Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 9:58AM 
In the age of the 30-second attention span and a 24/7 information availability, you need more than plain words and ordinary graphics to communicate to the social masses.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010 at 4:00PM 
If there’s one thing we love Twitter for, it’s sharing social media news and ideas. Just in the past week we’ve found a good heap of fascinating and useful stories
Tuesday, August 17, 2010 at 4:00PM 
For all you businesses trying to connect with people and gain exposure through social media, we have good news: Twitter has just reduced the barriers to sharing your content to almost zero.
Friday, May 21, 2010 at 3:44PM Summertime is finally just about here, so it’s time to start planning your big annual getaway. For most of us, this means exploring new lands and leaving the daily grind in our dust. While it can be relaxing to pack up and leave town for a few weeks, it can also be stressful to feel like you’re going to fall out of the loop while you’re gone and like you can’t rely on the internets for all your problem solving needs. Thanks to social media, leaving your home doesn’t mean you can’t stay connected. Just like packing your suitcase with your clothes, toiletries, lotions, swimwear, sandals, etc, you’ll need a social media travel kit keep you connected and allow you get the most out of your vacation.
First, you’ll need a smartphone, iPad or mini-pc/netbook. You’re packing a lot of stuff to take with you, so why take a cumbersome laptop as well? Get a small, light-weight device that will allow you easy access to the internet and will allow you to upload photos. Mini-pc’s are a great way to get online when you’re on the go and quality models can be found for $200-300.
If you’re like me, you have multiple websites you check every day to keep up with news, events, and in the case of vacation planning, recommended locations, restaurants and attractions. Instead of leaving all those bookmarks on your home computer, create a Del.icio.us account and you can check them from any device with internet access.
Keep in touch with your friends and family and let them know what you’re up to through Facebook and Twitter. Since everyone you know is more than likely on Facebook and/or Twitter, it’s easy to arrange meet-ups if they’re in the area, and get recommendations from them on places to stay, eat and visit. This is an excellent way to get local advice on places to eat and sights to see that aren’t in the travel guides.
You often don’t know anyone in the places you’re visiting, so finding a great place to eat can be difficult. Fortunately Urbanspoon.com is a great user review restaurant site. You can find local places to eat through their website or their android or iPhone app, see how people rated the restaurant and how they critiqued it.
TripIt allows you to plan out your entire vacation. You can add your flight, lodging and car rental information, plus add all the details of where you’ll be and how to get there, complete with maps and driving times. Even if you choose not to share the information through Facebook or Twitter, this is a great way to keep track of reservation numbers, costs and trip notes.
Finally, Skype is the best free way to call people and even includes video calls. You can stay in touch with the people you left back home and make them jealous of the wonderful time you are having - without having to pay long distance or roaming fees.
This summer, leaving home for a vacation doesn’t mean you can’t stay informed or in touch with the people you care about or want to meet. Thanks to wifi networks and mobile devices, you can maximize your trip, stay in touch and best of all, get rid of those stupid maps.
Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media.
Thursday, April 29, 2010 at 3:44PM
Friday, March 19, 2010 at 3:40PM and what we learned from them
There has been no textbook for social media. Most of what The Duffy Agency is doing for our clients in social media has never been done before. That means sometimes things will take an unexpected turn. Having launched several social media campaigns over the last few years, we’d like to share what we have learned. While most of these projects have been successful, they were not without their lessons to be learned. If you want to sharpen your skills in social media, the best way to improve is to learn from your mistakes. Or, in this case, ours.
Don't be fooled by the “gurus” who talk as if they have been practicing social media since birth. Social media is new to all marketers and all marketers are grappling to come to terms with it. When faced with your first social media campaign, it is natural to apply strategies and tactics form traditional marketing. What we have discovered is that many of these tried and tested approaches fall flat when applied to social media. I outline here 10 of the most common social media fails we have encountered and how they can be remedied.
So that we may discuss these projects frankly, we won’t identify the clients or brands involved. All projects were global in scope. In each case, it was the client’s first social media project. Deadlines were tight on all but one of the projects.
