Making Social Marketing Personal

Many people will tell you that when you use a Twitter account (or other social marketing techniques) to promote a product, website, or blog,

Twitter is often used for social media marketing

you should make a specific account for said website or product and keep your personal account separate and out of the public eye. This is not always true. Separation of one’s business and personal life is a traditional marketing approach which does not apply as much on the web. People who have grown up seeing traditional advertising all their life don’t want to hear about companies, but about people: Individuals with whom they can connect. If your project is small enough that you alone can represent it online, then using your personal account can give users a sense of inclusion that a company account with nothing but product and blog updates just can’t do. People want to be able to feel they know you, the creator of the content which they will consume. You become real to them in a way that a company—a large abstract entity—can never do.

 

Readers want a personal touch; if you love The Immortal Bard or the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets let it be known!

For example, take a look at the Twitter account of Jonathan Strickland (@JonStrickland): the senior writer for HowStuffWorks.com and co‐host of their popular podcast, TechStuff. Strickland’s current 1,324 followers are mostly fans of his writing and podcast. They don’t know him personally, but they follow him and virally market his podcast for free. If HowStuffWorks were to create a TechStuff Twitter account they would undoubtedly be followed by a great many of Strickland’s followers, but the same loyalty would not be present after they could no longer hear Strickland quote Shakespeare or Burgess in between tweets about the podcast or his latest article. They want to hear his own personal style and have a glimpse into his life. Compare Strickland’s bio line:

“Writer for HowStuffWorks. Actor. Director. Goofus.”

to the bio that might be present on a TechStuff Twitter account:

“Podcast about technology from HowStuffWorks.”

Both advertise the affiliation with HowStuffWorks, but it is possible for a reader to relate with Strickland’s; this has helped make his podcast a success.

 

Name Sam Whited
Bio Physicist, actor, backpacker, raptor lover, and all around outdoor enthusiast!
Using your personal account can create a sense of loyalty among your followers

 

Adversaries of this approach to social marketing will point out a problem: what do you do with your account when you switch jobs, or decide to start that next big endeavor you’ve been planning? If you simply start posting about designing steering wheels for ships instead of about mobile technology (or whatever you might have been writing about before) you’re likely to alienate many of your followers and suffer a decline in popularity. This means you’ll have to start all over gaining followers and creating a sense of trust and loyalty which has now become even more difficult because, if you lost a great number of readers, potential new readers no longer have the social draw of seeing that you already have a large group of followers. As it turns out this is less of a problem than you might think because you used a personal account. As I stated earlier, people follow you to connect with you, not your product. They are interested in what you have to say about your product and your personal endeavors. If you have taken the time to get to know your followers as you should then they can form a client base for your new project. Your readers can remain your readers, and become interested in your new subject matter as well.

While using a personal account and using a business account to market a product both have their merits and are useful in different situations, for websites, blogs, small businesses, and other smaller projects it is often more beneficial to use your personal account rather than an account created specifically for the project. Not only will you already have engaged followers who can start marketing your product from day one, but—should you decide to move away from the project in the future—it will be easy for you to use your current followers as a social marketing base for your next endeavor.

Effecting Change Using Internet Media

This post was written for Blog Action Day 2009.

 

The internet shrank the world more than any other innovation of the twentieth century: tightening social and economic ties between businesses, cultures, and nations more thoroughly than the genesis of commercial flight, or the threat of atomic war.

 

Map of the internet dated Jan 15, 2005 courtesy of the Opte Project

Today the internet is a staple of modern life. Broadband connections—once reserved for large corporations, research centers, and institutes of higher education—are now common place, and the fastest transcontinental networks can transmit tens of gigabits per second; a speed which will most likely become outdated within the next decade. It has opened new, and often exclusive, windows for business ventures of all sizes and has (in short) become an integral part of the functional corpus of our society.

 

As more and more home users have access to high‐speed networks, the internet has also become more than just a place for businesses and organizations. It has become a dynamic and social entity in which individuals can maintain a voice and can make their thoughts available to a wider audience than was previously possible. It has evolved new and exciting uses such as blogging and social‐networking. Even more recently “microblogging” sites such as Twitter have pushed the boundaries of the social web and arguably remain largely unclassified; still finding their niche in the greater virtual ecosystem.

 

Recently, a 1948 essay coauthored by George Orwell was brought to my attention by Blogger’s Rick Klau. As Klau points out, Orwell’s essay on pamphleteering “reads like a modern‐day essay about blogs.”

Thomas Paine's Common Sense is one of the most famous and widely published pamphlets of all time

In his essay Orwell discusses archetypal themes such as censorship and freedom of speech; ideas which, though opposite in their form, both find a place in human nature. Orwell states, “Pamphleteering can only flourish when it is fairly easy to get one’s writings printed, legally or illegally,” and “good pamphlets are likely to be written by men who passionately want to say something.” Clearly the world has not changed much in the past few centuries: news often still has to be smuggled across national borders (though today’s proxies don’t involve horses), and, though it may be easy to get one’s writing printed, without real passion it is often difficult to have it heard. Individual pamphleteers publishing their works and distributing them may reach only a few in a community, are easily censored, and—unless the work is truly outstanding—they will never appeal to a wider audience. However, there is a key difference between the eighteenth century pamphleteer and the modern blogger: we are not alone. Pamphleteers met in small groups of a few individuals and were often separated from their contemporaries by great distances which made collaboration slow and cumbersome. Enter the internet.

