New Social Media: 2012

Internship at KSL

KSL in Salt Lake City is offering an internship in New Social Media. Check out this link for more information and how to apply.

Back to Class

The trial is over. Back to class. I look forward to seeing you all tomorrow, Wednesday, November 28th.

Yes, there's an assignment due...

There's some confusion as to when the Contextual Impact of Social Media assignment is/was due. The schedule indicates yesterday, November 12. In my review of all your blogs, there's only a handful of posts dealing with any kind of contextual analysis. The rest of you have until Friday to finish and post your findings and opinions.

There are some extraordinary examples such as Scholarism, and Pretty Little Liars that I'd recommend to any social media student for reading and inspiration.

I'm noticing a number of formatting issues from line spacing and text wrapping to changing fonts and point sizes. Please edit the html code of your postings to reflect this criteria:

Twelve point font size in easily readable font in Helvetica or Times New Roman influences,
Black text on white or contrasting background,
Paragraph spacing,
Embedded links to your research,
Attributions to any images used that are not your own,
Clearly titled posts.

Your blog serves as your portfolio for this class. Please manage it to represent your best work.

Education 2.0

First

Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion,

or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;

or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;

or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,

and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Rules

Page Insights

The best way to get your audience to engage with your content and share it with friends is to understand what the people you’re reaching care about. Page Insights gives you the data you need to gather these consumer insights.

With Page Insights, you can:

Assess the performance of your Page
Learn which content resonates with your audience
Optimize how you publish to your audience so that people will tell their friends about you

For example, you can look at each of your posts and see the ones that are getting the most virality. Post more of this type of content if you want to increase the number of people talking about you.

Insights can be found on the Admin Panel of your page. It looks like this...

Insights Data
You can access your Insights data through the dashboard, or export it using the Export Data button in the top right corner.

If you decide to export it, a dialog box will allow you to specify:

The date range for which you want to get data
Whether you would like to get the data as as an Excel file or as a CSV (comma separated values) file
Whether you want to see data at the Page level, or for each individual Page post

Insights Data Types
In the Overview mode of your Insight page, four metrics at the top allow you to quickly assess the size and engagement of your audience.

Total Likes: The number of unique people who like your Page as of the last day of your selected date range.
Friends of Fans: The number of unique people who are friends with the people who liked your page as of the last day of your selected date range.
Talking About This: The number of unique people who have created a story about your Page during your selected date range. A story is created when someone:

Likes your Page
Likes, comments on, or shares your Page post
Answers a Question you've asked
Responds to your event
Mentions your Page
Tags your Page in a photo
Checks in or recommends your Place

Weekly Total Reach:The number of unique people who have seen any content associated with your Page (including any Ads or Sponsored Stories pointing to your Page) during your selected date range.
Total Subscribes: The number of people subscribed to your page.

The Likes mode of your Insights page breaks your audience down demographically by gender, age, location and language.

Writing Effective Ad Copy

Clarity - State exactly why offer is compelling and why your target audience should care.

Proximity - Don't distance your persona by coming across as a sterile company, humanize your text, make the appeal interpersonal.

Specificity - Facebook allows you to target specific persona, capitalize on this valuable advantage.

Delivery - Don't over-promise, especially with give-aways and contests. Follow through or you'll spend much of your time spinning.

Variety - Shake it up, link ads to specific marketing draws germane to your service or product.

Spontaneity - Have your clear call-to-action lead to a click.

Some ad copy to discuss...

GGC Expeditions
More shoreline than California.
Reserve your kayak for a Spring expedition.

GGC Expeditions
All the adventure with a minimum of risk.
Reserve your family's spot in our next expedition.

GGC Expeditions
Rent a real RV and see the West like few others do,
paddling slot canyons and exploring ancient places
you'll never find on the Interstate.

GGC Expeditions
Reserve your next expedition,
but only after we've sworn you to secrecy.

Creating a Profile Logo

Facebook's rather rigid format in Timeline can be a bit off putting when it comes to creating something visual that pops your page. To make this more difficult, Facebook changes dimensions on a whim, so it pays to keep up with their changes to preserve the continuity of the look of your page.

The current sizes for the profile and banner are 160x160 and 851x315 pixels as seen above. When creating your profile image, you'll want to do so in 180x180, keeping enough negative space to be automatically cropped when you upload it to your page.

