Think you’re a Renegade? Got experience in graphic design or an interest in social media? Want to learn some cool stuff at 200 mph from some of the top experts in the social media industry? Great. Get in and saddle up.
How much do you know about Digital Royalty? Maybe you follow us on Twitter or Facebook. Maybe you saw Amy Jo Martin’s TEDTalk, or you read her book, The New York Times Bestseller Renegades Write The Rules,where she recounts her mentorship to big guns like Shaq, Dana White and The Rock. We work with many Renegade brands, teams, agencies and personalities to educate them on how to get the most out of their social media efforts and we’re part of the Downtown Project in Las Vegas where some pretty cool things are happening. Want to be a part of it? We’re looking for your help.
Warning:If you’re not a Renegade, this might not be the place for you. We don’t just tweet and post cool pictures on Instagram all day. We rock analytics that show trends you didn’t even know existed. We break traditions. We ask a lot of tough questions (Mostly: Why not?). We ask forgiveness instead of permission. We do things differently and we work under some intense (but fun) core values. We navigate new paths for our partners and we show them how to connect with people to innovate their industries. Still interested? Email us here and let’s see if this chair has your name on it:
Can I ask you a personal question? What’s your number? No…not that number, your inbox number! For the past few months, my personal inbox has been hovering consistently around 300. These aren’t just those “look at what’s on sale at the J.Crew outlet” emails. These are articles I’d like to read and emails from friends that I’d like to stay in touch with. Sometimes, though, my busy schedule gets the best of me and the emails I’d like to read or respond to end up buried under dozens (or in my case, hundreds) of other emails.
Email management has become a subject of serious debate here at Digital Royalty, as we are always searching for ways to streamline communication and be more efficient. One of the ways we have done so is to substitute emails for voice memos (when possible) using an app called Voxer. I recently downloaded an app called Mailbox, and was surprised to see that there were about 600,000 other people ahead of me also waiting to download the app. It took a few weeks, but my Mailbox account has finally arrived!
The premise of Mailbox is simple (and completely contradictory to how I typically use my inbox): your inbox is not a storage space. Your inbox should only include emails that need your immediate attention, kind of like a to-do list. The app’s simple interface feels very intuitive and with a quick half-swipe to the right, your message moves to all-mail, or with a full swipe to the right the message will be moved to the trash.
With a quick swipe to the left, you can add an email to a list, or schedule an email to reappear in your inbox whenever you’d like. Once you make the mental shift to start thinking of your inbox as a to-do list, the ‘snooze’ feature is really where this app shines. Let’s say you get an email but you don’t need to deal with it until tomorrow, or even next week. Simply half-swipe to the left and the message will snooze until you’d like to reappear in your inbox. Or, fully swipe to the left to add the message to a list.
And voilà! Your email inbox is now manageable. You choose when to deal with what, and as long as you stay on top of it, clutter can easily be filed away and dealt with another day, leaving behind what’s actionable and important. At the moment, Mailbox only syncs with Gmail accounts and won’t let you add emails to your existing Gmail labels. Other drawbacks are that there is no desktop version and it is only available for iPhones. It’s still a new product and just last week it was acquired by storage giant Dropbox, so it is likely they will be making tweaks as more users join.
In case you were wondering, my number is now zero! And to entice you to stay at inbox: zero, Mailbox pulls in a different photo from Instagram everyday. But, you must have an empty inbox to see it! What’s your number?
Our friends at Facebook have done it again. They’re rolling out updates to the News Feed to clean up the view and focus on delivering stories from the audiences you care about most. They’re adapting to changing user preferences by getting rid of the clutter and spotlighting what your friends are sharing. Stories are bigger, cleaner and more organized. For example, if your friends all post the same video, you can just flip through the stories to see what everyone is saying. The new design is based on richer stories, choice of feeds and consistency across platforms. CEO Mark Zukerberg describes the new interface as the “best personalized newspaper” a user could have.
Facebook is taking note of features from some of their competitors by incorporating an icon sidebar on the left-hand side like Google+ with bookmarks and chat contacts available on both desktop and mobile. There is an increased focus on visuals vs. text, like the Pinterest and Instagram platforms.
