Category: Projects

Quick’n’Dirty Episode 50: Be Interesting and Be Interested

Posted by Rich Harris – July 3, 2010

This week’s episode made us hungry, and not just for food. After co-hosts Jennifer Leggio and Aaron Strout had the opportunity to chat with Winnie Hsia (@MissWinnie), Social Media Specialist for Whole Foods (@WholeFoods on Twitter), we were reminded that if you have a passion for customers and the business you are in, it is possible for that passion to resonate up the corp ladder influencing change in long-standing policies etched in proverbial stone by a 30 year old company. It’s also rad when you can applicably discuss business and food in the same show. You can listen to this episode here.

First topic of the show was our Social App of the week. With location-based apps and functionality becoming more than just a personal novelty, making their way into the advertising space, marketing campaigns and creating more biz partnerships, it’s a very hot topic right now. This week we chose location-based app Whrrl. This app has been around for a few years and while it is not new and they offer some of the standard features of the other loc-based apps, one of the things that sticks out is their “Societies” feature, making it easier for you to virtually group together with others that share your specific interests and passions. Giving users an option to either join a “Society” or create their own if they haven’t found one that serves a need or specific interest they’re looking for, is a great way to foster new relationships virtually and meet new friends in a way that is more meaningful online. Really cool.

Next was our featured guest, Winnie Hsia. Many of us can vouch for the fact that it’s always a challenge bringing social media into an older company. While she started out doing some part-time stuff on Twitter/Facebook for Whole Foods, Winnie was able to create value for Whole Foods quickly within the social media landscape and has since turned it into a full time job. From answering questions from headquarters via various social media channels, to encouraging and educating individual store managers on how to leverage SM to increase sales and customer involvement, she has really helped paved the way for a company based on everything organic, gracefully transition into the digital lives of it’s customers without missing a beat. She has found a way to utilize her passion for food, community and technology to connect and engage with customers on Twitter, Facebook and beyond. Her closing tweetable thought was so awesome I had to make it the title of this blog post: “Be interesting and be interested.”

Finally, our Twitterer of the week was none other than Jo Garfein (@JOpinionated). After reading through her tweets, credentials and various projects that she is part of, I assure you that if you at all think you are truly in the know when it comes to pop-culture, you have more than met your match with Jo. She is a pop culture content machine and an unparalleled Lost fan. You can check out her various projects at JOpinionated.com. Jo, we love your tweets!

Last but not least, for our point/counterpoint segment, Aaron & Jennifer went on to discuss businesses being able to attach a dollar value to a fan or follower. This to me is the Holy Grail of data in social media, data that if at least 85%+ accurately established and forecasted, will finally allow businesses to fully harness SM for revenue purposes as well as help those of us in running the  SM show to be more iron clad in our pitches to executives and both internal/external clients in business. The discussion was sparked by Q’n'D after discovering and reading a recent article posted at GigaOM. They do a terrific job discussing some of the challenges and discoveries covered in a recent report developed by Syncapse, a social media measurement firm.

Here are some of the more insightful takeaways from the study:

  • On average, fans spend an extra $71.84 they would not otherwise spend on products they describe themselves as fans of, compared to those who are not fans.
  • Fans are 28 percent more likely than non-fans to continue using a specific brand.
  • Fans are 41 percent more likely than non-fans to recommend a product they are a fan of to their friends.

This information is definitely helpful and was finally presented in a way that most of us in business can make sense of. It also reinforces how marketing will always be, to some extent or another, a series of moving targets that will evade our business objectives if we don’t make research a huge part of the equation.

Next week we’ll talk to Bob Knorpp, of The BeanCast. Please join us next Thursday live at noon PT / 3 ET in the Blog Talk Radio chat room or feel free to listen anytime on iTunes. Have a great weekend!

Onward.

I’ve Joined The Quick ‘n’ The Dirty

Posted by Rich Harris – May 11, 2010

Over the last few weeks I’ve been talking to Jennifer Leggio (@Mediaphyter) and Aaron Strout (@AaronStrout), and not just about their inability to agree on what smartphone is the suckiest….(an ongoing topic of snarky contention between them both always making it’s way onto the show).

They started The Quick’n'Dirty Podcast on BlogTalkRadio almost a year ago and it has since grown to the point where they need some help. Their reputations, experience and down to earth approach in business and social media have helped them grow the show quickly and attract some well known talent as guests on the show. My role as producer on the show will be to help put together and implement the tools needed to make the content syndication more fluid, tightening up some of the nuts and bolts of the show, and at times standing in as co-host if either Jen or Aaron get called off to duty to better mankind through social media.

