Tag: hashtag

Brandwatch Watching Social Media Week

Posted on by Sara Adam

People are conversing constantly online, and that means an increasing likelihood that your brand is being mentioned in places that you aren’t aware of. Who is talking, who is listening, and what do you really need to be paying attention to? 

Brandwatch is a software that allows you to access the most relevant conversations happening on social media that impact your brand. Their platform gives you access to all of these data points, so you can slice and dice in the ways that make the most sense for your brand and their intuitive user interface makes it less frustrating to extract the information you need.

They use their own crawlers to look through over 70 million sources, which include blogs, news, forums and major social networks. Additionally, their channels allow the tracking of public Facebook pages, without needing any admin rights. That’s a score for your team.

And we couldn’t be happier to have Brandwatch joining us at Social Media Week Campus on our ground floor and hosting an event. We recommend you hear Will McInnes, CMO at Brandwatch, as he discusses his perspectives on 21st century business and how the internet is radically changing our personal behavior, our organizations and our society. Then, swing by our Future of Now Exhibition area to see them showing us data in real-time about what is happening across the social channels as it relates to SMW. They will monitor social mentions and display items for the top influencers, hashtags and topics. Get people talking about your event, and then see it up on the Brandwatch screen!

Today is the last day to get a campus pass at the current price- the price will go up to the walkup price tomorrow so don’t wait! Check out the schedule for the amazing lineup of speakers and events and make sure to check out our opening night party, hosted by Nokia.

Never Stop Learning: 10 Masterclasses You Can’t Miss

Posted on by Nicky Yates

Gandhi said, “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”

And we think it’s a good rule for life and business. Which is why we started bringing hands-on, practical classes to Social Media Week. This year, we’re giving you even more opportunities to leave SMW14 with practical skills that will advance your career or bolster your personal goals. These are ten you can’t miss next week:

  1. Navigating Internet Subcultures: Reddit, Tumblr, Snapchat, and Twitter
    If you want to get in, you got to be friends with the band. And the band so to speak of the Internet are the subcultures of Reddit, Tumblr, Snapchat, and Twitter. These subcultures can be some of the best sources of inspiration for real-time social media posts — but you need to understand them first. In this Masterclass, you’ll get the unwritten and incredibly nuanced rules of these communities and gain a playbook on how to use these sites as sources for real-time marketing.
  2. Build an Effective Email Newsletter (From Scratch!) with Basic HTML & CSS: Turn Likes into Sales
    Ok, we all know that email is one of the most effective ways to reach your audience (and we’ve been using and abusing that these past few weeks…), so that means knowing how to create campaigns and newsletters that people will open is critical to your marketing. So, we have two options on Tuesday and Friday for you in this Masterclass designed for beginners to learn how to create an e-mail newsletter from scratch.
  3. The Power of Hashtags: Case Studies and Mechanics for Both Users and Brands
    Oh, the hashtag… We love it in all its glory. But do you know how to really use it? In this Masterclass, Tagboard CEO Josh Decker will provide the do’s and don’ts from both the user and brand perspective, including case studies from some of the world’s biggest brands and professional sports teams.
  4. Building Wearables: A Hands-On Intro to Open-Source Interaction Platforms
    Put your phone down, it’s the year the wearable computing. And we’re teaching you how to be ahead of the curve. You’ll have two opportunities on Wednesday and Friday to create a basic wireless soft fashion cuff using an Adafruit Gemma.
  5. Data-Driven Channel, Content, and Campaign Intel, Presented by Unmetric
    Data, data, data. Decisions should be based on data to determine what content works best, and you’ll have two opportunities to learn how to use it. Unmetric is showing you the three C’s of social media intelligence and how social media marketers can use them to gain a competitive advantage on both Wednesday and Thursday.
  6. Your Spine Online, Rejuvenate and Reconnect with Breathe Repeat
    It’s not all work at SMW. Happy workers are more productive workers, and your health plays into that. So, that’s we’re bringing in Breathe Repeat to educate us all about our backbones and how being virtually connected can affect the natural flow of their own circuitry.
  7. Lean Marketing: “Think Like a Brand. Act Like a Startup.”
    Lean marketing is enabling brands, corporations and startups to accelerate speed to market, increase conversion rates, and improve customer engagement. It’s all about your ROI. In this Masterclass, General Assembly will share insights from this approach and how your brand can implement it.
  8. Making Longform Videos That People Will Watch
    Video is still king. But it’s not just shortform. Brands like VICE are seeing great success with more in-depth stories and longform content. In this Masterclass, Motherboard’s team will look at all aspects of video production, including finding story ideas, shooting, and editing.
  9. Winning The Participation Economy: Understanding Global Conversations and Developing a Social Strategy
    2014 brings us two global events that marketers can really capitalize on to create global conversations. How can brands stand out? Marketers of all sizes are welcome as Big Fuel shares the evolution of social media marketing and how it is changing once again in the context of global conversations. At the end of this Masterclass, you’ll have developed a sample social strategy.
  10. Programming For Non-Programmers
    Web development can no longer be relegated to an elite few. If you’re running a tech start-up, it’s essential that you know the fundamentals. Ultimately, knowing how to “talk to the talk” will help you communicate better with developers, and in this Masterclass, we’ll tackle development principles to get you on the right path and the differences between front and back-end development.

