Suresh Sood, December 2010

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING PRACTICE

PARTICIPANT WORKBOOK

Suresh Sood, December 2010

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

1.INTRODUCTION .......................................................................... 3  

2.RELATIONSHIPS NOT TECHNOLOGIES .................................. 3  

3. THE MARKETING TRANSITION FOR 2011 ............................. 4  

4. THE SOCIAL APPROACH AND MARKETING “YOU” ........... 5  

5. WHAT’S YOUR STORY IN YOUR VOICE? ............................... 5  

6. BLOGGING ................................................................................... 5  

7. LISTENING OR MONITORING YOUR BRAND ....................... 7  

7. SOCIAL TOOLS AND TACTICS OF YOUR BRAND ................ 9  

9. EFFECTIVENESS OF YOUTUBE ................................................ 13  

10. FACEBOOK FOR BUSINESS & FAN MARKETING ............. 13  

11. SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS ................................................ 16  

12. SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGNS AND BRAND PRESENCE .. 19  

13. WHICH PLATFORMS FOR OWN COMMUNITY? ................ 21  

9. ABOUT YOUR COURSE DEVELOPER & PRESENTER ........ 24  

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This reference guide helps maximise your time during this 1 day course developed for Planet Ark. The materials for the course are sourced from the UTS popular Social Media Marketing Practice (SMMP) course stages 1 to 3.

This workbook together with your own related thoughts helps to serve as a foundation for the session and subsequent actions. Furthermore, the concepts discussed in this workbook ensure all participants have a common framework from which to operate.

The value chain of activities when devising online communities or social networks is:

social architecture conversations relationships

Online Social Networks (OSNs) provide a platform for handling relationships in a scalable fashion. Achieving high levels of ongoing conversational customer contact and service are simultaneously achievable with Facebook being used by many organisations. The conversations directly engender relationships online and offline in word of mouth fashion.

In a world of fewer funds being available, a key objective of the session is to understand the variety of techniques available to Planet Ark to catalyse “fans” and have them build upon conversations to create an understanding of Planet Ark activities amongst their own social networks. The desirable position is the community members do the selling of Planet Ark programs to other similar individuals in their own networks while having fun.

1.INTRODUCTION

2.RELATIONSHIPS NOT TECHNOLOGIES

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Equally important is the ability of customers to provide online support amongst themselves minimizing the need to provide a fully resourced help centre.

The Planet Ark relationships develop with site co-ordinators, volunteers and sponsors or donators. Social media transforms both the discovery of information and usage.

Sometime in late 2009 more traffic started appearing on Facebook relative to Google. Australians spend amongst the highest amount of time per month on Facebook relative to other users around the world with 7 hours 45 mins per month (Nilesen Company, April 2010) and “Facebook is my newspaper” (Susie Wilkening, reachadvisors.typepad.com/). No longer does power vest with Google and Webmasters. Social search shifts power to the users of social media generating content.

Social Media Marketing Practice is not conventional marketing but “a many-to-many mediated communications model in which consumers can interact with the medium, firms can provide content to the medium and, in the most radical departure from traditional marketing environments, consumers can provide commercially oriented content to the medium” (Hoffman & Novak, 1997).

Longer term, the blending of user generated content within brand advertising is set to become commonplace. No longer is a creative sufficient to gain consumer attention. Consumers seek relationships and brands entering into conversations rather than broadcasting gain consumers who represent them to other consumers. In 2011 the conversation calendar is the singlemost important artifact to get activities underway.

An important accelerator of the trend to embrace social media is the accessibility of online services from mobile phones. UK data indicates a significant amount of Internet access actually takes place at home via mobile. In Australia, the Ray Morgan data for June 2010 shows a 50% increase from 1.6 million to 2.4 million persons. The most significant usage is amongst 20-29 and 30-39 year olds for 32% and 24% of mobile Internet users. Other groups represent around 15% of users in the age group. With the release of Apple iPhone 4 and Google Android models the number of mobile Internet users will soar. One button access to Facebook and LinkedIn is a further capability driving online social network usage.

