Changes in Social Media can be rapid, and in order to stay on top of your game you must be prepared to learn, unlearn and relearn.

Choosing a platform

Over the course of this blog series on LightSpeed’s Social Media Strategy I have highlighted certain aspects of our approach to the social media platforms that we have decided to actively engage with. These platforms are what we see as the big three: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Each of these platforms requires a unique understanding and offers its own advantages and disadvantages that need to be weighed and considered before you start to engage with their user base.

We have chosen these platforms based on their popularity, the fact that we were already there and that we are extracting value from them. But be warned: There are always new social network popping up, and the popular ones might not be the best for your business.

“You don’t pick which platform you should be on, your customers do.” – Nadia Boucher

Five steps to a Social Media Strategy

Coming up with a strategy for your business’ engagement with Social Media is of the utmost importance. You need a plan and set targets or else you are doomed to fail.

Mike Anderson of Meltwater Buzz shared his Five steps to building your own Social media strategy at the recent Social Media World Forum, and I’ve tweaked it a bit for our perspective:

• Step 1: Listen

They say all Social Media efforts should start with listening. Start listening to social media sites to find out where your customers are and what their needs are.

• Step 2: Define why

Ensure that you know why you are getting involved in social media and what you hope to achieve.

• Step 3: Strategize

Social Media platforms were not created equally. Choose  your channels and define measurable goals before you go to market. Remember that Content remains King and be sure that you have something to say.

• Step 4: Engage

Take action on your insight into your customers. Get involved with them, run campaigns and invite them to participate.

• Step 5: Measure your return on investment

When measuring the ROI of Social media campaigns don’t focus on the amount of followers and likes, but on how your efforts are helping you achieve business objectives.

Be Genuine

So now you have your shiny new Social Media Strategy in place and you feel that you are good to go. Just hold on before you jump online and get some buzz going. Remember that with Social Media it’s not really about you, it’s about your customers.

The tricky thing about Social Media is that you are sharing space with your customers’ friends and family, their real relationships with real meaning. People don’t really want to be marketed at and you don’t want to be the online version of a door-to-door salesman or an annoying telephone marketer. You should strive towards adding real value to the social spaces that you engage with.

Be truthful, be caring and be about the people.

Pieter du Toit of Social Media IQ said it best:

You don’t do Social Media, you become a social company.

Find us on your Favourite Social Platforms here:
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn

ADDED

Check out this slideshare presentation from the SMWF:

SMWF Meltwater Buzz & Cell C Present Social Media Monitoring for SM Strategy

We have maintained a presence on Facebook over the years, but with recent changes to Facebook’s view on how brands should engage with customers on their platform and our own reevaluation of our Social Media Strategy, some change were in order.

Facebook: Groups and Pages

Facebook has been updating their Groups product and decided that it would be archiving old groups. Only selected groups are being given the option to upgrade to the new Facebook Group format and Facebook is urging brands to make the transition to Pages.

Now Pages has a few advantages over Groups for a company on Facebook:

• It is a profile on it’s own and can be managed by more than one admin
• Updates to the Page’s wall shows up in the Newsfeeds of it’s fans (this was not the case with groups)
• Custom Tabs give you a lot of freedom to make your Page unique and work for you

Ultimately it’s better for LightSpeed to make the transition to a Facebook page, and we have. A unfortunate side effects is that we haven’t been able to convince enough Facebook Group members to make the transition to our new Facebook Page, and if they do not do so, we face the possibility of losing contact with these old members completely and will no longer be able to reach them with messages from our company.

This is bad for us, but maybe a opportunity to build our Facebook community form scratch, and this time getting the content aspects of it right.

Posting, Auto-posting, message content and Insights.

We have been using RSS Grafitti to auto-post our updates on our blog to our Facebook  Page.

This has resulted in sloppy updates on our FB page, updates that have no thumbnail and no well crafted excerpt to draw a reader into the blogposts. We have decided to do away with this function, and manually update our Facebook page. Now we can craft a message aimed at our Facebook fans, resulting in a more relaxed message with a better tone suited to the audience and aimed at engaging conversation.
In time we will manage these updates from Hootsuite as well, as we currently do our Twitter messages. We also use bit.ly to shorten the links posted on Facebook and Twitter. Bit.ly provides a nice breakdown of the shortened link, showing us how many people have clicked on the link from either Twitter or Facebook. This is helping us learn more about the audiences on the respective social media platforms, and helping us determine what content fares well on which platform.