The News Feed will now be categorized into content themes or channels. In the past you could categorize and group friends, but most users did not take the time to do this. Now, Facebook will automatically do this for you for the more popular categories of content users might be interested in. Check out stories from all of your friends, just look at those stories with photos, see what your friends are listening to or news from artists you like, or check out ‘Following’ to give you the latest news from all of the pages and people you follow.
From a marketer’s perspective, you have a greater opportunity to reach and engage with your audience and have your content be discovered. Why? Because these changes are designed to increase user engagement and people spending more time consuming the content within the newsfeed. With a more prominent ‘Following’ feed on the right-hand side of the home page, users are able to discover content from the Pages and people they follow, giving your message more distribution. Just as content from friends in the News Feed is becoming more visual and larger with the redesign, so are page posts, ads and sponsored stories. Ads on the right-hand side will also be wider, with clearer calls to action. Not only do these updates help user engagement, they are working towards new advertising channels to improve targeted advertising. And with this emphasis on highly visual content posts it’s imperative to include unique photos and videos in your posts to stand a part from your competition.
These updates will be rolled out over the coming weeks, but if you are like us and can’t wait to check them out join the waiting list here: https://www.facebook.com/about/newsfeed
And Facebook isn’t the only one with spring fever, cleaning house and making updates. Just as Facebook has improved the News Feed in a visual way, make sure to check out Digital Royalty University for our updated Facebook and Twitter 101 classes with new animations and demonstrations. As Facebook continues to roll out these updates we’ll be making changes to keep our Facebook 101 class up to date as well. Happy learning!
I’m sure many of you saw Dave Grohl’s raucous Keynote speech from South by Southwest 2013. If not, invest the 45 minutes*, it’s fantastic. While Grohl’s story was directed primarily at musicians, there were several takeaways for the entrepreneur, the artist, and of course, the music fan in all of us.
Grohl’s message centered around the creative process, and how musicians are best when “left to their own devices.” And the great news is, thanks to social communication and their willingness to take risks, artists have more creative devices, more freedom and more ways to connect with music fans than ever before.
First, discovering new music is easier than ever. Connect your Spotify account to your Facebook account and see what your friends are listening to. There are streaming radio stations and playlists that are based on your interests on both Pandora and Spotify. Also, the new MySpace is an incredibly deep resource for finding new music. Even deeper underground lies one of the most innovative uses for Google+, Artists In The Plus. It’s a “giant network of free promotion for artists.”
Want to see a great show? There’s a social app for that called Timbre. It geo-locates nearby concert venues and even gives you a sample sound bite and a direct link to buy tickets.
In his SXSW keynote address, Dave Grohl details the struggles within Nirvana when the band of self-made punks went from “one of us” to “one of them.” In 1991, musicians didn’t have the means to communicate with fans like they do now. Artists no longer need to speculate. Instead, they stay in touch with millions of fans on their own terms, through Instagram photos with fans while on tour, YouTube ads like Def Leppard’s, and email newsletters loaded with perks. For example, Rhianna isn’t shy about sharing everything with her fans on Instagram.
Tommy Lee from Motley Crüe hides concert tickets for fans and often times waits to greet them when they follow his clues on Twitter. Many artists, such as Lady Gaga, have even created their own entire social networks.
Purchasing music is changing, too. Enter crowdfunding. The Digital Royalty team members and I are big fans of artist Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls and Grand Theft Orchestra. As she details in her TED Talk, “The Art of Asking,” she gives away her music and she’s chosen couch surfing for years – just for the connections. Palmer tweets for help out of a passion for a “random closeness.” She advises musicians to start asking the right question: “How do we let fans pay for music vs. making them pay for it?” Easy. Be human, get connected, and start truly “seeing” fans. Once you do, the income can be significant, albeit secondary to the experiences for fans and artists.
Remember when corporate record labels used to hold all the cards, dictating what success looked like? Not anymore. Over the past two decades, the power shifted to the point where bands don’t need to top a chart or grace the cover of Rolling Stone magazine to know how their fans feel about a new record. Conversely, fans no longer rely on a flyer on their windshield to know their favorite band is coming to town. We now live in an era where fans have unprecedented access to bands through social media. Best of all, bands no longer need to speculate about the riots they incite in their fans.
As one Digital Royalty employee found out this weekend, losing your phone is not a fun experience, but I am here to tell you there is hope!
