This was my first time flying VirginAmerica [I have flown almost 1mln miles on other airlines]. I liked their entertainment system, ability to order foods and drinks via this system, comfortable seats and of course friendly flight attendants and a great service.

But what I want to write about is … something different.. Actually I want to ask a question to Virgin America airline and other brands: how committed are you to Social Media channels?

What do I mean?

Yes, when you visit Virgin America’s web site http://www.virginamerica.com/ you will see links to their Twitter, Facebook and YouTube channels.

Yes, they have over 100,000 followers on Twitter, etc…

But… I have not heard flight attendants mentioning Twitter or Facebook during my flight.. They did not ask me to check into this flight on FourSquare and maybe giving me a glass of wine for doing it .

They did not ask me to capture this great shot during the flight and post it on Twitter right from the flight using in-flight Wifi services…

No, they did not!

Why??? Why are hotels, airlines, spas and many other businesses not encouraging their customers to follow them on social media channels outside of the web sites, social media channels?? In real life?

Does this mean that they are still testing the waters? Not fully committed to social media channels? Or maybe this means lack of integrated marketing strategies?? The group that is responsible for social media channels does marketing using those channels and not talking to the other marketing teams on how they can use traditional marketing channels to promote social media ones?

What do you think?

Saw data on number of viewers on YouTube, then Mashable posted a blog on Old Spice sales. Very impressive results.

One aspect of this campaign was somewhat puzzling to me – there was no good way for this brand to communicate with all those 16 mln + viewers on YouTube: you can’d get emails of those viewers, you can’t send them a note, promotion, info about a new product, etc…

I also have not seen The Old Spice’s efforts in capturing their YouTube viewers audience on other social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook where they can continue interactions with their fans.

So I decided to look at the statistical data for all these 3 social media channels: YouTube, Twitter and Facebook and compare the numbers.

As you can see there was a significant growth in both: number of Twitter followers and fans on Facebook.

Out of over 16 mln YouTube video viewers only 100,000 people started following @oldspice on Twitter – that is just .6% and about 740,000 fanned The Old Spice Facebook page  representing 4.5% of YouTube viewers.

Here are my questions for you:

• Do you think The Old Spice could of done a better job using their amazing viral video to drive more followers on twitter and fans on Facebook?
• What you would of done differently?

Here is a step by step process on how you create simple auto feed of content to your Twitter account.

Step 1. Identify relevant information sources on Internet. You can use Google Search, Technorati search to locate blogs, news sites, papers, etc that have great content that’s highly relevant to your Twitter followers.

Example for Social CRM:

I identified major bloggers in Social Business space [Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0] and collected their blogs informations here.

Step 2. Find link to RSS feeds for each data source.

Example:

I clicked on a first blog address listed in my table referenced above. It happened to be Andy McAfee’s blog.

You can copy all the RSS addresses to a notepad for now.

Step 3. I like using Yahoo! pipes to aggregate and sort RSS feeds. Here is a very simple example of how you can use Yahoo! pipes to aggregate RSS feeds.

a) goto Yahoo! pipes. Click on Create a pipe button.

b) Start adding RSS links:

c) after you are done adding all the links, drag Sort function to a workspace and Pipe output. Connect all the pieces. Do not forget to name and save your pipe!

Step 4. now you need to save RSS link to this pipe and use it in a feed burner to start publishing your highly informative content to your Twitter stream. I am using Google’s Feedburner for this:

Words of caution:

- make sure you select relevant content [to your audience, of course!];

- test your Yahoo! pipe to ensure you are getting an output you expected to get;

- adjust Feedburner to publish limited number of articles in reasonable time frame.

Feel free to drop me a note if you need help with your content strategy or content automation!

I’ve been doing number of workshops on how to use Twitter for business. Each time I had to go into lengthy overview of different content types and twitter content strategies.

Here is a quick overview of my thoughts on this subject.

What is Content Strategy?

Content strategy includes the following stages:

• Planning (business goals, target audience, type and sources of content, frequency of distribution, etc);
• Content creation (tools, processes, methods);
• Publication (tools, processes, methods);
• Analysis/Governance (usefulness, relevance, etc..)

Let’s look at major Twitter content types.

• “Meforming” [term introduced by Guy Kawasaki] – you telling us where you are, what you eat, who are you with, etc..
• News/articles sharing – you including a link to a news story you liked;
• Event announcements;
• How to questions/complains;
• You responding, commenting on someone else’s content.

Here is a random snapshot of my twitter stream:

Out of 8 tweets, 6 contain shared links, 1 event announcement, 1 how to question. Based on my observations, about 75%-80% of all tweets contain links or belong to news/article sharing category. This is very important to understand. It means that people mostly use Twitter to share an interesting content they found elsewhere or on Twitter.

And now we come to an interesting question that I am sure will generate good discussions: does it make sense to automate some of content discovery and delivery processes on Twitter channel?

The answer from Guy Kawasaki is very loud and clear – YES, it does make sense to do this. He is using a combination of Alltop [content aggregation and discovery tool] with ObjectiveMarketer [content delivery service] to populate his twitter updates. He is also a strong proponent of repeated content delivery – each of his tweets gets repeated 4 times at a different time intervals.

My personal Twitter content strategy is different for each Twitter account I manage: some of them I run in 100% automated manner, for some I use a combination of automated and manual content delivery services. How did I decide which strategy to use? Based on the business goals for each Twitter account. [see content strategy stages above].

