Social Media Summer School - Our Summertime Get Together

Back during the Summer Want&Blog was taken over by our social media summer school, 7 days of articles, opinions, videos & links on how to run a social campaign and case studies of those doing it well already - we had submissions from dozens of commentators all around the world.

Missed it? You don’t have to miss out, browse through the articles we posted through these links, each responding to a day’s topic.

1. Listen
2. Involve Stakeholders
3. Make a Plan
4. Set Rules
5. Engage
6. Add Real World Value
7. Measure (Then Adapt)

If you’d like to be a regular (or one off) contributor as we relaunch next month get in touch by clicking the ‘Ask Us A Question’ button - be sure to introduce yourself and include an e-mail address and a link to your own blog (if you have one!)

Social Media Summer School - The Week That Was

Last week Want&Blog was taken over by our social media summer school, 7 days of articles, opinions, videos & links on how to run a social campaign and case studies of those doing it well already.

Missed it? You don’t have to miss out, browse through the articles we posted through these links:

1. Listen
2. Involve Stakeholders
3. Make a Plan
4. Set Rules
5. Engage
6. Add Real World Value
7. Measure (Then Adapt)

Social Media Summer School Day 7 - Measure (Then Adapt) //Kenneth Bruno
Cold Stone didn’t want to be given the cold shoulder

With approximately 600,000 fans on Facebook, there is no doubt that Cold Stone Creamery, owned by Arizona-based franchiser Kahala, is popular within the realm of social media. But as is the case with many companies, social network notoriety has not always translated into sales. That fact is what led Cold Stone executives to embark on a three month tour to try and determine what the company needed to do to drive customers from their computer screens to one of the 1,300 Cold Stone locations nationwide.

Suzanne Schutz, Cold Stone’s VP of Marketing, says the meetings showed them that they needed to look outside the box. “We identified some key strategies to get us there and one of them was innovative marketing and the other was social media,” she said. “We feel marketing has definitely changed and advertising and the traditional advertising methods don’t really work as well.”

Cold Stone is hoping that the introduction of two new social media programs will help the company improve its bottom line. One of their primary efforts is the July 7th introduction of the Cold Stone eGift. Using a platform developed by e-commerce and payment processing First Data in use by Cold Stone and other food service companies, the eGift takes the concept of the virtual gift and brings it back to reality. Users can send friends a code for one of several Cold Stone offerings via Facebook or Cold Stone’s website. Schutz says that eGift offerings range between $5 and $7 so as not to undercut the traditional gift card.

In addition to the eGift, Cold Stone this week unveiled a new Facebook sweepstakes where consumers who share their opinion on one of Cold Stone’s three Gold Cone monthly flavors can win an opportunity to help Cold Stone develop a new flavor that in 2011 will be distributed nationwide.

Kenneth Bruno is a Forbes CMO Network and Technology contributor, you can follow him on Twitter here. This article has previously appeared on Forbes.com

Social Media Summer School Day 7 - Measure Then Adapt //Via Twitter
The 2010 World Cup: a Global Conversation

During the 2010 World Cup, the world watched together - and they shared their experiences in a real-time, global conversation on the Internet.  To illustrate that point, here are statistics and infographics that illustrate the global nature of the games and how fans’ interest & enthusiasm built over the course of the tournament on Twitter.

• The World Cup final represented the largest period of sustained activity for an event in Twitter’s history.   
• Throughout the match, Tweets-per-second (TPS) were much higher than average; during the game’s final 15 minutes, this jumped to more than 2,000 TPS. (Spain’s winning goal in the final scored a 3,051 TPS.)
• During the final, people from 172 countries tweeted in 27 different languages.
• At the moment of the winning goal, people from 81 countries tweeted in 23 different languages.

To highlight how much Twitter has been pulsing with World Cup activity over the past month, their analytics and relevance teams put together the infographic above, charting fans’ use of hashflags (like #esp or #usa) during the tournament with a background of TPS over the same period. 

• When you look at this graphic, think of it like a soundwave — the louder and more consistent the “sound,” the bigger the impact in all directions.
• Countries’ flags represent use of their hashflag. The size of the flag “waves” fluctuate with the frequency & consistency of tweets containing each country’s hashflag. 

//Via Blog.Twitter.com

Social Media Summer School Day 7 - Measure (Then Adapt)

Some people say you don’t need to measure your social media efforts, that you can simply be an influencer in your customers’ conversation or a spectator on the sidelines, but most of us will have to report something to our bosses.

“How are you defining success in this area?”

We look at directional discussion and sentiment, but we don’t try to tie a specific ROI.

Aaron Magness, Business Development Manager, Zappos.com

How can you measure your success in relation to your existing aims? What tools exist to measure genuine sentiment and not just momentary buzz? Like the networks you can can choose to engage through there are hundreds of measurements of their success and again you cannot hope to use them all, fully understanding and evaluating a few key performance indicators is always more effectively than a huge amount of data you cannot make use of.

Success may not just be about numbers or sales, do you know more about your customers? What were the goals you specifically set yourselves during the planning phase?

Above all you shouldn’t expect overnight success through social media, viral campaigns are few and far between and most genuinely succesful initiatives have taken time to build up trust and understanding with their core customers. Don’t be afraid to experiment and to respond to feedback & ideas from the community. Such a group can be a lot of effort to build up and maintain (contrary to social media’s ‘free’ appearance) but can add huge value in the end.