Now that you have had a chance to go through The 8 Essentials (TM) in part one, take this opportunity to meet with your team and board to make the ultimate guest list of every strategic partner, company sponsor or high-level donor you have wanted to secure for your organization. This is your dream list. Put it all in there, because they won’t come if you don’t invite them!

Your Action Plan: Start by making a list of the key people and companies you are looking to connect with over the course of the next year. Start with who you know, then build toward who you want to know. Through this process you might even find a new group of people you didn’t know that you want to know!
Tip: Creating a Google doc is a simple and easy way to get started with your list. It can be easily shared with your internal team, board and any high-level volunteers that might be helping you with outreach during the year.

Defining your relationships: Fundraising is all about relationship building. You’re inspiring people to invest in your organization’s mission. This might feel strange at first, but rating relationships will go a long way in helping you prepare for your year. This idea came from Keith Ferrazi’s, author of the book, Who’s Got Your Back. I adapted his relationship measurement tool for you here:

(-1) Damaged– Someone who has had a bad experience in any capacity with the organization. The relationship needs repair
(0) Prospect – A potential contact, someone you haven’t met yet and are adding to your action plan
(1) New – You have been introduced, & will follow up on the conversation
(2) Engaged – They have an understanding of the organization, maybe attended an event or made a visit, but haven’t made a donation
(3) Donor – They have a deep understanding of the organization and have committed with time, talent and/or treasure

Once you’ve defined the relationship, start tabling out your list of contacts, like this:

Relationship Level: 1
Point Person: Executive Director
Company: “Large Company”
Contact Name: Jane Doe
Title: VP of West Coast Marketing
Contact Info: Jane.doe.c.Com
Info/Interests: Met @ networking event; married w/ 3 children; loves baseball; never attended an event
Initial Ask: Purchase a table @ annual gala for $5,000
Timeline: Early June, 3 months before gala

Once you start pulling these together, drop them in a spreadsheet for easy tracking!

Strategy: Each person on your list has a set of interests and unique ways to contribute time, talent or treasure to your organization. So, be sure to specify why you want to reach out them and how they can help your organization.

Timeline: Next, sort your list by relationship level and determine the order of people to whom you’ll be reaching out. You’re making a networking plan, so start with the networkers in your community. Set monthly and quarterly goals for outreach. I often find teams check-in with one another frequently, but are always chipping away at their massive yearly goal. Quarterly goals are key to keeping on track and staying motivated!

Planning Tip: Your “half-way mark” in fundraising will not always be six months into the calendar year. If your annual gala raises most of your operating budget, but isn’t until October and you don’t see much activity during the summer months, consider aiming to hit your 50 percent mark by the end of May/early June.

If you enjoyed these exercises today, be sure to come back next week for part three where you’ll learn how to leverage social media for prospect research to identify partners and sponsors. I’d love to hear how this worked for you. Tweet me @bradyhahn or leave your comments below.
 

Brady Hahn is a facilitator, researcher and strategist, Brady specialing in matchmaking non-profits, for-profits and social entrepreneurs. She has developed more than 80 professional development and special events for organizations such as Step Up Women’s Network, Pamper Me Fabulous, Social Media Week and her own series, Social Media For Social Good in partnership with Digital LA.

I started off my search by looking for all of the talk about Paris going on in the past six months. In that time I was able to find 1.9 million blogs, 1.7 million online news articles, 1 million forum postings and 4.8 million tweets mentioning Paris.

Trended out over time we can see that like most other cities we’ve looked at, with Twitter being the dominent social channel. What’s interesting to note in the popularity chart below is how the news seems to dip every weekend. It’s as if much less is going on in Paris on the weekends, but I find that hard to believe.

I then broke down where all the chatter about Paris was coming from. Paris has a reputation of being one of the most romantic places on earth, so it’s not surprise that it garners a lot off attention from the rest of the world. 29% of all the talk about Paris was coming out of France. The next three countries talking about Paris seem to always be top countries in conversations; the USA (26.8), the UK (6.5%) and Canada (3.8%). What’s interesting is that Germany talked about Paris just as much as Canada, and Brazil (3.2%) wasn’t far behind either.

Next, I pulled up a buzzgraph, which shows us words we find most connected to talk about our search terms, which in this case is Paris. Unfortunately, there was nothing terribly interesting in this particular buzzgraph. Most of the words were quite generic, such as “France” in the center, the country Paris resides in. As well we see “Sarkozy” who is the current president of France and “Europe.” However, there is one thing that seems to stand out a bit here. You may have noticed the word “niggas” towards the top of the buzzgraph. This isn’t there because of racism in any way, but rather thanks to Jay-Z and Kanye’s wildly popular track “Niggas In Paris” from their Watch The Throne album which came out in the fall.

I then started to dig a little deeper into the people that were talking about Paris though social media. Over in the blogs that were talking about Paris I found that both men and women seem to have an affinity about Paris. The split between the two genders was almost dead even with females making 51% of the mentions and males the other 49%. I also found that bloggers aged 21-35 talked about Paris the most (51%). What’s interesting here is that every other age demographic talked about Paris the exact same amount, with 16.3% of conversations coming from each other category.

I then moved over to Twitter. Here the gender split was almost the same as it was in the blogs, except that females moved up another 1% to 52% while males made up the other 48%. When I looked for the top Twitter sources mentioning Paris the most I found something interesting that I hadn’t found in any other city before. The usual classified type accounts still existed, like @Perfectly_Paris, which does apartment rentals for Paris, but there was also a great amount of accounts from outside of France. One of these accounts was a music producer named @HeleneScrive who seems to have a popular song called “Paris sous La Pluie.” There were quite a few other music related accounts like @Hitboy_SC, from California, who seemed to mention Jay-Z and Kanye’s track “Niggas In Paris” quite often.

For the last part of my analysis on what the social world is saying about Paris I looked into two of the larger activity spikes that I found in the past six months. The first spike mainly occurred on Twitter between November 7-11. During this time the ATP World Tour was holding it’s French Masters in Paris. We can see that “masters” is a strongly connected word in the buizzgraph, but we can also go through and pick out a few tennis player’s names such as Novak “Djokovic” and Tomáš “Berdych” who were playing in the tournament.