Fail #1: Runway Fail
The biggest difference between traditional media campaigns and social campaigns is the amount of ramp-up time needed. Traditional campaigns can start and have effect almost instantly, like a rocket shooting straight into the sky. Social campaigns need time to build an audience and credibility to gain altitude, like a glider. Every social media project we have started has been starved for time. Our clients have planned them as they would a traditional campaign. As a result, we were tasked with accomplishing in weeks what should be given months.
This certainly hurts the outcome and can damage brands who appear to be pushing too hard in the social space. In several instances, we needed to hit very ambitious numbers in a very short period of time. We surpassed our numbers, but it meant we needed to push the conversation harder than we were comfortable with and got some push back from the community who felt at times they were being spammed by our “conversation.”
The Fix: Plan a long runway for your social media project. If, for example, you want to use social media for a launch and do not have a social media following today, plan at least six to nine months to build a following before your launch. Better still, start building your social presence now so that you will be ready.
Fail #2: Approval Fail
It's hard to sign off on a project when you don’t really know what you are buying. This is the situation many marketers find themselves in. As a result they sit on proposals. This bogs down the project from the start, frays nerves and eats into time schedules. This is a double whammy as most social media projects are initiated with insufficient time to start with.
The Fix: Since social media is new for most marketers, we often conduct workshops with our client’s management team to help them understand social media campaigns and how they work. This way, they understand what they are investing in. The companies that took the workshop were able to get the estimates approved quickly. Three clients did not. In each case, the approval process dragged on for months (over 3 months in one case). These delays would wind up creating further obstacles down the road.
Fail #3: Campaign Management Fail
With traditional media, most of the work comes before the campaign is launched. You develop promotional items like an ad, TV spot or brochure. You tweak them to perfection then launch it into the market. Once it is published, broadcast or distributed there isn’t much you can do, so you move on. With social media, the real work begins after launch. We find this takes many, many clients by surprise as they aren't used to allocating time or resources to this post-launch phase and fumble the projects, despite the campaigns being successful.
The Fix: Prepare for success. Once you start a conversation in social media, you must be prepared to a) fuel it with new content on a regular basis that adds value to the community, b) address criticism and concerns in near real-time, c) address sales leads and enquiries in near real-time and, d) access the right people at every level of the organization to participate if needed.
Fail #4: Adaptability Fail
Social media campaigns give us the ability to measure the results of our efforts in near real-time. That's the source of one of the true powers of these campaigns. We never had this capability before. With traditional media, we would take our best shot and conduct research after the fact to see how well the campaign succeeded. Today, we can see how things are going instantly and, better yet, we can make course corrections while the campaign is running.
Being able to monitor a campaign's success in real-time means you see what works and what does not immediately. If you aren't set-up to act on this information and make course corrections, your campaign will suffer.
The Fix: Adopt a new mindset when it comes to campaign management. Nothing is locked in place. Look at your campaign plan as a hypothesis and be ready to adjust it to reality. For instance, finding how your target wants to be engaged in social media is the key and it sometimes takes a little trial and error to find it. So be ready to adapt your brilliant strategy at any moment.
Fail #5: Reflex Fail
As a consequence of getting real-time feedback and interaction, social media campaigns require swift reflexes and much quicker reaction times than traditional media campaigns. This often conflicts with a company’s approval processes. All our clients understood that social media required swift response. They prepared their organizations for fast-track approvals. However, this usually meant reducing approval times from several weeks to several days. What was really needed were approvals in a matter of hours and in some cases minutes or seconds.
The Fix: Adopt a real-time based time frame and then adjust existing creation and approval processes accordingly. In most cases, it will mean your approval people need to speak on behalf of the brand, as opposed to approving individual statements as such. This is new for many companies and places more responsibility in the hands of the people at the end of the communication chain. It also makes the need for clear brand values and brand training more essential than they have ever been before.
Fail #6: Employee Engagement Fail
Social media assets need to be populated to attract your target. They require a certain critical mass of people in order for them to function properly. Once they function properly, they produce value for participants. This attracts lots more users, which adds to the value etc. If your campaign is under a tight timeline, like these programs were, achieving critical mass quickly is essential to success. Your employees can be the key to this - if they participate. Do not assume they will.
