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Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

Facebook f8 Conference Live Stream

22 Sep


We are excited to watch the Facebook developers conference live stream. Last night we started experiencing programmers pain since they’ve rolled out some changes prior to updating the documentation. The Hand Things Down app which is launching this weekend has broken so we are anxiously awaiting updates to the documentation. We are hoping to stay on our release schedule and will likely have to work night and day to hit our deadlines. Hurry up Zuck!

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Harder to Lose Klout When You Actually Engage

14 Jul

When you’re involved in social media, engagement is everything. Do you ever wonder what would happen if you suddenly stopped posting? This is the question I wanted to answer with the experiment on “How to Trash Your Klout Score“. Business owners believe social media needs near constant engagement, one of the questions I wanted to answer was what is the bare minimum you need to do so you can run your business or even go on vacation while still providing your customers a great online experience. I will post those guidelines after the experiment ends on July 17.

Seven days into the experiment, my Klout score is holding steady at 52 points. I had to tweet for an hour on July 8th for the Social Media Club Twitter Chat on the topic of Finding Balance for your Professional and Personal Life Online. If you look at each data point in the graph my score was going up incrementally for a couple days after this event. Since I stopped tweeting on my account it had a negative impact on Merlin U Ward’s (@MerlinUWard) brand, resulting in a 6% drop in reach for him. You can read the details and additional metrics on Merlin’s blog.

When I started the experiment on my Klout score, I never thought it would impact anyone else. Merlin bet my Klout score would drop 5 points, my goal was to drop 7 points. For people or businesses who only push out content or talk AT people, disconnecting may not have noticeable impact on anyone else’s reach. I believe Merlin’s reach dropped since we use Twitter as if it was instant messaging and texting to discuss my favorite topics, technology and business or fun things like #futzing and #wordswithfriends. I post a lot of articles on startups and entrepreneurship which ties into the conversations we are having publicly, you can think of it as tweet radio.

Klout score steady at 52 points after 7 days of inactivity.

The interesting side effect of this experiment is how the Klout score for my business account has gone UP. I’ve been tweeting out of the Hand Things Down Twitter account (@handthingsdown) and using it to have conversations I would normally have on my personal account. The other night, there was an informal Twitter chat about when the next #Twilight movie “Breaking Dawn” would be premiering. The Twilight series is near and dear to most moms which is the group I normally socialize with on this account. Since using @handthingsdown to have more conversations, the Klout score went up nearly 4 points in a week!

The lesson from the last few days; your Klout score will go up dramatically just by talking to people and BEING SOCIAL, it is after all social media. It’s not an exotic animal to be gawked at from the outside, it’s more like happy hour where you get to know people and discuss topics you are passionate about.

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Why We Switched to Facebook Comments

20 Jun

90% of visitors to online communities are lurkersEvery couple of weeks we participate in a Founder Institute master class to continue discussions and keep forward momentum for our startup. The subject for the last call was user acquisition. We went over the various tactics on how to drive engagement through social media channels like Facebook fan pages, Twitter, Quora, Youtube, and commenting on blogs related to our business. Each startup participates in a different mix of social outlets, it really depends on where the customers for your company hangout, a business to business (B2B) company may not require a YouTube or Facebook presence. B2B startups may spend more time on Linkedin discussions or Quora answering questions and establishing themselves as subject matter experts in an area related to their product offering.

Driving Awareness on Facebook

After the call, it was clear we needed to switch from using the Disqus commenting system to Facebook comments. Migration will be easy since we are fairly new and we haven’t received many comments using Disqus. While no one wants to be dependent on Facebook for all of the social aspects of their web properties, this is a case where it made sense for us to move to Facebook comments. Moms with toddlers who are on Facebook are our launch target and we want to make sure every comment made on the Hand Things Down blog shows up on their walls to further drive engagement with our brand.

Where does your customer hangout online?

On Wednesday night, I was at a Social Media Planning Meeting and Jeff Moriarity said one of the pros for using Disqus is conversation around your brand from all over the web is aggregated in one place. Here are some questions your startup will need to consider; Where does your customer hangout? What do they read? What videos do they watch? Are they more likely to use Facebook or Twitter? You also need to keep in mind that if your target customer is only on Facebook, perhaps Facebook commenting will help them move from being a lurker to an engaged member of your community.

Your company can listen for conversations around the web using a different tool. We are using Google Alerts to listen for any mentions of our brand and actively retweet or push original content on Twitter and our Facebook fan page.

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Getting Press for Your Startup

02 Jun

Getting your startup in the newsWhen we were in the Founder Institute at the beginning of the year, we had weekly milestones for customer development, market research, competitive analysis or product development to keep our business moving forward. The biggest aspiration we had at the time was to graduate. We worked our butts off to polish the pitch deck and get the 0.1 version of the Hand Things Down mobile app done during our last three-week sprint.

