RonVitale

Is Social Media Harmful During a National Crisis?

After a long day in which police went door to door searching homes for Dzhokar Tsarnaev, I listened to officials in the Boston area tell the public that they were opening the subway, roads and allowing people back out on the street. Minutes later I watched in horror as shots rang out in Watertown and the hunt for Dzhokar Tsarnaev continued. On my TV, I watched as helpless news anchors talked about what they knew, realizing that none of them had the power of Twitter at their disposal.

News Truly Is at the Speed of Light

With my laptop on, I started searching on Twitter and within minutes I saw reports from people in Watertown filling up my tweet stream. Were these reports true or false? It was tough to say, but I think I knew about 15-20 minutes before national news that Dzhokar Tsarnaev was holed up in a boat on Franklin Street:

With the internet, people started using Google maps to post satellite pictures of the house and the boat in the backyard. Gone are the days in which onsite reporting of the type we had last night matters. Anderson Cooper might as well have been in Europe because the news on CNN was out of date to what was happening in real time on the web. CNN and NBC desperately tried to get confirmation from officials that the suspect had been found but they lagged woefully behind what everyone already knew on Twitter.

Granted I had not confirmation that the tweets that I were seeing were true, but I started seeing reports about flash bangs going off and a good while later the TV anchors talked about the same thing. I also knew about the thermal imaging from the helicopter and how it was used to find the suspect and saw that many of the tweets were coming directly from what people were hearing via the online police scanners. Much of the tweets I saw were right on the money, but I had to ask myself: Was this good?

What About People's Safety?

I wasn't the only person worried about what was taking place in Watertown and how people on Twitter were communicating that to the rest of the world. @gwynnek made a good point: People were tweeting what they heard from police scanners and there was no way to tell how giving that information out might aid the suspect or those who might have been working with him:

What unfolded quickly on Twitter amazed me as I watched the hunt and capture of one of the Boston Marathon suspects take place on live television. But that's where the darker side of social media crept in. In order to spread the news, be the first one "in the know," people continued to tweet direct quotes from local police scanners and it soon became apparent that hundreds of thousands of people were listening to the online scanners:

And no matter how many times local TV stations urged the public to not report what was being broadcast on the police scanners, people tweeted more and more of what they heard.

I'll ask it again: Was that a good thing? Did being cool and sharing out what the police were saying on the radio do more harm than good? I can only imagine what police, the FBI and Homeland Security must think about this latest fad with the public wanting to participate in the real time chase and capture of a suspect. What we know is very little: It is alleged that two brothers worked together and set off the bombs at the Boston Marathon, but there are many questions still unanswered. Did the brothers have help? Could other sleeper cells be listening in to the news and twitter chatter last night to learn from the event?

We Are Helping Our Enemies

I love social media, I truly do. I've been on Twitter since April 2008 and have seen many wonderful uses of Twitter, but I have to say that last night was a much darker side. Anyone who wishes to harm our country simply needs to listen in on last night's chatter and learn about the online police scanners, learn of the position of the police from the public and could have easily mislead the public by spreading false rumors through social channels. The genie is out of the bottle. I get that. I know that there is no turning back and I also understand that many using Twitter do not have the maturity to understand the power of the tool that they are using and how they could be assisting criminals.

We live in a world in which we are the judge and jury all at the same time. We can participate in a live event and spread our thoughts out to the world while it's unfolding. I saw many tweets similar to the one below in which angry people wanted the suspect's head. But we don't know all the facts, many people were wounded and people lost their lives. We're angry, we want revenge, but we also need to take a step back--unless we want to go back to the era of the Roman Colosseum. Does anyone wonder why the Hunger Games was so popular? Truly we're not too far from those books.

Whose Fault Is it?

I remember watching the OJ Simpson chase and how my friends and I were all glued to the TV. Now it's a totally different world. With Twitter, we can be snarky, a jokester, spread the word and make other comments all in real time with anyone in the world. Maybe it's already happening, but I'm waiting for the next crisis to have the suspect tweeting back to the world.

I believe that tweeting out police scanner information during a crisis in which people's lives are at stake is flat out wrong. I'd suggest that the online scanners be taken down during such an emergency. Flip that switch off. We don't truly know how we might be aiding criminals by sharing out information or helping our overseas enemies plan their next attack on us. In the end, as with many things in life, it comes down to personal responsibility. Each person needs to take responsibility for his or her own actions. And unfortunately, from people's behaviors on Twitter last night, we're in for one hell of a bumpy ride.