Using bit.ly we have also been able to experiment with time postings, helping us to narrow down which times are the best to post updates to the individual social platforms.

Our blogposts are also posted as noted on Ashley’s personal profile. This has helped to create conversation around LightSpeed’s activities and provides a channel for Ashley to communicate personally with our stakeholders.

Facebook Page as a Internship tool

Internships are a big deal for LightSpeed, with most of us monkeys having started out as interns here in one form or another.

We like having the interns around, as the contribute to the youthful spirit of the company and as a constantly learning organization we often learn something new from them while teaching them our tricks of the trade.

Every year we have a few international interns come through the company, doing work for their schools and contributing to various internal projects aimed at improving our business. Examples include the building of our Project Blog (using the P2 theme), perhaps our most important internal communication tool and market research.

Ultimately Facebook is a powerful communication tool for us, and not one that any web savvy company that is serious about social interaction can do without.

Join our Facebook page and get in touch!

In the past we’ve shared some insights surrounding the importance of Twitter in the South African market place, as well as some insights into what influences SEO.

The comments made by Walter Pike and Anita (@anib) on our view of Twitter and Social Bookmarking led us to reconsider our approach and it became clear that our Social Media Strategy needed some refining.

Taking into account our existing social media profiles, the resources available and the statistics on referrals and activity generated from our social media presence we have decided to focus on the big three main platforms: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

We have maintained a presence on these platforms in the past, but we realized that we weren’t taking full advantage of these platforms as tools for deeper customer interaction, product promotion and a platform to share our expertise and insights.

Over the next few post, we’ll delve deeper into the specifics of our Strategy for each platform. But first a few other observations.

Social Media Tools

There are a lot of tools out there that can help to simplify the managing of your social media marketing efforts. Maintaining multiple accounts with multiple logins proves to be a tedious process, especially when more than one team member is involved and we investigated the use of some of these tools to help us simplify the process.

Hootsuite and Tweetdeck were highly recommended, but in the end we decided on using Hootsuite.

Hootsuite has certain attractive attributes that really stood out for us.:

• It allows us to spread Messages across platforms, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn
• Send messages from our mobile phones
• Track Results with real time statistics
• Allows for Team Collaboration and multiple contributors without sharing passwords
• Assign tasks to Team members – allows us to delegate messages, monitor responses and progress
• Schedule Updates

The main drawback to Hootsuite is that is still does not support the functionality to manage LinkedIn Groups or company profiles

If you are a Hootsuite user and would like this functionality to be included in their next upgrade, I urge you to petition them for it here.

Link Shortening

A 2010 study published by Fuseware, a Parow based Social Media Research company, provides fascinating insights into the importance of Twitter to the South African market.

We are currently in the process of having our Homepage redesigned by well known developer Foxinni to better align our web presence with our evolving business model. With the current proposed redesign draft we debated the issue on whether or not to include the “Follow us on Twitter” Social Media sharing button on our Homepage.

Lightspeed does not use Twitter  as much as Facebook as our social media platform of choice. and we had to ask, are we maybe missing something? Having “ReTweet” and Twitter sharing buttons activated on your blog is important to help drive exposure of your blog and contribute to SEO, but the value of these sharing buttons on one’s Homepage is debatable if the social media platform is not being maintained in earnest.

The truth is that engaging in Social Media requires attention and effort and it is often better to focus on one channel and maintain it to the best of your ability than to spread your message across multiple platforms without dedicating the resources to maintaining and actively engaging on the platform.

Twitter in South Africa: The Hard Facts

The Fuseware report sheds some light on the true value of Twitter for the South African market, and dispels a bit of the myth that “Everyone is getting onto Twitter”.

An estimated 55000 South African are active* Twitter users. With the South African population estimated to be at about 50 million (49, 380 000), that’s 1% of the South African population. Now 1% is a very small market, but if the average profile of the South African Twitter user fits within the target demographic of your business it is worth utilizing the platform to engage with your customers.

When comparing these statistics with the recently published data by Socialbackers estimating South African Facebook users at just under 3.8 million, Facebook seems to be the stronger platform with deeper market penetration and a wider audience. This justifies making Facebook the focus area for our social media marketing efforts.