Masterclasses are a special offering for our attendees with a Campus or Insider Pass only and are available on a first-come, first-serve basis. So, get your pass here now before sales end on Friday and join us, Nokia, and MKG for what will be our best SMW14 yet.

#eprdctn – Digital Publishing Professionals Collaborate on Twitter

Posted on by Deanna Utroske

Creating digital books takes a fair amount of knowhow and patience: ebook developers have CSS and HTML skills, and they put in long hours designing, coding, testing, and running quality assurance checks on each title that they build.

It’s a specialized — and potentially lonely — niche in publishing, not unlike copyediting, in its level of nuance and behind-the-scenes mystique. Some publishers and content creation teams employ a number of developers in-house. But many industry professionals work on teams of experts in related fields or remotely as independent consultants and are, in essence, isolated from their eProduction peers.

Along with that comes the challenge of a swiftly evolving digital publishing world, where there are frequent software updates, numerous tweaks to vendor specifications, and each new device launch means new rules and new creative opportunities for developers.

Hashtag Community

hashtagFortunately social media, and the #eprdctn hashtag, make it possible for eProduction pros to keep up with those changes, stay current, stay connected, and stay sane while working independently. “#eprdctn is a large community of ebook developers who discuss technical aspects of their day-to-day work. We share advice and resources as we find ways of improving workflows,” explains Iris Amelia Febres, an Ebook Developer at F+W Media who also teaches electronic publishing for Emerson College.

#eprdctn is a community that “is most often [engaged in] a loose conversation about current issues. Once in a while we…have a ‘dumb question amnesty,’ during which time anyone can post any question — no matter how simple — to #eprdctn and get an answer from an industry leader. These are always very popular,” notes Laura Brady, Ebook Developer and Principal at Brady Type and an occasional leader of the #eprdctn group.

Flocking To Twitter

In 2011, Lindsay Martin started the group by contacting professional in the field who already used Twitter to share insights and encouraging them to include the hashtag with their posts, explains Ebook Developer Colleen Cunningham (@BookDesignGirl).

A valuable group of established experts, regulars, lurkers and drop-ins, “the #eprdctn community on Twitter is far and away my favourite co-worker. These people lighten my load with humour, tech support, news and information, and collaboration,” says Brady. Beginners are always welcome, according to Febres, who describes the community as both “a job board and a Q&A session.

Twitter makes it all possible. Some people have tried extending the group “to other social media platforms but Twitter seems to work the best because, there, it’s truly organic and of-the-moment. No moderators are necessary,” notes Cunningham. #eprdctn hosts a nicely structured hour-long weekly chat too; a “roundtable discussion, where it’s a bit of a free-for-all in terms of what to talk about. Sometimes major events of the week will form the session [or] guests lead talks and people will ask them questions,” says Febres. You can join the conversation each Wednesday at 11:00 am EST.

In Real Life

#eprdctn comes together in person, too! Febres organizes a casual meet-up of developers as time allows and points out that the community also tries to “get together if we’re attending a conference, like Digital Book World. It’s great to have that face-to-face time to connect with colleagues on a personal level. We trade stories and tips, network, and just have a good time. It’s part networking, part therapy. Making ebooks can be tough!”

Women’s Workforce

The group is doing work, beyond the day-to-day tasks at hand, by empowering women in tech to continue making great strides in the field of eProduction. “Ebook development seems to be a good gender mix, the leaders in the field are also a healthy mix. In fact, there are so many whip-smart women in this tech-focused space that it makes me a hopeful feminist ebook developer. The most outspoken members continue to be men but that is certainly shifting,” says Brady who strives “to mentor women trying to find work in ebooks.” And who, in planning the ebookcraft conference, “managed to get about 60% female speakers.”

