a company called iRise where I was Senior Manager of Strategic Projects. iRise is an LA-based software company that sells a rapid prototyping/visualization solution for companies who want to accelerate their software development process. In March 2008, Mitch Bishop, the CMO, came up with the idea of hosting a video contest to stoke the creativity of our user base and drive awareness and demand for our product, and I was assigned to develop and manage the project. The only guidelines that I was given were that the prize total should be $20,000 and that the contest should be over by the end of the second quarter. So, I had 3 weeks to research and develop the project before launching in early April.
The bottom line is that running a commercial contest involves many different skill sets including “sales”, social media marketing, guerilla and viral marketing, writing, business development, technical web development, market research, marketing analysis and project management. These skills could be wrapped up in one person or spread across a team. In my case, I performed all of the skills except for the technical website development.
Developing the Rules - I started out by research user-generated contests and checked out many different options. There are companies that will actually host contests for you (like Votigo, memelabs and online video contests ), but I didn’t want to lose control and didn’t have the budget to do. I ultimately patterned most of our contest process and rules after the Heinz commercial contest mentioned above.
Our contest was based on two phases. In the first phase, people would upload their 30-60 second video to YouTube, register for an account on the video contest website and then submit the YouTube URL to us. An internal committee would then review the submitted entries and select 10 semi-finalist videos for phase 2. The criteria for selecting the semi-finalists would be based on:
#1) Originality (40%)
(#2) Overall appeal (30%)
(#3) Likelihood to motivate people to buy or try iRise (30%)
In the second phase which lasted 2 weeks, public voting would determine the final winners. People were allowed to vote for one video during each 24-hour period and the video with the most votes would win the overall prize.
Creating the Website – The key with setting up the website is to have a very talented web jockey and your own URL. For the iRise contest, we set up a URL for the “Visualize the Prize” contest at http://irisevideo.com/ and I was very fortunate to have the iRise Webmaster Ray Walker as a resource. Ray likes to experiment and he came up with some very clever ways to run the site and voting using off-the-shelf open source tools. While Ray could set up the website infrastructure, there was still a lot of content to develop for the site. Ray even wrote a Facebook application to display the final 15 video entries from within Facebook.
iRise Visualize the Prize Contest
Getting the Word Out – I spent the better part of the first week promoting the contest in as many outlets as possible. I joined a number of Yahoo Groups, Facebook Film and Video groups, and other online forums and groups so I could post messages in different forums. I didn’t keep count, but I probably posted in at least 100 forums or groups and re-visited some of the sites to post reminders. I also bought ads on Facebook targeted at people with film and video interests and set up ads on Google. I tried contacting the top film schools to announce the contest to starving film students, but didn’t have much success with that path. Since I wasn’t sure which of my guerilla marketing efforts would pay off, it seemed like I was just praying and spraying – but in the end, it all worked out for us.
In addition to the guerilla marketing, we issued a press release on the contest and I wrote a couple of blog entries on the iRise corporate blog and for the Catalyze community. I posted a link to the post on Twitter and several of my Twitter contacts spread the links and wrote their own blog posts. I was also frequently blogging on the video contest site in order to keep the content fresh.
Waiting for Entries - The most frustrating part was waiting for entries to get submitted. The contest was launched on April 10th with a submission deadline of June 4th. I knew we wouldn’t get any entries for the first couple of weeks, so all I could do was to track traffic on the contest website and post blog entries discussing the contest. I also created and uploaded 2 videos of my own to “prime the pump”. We were averaging 50-75 visits per day, so I knew we were getting some attention. Our first contest entry came in with 4 weeks left in the contest and with 3 weeks left, we had just 3 rather mediocre entries. The big flood of entries started arriving with 5 days before the end of the contest and we ended up with 44 total entries. I liken the final influx of entries to an eBay auction – all of the action is going to come in the last few days, so just stay calm and let the process take care of itself.
Judging and Selecting the Winners – Our contest rules were set up that an internal committee from iRise would select the top 10 videos from all of the entries and then let public voting decide the overall winners. We set up the voting so people could only vote once per day. We ultimately selected 15 videos for the last phase of the contest.
The Results – Overall, the contest was a brand awareness success and the jury is still out on whether iRise will be able to attribute any revenue to the contest. During the contest, we had over 16,000 visitors to the contest website who looked at 57,000 pages and the videos received more than 30,000 views on YouTube. Most of the submitted videos were not from iRise customers or partners, but we did have a handful of videos submitted from ‘friends of iRise’. The majority of the entries were submitted by people who first had to figure out the iRise product and message, and come up with an idea for a 30-second spot.
The contest also generated a bunch of residual content on the contest website and on YouTube. Longer term, success should be measured by actual sales which could take several quarters or more to play out. It also remains to be seen how iRise can leverage the video content in the future.