I’m honored to be onboard  and thankful for the opportunity to work with and be surrounded by so much talent and intellect. It’s nice when you can work with people that you are also comfortable enough inviting to a bbq at your house and sharing a beer with.

For more information on The Quick’n'Dirty Podcast and it’s co-hosts check out these links:

Aaron Strout’s Blog

Jennifer Leggio’s Blog on ZDNet

Q’n'D on BlogTalkRadio

Q’n'D Podcast Subscription

Q’n'D on Twitter (@quickndirty)

Q’n'D on Facebook

Our main blog is in development and it’s launch will be announced in the coming weeks.

FeedTheMuse.net – Power to the Artists. Power to the Fans.

Posted by Rich Harris – April 26, 2010

Old School

From 1998-2001, I was in an aspiring band called Stitch that was starting to do well. We had a distribution deal with Metal Blade Records, we were in Tower and Wherehouse record stores, had a good lawyer, were one of the first bands on MP3.com (yeah remember that?), and had a half-stable bulletin board/forum application that ran on PHP when it was new and obnoxiously vulnerable to PHP injection attacks. Back then our only opportunity to get support, sell products, etc. (unless you had a web developer or designer in the band), was to be touring or playing a ton of shows……..Not anymore.

New School

In an age where record labels almost don’t mean anything anymore. In an age where if an artist or band is capable of  running their own show if their music has that magic and speaks to people thanks to all the great fluid syndication that happens on these interweb thingies…only a handful of sites have a real genuine ‘Give to the Artists That Inspire You’ vibe. FeedTheMuse.net is a website that enables and empowers the talent to enlist their actual fans to help them out. No middle man. No bullshit. Fundraising for bands for the same reason that public schools need to hold a bake sale to buy school books – The powers that be don’t always have the well-being of the talented folks top of mind that actually NEED the support. They’re too busy lining their own pockets.

All you gotta do is create a free page on their site, upload a band pic, fill in your mantra/bio, and people can just start supporting you financially. It’s cool because you set up different donation tiers. For example,  donate $1 and it is just you helping, donate $10 and get a band demo/t-shirt, etc…

A good example of this solution in action is for a local bay area band called “Electric Leaves”. Check out the implementation at: http://www.feedthemuse.net/electricleaves.

If you are in a band and want to make it easy for your fans to hook you up while you hook them up, I highly recommend this site. Everyone wins.

Onward.

Does Your Company Have a “Reputation” for Engagement?

Posted by Rich Harris – April 20, 2010

There are lots of new companies that were born into the era of social media. They have a full-on reputation for customer engagement and interaction. It is expected of them by their customers/audience and has been since they launched their website(s), blog(s) and Twitter account(s) and their company was spat out by the venture capital womb for all of us to check out. Social media influenced the initial business plan before they even launched. Hooray for them! Hooray for social media! Hooray for organic engagement! Hooray for BBQ sauce!

Training Day

However, SOME companies were not born in the age of social media. They make the best products *still* and are the leaders in their respective industries, have been around since the dawn of time, yet *still* offer a product or service that is relevant and in need. Just like you need to train your big ol’ company to shift to a culture of customer connect, engagement and transparency, you also need to possibly train your long time customers to start looking at your company along the same lines. In high tech, some of the original gangsters of silicon valley that still run the technological show on the back-end with less glamor and more of a solid backbone than almost any other tech company around (Oracle, Intel, etc…) may or may not have had a reputation for direct customer interaction over the past couple decades. So for those that haven’t, while their products or services are best-in-class and their customers know it (these custies show these brands decades of loyalty), these customers still have established an engagement status quo with them when it comes expected direct communication and involvement. If you are a long running big company trying to stay at the forefront of the new customer culture, there’s a chance you may have some work to do. There may be some serious re-shaping and molding of the minds and hearts that needs to take place.

Give The People What They Want

If you have a good product or service that fills a unique void/gap, you’ve already won the battle. To win the war in today’s landscape, you need to leverage social media channels to embrace your interactions with your customers in a way that makes them not only invest in you when things are good, but also want to work with you on improving your reputation when your company is at a low point. They need to have some sort of incentive that drives them to want to be along for the full ride as a customer (an investor, really).

Here are some ideas that I or someone else has thought of to stir the proverbial customer pot a little bit to help get your audience more involved:

Contests/Giveaways

  • There isn’t a human being on the planet who doesn’t like to be the benefactor of “free”. Throw down some dough for something people really want, a great product that 1000′s would want for free yields you at least a small pile of opt-in leads for hardly any cost. These are people you can connect with on some level and begin conversations with, retraining them in the new way that your company interacts with them, setting a new standard. Make the requirements for a contest such that they have to comment or start a discussion to be entered to win.