The Fix: Getting employees to participate should be treated as a campaign in its own right with a well thought through campaign strategy. Ad-hock efforts won’t cut it. A couple of the clients we worked with have in excess of 100,000 employees. Just 1% participation would have skyrocketed their campaigns. That didn’t happen. Smaller companies tended to do a much better job at persuading employees to participate with participation in excess of 50% common. And, by all means, review your company's policies with regard to firewalls and access to social media by employees. System security and access to social media are not mutually exclusive (no matter what any well-intentioned IT department tells you).
Fail #7: Etiquette Fail
While each social media tool has its own subtle etiquette, they all abide by one golden rule: Do not bore people by talking only about yourself. Marketers are used to talking about their brands. For decades we have used traditional media to push our message out onto the world. That is a strategy that is destined to fail in social media. In fact, we saw a very clear pattern across all our campaigns: the less we talked about ourselves, the more people listened and interacted with the brand. Want to drive people away? Just start pushing your marketing and PR messages out through your social media channels.
The Fix: Zip it, stop selling and start listening. This can be a hard pill to swallow for many marketers. Just remember that all the rules of polite conversation hold true in social media, chief among them do not talk about yourself incessantly. Focus the conversation on the parties you are conversing with.
Fail #8: Conversation Fail
Traditional campaigns are events with defined start and end points, usually over a few months. A social media campaign is an ongoing process that has no defined end point. In several cases, we have built substantial communities for clients who thanked us for doing such a great job and asked us to pull the plug and end the campaign. This means shutting down websites, Twitter streams, Facebook pages, YouTube channels LinkedIn dialogue, etc... They did this because that’s how they have always run campaigns – as independent events. They did not understand the power in having a community and developing it. Neither did their bosses. So they asked us to disband it.
The Fix: Building communities is the single most important commercial objective of social media. If you do not regard a community as a tangible, measurable asset, then you are wasting your time engaging in social media. If you have amassed a community of several thousand people, you cannot simply shut them off, especially if you ever want to interact with them again. Understand the nature of social media campaigns before you embark on one. This requires long-term planning and a community-building mindset.
This is not to say that all social media activities are run forever. We divide our social media campaigns into baseline activities and special campaign activities. Baseline activities may, for example, include a constant presence and interaction via a blog, Twitter, Facebook and buzz monitoring. During campaign periods, we may add to this with special contests, campaign sites, videos, activities, forums etc. that we will stop at the end of the particular campaign. But our baseline activities to build and nurture a community are a 24/7/365 activity and need to be planned and resourced accordingly.
Fail #9: Generosity Fail
Generosity of spirit goes a long way in social media. This includes honesty, transparency, the ability to accept criticism of your brand and to acknowledge achievements of competing brands. Wishing anyone ill, including your competitors, will not help your cause in social media. Far from it. On several occasions, we have been asked to delete comments in forums that have mentioned our clients' competitors in a positive light. Or we have been asked to inject unjustified digs at our clients' competitors. If you indulge yourself in this manner, it will only serve to make your band look bad.
The Fix: Do not be mean-spirited in social media. Of course, if there is misinformation about you or your competitors, you should clarify. But in all cases, remain balanced, positive and objective. Do not seek out opportunities to make your competitors look bad. Why? Because they are not considered “competitors” by the people you are conversing with. More often than not, they will be considered valued resources by your community. If you really want to compete, focus instead on being of more value to the community than your competitors are.
Fail #10: Budget Fail
If you have read the previous nine Social Media Fails, you can see that a social media campaign is fundamentally different from conventional marketing campaigns. It needs to be budgeted as such. One of the biggest snags for companies entering this arena is having no basis on which to plan budgets for social media. In most cases this leaves the social media campaigns under-resourced and dysfunctional.
The Fix: Budget for long-term engagement, not one-off events. Read through the nine social media fails above and, based on this, have a frank discussion with your social media advisors about your marketing objectives and how you see social media contributing to those objectives. Sketch out a 12-month program with measurable objectives and then talk price. Finally, nine months into the program begin planning for the next 12-months.