3. THE MARKETING TRANSITION FOR 2011

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In social the expectation is conversations first to build relationships and transactions later. Hence, your engagement model is not 100% of online time chatting about your products and services. For example, the recommendation for Twitter is 70-20-10 (Angela Maiers). This is to say:

a) 70% - Sharing others voices, opinions, and tools

b) 20% - Responding, connecting, collaboration, and co-creating with like-minded Twitter colleagues

c) 10% - Promoting and/or chit-chatting

This largely social approach is applicable across all social media interactions and associates with the voice of the individual.

The ablity for consumers to take a “Flip” camera or smartphone and immediately post or tweet multimedia content makes the notion of a website obsolete. Most importantly, the stories are first person stories. Planet Ark has already taken the first steps to embracing first person stories as seen from the activity to capture and promote stories for NTD in 2010. But these stories are not from ordinary everyday people. Where are these stories?

Reading and analyzing the first person stories provides immense value for communicating with consumers and understanding first hand without prompting the drives to embrace NTD in the own words of consumers.

Create a conversation calendar, which includes first person stories.

Blogs a very early form of social media continues to be the foundation for many social media platforms and websites. A blog represents an online conversational (word of mouth hre becomes word of keyboard) marketing tool. In the long-term websites are expected to be replaced by blogs consistent with the move from transactional to conversational/relational marketing. Blogpulse a blog trend engine identifies over 151 M blogs as at 5 December 2010.

4. THE SOCIAL APPROACH AND MARKETING “YOU”

5. WHAT’S YOUR STORY IN YOUR VOICE?

6. BLOGGING

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Review the Blogpulse tools:

Trend search for terms over the last 6 months

Use conversation tracker to assemble a snapshot of

Blog search engines Technorati and Google (blogsearch)

Chris Brogran a well respected blogger and online marketer has written on the discipline to write daily (http://www.chrisbrogan.com/the-discipline-to-write-daily/). While this approach works for some an alternative strategy is the conversation calendar and planning in advance to understand the areas to spark discussions interspersed with commentary coinciding with industry events and holiday season. Taking such a longer-term view does not undermine the need to be spontaneous or indeed respond to current affairs events not previously considered.

Blogging tools allow for publication of a posting on a future date fitting elegently with the notion of listening and the conversation calendar.

Some blogs truly understand the idea of social etiquette to enter into conversations before selling you a product or service.

What learnings for your blog do these 4 sites provide?

www.englishcut.com

www.stormhoek.com/blog/

gapingvoid.com/

scobleizer.com/ (review first 3 mins or so of TeamSnap CEO)

Blogs assist in the rapid publishing of content. Popular blogging software applications are Blogger (Google), Typepad and Wordpress. Two key platforms for rapid deployment of blogs are Tumblr and Posterous. We will devote time to these platforms to gain first hand experience.

Posterous provides an immediate autopost capability updating Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter,Wordpress etc. from Posterous.

With regard to blogging the bulk of our time is spent with Tumblr. The tumblogs as they are known incorporate text,

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images, videos, links, quotes, and audio postings. Links to social networking sites are simple.

For signup you should consider a vanity URL which can form part of a custom domain e.g. yourname.com otherwise default is yourname.tumblr.com. Once logged into the system, the Tumblr dashboard allows flexible posting of all media. RSS feeds can be aggregated and displayed, tweets imported, youTube videos and social bookmarks. Posts are shareable on Facebook or directed to Twitter. Tumblr entertains the notion of followers and incorporates a Like feature. Significant customization of appearance is available via themes. A useful feature is the ability to time posts and have them available at different time intervals. Adding tags is essential to indicate the nature of the posting to an external search engine. If required Google Analytics is inserted into the blog site via custom HTML and helps to provide an understanding of traffic activity and keywords.

Try using snippets from any of popular blogs below and

a.) tagcrowd to generate a cloud

b.) perform linguistic analysis liwc.net/liwcresearch07.php

c.) process blog author’ s Tweets using analyzewords.com

www.englishcut.com

www.stormhoek.com/blog/

gapingvoid.com/

scobleizer.com/

Gary Vaynerchuk (garyvaynerchuk.com) highlights the importance of listening and the domination of brands.

The simplest of tools to monitor brand within social media require an understanding of the vocabulary setting the business apart from others both online and offline. Netvibes is relatively straightforward and some users setup several dashboards with each dedicated to a particular set of terms.

