Creative Social Media Experiments

Mark Farmer - Digital Strategist, York University

Infonex: 2014-02-25 Intro Beware the social media guru. Likewise the social media ninja, the social media Grand Poobah... in fact most varieties of social media expert. All those titles have negative connotations in the industry, because a lot of people with dubious track records have used those titles for themselves, and then given bad advice or failed to live up to expectations. Having said that, theres one person in Canada who I think is legitimately a social media guru, and thats Mitch Joel. He runs the Twist Image agency, with offices in Toronto and Montreal. He puts out the 6 Pixels of Separation blog and podcast, and published the books Six Pixels of Separation and Ctrl Alt Delete. I attended a talk by Mitch a few years ago in Toronto, and he mentioned how he often gets approached by people who ask him how to make something go viral, or whether he can make something go viral, or whether something they've done will go viral. His response at that talk was very telling. To paraphrase, Its like Ive got a Magic 8-Ball and all I have to do is shake it to get the answer to whether somethings going to go viral: It is assuredly so, Cannot predict now, or Outlook not so good. So think about it: if the one guy in Canada who - I think - has a legitimate claim to being a social media expert, is not able to predict the virality, the success or failure of anyones efforts on social media, what chance do we mere mortals have of doing so? Not much, unfortunately. But people still want certainty. Businesses arent built on closing their eyes, throwing a dart at the board and seeing where it lands. They want that certainty, even if its not 100% realistic to expect it. So Im going to share a way of getting, not to certainty, but to probability, which is actually pretty damn good in the highly uncertain world of social media. So heres a simple formula Im going to share with you from the fifteen-odd years Ive spent in the online world, for achieving virality, success, results, pretty much anything on social media: 1. 2. 3. 4. Try something. If it works, do more of it. If it doesnt, do less of it. Rinse, repeat.

What sounds simplistic and obvious, actually isnt. What it is, is the essence of some fairly advanced business processes such as the concept of scrapiness described by Eric Rees in his book The Lean Startup." It's reflected in the principles of the Agile manifesto, its the basis for the rapid experimentation and more. Its simple to explain, but very difficult to practice. But its going to get you and your organization where you need to go better than any other approach, for one simple reason: No one can accurately predict whats going to work for you. That goes against a lot of assumptions that underpin the business world, namely that somebody somewhere has the answer for you, and that someone is probably a very bright, very highlypaid management consultant - or guru - because that information has to be precious and valuable (and probably expensive) otherwise <insert organization name> would look foolish to not already know it. But, if we just track down that one highly-paid guru with that knowledge and those arcane insights, then well have the knowledge and we'll know what to do, and then well excel and get our performance bonus, and, and, and.... So we spend a lot of time and money on very highly-paid management consultants to tell us what to do, because of that assumption, and because doing so shows that we did the right thing hiring the best and brightest so that if things dont pan out quite as planned, we can at least point to our due diligence and say not my fault! and then point at where the management consultant went and say He went thatta-way! But that doesnt get us any further ahead. So what do we do? We go find out what does work. How do we do that? 1. 2. 3. 4. Try something. If it works, do more of it. If it doesnt, do less of it. Rinse, repeat.

Let me point to a few examples from my own past. Examples Example 1: The Royal Ontario museum. Previously the ROM had done live broadcasts from the field using satellite technology. Unfortunately, satellite technology is very expensive and finicky when theres cloud cover. Enter me: I noticed on a map of southern Alberta that a certain Telco which will remain nameless advertised 3G coverage in the area where were planning a summer dinosaur dig. I decided that it was worth the experiment to take a wireless device into the field and see if we can do anything live. I had dreams in my head of FaceTimeing with school groups back at the ROM, live Twitter Q&As, Skyping with classes in schools around Toronto. So I bought a portable, battery-operated 3G to WiFi router, tested it extensively and took it out into the field with the palaeontologists.