The second spike I looked at was much more recent. From January 26-29 we can see a spike in activity about Paris on Twitter as well as in the news and on blogs. This spike was a little more interesting as their are a few key things going on here that mention Paris. First, is that the football (soccer for the North American’s) are all abuzz about the potential for Chelsea player Rodrigo Alex Dias da Costa to transfer over to the Paris St “Germain” team. The other thing going on in the buzzgraph actually has nothing to do with Paris the city. It actually has to do with Paris “Jackson,” daughter of the King of Pop, who recently said in public that she has a thing for Justin Bieber. If there’s anything that I’ve learned from analyzing social medis stats over the past few years is that anything that has to do with Bieber spreads quickly and in large amounts through social channels. Why that is, I can’t really tell you. Ask the closest 13 year old girl, she’ll probably be able to tell you why.

This was one of the more interesting host city studies I’ve done so far just because “Paris” seems to appear in talk all over the world and not all of it has to do with our Social Media Week City. I’ll be back again soon with another Sysomos look at yet another Social Media Week host cities.

I had the chance to speak to Andrew Denham, the founder of Bicycle Academy at the very end of 2011. In this interview Andrew:

• Explains how the Bicycle Academy works and what inspired him to set it up
• Why he chose to crowdfund it
• Why he chose the platform that he did
• What he believes made the campaign such a successful one
• Gives advice for anyone else looking to run a crowdfunding campaign

TW: Andrew, thanks very much for taking the time to speak to us. Why don’t you start by telling us a little more about the Bicycle Academy?

AD: The Bicycle Academy is a place to learn how to make bikes, so it’s a frame building school. It has a bit of a twist on normal frame building schools in that the first frame you build you don’t actually get to keep. So you are taught how to make a bicycle frame by way of brazing, which is like welding, but rather than getting to keep that you give it away and it goes to charities, it goes to help people in Africa who really need bikes to get through their everyday lives.

 
TW: So what gave you that idea?

AD: Well, it’s a bit silly really. I run a bicycle event in my home town called the Cobble Wobble. It’s a bicycle race up a really steep cobbled hill, and I thought it would be really funny to try and build a custom bike that would look a bit like a funicular train going up hill. So, it would have a tiny front wheel and a big rear wheel so it would look level as it ascended the hill, and I started looking at frame building course and first of all they are very expensive. And secondly, you couldn’t really build something silly like that for a couple of reasons.

One because you probably would not want to spend all that money on doing so, and two they are really geared up toward more touring frames or mountain bike frames so it wasn’t an option to build a Frankenbike. So, I was thinking about that and at the same time I was also trying to do some work to help some bicycle charities and one who distributes bikes in Africa. It was apparent that there was a distinct shortage of certain types of bikes, so adult male bikes, so a gents bikes really. And not only that but some of the bikes that were sent out were sent with the best of intentions but in many ways they take an awful lot work to keep these bikes going. You may or may not know that there are 31 different types of seat post on a bicycle, in terms of the diameter of the post so imagine that across all of the other components on a bicycle and all these bikes being sent out to Africa, just imagine how difficult it is to keep those bikes running when things go wrong or break?

So, I had the idea, and it’s not a new idea, wouldn’t it be great if there was a standardised bike and I was thinking how could I help to make that happen? And so the two things got married together in my head and I said what if you went on a frame building course and the first frame you built was this standard bike and that got given away. For that to work, people would only be willing to do that if there was a bit of a trade off so let’s make it a bit cheaper than other frame building schools and let’s allow people to come back and build their own frame as and when they want to. So they can make use of the workshop as a hack space to build their own bikes. So it all started to balance out and things seemed to make sense. There was a nice philanthropic thread to it which gave it heart and soul but it was also democratising frame building so that people could do so that otherwise perhaps wouldn’t have been able to afford to do so.

 
TW : I guess these are also skills that are disappearing as well as these days a lot of frames are carbon fibre, so frame building is a declining skill probably.

AD: It is, yes; and we are going focus on steel frames for two reasons. Firstly it’s far more accessible. Brazing is an accessible method of joining two metal tubes together. So, we are going to specialise on steel and you can do an awful lot with it. It’s cheap and it makes an awful lot of sense, but you are right these are skills that are fading, there was a time when every town had a bicycle frame builder and now there are very few and there are only two places in the UK now that offer frame building courses and they are quite expensive. They are very good training providers but most people can’t afford it.

TW: So you are setting up the Bicycle Academy, people can go learn how to build a frame, first frame goes out to Africa then they can come back and use the facilities again. To do that from scratch takes significant capital investment and the way you decided to do that was using Crowdfunding. So what made you want to use Crowdfunding as a method for raising funds for this particular scheme?

AD: I think it was a number of things. First of all Crowdfunding is a really romantic way of funding a business, and that is a deliberate choice of words. I think there is something lovely about people rallying together to make something happen that they believe in, and the Bicycle Academy is something I certainly believe in and a lot of people who have joined us along the way certainly do as well. And so it made sense that this was a way of funding that might work.

But if I was being objective about it, I wasn’t hugely keen to go to the banks or an investor because it can be really expensive and it can mean you have this horrible thing looming over your head, which can add a lot of pressure. But that is not to say you don’t have a responsibility to the people that back you during crowdfunding– you absolutely do but it’s different. The mentality is different, they are not simply in it to make money. In fact, typically crowdfunding is not equity-based, it is reward-based. So, someone will contribute money to your project in exchange for something.

So, for the bicycle academy we offered a number of rewards. £20 would get a lovely T-Shirt and bits an pieces. £50 got a T-shirt and bespoke bag; right up to £1000 for a one-to-one course at the Bicycle Academy. And so what it has allowed me to do is effectively pre-sell almost a year’s worth of course places and put that profit from those courses straight back into the bicycle academy which pays for the start-up costs before we have delivered any courses. So, it’s a sort of backwards way of operating in any ways but it’s what makes it so attractive because I have the money up front and I can invest in the set-up costs and tooling I need and know I have people coming on the courses.
 

