Dooley Online

Social Media 101 - Making Connections: 3 Rules of Thumb

Recently, I have been getting a lot of inquiries from students and colleagues asking for guidance on making social media connections:

Should I accept invitations from people I don’t know and even don’t know about? Or should I limit my contacts? What is good form?

Don't feel that you need to respond to everyone who asks to connect. 

Here are three simple rules of thumb:

1. Connect with people (or brands) you know.
2. Connect with people (or brands) you trust.
3. Connect with people (or brands) who have something to say you want to hear.

If you use these three rules of thumb, you should be able to build an online community that best reflects your life, your interests and your information needs.

 

Tribes, Social Media, and Shah Rukh Khan: A Brief Case Study

The Indian film superstar Shah Rukh Khan (also known as SRK) has a huge tribe of fans and has been dubbed the "Baadshah of Bollywood." His fan base goes beyond India - can be found in throughout the world. By some estimates he has more than a billion fans (and counting).

Seth Godin might label his fans a Tribe. According to Godin, 

“A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.” 

Social media offers gives tribe members a seemingly direct connection to their leader, their inspiration, their power source. When the leader posts something in social media, the tribe takes notice, shares the information, and responds.

SRK's online tribe is fairly extensive. It includes the Bollywood press and marketers, the brands he holds - such as Red Chillies Entertainment and Kolkata Knight Riders, Brand-SRK. It extends to fan clubs around the world and individuals. Fans of Shah Rukh Khan often refer to themselves as "SRKians" and each claims to be SRK's biggest fan. Perform a search on any social media site for #SRK or "Shah Rukh Khan" and you will be astounded at the breadth of different tribe members out there.

Perhaps one reason SRK's tribe is so large is that he has respect for his tribe and the power his tribe gives him. In an Hindustan Times interview, he explained,

"You know, there is a story I have heard: a person was walking and somebody turned to him and said, ‘See how much power you have. You are walking in front and thousands of people are walking behind you.’ And as soon as he said that, the leader replied, ‘That’s not power. Power is not the ability to lead people, but to take them along.’ So he went to the end of the line and said, ‘Let everyone walk ahead and I will look after them from the back.’ That’s what power is. "

For his latest film, Chennai Express (released worldwide on August 8), SRK connected with his tribe via multiple social media channels - encouraging his fans to see the film and share in the fun. His fans eagerly obliged, enthusiastically sharing news and content related to the film as soon as it became available.

Besides periodically posting teaser trailers and item numbers from the upcoming film on youtube - something that has become standard practice for most films - additional online connections and content were made available. This included:

• Livestreaming

  • The Chennai Express music launch was livestreamed (and recorded) a month before the film was released.

  • On August 14, SRK and director Rohit Shetty participated in a Facebook live video chat based on question submitted via Facebook #hashtags.

• Extra Video Content. Several special videos featuring SRK and Chennai Express were posted, including: 

  • Shah Rukh Khan Teaches You How to be a Superstar (posted July 10) which is a humorous take on the life of a film superstar.

  • Lungi Dance - Full Video Song - "Chennai Express" (2013) Honey Singh "Shahrukh Khan" Deepika (posted July 29) which is a musical tribute to Rajinikanth, a Tamil film superstar.

  • Bollywood's Ultimate Romantic Hero - Rahul - Shah Rukh Khan (posted August 13) which features clips from previous SRK films and encourages people to fall in love with "Rahul" all over again as they watch Chennai Express.

  • SRK and Rohit Shetty visited several movie theaters showing Chennai Express shortly after its release and recorded snippets of the fun fan frenzy which were posted online.

• Twitter: 

  • Shah Rukh Khan, who had taken a hiatus from Twitter, started to tweet again along with Deepika Padukone and ChennaiExp2013. However, SRK's tweets weren't so much about Chennai Express. SRK's tweets tend to be more philosophical and reflective, focusing on his life, musings of the moment, and his family. 

  • Twitter India and ZipDial set up a collaborative service to allow everyone in India to follow and engage the superstar on Twitter via SMS.

  • While the main Twitter hashtag used for the film was #ChennaiExpress, several hashtags were added for special promotions such as #FamilyExpress #RohitShettyExpress #NumberOneExpress #ChennaiExpressWeekend and #CommonManExpress, among others.

Breaking News : #ChennaiExpress is Trending on Top Worldwide on Twitter pic.twitter.com/KfOgtuZyuK

— Bollywood 24x7 (@B24x7Official) August 8, 2013

• Contests. 