The story doesnt have a totally happy ending, unfortunately. It partially ends with me hopping up & down angrily outside a farmers field near Medicine Hat desperately trying to navigate the automated attendant on the Telcos voice-activated help system, using someone else's device, with about a bar of signal on my phone, all the while being mercilessly stung by mosquitos as the sun starts to sink below the horizon. Was the experiment a failure? I say no, for a few reasons. Number one, because of what we did: mitigation. I wasnt just there to hold a wireless device up in the air, close my eyes and pray. I was there to test a variety of technologies and learn from them, for example an iPad, which I used to capture video that I cut on the plane ride home and back at work using iMovie, which resulted in about 5,000 views on YouTube. The photos I took with it became the materials for Facebook posts & Facebook photo galleries and a Flickr photo gallery. We even managed to get a few tweets in. It was the first time we had taken an iPad into the field, and by doing so we learned that we had a rugged platform we could shoot and cut video on, take photos and notes with, and which would hold a charge for more than a day of constant use. It could also let us upload directly, dependent on locating a wireless signal. And we learned that although the technology wasnt ready for prime time with 3G networks available to us then, we had a device we could take into the field when more robust 4G (ready now) and 700 MHz spectrum (ready soon) networks are available, to allow the kind of live interactivity I was dreaming about And we captured all this knowledge in a report so that we didn't lose it and could leverage it when the time came. And finally, it wasnt a failure because it was an experiment. Thats the nature of experiments: theyre experimental. That doesnt make them easy to embrace for risk -averse organizations, but it puts them in their proper context. All of which underlines that experiments can fail. But, as Eric Ries points out in the Lean Startup, for an entrepreneur or change agent - which some of you no doubt are - failure is important if it gives you an insight that's important or critical in the development of your business. This did. And through our mitigation efforts, we harvested some benefit from it. The biggest challenge you're going to face with experimentation is cultural. Your institution has a risk appetite and what I call a 'change profile.' You may be completely risk averse, and I have no magic formula for dealing with that. You need a few things like a business champion, quick wins and a guerilla approach when the odds are stacked against you like that, and I'll talk about that more later.

Example 2: York University. Instagram. We recognized that Instagram was gaining traction as a place where the 17-25 demographic goes to share photos. So we knew that we wanted to be there, but had no real idea what the playbook might be. We looked around at other players like U of T and Ryerson University to see what they were doing. We saw that U of T was getting good results, but thanks in no small part (we were told) to their use professional photographers, at least in part. I didnt have the cash to pay for pro photographers, and I didnt have a team of ambassadors the way Ryerson did, so I was uncertain if this was going to get any play. So we got our account name (yorkuofficial) and hit go. (Actually, we were looking for the account name yorku, but someone in mainland China is squatting on it). We took a leap of faith, which was that this was going to work - something which I was entirely uncertain of, given our lack of resources and differing approach. And the results were better than we could have expected. Were closing in on 1,000 followers in less than six months (double our goal for the first year) and 5,000 likes. There was a risk to us in starting a channel and seeing no results, something which we've seen numerous other academic accounts (which shall remain nameless) experience. And rather than overthink it, we went for it and saw it as a learning opportunity where we could write the playbook as we go. And thats exactly what were doing. Learning by doing is the most important part of experimentation. The learning we took from this is that having the official institutional account on a medium is a lightning rod for fans. As soon as we opened the account, we had fans. I think we had something like 100 before we posted a single photo. We also learned that we didn't need to create a single photo ourselves, if we could act as the curator of other people's experience and highlight the campuses through their work, giving them credit in the process. We took a leap of faith, and learned critical information about our business and our audience int he process. Example 3: Everywhere Example three is everywhere, and I mean that literally. At no point in history have we ever had the kind of rich playing field for experimentation that exists today, thanks to social media. If I had told a marketer or an advertiser 20 years ago, Hey - were going to create a whole slew of media where you can experiment in real time with your audience every minute of every day. Youll be able see live results segmented in every way imaginable, demographically, by time of day, location around the globe and more. Youll get to see exactly what resonates, what your audience wants more of and less of, and its all FREE, guess what wouldve happened. Right. They wouldve laughed me out of their office. Well, guess what - you have that opportunity now, thanks to Facebook. LinkedIn. Twitter, Instagram.... This is the ULTIMATE experimentation playground, because every day you get to try a new content experiment and see what the results are. You can A/B test content based on any number of criteria.

And at York were trying more content experiments Selfies at graduation Instagram contests Possibly Pinterest ...and more. The sky's the limit. Measuring results: The importance of experimentation boils down to this: there is no template, no Magic 8-Ball, no crystal ball. That can be tremendously frustrating, and either terrifying or thrilling, depending on your point of view. Because not only is there no template, but if there were, it wouldnt apply to you, because each implementation of social media is idiosyncratic and unique to you and your organization. You cant just apply what works with someone else. Sure, there are best practices and some are specific to your vertical. So by all means, if youre just starting out, go pick up a copy of Six Pixels of Separation. Visit HubSpot, MarketingProfs, Social Media Examiner. Sign up for the American Marketing Associations free webinars. Go find out what other levels of government and other jurisdictions are doing. In my own case, Ive done a lot of research on what other universities are up to, in Ontario around the world. Because of that, I feel Ive got a handle on the best practices in my current industry. But in the end, all the advice and all the best practices in the world arent going to drive social media success for you. Youre going to need to experiment to find out what works. This is tremendously liberating. And you can start learning right now. Luckily, you have all the resources you need at your disposal not only to experiment, but to measure the results of those experiments and the efficacy of your efforts. Theyre called analytics, and there are a whole host of them. They fall into four categories: Free platform-specific dashboards: Facebook LinkedIn Twitter YouTube Instagram (Statigram) Paid platform-specific dashboards Hashtracking Tweetreach Tailwind EdgeRank Checker