TW: It’s an interesting point because this is one of the great propositions about crowdfunding, particularly for a product-based enterprise in that you are essentially selling pre-sales and it’s quite a nice way of getting into commercial operation. So did you know much about crowdfunding before you started the campaign?

AD: I had seen some of the almost fairytale success stories on Kickstarter, the Lunatik watch amongst others so I was aware of it. But I think when I came up with the idea of the Bicycle Academy it wasn’t something that I thought of as something I wanted to pursue as a business venture per se, it was just something that I want to see if I could just make happen and potentially set up as a not for profit. But it evolved and is something that has a lot of potential and so I am committed to making a business of it.

But crowdfunding seems to fit quite early on and after coming up with the idea in November 2010, I did a lot of research into crowdfunding over the following six to eight months looking at other projects and basically seeing what worked and didn’t work and to look at other brands as well as I think there are brands that if they were to crowdfund almost anything they would succeed just because they have the right sort of following. People who really believe in the brand or products. I think if you want to succeed in crowdfunding, unless you have some ground breaking product that people don’t want to know where it came from or about you they just want the thing, you need to have a connection with your audience so you have these evangelists customers if you are already trading or people that just know what you are trying to do and are supporters.
 

TW: So they have been exposed to the theme and idea of what you are trying to to?

AD:Yes so over that period I had been blogging and updating people, and from the first point that I starting telling people I had this idea that’s is pretty cool and it could be a really good thing, people started following and it picked up some momentum. And the people that were following it really believed in it and I was fortunate to have those kind of supporters I guess so it really fitted that crowdfunding would work for Bicycle Academy.
 

TW: So before you began the process of raising money you had built up a rapport with followers you had primed them to exactly what the academy was about, got them enthused about it before you had even begun to raise the prospect of starting a crowdfunding campaign.

AD: Yes absolutely, and the next stage was to explain that the crowdfunding was going to come. In June I announced that we were going to crowdfunding and June to November (when the crowdfunding began) is a considerable time to be building up anticipation about it. I had a countdown on my website and people were really excited to the extent that when we actually did launch people were falling over themselves to back the project, they were so eager to do it. In fact Peoplefund.it , the platform we used, launched on November 1st but the actual site was visible a couple of days before and people were so eager they found the website and we had put a couple of test pledges on it just to check the functionality but people thought that the site had gone live and were really worried that they were likely to miss out and before it had launched we had already secured £6000 in pledges. A couple of people had seen it and another couple saw it that others were pledging and I started to get all these emails saying “I thought it hadn’t launched yet” which was brilliant.
 

TW: And you were using blogging tools, so were you using any other social media tools to build that rapport and that relationship?

AD: Absolutely, it started with a posterous blog and then a Facebook page, and I stress page rather than account because people often set up a personal account and that is the wrong thing to do for a number of reasons. One it’s not what is designed for and it’s not fair in terms of people’s privacy because you can see a lot more about them that is reasonable if you’re an organisation but pages also offer a lot of insights in terms of visitors which is really beneficial so it was a page and not an account. We also had twitter and a website. Now I am not someone that is an expert in these things but what I have learned, and I still do it, I refer to “we” as opposed to “I” because it is something bigger than you, it’s an organisation and people often speak of we even when it is just themselves that are doing something and makes them feel good and gives the whole thing credibility but I don’t think it does and one of the lessons I have learned other the past few months is just say “I” and sign of with your name because ultimately it is you that’s doing it and it’s important to create that connection.
 

TW: You mentioned that you used the platform Peoplefund.it What made you choose that particular platform?

AD: It was quite exciting really. I was approached by somebody involved in the project in June at the Bespoked Bristol – the hand made bicycle show. I spoke to them about the Bicycle Academy and they said they were starting this crowdfunding platform and that it would be ideal for me to crowdfund on their platform. So I learned a bit more about it. Peoplefund.it has been created by Keo Digital – which is part of the River Cottage Group, so it’s something that Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is involved with running and they are responsible for River Cottage, Fish Fight, Energy Share Landshare.
 

TW: So to put this in context for an international audience, these are very high profile organisations in the UK. Certainly Hugh Fearnley-Whitingstall a very well-known television personality within the UK.

AD : Yes absolutely and they have a hell of a lot of credibility and rightly so. They are very accomplished. There are a number of other crowdfunding platforms in the UK. It should be said you aren’t able to start a Kickstarter project from the UK unless you have a US bank account so that immediately closed that off but I believe that is something that is likely to change in the next year or so. So there are a limited number of platforms but crowdfunding is relatively young in the UK. There are not that many projects that have been started, not that many that have been successful and also of those that have been there are not many that have raised the amount of money that I needed. So it wasn’t as if there was an obvious choice in the UK and Peoplefund.it were new and they were launching and Bicycle Academy was selected as one of their 12 launch projects, so that was all very exciting. It was a bit of a gamble I guess, but everything felt right, and I believe in what they do outside of Peopelfund.it and so I thought it was a good fit.
 

TW: Great. And to cut a long story short, yours was a rip roaring success wasn’t it?

AD: Yes – I think we were 66% funded within 24 hours. We needed to raise £40,000 and we would have been 100% funded in three days but I ran out of course places. I had put a cap on the number of course places we offered, just because I wanted to see what happened really. We might have sold lots of the smaller pledges, but I got so many phone calls and emails begging me to release more than I did and we were 100% funded in five and a half days. So it was the first ever Peoplefund.it project to be funded, it’s the most funded UK reward-based crowdfunding project and I believe it is the fastest funded of projects over £1000, but I am sure that is changing all the time, so those claims may have changed by now, but certainly it was only a month or so ago.
 

TW: Well it certainly attracted a good deal of attention hence us speaking to you about it because it is such a recognised and successful campaign. You said that you did quite a lot of preamble and preparation work and that you feel this was useful in making your project a success. Are there any other factors do you think that helped make this a particularly good and successful campaign?

