48. Fail early and often! (Remember Yoda, “No Try … Just Do”)
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50.
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Hinweis der Redaktion
Our strategy - to find our online audience, is to find out where they are, and what they are talking about, so that we can join the conversation. So that is our first task. There are a few sites that are specific to arts and culture and we’ll look at those in a moment. Then we’ll also delve into the specifics of tracking down other conversations by reading and subscribing to blogs, google alerts and keyword searches.
Yelp is a social networking site where people can share opinions about arts and culture, nightlife, restaurants and so on. The site currently focuses on major metropolitan areas. This is a screen shot of a Page about DC If yourmembers are here, they should monitor it and see what people are saying about them. You can also add your venue, as well.
Upcoming is another site which lists all sorts of events and things to do. This is a screen shot for DC also. You can create events here. In fact a member of your audience could create an event and bring a bunch of their friends.
Eventful is another similar site where events can be promoted.
To being our listening program, we will need to set up a google account, set up and test keywords, and subscribe to feeds. “ Feeds’ is another way of saying that you are subscribing to a service which delivers information to your in-box when it happens. I’ll go into a little more detail in a moment. So first we will start collecting information, then begin the process of reading and refining our searches, and then we need to do something with it. Flickr Attribution Rabbit by D-32
Now we’ll take a look at some of the tools you can use to track conversations on line - about your organization, and about the subjects that are important to you. The point of this is that if someone is talking about you. You NEED to know about it. If someone says something good about you, you can acknowledge it. If someone is saying something bad about you, then you can address their concerns. Comcast does an exceptional job of this. When I was listening to one of the debates last fall, I was listening online and also looking tweets that my friends were making in Twitter. At one moment someone got really angry because Comcast had put a Test of the Emergency Broadcast system right in the middle of Biden’s response. They mentioned Comcast in their tweet, and because Comcast searches for every mention of their name, they immediately responded to her and let her know that it wasn’t Comcast, but her states, Telecommunications Dept that controlled that. They were certainly sorry, but it wasn’t their doing. This incredibly fast response took something potentially damaging and turned it around instantly. When people know that you are listening, they also think twice about what they say.
To begin with we will set up a google gmail account. We’re going to use google reader as our aggregator of all the information we find. It will be the one main place where we will keep everything together. Once we have a gmail account set up, then we will have access to all the other google tools we will be using. The first of which is the google reader. To set up google reader you need to have an account. When you set up the account you also get a gmail account. You don’t have to use it for email, but it’s a good back up.
Once you have created a gmail account and logged into My Account, your google dashboard will come up. This page has links to the google reader, google alerts, and a host of other tools.
Once we have our account set up, we are going to open the ‘reader’. This is where we will be looking At our feeds. What are feeds? Feeds are a way for readers to subscribe to frequently updated content from preferred websites or to aggregate Content from many sites in one place. This is creating a web of automated connections from information sources to your dashboard. Automated feeds get the information for you and place it in your reader in an easily digestible form. Its really easy to be overwhelmed with data. Like asking a question and getting the NYCity yellow pages for your answer. This is a process that helps refine that information for you into manageable chunks. Now that we have the reader set up, we need to go and find precisely the right stuff to read. This is why we continually update and refine our keywords.
Let’s say that you have just discovered theDance Advantage blog. If you like the content and want to keep updated on the posts, you can subscribe to it. You would just click on this link here.
It brings you to this page. All you need to do is click on Add to Google Reader, and you are now subscribed to this blog. Whenever there are new posts, then they will show up in your reader. I’ll show you what that looks like in just a moment.
You can also subscribe to google alerts. These are notifications to you whenever the key word or words that you are looking for appear anywhere on the web that is searchable by google. I recommend that you set up alerts for the name of your organization, and the names of the key people in your organization. These alerts can be either sent to your email, or to your reader. You can also set up alerts for key words like “Dance and Social Change”, or “classical dance and New York. Getting good information through this process, is a bit time consuming at first, but can be very valuable in the long run. If you do nothing else today, at the minimum set up google alerts for your organization.
Here is an alert I’ve set up for the term dance USA. So if anyone mentions it, I’ll get an alert for it. You probably want to set up alerts for all the common variations of this as well as the names of all the people who are your common spokespeople.
