Last weekend a couple of us alligatortek personnel had the chance to attend the Social Dev Camp Chicago 2010 conference, or SDCChi. If you don’t know what SDCChi is, it’s a conference for developers and business people to get together for a couple of days in order to discuss trends and possibilities in social networking technologies. It truly is a great forum.
Due to my line of work, I usually know about rising trends and new services before they reach general public. I was on facebook before it was even available for use by the general public, I was on MySpace before it was cool (only to rapidly become tragically uncool), and I was on twitter before it became the holy grail for celebrity stalkers. The draw-back of getting in before anyone else is that many times I never realize the full potential of the platform. This is not because I’m not paying close enough attention, but because when these services first launch they’re usually not that great. Listening to what others are now doing with these platforms is really eye-opening, and also hearing about new ventures into social media type marketing. Some of the speakers that I had the pleasure of listening to include:
There were many others as well, but the words of these speakers rang through my ears the loudest and prompted this post. To see a full list of presenters, visit the Social Dev Camp website.
Transparency, authenticity, and engagement
Social Media gives your company the opportunity to connect with your customers, but many companies don’t understand this concept from a perspective outside of talking at the reader. What I’m referring to is tone. We understand that there is a time for formal writing to represent your company’s image, but you also have to make room for informal writing in order to humanize your business and become more transparent.
For example, our website is decidedly formal when it comes to writing about our products and services, but our blog is less formal. You know that I, Andrew Boyce, am writing this article talking about a conference that I attended this weekend. I realize that you may not know who I am, but I think it’s safe to assume that you know that I am a Web Designer and Developer at alligatortek, and not some no-name at an agency that we may have hired to write copy for our blog. When I later tweet about this article, some people on twitter may recognize my name and put my face to it from meeting me at this conference. This is transparency.
You know that I’m a person, and I am being authentic. I am authentically writing in my normal tone of voice, and this is what has kept you reading this article up to this point. Thus, you are engaged to continue reading the rest of what I have to say about the conference. I realize that this sounds really obvious, and I seem annoying right now for being so obvious. However, many people feel obligated to talk at people rather than to people when they are designated as the company’s voice in social networking. Companies such as Groupon have managed to overcome this by encouraging their employees to be “real”.
Let’s look at Groupon’s website to spot how they achieve this. Today’s deal in Chicago comes from the Gap. After the deal description, Groupon gives their insight into the featured deal at the bottom of the page:
‘Between the Gap flagship brand, GapKids, and babyGap, Gap is the rare store that has something for everyone. The same can not be said for Gap competitor The Gorp, founded in 2002 by former child weightlifter Wilmer "The Gorp" Gorpowski. What are some of the clothing and accessories on sale at The Gorp?
- Perpetually wet sweater
- Eyeless black daytime sleeping hood for babies
- Moonglasses
- Special capes for dogs who "believe in themselves"
- Now available by the half-pair: Pant!’
Groupon is using their own voice (with humor) to encourage people to return to the website, and to place a bid on the deal.
Does this actually work?
Yes! My wife actually bought a Groupon yesterday for taking me out to dinner for my birthday next month. I didn’t prompt her to do so; she has been using the site since before I had even heard about it.
Give it a try. Start your company’s facebook or twitter profile today and start talking to people using your own tone of voice. People will sense that you’re being authentic, and start recommending you to their friends. This is an invaluable form of customer engagement. Many businesses will tell you that their most valuable form of advertising is word-of-mouth. Well what do you think social networking is? It’s large-scale word-of-mouth. If I like something, I’m going to tell my friends about it on facebook and twitter. If your company can prompt these conversations on a more regular basis, this leads to a rise in new customers.
For example, we have a facebook profile and on a really hot day we post something to the effect of “It’s really hot out today! I’m glad my clients require me to be inside in the air conditioning building their software!” While this is a back-handed self-promotion, it’s more likely to trigger a response than saying something like “Don’t forget! We develop custom software solutions for every industry”. I realize that we do post things to that effect on occasion, but sometimes people need to be reminded… It’s all about find your own voice.