AD: I think there is two things really. You have to have something that people believe in. What I am trying to do with the Bicycle Academy are quite noble things to be doing and that’s not me being unreasonable. I am trying to generate bikes for people that really need them and I am doing that at cost and donating. I am taking far less money than I could for the courses to make them more accessible to a wider range of people. I am not personally going to be drawing any money from the project for the first year because I have planned it such that there will not be enough money to do that because what money there is goes straight back into it. But it is a profit making business, it’s not just a charity and I think that is important as well because for it to work in the long run it has to sustain my involvement. That means I have to generate some way of living from that. And I think people respect that and those kind of values resonated with people. We are making a wonderful skill accessible to people who would otherwise just not get a chance to do it and whilst doing so we are doing something really good for someone else and that completes a nice circle where everyone gets something from the process . So we generate bikes for people that need them, people learned skills themselves and they create an opportunity for themselves and they can go on to continue to build frames and if we do a good job then I get to make a living from it.
 

TW: But you also had quite a range of rewards available didn’t you?

AD: Yes and you have got to appreciate I was asking £500 for a course and whilst that is very reasonable for a frame building course it is also a lot of money and there are lots of people who support the Bicycle Academy but simply can’t take a course. So it was important to offer a broad range and so I offered pledges from £20, £50, £150, £300, £500, £1000 and £2000 and the only pledge tier that was not taken was the £2000, but every other pledge tier was used. We sold out of the £1000, £500, a large number of £300, £150 and scores of the smaller pledges as well.
 

TW: So there is a real diversity so that people with different tastes, different requirements, some people will want to build a frame some won’t, but you had something for all.

AD: Yes and it’s important to understand that whilst I have talked about the noble aspects of the Bicycle Academy, the people that back it, not everyone does it for purely philanthropic reasons, most people are doing it because they want something in return. It’s an exchange. So just as an equity investor would expect equity, you would expect that the vast majority that invest in this want something in return. Of course it has to be said that some don’t, so there was an option when someone backed the project, well there were two there was an option for people when they pledged to not take a reward, and an option for people to pledge more money than the reward value, so you could pledge £60 for a £50 reward, and it was really heart warming that there were a reasonable number of people who actually did that.
 

TW: So you had tangible and intangible returns really?

AD: Absolutely yes.
 

TW: So how much work was it? I know it was all over in six days but how much work was it if you take into account the setting up of the project the running it through the course of the six days? Was it straightforward, did it take more than you thought or less than you thought?

AD: It’s incredibly intensive. I can’t overstate how much work was involved simply dealing with people wanting to contact me during that period of time. Backers, various media outlets that had picked up the story being published by other outlets and gaining a lot of interest. And of course you want to, and it’s absolutely crucial that you, speak to everybody, that email and reply to everybody because crowdfunding is done over a finite period of time so you don’t get a second chance, so you need to take every opportunity. So I had a day job and still do and I did a very bad job during that week. So I had to retrospectively sign off a lot of my time to holiday and grovel to my boss and apologise for the impact that it had. But leading up to it, this is going to sound a bit silly but it’s absolutely true. I was working a five day week condensed into 4 so I would get to work for 9 and leave at between 8 and 8:15 and then I would get home from work and I would work almost every evening till 3 or 3:30 in the morning and be back at work at 9 the next day. And that was time spent doing everything from promoting, conceiving the idea. Obviously conception starts very early but you need for it to evolve into something that is tangibly viable and that takes an awful lot of time because you are planning a business. It’s important to state that crowdfunding isn’t something that you do once you have had a great idea and you say I have these people that know me or follow me and you just give it a go, because even if you succeed with the crowdfunding you are very unlikely to succeed with business unless you have though tit through fully because you might have overcommitted yourself. So it took a lot of time to understand how much money I needed to raise to be able to have a known amount of money to be able to set up the Bicycle Academy. So I guess from June through till November I was working at least 30 hours a week at the very least up to sometimes 40 to 50 hours a week on the Bicycle Academy. And lots of that isn’t just sat in front of your computer, you are speaking to people meeting people, but it’s time not doing other things.
 

TW: So would you advise anyone else to use crowdfunding? Do you think it’s a sensible method?

AD: Yes I think so it’s a wonderful way of realising a project. The fact that you generate the backers who become evangelists for your project ad your potential new business, that is something that some brands never have. And if you do it right you can get them straight away. But it’s really important to realise that none of it can be contrived. You can’t fake passion for something and you can’t fake the things that resonates with people. You can try and you may get away with it to a certain degree but it will quickly become apparent. I don’t think crowdfunding is right for every business. If you have a very straightforward profit making business that is focused on profit and not much else and it sells a thing or you distributes a thing that you buy and don’t really have much to do with, those sorts of businesses are fine and are a means to that end, but I don’t think they would work well with crowdfunding. I think crowdfunding works well if you have something that is special, be it a unique product or service or something that you are trying to achieve that is greater than that, then it’s ideal.
 

TW: And if somebody is going to run a crowdfunding campaign, given that you were a great success and I think we have identified some of the factors in that, if you were going to advise somebody who was taking up a crowdfunding project what would you advise them to avoid doing?

AD: Don’t overcommit. Be very realistic. So you might have the best of intentions to deliver upon the rewards that people have pledged for by a certain amount of time but add a really healthy buffer. That’s the first thing. Otherwise their first real experience of your project will be one of disappointment as they get their reward far later than expected. You can do that by being vague or giving yourself a lot of room. Be completely honest. You are not going to benefit in the slightest by trying to tow a corporate line, be open. So, if you don’t know how to do something, for example with the Bicycle Academy you got the idea for most things but you don’t know how where to get your frame building jigs from – that might have been the case, say “I know about this but I don’t know about this but I am going to learn” or “I could do with some help”. I have had over 300 man hours pledged to the Bicycle Academy from backers a lot of which is skilled advice. So Health and Safety advice for running a workshop and all sorts of things that are incredibly valuable to the project, because I was open about it and said look I could do with some help. And finally, consider the whole thing as an exchange. Don’t see it as something that backers are going to do for purely altruistic or philanthropic reasons. So asses if the reward you are offering is really fair and it should be something that is better than they could achieve outside of the crowdfunding project. So if you have a product, for example our course would normally be £600, which is still significantly cheaper than our competitors I guess, but I was offering them for £500 with a number of other rewards in addition so it makes it very attractive and encourages people to back the project.
 