After taking a taxi to @FirstFridayLV, she realized her phone was missing. She furiously searched through her purse, discarding its entire contents onto the ground, hoping it was just hiding in a pocket. Not the case. The phone was officially gone. Luckily, we happened to be connected on Apple’s Find My Friends iPhone app and were able to confirm that the phone was indeed about 4 miles away. At this point, panic set in (you know, that sinking feeling in your stomach?). I don’t know if any of us actually realize how much we rely on our smart phones until they are unexpectedly taken from us.
After calling the lost phone and various cab companies with no luck, we had to take action. Luckily, Find My iPhone had been previously enabled on the iPhone 5 and we were able to login to the app from another device. Apple’s Find My iPhone service gives you access to a few tools that can help you retrieve a lost device (this service also works on iPad’s and Apple computers). 1. The most obvious tool is GPS tracking. As long as your phone is turned on, you will be able to see almost exactly where your phone is at.
2. The ability to enable Lost Mode. Lost Mode allows you to set a passcode on your phone if you do not already have one (if you don’t, we highly recommend setting one up now). It also allows you to specify a phone number that can be called from the lost phone. This setting locks your phone completely so that the only thing a would-be thief or innocent bystander can do with your phone is call the specific number that you designate.
3. The third feature allows you to play a sound on the lost device, whether the ringer is turned on or off. It’s a very distinct tone and should draw the attention of anyone near it.
4. The final feature of Find my iPhone is the ability to completely wipe your device. This will remove all of the data from the device and should be used as a last resort.
Are any of you still wondering if we got the phone back?
After not having any luck on Friday night, the first thing we did Saturday morning was check to see if the phone was still on. Sure enough it was, and it only had about 5% battery left, (Find My iPhone tells you the battery life too) so we knew we had to act fast. Find My iPhone even gave us driving directions to the location of the phone and we found ourselves in the parking lot of a rather seedy looking motel. At this point, with 2% battery left our hopes were fading. We were close to pressing the dreaded “Wipe My iPhone” button, knowing we might never see it again. Instead, we decided to play that annoying alert sound one more time, in hopes that someone might hear it. Seconds later, we got a call from the missing iPhone and were able to get it back. Turns out, someone had found it in the taxi and decided they were going to hold it.
This service won’t always guarantee you get your lost or stolen device back, but with that being said, it’s a free service available to any iOS or Mac owners and if it hadn’t been enabled we may have never found her phone. So, if you don’t have it, go download it. And if you do have it, make sure the app is enabled on your phone by checking your iCloud settings.
Social media platforms are a great resource for recognizing customer service complaints and an important tool for building and maintaining customer trust and loyalty. 66% of Americans online actively use social media, but only 16% of companies use it to engage with customers. As a business, you face the responsibility to reverse any negative issues that arise with customers. An easy way to respond and engage is in the social space.
When creating solutions for customer service issues, always remember the Golden Rule of Social Media: deliver value when, where, and how your audience wants to receive it. (If you’re not familiar with this Golden Rule we recommend taking a spin through our 8 Royal Rules class – it’s free!)
One example of a company that does a stand up job leveraging the social media space as a customer service tool and building relationships is Zappos. They developed an account specifically for customer service inquiries: @Zappos_Service. They actively reach out and respond to customer concerns using personalized messages and fast response times. It’s obvious that they live up to their reputation of having great customer service, and they have a lot of happy customers.
You can learn specific ways to convert a customer’s experience from negative to positive through our new Digital Royalty University class, Social Media Customer Service. This class will walk you through the steps for creating a strategy plan to help handle customer service issues, including defining your objectives, how to utilize your social outlets for different types of customer service situations, and how to be aware of who is making a complaint.
For more information or to sign-up for this new class, visit Digital Royalty University. Remember, with each class you purchase – you help us give back a class to teachers with Teach For America.
Just as social media has evolved in the last 5 years, so has the impact of social movements. I’m sure we all have a cause in mind that we’d love to spend time canvasing for, but busy schedules can sometimes make us feel like we’re unable to participate. However, social media is changing activism as we know it.