 

The copyleft symbol: Copyleft uses copyright law to remove restrictions and grant freedoms which can in turn be used to develop an idea further without fear of legal retaliation

The recent trend towards openness, copyleft, and net‐neutrality on the internet (and in the world in general) has created an environment where it is easy to find and build upon ideas and where collaboration is not only possible, but encouraged. It may be difficult to hear one voice, but what if thousands were to call out, all at once, using the full body of information freely available to them: establishing an audience using sheer volume? Just as it served the revolutionaries during the late eighteenth century it can now serve us today.

 

Whether you are a blogger, tweeter, podcaster, videographer, or use some other medium it is only possible to create global impact when united for a common cause.

Franklin's “Join, or Die”

Through coordinated events such as Blog Action Day, or simply by constructively presenting your ideas in an open and thoughtful manner it becomes possible for the virtual to influence the physical. It becomes possible for tiny members of a larger construct to influence the temperament of that construct as a whole.

 

This year Change.org has selected “Climate Change” as the official topic of Blog Action Day ‘09. This important issue facing peoples in all reaches of the globe will require more than just temporary actions to fix. It will require a change in the entire social landscape; a change of mindset which, like all large scale changes, terrifies us.

Ship tracks as seen by NASA's Terra satellite

Like the pamphleteers that dreamed of a free and unified nation we must not only strive to help ourselves, but also to draw others attention to the aforementioned issues so that they also may benefit in the knowledge of what must be done to ensure a victory for the human race. What lies beyond victory is difficult to see, and so we must not simply stop there. As Orwell stated about pamphleteers, “their victory brought no actual benefit, but merely the promise of one.” We may never reap the benefits or suffer the consequences of our errors, but by acting against climate change we ensure a possible benefit for our decedents: that they may be free to strive for a better world in new and previously unrecognized ways, instead of trying to reverse the damage done by our failure to act.

Creating a Twitter Widget with FeedBurner

In a previous post I discussed using Twitter and FeedBurner to create collaborative podcasts. This post will also detail a way you can expand the reach of your tweets using FeedBurner: we’ll be creating a custom Twitter “widget” for your blog or website using FeedBurner’s “BuzzBoost” feature.

The first thing we need to do is get our tweets into FeedBurner. This can be accomplished by simply burning a feed of the following format:

http://[UserName]:[password]@twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.atom

This will return your last 20 tweets. If you want a different number of tweets you may set the count parameter. You could also use a URI of the form "http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/[UserNameorID].atom" however this returned a 400 error for me each time I tried it (suggesting that FeedBurner’s servers are being rate limited). More information about getting info from Twitter’s API can be found at the Twitter API Wiki.

Once our feed has been successfully burned we probably want to set a few options. The first thing is to set "NoIndex" under the Publicize tab which will stop search engines trying to index your tweets. The second thing is to turn BuzzBoost on (also under publicize). I chose to not display anything but the title (the tweet) and to only show 1 tweet. Now we can stick the script FeedBurner spits out on our webpage or blog and we’ll be able to see our tweets! However, there are still a few optimizations we might want to make.

The current list of tweets is a bulleted list which is not very nice looking. Luckily, it is easy to change that with some CSS. Something like this will get rid of the bullets:

#[FeedURI] ul {
 list-style-type: none;
 padding: 0;
 margin: 0;
}

You can find out more about the exact structure of BuzzBoost's HTML snippets and how to customize them on this help page. We also probably want to get rid of the annoying “UserName:” before every tweet. This can be accomplished with a bit of javascript:

var arr = document.getElementsByTagName("span");
for (i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) {
    if (arr[i].className == "headline") {
        var alink = arr[i].getElementsByTagName("A")[0];
        alink.innerHTML = alink.innerHTML.substring(alink.innerHTML.indexOf(':')+2, alink.innerHTML.length);
    }
}

While all of this could easily be done server side with half the hassle and twice the compatibility it's sometimes more fun to hack away at a problem using existing web services. If you use this on your own site at all let me know how it turns out for you; good luck!

P.S. Before anyone points it out: yes I know Twitter already provides similar functionality (in fact I use it on this blog). It’s just more fun to do it yourself sometimes, not to mention that it allows for more customization, analytics, etc.

Almost home

Me holding a beautiful (injured) female juvenile Red-Tailed Hawk (B. jamaicensis)

I’ve finished up my internship with the Georgia DNR at Amicalola Falls and am back at my parents for a few days before I move back to Atlanta this weekend. As much as I loved working with the park – especially our wonderful birds of prey – and as much as I loved my little cabin in the woods, I can’t wait to get back to the city. I’ve learned so much from the good people of Amicalola this Summer, and gotten so much first hand experience with Raptors that I’m sure taking my falconry permit test will be no problem. This post is not so much a reflection or farewell as it is just to publically thank the wonderful staff at Amicalola and encourage anyone near the Dawson Georgia area (A short ride down GA400 from Atlanta) to see this beautiful park and all of its wonderful critters!