Social Media Marketing World Notes

I attended Social Media Marketing World last week in San Diego and learned a ton of great things. Here are my notes:

Monday 4/8/13

Icebreaker questions to help with networking:

• What are you passionate about?W
• What is your top bucket list?
• What is a great accomplishment you are proud of?

Larry Benet's other great points:

• What can you do to help others?

Quality of your relationships is important. Relationships are key. Value is key. What can you do to help people?

How can I help you? What is the most important project you're working on if I or my network can help you?

Follow up with people after an event is key.

Creating magic moments for other people. Be present. Birthdays, special days, etc.

Be a true friend and have their back. Create connection currency.

The girlfriend life Facebook fan page. Lots of shareable posting and affiliate links.

Dollarshaveclub.com

Guy Kawasaki talk:

• Alltop to curate links
• Jumpcut is a multiple level clipboard. Nice tool so you don't have to jump back and back through pages.
• Holy Kaw great place for curating content
• Smart brief share good content
• Feed me tool. Good for getting content. Take your alltop feed (adding /rss to end of your link) and put into Feed Me
• Buffer: create a buffer of stories for Twitter. Set up schedules. LinkedIn or Twitter. Extremely useful tool. Has a chrome extension
• Doshare chrome plugin to post into google+
• Nuke comments on Google+ chrome extension
• Replies and more extension for chrome extension for g+
• Life hacker.com good place for content

Kyle Lacy talk:

Slideshare.com/exacttarget get the slides for the 2:-5 Monday session

Wearesocial from the UK. Small highly engaged communities is key

@Nichole_Kelly talk:

Luckyorange tool. $20 a month. Allows you to have a better tool for tracking what people are doing in your site

Tuesday morning session at social Media marketing world

Chris Brogan talk:

• Have a separate landing page that is warm for each social media page. On Twitter, send people to a special twitter web page.
• Set up a newsletter list.
• Check Chris' site to see how he does signing up for a newsletter.
• Podcasting is really good to do.
• Cspenn on twitter. Follow him.

--Look into Chris' book on bravery

--Sign up for his newsletter

--Community Building for Big Brands

10:45 session

@sarahribinson
@sharpie
@ekaterina
@kittykatsmith

Susan from Sharpie: on Instagram, tumblr, Facebook, twitter. Evaluating snap chat and Path (for teens)

Revenue is a serving factor in building community.

Biggest ROI in using social is in humanizing your brand.
@ekaterina

Find your 10% and you can turn your like to live. Ten percent of people out there will help your brand by being in love with your brand.

Sharpie is starting to look into what revenue is being brought in by social and why social is providing value.

Best tip on time management for building community is to focus. Do A/B testing and focus.  @ekaterina

@sharpie has a content strategy. Build that calendar out with your internal themes. Use something sime: Google docs. Need to have images as well not just words. Build out a month in advance.

What is the one thing you know now that you wish you new?

Sharpie: started talked product but now shines a light on their fans on how they use social
Media.

@kittykatsmith from the beginning, make sure you have executive sign off on using social

Page lover: Analytics tool for Facebook

How to transform organizational culture with social media

11:45am Tuesday Session

Things that derail social:

Budget and resources
ROI
Technology (is IT threatened by this)
Legal
Culture and leadership

For the Four Seasons, each hotel has a PR director and social media falls under that person. Kerri Holden @fsaustin

Four seasons invested time in training with 100 plus tutorials on a site for all the PR directors. There is also one on one training. There is also a monthly call and the PR directors share best practices.


Twitter session @markwschaefer

• Learn how to increase small interactions with people overtime
• The number of people following a brand has doubled in the last two years
• Twitter is the most powerful way to find targeted information
• Social media mindset:
  • Meaningful content
  • Targeted connections
  • Authentic helpfulness

• Content must ignite. You have to find targeted connections.
• Need to have a content strategy
• Also need to have a network strategy: need to find people to help you (RT, etc.)
• Help people and they will connect with you.

Go Steelers tweet:

He heard from Michelle, she asked for help with her blog, he got her a video camera, she made video for him, she got job in France, sent work to Mark, he passed on to others,  she passed him other work, he networked with French blogger who he helped and provided content for his blog. He eventually met Michelle in France with his wife and they had built a great history of networking over years all from a "Go Steelers!" tweet. This is the Tao of Twitter.

Think about the qualitative benefits of twitter not just quantitative.

The Tao of Twitter by @markwschaefer

[email protected]

How to Implement and Optimize Your Social Strategy
Neal Schaffer

Businesses need a framework for social:

Logical
Rational
Practical
Flexible
Shareable
Entangle
Measure able
Optimization

This all needs to be in a written document.

Deming Circle (based off of dr. Demi g)

(Observe)
Plan
Do
Check
Act

This can be related to social media.

