Social Media Strategies – Influencer Outreach in 10 steps | 123 Social Media
Wondering how to reach out to the online influencers? 123 Social Media boils it down:
Step One: review the following six social media sources. In all cases, do a preliminary overview of your industry, of any keywords that are top of mind, as well as the names of any industry or association groups. This gives you a good starting point to detail where you want to go.
* Facebook Groups
* Linkedin Groups
* Alltop
* Technorati
* Postrank
Step Two: identify local or topical clusters. Once you have an overview, go back and cross compare items you found in step one. Key areas to look for are detailing top blogs (Postrank and Technorati both provide general scores) and identifying groups of users that spread across several services (high ranked blogs typically provide links to Facebook/Linkedin/Twitter groups.)
Step Three: break down apparent clusters that make sense for your business. Define geographic, topical, market, and demographic silos that are applicable. For each cluster you establish, detail five to ten top individuals to interact with.
Step Four: establish your workload and labor commitment. Be realistic. If you have fifty individuals to interact with, realize personal outreach is going to take thirty to sixty minutes per person. For an extremely large outreach, this time adds up very quickly. If you don’t want to commit the time, reduce the number of people you are reaching out to. You should also consider investing more time up-front for your own learning curve.
Step Five: research and personalize. Go into every site and review the “about” page and the past three to five articles, along with the last 30 days worth of information on Google (search for the persons name using the “advanced search” function to view only recent information.) If they have a Twitter account, spend a few minutes reading recent activity.
Step Six: Review your strategy. One of the most important steps of the process is to go back and re-think your strategy based on all the information you have just gathered. In most cases basic tactics and goals stated at the beginning may be proven to be inherently flawed.
Step Seven: outreach. Remember to try two or three options. The best way to earn an honorable mention in someone’s rolodex is to offer something of value to them. This “offer” doesn’t have to be cash (although a lot of people love this…) and could revolve around some common benefits. Think outside of the box when doing outreach and do not be scared to pick up the phone! (also remember to have effective follow-up.)
Step Eight: build the relationship. Once you have taken the effort of outreach, continue working on continuing communication. If you have a web only relationship make a schedule to communicate through blog comments, twitter, and other web services. If you have the ability to meet in person, attend or coordinate regular events to build stronger personal connections.
Step Nine: pay it forward. During the course of research, outreach, and relationship building: attempt to detail three to five basic objectives for each contact. Your assistance in reaching small personal goals for each contact is a quick method for solidifying a memorable and positive relationship.
Step Ten: collect some good faith karma. After you have contributed to the conversation, begin to seed your communication with your own professional wants and needs. Continue to review your own contributions vs the requests you make, and be careful to maintain a balanced two-way relationship.
BONUS:
Ask around. In many cases, professional peers may have already done some of the work above. If they have, ask to share notes and compare objectives to leverage any synergies you may have. If they have not, ask them if they would find value in your research and get them to commit some support to the effort.
Read the entire post here: Social Media Strategies – Influencer Outreach in 10 steps | 123 Social Media
Jordan Raynor: The 7 Deadly Sins of Tweeting Politicians
Jordan Raynor’s blog is worth reading and @JordanRaynor is worth following on Twitter. On his blog he shares some great insights on using new media in politics. Here he explains what can go wrong for pollies on Twitter:
1 Only using Twitter for “the ask.” I get it – at the end of the day social media means nothing to your candidate unless it raises them more money. And while I sharply disagree with that philosophy, I understand that's the conversation going on in most campaigns. But just as in offline fundraising, to raise the most money online a relationship must first be built. Obama New Media Director Joe Rospars has said, if you have 10 emails, it is the 8 emails that don’t ask for money that lay the groundwork for the two that are. The same rule should be applied to Twitter.
2 Using Twitter as another press release distribution service. First off, the press release is dead for political campaigns. Instead of using press release corporate speak, listen to the way people communicate on Twitter and adapt the way you communicate your message directly to your supporters.
3 Not listening. Most politicians see Twitter as a one-way channel to push content out to. The good tweeting politicians see Twitter as a chance to gain valuable feedback from voters. Politicians who are not listening to what the Twitterverse is saying about issues important to them are missing out on a huge opportunity. Twitter can and should be used to test and tweak your campaign’s message. Listen and consider engaging with an @reply to a voter once in a while.
4. Forgetting that you are human. The point of social media is that it is, well, social. Learn how to take off your online tie and show that you are a human being. Yes, this means sometimes tweeting about your personal life! Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill said it best when she said, “It’s important for my constituents to know that I do my own laundry.”
5. Sending your followers on a treasure hunt. Twitter is a great way to drive traffic to stories, videos, donation pages, etc… but make sure you are linking directly to the content you want your followers to see. If the content you want your followers to see is not on your homepage, don’t tweet a link to your homepage and force your followers to dig through your site to find what you want them to find. The key to success on the web is eliminating friction and that’s an important value to remember when linking to content via Twitter.