Some more interesting statistics:

• 4.5% of South African sites reference Twitter
• In  April 2010 Twitter was the 7th most visited site in South Africa
• 12.96% of SA Twitter accounts have geo-location enabled
• 35-40% of Tweets originate from a Mobile Device

What are they Tweeting about?

• 23% are retweets
• 17.3% are Questions
• 24.5% of Tweets contain links
• 47% of Tweets address another user – showing that the users that do actually Tweet are actively engaging in conversation with fellow Twitterati

Take a look at the follow up post for a deeper look at the profile of the average South African Twitter user here.

*Active Twitter users as defined by the 2010 Fuseware report was measured by having tweeted at least once in the period of the report – March to April 2010.

Microblogging

Social Syndication

SMM vs SEO

It’s not a question of having either good SEO or a decent Social Media Marketing (SMM) strategy in place. You need both.

In the recent past, many former bloggers have been saying that blogging is dead. They have abandoned the act of blogging and moved on to the greener pastures offered by the likes of Twitter and Facebook. Social Media and mobile are the buzzwords and blogging is old news.

Frankly, I found this to be an absurd notion. Over the December holidays I encountered three people ranging from the ages of 25 to 56 who had just taken up blogging. They weren’t tech-savvy programmers but a lawyer, a student traveller and a house wife.

If they were taking the time to get into blogging, and for no immediate financial gain, surely blogging couldn’t be in it’s death throes. It seemed to me as though the whole “Death of Blogging” thing was nothing more than hype created to get some attention.

But suspecting wasn’t good enough. If I wanted to make a contradictory statement, I needed some proof.

The Quest for Statistics on the State of the South African Blogosphere

Finding any decent information on the South African Blogosphere proved very challenging. I contacted the Letterdash blogging platform – as part of News24 I am convinced that they must have a thriving community of bloggers – but their contact form was non existent with a 500 – Internal Server Error staring me in the face. Local Blog aggregator, Afrigator, also didn’t provide me with the information I needed.

I had no other choice but to turn to our friends, the Americans…

The Stats from the States

At a loss for finding statistics for our local scene, I consulted the excellent Technorati State of the Blogosphere Report published every year. Surely if blogging was in the decline, it would be visible in the USA first.

While this report doesn’t give a definite number to all the bloggers in the world, studying their methodology does yield an insight into the burning question of whether or not blogging is indeed still alive and well, kicking and with a pulse.

Technorati have an Internet survey conducted every year among bloggers nationwide. The survey group was shrunk from 2,828 bloggers in 2009 to 1,091 respondents in 2010.

However, the Report also uses data collected by Lijit, a trusted publisher network of over 12000 publishers and 700 million page views per month.

Lijit-collected data for the 2010 State of the Blogosphere report was from two primary sources.

• 13,000 active Lijit publishers that have the Lijit Search Widget installed on their blog (up from 11000 in 2009)
• The network of 3.8 million blogs that those 13,000 blogs connect to via their Blogroll and other social network connections tracked by Lijit (up from 2.5 million in 2009).

If Lijit could expand their survey group from 2009 to 2010 because they now have a larger pool of active users, then the Lijit data corroborates that Blogging isn’t dead and thriving still.

I’ll state that blogs have come of age. They have been around long enough to be effectively
assimilated by the mainstream. Blogs have gained legitimacy and are read by most internet users every day, in one form of another. The humble blog may not be the hotshot new kid on the block anymore, but it’s here to stay.

As Warren Ellis said in a recent Wired magazine column:
“When any medium starts getting “the death of…” articles, it doesn’t mean the medium in question is dying, so much as that people are bored with it and are looking for the next thing. And while they were looking for other things to be interested in, Chicago street gangs started blogging to protest against police harassment. Remember Blogger‘s original tagline? “Push-button publishing for the people.” That looks alive and well to me.”

Look out for the next post, where I will delve a bit deeper into the findings of the State of the Blogosphere Report and what it says about Microblogging and SEO.

BuddyPress will extend WordPress MU and bring social networking features to a new or existing installation.

As an avid facebook and WordPress user I have taken to the idea of extending WordPress-MU with social networking features very well. Foxinni was the first person to tell me about BP, the I caught my attention immediately. I started testing out the very early stages of the software in May 2008 while preparing to do a talk at WordPress Cape Town Meetup.