Social strategy Plan:

What is your objective? ROI tracking. Examples: increase sales: customer retention, brand Awareness.  decrease expenses: recruitment for new staff.

Customer -Target (detailed demographics). Understand what your customers want from you. Sneak peek? Coupons? What?

Share- content (what are you sharing?)

Who -employee or outsource.

Brand- branding guidelines including voice

On boarding- how? Phases and how to roll platforms out. Also includes training on how to use social for internal staff.

Need:

Social medi policy
Social media guidelines
Internal communication
Training
Step by step

He has a slide with a link to a free social media planning calendar.

Create a daily workflow:

Experimenting
Creating
Curating
Sharing
Engaging

These should all be well defined to help you with the day to day.

Social is part science and part art.

Integrate social everywhere:

Website
Online ads
Events
Email marketing
Content
Print/ radio/tv

Nealschaffer@gmail. Com

Closing keynote:
Why it pays to be like able
@DaveKerpen

Slideshare.net/DaveKerpen
[email protected]

How to Use Hootsuite to Manage Your Social Media Networks

What is Hoot Suite?

(Updated June 25, 2010 to reflect the new changes in Hootsuite 5)

Hootsuite.com is a website that enables you to manage multiple Twitter accounts, Facebook, LinkedIn and Wordpress postings. With Hoot Suite, you can also create multiple search columns to help you filter your Twitter stream, track keywords, hashtags or people’s tweets and follow the conversation on your Twitter lists.

Step 1:

Visit Hootsuite.com, click on the “sign up now” button and complete the following information:

Step 2:

After you create the account, click on the link you’ve received in an e-mail to activate the account or enter the confirmation code in the form box and click on “Confirm” (see the screenshot below):

Step 3:

Add your Twitter profile information (login and password) to the Hoot Suite pop up:

Step 4:

Once you associate your Twitter account to Hootsuite, a column will be created, showing you all the tweets of those you are following:

Step 5:

Next add your other social networking accounts (other Twitter accounts, Facebook, LinkedIn, Wordpress, etc.) by clicking on the Owl icon (top left of the Hootsuite page), select “Settings” and then “Social Networks.”

On the next page, select the social network account you’d like to add to your Hootsuite account and follow the instructions to add your login information for that account. Continue to add your social media accounts until you’re finished.

 
Now that you’ve finished adding your social network accounts to Hootsuite, you’re done. Take a moment to relax and do a happy dance! The next steps are tips on how to use Hootsuite to help you better follow the conversations taking place on your networks.

Setting Up Your Search Columns:

After you’re finished adding your social networks, click on the home tab icon to return to the Hootsuite home page:

 
Learn Your Way Around Hootsuite:

Here are a few instructions to help you navigate the Hootsuite control panel:

 
Text input box:

The red oval (pictured above) covers the input box that enables you to send out your 140 messages on Twitter (if using Facebook you’ll see the 420 character limit). To the right of the box is a character counter that counts down to 140.

Below the text input box is a smaller link box with a “Shrink It” button. You can take any URL, paste it into the link box and then click on the “Shrink It” button. Your link will not only be shortened but you’ll then be able to use Hootsuite to track the number of clicks on the link. In the example below, a link from CNN.com was shortened to: http://ow.ly/20dQj  Note that links in the box do count toward your 140 Twitter cap.

 
The input box area also has tools for uploading documents or photos as well as a “Send Later” feature. Unless you have no other online storage solutions, I recommend not uploading documents and photos as it’s more effective to use other services to store such items (Flickr, Facebook, Google Docs, etc.). Regarding the “Send Later” feature, I recommend not using it. It works fine, but best practices for social media are to send out live tweets and not schedule them.

Select Social Networks Area:

To the right of the text input box area, is the “Select Social Network(s)” area. Simply click which social networks you would like to send a message out to:

Now you have an easy way to send one message to multiple places at a few clicks of a button. Remember, your followers of your different social networks are following you for a reason. Best practice is to mix up your messages and try to stay on theme if you have multiple Twitter accounts. Sending every message to all your accounts (all the time) is not recommended.