  • A contest was held as part of the Chennai Express Karaoke App launch. The winner would have the opportunity to meet Shah Rukh Khan in person in Mumbai. However, with the SRKian tribe covering the globe, the winner ended up being Bindia Patel from Texas, so SRK had resort to congratulating her via video on Facebook.

  • The #FamilyExpress contest was held the weekend of August 23-25 and SRK invited his social media fans to see the film again. For those who sent in photos of the ticket stubs and their families, he would make a short video. While there was a large response, SRK followed through on making the videos. You can view Shah Rukh Khan with the Dooleys here.

• Fan Generated Content. Fan-made artwork made the rounds. Polls were taken as to who is the greatest Bollywood star ever, SRK or [add name here]. People were encouraged to show their love for SRK by sharing photos of the star. While some content came from Chennai Express, a great deal of content also came from other sources.  Fans find and post photos from SRK's films, photo shoots, and personal life. Youtube.com has a plethora of film and video snippets about SRK. There is also a thriving PlanetSRK community forum where members share stories and answer questions about SRK's films and his life.

• Multiple Channels. Just as there are multiple profiles, pages, and groups on Facebook and Twitter, there are quite a few profiles, pages, posts, and boards about SRK on Google+, Pinterest and other social media sites - not to mention mainstream news and blogging sites. It is no wonder that SRK won the IIFA Digital Star of the Year Award in 2013.

Of course, SRK's in person visits also helped to fuel the enthusiasm of his tribe to push Chennai Express into the "400 crore club" to become the highest grossing Bollywood film ever.

It will be interesting to see how the SRK tribes sustain enthusiasm through this upcoming year as his next film, Happy New Year, is not scheduled for release until the latter part of 2014. 

UPDATE 22 October 2013: 

The 2013 Social Media Leadership Awards today announced finalists, among which are notable brands and organizations on the forefront of social media.

Proud to announce : Chennai Express Digital Campaign @ChennaiExp2013 & Humble Me chosen as finalists at SMLA awards http://t.co/7aCU8zhJNa

— Shailja Gupta (@Shailja) October 23, 2013

Find out more:

• From Chennai Express to "Record Breaking Express": A spot-on social media strategy for extended reach
• Social media strategy that significantly increased social reach and buzz, contributing to the success of "Chennai Express"

UPDATE 31 October 2013:

• CASE STUDY: The Role of Digital Marketing & Social Media in the Phenomenal Success of Chennai Express

 Update 13 December 2013:

• The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania honours SRK's Chennai Express

Update 25 January 2013:

• Filmfare 2014: Shahrukh’s Chennai Express Bags Sony Trendsetter of the Year Award

Update 9 February 2013:

• Zee Cine Awards 2014: Shahrukh Khan’s Chennai Express Bags Best Marketed Film of the Year

Friday Fun: Create Your Own Online Memory Game

In my spare time, I blog about Bollywood.

For playback singer Sukhwinder Singh, I recently celebrated his birthday by creating an online memory game using the website www.yourownmemory.com. 

Here's the finished game as posted on my blog:

Besides looking sweet, this game can be played multiple times as the cards are reshuffled each time you replay the game or reload the page.

Creating the game is simple. But you need to do some work beforehand. Here's what I recommend you do before creating your online memory game:

1. Create a series of images that will be resized: 
   • 1 800x600 background image (will be resized)
   • 1 200x200 square logo representing your brand or website
   • 1 200x200 square card back image
   • 10 200x200 square images that will show up when the card if flipped. These images will be resized, so you want close-ups or otherwise easily-identifiable images that are still recognizable when scaled down. You also want to make sure that the images aren't too dark.
2. Create a document of text to be used for the memory game:
   • Game Filename Title (for saving your work to a unique URL): 
   • Game Title: 
   • Game Menu Text (max 110 characters): 
   • In-Game Text (max 50 characters; optional): 
   • After Game Text (max 115 characters): 

The reason I recommend setting all this up beforehand is that once you create a memory game you don't have the option of editing/updating the files. So, you might find yourself creating more than one game before you get the version you want.

Here are two of my previous versions which didn't work out quite right:

Version 1

What I didn't like about this one is the white lettering on light gray background. It just doesn't work. The reason I picked the gray background for the graphic initially was because it was an extension of the gray background of the image of Sukhwinder Singh. While I wanted to retain this image of Singh in the left side - a positioning that works - I had to crop the image and Photoshop out the gray background. I also had to increase the size of the image of Sukhwinder because the original graphic is cropped so that his left leg is cut off in the front at the knee. Once those issues were taken care of I could use a background color that was more conducive to displaying the white text. I decided to use a Blue #003F6A.

