Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category

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Walking the “Integration” Talk

by jburwell | Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

In our consulting work here at Amplify, we regularly come across clients that are looking for guidance on how to embrace the new direction in which communications is moving – one that involves learning how to effectively engage your constituents directly without having the filter of the media.  Here are a few of my suggestions on how to successfully integrate new media strategies with existing communications plans:

1. Relinquish a little control of your brand.  Don’t obsess over staying “on message” and instead focus on developing a productive dialogue with your constituents.

2. New media tools are a means towards an end so make sure they support your broader communications goals (e.g. increasing donations, recruiting new members, influencing public opinion, driving action on an issue) before employing them.

3. Explore ways to utilize new media tools to repurpose existing materials and gain more mileage from them.  For example, we once took b-roll and leftover footage from a client’s fieldwork and turned them into online commercials that were used for their end-of-year funding appeals on their web site and in a series of digital press releases.

Visit Amplify’s Multimedia Gallery to learn more about our new media work.

Posted in Public Relations, Social Media | No Comments »

Why popularity matters…in Facebook ads, that is

by Elena Berger | Friday, July 23rd, 2010

Your ad is your campain's cheerleaderIn a recent post on e.politics, Colin Delaney outlines a potential pitfall in Facebook’s ad model that some advertisers may not know about: namely that Facebook charges more per click if an ad is underperforming, and skews cheaper if an ad is doing well.

Though you might cry foul (or FAIL!), this cost-per-click model is really nothing new. Google Adwords works the same way. The lower your ad quality is calculated to be, the more you’ll see your investment affected by higher costs per click. Ad quality may be determined by several factors, including whether users view your ad as relevent to their search. In this way, the system pretty much punishes you for not thinking about and A/B testing for variables like audience, keywords and copy.

Back to Facebook. In Colin’s example of a recent ad campaign, he saw the most clever and creative ads do badly and therefore cost more, while the more generic ads skyrocketed. This is another bizarre and often frustrating fact about advertising. What YOU think is a good ad may not actually translate to the average user. Why this is true we may never know. But this is why we always say TEST, TEST, TEST. Create a spectrum of ad copy running from bland to snarky. Choose a variety of images – including ones you wouldn’t click on yourself…because the people you want to reach are not you.

And here’s my most important advice for someone about to test Facebook ads: separate your ads into individual campaigns. Why? If you have one ad in particular that is doing terribly, it will bring your campaign’s average click-through rate down, and your high-performing ads may suffer the consequences. So different ads and different target settings get split into different campaigns, to save your good ads the embarrassment of being seen with their less popular counterparts.

It’s a harsh truth, but in this case, popularity wins every time. Is it so far off-base to call your most winning ads your “cheerleaders”?

Posted in Advertising, Marketing, Social Media | No Comments »

Facebook By The Numbers: The Congressional Leadership

by Kevin Reid | Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

After doing a quick tally of Facebook stats for the top Congressional leaders, I have two things to say: #1) someone at Congressman Boehner’s office is doing something right (although keep reading… there is room for improvement) and #2) WTF? Is this really the best Congress can do? 

While the Facebook pages of political superstars like Obama and Palin have larger followings than most major newspapers in this country, the other household names within the political universe barely register on the scale. The lone wolf is Rep. John Boehner, the Republican Leader, who is way ahead of the pack with over 100,000 followers compared to Pelosi’s 20,000.  Reid, Hoyer and McConnell are left in the dust. 

Facebook Counts for Congressional Leaders

Scratching a little further, the numbers change things around. While there is nothing wrong with a lot of followers, another key metric – engagement – tells a slightly different story. 

Reid has posted 54 updates to his page this month.  McConnell has posted 24 updates. Boehner has posted five. Hoyer has posted three. The Speaker has only posted one!  So, Reid is updating his followers about 3 times a day on average while Pelosi is updating her followers once every two weeks.  Everyone else is somewhere in between.

Ha! But, Reid is being sneaky… he has hired someone who knows what an RSS feed is and is actually just having blog posts from his campaign site reposted on his Facebook page. “Cheater!” you say. Not so fast. By using technology to distribute his posts beyond his campaign website, he is being smart. He is simply using one of his networks to get his message out. He is sharing.  He is being social.

But guess what? Boehner has a blog. Pelosi has a blog. Hoyer has a blog. Why aren’t they republishing their blog posts on Facebook? (And, yes… I did check and those blogs are official blogs, not campaign blogs.) Somebody get on the phone and give them a call!

And, what about McConnell? It looks like he had an active blog for the 2008 election, but hasn’t updated it since. That’s OK. He’s on YouTube and posts his videos to his Facebook page. In fact, he has posted something to his Facebook page 24 times so far this month. And, these are not RSS generated re-posts of content.  These are real status updates and comments. So, of all of them, McConnell’s Facebook page is probably the most genuine.  