How to create a meme
A meme (pronounced meem), in case you’re curious, is a concept referring to a theme on the internet carried out through images, videos, and words that conform to community-decided guidelines that mutates and becomes viral (see lolcats). The purpose of a meme in a business environment is to spread a message in order to get people to pay attention to your product or service (see Old Spice Guy). There are several “ingredients” you may use to create a successful meme. Some include:
- humor
- sex appeal
- nostalgia
- uniqueness
- familiarity
The more elements that you use, the more likely it is for your meme to go viral. However, getting a meme to go viral is not easy. If you decide that you want to experiment with viral marketing through the use of memes, good luck. It’s a lot of work, and trial and error, though the pay-off can be substantial!
You can get rich from posting pictures of cats on the internet
Speaking of memes, that brings me to the Cheezburger Network. The Keynote speaker on Sunday was CEO of the Cheezburger Network, Ben Huh.
Ben Huh was a venture capitalist who one day decided to buy a blog filled with cat photos. Since then he has turned this blog into a comedy meme network. Initially I thought that the purpose of having Ben Huh speak was to bring a light and humorous end to the conference, leaving a good taste in everyone’s mouth. As it turns out Huh is a very intelligent man with many insights on the industry, and a revolutionary ideology on business and software development. He calls this method the MPH method. What does “MPH” stand for? Why Mr. Potato Head, of course!
Here’s what it comes down to. This is how Huh turned a blog with cat pictures into a multi-million dollar company:
- People like to look at pictures of cute cats
- Post pictures of cute cats on the internet
- Allow other people to send pictures of cats to be posted on your blog
- Post these cat photos in order to build community
- Post ads next to the cat photos
- People click on these ads
- Profit
It’s really a simple concept, and that’s what Huh is all about. The simpler the better.
After Huh bought the blog, he soon found out that maintaining the site was a full-time job. He decided that he would set out to make his job so easy that he would only have to work for 4 hours per week. He did this by developing one of the worlds most popular image editing software programs, the LOL Builder. The builder consists of a photo picker/uploader and three lines of text. The beauty is in the simplicity.
Soon after developing the builder, they noticed that if the captions you enter are too long, they run off the side of the photo. They decided that they had a couple of options to fix this:
- Auto-adjust the size of the text to fit in the allotted space
- Auto-wrap the text down to the next line
- Warn the user that the text will run over.
- Do nothing.
They decided to go with number 4. They found that people figured it out, and no one ever complained. This is rather refreshing because in computer science you’re pretty-much taught to never trust your users. This method places all responsibility on the user; if they mess up, they have to fix it. It remained un-touched for many years, and is basically the same to this very day.
This method of user-generated content allowed users to do all of Huh’s work for him, and they loved doing it!
These same methods of simplifying the development and workflow processes led to the ability to launch a new website within 2 hours from the birth of a meme. The Cheezburger Network now consists of 50+ websites, and brings in millions of dollars in ad revenue per year. The Cheezburger network also brings in the second highest volume of traffic of all blogs hosted on WordPress.com, second only to CNN.
How to use twitter more effectively
Now my final thought on the conference. This did not come from a presentation, but rather from experience.
I’ve been using twitter for years, and have not really had the time to dig into its core functionality to discover its full potential. Twitter is all about conversation. It enables mass amounts of strangers to communicate on any subject, and give their opinions.
The secrete is in the #hashtags
If you don’t know what hashtags are, they are any number of topics that are denoted by the pound symbol (#). Anyone can make up a hashtag at any time. All you have to do is add “#” to the front of a word or phrase that has no spaces. For example, do a twitter search for the hashtag #alligatortek, and see the message that I left for you. We can discuss our experiences with alligatortek, and everyone will be able to see the conversation.
The hashtag for Social Dev Camp Chicago is #SDCChi, and the hashtag for the Unconference is #unconference. Watching these hashtags will allow you see what everybody is saying about the conference while they are saying it. So if you’re part of organizing an event, you can standardize a hashtag and encourage your attendees to use it. This will facilitate your attendees in finding each other, and also bring value to your own twitter account. All you have to do is display your hashtag around your website and your event. Not only will you be opening lines of communication, but you will also be able to go back through the string of tweets for valuable feedback.
This is just an introduction to the value of twitter, subscribe to our rss feed for upcoming articles pertaining to social networking (like the use of rss feeds).
Thank you for reading. To all of the people who organized the Social Dev Conference Chicago 2010, we had a great time and hope to see you next year!