6 Lying (or hiding) who is actually tweeting for you. In an ideal scenario (mostly for the potentially disastrous entertainment value) all politicians would personally tweet, but it is widely understood that the majority do not. A bigger mistake than not personally tweeting though is lying about it. If your staff tweets for you, make that clear. You don’t want to be giving an interview on CNN and have a staff member send out a tweet, supposedly from you, at the very same moment. It is not difficult to know who is genuine and who is not on Twitter and other social platforms.
7 Tweeting your favorite quotes from historical figures just because you have nothing to say. If you don’t have anything valuable to say, say nothing at all. An occasional quote from George Washington is inspiring, but your followers would much rather hear something you may think is mundane (such as the fact that you are walking your dog) than you proving that you are an inspirational-quote-buff.
Read the entire post here: Jordan Raynor: The 7 Deadly Sins of Tweeting Politicians
What Tweets Work..And What Don’t
Have you ever thought about the impact that tweets may have on the number of followers you have?
TweetEffect is a service that provide details on how many followers were attracted or driven away after you made a tweet. While it’s an interesting service, I think it’s difficult to assess if a particular tweet had a direct impact on drawing followers in or driving them away.
TweetEffect doesn’t require you to log in. All you do is insert a Twitter username, which creates a report.
Read the entire post here: What Tweets Work..And What Don’t | Twitterrati
6 Quick Tips to Search Twitter Like an Expert
6 Tips for Better Twitter Searching
1. Switch to Advanced Search – You may be familiar with standard Twitter Search, but if you want some deeper searching power, try using Advanced Twitter Search. With advanced search, users have an entire page of operators. For example, you can look for tweets containing a keyword that were sent by a particular user. If you run a local business, you can search for tweets near a specific location. Both of these tasks could help provide a targeted and relevant list of people to follow on Twitter.
2. Use Exact Match – When looking for only a specific phrase of words on Twitter, use exact match. This can be done in advanced search or by including quotes around your search phrase “sample search phrase”. This is often important for long search phrases that can return many irrelevant results due to pulling results for each individual word in the phrase.
3. Subtract Words That Muck Up Results – Even using exact match, the results you find may not be clear enough. Often business that you are searching for may share names with other organizations or products. The best way to solve this problem is to remove keywords related to the irrelevant results. This is done by placing a minus sign in front of the words you want removed from inclusion in the results. For example, let’s say you are looking for tweets mentioning Bayer, but you only want tweets from their Crop Science Division. Your search box may look something like this: “Bayer Crop Science” -aspirin -chemical -pharma.
4. Examine Sentiment – As marketers, a common question that gets asked is sentiment. Do people like our company? Twitter can help answer this question. Twitter allows you to search for positive and negative search results. This might not be the level of detail some marketers are looking for, but it is a start. Search for sentiment is simple by including a “:” for positive and “:” for negative. Example: For negative tweets about your competitor enter: “competitor name” :(
5. Filter for Only Links – Sometimes searching Twitter is not about what people are sharing and instead about the links that people are sharing. Fortunately, Twitter provides a way to filter for only tweets containing links. This filtering is done by adding filter:links following your search phrase. Example: “search phrase” filter:links
6. Put Everything Together – Learning different Twitter search commands is valuable, but there’s a second, even more valuable step: Putting multiple search operators together to find clear and targeted results that will ultimately help save time and deliver actionable information. Say you wanted to find results for a specific phrase that was shared by another company that you don’t care about, but you only wanted the positive results that contained links, this is what that would look like: Example: “Search Phrase” -”phrase you don’t care about” : filter:linkshubspot
Bonus Tip: RSS Feeds for Search Results – One problem with Twitter search results is that many of us want to see the data and information over time, instead of only the couple of minutes after we search for it. Twitter make it easy to do this by providing RSS feed for search results pages. In the right side bar of the results page, click the “feed for this query” link and then add that feed to an RSS reader and you can easily track specific search results over time.
Twitter Search is powerful, you can find a complete list of search operators on Twitter.
Read the entire post here: 6 Quick Tips to Search Twitter Like an Expert
Labour MP directed voters Conservative’s way – niiiice
With strategy like this, they deserved to lose…
Former deputy Prime Minister and member of the U.K. Labour Party, John Prescott, is encouraging supporters to click on Google pay-per-click ads sponsored by the Conservative Party, in order to diminish the campaign budget of Labour’s major political rivals.
Prescott posted an update on Twitter today stating, “Click here http://bit.ly/RinseCashcroft then click on Labour Have Failed = 50p out of the Tories warchest. Let’s do this!”
Read the entire post here: U.K. Labour MP Urges Voters to Click Conservative Ads – ClickZ
How would you describe that ‘election-war-chest-emptying’ strategy?
