For the last three years, I’ve been a part of Ad 2 San Diego, a non-profit organization of advertising professionals ages 32 and younger. I’ve served as the Social Media Chair, the Director of Communications, and this year am currently serving as their Secretary of State.

My primary responsibilities are to design and execute the social media strategy to grow our membership which I am happy to report that we have been able to increase year over year. One of the many questions I get asked from other Ad 2 chapters is, “What should I talk about on my social media channels?” My suggestion — apply “The Social Media Rule of Thirds.”

The Social Media Rule of Thirds

Simply stated, one-third of your content should support your industry, one-third should be about your members, and one-third should be about your club. This rule is easy to remember as it is to apply.

Industry: One third of your content should support your industry.

Technology and business trends are constantly evolving which is why it’s important to stay abreast of industry trends. If you can help your audience put their best foot forward by sharing fresh new ideas to help them add value to their business, they are most likely to be a highly engaged fan.

The easiest way to help your audience stay informed is to share industry specific news, announcements, and events that your audience may find helpful or informative. If you’ve attended a recent conference or seminar, highlight the key take aways and if possible, share a link to the presentations.

Members: One third of your content should be about your members.

Your members are the foundation of your organization so engage in a dialogue with them. Show your members that you value their opinion by using social media to collaborate and drive future events with new ideas. Poll members on what topics they would like to learn more about and include that in your programming.

If you have board members and volunteers that help with your club’s operations, recognize their hard work. I have also seen club’s make announcements when any of their members receive a special award or promotion at work. Lastly, if your club has special membership discounts to industry specific conference, be sure to share that as well.

Club: One third of your content should promote your club or organization and aim to generate revenue for your business.

Let your audience get to know your club’s mission and provide information on how people can get involved. Take the opportunity to promote upcoming events, highlight the benefits of becoming a member, and what your club has accomplished.

Ensure the long term success of your social media strategy

Most clubs and organizations bypass the first two rules and immediately jump into self-promotion. As a result, their Facebook page or Twitter account comes off as a hard sell and fans start to unlike the club’s page,  hide posts and Twitter followers start to drop off.

In short, to ensure the long term success of your social media initiatives – apply the Social Media Rule of Thirds to your content strategy. If you’re already applying the Social Media Rule of Thirds, I’d love to hear what type of content you’re sharing and whether it was a hit or miss.

[Image Source: istockphoto]

Related posts:

1. Digital Media Dinner – Social Media Branding Recap
2. Social Media Camp: San Diego at Sony on April 30th 2011
3. 5 Types of Social Media Campaigns

Matt was a web application created by the Carsonified team that I discovered in 2008 and shared how anyone  use Matt to make managing multiple Twitter account more efficient. Since then, Matt has become a parked domain and the service no longer exists. Fortunately, there have been other social media dashboards that took managing Twitter on a whole new level such as CoTweet.

Today we will cover how CoTweet’s platform can help you manage multiple Twitter accounts and how you can get started with CoTweet today at no cost.

Managing Multiple Twitter Accounts with CoTweet Standard Edition

If you’re on a tight budget, CoTweet’s Standard Edition is something you should look into because it’s absolutely free. This edition is best suited for individuals and organizations that manage only a few Twitter accounts and is managed by a couple team members.

Below are a few noteworthy features that you can benefit from:

Multiple Account Users

Easily add up to five Twitter accounts through a single CoTweet login and post updates all in one interface. Feel free to invite colleagues to join your account to help manage your Twitter presence.

Tweet Scheduling

Prepare your updates ahead of time with this feature. Simply enter your update then choose the date and time you want the post to go live. The only caveat with this feature is that you don’t have the option to bulk upload status updates.

Multi-Account Posting

Have a message that can be posted to multiple accounts? No problem. You can select more than one Twitter account to publish your update.

Click Tracking

View how many people clicked on a link that you posted from the user interface. All urls are shortened with Bit.ly.

Monitor Keywords and Trends

Use CoTweet as a listening platform to monitor specific keywords and trends. I like to use this feature when following a hashtag for a conference.

On Duty Notifications

With CoTweet, you can delegate responsibility to someone else on your team. One an individual is assigned to be On Duty, he or she will receive email notifications when updates are sent to any of your Twitter handles.