Multi-platform freemium HootSuite Multi-platform paid SproutSocial

Youll notice that two of these are free. That means you can start measuring the results of your efforts right now, without spending a dime. So, if you havent already, get started and - have I mentioned this already? - learn by doing. If you want further advice or guidance, I recommend picking up Measure What Matters by Katie Delahaye Paine or Measuring the Networked Nonprofit by Beth Kanter. Both are great - Id personally start with Katies book just because its a little more specific and slightly less academic, but both are great books. Measurements important for more than just measuring the results of your experiments. Specifically, Legitimacy is built on being able to measure things objectively, and if you want social media to be taken seriously in your institution, you will need it legitimized. Demonstrating success. Nothing motivates like a success story, and youll need to motivate people to adopt social media. Thats why you showed up here today, at least in part, right? Clarity for yourself. How can you evangelize something to others if you yourself cant tell whether or not its a success?

So how do you go about measuring? Thusly: First, define results Is the desired result something tangible, like more revenue, more sign-ups for a newsletter? Thats fairly direct to measure, but it can be difficult to track back to social. Theres a few things you can do here, however Shortened links in your promotions and campaigns: because theyre unique, you can use them to track referral traffic to your website, and connect that to your shopping cart or sign-up form. Special offers promoted online using a unique code: allow you to measure pickup. 30-day cookies. Or just ask people, using a survey or questionnaire: How did you hear about us? What was the most important part of your purchase decision? This will allow you to benchmark how important (or not) social is in driving traffic.

Or is the desired result something less tangible, like increased reputation? If so, how will you measure that? Probably through a proxy, like sentiment. For us at York, thats fairly important because we connect the institutions reputation with applications. And this year our first-year applications increased while our competition and first-year applications in the province decreased. This is probably due at least in part to our brand campaign, which you may have seen around. Its a proxy for us, because if sentiment goes up, assumedly so does the reputation we depend on. But be careful: measuring things like sentiment online is fraught with danger. A lot of companies with very expensive products will claim to monitor sentiment automatically. Their output can be pretty dubious, but you can manually find out sentiment: it just takes longer. Lastly, its possible it can be measured simply and directly using criteria like: Likes Retweets Comments

Those last metrics are fine in and of themselves, but remember to always ladder them up. For example, youre not measuring likes for the sake of likes; youre measuring likes because its a measure of engagement. Hopefully youre not measuring retweets purely because its a vanity metric, youre measuring it because it shows reach. You shouldnt put a lot of emphasis on someones follower count because getting picked up by someone with 10,000 followers sounds impressive; hopefully you care about that because reaching someone with 10,000 followers means you reached someone with influence. Once youve got those metrics, those KPIs, please remember to share, share, share. Dont be obsessed by whether those numbers will go up or down - the simple fact that youve got hard numbers to report is going to help you engage stakeholders that its an end in itself - dont wait for a perfect report, to start sharing, and dont keep them to yourself. Organizational acceptance - cultural shift Which takes us to the last part of my talk, Zen and the art of organizational and cultural change. Being a change agent is not easy, but its within your power. But its like the old joke about light bulbs: How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb. Only one, but the light bulb has to WANT to change. If an organization wants to change, or at least if there are parts of it that do, you can leverage that to achieve some success. If by some stroke of bad luck youre in an organization where nobody wants to change, then youre completely out of luck. But in organizations where theres even a glimmer of hope, here are some of the things you can do.