Feedback

  • Polls – There are so many easy to use/setup polls on Facebook and widgetized polls to embed on any website/blog now. Keep ‘em short and sweet and construct questions give off the transparent open-minded “we’re here for you” aesthetic and be genuine about it.
  • Request public opinions on your product or service or perception by publishing a sincere letter on behalf of the company as a “Note” on Facebook. Let people fire away. Delete the content containing expletives or blatant disregard and read the rest intently. You might unearth all kinds of stuff from your customers that you hadn’t ever realized.
  • No one knows how to fill a particular void than the ones you are trying to sell to: Your customers! Run public discussions on Facebook or a blog. People like to say nice things, but they LOVE to complain, and that’s your nugget. Complaints are your ammo to improve your company. Turn a negative into a positive. The objective byproduct of their complaints are that your company makes a better product, provides a better service, fills a need.

Events

  • Host several small tweetups focused on a very specific and known demographics. It’s cheap and you’ll learn more in 2 hours about people than you would in 7 days of doing ‘social media’ from your computer. There’s not a dollar figure on the planet that holds a candle to this stuff. What you learn here will translate into more thoughtful and calculated social media risks as opposed to the shotgun blast approach that most use social media for.
  • If your company is sponsoring or showing at an event, invite people (current and potential clients alike) from all over to simply just ‘stop by’ and say hello. Shake some hands. Those events have hand sanitizer everywhere now so get your networking on to allow potential new markets and customers to start buzzing around your scene.

Recycle Your Customers

If your customers aren’t used to you using social media or engaging them directly, it doesn’t mean they don’t want to and that you can’t change that. You don’t need to trade them in for new ones. After all, more often than not they’ve invested in you so anything new you do for them, or any new amount of time you invest in them, is all gravy, which makes switching to your new customer relationship from the old, pretty painless. Recycle them for use into the next chapter of your company.

Onward.

Sharing (Info) is Caring

Posted by Rich Harris – April 11, 2010

So if you know me, you know that while I mean well and have the best intentions, I’m one scatter-brained dude, always consuming and outputting as much information and *stuff* as possible. I follow so many talented people in the social media space and have so many feeds and streams of information coming at me from so many directions that I was finding it hard to man handle all of it, let alone (and most imortantly) be able to methodically share the stories and tidbits I found with all the people I know that could benefit. The other side of this is that my personal and business life overlap a LOT and I wanted to organize that at least a little bit so that I could focus on having some sort of non-business side to my personal life and some sort of non-personal side to my business life.

I created a Facebook Fan page for ‘The 47 Project’. I know your first thought is probably: What a self-absorbed narcisitic jackass. While I do overshare and generate tons of my own original content, this fan page is going to be 5% content created by me, and 95% created by everyone else in the social media space. There will of course be some smatterings of humor, personal commentary, etc. but that’s about it from me. I like being the messenger.

I think if we all spent more time unearthing someone else’s talent and lifting them up than we do ourselves, the world would be a better place.

Anyhow….enjoy.

You can either click on the Become a Fan link in the right column on this page or go directly to the page.

The Ethics of Sponsored Outreach

Posted by Rich Harris – April 6, 2010

The Truth

Today’s web audience can smell bullshit a mile away. And I thank them for it. Companies are lucky to have them for so many reasons outside of being paying customers. Their low attention span and ability to talk to their trusted friends before making a purchasing decision can squeeze the accountability out of companies like a ripe grapefruit in a vice. They help make our world and the companies that run it, a better place. My opinion of course.

At the core, my philosophy on social media/marketing (and in life really) has always been: “Be unapologetically genuine, truthful and transparent.” I’ve really tried to stay true to this my whole life, in all my business endeavors and I try to keep those traits as mainstays in everything else I do.

The challenge with social media is that it’s so vast and enormous and noisy. Because it’s so huge, we need to get more calculated and efficient. As we grow our efforts and things start to take off, new opportunities and scenarios are unearthed.

I’m sure this scenario sounds familiar: You are trying to maximize your ROI with a big campaign push. You are trying to pull out all the stops by seeding relevant key influencers, implementing a solid social media strategy relying on the most extensive outreach and syndication plan possible with the budget and manpower you were given. You realize you are ready to go bigger. You are ready to step up your game and numbers on a grander scale. Unfortunately, the size of your golden revolutionary game-changing campaign vision is WAY bigger than your allocated tangible means.