UFO

They say that raising a child is a full time job, and I’ve found that’s true… especially when it comes to birds. Yesterday a family brought a baby bird (We think a Cardinal, but it’s really still a UFO at this age) to the park saying they had found it in a parking lot and wondered if we’d look after it. While we have a wildlife rehabilitator who works at the park and specializes in birds (raptors specifically, but other birds are fine too) we would normally put down a nestling this small and continue the circle of life by feeding him to one of the snakes or our opossum, but our rehabber saw this as a good opportunity to give me some first hand experience and we kept him.

He was very cold when we first got him as the family that had found him (full of good intentions) had put him in a well constructed, but very wet nest which had chilled him thoroughly. After getting him into a dry nest on a heating pad, rehydrating him, and feeding him we left him for the night which would probably determine his fate. Luckily he did not waste away, warmed up well, and was still alive this morning. I started feeding him about 1 cc of crushed dog food mixed with water and some bird beneficial bacteria every thirty minutes or so via a syringe stuck down the esophagus and strait into the crop. Later our rehabber got in and brought me some real bird food which was full of all the vitamins and minerals he would need to be healthy. He’s now doing very well, has a full crop, and there’s a good chance he’ll survive to be released into the wild (after being de-imprinted possibly, he’s only just started opening his eyes this evening… I may be mommy now).

If you find a baby bird, the best thing you can do is put it back into the nest. With the exception of vultures, the birds of Georgia don’t have a sense of smell, so the mother is not going to smell you on the baby and kill it, and even if she could smell you she would still take care of the baby. If you can’t reach the nest construct another nest out of an old basket (or anything else with holes for water to drain) and place it in the tree near the first nest; if the mother feeds the baby once she will continue to feed both nests. If the bird repeatedly falls out of the nest and has all of it’s flight feathers it may be learning to fly, so leaving it alone is the best way to ensure it’s survival. Finally, always remember that it is illegal to possess any native species in Georgia; if you don’t know how (or aren’t licensed) to care of the baby you can’t have him. Take him to a licensed rehabilitator or, even better, let the mother bird take care of him herself.

P.S. I hope you’ll excuse the quality of my recent images as I don’t have a real camera at the moment.

Update: No longer a Cardinal, UFO has grown up to be a Chipping Sparrow. Funny how alike they look as babies.

Collaborative podcasting with Twitter

After reading about Rick Klau’s implementation of a collaborative podcast using del.icio.us I decided to do the same thing using Twitter. A quick read over the Twitter API and I had it set up and running. For those of you who don’t want to read Rick’s post, I’ll start from scratch and describe the idea and how I set it up.

The idea is simple, anytime someone mentions me (@SamWhited) on Twitter and includes a link to a media file (an MP3 for instance) the media file is automatically downloaded and synced to my Zune in the form of a podcast. Twitter makes it easy to re-tweet songs as well which is an added bonus.

Setting it all up is fairly easy, just set up a Feedburner account and burn a feed of the following URL:

 

https://<TwitterUsername>:<TwitterPassword>@twitter.com/statuses/mentions.rss

 

Then make sure podcasting is enabled for the feed and make sure to set any privacy options you may want. Now you can simply subscribe to the new Feedburner feed in any podcast client (Zune, iTunes, etc.).

 

So go tweet some tunage my way and thanks to Rick for the idea!

 

UPDATE: Apparently Twitter shortens all URL's now and does not retain the files Content-Type header. This means Feedburner will not work. We need "Content-Type-burner".

UPDATE 2: Turns out Feedburner is not following the 301 redirect properly; they are aware of the issue and hopefully we'll see some progress soon.

Amicalola Falls

As I mentioned previously, I recently became a resource management intern with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources at Amicalola Falls State Park. The park is beautiful and I love my job so far. While I officially work in resource management I also work with programming and outdoor education, especially with Amicalola's rehabilitated birds of prey and their reptile collection. The raptors and other birds are possibly my favorite thing about the park so far; from Owl-Capone (the Barred Owl from Owlcatraz) to Fabio the American Black Vulture (more Stork than raptor), I thoroughly enjoy working with them on, and off the glove. The snakes are also lots of fun and people passing through the visitors center love to touch the snakes and learn about the various species native to Georgia (my favorite being the [Eastern] King [Snake], Elvis even though he sometimes thinks my thumb is a tasty snack).

 Zeus the Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus)

So if you’re in the Dawson area stop by and see one of our public programs, hike to the falls, or eat at our amazing lodge! The park is just gorgeous this time of year, and there are so many good trails in the area (including the ever popular un-official start to the Appalachian Trail) that it’s hard not to have fun, even when doing so much work (sic)!

 Scooter the Corn Snake (Elaphe guttata)