Assignments

Sometimes you come across tweets that you don’t have the answer to but someone else on your team may be able to respond. When this happens, you can assign an update to a member on your team to follow up. According to CoTweet, “They’ll be notified via email and the updates will appear in their “Follow Up” queue.” Once a response has been delivered, you’ll receive an email containing their response along with the original update.

Conversation Threading

This feature makes it easy to see which updates have been responded and by whom on your team.

Archive Messages

If you like to keep a record of what updates you’ve received including ones that you’ve sent out, this feature will allow you to do just that.

Rich Profiles

Of all the features that come with CoTweet Standard, I’d have to say that this feature is the one that I use the most. When you click on any username in the user interface, CoTweet will display the conversation you’ve had with that particular person, highlight their most recent updates, and include their Twitter stats (i.e. number of follower/following). Last but not least, you can instantly follow or unfollow people from this convenient panel.

Get Started on CoTweet

Ready to make the jump to CoTweet? Sweet, follow these simple steps below and you’ll be a multi-tasking social pro.

Step 1: Go to http://cotweet.com/signup/.

Step 2: Introduce Yourself. Fill in your First and Last Name and then the company that you’re associated with. Leave this field blank if you’re not using CoTweet on behalf of your company and using it for personal use.

Step 3: Create your CoTweet login by entering a valid email address and entering a secure password.

Step 4a: Review the Terms and Conditions. By signing up you agree to CoTweet’s Terms & Conditions.

Step 4b: Then click on the “Create Your Account” button.

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I stumbled across the course, “User Motivation,” a lively RSA Animate which was adapted from Dan Pink’s talk at the RSA. While the video illustrates the hidden truths behind what truly motivates people, I was truly taken back by how absolutely clever and entertaining this video was. For instructors that have students that are auditory and visual learners, this is definitely a good example of how to keep your student engaged when teaching online.

The second series of Digital Media Dinner was held last month and focused on how businesses both large and small could strengthen their company’s presence across various social networks, review sites,  in addition to collective buying sites such as Groupon.  The event was hosted by local social media consultant, Melodie Tao (also known as Marketing Melodie) and featured Danny Wurst, Community Manager at Yelp, Kate Grofton, Account Manager at Groupon, and Lee Mills the VP of Marketing at MojoPages as panelists.

To kickoff the event, Melodie Tao presented a high level overview of popular online review sites, location based services, and provided the audience with tips and tricks on how to create and maintain their own Facebook business page. Then opened the floor to the audience to ask her and the panelists a few questions. What I found most interesting was the difference of a Facebook Profile versus a Facebook Page.

According to Facebook’s terms of service, “Profiles represent individuals and must be held under an individual name, while Pages allow an organization, business, celebrity, or band to maintain a professional presence on Facebook.”

This means, should a business create a Facebook profile instead of a Facebook page, Facebook has the authority to delete that profile and as a result, the business would lose their list of friends. So if you’re business has a profile instead of a page – act now and set up your Facebook page. Once you make that change you’ll have access then to view analytics on your Facebook page and take advantage of Facebook’s Like buttons and widgets.

Another key take away that I came home with were Yelp Events. Apparently I have been living under a rock and am not as Yelp savvy like my dear friend Jonathan H. because when Melodie Tao asked who heard about the event on Yelp – almost everyone raised their hands! Yelp Events? Huh? What is that?

Yelp Events features local events that Yelpers can RSVP to and a comment board that the community can participate in. My excuse for not being aware of this feature is because I generally look for events on Facebook and only go on Yelp to read and write reviews. However, since the event, I’ve taken a stab at adding a few San Diego Ad Club and Ad 2 San Diego events to the calendar and it was pretty easy.

Overall, I enjoyed Digital Media Dinner and look forward to the next series. For those of you that were unable to attend, you can view Melodie Tao’s presentation below or on SlideShare.

Related posts:

1. Social Media Breakfast San Diego Recap
2. Mari Smith 10 Facebook Do’s and Don’ts Event Recap
3. Social Media Rule of Thirds to Grow Membership

Thanks to my current employer, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to attend the Online Marketing Summit (OMS) in San Diego which was held at the Downtown Westin Gaslamp Quarter. I was at the conference most of the time providing attendees with a demo of my company’s software solutions for SEM and SEO and while I wasn’t able to attend a lot of the sessions, I was able to attend a session on how marketers could leverage the location-based social media platform, Foursquare, to target and reward loyal consumers.

