Is your social strategy ignoring 30% of your audience?

March 19, 2010 in Social Media, Tips

You’ve read all the books on engagement and strategy and you are well on your way to building a responsive digital presence for your brand. Excellent, but are you ignoring a third of your followers and fans?

Unfortunately too many brands and blogs aren’t taking Peter Shankman’s advice, “Hit them where they are”. Where is your audience? On their phone.

Is your website optimized for mobile web browsers?

The only acceptable answer is an unhesitating and empathic yes. Here’s why

Fans on the Run

The latest data shows that the mobile web is more important than ever. The latest report (Jan 2010) from comscore has a wealth of information but here’s a few notable stats

percentofmobileusers

Do you see in that graph?

  • 30% of social networking users are on their smartphone.

You shouldn’t really be surprised if you are paying to tweets and Facebook posts. A ton of these updates are from twitter mobile apps or are tagged with Facebook Mobile for XYZ phone.

In fact:

  • Twitter mobile usage is up 347%
  • Facebook mobile usage is up 112%

With these sort of numbers can you afford not to have a mobile friendly webpage?

What's wrong with this Pic

Welcoming the Mobile Web

Here’s the good news creating a mobile ready website isn’t all that hard.

From a technical standpoint it is a 2 step process.

  1. Detect that the website visitor is using a mobile browser
  2. Direct their request to a different page

Your particular method will depend largely on your website’s purpose and the resources you have but here’s a few tips to get started.

  • WPtouch – If you are running Wordpress then this plugin handles everything. It’s clean, fast, and offers a lot of customization. I use it on every Wordpress site I manage.
  • General Method – Detect mobile browsers via user agents then use PHP/ASP scripting to redirect the page. DetectMobileBrowser.com has some script examples.
  • Use a site like Mobify.me to create a mobile web page

As a side note if you have flash on your site or a flash intro (banish the thought & fire your webdesigner) creating a mobile site is 100x more critical. The mobile web doesn’t use Adobe Flash.

There are a thousand ways to do this well without blowing the budget. No excuses.

Takeaways

A large rapidly increasing segment of your audience are clicking your links from a smartphone are you meeting them where they are? Its more important than ever.

My thoughts… out loud.

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Notes from Social Media Next Level

March 17, 2010 in Social Media

Peter Shankman and Chris Brogan held a conference call today that focused on helping businesses and organizations take the “Next steps in Social Media”.chrisbrogan_petershankman

It was a solid call with actionable advice. A rare commodity in social media. It was the first time I’d ever heard Shankman speak and I love his passion and intensity.

A couple of friends asked that I share my notes and since I’m a giver I decided to  share them with all of you. My notes need a bit of refining but I’ll have to wait for the archive mp3 to flesh them out further.

Surrounded by Smart Folks

I have to give a major kudos to my good friend Amy Bradley-Hole.

Peter Shankman shared her work with @CapitalHotel & @CapitalBarGrill as a case study of how businesses can use Foursquare and Twitter to broaden their customer base and encourage engagement.

Amy is simply brilliant and awesome. Follow her and keep and eye out for some upcoming blogging and branding seminars from her. Guess where we met? Yep, a tweetup almost a year ago and now I’m honored to call her a friend.

Notes & Links

On to my notes. You can view the published Google Doc (which will be updated), download the PDF, or view the embed below.

Links referenced in the call (Check my Diigo #Broman tag for updates)

Broman Conf Call

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Forget #SXSWi, What 3 non-geeks taught me about the location wars.

March 16, 2010 in Social Media

The geeks have been watching the geosocial showdown between Gowalla and Foursquare this past week in Austin. We’ve chronicled a flurry of app updates and everyone from Bloomberg to the tech blogs have been reporting every nuance of the competition.25118v5-max-150x150

For my money I think Gowalla is the clear winner of SXSWi 2010. They rose to the challenge and put a significant dent in Foursquare’s dominance. However, the most eye opening events came from 3 non geek friends that have no idea that SXSWi even exists.

The SXSWi scoreboard (or why Gowalla won)

Comments – Their latest apps allows comments on friends checkins. It isn’t perfect and better notification of comments is needed but they understand all social networks need conversation. Last week when I checked in a doctor’s office a friend left a comment asking about my wife’s health. He can’t do that in 4sq. Point:Gowalla

Photos – I can now add photos to locations that I’m checked into. Honestly this is a no brainer. It’s not as slick as Loopt but pics in 4sq? Nope Point:Gowalla

Popularity – While 4sq still holds the lion share of the market (500k vs 100k) there is good evidence that Gowalla had an equal number of checkins at SXSWi. This is a major coup for the underdog. Point:Gowalla

Coverage – I don’t have hard data but it seems that Gowalla has gotten a good bit more coverage on major tech blogs and news outlets shows. Add in the fact that they won the SXSWi web award for Mobile tech and the were chosen as the overall winner of the second annual Statesman Texas Social Media Awards. Point:Gowalla

Intangibles – I’ve got a friend in the biz that has evaluated 4-5 checkin services and he was most impressed with Gowalla’s roadmap and offerings for his clients. Since I’m part of the huddled masses I’m not privy to Gowalla’s future but he’s one of those folks that you can bank on his opinions. If he’s impressed with Gowalla then Point:Gowalla

Moving beyond the Geeks

The story of 3 non-geeks and Gowalla

  • A couple of weeks ago I attended a conference in Memphis. After checking into our rooms our group gathered in the lobby. One of the guys mentioned, “You’ve already checked in to this hotel on Facebook. How’d you do that?”
  • During praise team practice tonight a friend commented on an update I posted from a new Thai place in town. She was interested in trying the place out and was thankful she saw my unflattering review.
  • Then tonight I get home from a revival and I’ve got a Gowalla friend request from a third friend from church. Based on the timeline I assume she’d seen my post Gowalla Facebook status update from church tonight. When I looked at her stream she’d already checked in and dropped an item at a location.