An ideal approach to staying upto date on the social media sites and a variety of topics is the use of RSS feeds.

7. LISTENING OR MONITORING YOUR BRAND

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This universal symbol seen across the web identifies an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed. The updates from a web site in any format are pushed to you. RSS offers benefits all round to consumers seeking large amounts of content, publishers looking to generate subscription content and advertisers seeking to avoid challenges of email spam and search engines. Consumers using social media are able to produce RSS feeds of content e.g. photo sharing sites or blogs.

While a number of different methods and tools can be used to read RSS feeds the simplest and most flexible is the use of Google Reader.

Take time out to find instances of RSS feeds. The ABC feeds are available at http://www.abc.net.au/services/rss/.

You can include audio or even Discovery Channel videos.

If not already create a Google mail account. This is required not for the use of email but accessing the Google Reader.

Familiarise yourself with the reader by watching:

http://www.youtube.com/GoogleReaderHelp

Set up the reader and make yourself comfortable with the overall tool. Add a handful of feeds. If you already have existing social network feeds these can be added as well.

Create RSS feed from Flickr for “Indian architecture” using http://www.degraeve.com/flickr-rss/ and ReaderPlay

Try adding a RSS feed from Twitter search. Save into a new folder and search within folder for terms. Try ReaderPlay

An alternative tool for certain applications is Google Spreadsheet. To read an RSS feed into a spreadsheet:

Type the URL of any feed e.g. best of ABC into a cell A1

In cell A2 enter =ImportFeed(A1, “Items Title”, FALSE, 10) This is title of last 10 stories in column A.

Also, =ImportFeed("http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q= chris+brogan","","",20)

Translate & Language detection

=GoogleTranslate("Hola, ¿cómo estás?","es","en")

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=DetectLanguage("Hola, ¿cómo estás?")

Combining listening and analytics use Postrank social media analytics garnered from readers online in conjunction with Google Reader. PostRank brings together stories related comments, bookmarks, tweets, and other interactions from social hubs. Publishers use PostRank analysis to gauge influence and reach audiences.

NewsCred allows the creation of a newspaper in a minute. The newspaper is shareable with others having a similar interest.

Use the opportunity to create your own newspaper with editorial content. The newspaper allows for inclusion of RSS feed URLs.

An interesting news sources for sharing is:

Twitter – trending topic hastags

Some advanced technologies useful for blogging are Apture, Evri, Headup and Zementa. Give them a try to understand the rapid convergence of news and social media content.

To remain upto date with changes in social media technologies these news aggregation sites cover everything you require:

1. Alltop is positioned as a personal magazine rack of over 32,000 sources. http://social-media.alltop.com/ is for all social media related news.

2. Popurls.com – a very popular news dashboard for all the latest from many sites and all in a single page!

3. If you desire to focus on just one publication: http://mashable.com/social-media/

Social media not only enables a new form of commerce, social commerce but also a radically new approach to printing information. As much a revolution as the Caxton printing press of the 1400s “media” represents a new way for consumers to generate, discover and peruse multimedia information. Importantly, the distinction between the readers and publishers of content is disappearing. The “social” aspects provide ability for consumers to connect online and share information.

7. SOCIAL TOOLS AND TACTICS OF YOUR BRAND

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A variety of resources help gain a first hand understanding of the plethora of social media news sources and advanced publishing tools available for content generation and republishing and consumption. You can choose to use these tools to rapidly populate social media environments with real time information as well as provision a diversity of sources for research. The information is meaningful and makes more sense than using the dummy five-century-old text of “Lorem Ipsum” when working through laboratory exercises.

The content selection depends on your chosen sphere of activity including the promotion of products and events, professional networking or a drive to increase traffic converging on your web or blog site.

For simplicity, the 3 stages of customer activity associated with social media are:

1. Sharing content

2. Conversations (Listening and Discussions)

3. Relationships

Through use of social media we are able to transform from a one to many broadcast model to a many to many communcations model and influence consumers through a personal interaction. Furthermore, the tools readily allow consumers the opportunity to dialogue and better understand product and service offerings. Consumers and employees alike are able to provide feedback on relevant content. Some customers will become evangelical about our business or personal brand and become key to the development of communities to further involvement in our areas.