You may have noticed that most of these fails stemmed from two common causes. First, the application of traditional marketing tactics to social media. And second, inadequate lead time. The good news is that in both cases these barriers to social media brilliance are easy to overcome. If you feel you need some help getting on the right track, contact grant@theduffyagency.com to see how we can apply what we've learned to your next social media campaign.
Recommended Reading:
An excellent post by Brett Nicholson on DigitalOZ blog “99 Social Media Mistakes, Complaints & Failures.”
Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 10:06AM Methodical Madness closed out 2009 winning the blog of month for November. Then we were short-listed by Social Media Examiner along with 20 others for the distinction of the world's Top 10 Social Media Blogs. Our fellow finalists include a roster of stellar blogs like Chris Brogan, CopyBlogger, Mashable , and Social Media Explorer . Winners to be decided soon by jury.
Methodical Madness is also short-listed with 12 other finalists on Fuel Line's Ad Agency Blog of the Year. Please VOTE before Friday, January 22. Below you can see the Fuel Lines poll results live.
CLICK HERE to VOTE for The Duffy AgencyWednesday, December 9, 2009 at 12:27PM Michael Gass over at Fuel Lines blog included Methodical Madness in his monthly Blog of the Month poll for November. We were one of fifty-eight blogs nominated. Not only did we win, but we’re also the first blog to win from outside of the US. We want to thank everyone for voting for us. We were just honored to be included in such a great list of blogs. Thank you Michael for including us in your poll and a special thank you to everyone that helped make us #1.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009 at 4:34PM
Welcome
to Twitter Tuesday. Every Tuesday we will post about Twitter. Stop by
for advice and how to's for marketing professionals. Every other week
we will post our AppQuest Edition featuring a review of twitter
applications.
What’s the best way to get analytics on your Twitter profile?
As you try to build your Twitter profile and find new people to follow, it’s important to track how you use Twitter. Odds are you’re doing things with your account that you’re not even aware of. By using analytics, you can discover not only what your Twitter habits are, but the Twitter habits of your friends as well. This is important info when you want to get a lot of exposure for a tweet or launch a Twitter campaign. There a lot of websites that provide one aspect of user statistics or have a gimmick to measure popularity, but today we’re looking at sites that provide thorough user statistics. In the future, we’ll cover user trends and ranking.
I sat down with my co-workers and created a wish-list of qualities that we as marketing people want in a Twitter account analyzer. Of course, all the apps have to be free and require no downloadable client. Beyond that, we wanted to be able to:
Twitter Grader is best known for its Twitter user account grading. What people don’t realize is that it also has analytics. Well...sort of. They can analyze followers within their site, meaning that if your followers or followings are registered with Twitter Grader, they can be analyzed. Of our 3,681 followers and 2,705 following only two people were found. Twitter Grader’s best feature is its user history. This is a quick chart that shows how your follower rate compares to your following rate. You can also register with the site to get more functionality, but I didn’t see any after registering. While it’s not a very good analysis tool, the site’s account grading is still the best bragging rights tool available.
RATING:
Twitter Analyzer is a great free tool that provides over 26 different analytics, and more are in the works. If you need to know specific information about your Twitter habits, this is it. From the number of times you tweet a day to what groups your Twitter followers fall into to the friends you mention most in your tweets, Twitter Analyzer covers all my analytics needs and then some. It is easily the most thorough free analytics tool available today. The best part is you don’t have to register with the site to use it. This means you can also check out the Twitter usage of your friends as well. Analytics like “the friends you’re most in contact with” can help you identify the people that influence the people that influence you. This can be incredibly helpful in building your online network.
RESULTS:
Twitalyzer measures your Twitter profile against five analytics: Influence, Signal, Generosity, Velocity and Clout. The concept is similar to Twitter Grader – your profile is measured on a scale of 0-100. The grading is rather harsh, so you really have to work on your account to bring it up. Each of the five areas go into more detail and offer up suggestions on how to improve your score. This can be very helpful if you’re trying to be more influential on Twitter. A nice additional feature is the use of time-based analysis using Google Motion Charts and the ability to set benchmarks to work towards. Finally, if you’re weak in one area, Twitalyzer provides the top 100 people in each of the five components you can follow and learn from.