And here is the winning video:
Keys to Success – I believe that there were 3 keys to our success.
Obviously, the first key was that we set the contest prizes at a high enough level to garner interest. The first prize of $15,000 was enticing enough to induce some people with professional expertise to submit entries. In fact, we had trouble selecting the top 10 videos for the final voting and decided to expand the final voting to 15 entries. I think we may have overpaid in that we probably could have gotten away with prizes of $6,000, $3,000 and $1,000 – and would have gotten the same number of quality entries. Besides the top 3 prizes, we also passed out $100 Amazon gift certificates to the 12 entries that didn’t take home any of the cash rewards which hopefully took some of the sting out of not winning.
The second key was to have a great website that allowed us to showcase each of the video submissions and to capture the final voting.
Thirdly, our guerilla marketing efforts got the word out to enough people who were interested in submitting their work.
Overall, I had a great time and learned a lot about running video contests. Feel free to drop me a line if you have any other questions or add a comment below with your own experiences.
If you are managing a community, especially a B2B or professional community, you need to make your community friendly and available to LinkedIn members. LinkedIn is becoming the de facto social networking site where people maintain their online ‘resume’ and having a LinkedIn Group is a community best practice.
Adding and maintaining a LinkedIn Group is pretty simple and low maintenance. Plus, LinkedIn Groups are a great way to make your communities “stickier”. If you can get someone to join the community and your LinkedIn Group, then it is highly likely that this is a member who really supports you community and will be around for the long haul. Members can also use the group feature to connect with other LinkedIn members who are not in their network. In that way, the group ‘badge’ acts as a pre-qualification for vouching for a contact. Since the LinkedIn Group is listed in the Group Director, it is also a great way to drive additional traffic to the community website.
During the 18 months I managed the Catalyze community, about 1/3rd of our community members also joined the LinkedIn Group. I don’t know if this is above or below average, but I was pleased with that level of commitment and popularity.
Upload a large (100×50 pixel) and small (60×30 pixel) logo — This is probably the hardest part of creating a group as you have to scale your community logo to these exact width specifications. I use SnagIt to create JPGs which I would highly recommend if you are doing this on your own.
Fill out the group information
Wait for confirmation that your group is active
And here is how the LinkedIn Groups will appear in your profile:
LinkedIn Group Listing
When your group is activated (it takes a couple of days to get approved), you get a group URL that you can use to direct members to so they can add the group to their individual profile.
You should also include the link on the About page of your community. I also included the link in my bi-weekly email updates.
I set up my LinkedIn Group to require me to manually approve all members which allowed me to make sure that LinkedIn members who were not affiliated with my community were included. I found that there are a lot of recruitors and LinkdIn badge collectors who would try to hone in on our community group. Checking and approving members took me about 5-10 minutes several times per week.
With LinkedIn Groups, a list of all members and their emails is also available for download to the person with adminstrator or manager rights. You could use this list to supplement your community email marketing efforts or provide the LinkedIn members with special offers.
I am interested in your experiences with LinkedIn Groups. Add a comment below about how LinkedIn Groups is working for you.
This thought came to me last night while reviewing traffic on my Twitter account and noticing a lot of tweets around Pabst Blue Ribbon or PBR as it is more affectionately known by “beer bon vivants”. I’m from the Midwest and have downed a few PBRs in my time – but PBR is my Dad’s beer and I don’t understand the fascination with it when there are so many better microbrews out there to taste.
So, I decided to a little research on which beer brand is the most Web 2.0.
Based on a review on Facebook, one of the more popular sports appears to be Beer Pong and there are a multitude of groups devoted to this ‘sport’ (which harkens back to Facebook’s collegiate roots).
When it comes to beer brands, here are my Facebook findings:
And then I examined Twitter comments and for my test, I just counted the number of tweets in the last 24 hours. I know this isn’t very scientific, but it’s my study:
If you’re into homebrewing, Dave Smith (the @BeerSmith on Twitter) wrote a blog post recently which identifies a number of Home Brewing Social Sites. And if you’re really into beer and community, there’s always the US Beer Drinking Team website which is dedicated to the sisterhood and brotherhood of beer drinking while promoting responsible drinking.
So, who’s the winner? For now, I’d have to give the nod to the Guinness who gets the bronze medal on Facebook and the silver medal on Twitter. PBR is interesting in that it is a relatively small brand but won the gold medal in the Twitter rankings (mostly due to Twitterholic @jstorerj).
So what does this all mean for Web 2.0 and beer companies? Does Joe Sixpack (who buys all of the Budweiser, Miller and Busch) not spend any time on Facebook or Twitter? Are most beer companies behind the social media curve?
I think I need to drink some more beer and do some more research. Anybody care to join me?
