Happy #smday from Melbourne!
Inspire9 Studios, Richmond, Melbourne
Sunday June 30th: 3-8pm
Imagine doing something completely new on a Sunday, uncharted territory as Captain Kirk would say, into a social media ‘Unconference’ in aid of Mashable’s global Social Media Day. Now, if you love spontaneity, then an unconference is definitely for you. It’s a meeting without agenda or flashy presentations, simply put by Wikipedia as a participant-driven meeting. The crowd has total control; creating the sessions, organising the running order and how to gather to discuss them.
Quite a crowd gathered in Richmond last weekend, donned with stickers showing only their Twitter handle as a stream of Tweets displayed everything happening globally on #smday.
Being my first unconference I jumped in the deep end and added a session idea, so naturally I was up second. Here’s what I learnt…
What’s the ROI for Social Media?
“What’s the ROI of not putting your pants on in the morning?” @trevoryoung
Hard to define and totally dependant on what your objectives are, often being brand awareness over gold coins. Plus the return on ignoring is sometimes far worse than not getting involved at all. Your customers are already there talking about your brand, so why not join the conversation.
In what ways has social media changed the way we watch TV
Sitting in a Game of Thrones round table format, my session began. It was great to be able to share a lot of tactics I’d used whilst working at Syfy in the UK, plus hear new ones too. TV has definitely become a collaborative viewing experience with people live tweeting along to their favourite shows, capturing people’s reactions on YouTube to shocking episodes, being able interact with your favourite characters online and even allowing viewers to influence plot lines.
Netflix’s House of Cards strategy was discussed, which took advantage of binge-viewing by posting all episodes online at the same time. Who wants to wait for the next episode? In this way, taking feedback from viewers using social media has changed the way we watch TV and with this example has also helped content piracy to some extent too.
Using images in social spaces
This session touched upon the copyright laws surrounding certain imagery online and different ways we can cover ourselves for, e.g. Sharing an Instagram picture on our blog. Maybe best to stick to the creative comms licensed images you find on Google in my opinion.
How do you promote your blog?
Do we really need to create really quirky content to get more traffic to our blogs? It seems that a story by an 8 year-old titled ‘Julia Gillard is an Elephant’ would get a whole heap of traffic compared to ‘The Elephant named Julia, who married Elephant Gillard’. It’s how we present our content that’s key and the more topical the better.
The more niche your blog is, the easier it seems to be to get followers as you become the expert in that field. A little difficult for personal blogs that cover everything, but then using tools like Zemanta you can make use of cross-platform blog sharing by displaying other peoples related posts on your blog and they do the same on theirs for you.
Last, but not least it’s social analytical tools time in tweet form
- “More people are clicking your Twitter links than you think.” bit.ly
- Twitter analytics tools of the day: ManageFlitter, Hashtag.org for # trends or in Twitter itself! Seek and ye shall find.
- Try CrazyEgg for a heat map of where your visitors click. Things are always better in pictures.
It was fantastic to meet people from so many different spheres of social experience, share our stories, a beer and bite too. Thanks goes to @socialmelb for organising such a great day and to @inspire9 for lending us their space.
Tell us your #smday stories and whether you got involved too!