We naively thought, once we graduate we can get back to a normal life. Then as you hit each milestone, you take a breath, maybe catch up on a little sleep and start charging towards the next goal. Startups usually go into beta, then start scrambling to get press for their big launch. We were very lucky to receive our first mention in a Mashable article by Jolie O’Dell on the “5 Ambitious Social Good Startups Created in a Single Weekend” while we were busy with the private beta for Hand Things Down.

Before you begin tackling the tactics below to make a splash with your web startup, make sure you create a compelling story to make people want to share what your company’s story with their friends. Then give them a product they can’t live without so they keep telling their friends about it.

Top 7 things you need to do to launch a web startup, according to Robert Scoble on Quora:

  1. Get a LaunchRock site or create a landing page from WordPress using the LaunchPad theme to collect email addresses.
  2. Make a blog.
  3. Make a YouTube video channel.
  4. Start Tweeting.
  5. Get a Facebook Page.
  6. List your company on Angel List (and StartupLi.st, CrunchBase, etc).
  7. Figure out the 10 journalists you want to have seen your product before you launch.
  8. Be lucky…added by me

If you are creating your startup team, the ideal combination is to have one person focused on business and marketing while the other founder focuses on development. My primary focus has been on creating content for the blog, writing guest blog posts on websites that our target customer regularly visits and of course social media. Social media includes tweeting regularly on the company Twitter account, posting questions and content on the Facebook page and commenting on Facebook pages our target customer might read AS THE BUSINESS FACEBOOK PAGE. Do all of these marketing activities even before your company releases the product to build your online brand. Social media marketing takes a long time to gain traction. If you don’t have time to create your blog, create a landing page where you can collect email addresses of interested customers that you can market to when you start your beta.

I added number 8 because luck will play a part in how hard or easy it will be to get your company in the news. Since we participated in Startup Weekend, Founder Institute – Seattle, and continue to be active in the startup community, we are sometimes listed on their websites under the Hand Things Down brand. Being listed in the Startup Weekend company directory got us included in the social good article on Mashable.

Lastly, guest blog and begin developing relationships with 10 journalists you would like to feature your company before you need press and establish yourself and your company as a thought leader in your space.

Image credit: Chlorine-lim

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World Domination One Like at a Time

22 Apr

I spent the day watching the live streams of the sold out Facebook F8 Developer Conference. It was streamed by Livestream and besides a few hiccups in the beginning it was great to consume all that information from the comfort of my own desk. The conference timing couldn’t have been better, I have been defining software requirements and drawing workflows for my business partner with specifics around integration with Facebook. Learning first hand about the changes Facebook was announcing allowed me to simplify some the requirements while I was watching the broadcast. Since our website is built on WordPress.org, I was able to quickly implement the new Like button by embedding the iframe into a text/HTML widget. The Like box links the title to the Facebook Fan Page, includes member photos, and if the user is not logged into Facebook, it will allow them to login from our website and automagically post to their Facebook stream. With just a few clicks Facebook integration was accomplished. Additionally, I was able to delete about seven different WordPress plugins we were using to create this integration. Next up, my business partner is working on getting single sign-on working without using the RPX plugin.

Key Messages

  • For developers some of the announcements made by Facebook simplifies the registration and login process because the single sign-on functionality asks for permission to access email and register the users Facebook account to a website. They are now using OAuth 2.0 protocol so this will play nicely with additional login options to different services such as Twitter.
  • Social plugins such as the Like button or box and the activity feeds help even novice bloggers get started with the Facebook platform using a single line of HTML. The code is generated by Facebook after the blogger makes some selections, which can be copied into blogs.
  • Insights is the Facebook analytics tool, the website says, “get detailed information about the demographics of your users and how users are sharing from your application.” While I believe the single sign-on is a must have, what is interesting is the analytics and the server-side personalization.

When launching a new website and brand, it’s important to understand who the customer really is and what they are doing on the website or the web application. Our assumption and research is tailoring the content of our website to a particular demographic, yet what if our target demographic is completely different from our actual users. We need to learn who they are and how they are using the application so we can optimize the experience for them.

The software requirements already build in a few tests to see which elements will drive viral growth and tracking to see where the users are dropping off. We will also request feedback and survey our users to see how their perception of what they are doing ties into actual usage. The goal is to launch a beta version in the coming weeks and update the software bi-weekly to refine how it works with a small group of people. More to follow on my side of the entrepreneurial journey in the coming weeks and how our Like box does in driving world domination.

 
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