These 3 stages make the classification and thus a selection of social media environments for marketing activities understandable in terms of primary usage and relationship to business strategy. The table illustrates the classification

Social Media Share Conversation Relationship

Blogging ✔ ✔

Facebook ✔ ✔

Flickr ✔

Twitter ✔ ✔ ✔

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Check out knowem.com or namechk.com for popular social media sites.

The primary focus of linkedIn is professional and business connections.

Complete the profile and allow LinkedIn to scan your email.

A completed profile increases the potential for others to readily find you via search engines.

Work with answers to establish your expertise through being awarded expertise points.

Join some relevant groups and enter into discussions

Create a poll using applications.

Save profiles of your 1st level marketing connections.

Establish a golf game or attendance at a food festival with your first level connections with relevant interests. Introduce them to each other at the event.

In linkedin friends are connections. An email box contains requests from others wishig to add you as a connection. Sometimes recommendation request will find their way via the inbox, as do answers to questions you ask.

A large number of groups exist in Linkedin and the process to create your own group is very simple.

Best practice is to complete your profile, connect, use answers, join groups and request recommendations.

The Twitter signature tune is a tweet or short post of 140 characters. The focus for Twitter is sharing information with people of like minds or interests as well as experts. Twitter is a hybrid of sharing, conversations and relationships. The simple format of Twitter forces an efficiency and effectiveness not seen with heavier weight communication tools.

For a long time Australia has not had the opportunity to utilize twitter text messages. In late 2009 Telstra made the 2-way

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sending/receiving Twitter SMS via short codes. But with an Apple iphone or equivalent smartphones consumers find themselves using 3rd party twitter applications.

A useful resource for starting with Twitter :

support.twitter.com/groups/31-twitter-basics

Sign up for Twitter with a simple bio.

Change your background design.

Additional tools to explore are TwitPic.com (photo sharing) and a URL shortening tool. Try bit.ly and explore the analytics capability of this URL shortner.

To understand the Twitter advertising model review the YouTube video

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l-ivcnLrSc

(Twitter - 140 Second Tour - Promoted Tweets)

To understand a little more about the promoted tweets and the notion of “Resonance” http://support.twitter.com/articles/142101-promoted-tweets

Participating, as an expert will help reinforce the following you develop through the good information and follow up tweets you send. The opportunity to drive traffic to the blog posts and web site has proven to be rewarding.

Best practices are well understood in a variety of social media and exist for sharing, RSS, blogging,YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

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Video is an essential component of social media marketing activities. Learnings exist from Diaspora (see kickstarter.com), Susan Boyle, Blendtech and the consumers posting reviews on video sites (www.expotv.com/videos/reviews/7/73/Apple-iPad/316235) especially the Queens of Haul (www.youtube.com/user/AllThatGlitters21).

The blogs previously reviewed have a heavy focus on using video content. YouTube is the most popular video sharing site. Video continues to be instrumental in helping grow business and for 2011 a multiplatform VIDEO strategy merits attention. The video sites to develop upon are:

YouTube

Vimeo

Bliptv

Viddler

Bright Cove

Metacafe

Facebook presents an exicting opportunity to enter into conversations with fans.

What about people who already wrote stories? What about people who gesture “Like”? All these people are a first point of call for striking up conversations.

Facebook embraces both personal and business usage. As establishes businesses attempt to become “social” the Facebook capabilities to directly interact with clients increasingly becomes an important aspect of customer service. Facebook incorporates a variety of social media inclusive of microblogging, photos and videos. In spite of ongoing changes to improve the Facebook experience the core functionality has pretty much remained unchanged.

If you are not a member of Facebook think about your personal side and the type of profile related comments you intend to share. Hint: owing to identity theft probably not a good idea to provide all your details accurately. For example, you might desire to reverse the day and month or even provide a slightly different birth date. Of course how far you go depends entirely upon your own sensitivities. Just bear in mind you will be communicating with friends sooner or later on Facebook so best not to stray too far from the truth.

If you do have a Facebook personal page you should review the personal profile. Ensure you do not maintain any business related info. In line with social etiquette do not offer any special

9. EFFECTIVENESS OF YouTube

10. FACEBOOK FOR BUSINESS & FAN MARKETING

14 Suresh Sood

deals as this jepordises your relationships. In Facebook the time and place to sell is using a business page (pages).