Febres agrees that gender parity is important in the world of ebook production: “There’s a pocket of us female developers….we complain and challenge and wonder [and] we can be pretty vocal about it. I always try to share different ‘pro-women in tech’ networking events and resources, like the monthly Boston Girl Geek Dinner.”

You Can Too

As talented women-in-tech in their own right, Febres and Brady share a few suggestions about how you can launch your own social media lab-style community:

  1. Pick a day and time.
  2. Be consistent with your meetings.
  3. Posit questions to the group and share links.
  4. Invite others to participate.
  5. Have a hashtag!

Regularly scheduled chats can quickly turn into an anytime resource network. “Think of building a community as a collaborative tool, not a community with leaders and followers… #eprdctn is not a place to say and tell. It is where you go to figure out, to help, to ask for [help] and to find fellow travellers,” advises Brady.

Does your industry host useful social media conversations? Share your wisdom and community hashtags in the comments. Then, make sure you check out these related events this SMW14!

Deanna Utroske is the Social Media Brand Director for New York Women in Communications and writes on women’s career issues, lifestyle topics and more. Follow her on Twitter @DeannaUtroske.

Coverage of SMW12: Socializing the News

Posted on by Lisa Chau

Who

Moderated by Peter Himler – President — Publicity Club of New York
With Panelists:
Anthony De Rosa — Social Media Editor, Thomson Reuters
Craig Kanalley — Social Media Editor, NBC News
Elizabeth Heron — Social Media Editor, The New York Times
Jake Porway — Data Scientist, The New York Times
Mat Yurow — Social Media Producer, Bloomberg News and BusinessWeek
Steve Krakauer— Senior Digital Producer, CNN/U.S

What

The Socializing the News luncheon began with Publicity Club of New York’s President, Peter Himler introducing Jake Porway, the Data Scientist at The New York Times’ Research & Development Labs to demonstrate his company’s Cascade app, which I must say is likely the most *beautiful* tool presented during Social Media Week 2012.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQBOF7XeCE0

Project Cascade goes beyond the two dimensional graphs most companies currently use. It’s a three dimensional representation of how news is shared and how it spreads. The app uses data from the New York Times website and Twitter, well-worn territory but and it adds a key element: information from bit.ly, the URL shortener. By working with bit.ly, staff were able to see when New York Times links were shortened or expanded. Altogether, a full tapestry is exposed: Read; Share; Engage.

Person 1 browses the NYT site, reads an article of interest, uses bit.ly to shorten the URL, shares on Twitter; Person 2 clicks on the  bit.ly link, expands the URL to read the story; Engagement via returning to the NYT website, retweets and conversation. A very powerful data set emerges from these actions. Using the tool developed at the NYT, researchers can see the cascade of events which happens whenever someone tweets one of their news stories.

Project Cascade shows all the sharing behavior based on a tweet. All the layers of retweets. The echo effect across Twitter. The degrees of separation from the original tweeter. Analysts can see the reach of an article by seeing how tall the graph gets, built by layers of retweets. They can also see when others enter and leave a conversation, streaming over time. Consequently, they can also pinpoint influence by large spikes in the data. Who are key players and what are they saying? The app allows analysts to understand the nature of a tweet and how it spreads by looking at the backbone of influential people. Does it help when someone asks a question or adds their thoughts? Do they use a certain hashtag? How does conversation evolve? On which branch do people enter the tapestry? How do things change over time? Using the tool, analysts have quantifiable data to ask questions like “When is the best time to tweet?” They can test the hypothesis and see what works best. They can see who are consistently bringing people back to the site. Which articles are likely to spread and why. What are the sections which affect the flow of conversation? How do journalists become a part of the conversation? Should we retweet ourselves? Should stories be managed or should they be allowed to grow organically? Now, all these questions can be looked at because Project Cascade offers a lens into what is happening in social media.

But Socializing the News wasn’t all apps. Steve Krakauer shared on how social media has a real impact on what companies do. What happens on the digital space translates into more viewers on CNN. Now, the question is how to harness that. Piers Morgan is a great example of how Twitter can build a brand. He is a personality with a strong following. And it really is Piers who tweets. Google+ doesn’t have a good metric or analytics system, yet, and it hasn’t opened up the same way Facebook and Twitter have. For those reasons, people hesitate.  For big organizations to consider Google+, it will have to show more of the back end data. With Facebook and Twitter, you can have a community where you can hit people with what they are interested in. Cultivating a community that already exists is almost as important as reaching out to new people. But most important is people clicking on links, replying, retweeting and commenting, more so than follower numbers or likes.