RATING:
TweetStatswas the first Twitter analytics tool I ever used. It’s bright, colorful and simple to use. Not much has changed in the time I’ve been using it. There are eight graphs and two tweet word clouds. From time of day to who you reply to and retweet the most, the graphs give you a quick overview of your Twitter activity. As for the Tweet Cloud, this gives you a great breakdown of which words you use the most, the top five words you use and the top five hashtags you use.
RATINGS:
RATING:
Klout is another grading site, but with much more statistical analysis. Using five key analytics – reach, demand, engagement, velocity and activity – Klout allows you to not only see who you influence and who influences you, but also shows who is losing influence and who is gaining influence. The site feels very similar to Twitalyzer in look and feel. There is no explanation for what their five analytics mean or how to influence them. Klout’s current offer is a good start, but still has some growing to do.
PROS: Lots of analytics that provide a good deal information. The influence tracker is a great feature to find out who is most influential in your network while helping you build your own influence.
CONS: Little explanation of any of the analytics used. Klout could easily rip off what Twitalyzer does to create a better experience, but for now they are living their shadow.
RATING:
CONCLUSION: While TweetStats and Twitalyzer both have very useful analytics, neither comes close to the depth and variety of Twitter Analyzer. Twitalyzer’s benchmarking tool is a great way to set goals for yourself. Combined with Twitter Analyzer, you have all the software you need to mount a Twitter campaign and measure its success. Because the analytics are live, you can make course adjustments on the fly to optimize your Tweeting.
What tools do you use to analyze your Twitter profile?
Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media and won't shut up about Twitter.
Download the Slideshare version of this blog post.
Friday, October 23, 2009 at 3:38PM
How to use social
media to cope with loss
As Halloween draws
near, our thoughts turn to the more macabre areas of the imagination. While
visions of ghouls, goblins, vampires (no, not the sparkly Twilight kind) and
zombies creep into my mind, the celebration of the darker nature of humanity
eventually brought me to thoughts about death. Sure, social media helps people
connect to meet up for coffee, attend conferences or find a good place to buy
shoes, but how does it help us cope with death? I had no idea, so I set out to
discover how support groups are using social media these days.
The Compassionate
Friends , a support group for families dealing with
the death of a child, has gone beyond a standard support site and added a
Facebook page. You can leave videos, upload photos and
participate on their discussion board to help build a community on a site you
already visit regularly. Their discussion page is very active with many people
offering up stories and advice about their experiences.
Pocket Cemetery is an iPhone app that lets you create memorials to your lost friends and
relatives (or beloved celebrities and pets). You can create customizable
virtual gravestones, send virtual flowers and send prayers and messages.
This is the only
iPhone app I could find in this area. As death is something that touches us
all, without exception, I’d expect to see a lot more effort to cater to our
need to cope in the future.
People often turn to
religion in their grieving. Tangle, a Christian lifestyle site, has embraced Web 2.0 technology. They’ve
launched an online prayer wall that allows you to share videos, photos, leave prayers
and have someone add their own support for you. They allow you to share your
prayers through Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and via email and Twitter. Tangle
is very active within the Christian community, and with comments posted on
almost every prayer, many people are finding the community support they need.
Muxlim.tv is the world’s largest Muslim lifestyle site. On it, you can read blogs, watch
videos, listen to prayers, take polls and a whole lot more. It’s a social media
haven for Muslim’s online. Once you register, you create a personal profile,
which appears to be a cross between Facebook and MySpace.
But what about those
of us who aren’t religious? Experience Project is for anyone regardless of religious
preference – or lack thereof. You can create a group to talk about your experiences
where others can comment and offer support, insight and help. Each group has
its own built-in support system that helps create a support community.
Dealing with the death
of a loved one is never easy, but with the help of social media many people are
finding it a little less painful.
Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media and won't shut up about Twitter.