Mike Lewis, the speaker and  Vice President of Marketing at Awareness, Inc. kicked off his presentation with a comedy web series on YouTube produced by HubSpot, Inc. called, “Foursquare Cops,” which I had to share (see below). The rest of the presentation is up on SlideShare. If you attended the event, what was your key take away?

Foursquare Cops – HubSpot, Inc.

Top 10 Ways Marketers can Use Foursquare

Presented by Mike Lewis (@bostonmike) at OMS 2011

View more  presentations from Mike Lewis on SlideShare and visit his blog Social Episodes for more of his insight on social media and its on today’s businesses.

If you’re already on Foursquare, feel free to add me – HeyStephanie. Check you later!

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3. Social Media Camp: San Diego at Sony on April 30th 2011

In an effort to stay abreast of trends in the social media landscape, I enrolled in the Marketing via New Media course through UCSD Extension which is taught byBecky Carroll, author of the CustomersRock.net. The objective of the online course is to “examine interactive marketing opportunities beyond websites, including blogs, vlogs (video blogs), forums, e-mail campaigns, social networking, communities, podcasts, mobile computing, and even virtual reality.” For individuals whose day to day activities are usually fast-paced, this is a great way to learn and embrace the new marketing opportunities within social media on their own time.

I first heard of the new media marketing course in 2008 when the company I was working for at the time, Brickfish®, was invited by Becky Carroll and her students to speak. We presented what Brickfish was and how companies could use our platform to launch a social media advertising campaign. In fact, I blogged about my first encounter with Becky’s class which you can view here: Marketing via New Media Meets Brickfish.

Since 2008, I’ve always wanted to enroll but there was always an obstacle (i.e. work life balance, other extracurricular commitments, etc.) that prevented me from doing so. Now that I’ve finally enrolled in the class and I’m definitely looking forward to what the course has to offer as well as meeting other students in the class that are as passionate about social media as I am. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

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1. Marketing via New Media Meets Brickfish®
2. Guest Bloggers on HeyStephanie
3. HeyStephanie’s Social Map

There’s a new feature on Facebook called “Places,” that allows you to share your location with your friends by checking-in at a location. You can even tag friends that are with you which frankly, is what I like most about this feature. Like other location-based platforms, you can see if your friends have checked in nearby – that’s happened to me on several occasions when checking in on Foursquare.

However, unlike Foursquare, Facebook Places doesn’t let you become the Mayor of a location which is really what I think makes Foursquare fun from a user’s perspective. You can win badges, oust the current Mayor, and if you’re lucky…take advantage of customer exclusive rewards like becoming the Mayor of your local Starbucks and getting a discount on your next cup of coffee.

I wonder what the future plans are for Facebook Places…Will it integrate with Facebook’s business pages? What’s their strategy against competitors like Foursquare and Yelp? I guess time will only tell.

For now, I’ll stick to my current guidelines:

1. Default check-in: Foursquare
2. If it’s a restaurant: Yelp
3. If a friend is with me: Facebook Places

However, despite which platform I decide to use to check-in, the funny thing is, it’ll end up on Facebook anyway.

If you’re on Foursquare, be sure to add Heystephanie. Check you later!

Related posts:

1. Tips for Marketing on Foursquare – OMS 2011
2. Mari Smith 10 Facebook Do’s and Don’ts Event Recap

If you thought corporate brands were the only ones diving into the world of social media, you’re wrong. Non-profits are leveraging the social media landscape  as well to optimize their communication efforts, raise funds and maximize awareness for their cause.

In fact, if you’re active within the Twitter community, you may have seen several of your followers with a 12for12k Challenge border surrounding their avatar. The 12for12k Challenge is the combination of social media and fund-raising.

The concept is simple:

• 12 months of the year
• 12 charities, a different charity each month
• $12,000 per charity

To learn more about the 12for12k Challenge, I reached out to founder, Danny Brown, for an informal interview.

1. Tell us about the concept behind “The 12for12K Challenge” (i.e. how you came up with the idea, what prompted you, etc.).

The idea was simply to try and help as many good causes as possible in 2009. For anyone that visits my blog, they’ll see a list of charities I support. I wanted to take this further and help organizations that are great causes but may be suffering from either awareness, support or funds.