How about you? Do you have Twitter content strategy? Does it work for you? Does it meet your business and personal goals?

Fact:

Increase in sales of ½ pints of beer on Thursday nights from 45 to 300-350 using Social Media channels to promote this offering.

Fact:

Sales revenue growth 10% for the year vs projected 3% due to increased customer awareness and engagement via social media channels.

About Tied House Brewing:

Family owned and operated since 1988 local micro-brewery in Mountain View, Ca.

Main Social Media Channels used:

Twitter and Facebook.

Tools:

use of free tools such as Google Analytics, Facebook Fan Pages Analytics, Google Alerts to monitor and analyze social media activities.

Here is my interview with Carolyn Hopkins, Director of Marketing and Events at Tied House Brewing – the master mind behind social media strategies and execution!

Here are top 5 reasons:

1. Make sure your Twitter profile is updated and contains descriptive info on who you are and what you do;
2. Your tweets: if all you do is auto-feed your twitter updates, do not engage in conversations [unless you are CNN ..] people most likely will not follow you;
3. Frequency of your tweets – if you very very casual Twitter user – also can be a flag to not follow you;
4. Numbers: correlation of number of people you follow and people follow you. If you have much higher number of people you follow vs people who follow you back – might make people think twice to follow you or not;
5. Overall number of people you follow. If you follow gazillions of people then some people would think you are not selective and just going after numbers of connections.

And of course these 5 reasons applicable in case of complete strangers looking at your Twitter presence and trying to decide to follow you or not.

Feel free to add your thoughts and your considerations!

And then Buzz came along. At first I enabled my Tweets to populate Buzz stream – was too much noise, much of which was irrelevant to my Buzz followers. Stopped. Then I set up auto-updates from Buzz to Twitter. That worked just fine, but what I was missing was that constant presence factor on Buzz that I wanted to have. I decided to connect Google Reader to Buzz, which in turn auto-updates Twitter. And I populate shared Google Reader folders via RSS feed built on Yahoo! Pipes.

I think I finally found the right Google Buzz content strategy that works fine for me.

Of course, I am just talking about semi-automated part of online presence, which contributes to about 20-30% of my total online communications – I know I will be attacked by all the social media gurus on a subject of online conversations/dialog,etc.. – yes, we all agree here, much needed and has to be a significant part of the overall social networking communications strategy

Hope you can share with your lessons learned/best practices!

click FOLLOW on TWITTER button – Happy Shopping!

How about you? Do you have your own rules you use on Twitter? Your top 5 do’s and don’ts please!

Here are some more examples (created by Marc Smith):

After looking at multiple maps created for brands, events, people it became obvious to me that there are certain attributes of the map I am paying attention to. And those visual graphs represent so good the things we should be looking at when evaluating our twitter activities. Though there are no perfect tools that will give you a full and complete and detailed analysis of everything you do on Twitter, there are some that will help you to get just enough data to be able to make high level assessments and take actions.

Here is your high level check list that will help you – the social media network analysis executive – to assess the success of your brand’s twitter engagements by specific areas. By no means is this a complete check list of everything you need to measure and analyze on Twitter, but should give you a good starting point.

The measurements below depend on your business goals and will have different weighting factors specific to your business.

Examples of the ways to capture a) analysis strategy; b) results analysis strategy.

b) And for each measurement on a specific date you will document results, action items, why previous actions worked/did not, what changes if any need to be applied.

People

• How many people follow my brand on twitter;
• How many people I follow on twitter;
• Do I follow people who have mentioned, RT, @reply to my tweets?
• How many people who follow me have high level of influence?
• Are people who tweet about my brand connected?
• Are there clusters of people who tweet about my brand? [by geography, by interests, etc..]
• Do I follow competitors?
• Do I follow influencers [analysts, reporters, etc..];
• Do influencers follow me?
• Who do I need to follow?
• Who do I want to follow me?

Analyzing your twitter people data is very important – I do not think you’ll argue with me here. You can learn so much from the data collected, like we found out from our analysis of one of the conference maps that there were two clusters of communities of people who attended the conference: mathematicians and social scientist. We also found out that those two clusters had just a few interaction points between them. And we found couple of people [bridges] who were well connected with both clusters. The recommendation for the conference organizer in this case might be to talk to those “bridge” people and ask them to connect more people from each cluster.

Tweets

• How many people RT my tweets?
• How many people @reply to my tweets?
• How many people execute an action based on a link in my tweet?
• What people tweet about: product info; product purchasing decisions; product quality;  etc..?
• How many influencers RT my tweets?
• Sentiments analysis – good, bad, etc…
• Lists you are in and their categories.

Assessment of your tweets will indicate quality and business relevance of content you provide. Quality is easy to understand. How many people RT, @replied, etc .. should give you a good feel on quality. Business relevance is as important as quality of content. Example: you might be tweeting all day long great barbeque tips and have zillions of people RT and follow you, etc.. but is this relevant to your business if you are not a barbeque sauce maker, cook, etc.. if you are in a different industry all together? Probably not. To meet your business strategy you want to make sure that most of the people who follow you and you converse with are the people who either own or want to own your product or use your services, people who know a lot about the space you are in, people who write about the space you are in, etc.. Again, we are talking about “tweeting for business” here! If you are not capturing the attention of your target audience on Twitter you definitely need to do some work on a content side of your tweets.

How about you? What strategy worked or did not work for your brand on Twitter?

What do you measure and how?

Share your thoughts!