Access to Your Social Network Columns:

To access your social networks to see the conversations taking place, simply click on one of the tabs. In the example below, I’ve boxed off the social networks that I’ve associated with Hootsuite in red:

 
Creating columns to filter conversations:

To create a column in Hootsuite, simply click on the “Add Stream” button. For example let’s say you want to better listen to the conversation taking place on Twitter. With the columns in Hootsuite, you can create a column for a keyword, hashtag, or even one of your Twitter lists. To do this, click on the “Add Stream” button below your social network tabs and in the pop up window, select which Twitter profile you’d like to create a column for and then choose whether you wish to  create a column for an existing Twitter functionality (Direct Messages inbox, Favorite tweets, etc.) or  for a keyword, search result or Twitter list:

 The screenshot below is for creating a “Keyword tracking” column:

Below is a screenshot, with examples, of creating a column for a search term:

 
Below is a screenshot for creating a column for a Twitter list:  

What’s a Twitter list? I’m glad you asked. On Twitter, you can create a list of those you wish to follow on Twitter, grouping them as you see fit. For example, if you create a “Journalists” list, you can add only reporters you are following on Twitter to this list. Then, in a “Journalists” column in Hootsuite, you would only see the messages from those reports on your “Journalists” Twitter list.
Implementing this is easy. The most efficient way to create a Twitter list and to add Twitter users to that list is to log into Twitter and create a list. Once logged into Twitter, on the right hand side of the page, click on the “New list” link:

 
On the pop up window that appears, add the name of your list, an optional description, make the list private or public and then click on the “Create list” button:

 
After you create a list on Twitter, you can add people to it on Hootsuite by clicking on someone’s name in one of your Hootsuite columns (for example, your Home Feed column). A pop up box will appear, click on the “Add to list” button and select which list to add the person to:

The pop up window also allows you to follow, unfollow, direct message or reply to a person as well as shows you the number of followers that person has, number they are following and their location.
After you have finished creating all your columns, you can then easily follow whatever conversation you would like. To respond to a person’s tweet, position your mouse to the right of a person’s Twitter username and options for replying, re-tweeting and direct messaging will appear. The down arrowhead in the picture below also pulls up additional useful features. And a rule of thumb: A reply tweet is public whereas a direct message is private. Note that with Hootsuite 5, the default for re-tweets is to use Twitter web re-tweets. This means that you’ll be asked to confirm that you want the re-tweet sent out but you’ll not have a chance to edit the re-tweet before it goes out (annoying if a tweet is longer than 140 characters and a link gets cut off). However, you can easily change back to the old Hootsuite re-tweet style: Click on the Owl icon in the top left, select “Settings,” and then choose “Preferences.” To use old style re-tweets, uncheck the “Twitter web re-tweets” box, then click on the "Save Preferences" button.

 
Tip: Now that you have columns created and your social network accounts associated to Hootsuite, remember you can use Google or the Twitter search engine (search.twitter.com) to help you find others to follow. Typing in a person’s name and the word “Twitter” in Google typically brings up a link to that person’s Twitter profile page. From there you can follow that person, and if you wish, add him/her to one of your lists.

Tip: Don’t like how your columns in Hootsuite are organized? Just grab one with your mouse and pull it to the left so that you can re-arrange columns at will.

 
Tracking:

If you send a link out using the “Shrink It” tool in Hootsuite, you’ll be able to track the number of clicks on the links. To access the tracking portion of Hootsuite, click on the Owl icon in the top left of the main Hootsuite screen, select “Stats” and then choose “Individual Message” as shown below:

 
On the next page, you’ll see a list of your most recent tweets that were tracked. Click on the “View Stats” link to see the number of total clicks for a message:

 
To obtain a high level view of the number of clicks for all your messages over time, simply click on the “Summary” tab:

 
In the “Summary” tracking area, you can also click on the “Clicks by Region” link to obtain a report showing the geographic locations of those who clicked on your links:

 
Organizational Administration Features:

Hootsuite also enables you to organize and assign social network account responsibilities to different users. For more information on these features, read the official Hootsuite invite team collaboration blog post.

Signing Out:

Finally, if you want to sign out of Hootsuite, click on the “Log Out” link in the bottom left potion of the main page.

 
Sharing Tip:

Another useful feature is the “Hootlet” toolbar feature. To add this Add-on to Firefox, click on the owl icon (top left), select “Apps and Plugins” and then choose “Hootlet firefox Add-on.”

For example, in the screenshot below, I visited CNN.com and clicked on the “Hootlet” link in the bookmark toolbar. A  Hootsuite pop up window appears, allowing you to easily send out a message to your social networks that links (in this case) to the page I was reading on CNN.com. The Hootlet tool automatically pulls the web page’s title into the text box along with the shortened (and trackable) link to the page. Just click on the social networks you wish to send the message, edit the message as desired and click on the “Send Now” button. It’s that simple. Using the Hootlet tool is an excellent and efficient way to help share content with your social networks.

 
I hope these instructions have been helpful as Hootsuite is a great tool to help you navigate and upkeep your social networks.If you enjoyed these instructions, please follow me on Twitter @ronvitale

Thank you.