The prompt was from reading newspapers and speaking to non-profit friends, about how traditional fund-raising is being hit hard by both the economy and the cost of getting your cause into the open. It’s clear that social media can offer solutions to both these issues, and that’s when the idea started taking shape.

We’ve used a variety of tools and mediums to raise awareness for what we’re trying to achieve, and the charities themselves. Twitter has been hugely effective for us, particularly with the use of the 12for12k Twitter avatar. This leads to people questioning Twitter users sporting the avatar what 12for12k is all about, and that leads to conversation. Which is still the best way to promote anything.

We also have a 12for12k Facebook group, the main 12for12k site with blog, the 12for12k promo video, and we’ve recently set up a blogger program for bloggers to get directly involved with 12for12k.

We’ve also held fun events like a Tweetathon, a virtual pajama party and live tweetups, and this month we’re looking at holding a virtual 12for12k karaoke – more details on that soon!

January was WarChild; February was Stop the Silence; March was Share Our Strength; April was Yehu.org; and this month is Hospice of Peel. As far as donations go, we have only broke the $12,000 barrier once (for the March charity) while the others we have raised on average around $5,000.

Obviously we’d love to hit the $12,000 and we will continue to look into ways to make this happen, but I think we’re hugely happy at the support we’re receiving so far. Plus, it’s been a matter of raising awareness about 12for12k, and I feel we’re reaching that now. We have a huge announcement to make for June and November should also be an exciting time as we combine with a great organization.

I know the charities we’ve supported so far have experienced a lot of new people visiting their sites and wanting to find out more, following our partnership. That’s all we ever wished for, so on that front, I think we can be really pleased.

The Hospice of Peel charity is a perfect example of the way the whole 12for12k thing works. We’ve never wanted to be in the mindset of, “Here are our 12 charities – give us your money!”. Instead, we want to involve our supporters as much as possible. So we ask for recommendations of charities we could possibly support.

This is what happened with this month’s charity. Daniel Patricio is a young guy in Toronto doing some amazing things through social media, and is an active supporter and volunteer for the hospice. We’re already connected on Twitter, and Daniel asked us if we could look at Hospice of Peel. It seemed a perfect fit for our ethos, and they do amazing work, so it made it an easy organization to support. 

There are a number of ways. Obviously the first is by donating to each month’s chosen charity – you can find out about Hospice of Peel and how to donate here.

We know times are tough, so if you can’t afford to donate, but you still wish to support and have a blog, you can  use our blog badges to display on your blog. These link directly to 12for12k and help raise more awareness.

And, of course, just let your friends, family and colleagues know about us and what we’re trying to do. The more we can make people aware, the more we can help a given month’s charity.

First, make sure you meet our criteria. We want to make sure we help each charity as much as possible, so we have four guidelines:

• No more than 10% admin cost
• Accounts must be available to public on request
• Need to have a plan for sustainable change in place, and not just offer a quick-fix solution through donations
• Need to accept Paypal

If that’s you, then we’d love to consider you. Just email charities@12for12k.org and let us know a bit about you, and we’ll definitely look.

More About Danny Brown
Danny Brown provides business branding and social media consultancy services to the consumer and commercial markets, from small start-ups to Fortune 500 businesses.

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This past weekend, my husband and I participated in a nationwide Tweetup for 12for12K and Mom It Forward to support the non-profit organization Yehu.org. Yehu is a microfinance organization in the rural coastal region of Kenya for the poor, by the poor. They provide financial services, business opportunities, and skills training for poor rural entrepreneurs in Kenya.

Yehu’s mission is to enable these entreprenuers to save and earn interest while providing these entrepreneurs access to micro-loans which can help them start or expand their business.

To support Yehu.org, 12for12K and Mom It Forward teamed up and hosted special events throughout the month of April with 100 percent of the proftils going towards the cause.

The San Diego 12for12K charity event was held at the Hard Rock hotel’s newly relaunched rooftop bar and lounge, Float, where fellow San Diego tweeps met up to to help raise funds and awareness. It was great to see so much support and finally being able to meet tweeps in person. In fact, a big congratulations goes out to Rachel Kay Public Relations, Downtown Rob of WebWizards.net, Cinthya “Sugar” Jones, and promotions partner Rich and Creamy for hosting a wonderful event. I especially enjoyed the 12for12k-tini, the photo booth, and look forward to supporting next month’s charity. At the end of the night, the event raised $1500. Awesome work everyone!

