Archive for November, 2009

One of the important aspects of a Social Media presence is your ability to measure its effectiveness in achieving your end goal.

Twitter is considered to be the current rock star of Social Media. Having such fame, it will inevitably end up as a potential spoke for your Social Media Hub. It therefore becomes important to be able to measure its effectiveness.

Defining Twitter Success

While most “experts” and “gurus” will say that the key to success in Twitter is having a large number of followers, I’m telling you that isn’t the case. The quality of your followers is much more important than the number of followers you actually have. Sending dynamic messages (with links to articles, photos, etc.) with good content will cause engaged followers to retweet your messages and engage you and your agency in conversation. There is more value in these types of Twitter activities than just sending non-dynamic propaganda.

This becomes evident when you begin looking at these three free analytic tools that will help you determine the effectiveness of your Agency on Twitter:

TweetStats

This is a very simple tool that measures the number of tweets your account sends out on a monthly basis, as well as the density of messages and their times sent over the course of a week. The tool also gives you insight into the top ten users you have retweeted and who have “@” messaged you. While the analytics aren’t deep, this is a great little tool to measure just how much your Agency uses Twitter, and to be able to quickly spot any gaping holes in your Twitter messaging approach.

Twitalyzer

This is a more advanced tool for analyzing your effectiveness on Twitter. Twitalyzer breaks your statistics down into 5 groups: Influence, Signal, Generosity, Velocity, and Clout. Twitalyzer breaks down your activity on Twitter, coupled with the activity of your followers, and is able to develop a better picture of your account than just counting the number of followers you have. Twitalyzer excels as a tool used over time. I would recommend analyzing your Twitter account once a week on a set day, and once a month of analytics has been recorded you can look at the changes in a time based analysis.

Twitter Analyzer

This is by far the prettiest user interface of the bunch. Twitter Analyzer provides you with a slew of statistics including your Popularity and Reach. However the real hidden jewel of the service is showing you the number of your followers who were recently online using Twitter. This is a hugely important statistic to know and understand, because the truth is the number of your overall followers are less important than the number of your engaged followers when you send out a Tweet.

Bill Delaney of Montgomery County Fire Rescue used Blog Talk Radio to create a podcast about Holiday (really year round) cooking safety tips. Blog Talk Radio is a free social media tool to record a podcast. The file can be embedded in a site as I have done below, accessed from Blog Talk Radio, or used to generate a podcast.

Blog Talk Radio allows live call in and text chat. I called in with two of my questions and was pleased to interact with Bill voice-to-voice. Previously we have interacted just on Twitter and Facebook.

Bill is the Social Media public information officer and program manager for community safety for MCFRS. You can follow him on Twitter or visit the MCFRS blog.

A common feature for the Hubs of Emergency Response Agency websites is badges and buttons that link to the agency spokes. Remember some of the spokes you can link to from your hub include:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Flickr

Twitter has a set of buttons available as a link from the Twitter Goodies page. Adding a Twitter button is as simple as copying the HTML code associated with button and pasting it into a widget, sidebar, post, or page.

View this screencast for a quick demonstration on how I added the Twitter button to this post.

Once your Agency has established a blog, it is important to create fresh content so that its growth does not stagnate. Otherwise it eventually will suffer from dystrophy and become useless.

There are many different ideas and theories regarding ideal posting frequency and the posting day/time. This is something you can decide best practice by performing an analysis of a blog’s analytics. As a simple guideline for any Agency to use before such a study is conducted, our recommendation is a minimum 3-4 posts a week published between 7:00am and 9:00am local time for general posts. Breaking news and alerts should be posted as promptly as possible.

Here are 7 types of blog posts agencies can create to fulfill that type of obligation:

• News – Share the latest news from inside your organization as well as current trending issues in the community and how it can potentially affect your organization
• Educational – Every month and week of the year has awareness campaigns built around them, as the Safety Observances 2010 list and 2010 Health Observance Calendar shows. You can use these calendars to prepare content in advance and spread awareness through your community
• Celebratory – Celebrating jobs well done, agency successes, and highlighting positive effects is a great way to communicate value to your community
• Promotional – Promote a new or long standing service, safety program, or event by providing an in depth look using both words and images
• Preparational – Prepare both the residents and responders of your community for potential disasters that are specific for your region through blog posts on a seasonal cycle
• Alerts – Alert your responders and community to impending disasters, such as a potentially damaging storm front or budget cutting legislation that will negatively affect service delivery
• Linking – Share links to news items, situation updates, and important information that will affect your community

Whether you are using your blog as a hub for your online presence or not, keeping it well updated and a resource for your community is a must. Utilizing these simple blog post types should be able to keep you blogging all year long!