Now that the sizes are determined, you can create the image identity. There are as many workarounds to this as there are desktop publishing applications. I've decided to use one that isn't, it's a presentation application instead, Apple's Keynote.

The Southern Utah Miata Enthusiasts and Gliding Glen Canyon Expeditions are two pages I'm managing for the purposes of demonstrating for this class. Both needed a makeover in the cover and profile pics to establish a better brand identity.

For SUME, I created a simple slide in Keynote with two separated words, SUME, the acronym for the club, and ZOOM, playing on Mazda's marketing catchphrase, ZOOM ZOOM. I typed out the words independent from each other so I could arrange them vertically (following the 180 ratio of the profile image).

Once I was happy with the arrangement and size - the bigger the better for resolution's sake - I brought the slide full screen and took a screen shot of it on my iPad, turning it into a png file now stored in my photos.

It looks like this.

I then imported the file to my iMac desktop, uploaded it to my SUME Facebook page where I edited the cropping of the image and saved. The result...

Despite the centered text, when it uploads and crops it goes a hair asymmetrical. Were I a bit more anal I'd go back and rework this. But I'm not.

I also changed the cover photo to one that had some negative space wherein the profile image could nest, using the diagonal vectors of the image to draw the eye to the content of the header.

For the Gliding Glen Canyon page I wanted an identity in the context of kayaking. Again, using Keynote on one slide, I created the logo grouping the words "Gliding," "Glen" and "Canyon" using the same font and spacing them creating a word picture. Creating each word as its own design element provides this flexibility. I then added the word "expeditions" changed it to a 33pt Copperplate font in all caps and positioned it beneath the word picture as a foundation.

Next, I added an image that as lots of negative space while incorporating the kayak theme. I should note that all the photography is mine, composing and shooting to the end of using these images in design.

Keynote allows elements to be placed foreground and background. I selected the image, made it go background and placed it underneath the text to get the desired composition.

The result...

I left space around the image knowing I would be cropping this in Facebook. An oversight on my part was not nailing the vertical ratio at something beyond 180, inducing a black edge at the bottom beyond the image's frame.

I changed the cover image as well, to bring in texture and contrast to the blue while keeping with the kayak theme. It helps that the colors are complementary.

And now the page looks like this...

Vanity Usernames

Your targeted market can find your Facebook page more intuitively if you've created a vanity username.

Facebook allows custom usernames within the page's URL. For example, I use an alias in just about everything I do, from my blog, imnosaint.wordpress.com to the vanity plate on my car, IMNOSNT. Go to http://www.facebook.com/ImNoSaint62 and guess what you'll find?

You can do the same with your Facebook page. Go to http://www.facebook.com/username/ and follow the prompts, heeding their warning that you'd better be sure of the name - you can only change it once.

When Facebook introduced this feature over one million vanity names were claimed within the first hour. Assetize.com put hundreds up for sale after they went on a vanity name feeding frenzy, turning around to sell popular vanity names to the highest bidders.

Now you can find Gliding Glen Canyon expeditions at http://www.facebook.com/glidingglencanyon, and Southern Utah Miata Enthusiasts at http://www.facebook.com/sumezoom. Clever, huh? I made that one up all by myself.

(In case you couldn't figure it out, Mazda's catch phrase is "Zoom Zoom.")

Hashtagging the Debate

Watch the Presidential Debate tonight, network of your choice, though it's my duty and ethical obligation to encourage you to watch anything other than Fox News.

While watching, follow the debate on a social media of your choice. The most popular will be Twitter and Facebook.

For Twitter, you can find popular hashtags online. The official Twitter hashtag is #debates.

For the uninitiated this might be confusing at first. What will help is having the ability to watch or listen to the debate in real time while using hashtags that relate to the content. These may include #taxes, #deficit, #healthcare, and #lyingsack.

On Facebook, follow the feeds on the candidate's pages.

Take a few notes, or better, a few screen shots of the feed you're following. What debate rhetoric stirred things up socially?

At the end of the evening, post your thoughts on your blog. This is a great artifact to see social media in action and to actually become a part of it.

Taking Social Media for Granted

Heads Up...

Your Facebook plans, the first three items on the rubric, are due this week. Be prepared to present your plan to the class on Wednesday and Friday, much like Jared and Hillary did on Monday. Looking forward to seeing your directions.