The other issue was that I wasn't totally satisfied with all the game images. I felt two of them were too dark and one needed to be cropped more appropriately for this medium. So I revised these images as well.

And because I created a document with the text I wanted to use for the game, I was able to easily adjust (as necessary) and cut-and-paste that information into the memory game creator.

Version 2

This version is much better. I did add a small lens flare to the background, but the game developers add some visual elements as well, so you can go with a plain background color.  Also note that you don't need to create a background image - the developers give you a selection of colors to choose from if you don't have a background image; however, a background image allows you to further identify the memory game content.

I still wasn't satisfied with this version because when you play the game, the In Game Text: "Find the matching song pairs" covers our singer's face.  Note that the text around Sukhwinder's waist is a little difficult to read as well, but it is still legible and because I like the image so much I decided not to make changes here. But keep this text in mind when you are designing your background image.

Each time you create a game, you are provided with a link, embed code, iframe code and a SWF ZIP file download. For each of the three games I created, I copied all this information into the same document I was using for the game configuration and downloaded the SWF ZIP file. Note that while you can use the SWF ZIP file download to host the content on your site, when developers update the site the revisions won't carry-over to your file. Also, this ZIP uses the same name each time you save so you should be sure to revise the filename, associating it with the version created.

Let me know if you try out this cool tool! And check out my Bollywood Blog "Songs of Sukhwinder Singh: A Memory Game."

5 Things to Think About Before Launching Multiple Twitter Accounts

In a recent Twitter training session, I was asked if people should create two accounts - one for personal use and one for professional use. 

My initial response was mixed. For someone new to Twitter, I am inclined to encourage them to get up-to-speed with one Twitter account before trying to manage more. However, if you have multiple reasons for using Twitter that don't fit neatly into one account, it makes sense to consider setting up multiple accounts.

Before going this route you should consider five key factors to keep in mind when launching any Twitter presence:

1. Building Your Listening Post

Creating twitter account that is useful to you requires that you spend the time to identify and follow people who post tweets you want to read. You can segment your audience by having multiple Twitter accounts or you can set up one account and segment by leveraging Twitter Lists or tools like Paper.li.

2. Establishing Your Voice

What kind of information do you want to share? What do you want to say? What original resources (blogs, infographics, videos, powerpoints) do you plan to provide about a specific topic? How does what you have to say reflect on your brand? Does your organization have social media policies that provide guidance to employees in the social media space? You can set up different accounts to reflect your different voices or set up one account describing what you tweet about. If what you have to say is vastly different 

3. Building Your Community

The idea "if you build it, they will come" only works on Twitter if you are some type of celebrity or tweet about really useful content on a consistent basis. Just because you set up a Twitter account doesn't mean you'll get the right followers. While Twitter is an easy online tool to set up, make sure you are willing to participate in the online conversation. Just like growing a garden, you need to spend the time to feed and build the community.  If you set up more than one Twitter account, assume you'll have to spend that much more time to build community around each.

4. Managing Your Accounts

Each Twitter account requires a unique email address. So, if you manage multiple Twitter accounts, you will need to setup and manage multiple email accounts as well. You will also want to select an easy-to-remember username for your Twitter account that reflects you, your brand, or the content you are tweeting about.

If you are working with multiple Twitter accounts you may also want to leverage some online tools to help you manage them. Here are two to start with:

• Twitterfeed.com will automatically feed your blog posts to your Twitter account and provides some configuration on how those feeds are posted.
• Hootsuite.com can help you manage multiple twitter accounts by providing a URL shortener, ability to schedule tweets, and analytics. There are also a number add-ons to expand this management suite of tools.

Finally, you will want to identify milestones to analyze the success of your account - growth rate of follows, retweets, clickthroughs, follower type, etc. On the issue of follow-to-folllower ratio, it is best to have your followers number close to or higher than the number of accounts you follow. This will help you avoid the dreaded 2000 follow limit.

5. Developing a Strategy that Considers Other Social Media Platforms

While this is listed last, you should begin developing your strategy first. And be prepared to modify your strategy as your online presence evolves.

You should being by acknowledging that Twitter should be just one of your tools in your online communications strategy.

Before you you jump into any social network, consider your audience: Who are you trying to reach? What social networks are they most likely to already be using? What do you want them to do? Are there existing social networks you can feed content to? Facebook (the largest social network out there), LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest are all viable platforms for communicating your message. And don't forget the opportunity to leverage email, the first online social network. 