In my opinion, Boehner and Reid are performing the best out of the bunch even though there is room for improvement. But, with a little effort, Pelosi, Hoyer and McConnell could easily jump to the front of the line.  I will check back in a month and let everyone know. But, in the meantime, I will start looking at the Twitter accounts.

For more on this, see also “Capitol Hill Democrats and Social Media: The Sky is Not Falling,” on epolitics.com

[Note: Steny Hoyer has a personal page, a politician page and a “government official” page.  I used the government official page (which has the lowest number of followers) because it seems to be the most active (his politician page hasn’t been updated since February).]

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Posted in Politics, Recent Trends, Social Media | No Comments »

Social media planning

by Jennifer Berk | Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

I have a guest post up today at Campaigns 101, on social media planning and the POST method, that was originally written for the Congressional Compass. Vishnu Subramaniam added the catchy title: Stop! In the Name of P O S T! Do You Have a Social Media Plan?

Posted in Politics, Social Media | No Comments »

Crisis management, White House style: publicizing oil spill efforts

by Jennifer Berk | Monday, May 17th, 2010

McClatchy has a fascinating and comprehensive description of the White House’s messaging efforts around the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

Within hours, it was cranking out a sustained barrage across the broad spectrum of modern media — statements, reports, e-mails, tweets, photos and videos — all punctuated by a high-profile presidential visit to the Gulf followed by an incendiary speech at the White House and a video recap with exclusive behind-the-scenes views of Obama in “West Wing Week,” the White House’s new online program at www.whitehouse.gov.

I’d noticed the White House’s long timeline blog post earlier, “The Ongoing Administration-Wide Response to the Deepwater BP Oil Spill”.  It starts with Search and Rescue, goes on to The President is Alerted, and lists Assets Deployed To Date starting the night of April 20th and continuing every day since.  They’re continuing to update the timeline with every day’s five to ten actions, and its length at this point is awe-inspiring.

Most importantly, their publication schedule is reaching the media: the day after the timeline was first published, Politico had an item headlined Disaster in the print edition that started with Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN), the House Republican Conference Chairman, saying the government didn’t react quickly enough to the oil leak.  But at the bottom, it mentioned the “6,300-word opus” posted by the White House.

McClatchy’s article ends with Dan Pfeiffer, White House communications director, saying “”We were successful at getting a pretty high percentage of the coverage accurately depicting the steps the administration had taken . . . . It was not clear that was going to happen (several) days ago.”

Impressive results for a crisis communication plan, in the wake of an environmental disaster that will continue to affect us for years.  Hopefully the management of the leak will have positive results soon as well….

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Posted in Blogging, Politics, Public Relations, Social Media, Video | No Comments »

Can you keep up with political/technical change?

by Jennifer Berk | Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

I’ve mentioned before that one of the big lessons of online campaigning is to budget for continuing web development. Here’s a great example of why you need to do that, from Talking Points Memo:

About two weeks ago, I took a screen-capture of the front page of Crist’s campaign site shortly before he announced his party switch. One element of the site that caught my eye was an image linking to an issues page, which said: “*Consistent Leadership* The Charlie Crist Conservative Record.” This had been a part of his site for some months, in an effort to defend credentials on the right when he was running in the Republican primary against Marco Rubio.

Now the “consistent leadership” remains, but in a slightly different form: “*Consistent Leadership* The Charlie Crist Record.” The word “conservative” has been deleted.

Here is the before picture:

And here is the after picture:

Obviously this is a bit of an unusual circumstance, but this isn’t confined to political upheavals: how fast was your favorite political campaign or advocacy group to implement the new Facebook Like button?

Posted in Issue Advocacy, Marketing, Politics, Recent Trends, Social Media, Websites | No Comments »

The Lowdown on Facebook Ad Success

by Elena Berger | Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

Sample Facebook AdWith Facebook’s community growing every day, and an advertising platform that is built for its social atmosphere, advocates and corporate brands are both figuring out the same thing: This is for me.

Facebook ads offer a low-risk, pay-per-click opportunity to start reaching out to new audiences. Within an enormous pool of potential new contacts,  you can target a large swath of people, or a very specific group—say, all people who live within 25 miles of Washington, DC, are women between the ages of 18 and 25, and list “hiking” as an interest. That’s about 2,100 people, by the way.

And according to a new report from Nielsen—as well as Amplify’s years of experience—these ads work when done right. Ads can be effective during a one-off campaign, even if you haven’t developed a Facebook presence. But if you’re really interested in cultivating a following that will be there for all your future campaigns, you should start out with ads that attract people to your fan page, taking some time to get them acquainted with your organization.

Nielsen’s report, Understanding the Value of a Social Media Impression, analyses the results of over 125 ad campaigns and 800,000 Facebook users . It concludes that, just as with traditional PR, a combination of paid media and earned media will reap the biggest rewards.