This is what the google reader page looks like. On the left side this section shows what I’ve subscribed to. A blog called Inside Facebook. An online marketing blog, my google alerts - which we refer to as ego searches. On the top left is a function where I can search for feeds on specific key words. In this case I typed in new york state arts alliance. The center section shows the feeds that I might want to chose to subscribe to. It also tells me now many other people are using the google reader to subscribe to this feed. It also tells us who this feed is coming from.
Once I’ve added a feed, I can manage where it shows up in my file cabinet on the left. For example I’ve got folders for ….
I often experiment with google search as a place to begin. Who comes up first? Does it look like these key words are giving me interesting results. Then I can subscribe to feeds of those keywords. I can also subscribe directly to interesting things I find in search.
This is what the google reader page looks like. On the left side this section shows what I’ve subscribed to. A blog called Inside Facebook. An online marketing blog, my google alerts - which we refer to as ego searches. On the top left is a function where I can search for feeds on specific key words.
This is a search I did for feeds for ‘arts and Syracuse. Interestingly, I came across this feed from Yelp. It’s a post from a woman reviewing the Center for Ballet and Dance.
Google and Yahoo groups have a lot of activity. I read somewhere recently that more than 50% of the ‘social activity’ takes place in these groups.
Another powerful search tool is Technorati. Technorati also picks up blogs that Google misses and visa versa, so its good to look at both Using, the advanced search function you can look at blogs in English, or other languages, And for how much ‘authority’ they have. Authority tells you how many people are reading it and linking to it. The higher the number the better its authority and importantly its reach. You might want to focus on the blogs that have the greatest reach for your interest area. This is a process of discovery…. Uncovering networks on top of networks.
Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking tool. This is a place where you can store your bookmarks online, And share them with others. I did a search for Dance/USA. 22 people saved this link. Do you know who is interested in your organization? If you find a site that you want to remember you add it to your delicious account, then add ‘Tags’ to It to help you identify and sort it. You can also search delicious to find out what other people are bookmarking. We can see that there are 5700 people who saved this bookmark for upcoming.org - that is one of the event sites that we looked at earlier. You can also see what other key words people used to tag this link. It can be helpful to experiment with those key words. Finally, you can also see what users saved those bookmarks. You might find that there are particularly savvy users in your area of interest that you can follow…. And see what else they have bookmarked. I have set up my account so that whenever I bookmark something, it shows up in my facebook account, so my friends can see what I’m looking at if its of interest to them.
Twitter is a micro-blogging tool. In 140 characters or less, you can tell your friends what you are doing, Or what is important. And using ‘tinyurl’ you can include links to interesting information. Twitter has a search function, that identifies people who are using your keywords. And you can add a feed of this to your google reader dashboard as well. You can see who is talking and if they are interesting, you can follow them - adding as friends, and also explore Who their friends are and their blogs and sites.
Mention Met Opera - Barbara of Seville,
To help build internal capacity at your organization it is important to think about these things. Share your learning with others in your organization, and also share your results. Just leap in and try things - experiment. Begin with small steps. Failing is a natural part of the process…. Network with your colleagues - because partnerships can be powerful. Find ways to collaborate.
Remember that one of the things you are doing with your listening program is gathering valuable social media marketing intelligence. You can easily share things in your google reader with friends or colleagues. You can email items of particular value around to your team. You can sort your feeds into folders on your reader. Be sure to fine tune your search processes - its an interactive process and will take a little time to get off the ground.
Chris brogan is one of the ‘rockstars’ of social media. He posted this tweet a couple of weeks a go. And the idea of failure being an important part of the learning process is really good to remember. We have to make room for failure, and to learn from it.
Here are a few questions to think about has you begin and go through this process. What are you learning? What is the business value? Do you need to share this insight or blog post with someone else? How will you respond. What is your plan for dealing with negative comments. Its important to be able to hear those voices. I don’t know if any of you have heard the latest video on YouTube making the rounds. A country singer’s guitar was broken by personnel at United Airlines. He went around and around with them, and finally said, if you don’t help me out here I’m going to write 3 songs and turn them into videos. Well the first one is out and has had over 10 million views on YouTube since it launched. United is learning an important lesson. Also don’t forget that the ‘listening’ process Is for the entire organization. You can choose ‘beats’ for each team member to cover and share the load and the learning.
And just a quick reminder…. Its all about investing in relationships! - and all that that entails.
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