TW: Fantastic. That is really interesting and very helpful and I am sure lots of people that listen to this or read this will see this as an inspiration to go out and do their own crowdfunding project and hopefully draw on some of the lessons you have shared there. Would you do it again Andrew?

AD: Yes I will, and it’s I will as opposed to I would. I can see that there will be a phase in the Bicycle Academy’s future where it would benefit again from crowdfunding. I have a lot of right ingredients, this wonderful group of people who really believe in the Bicycle Academy who have already backed it and as long as I can deliver on everything I promised I can’t see any reason why they wouldn’t be open to doing the whole thing again, at the right time. So there are times in its future then I can see it happening again for sure.
 

TW: Great. Well thanks for taking the time to speak with us today Andrew and we wish you well with the Bicycle Academy and hopefully if you are running some more crowdfunding projects in the future we can hear more about those and more about your success. So if anyone wants to find out more about the Bicycle Academy where do they go?

AD: Our website is www.thebicycleacademy.org twitter @bicycleacademy and we have a Facebook page. Once you go to the website you can pick it all from there.
 

TW: Brilliant. Thanks for speaking to us.

Tim Wright is a Director at twintangibles,  a Glasgow based business advisory and research firm that helps organisations generate value from social media and the mindset that underpins its use

twintangibles will be presenting a session on crowdfunding as part of Social Media Week London – for event event details go here

 
Jeff, can you tell us a little bit about how and why you decided to get involved with Social Media Week?
Social Media Week’s unique approach to viewing the transformational effects of social business on the world through the lens of each regional epicenter strongly aligns with the way Dachis Group views Social Business. In particular, New York has quickly become the global anchor of social media, so it was the appropriate venue for Dachis Group participation in Social Media Week.
 

Dachis Group helps design, implement and measure social business solutions for companies. What interesting trends have you seen emerging from the intersection of business and social technology and where do you see it going in the next few years?
The evolution of social has reached a critical inflection point. Brand Marketers have historically dabbled in social, funded largely out of discretionary or experimental marketing budgets. Most organizations have quietly been tasting, testing, and trying social, trying to understand the potential social has for their brands, its unique characteristics, and how to best integrate it into the overall marketing mix. At Dachis Group, we have witnessed a transformation in the latter half of 2011 as 2012 budgets began their planning cycles. For a significant percentage, social is a material and strategic component of their 2012 marketing strategy. For some, it is at the strategic center.

This has resulted in some interesting trends:

1) The rise of performance brand marketing: Organizations are moving from likes and followers as a metric for the value of social spend and getting more sophisticated about measurement. They are talking about socials ability to quantify meaningful business benefit in terms of brand marketing business outcomes like brand love, brand awareness, mindshare, and advocacy. Social’s unique attributes of deep, meaningful two-way engagement and the quantity of data available for analysis is powering this transformation.

2) The intersection of social media insight and engagement and the connected company: Companies are harnessing social’s capacity for deep customer insight and marrying it internally with social’s ability to self-organize employees to act on insights. They are using these same social organization strategies to mobilize diverse constituencies like employees, advocates, and partners to drive large scale mobilization for social media engagement.
 

Let’s talk a little about the Social Business Council, the largest peer-to-peer knowledge-sharing community for active social business practitioners. How does Dachis Group run this- and how are you able to move businesses beyond competition to collaboration?
The Social Business Council crosses organizational boundaries to help peers cross-pollinate best practices and crowd source social deliverables like policies, procedures, and frameworks. It also acts as a private meeting space for the pioneers in social to network, collaborate and build connections between organizations. Finally, the Social Business Council produces pioneering research that simply isn’t possible to create through traditional mechanisms and techniques.

A strict vetting process and robust rules of engagement have created a unique estuary where competitors, partners, and highly diverse industries can come together to accelerate social business adoption.

 
Dachis Group develops and maintains the Social Business Index, providing the only ongoing real-time ranking, analysis, and benchmarking of Social Business adoption and performance. What surprises have you seen from the Index and how is it affecting businesses listed?
The Social Business Index is the world’s largest quantitative analysis of social business performance, measuring real-time social of 30,000 brands.

One of the most interesting observations from scale of analysis is the sheer number of effective strategies that yield successful business outcomes for large, global organizations. Some organizations use tightly orchestrated marketing campaigns with brilliant and creative social integration. Others fuel massive participation, gently injecting brand attributes and messaging into the conversation. Without the large scale analysis of the Social Business Index and the rich organizational analysis capabilities to look for trends and patterns in specific regions of the world, industries, and engagement tactics, it would be impossible to detect these emergent trends.

Where do you personally go to inspire yourself and then to inspire your company?
I get the most inspiration from some of the amazing innovation of our customer base. With over 40% of the Fortune 100 as clients, we are honored and privileged to watch the transformative power of social as it unfolds. Our internal social tools buzz daily with anecdotes from our partnerships with these organizations.
 

How do you personally use social and digital media and has your work influenced that?
When you look across the hundreds of Dachis Group employees, you see a similar sight. Everyone has TweetDeck, Hootsuite, and other Twitter power tools open. They all have a set of browser tabs open to the large social platforms like Google + and Facebook and well as a more personal collection of smaller or niche networks like Pinterest. That is paired with an array of internal social tools used to bind together our team, that is distributed between over a dozen offices globally and a host of mobile solutions as they flow between offices and client sites. We are an extreme example, but every Dachis Group employee lives and breathes social daily.
 