Setup a personal Facebook profile and gain an understanding of the Wall, Status updates (microblogs), Liking, Newsfeed, Notes (blogs), Photos, Videos and Tagging.

Work with people who “like” to engender conversations

The benefits of mastering a reader means you dot ever have to visit the web site or source. In our case, the benefit of not visiting Facebook all the time is we avoid the many applications friends often send us by way of quizzes etc. Anyway, if not already clear Facebook does nto make life easy by sharing the RSS feeds we require. So here's how or at least working shortcuts for each type of feed:

Notifications - www.facebook.com/notifications.php

Posts - www.facebook.com/posted.php

Notes - www.facebook.com/notes.php

Status Updates - probably most useful. Locate the notes feed and substitute the part "friends_notes" to "friends_status". Everything else remains i.e. the long numbers.

To achieve a business presence on Facebook you require to set up pages. These pages are created from within your personal account as www.facebook.com/pages and follow the steps. The business pages allow consumers to add comments to your business wall. Fans are the term used to refer to the people friending your brand or product pages. Advertising is available and you can walk though and develop a campaign with a daily budget for planning purposes. Take a look at the audience reachable, suggested bid price and pay per click ads. Insights is the Facebook analytics to access info on people interacting with the page.

Best practice is ensuring a reasonable brand presence with personality, web site details and feedback on customer dialogue. To market your page on Facebook:

Advertise on Facebook

Tell your Fans

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Get a Badge

Add a Like Box to your Website

Send an Update

A variety of proven techniques help establish a rapid fan page following. Setting a target number of fans with a desire to achieve quality not quantity is a precursor to success.

Key steps to enhance fan interest are:

a) Status updates include questions to gain feedback from fans as well as notifying fans of competition finish

b) Actually take time out to read the stories

c) Experiment with vocabulary for calls to action

d) Review applications to enhance appeal e.g. http://involver.com/applications/

e) Consider multiple pages by campaign, product e.g. tree type. Fans will likely relate to an object vs brand.

f) Conversations not spam try using “You”

g) Ensure influncers are fans of Facebook

h) Friends get friends via competitions (see Wildfire promotional tool)

i) Let your fan base know your biggest supporters and praise them publicly.

j) Use notes in a variety of contexts to determine the spreadability

k) Use email to drive traffic

l) Get into habit of daily reporting and review Insights

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The measures are based on objectives e.g. earned media mentions, volunteer number, trees and shrubs or site co-ordinators.

Capturing social media analytics for all social channels remains a challenge.

At the most simplest level HowSociable provides a simple way to begin measuring brand visibility on the social web.

Mentionmap (apps.asterisq.com/mentionmap) loads each user's Twitter status updates (tweets) and finds the people and hashtags they talked about the most. The data is displayed using Constellation Framework. In this data visualization, mentions become connections and discussions between multiple users emerge as clusters. Clicking a user will display their network of mentions as well as details from their profile. You can also search for friends by typing their Twitter usernames into the search box. Users can retrace their steps using the history bar. The current node is stored right in the URL so you can copy the link.

Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform aggregating user generated content from blogs, networks, bookmarks, comments, news,image, video and audio. The service provides analytics of strength, sentiment, reach and passion.

Bit-ly provides the ability to shorten a URL and track usage. Bit-ly tracks number of clicks, traffic sources, and time clicks occur. Appending a plus sign to the URL the user is able to see how many clicks and other info.

xinureturns.com/URL provides dashboard feedback of your site within social media inclusive of Technorati, Googe Pagerank, Diggs.

A comprehensive tool SocialToo creates social surveys for Facebook /Twitter and tracks social stats. It also will send you a daily email describing follows and unfollows on Twitter.

SocialBlade covers Digg (socialblade.com/dig) and Youtube (socialblade.com/youtube/). For Digg SocialBlade takes the stories hitting Digg’s front page providing stats and comments for each story as well as the time the story takes to reach front page.

To understand the effectiveness of a campaign or brand activity encompassing social media but impacting or driving

11. SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS

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online search interests Google Insights for Search provides insights into broad search patterns and provides a significant history. “Breakout” means a change in growth greater than 5000%.