  • Paid Media. For paid media in this case the report recommends starting with “Homepage ads” – the Facebook social ads that ask you to become a fan (or “Like” you, as is now the case)—combined with the more personal version of these ads in which a friend who’s already a fan is listed in the ad—suggesting the endorsement of someone the reader trusts. In branding terms, this adds up to a substantial increase in ad recall, brand awareness and purchase intent.
  • Earned Media. Of course, more people taking action means more “earned media”—in this case, the story showing up on people’s Facebook feeds (as well as being actively shared)… what we call the “networking effect.” This is harder to quantify, but it’s clear that what earned media lacks in reach, it makes up for in how effectively it zeroes in on future fans.

The same branding recommendations hold true with advocacy groups. This is all a fancy way of saying that before you can expect people to do something, they should already know who you are and like what you do. This is far more likely to be the case if your message catches their attention, and if their friends will vouch for you.

The main takeaway is that it’s the time spent cultivating your fans before your next big campaign, and not the campaign itself, that will make all the difference. Your message could be the most important information in the world, but if nobody’s looking, it doesn’t matter.

To learn more about how Amplify can help you leverage Facebook, email Elena Berger.

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Amplify teaches the basics of social media (plus a bonus)

by Raquel Ortiz | Friday, April 16th, 2010

This week Amplify hosted a free “lunch and learn” session on social media, plus how to integrate traditional and new media. The presentation offered participants new to social media a background on the major players, like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr and some tips for success in utilizing each of them. One universal rule? Go where your audience is. Companies and organizations can easily get swept up in wanting to take advantage of the latest tool or technology before analyzing whether that platform actually reaches their target audience or helps them achieve their organization’s goals.

Oprah covers IFAW seal campaignThe second half of the presentation discussed how to integrate new media and traditional media – more specifically, how to use new media to generate press coverage. An example from Amplify’s own work was an online video we created for the International Fund for Animal Welfare’s Gift for Animals program. We used archived footage from IFAW’s field work to create a video commercial that we posted on IFAW’s YouTube channel and then sent out through a digital news release. The unique approach generated media attention for the alternative gift program, including a feature on Oprah.com. Our advice to any company or organization is to explore opportunities to repurpose existing materials and get more mileage from them through social media. Think about what you’ve done recently and how it might be adapted for a new media application – but only if it reaches your target audience of course!

Posted in Public Relations, Social Media, Video | No Comments »

Online organizing in the Brown (R-MA) Senate campaign

by Jennifer Berk | Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

Like the Obama campaign’s online organizing, the Scott Brown campaign for Senate in Massachusetts is getting mainstream attention. It’s normal that Personal Democracy Forum would comment about the Brown campaign’s use of Google tools. But Wired talking about its online organizing, fundraising, and word of mouth?

For his run to fill a U.S. Senate seat held by U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy for decades, in a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 3 to 1, Brown invested early in an online campaign that drew supporters, turned them into active volunteers, contributors and advocates, and laid the foundation to exploit a tidal wave of excitement and enthusiasm that rose unexpectedly in the last weeks of the campaign. The image of Brown taking time to shake hands with every single supporter who showed up at his victory celebration the night of the election is an image of how he sees the online campaign: as a way of meeting and connecting with people who want to be involved.

For the story from Prosper Group, online consultants to the campaign, read What Brown did right online, Behind the scenes of the Brown moneybomb, and The other Scott Brown campaign “bomb” from their blog.

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Posted in Grassroots, Politics, Social Media, Websites | No Comments »

Any advocacy is good advocacy?

by Jennifer Berk | Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

Everyone’s heard “any publicity is good publicity.” Does the same apply to activism?

I’m used to seeing Facebook statuses that don’t make sense without context. But the colors were less comprehensible than most. Brigid Schulte on the Washington Post’s Story Lab blog asks:

Was so openly and willingly posting something as intimate as one’s bra color an attempt to raise breast cancer awareness? Or was it all just another Facebook ‘send your friend a snowball’ or ‘take your celebrity boyfriend quiz’ silly game?

Whatever its original purpose was, it did put breast cancer in front of a lot of people. But not everyone was happy about the method:

Some breast cancer survivors blogged about the heart-wrenching decision of whether to post a bra color or not. “I wrote ‘None – in fact, I don’t even OWN one,’” blogged one survivor, who noted that many of her friends who’d had mastectomies began writing “Nude.” “Nothing.”

I’d be irritated with any established organization that created this (they should know to run their messaging by some stakeholders). But no one knows who started it.

This is part of an overall loss of control that affects advocacy organizations as well as brands. They’ll need to figure out what to endorse and what to disavow in order to benefit from activism that doesn’t quite match their own messages, might offend traditional supporters, but spreads through populations they’ve been unable to reach.

Posted in Grassroots, Issue Advocacy, Social Media | No Comments »

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