Take for example the “Kony 2012” movement. Invisible Children created an informative and empathetic video to spread their position that Joseph Kony needed to be brought to justice for turning African children into sex slaves and foot soldiers, and they did it all through social. The video gained traction and the results were astounding:
Over 100 million views in less than 1-week
3.7 million people from 185 countries took the online pledge to support efforts to arrest Joseph Kony
Invisible Children became the most liked non-profit organization on Facebook with 3.1 million likes
Just yesterday the @Invisible Twitter account tweeted a picture implying a possible re-launch of their campaign beginning on March 5th, exactly one year after their video hit the social space. Whatever their message means, they’re not stopping. They’ve already built the momentum for their campaign to continue having a huge presence on social.
The infamous Egypt Uprising is another great example of an activist movement shaped by social. Citizens of Egypt used Facebook and Twitter as tools for coordinating demonstrations and herding the masses. Without the use of social, fewer people would have known to show up to protest. As there is strength in numbers, this tactic gave many people the courage to show up, knowing that they weren’t alone. The results of this set an example that we can expect will influence future movements.
A more recent case of social activism was the outrage over Instagram’s change in their privacy policy. When people realized how this change would affect them, they took to social to speak out against Instagram and share their anger. Not only did this catch the attention of Instagram’s CEO Kevin Systrom, it actually created change. Systrom heard the voice of the masses loud and clear and responded accordingly.
With over a billion people on Facebook and 555 million people (and growing) on Twitter, we can’t count social out as a stage for activism because social media changes public awareness. We can donate money or support a fundraiser through Twitter just by simply replying “donate” to a brand using Chirpify. We can even ensure a call to action through social media event activation (and hey, Digital Royalty University has a class for that!) that ultimately bridges the virtual and physical worlds and gives people the opportunity to actively participate both on and offline. It’s important for activists to be where the people are, and the people are on social.
Facebook has started to cater more to its business-users in recent months by rolling out frequent updates to Facebook’s promotional products. Prior to mid-2012, companies had to hire developers to build custom tabs and apps in an effort to bring the company’s website (business efforts) into their Facebook Pages. “Fish where the fish are!” The experts would wisely say.
As many Page Admins know, trying to duplicate website features into Facebook apps is an arduous effort and often times the resulting traffic doesn’t support the decision. (Will flash work? Is it secure? Can my fans see it on a mobile device?) The truth is, apps can effectively drive repeat traffic to your page, but it can be tricky. Here’s a couple ways your company can benefit from those custom apps.
Contests, Sweepstakes and Giveaways. This is a fantastic way to build your Facebook community and reward your fans. Furthermore, brands can learn more about those who choose to participate, since apps gain insights separately from the page they’re installed to.
One very user-friendly Facebook app solution is ShortStack, which is my personal favorite. Businesses of all sizes can “stack” widgets to create their own custom apps using custom forms, images and external content from YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, SoundCloud, Foursquare, Google Maps and more. There’s even advanced options that let you install to multiple Facebook Pages, database storage features and built in themes.
Wildfire App by Google is another pro option with the ability to customize and run promotions on your company page. There are several pricing tiers ranging from very basic to very advanced. DoubleTree by Hilton does a nice job of adding some rich features to their pages such as online booking.
Deliver unique, exclusive content. UFC, VW and Red Bull are crushing this concept. These huge global brands have integrated their Facebook Pages into their overall brand footprint and it shows in their custom apps.
UFC shows preliminary, un-televised fights to those who Like their page – All 10 million of them.
VW lets their fanatics post stories about the rich Volkswagen culture.
Red Bull has their own TV channel celebrating action sports & the lifestyle Red Bull knows best.
Facebook Apps can be a great addition to your Facebook Page if they provide great value to your brand’s community. The trick is letting people know that they exist. Facebook doesn’t make a dime from these custom apps, and this is precisely why I think they’re so difficult to locate to the average user. For this reason, it’s smart to promote your custom app using Facebook’s promotional products. Keep that in mind when you set a budget.
What brands have you seen using custom apps effectively?
So you’ve set your social media strategy and have a plan in place. But are you really ready to rock and roll? You are if you’ve identified your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Make sure to establish your metrics and goals from the start. Otherwise, how do you know if your efforts are really paying off? Establishing goals and setting benchmarks is key to all initiatives you set out to do in life – whether for pleasure or business. In the case of business you probably have someone you have to answer to (aka The Boss) and prove the success of the initiatives you are charged with. A benchmark is simply logging your current counts prior to launching the campaign so you can measure your progress against these numbers. Don’t set your goals too low just to prove that your campaign was a success. Often times we measure things to prove what we set out to do is right and we end up measuring for the purpose of proving rather than the purpose of learning. Keep that in check.