So how do you go big with way less headcount and budget than your vision requires? There are a number of ‘services’ that exist out there now that would like to help you. But while their technical abilities are sound, I’m concerned that the needle between real and ‘payola’ will get pushed too far in the wrong direction.

Here’s what I’m talking about……

The Proposition

I was approached recently by an agency recently about hiring them to do ‘targeted, sponsored outreach’ utilizing paid blog posts, tweets, et al. The process is pretty simple. You have a kick off meeting with them to discuss the following:

  • Your product or service and brand
  • Your business objective with the particular campaign or initiative you are hiring them for
  • The demographic(s)/market segments you’re trying to proliferate
  • Known subject/demographic (and very specific) key influencers (so they can research all of their conversations, posts, etc.)

Once you establish some of these basics with them, they then move forward with profiling bloggers, tweeps, and others from a pool of hundreds of thousands (so they say) of authorized content creators that have gone through a review process. This process interviews bloggers to find out what they normally write about, their hobbies, their focus, knowledge level, etc.

Example

If you were selling a new camera for instance, they would work with the bloggers they’ve profiled that are photographers, or are at least enthusiasts on some level. Then, they would orchestrate a blog post idea/concept by each of these bloggers that would all go out at the same time (roughly), mentioning your product, your company, with all positive commentary when the launch happens. There would be a HUGE amount of link love, exclusive content, and thousands of people that were advocates of your company and this new camera……………at least algorithmically. :-)

The Concerns

If you were to go down the path of basically the modern day payola version of social media, and savvy consumers saw or recognized the pattern and sudden onslaught of blog posts/tweets about you that came in at a volume that was NOT part of your track record, would they lambaste you for it? Would they start to write their own blog posts about your company paying for synthetic blog posts instead of ones that were written organically by people that actually do know/follow/buy your company’s products or services? Would it turn into a PR nightmare and make your company look shady?

Would you be the coveted winner of the “Social Media Used Car Salesman” award?

The Questions

I’m curious to know what others’ experiences have been with sponsored outreach, blogs posts in particular. Maybe hundreds of companies are doing this and no one notices, or even cares for that matter. I already know why it *works* from a technical and human behavior level, but is it the right thing to do or is it better to just continue to grow everything organically….or a combination of both? Did I leave the iron on?

Onward.

The Tweditorial Calendar

Posted by Rich Harris – April 2, 2010

There Is So Much To Do

Ok so I’m kinda burnt out on the “Tw” words myself but today I’ve been a glutton for cliché. Let’s face it, if you are running the social media show for any medium to large business, there is an enormous, ever growing list of initiatives, ideas, objectives, strategies, metrics, and executions. Even the most organized person can’t herd all the social media cats 100% of the time. When you have product launches, contests, campaigns, big company announcements, and partnerships, it can get pretty gnarly trying to keep track of it all.

Fertilize Your Twitter Growth, Get Organized

If you’ve been in the marketing/PR game for awhile, the editorial calendar has been your bible for content/campaign planning, organization, and delivery. If you are managing the social side of marketing campaigns that have complex schedules, several moving parts, Twitter is no exception. As you scale and fine tune your marketing efforts, your Twitter footprint might grow into multiple accounts representing global regions, multiple market segments and sub-segments, or it might be one account leveraging several partner content pieces that adhere to a multi-prong timeline to engage customers. Either way you slice it, at some point your Twitter execution, if done right and is showing success and growth, is gonna need it’s own prominent real estate on your calendar next to everything else. There are three primary types of tweets that I use that need a spot on my calendar. I’ll cover them below.

Maintenance

Millions of people see millions of tweets each day. Millions of people also miss millions of tweets each day, some of which they would’ve probably like to have seen (pre-sale concert tix, plane tix, hotel one day only pricing, other promos, etc.). I used to consider duplicate tweets from the same company’s account to be spammy so I avoided doing that on behalf of my current company. However, now that noise reduction is a requirement for businesses on Twitter, whether they are sifting through the noise for leads and prospects or they are responsible for contributing to the noise, hoping that the right person is noticing, 1 promotional tweet gets lost in less than a nanosecond. The issue with that is that there might be someone following your company that really would like to have seen that tweet if you just gave them a second (or third) chance to know about it. With that said, not only have I decided that it’s ok to duplicate a tweet here and there, I’ve also seen long time followers respond to the third duplicate of a tweet — proof that prior tweets had just passed them by. So much info, so few characters, so many tweets, so little attention span and time.