All 3 friends are savvy web users and facebookers and none of them have ever heard of geosocial or SXSWi. Yet all 3 found something interesting in my Gowalla Facebook posts and 1 of them even signed up.

When non-geek folks start taking notice of a technology you’d better pay attention.

Beyond its usefulness it made me wonder. Why Gowalla?

At the risk of oversimplification which status update would you click?

foursquare_versus_gowalla

If you are a non-geek, I’d say the answer is likely Gowalla.

Sure the geosocial war reaches far beyond icon design and user interface but appeal is important. In general I’d say Foursquare appeals mostly to geeks while Gowalla may tap into a larger audience.

The road ahead

Gowalla still has some signficant challenges ahead.

  1. Search – Gowalla desperately needs to enable venue search. @JW (Founder,CEO) says it’s coming in 2.1
  2. Parnterships– Foursquare is moving quickly to partner with everyone from Starbucks to Zagat. Gowalla needs to play catchup.
  3. Business Accounts – Gowalla hasn’t enabled business accounts. Business promotions and incentives is the real battle ground. I know the initial focus must be on building a user base so I’m hoping that Gowalla can begin this new phase soon.
  4. API – 4sq’s API has encouraged other apps like @Waze and @Foodspotting to allow checkins. As this market grows Gowalla needs to have a robust API to encourage 3rd party app integration.
  5. BlackBerry App – Gowalla needs a native Blackberry app. BB users can use m.gowalla.com in the meantime but a native app is needed for widespread adoption. They say more devices are in the works.

Takeaway

The way I see it Gowalla has made a significant leap both in the geek world of SXSWi and the more important market of everyday folks.

UPDATE: According to @Gowalla the have fixed the missing items bug and they are working on a better photo+checkin interface.

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Taking Social Media to the next frontier – your backyard

March 9, 2010 in Social Media

Metrics. That all-too-scientific-sounding word that helps us keep score in social media. Click stats, follower numbers, subscribers etc… sure they matter but let’s try a new metric,

Name 5 friends in your local area that you met through social media.rogers_zoom

Not people. Not contacts. Friends.

If you can’t then you haven’t really tapped the power of this medium.

All Politics Social Media is Local

How ‘bout them Hogs!

If you live within 150 miles of me you instantly know what I’m talking about but if you happen to reside outside of my great state it might as well be hieroglypics. This proves a powerful point in social media.

Geography adds context.

I’ve met a ton of great folks via Twitter from Dubai to California but there is a good chance that neither @highandwild or @louisgray care anything about the Razorbacks or our state senate race.

We are friends but we don’t have that in common.

It’s simple. Proximity breeds commonality. If we live in the same town then you automatically hold value. Even if it is mundane weather and traffic issues I care. You are talking about my backyard.

And if you are business?

It’s even more important. Those locals are your potential customers.

If you want people to engage your coffee shop, restaurant, computer business, or car wash it helps if those folks live in the same town.

So whether we are talking about personal connections or business cases you should be building relationships locally through social media.

Finding Locals

So how do you go about finding folks active in social media in your town? Welcome to the Fred Roger’s school of Social Media.

(I say social media but these tips focus on Twitter because randomly inviting strangers to fan a FB page isn’t the way to grow a fan base. I might follow up with a localize Facebook post if I can stomach the research)

Here’s the standby answers that any Google Search will tell you to try:

  • Twitter Search – Go to the advanced options, and search for tweets “near this place”. Example: Tweets within 100mi of Little Rock
  • Twellowhood – A bit stale but still useful directory of twitter users based on location

Here’s a few of my tricks for finding locals:

  • Find your local news station twitter account or local celeb, and browse the people following them. Look at their location info and last tweet timestamp and you’ll find a treasure of local tweeps.bingtwittermap
  • Bing Twitter map – (requires silverlight) Go to Map Apps in the bottom tool bar  and select Map Apps, then choose the Twitter map option to see a map of your local area overlayed with recent tweets.
  • Tweetie iPhone App – It has a feature to show nearby tweets
  • GeoSocial GeoSocial GeoSocial – Sign up for Gowalla and Foursquare and use them to find people around you. Heck they even link to twitter and facebook accounts in user profiles.

And most importantly. Find a tweetup.

Put your town name and tweetup or meetup into Google and there is a good chance you’ll find your a local gathering of social medians. Get the details and get involved.

Takeaway

Whether you are looking for friends or customers you’ll find that localizing your social network will be one of the most rewarding facets of your social media strategy.

And you don’t have to take my word for it… (apologies to Levar Burton)

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What the heck is Tumblr?

March 6, 2010

Tumblr is a free, simple, and highly customizable blogging platform.
Why should you consider tumblr?
If you are looking to start your first blog or create a niche blog Tumblr might be the place to start.
The Pros:

Very easy content posting
Great design options
Active social community

The Cons:

Doesn’t provide a way to export your content if you ever decide to [...]

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What you don’t say matters

February 24, 2010

1086 days.
That’s how long I’ve been on Twitter without a single truly negative experience.
Until today.
the Backstory
My metro area is thriving with tweetups and gatherings of tech, pr, advertising, and business professionals. I have the high honor of being one of the people that helps organize these meetups and its been one of the [...]

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Can GeoSocial move beyond the game?

February 22, 2010

As I play with more location aware social networks I find myself asking the same question.
What does this service provide that’s going to keep me coming back?
I like points, badges, and achievements as much as anyone but they aren’t enough to keep me around for the long term.
The problem with putting the focus on the [...]

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