Social Media Aggregator services are emerging to pull together updates from social networks and social media. Ping.fm is a social service created to making it easy to share posts with the world. You just post once from wherever you want. Friendfeed builds a single customized feed. Friendfeed is a Facebook owned company. Profilactic is a social media aggregator /lifestreaming service pulling together just about everything 190 social sites.

The simplest of aggregation tools continues to be: Netvibes.

Use Netvibes to Manage Facebook and Twitter accounts

Track blogs and Twitter conversations

Personalise the dashboard

Review widgets

Pull email

The key approaches to accessing information from Facebook are the applications

vansande.org/facebook/visualiser/

www.touchgraph.com/TGFacebookBrowser.html

www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2415325843

www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2415325843#/apps/application.php?id=5303167721&ref=s

As of October 2010 Facebook implements “Download your information” under account settings. You get access to your photos, wall posts, messages, like count and other information. But the most flexible approach to extraction of own data in Facebook appears to be:

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http://apps.facebook.com/namegenweb/ or netvizz

Before using these tools ensure you understand the developer terms of use developers.facebook.com/policy/ before storing and using data from Facebook.

A rudimentary understanding of key social network measures helps achieve valuable outcomes with the key tools of network analysis especially to visualise influencers.

Diana – max links (degree centrality) most connected – connector or hub – number of nodes connected – high influence of spreading info or virus

Heather – best location powerful figure as broker to determine what flows and doesn’t –single point of failure – high betweeness = high influence – position of node as gatekeeper to exploit structural holes (gaps in network)

Fernado & Garth – shortest paths = closeness – the bigger the number the less central

Eigenvector = importance of node in network ~ page rank Google is similar measure

In summary, the different network measures pinpoint who or what is important in networks:

Degree Centrality - how well connected; direct influence

Degree Closeness - how far from all others and how long information takes to arrive

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Betweenness - brokerage, gatekeeping, control of info

Eigenvector - being connected to the well connected (a popularity & power measure)

Two key tools are suitable and freely available for mapping the social data from Facebook as well as other social media networks.

• NodeXL software, documentation and supporting data sets at nodexl.codeplex.com/

• Gephi software and tutorials at gephi.org

The Gephi procedure for opening, visualisation and output of network file is captured in the table.

Existing data sets froom past Twitter activity are available online to assist with a first hand understanding of lessons learnt. The data sets go beyond Twitter and are very large in some cases.

Stanford Large Network Dataset Collection - snap.stanford.edu/data/ collection of large datasets of networks.

140kit.com/datasets includes Oldspice Ad Campaign dataset of over 6 million tweets and 2 million users. 140 kit processes the twitter data supported by analytics and visualisations. A Twitter report on the Old Spice campaign helps to understand the occurance of the “Twitter Storm” to determine if the activity is repeatable along with success.

Create a spreadsheet indicative of your Facebook page with suitable parameters for:

Unique Visitors per month

Checking visits per person month

Clicking FB pages per person per visit per month

Total Page Views

Time spent on FB per month for your entry/site

Total page views = f (visitors, checking and clicking)

12. SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGNS AND BRAND PRESENCE

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Review the number of page views as a result of:

Additional users, additional visits per month or additional page views per visit.

In the absence of any figures available to you use:

100,000 visitors, checking 7 times per month and clicking 20.

What is your takeaway from this exercise?

Think about all you do with intervention as humanistic because otherwise the alternative automation or mechanical is not social. If you are to create interest in your communication, experiment with:

Your text/copy requires a conversational slant

Being social – name not company sender

Use real names (profile names?)

Make execution personal not canned

How do we achieve a high likelihood of the message being forwarded? Recognize people who have been successful wish to make others aware of the accomplishment e.g. students wear school uniforms after football team achieves victory. Generalising, “the tendency to ‘bask in reflected glory’ (BIRG) by publicly announcing one's associations with successful others” (Robert Cildini article published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology1976).

An early example of converging social media user generated content and tv is the flight of Conchordes. In 2009 HBO used social media to build buzz for the season 2 tv show the flight of the Conchords. A "lipdub" contest (www.youtube.com /flightlipdub) encouraged fans to upload videos of lipsyncing to "Hiphopopotomas vs. Rhymenoceros." The best of the clips from 200+ submissions were edited together into one "fansterpiece" (masterpiece) for airing on tv.