Andy Peatling is the lead developer on the BP project. Andy started the project as ChickSpeak.com a WordPress MU Based Social Network, see about blurb below:

ChickSpeak is an organization for young women created to inspire Big Dreams, Strong Values and Success in the world.

Here are some important BP links for more detailed info on the Automattic driven project:

• Testdrive -This is a great place to test out the software with out having to install
• My profile on TestBP.org
• LightSpeed TestBP.org Blog about our BuddyPress Development efforts
• Main Website – Find out all about the project, download and much more
• SVN – Grab the latest code from Subversion
• BuddyPressDev on Twitter – Follow the latest tweets

The past few months LightSpeed has been Contibuting to Change (C2C). Traffic Brand introduced us to the DA who needed a small volunteer registration website called Contribute to Change. We started with a standard 5 page website designed as a landing page for a PPC campaign and volunteer registration formto allow people sign up and help promote the DA.

We have been researching the Obama political campaign and how they built My.BarackObama.com a.k.a MYBO to enabled supporters to be more involved with promoting the party. We have been busy developing BP powered volunteer system to drive the C2C website. This will allow people to join in and help the DA grow its support base. More on how to sign-up to the live system at the end of this month when it launches to the existing & new volunteers.

We will be making use of all the existing BP features and adding some interesting new modules. See details below:

Modules:

1. Authentication modules – Google’s OpenID Endpoint + Facebook Connect
2. Recruit a friend + Contact Importer – Friend importer tool and more advanced tools for recruiting new community members
3. Spread the Word – Tools for mailing the press or prominent blogs
4. User/Volunteer Points System – Volunteers earn points for every action and these are displayed in a sidebar widget
5. Action center – User dashboard page displaying member points, call-to-action tools and much more
6. Import Users – Import existing volunteers into the C2C BP system
7. Events – Create/host an event, find events, featured events
8. Go-door-to-door – Voters use this module to organise neighbourhood walks going door-to-door to discuss and help promote the DA
9. Make Phone Calls – Talk to Voters, record/update details and promote the DA
10. Mobile Theme – mobile theme for buddypress making the site more accessible to users

BuddyPress Modifications:

1. User Sign-up or User Registration needs to be extended and integrated into
2. Members Only system accessible only to registered volunteers
3. Buddy Press Top Menu Bar needs to be extended to cater for the new volunteer tools by adding new quick links

Potential modules:

• Facebook style bottom bar with Jabber Chat built in to enable volunteers to chat to each other trough the system

Some interesting research links:

• BuddyPress: Adding Twitter And Friendfeed
• BuddyPress: Expanding Settings Menu
• BuddyPress: Building Your Own Components With These Building Blocks
• BuddyPress Notes by Lisa Sabin-Wilson
• WP-FBConnect

I will be blogging further information in the weeks to come. Stay tuned in.

I would like to be able to use OpenID, Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect authentication services with BuddyPress.

There is already an MU OpenID plugin developed by Automattic, hopefully we can revise this plugin and adapt it for buddypress. See details about plugin below:

Once installed, OpenID 1.1 link tags will be added to the homepage of every hosted weblog. Users can then use their weblog as an OpenID; when they authenticate against third party sites using that URL, WordPress MU will ask them if they wish to share their identity with the site in question. If they say yes (or click “always”) they will be redirected back and logged in to that site.

The plugin also adds a new “OpenID” menu item to the Options tab in the WordPress admin application. This new page allows users to manually add and remove sites from their “always trust” list – although normally they will only modify that list indirectly by clicking the “always” button when they sign in to a site.

The plugin includes simple defence against phishing attacks. If a user tries to sign in with an OpenID but is not logged in to their WordPress MU account they will be told to navigate to the site manually or using a bookmark; presenting a log in form at that point would train users to enter their username and password at the instruction of untrusted sites.

In the above scenario, their attempted OpenID login is recorded in a cookie. When they next log in to the site (within a 5 minute window) they will be taken to the dashboard for the OpenID which they attempted to authenticate and will be presented with a link to continue that action.