To learn more about The 12for12K Challenge and support for Yehu.org, visit the official 12for12K blog.

Since the month of April isn’t over yet, you are more than welcome to chip in for the cause.

Credits: Photos courtesy of James Gose and template created by Leiko Beck Designs.

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1. Meet Danny Brown & The 12for12K Challenge
2. Ad 2 San Diego Cause Marketing Night and Charity Art Auction
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In the article, “Are Your Customers Ready for Social Media,” we discussed how you can use Forrester’s Social Technographics® profile tool to asses how your customers will engage in a social media campaign based on what they’re already doing online.

Today we’ll review five types of social media campaigns that you can create to engage your consumers and promote your brand. We’ll also discuss the pros and cons of each campaign type so you can decide which type of campaign best suits your audience.

Before we begin, I’d like to clarify that the term, “social media campaign,” is used in this article to describe customized contests and promotions that companies launch to engage consumers in their advertising message.
Social media campaigns leverage user generated content (UGC) created by brand loyalists to promote a company’s brand, product, or advertising message on multiple social networks. UGC in general can be broken down to five categories: Photos, Blogs, Design, Videos, and Mixed Media which combines all types of UGC.

Photo Campaigns

Photo campaigns are easy for consumers to participate in. Majority of online users have photos stored on their desktop and are familiar with how to upload photos to websites (i.e. Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, etc.). As a result, the barrier to entry for photo campaigns is relatively low.

With photo campaigns, you decide what the theme of your campaign should be. One example of a photo campaign is Sugarloot’s Paparazzi Princess Contest. Sugarloot asks members to submit their ‘paparazzi-worthy’ pic to the to be eligible to win a designer handbag.

While photo campaigns are low barrier to entry, it’s important to keep your campaign theme simple. A theme such as, “Share a photo of you and your best friend,” may draw entries of two girls as best friends or a girl and her chihuahua. Be specific or you’ll be moderating irrelevant entries all day.

Blog Entries

Social media campaigns that ask participants to create a blog or submit a story are also low barrier to entry campaigns.  As the campaign sponsor, you create the theme and list the requirements that participants need to meet in order to be eligible to win a prize(s). DebtGoal, for example, is currently running a campaign on Facebook that asks participants to share their thrifty tips on how to save money.

The skill level required to post a blog is easy and you can expect to see a lot of entries. Unfortunately, what you might find in a blog campaign are entries  that  don’t relate to the prompt or entries with multiple grammatical errors. Furthermore, blog entries in a campaign are typically less engaging than photos. Visitors to the campaign will see lines of text and may become bored with the campaign and leave versus a photo campaign that’s more pleasing to the eye and drives more engagement.

Design Campaigns

Design campaigns are fun because the company is asking their consumers to be creative with the brand.  One of my favorite design campaigns was the Design a T-Shirt for Honest Foods campaign. Honest Foods and Brickfish provided the artwork and T-shirt template that participants could use in their designs. Over 2,000 original designs featuring the Honest Foods logo were submitted to the campaign and shared across the Internet.

For participants that aren’t familiar with Photoshop or other photo-editing software, they may find this type of campaign difficult and the number of creators in your campaign may be smaller than what you expected.  As a result, design campaigns are generally medium to high barrier to entry. A good rule of thumb is to provide the artwork that artists can build upon and be clear with how participants can and cannot use your logo.

Video Campaigns

Video campaigns are entertaining but just like design campaigns, they are also high barrier to entry campaigns as it requires basic video editing skills.

If your target audience isn’t experienced with video-editing, you may find yourself with only a handful of entries. However, if you do find the right audience, you can make the campaign easier by providing the creative assets .

Mixed Media

Mixed Media campaigns are perfect when you want a mix of UGC and want to open your social media campaign to a broad audience that way anyone can participate. You can even drive more engagement to a mixed media campaign if you offer a prize for each medium (i.e. best photo, blog, design, video, etc.).

Need Ideas?

Still not sure how to get started or which type suits your company? Below is a list of companies that sponsor social media campaigns:

• Brickfish.com
• Sugarloot.com
• Polyvore.com
• Votigo.com
• YouTube.com

[Image Sources: Xanetia, illuminator999, Striatic, Diego Cupolo]

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2. Are Your Customers Ready for Social Media?
3. Digital Media Dinner – Social Media Branding Recap