Your KPI’s are likely going to vary depending on the goals of your campaign. For example, maybe you are looking at key metrics across your social media channel platforms like comments, likes, follower growth, retweets, hashtag volume, or check-ins. This list could go on and on based on all the social platforms you are using and monitoring but I think you get the gist.
Free listening tools to help monitor & measure:
TweetDeck – listening dashboard to monitor your Twitter account, @replies, Direct Messages and tweets and keywords.
HootSuite – monitor multiple accounts and specific keywords. An efficient tool for monitoring your full ecosystem if you are on many social platforms and create custom analytic reports.
Topsy – monitor trends or topics of interest through hashtags and specific Twitter handles or phrases. Great for gathering the tweet volume around a hashtag.
Twitter Counter – can help predict and measure follower growth on your Twitter account or on a competitor’s.
Bitly – since there are only 140 characters in a tweet this tool helps shorten URL links. Create your free account and all the links you’ve created will be saved plus they’ll include tracking for how many clicks each link receives as well as where referrals are coming from.
Facebook Insights – if you have a brand page you have access to Facebook’s analytics dashboard, providing stats on page ‘Likes’, likes per post, user demographics, People Talking About This and more.
There are also some pretty robust listening software partners out there with dashboards that dive into more detailed analytics and provide great visuals and graphs to help tell the full story. These analytic platforms expand beyond the basic metrics and include trend tracking, sentiment, word clouds, keywords within posts, brand advocates and influencers, hashtag volume, and much more. If you are able to make the investment, some platforms you may want to check out include:
Setting your KPI’s up front is just the start. Make sure you find the right tools to monitor your progress throughout your campaign and don’t wait until the end to login and view the stats. The beauty of social media is experimenting, listening to what works or doesn’t work, and being able to change things out on the fly to help improve your results. And knowing what needs to be measured and what doesn’t is what will give you an edge above your competitors to focus on what counts.
As Albert Einstein said, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.“
I am sure we can all agree that there never seems to be a shortage of emails in our day and in-boxes can become quite overwhelming at times. A recent email study* revealed that 63% of emails are internal communication and 61% of all emails were considered non-essential. Problem identified. Email etiquette is a frequent topic of discussion at Digital Royalty when it comes to over cc’ing people and unnecessary email replies. In fact we even have plans to roll-out a Digital Royalty University class on this very topic. We are always looking for efficient ways to operate as a business and communicate with one-another. Until we can figure out how to respond to emails mentally, we’ve recently stumbled across a gem of an application that we are stoked about, called Voxer.
If you’re not familiar with Voxer, it’s a free “push-to-talk” application for smartphones. In other words, it’s similar to a walkie-talkie. You push to talk and release when your message is done. The application sends voice messages, text or photos to your indented recipient. You can also leave notes to yourself so that you don’t forget something or don’t want to rely on Siri who may or may not misinterpret you.
When we tell people about this app, their initial reaction is always, “Why wouldn’t you just call the person?” Well, there are several reasons:
The intended recipient is in a meeting or in the middle of a flight
You only have 15 seconds between meetings
Maybe you just really don’t feel like talking
A killer idea comes to you in the middle of the night
If you’re Amy Jo, you can avoid the use of emoticons
Avoid international roaming charges for phone calls and text messages
The note will be saved on the app so you can refer back to it
Need I go on?
Creating an account is super simple and can be done by signing in with your Facebook account once you’ve downloaded the application. Just a heads-up, if you do create an account through your Facebook login, that means all of your Facebook friends have the ability to “Vox” you whether you like it or not. You do have the ability to block and delete people though. Phew.
Let’s be real, we’ll never completely eliminate email as much as we would all like to, but this application definitely helps you maintain your in-box. Our entire team is using it to cut back on unnecessary emails and misinterpreted Skype conversations – specifically when team members are on the road or out of the office.
Efficient right? Plus, it brings back fun memories of playing with walkie-talkies as a kid. Give the app a whirl and let us know how you like it.
PS: Try leaving a random Voxer voice message for your friend/family member or co-worker. I guarantee it will brighten their day. #RandomActsOfVoxer