In May 2007 facebook launched the Facebook Platform, which allowed third party developers to build rich social applications within Facebook. On the 9th May 2008 facebook announced Facebook Connect the next iteration of Facebook Platform that allows users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site. This will enable third party websites to implement and offer even more features of Facebook Platform off of Facebook. Here are just a few of the coming features of Facebook Connect:

• Trusted Authentication
• Real Identity
• Friends Access
• Dynamic Privacy

These are just a few steps Facebook is taking to make the vision of data portability a reality for users worldwide. Hopefully we can integrate this into BuddyPress in the coming months?!

Next item up for discussion is Google Friend Connect, uses OpenID, oAuth and Open Social to let users log in to their favorite apps using a trusted ID provider and then access their friend info from those apps – all while on another website altogether. That could be any website that has chosen apps from the Open Social/ Friend Connect app gallery and pasted the iframe code onto their page.

In closing

We can expand the social networks we build much more rapidly by allowing users to tap into  their own networks. Feedback most welcome!

• Logged in user would like to create an event
• User will click a menu item in top bar “My Events”, this menu item should drop down with the following items displayed:
  • Create an Event
  • Find Events
  • Manage Events
  • Attend Events
• The next step is to bring up a landing page for the events component
  • A good example of an events list page is facebook events
• When Events dashboard loads you will see a the following:
  • Directory listing of upcoming events in your area
  • Featured events
  • Create an Event big button
  • Browse Events – general browsing tool
  • Search events box
  • Export Events (Google, iCal or Outlook)
• The events component should have a Sidebar Widget always visible

So now I have described the overview of the events module lets drill down into a bit more detail per page, see below.

Events Listings / Browse Events

• Filter mechanism to see events in your neighbourhood
  • By area
  • By Date
  • By Type
• General listing of all upcoming events is the default display when browsing events, details displayed:
  • Date
  • Title
  • Tagline
  • Hosted by
  • Type
  • Where
  • When
  • Your RSVP
• Friend’s / Neighbour’s Events
  • Date
  • Title
  • Tagline
  • Hosted by
  • Friends Attending
  • Type
  • Where
  • When
  • Your RSVP

Event Invites

• Users can send an invite message via system and system sends notification email with the following details:
  • Title
  • Day of week, Month, Date, Time at Venue, Geographic Location
  • Invite by Member Name (who invited me)
  • RSVP message (optional)
  • Will you attend – Yes, No, Maybe?
  • Remove from my events
• Once selection has been made then a confirmation message should display to confirm the user’s attendance

Single Events Page

• Event Info
• Title/Event Name:
• Tagline:
• Host:
• Type: Go-door-todoor, hand out leaflets, house meetings,
• Description:
• Network becomes “Geographic Location”
• Time and Place
• Start Time:
• End Time:
• Location:
• Street:
• City/Town:
• Contact Info
• Contact Person:
• Phone:
• Email Address:
• Confirmed Guests should display in a section
• Discussion “Wall”, RSVP message are posted to the “wall”
• Sidebar widgets
• Invite more people, earn points
• Remove from My Events
• Admins for event
• Your RSVP status

General Events Notes

• Admins to be able to create events and send to an entire network, BUT standard users will only be able to invite volunteers that belong to the same groups as them
• Events hosts need to be able to upload a list of actual attendees of the events, all members who attend will be able to score points for attending

In closing

I feel that the events module is a big must for just about any social network and could add huge value to everyone using buddypress! Please send me your feedback….

Basic Profile Information

• Networks – Possibly able to create and/or choose network
• Sex – Radio box with options for Male/Female/Alien
• Birthday – Date selector
• Company Name – Text Field
• Position
• Company Website – Text Field

About Me

• Summary – Multi-line text box
• Specialties – WordPress Tags would work well here
• Interests – Multi-line text box
• Hometown – Text-box
• Country – Selector

User on the Web

• WPMU and/or BuddyPress Websites – Multi-field allowing up to 3 entries to avoid spam
• WordPress Websites
• Social Profiles
  • Flickr
  • facebook
  • YouTube
  • Plaxo
  • Delicious
  • LinkedIn
  • Many more to choose from

Contact Information | Personal and/or Work

• Mobile
• Telephone
• Address
• Google Talk
• Skype
• Website

Education and Work

Need to be able to add multiple positions:

• Employer
• Position
• Time Period
• Location
• Description

Need to be able to add multiple entries:

• Educational Institute
• Years
• Graduation Year
• Qualification

Thats all I can think of for now, maybe we dont need all this information, but being able to add more info would definately help people find each other on testbp.org.

Feedback would be great?!