This year’s theme for Social Media Week is Empowering Change Through Collaboration. How are you seeing this played out locally and globally?
Social Media represents a paradox. Social provides deep intimate engagement, but an audience at Super Bowl scale. Early collaboration strategies in social for organizations to engage with their markets have been simplistic. Hundreds of tools have flooded the market to help these small social teams maximize their ability to coordinate their activities. The challenge is that they are attempting to engage with millions, tens of millions, and in some cases, hundreds of millions of fans/followers/subscribers. To engage at scale, organizations are going to have to bring other constituencies to bear. They will need to activate their employees. They will need to coordinate with their partners. They must engage their advocates. These mandates require collaboration strategies at a massive scale and are spawning innovation at a fantastic rate.
 

SMW NYC is fortunate to have you keynote this February. What is in store for attendees?
I’m honored to be able to participate in SMW NYC. Attendees should look forward to seeing a vision of social, inspired from the front lines of innovation and thought leadership with hundreds of the world’s leading companies. We will follow that keynote up with a pragmatic workshop to couple that insight and inspiration with tangible education to make it real for the attendee.

So, pick up your phone, check it out, and let us know what you think! We’ll be building upon it for SMW12 September, making it even better. In the meantime, meet the team that helped make it happen: Todd Shingler of Mobile Perspectives and Rob Leishman of New Media Innovation.

How did Mobile Perspectives and New Media Innovation both get involved with SMW12?
Mobile Perspectives had previously met with the coordinators of SMW Chicago about putting a mobile web solution together for the Chicago 2011 event and they introduced us to the Global SMW team at CrowdCentric. New Media Innovation is a strategic technology partner of Mobile Perspectives. We leverage NMI’s Intelligent Multimedia Publishing Suite (IMPS) when delivering mobile website solutions and engage their delivery team as needed during project implementations. For Social Media Week, Mobile Perspectives worked closely with CrowdCentric while designing the mobile user interface and implementing the service flows to ensure a consistent- and mobile optimized– experience for SMW attendees. New Media Innovation handled the majority of the back-end integration work so that attendees can login, register for events and subsequently manage their SMW schedule.

 
Mobile Perspectives and New Media Innovations are both solid companies built around building and designing mobile solutions. What sets you both apart and what was great about working together on this partnership?
We believe our collective breadth of experience in delivering successful mobile projects across a diverse range of industries for companies such as Wal-mart.com, Wells Fargo, AT&T Wireless, Cox Communications, and Qantas Airlines, as well as our experiences working with smaller local businesses sets us apart. The founders of MobileAware and New Media Innovation have worked together in a variety of capacities over the past decade and our teams and skill-sets are highly complementary.
 

Todd, Mobile Perspectives also have the Mobile Campaign Edge offering cross-channel promotional services. Can you tell us more about this?
Mobile Campaign Edge (MCE) was created in response to having a number of our consulting clients ask if we could simply execute the strategies we developed for them. MCE itself is a customized solution and set of best practices that extends an organization’s web, social media and traditional marketing to the mobile channel. The resulting cross-channel integration (web, mobile, social, print, TV, radio) provides a constant communication platform needed to reach and interact effectively with their target audience. Beyond mobile web, we incorporate text messaging, QR Codes & Microsoft Tags, mobile video and other complementary mobile technologies as appropriate. Our primary focus is on enabling effective, targeted engagement of our client’s consumers while they are on-the-go.
 

What trends are you seeing in the mobile space?
The primary trend we are seeing is the creative leveraging of social media and geo-positioning to enable mobile-enhanced experiences that are simultaneously more personal, intuitive, effective and satisfying than previously possible. Retailers are starting to leverage geo-enhanced mobile advertising within applications, like Pandora, to entice consumers into nearby stores and then offering mobile concierge services through branded mobile applications. Restaurants and other businesses are enabling– and encouraging- loyal patrons to ‘share’ their experiences and purchases with friends and followers by linking directly to social media via optimized mobile websites. When there is a sufficient value exchange, consumers are willing to share their location and act as brand agents within their social media circles.
 

Rob, you create mobile solution for enterprises looking to interact with their customers via Mobile. With the complexity of different backend systems within these organizations, how does New Media Innovation tie this together for a successful customer implementation?
New Media Innovation has been developing and fine tuning our Mobility suite of products for the past 5 years. We have developed a highly configurable and flexible product suite that allows us to provide a mobile offering to suit any customer. Example solutions may be

• An out of the box Mobile website
• A Multi-Channel (Mobile and Web) based site
• A Native Client (currently iOS or Android)
• Or a combination of all of the above.

We work with our clients to define their requirements and help guide them on the appropriate technology for their situation. Whether it be extending their existing web-based systems to mobile via our New Media Framework or using our Mobile/Web CMS (the IMPS Product used for SMW) to host and manage the customer branded multi-channel digital content on their behalf.
 

As the rate of accessing sites via mobile is steadily increasing, do you think this will slow down or will brands that opt out miss the boat?
Brands that opt out will definitely miss the boat. Retailers are already starting to change their business models and revisit their supplier relationships to avoid simply becoming ‘showrooms’ for Amazon. Likewise, the hospitality industry is fighting to take back ownership of customer relationships they’ve inadvertently ceded to OpenTable and GrubHub. The advances in smartphone capabilities provides brands with a new opportunity to get (literally) into their consumer’s pocket.
 

This year’s theme for Social Media Week is Empowering Change Through Collaboration. How are you seeing this played out locally and globally?
The growth of social media, web communication tools and complementary mobile apps makes it possible to quickly assemble and manage virtual teams across companies and geographies. Take the SMW mobile website for example. Mobile Perspectives is based in Chicago, Crowdcentric in New York, New Media Innovation in Melbourne, Australia, the Nokia maps team is based in Finland, and Techliminal, who we worked with on the back-end integration, is based in San Francisco. Almost all
of our communication has been via email or Skype and our geographic spread actually allowed us to progress the mobile website virtually around the clock.
 

Finally, what was your favorite part of working with SMW this year?
Everyone we’ve worked with at SMW has been incredibly enthusiastic and collaborative. We’ve also enjoyed gaining insights into the hot social media topics around the world through our exposure to the various local city event blogs and schedules.

A literal and metaphorical barrier?