Once you consider these five points, the decision on whether you set up one Twitter account or several is up to you. Just make sure you have a strategy in place for long-term participation in the online conversation so that your account(s) don't go fallow.

HOW TO: Centering YouTube Videos or other iFrame Content

I've been embedding several videos in my blog "Falling In Love with Bollywood" when I encountered a problem.

I couldn't center the videos - align="center" attribute was either deprecated or just wouldn't work within the <div> <p> or <iframe> tags.

After searching extensively, I found the answer by wrapping the <iframe> in a <div> CSS style tag:

<div style="text-align: center;">

<iframe>content</iframe>

</div>

Here is a YouTube video which uses this code to center it in the column:

Enjoy employing this very simple solution next time you embed a youtube file or other iframe content!

Did You Know? LinkedIn Mentions

We're excited to introduce ability to mention your connections & companies in conversations on LinkedIn. linkd.in/Xg5SVr

— LinkedIn (@LinkedIn) April 4, 2013

In April, LinkedIn announced that you can now mention connections and companies in your updates using the "@" prefix.

This is a feature that was introduced by Twitter as a way to reply to or mention another user on the social network. In 2009, Facebook introduced a similar tagging feature using the "@" sign.

Here's how it works: Type the "@" sign before you begin typing the name of the person or company you want to mention. A drop-down will appear highlighting those in your connections which meet the criteria of the name you are entering. As you continue typing, the drop-down menu will update to provide you a better list of relevant connections. You can continue typing out the whole name or leverage the drop-down menu shortcut by clicking on the relevant connection.

Once the name is selected, it will have a gray background to indicate that it is a mention.

When you "Share" your update, the mention will become a link with a dotted underline, it will link to the company's page, and the link will enable a tool-tip pop-up to appear with summary information about the company.

Pretty neat, huh? A word of warning, though. Make sure you select a connection from the drop-down menu when using the @ prefix. If you don't select from that menu, the post may interpret the @Name as a Twitter username (and will link you to Twitter. So, if I hadn't selected "World Resources Institute" from the drop down, the update would have interpreted the mention as "@World Resources Institute" and the link would have taken me to user "world" on Twitter.

According to LinkedIn, this feature enables you to connect with a broader range of LinkedIn users - 

In addition to first-degree connections, you can also mention other LinkedIn members engaged in conversations in the comment sections of posts on the LinkedIn Homepage. Mentions will make it easier for you to start conversations with your network while also enabling you to respond in real-time when someone begins a conversation with you.

You can find more information about this feature on LinkedIn's blog.

 

Related Tweets

What do you think about this Facebook-style @ mention capability for LinkedIn updates? hub.am/Xq5aF7 via @thenextweb

— HubSpot (@HubSpot) April 10, 2013

 

LinkedIn Adds Twitter-Like Mention Feature To Boost Engagement trib.al/iQotz26

— Fast Company (@FastCompany) April 5, 2013

 

Why the Twitter Decoupling from LinkedIn Just Made My Life Easier

With a weekend of a derecho storm and a leap second that sent several online sites into a tizzy, I was suddenly also faced with the prospect of having to work harder at sharing online. But it seems to be quite the opposite.

 

---

 

It was a wild weekend for many

Like many of my colleagues who use social media as a main source of interaction, I was deeply dismayed when it was announced on June 29 that Twitter would unlink from LinkedIn on June 30.

As I opened my LinkedIn home page that Saturday, it was as if the derecho had blown away all the interesting updates coming from my colleagues.

June 29 derecho took down powerlines with a tree in my neighborhood. Power outages continue for many in the community.

Sure, it was interesting that Person-A connected with Person-B, Person-C and also Person-D on my LinkedIn home page.

But a whole page of that? Phooey.

I missed the real content: the news I got from people's twitter feeds.

Afer the decoupling, I discovered sites that claimed they had ways to work around this decoupling - but did I really want to invest in managing another posting tool right now? And even when I tried some of these tools I was unsuccessful in implementing them as LinkedIn was experiencing down time due to the addition of a leap second to our clock.

How to calibrate a leap second on a standard clock.

Now, one thing that LinkedIn's Ryan Roslansky did say in his blog post was that while we couldn't feed our Twitter updates through Linkedin, we could still continue to share updates on both LinkedIn and Twitter by reversing the process.

Initiate the conversation on LinkedIn. Simply compose your update, check the box with the Twitter icon, and click “Share.” This will automatically push your update to both your LinkedIn connections and your Twitter followers just as you’ve been able to do previously.