Amazingly, no lavish prizes exist for the winners just 10 seconds of fame. The activity used Facebook, Digg, Twitter, Delicious, and friend emails to spread word-of-mouth across social networks. The current Facebook page has well over 1 million fans.

More recently, the Toyota USA provides learnings. Advertising drives traffic to the Facebook page

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(http://www.facebook.com/toyota) and not the website. The drive is to capture multimedia “Auto-biography” stories of real users. Time will tell if this approach provides a framework suitable for consumers to tell stories.

Communities are social networks connecting people face to face or electronically. Communities provide marketing opportunities as well as a source of ideas for new products and inputs for product enhancements. To be successful a community requires a “social object” and community management. The benefits of own community includes “clutter free” as well as consideration of younger kids <14 years who are too young to colonise Facebook.

Social networks with an interesting wine twist include:

www.boozemonkey.com/home.php

www.corktrails.com/pqvvw

Peruse the Wikipedia list of social networking sites at:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites

Review a handful of elgg (elgg.org) and ning (ning.com) communities together with the functionality used most often.

The community assists not only consumer but B2B activities for sponsors to capture as well as spark conversations (including but not limited to):

0. Community Discussion

Moderator facilitates discussion in which company experts and major accounts people participate.

1. Brainstorm

Brainstorm on new product names, issues or planning.

2. Senior Executive chat

13. WHICH PLATFORMS FOR OWN COMMUNITY?

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Chat with senior executives of major accounts and with executives.

3. Photos /Video Tours

Share photos relevant to the topic as well as to gain familiarity with members of staff and major accounts.

Video tour of a new implementation within the major account. The video is available for later retrieval and training.

4. Twitter

Use of Twitter to capture real time thoughts and on the spot surveys.

5. F2F Events

Use the community to create /request face to face events achieving further depth to the online relationship.

6. Netnography

Provide deep feedback from listening to the major accounts talking about issues and opportunities. If a company desires, the netnography can be fed directly into the voice of customer program. This type of qualitative analysis uses online ethnography techniques. For further insights into netnography and community development see Netnography Doing Ethnographic-Research Online by Robert Kozinets (inventor of netnography method), 2010, Sage Publications.

Finally, a veritable gold mine to understand how to achieve a successful online community, the Ning creators provide a tutorial (bit.ly/fsp7oL). This document captures the successful patterns across all the Ning communities.

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Work breakdown for Own Community in Ning

ID Activity Estimated effort (hours) - tba

1 Review best practices on existing communities e.g. treeboss.net for ideas and concepts concisely documenting for future use where no practice exists or differentiation required use next practice e.g. rate pictures of trees and narratives

2 Agree priority feature set with inputs from best practice:

Photos –Videos- Latest Activity- Members- Events

Forums - Blogs

RSS – feed updates from twitter e.g. community manager

Share content with Facebook

3 Develop look and feel ensuring brand consistency with Planet Ark – customise theme and header (CSS later)

4 Welcome content for new members (populates text boxes)

5 Keywords for network and search discovery both Google and Ning

Google Analytics or Google AdWords (later)

6 Customise latest activity

7 Input community guidelines

8 Generate FAQs

9 Domain name (Point north Plane Ark domain to social network) and remove adverts using Ning Premium service

10 Invite people (import from lists of emails)

Open community for conversations

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Suresh Sood is the course developer and moderator of this laboratory workshop. He has developed and lectured for over a decade at University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) on the marketing implications of emerging technology innovations. He previously held the role of Senior Vice President with Reuters co-creating next generation online services with major Asian customers. Currently, Suresh Sood runs the ever-popular social media marketing practice short course with over 1000 executives attending to date. He consults on the transformation of customer interactions using social media technologies and works on a variety of online projects with new startups. Suresh holds a B.Sc (Hons) from London University and a MBA and PhD from UTS. His key research interest covers the impact of social media on travel, fashion and luxury goods.

Email: suresh.sood@uts.edu.au

LinkedIn: sureshsood

Skype: sureshsood

Twitter: soody

9. ABOUT YOUR COURSE DEVELOPER & PRESENTER

Suresh Sood