ANOTHER TRUE STORY: It’s a long, lonely road to finding new clients. But sometimes, there are moments that convince you that yes, you are doing the right thing.
Recently, I took that lonely road to see a prospective new client. A big client. A BIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIG client- and consequently, there was only a small chance of me winning their business. Still, worth the 2 hour drive.

When I got to the red and white barrier to their car park, I leant out and pressed the button on the squawk box: ”Name?” the disembodied voice asked.

-Chris West.
“Who you here to see?”

-I told him.
“Which company you from?”
-Verbal Identity.
Then the voice said, “Oh, that sounds interesting…tell me a bit more!”

So I gave him my 30 second pitch about how brands need a distinctive narrative and a distinctive voice – and the barrier lifted and I drove in. Funny, and a nice start to a meeting.

But to get to reception, you’ve got to walk out of the car park, along the pavement, and up the steps…and when I walked into reception, the security guard said,

“Name?”
- Chris West.
“Who you here to see?”
-So I told him.
“Which company are you from?”
-Verbal Identity.
He looked up, “That sounds interesting.”
“Hold on,” I said, “haven’t we just been through all this?”
“Oh no,” he said, “that’s someone else.  So, Verbal Identity? Tell me, what’s that all about then…?”

It was a reminder to me, whatever I do when I’m helping companies with naming new brands, you have to start with a clear idea of what’s best about the brand. But you also have to make sure you finish with a name that’s just as clear, and one that gets people listening.

After all that, it should be no surprise that Chris West runs a company called Verbal Identity which specialises in verbal identity. They can be found at, yes you guessed it, http://www.verbalidentity.co.uk

[Next chapter: the client you never want to win, but you have to, or you can never go home that night.]

Doing a search for mentions of São Paulo coming from around the world in the past six months I found 1.1 million blogs, 934,323 online news articles, 109,913 forum posts and 1.8 million tweets.

Trended out over time we see the popularity chart below. It appears that forums are not a popular place for talk about São Paulo. However, Twitter seems to be widely used to talk about it. This is no surprise as Brasil has been known to be one of the worlds largest Twitter using countries.

As I just said, Brazil is known as having a large Twitter using population. That probably helped in mentions of São Paulo coming from Brasil accounting for 71.4% all the mentions from around the world. The US makes up the second most mentions with only 7.1%. Interestingly, the Netherlands seem to talk quite a bit about São Paulo as they have the third most mentions with 6.1%.

Next, I pulled up a buzzgraph to see what all the talk of São Paulo was about. Most of the words I found contained in the buzzgraph were worlds talking about the city like “cidade” which means city and “Brasileiro” which mans Brazilian. What I found very interesting in this buzzgraph was the word “automovel” which mean automobile or car. I dug a little deeper into that and found out that São Paulo has a very large automotive industry. In fact, São Paulo is slated to soon become the world’s third largest automotive manufacturing city.

I then started to dig into who was creating all this talk about São Paulo. I started with the blogs and found that 77% of all mentions of São Paulo in blogs are made by males. That’s a fairly large amount. No clear reason on why women only mention São Paulo 33% of the time. I also found that there are a lot of bloggers aged 21-50 mention São Paulo. There was almost an even amount of bloggers aged 21-35 and 36-50 (35.2% and 36.1% respectively).

Looking at the industries that are talking about São Paulo, I found that communications blogs mention it the most. Again, this plays into the fact that Brazil is a heavy Twitter using country and a lot of communications blogs these days have a strong focus on social media. Education is the second largest industry to mention São Paulo in blogs at 16.2%.

I then explored the Twitter users mentioning São Paulo. Here I found a bit more evenness between the genders with males making up 63% and women 37%. I also looked at the top sources on Twitter mentioning São Paulo. These are the accounts that have a high authority ranking and mention São Paulo the most. The top Twitter source I found was @buscami, which is a Twitter account that tweets for an Ebay like service called Mercado Libre. Football (or what North Americans soccer) is quite popular in Brazil, so it’ no mystery as to why a few Twitter accounts that talk about São Paulo FC, like @spfcradar, are on the list.

Lastly, I looked into two of the larger spikes in activity that I found around talk of São Paulo. The first spike that I found occurred between September 20-22. When I pulled up a buzzgraph for that time period I found the love of soccer shining through again. In the middle of the buzzgraph we can see the word “Corinthian.” The Corinthians are one of largest football clubs in all of Brazil, who happen to play in São Paulo. At this time there was a huge match between the São Paulo FC and the Corinthians, and that drove this conversation spike. It’s also closely connected to words like “jogo” (game) and “jogadores” (players).

The second spike I explored was very recent. This spike started on January 24th and still getting a large as I write this post. Here we see a very strong connection to “Pinheirinho” which is  a section of São Paulo currently getting attention. Apparently Pinheirinho was a forgotten part of the city where over 6,000 residents were squatting. Police are currently trying to evict these people and they refuse to go. The people have been using social media to try to draw attention to what is happening here, and it’s been working. The current battle in Pinheirinho has got the whole world talking.

Those were some of the interesting things I found about the social world talking about São Paulo. I’ll be back again soon with another Sysomos look at yet another Social Media Week host cities.

First, I looked up how many times Miami had been mentioned through social channels in the past six months. In this time period I found Miami being spoken about in 962,147 blog posts, 915,499 online news articles, 841,453 forum postings and 4.3 million tweets.

Trending that data out over time, we see the popularity graph below. It’s interesting to note in this graph how blog and news activity about Miami seems to fluctuate almost in unison. Forums seem to follow the pattern mostly as well, except for a big noticeable lul around the end of August and beginning of September. We’ll be exploring the activity spikes a little later on.

Most of the talk about Miami was coming right from the United States, 63.1%, where it’s located. There’s also a good reason for this as we’ll see when we get to the buzzgraph. And, just like I’ve also seen in the past two posts about Hong Kong and Toronto, Canada (5.2% ) and the UK (3.5%) are right behind it. This is likely happening because these three countries are some of the highest content producers in the world.

As I said before, there’s a good reason that the United States owns over half of the conversation about Miami. When I pulled up a buzzgraph about Miami over the past six months, we can see that a lot of the talk is about Football, an American favourite. The words we see most connected are “Florida,” “Dolphin” as in the Miami Dolphin NFL team, and “winning.” As well, all around the buzzgraph we can pull out football related terms like “coaches,” “quarterback” and “offense.”