Which blog post type (from above or your own) do you think works best for your agency?

Download – Safety Observances 2010

PIO Social Media officers can and should schedule and automate the delivery of Twitter messages for several reasons:

1. New content from your hub and spokes may be of interest to your Twitter readers and will bring them to your Hub and Spokes – potentially for the first time.

2. Twitter readers can visit your Twitter feed at any time of day from any place in the world. If you are in the eastern time zone an 0800 post will not likely be seen by your West coast friends. Scheduling the same Tweet to post again at 1100, 1500, and 1900 eastern time will ensure that it is seen by more of your friends.

3. Use Twitter to announce upcoming events and programs by scheduling Tweets to post each day before the event. Consider making changes to each subsequent Tweet, like a ten reasons to attend list.

Remember, Twitter, like much of social media is like standing at the edge of Niagara Falls. Many social media users just have a few moments to glimpse at the raging of torrent of information that is passing by them on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or YouTube. Scheduling and automating posting of tweets increases the number of opportunities for your message to be seen.

I use two Twitter tools for scheduling and automating Tweets:

1. Twitterfeed.com “feeds your blog to Twitter.” It takes the RSS feed from my blog eps411.com and feeds the blog post title and shortened url into my Twitter account @gfriese

2. Hootsuite.com also feeds any RSS feed into a Twitter account. Hootsuite also has several other excellent features for Social Media PIOs.
a. ability to post a single Tweet to multiple Twitter accounts (Tweetdeck also has this feature).
b. ability to schedule Tweets to post in the future. Schedule a Tweet for posting several times in a single day or to repeat every day leading up to a special event.
c. a URL shortening service that allows tracking of clicks on the shortened URLs from a Twitter post.

A common question I am asked is, “Do you think readers will be annoyed if you are scheduling Tweets and reposting the same Tweet?” Potentially they will be. The risk is greatest for readers that only follow a small number of other Twitter users. If a user is only following 10 people they are looking at a trickle of Tweets and not Niagara Falls. Instead of slowing down your torrent for these users recommend other people for them to follow with a Twitter list or #FollowFriday (see Follow Friday: What is it?)

In our technologically enhanced society where multi-tasking on multiple applications across two cinema sized screens is considered the norm, it is only a matter of time before non-sanctioned media is created.

There have been quite a few instances where items were made public on social networks accidentally on personal accounts by their owners. The reasons these accidents occur vary between user weariness, ignorance of the public visibility of the message or its potential distribution, and the security compromise of an account. Repercussions from such events can be both detrimental to the creator and have a long lasting effect. It is only a matter of time before an Agency participating in Social Media would have the same type of accident.

Such was the case in Jefferson Parish, Louisianna when lewd e-mails were published on the parish’s Twitter account accidentally. So what should an Agency do when this happens?

5 Things For An Agency To Do After A Social Media Accident (or Ooops)

• Remove the unintentional/offending media – While there is a great probability that it has been cached or a screenshot has been taken of the material, to leave it active on the account is in effect an endorsement. While the majority of platforms offer a DELETE option, if you are unable or unsure how to remove it, e-mail a platform’s help contact
• Admit a mistake was made – It happened in full public view. You deleted it. Now admit the mistake on the same media platform and your Hub. Not admitting the mistake will leave you open for accusations of trying to “bury” or “hide” the accident and will call into question your Agency’s trustworthiness and authority
• Be transparent in the investigation of the accident – If there is an investigation, make sure to mention that in your admission. Be timely and conclude the investigation promptly with the results also made public
• Be forthcoming with how you will prevent it from occurring again – Be sure to explain the safe measures that have been put into place after the accident to prevent the occurrence from happening again
• Continue providing value through the Social Media channel – Do not suspend or abandon your Social Media presence due to the accident. Accident’s happen, people make mistakes, and your admission and transparency in the matter will earn back the trust of your audience. Continue to provide the same value you did as before so that trust is not misplaced

To Jefferson Parish‘s credit, they handled the accident nearly flawlessly by removing the offending media and admitting to the mistake. My only grievance with their handling of the situation is that they have suspended using the Twitter account while they look for safeguards to prevent this from happening again.

While their search is admirable, I say Tweet on! The best way to develop a safeguard is to continue to use the service, and in using the service they will continue to provide value for their community.