Mat Yurow joined the dialogue, offering his perspective from Bloomberg. Bloomberg‘s wire service is its main source of revenue. In a world where Twitter is becoming the source for breaking news, how does a company balance service offerings which are free v. charged? Mobile apps have been optimized for sharing and discussion and that is where the organic growth will happen. At the moment, it’s about building a following. Each social network has its own strengths, and those strengths are primed to be taken advantage of.

His company has found that it gets much more traffic from Facebook and people spend three times as much time reading articles on the site, as opposed to the traffic from Twitter, while LinkedIn is used by reporters to find leads. Play the slow game and build relationships. There are few tools better at relationship building than Twitter. Social media editors are responsible for building their credibility and clout to make people listen to what is being said; PR people are responsible for checking-in periodically even when they are not pushing or selling a story. Become a familiar face on a journalist’s timeline, and journalists will be much more willing to respond.

Yurow instructed attendees to find a way to add value to your followers, and play to the vanity of people. Mention them in a newsletter, and then let them know they have been included. Send out tweets at different times, depending on when people read. Understand your audience and find out when you can offer most value.  Consider scheduling tweets to post at night or on the weekends because social sites may be blocked at your followers’ workplace. Don’t lose your audience because they are not able to be at a desk when you are.

Then the New York Times’ Elizabeth Heron offered her views. On Twitter, the company uses the main @NYT account to break news. However, each desk has its own account and is responsible for its own social media strategy, so things don’t need to be completely centralized. “Hashtag Science” is used to create short hashtags which clearly identify the story and invite people to contribute. For example, #iEconomy to discuss how Apple is affecting the economy; how does Apple differ from other major companies that manufacture in China; do factory conditions affect people’s choice to buy iPhones?

To give readers access to journalists, the New York Times also holds live chats on Facebook, as well as on Google+ hangouts. The company likes to give direct access to reporters who work on series. And this international contingent of reporters is great for crowdsourcing. NYT considers the journalistic value of social media. It’s difficult to quantify, but if the company finds sources it would not have found otherwise or it’s able to cover breaking news more comprehensively, then it is significant. On the business side, the company cares about referral traffic. Engagement metrics are much more important than number of followers.

Craig Kanalley expounded on the role of the social media editor: to tell stories. Carve a niche and innovate to use social media creatively. There are endless possibilities. It’s also part of the employee’s responsibility to break out of a Twitter Monkey role. Engage journalists on Twitter by offering timely information.

Keep in mind that Pinterest is sustainable because it appeals to the mainstream audience, not the tech-geeky crowd. Finally, it’s better to post in real time in possible. Scheduling tweets can make you look outdated if not done correctly, so be careful.

The panel concluded with Anthony De Rosa. He stated that in order to be the place where people go for news, you should be the beacon for all news – it makes you valuable. You shouldn’t feel like you can only report those stories coming from your newsroom. However, make sure to validate; due diligence is necessary. Be a megaphone for your own content, but also act as a curator so you’re the central source for everything. The difference between social media and headlines is that you don’t have to be as literal with the former. Social media writers are aiming to grab attention rather than gain the SEO system. Ride the line of interesting and engaging, but don’t mislead.

Pinterest popped up again as a great distribution channel for videos, and LinkedIn was positioned as good for gathering information because it allows users to filter others by who people are: which companies do they work for and which positions do they hold? Listen on LinkedIn. This function doesn’t exist natively on Twitter, but can be maximized on LinkedIn.

Peter Himler helped us end the event by pointing us to MuckRack, which tracks thousands of journalists on Twitter and social media.

At the end of the event, I walked away feeling like I had a great sense of the myriad ways the news can get social and how companies are doing it.

 


Lisa Chau has been involved with Web 2.0 since graduate school at Dartmouth College, where she completed an independent study on blogging. She was subsequently highlighted as a woman blogger in Wellesley Magazine, published by her alma mater. Since 2009, Lisa has worked as an Assistant Director at the Tuck School of Business. In 2012, she launched GothamGreen212 to pursue social media strategy projects. You can follow her on twitter.