Next I looked into the people who were talking about Miami through social channels. This time I started with Twitter. Using a system exclusive to Sysomos, I was able to determine that 61% of people that were tweeting about Miami were male. This may not come as a surprise as the Miami talk was football focused. The top 12 Twitter sources talking about miami seems to be dominated by local news related Twitter accounts like @miaminewsnow who accounts for 43.4% of the talk. There’s also some classified accounts, like @motorvenfsbo, an account for car sales. Both of these kinds of accounts seem to be a trend we’re seeing in all cities.

When I looked at the people that were writing blogs that talked about Miami I cam across this football trend peaking in yet again. The skew of gender in the blogs is 77% are written by males, while women make up the other 23% of blogs that mention Miami. The age also points towards football fans as almost half of the bloggers fall between the ages of 21-35 (45.9%).

When I looked at the industry these blogs fall under, I found something that goes against the football theme I was seeing. The industry mentioning Miami the most in blogs was the communication industry (18.1%). This was not the surprise. The surprise was that sports related blogs only accounted for 4.5% of all the Miami talk. Instead of being in second place as I was starting to suspect, it turns out that real estate seems to be a big blogging industry. I guess there’s lots of property to sell in Miami.

As I looked into the larger activity spikes that we saw about Miami, I found more evidence that Miami is a sports town. The first large spike of data we see happened around August 16-18. The buzzgraph for that time shows a lot of “NCAA.” It turns out from some investigation that at this time there was a scandal going on Miami University, home of the “Hurricanes.” Apparently “Nevin” “Shapiro” had been giving benefits to the schools team that were outside of NCAA regulations. This was a hot topic in the college sports world and caused this particular spike in all the social channels.

The second large spike that I found was mainly on Twitter, but we can also see a slight rise in blog activity as well. This spike is yet again another sports related theme. On December 25th, the NBA finally kicked off their season. Miami loves their basketball, so this spike is related to the Heat’s first two games of the season in the date range of December 25-27. We can see a lot fo talk about the “Heat” and their star player “Lebron” James. We can also see strong connections to their first two opponents, the “Dallas” “Mavericks” on the 25th and the “Boston” “Celtics” on the 27th.

Well, that’s some interesting things I was able to find around talk of Miami. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this analysis it’s that whoever is doing Social Media Week sessions in Miami might want to think about incorporating some sports into their events. I’ll be back again soon for another Sysomos look at one of our upcoming Social Media Week host cities.

To get started, you’ll want to consider where your organization stands and what you want to accomplish in the next year. Take an hour and answer these 8 Essentials with your team before jumping into high gear for 2012!

The 8 Essentials TM

1. 1. If anything were possible, what would your organization look like? What would its impact be on the world?
2. 2. If you could describe what your organization does in a few key word phrases, what would those be?
3. 3. What is/are your most pressing problem(s) as an organization right now?
4. 4. If you could wave a magic wand, what would you ask for in order to solve the problem(s) mentioned above?
5. 5. To help you accomplish your goals, what does your ideal team or outside partner(s) look like?
6. 6. What legacy do you want your organization to have?
7. 7. What is your ideal start time and how much time are you willing /able to invest to see things develop?
8. 8. What financial commitment are you willing/able to invest to see things develop?

Once you’re done, use the facilitation pointers below to get the conversation going! Note what people are saying, as you will use this feedback later.

Discussion A: Are your answers to questions 1, 2 and 6 mentioned in your mission statement or anywhere on your site? If no, why not?Often times mission statements are thick, heavy and verbose versions of what the true heart of your organization is (see what I did there?). If you don’t tell people what you exist for in a clear and simple way, they won’t know how to help you!

Discussion B: Did each of your employees have similar answers? If not, be worried! If your staff doesn’t know the who, what and why of your organization, no one else will!

Discussion C: Questions 6 and 7 are really important. Look at the weight of the answers you provided above. If your response was “not enough” for either of them, go back and dig a little deeper.

Group Exercise: Looking at your answers to Question 3, work as a team to rate your most pressing problems in order, number one being the most important to solve over the next year. Remove or combine any overlapping ideas.

Next, match your solutions listed in questions 4 and 5. Do any of your “solutions” solve more than one problem?

If you enjoyed these exercises today, be sure to come back next week for part two where you’ll learn how to turn your 8 Essentials into a year-long plan for securing sponsors and partners! In the meantime, I’d love to hear how this worked for you. Tweet me @bradyhahn or leave your comments below.
 

Brady Hahn is a facilitator, researcher and strategist, Brady specialing in matchmaking non-profits, for-profits and social entrepreneurs. She has developed more than 80 professional development and special events for organizations such as Step Up Women’s Network, Pamper Me Fabulous, Social Media Week and her own series, Social Media For Social Good in partnership with Digital LA.

What makes modern video gaming so addictive?  For many, it’s the social aspect.  Earning trophies and achievements and sharing them with friends makes playing and beating games all the more enjoyable.  Mobile gaming apps like Words With Friends and Castleville allow you to interact with others on a regular basis – even if you’re separated by several states or continents.  For many, being able to connect with others via the virtual world is almost as good as the real thing.

PricewaterhouseCoopers, a global professional services firm based in London, recently revealed that the film industry brought in $84 billion in 2010.  Due in part to 3D, broadband streaming and Blu-ray sales, experts predict that the film industry will grow approximately 6.1% annually to a revenue of $113 billion by 2015.  Video game sales, which reached $56 billion in 2010, are predicted to grow by 8.2% and reach $82 billion during that same time period.  This means that the gaming industry is expanding at a quicker rate.

What will the future of video games look like?  It’s safe to assume that connecting with others around the globe will only become easier and more convenient.  What do you hope will change/stay the same about the gaming industry?

 
Abigail Elise is a freelance video game/geek culture writer, blogger and vlogger. She currently lives in New York City. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and is from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. You can learn more about her on her site.