I was a bit hesitant to try this method because:

• Fear of multiplex postings: I've discovered that when you feed one social media update stream to another social media network, you need to make sure you aren't creating an update loop of multiple postings of the same content (yes, I've been guilty of this). I already have give-and-take posting relationship established between Twitter and Facebook - whichever of these two I post on first is set up to migrate to the other network. What havoc would be wreaked by adding LinkedIn to this interactive equation?

• Lack of interaction with existing communities. I need to make sure I'm not just feeding updates to my social networks, but am really listening to and engaging with my community online. How would this triple-posting impact that?

 

How the LinkedIn to Twitter to Facebook posting works

My strong belief in embracing change with a big bearhug overtook my hesitation and I jumped in.

I posted an update on LinkedIn - and here are the updates that were generated:

 

---

 

STEP 1: LINKEDIN. Making sure Twitter sharing box is checked, post update on LinkedIn. Note: The checkbox will default to the setting of your last post, so make sure you have it checked or unchecked accordingly for each post.

 

---

 

STEP 2: TWITTER. LinkedIn update posts to Twitter. While the shortened link looks like you will go to LinkedIn, the link actually takes you to the original article through a redirect from LinkedIn. 

 

 

---

 

STEP 3. FACEBOOK. Autopost from Facebook to Twitter. If your Twitter feed is set up to autopost on Facebook (you can set this up through Twitter Settings > Profile), you get a nicely formatted update, graphic and all. This time the link to the original article is a Twitter-shortened URL which leads to the URL (though the LinkedIn redirect is used in the story).

 

To other posts, I've also tried adding @profiles and #hashtags to the post title - they do carry over to Twitter and to the Facebook status line (rather than the title which is pulled from the story link).

One downside of this is that you can't control what graphic or text gets posted over to Facebook. So if you do care about how a particular link is posted, you might want to hide from your Facebook timeline then repost the link by hand. You could also decouple posts from Twitter-to-Facebook and just do posts from Facebook-to-Twitter.

Tracking all of this in terms of metrics for posts from your blog/website may get complicated unless you use some kind of campaign tracking code such as that leveraged by Google Analytics. Because you are passing the link through multiple URL shorteners, it may be worth revising the Google Analytics campaign code a bit:

• utm_campaign=LinkedIn-Twitter-Facebook
• utm_source (don't include as it will be generated via the URL shortener)
• utm_medium=LauraLeeDooley (name of poster)
• utm_content (optional)
• utm_term (optional)

Why does this Twitter-LinkedIn decoupling make my life easier?

• It encourages me to spend less time on posting and more time on listening. Reversing the Twitter-to-LinkedIn connection to LinkedIn-to-Twitter allows me to post once and reach three networks. Yes, it is important to have a conversation with your audience on social networks, but sometimes you have something to share that you want to get out to as many of your touchpoints as possible. Making LinkedIn a resource that enables you to post to Twitter and Facebook for those posts you want to share via all three networks cuts down on the time needed to craft each posting. This gives me more time to "listen" to what others are saying.

• It facilitates more engagement with LinkedIn connections. While I am constantly posting content to Twitter and LinkedIn, I have found it more difficult to actively and thoughtfully post content to LinkedIn beyond the group that I manage. This forces me to take the opportunity to craft posts that meet that are more engaging and targeted at my audience on LinkedIn, with the added benefit of also posting to Twitter and Facebook.

• It decouples all Twitter/Facebook posts from LinkedIn. Sometimes I want to post something that might not be as relevant for my community on LinkedIn. So I can target Twitter and Facebook with these humorous or off-topic posts without carrying over to my professional network of LinkedIn.

• It has the potential to increase my Twitter following. I've reached the 2,000 Twitter following limit and have been working to build my followers to be able to get over that hump. While Twitter has decoupled from LinkedIn, LinkedIn has not removed the "Follow @Twittername" button on individual profiles. Since updates will now be crafted for the LinkedIn community, if people are interested in my posts they may have more interest in connecting via Twitter (since they won't automagically get my twitterfeed via LinkedIn). While not a proven theory, this is definitely something to monitor.

All of this is based on connecting your personal profiles together. You have to hand-post content to any Company and Group page you maintain. 

What are your thoughts on the Twitter-LinkedIn decoupling?

#BBCon - BlackBaud Conference for NonProfits 2011: Day 3

#BBCon - BlackBaud Conference for NonProfits: Day 2

#BBCon - BlackBaud Conference for NonProfits: Day 1