What I’m getting at with this is that it’s ok to have a cautious set of scheduled duplicate regular tweets that go out to let new and old followers know that you are on Facebook, or that there’s a contest running, or that this product just launched, or that you’d like to hear their opinion on something pertaining to your company. Due to the sheer volume of retweets when news hits or when great content pops up and everyone wants to share, we’re all getting a little more patient with the ebb and flow of duplicate content and most tweeps really know now when a company is a truly spammy misguided automated entity or not, by the track record with their engagement and content type/frequency. So get your weekly, bi-weekly or monthly maintenance tweets on your calendar where it makes sense. An example of types of tweets that fall into this category are: “Be sure to check us out on LinkedIn for small business talk <LINK>” or “How are we doing on Twitter? Contact us here <LINK>” .

Events

An event can be anything for a company – a product/site launch, a new service, a customer story, breaking news, quarterly financial results call, leadership change or an acquisition, to name a few. I don’t need to explain why this need to be on your calendar. Events can feel easy. There’s a nice hard date associated with it (usually) so you can wrap everything you do around it. From a social media perspective though, I try to look at events as a set of waves (maybe ’cause I’m in Cali). Your first ‘wave’ could be some teaser tweets that are mysterious. The second wave can be more teasers with more revealing content. Then you got the biggest wave of the set (official news/announcement breaks). It doesn’t stop there though. Surfers don’t just stop after the biggest wave of the set passes by. There are still smaller rideable waves to follow and the peeps in the water aren’t stop riding them until the set is done. Treat your Twitter execution in a similar fashion and plot it on your calendar.  One week of teaser tweets, tweet the launch, 2 weeks of follow on tweets and retweets of any partner/media coverage (third party blog posts, press, etc.).

When you have multiple events going on at once, plotting these on your calendar is key to not only make sure you are on time but to make sure that you aren’t hyping too many things at once, confusing your followers. Don’t make them ‘choose’ from five+ campaigns/contests to be excited about. Keep them focused as much as you can can within your control. Treat/give each event as much exclusive focus as the company roadmap allows to maximized your return.

Conversation

I know you are probably thinking to yourself, “Dude this is Twitter, it’s all about the conversation, What else is there?” While we’ve all kicked the crap out of the dead but still kicking horse that is now ’join the conversation’, I have to respectfully disagree. Twitter is about engagement. Twitter is just one of many mediums to achieve engagment. Engagement is multi-faceted. Engagement isn’t new, it’s older than you. Engagement is WAY bigger than social media. Engagement is only successful when it is allowed to be adaptable and amorphous for the sake of the relationship with your customers.

The randomness and unpredictability of the nature of human conversation on Twitter begs the question: “How the hell do you schedule the random conversational tweet and put them on a calendar?” The way that you approach getting the conversational tweet into some sort of schedule isn’t so much like the event driven tweet with a hard timeline as much as it is like a quota. Make sure that you participate in at least XX amount of relevant, genuine conversation streams per week. Putting a quota on human conversation is not contrived if it’s relevant and you care. If those two elements exist, then a quota just helps to ensure you are maintaining your investment in other people – which is the key to success.

Also Check Out…..

EmediaVitals: Use a Twitter editorial calendar to help lessen impact of ‘tweet’ duty

Onward.

GoLearn Skateboarding Hits #1

Posted by Rich Harris – February 8, 2009

I found out this morning that my iPhone app has hit #1 in top paid sports apps. I feel like finally some rewards may come from my hard work and the amazing work of my team. Yay! I had to show off the screen shot below.

GoLearn Skateboarding

Ok I’ll shut up about it already.

Launched My First iPhone App and Now It’s Featured at Apple!

Posted by Rich Harris – February 4, 2009

GoLearn Skateboarding Home ScreenIn 2008 I designed the UI for a How-To skateboarding iPhone/iPod Touch app called GoLearn Skateboarding. In December Apple approved the application, and this month they said they wanted to feature it! The feature went live yesterday and as of today it is ranked #2 in the top paid apps within the sports category at the iTunes app store! I’m super proud of and stoked on this project and we have a few more apps we plan on rolling out. I only did the front-end UI design so I have to give credit to Erik Florio/Giuseppe Taibi from Whagaa Software for providing the engineering expertise and the GoLearn platform. Credit goes to Danny Keith for all his help and support. Last but not least I need to thank Jarrod Allen and Jason Crum of Half Pint Skateboards for the video expertise and rider support. Everyone has been so awesome and I’m excited to see what opportunities arise for us in the near future. I’ve included some screen shots in this post.

PURCHASE THE APP NOW AND SUPPORT US!