First off, you need people, specifically: Advocates, enthusiasts, first movers and ambassadors. These are the people who are either enthusiastic about new technologies and approaches, or who at least recognize that change has to happen in your institution. They are the people who can act as your foot in the door to the business units you need to infiltrate (by the way, sorry for the military language, but this does indeed operate like a military campaign). Find out who these people are. Become their best friends. Find out what you can do to help them in their day-to-day work lives, what you can give them. Because as you try to gain allies you always have to be answering the question whats in it for me? If you cant answer that question, you shouldnt expect people to pay attention to you. You need a business champion. Unfortunately, nothing gets done in business without someone with some power and heft pushing quite hard from behind. Little old you cant do it alone. So you need to locate that business champion, and its usually going to be someone whose performance metrics coincide with yours, or who will at least benefit from the success of your social media efforts. In other words, its in their best interest to have the things youre responsible for succeed. Again, try to cultivate a relationship with that individual. Make yourself known. And always, show whats in it for them. You need a business need or a problem that need solving. Heres an example: theres a great little lab at Google called Google X. Theyre responsible for imagining the next generation of awesome, here and now projects like the Google self-driving car and much more audacious ones like a space elevator. And they have a few criteria for their projects. One of them is that theyll consider whatever cutting-edge, pie-in-the-sky idea you can come up with - it can be as outrageous as you want, but it has to solve a problem. If not, theres no business need for it. The same thing goes in your experimental, social media world. You cant expect anyone to pay attention to your social media efforts, if those efforts are not going to fill a business need, solve a problem for your audience / customers / stakeholders, or at least support your businesss goals. Remember: ladder what you do up to the bigger business picture.

The way that I usually end up doing these things is to try to display leadership and altruism share information, best practices, case studies and resources. Become known as the go-to person for information, an internal expert resource. Help people, and go a little out of your way to do so if necessary. As cliche as it sounds, the more you give in these situations, the more you get. Thats the only way youre going to get people to pay attention to you, and ultimately to do anything for you - is by doing things for them.

The next step is to support these people that youre building a relationship with. Heres how you do that. Create a team that meets regularly to learn and to share information, best practices, insights and so on. The fact that these people are coming together as a group to meet and get to know each other is as important as the actual exchange of information and peer learning thats going on. In a best-case scenario, theyll start to gel as a group, but even if they dont at least a bunch of them will be together in the same place and at the same time each month. Having a team that meets on a regular schedule also gives you an opportunity to find out whats going on digitally in the rest of the institution. It can become your ear to the ground. Guidelines. Some people will experiment, but usually only if they feel safe in doing so. One way you can make them feel safe or safer is by giving them guidelines so they know what to do and what not to do. Youll notice I said guidelines and not policy. Thats for a very good reason. Policy is proscriptive. Guidelines are inclusive. When youre trying to leverage social media in an organization, the last thing you want to do is to make people scared to dip their toe in the water, and give them a laundry list of thou shalt nots and the various ways in which its possible to screw up. Thats what a lot of policies amount to. So it may be valuable to have institutional-level policies for this kind of thing, but thats not whats going to get you where you need to be. Thats through guidelines. Policies are usually more formal, and more often represent the legalese the institution wants people to look at. Dont believe me? Cast your mind back to the last time you read a terms of service agreement for an online service (assuming youve ever read a terms of service agreement for an online service) from top to bottom. Can anyone remember what that was? More importantly, did id the 50-odd pages of legalese result in an action or a behaviour change on your part? Probably not. Policies like terms of service agreements dont do that. Training and support. These are essential, because guidelines are just a document. Training and support are the physical manifestations of those guidelines,and they help ensure that not only do people know what theyre doing, but that they know they have ongoing support when they need it. That kind of backup makes people much more likely to experiment and try new things, which is exactly what you want. You may need to give people a safe place to play: a sandbox. This may or may not work for your organization - Ive seen it go either way. But some people want a safe place to play with technology where they know they wont screw up, because theyre that hesitant about it. So at the ROM we used to do Tech Tuesdays where people could drop in and experiment with technology: hardware like iPads and iPhones, platforms like HootSuite and LiveStream, books and whitepapers they could borrow. To be totally honest, it had limited success, but I know other organizations where its gone over better. So it may work for you.

Celebrate successes. Even if its a small thing, make sure you do this. Not only does the person being feted feel the pat on the back, but other people see that recognition in action. And thats just as important. Encourage acceptance by management. This usually means giving management assurance, through. Best practices & case studies. Business loves to remove risk from an equation. So if you can show that somebodys done the thing youre proposing before, and you can show how they succeeded, or how they screwed up and how you can avoid doing so, youll be more likely to gain approval for your projects and experiments. Decision-makers want to know that theres not a major downside to supporting you and your experiments: so show them that. Competitive scans. Dont underestimate the power of envy. If other jurisdictions or other agencies are already doing things, it can be a tremendous lever inside your own organization to say that everyone else is doing it and why arent we. Alternately, as Picasso said, great artists steal. Instead of steal here, I would say repurpose, but you get the idea. But be careful to back up any recommendations with a business case.

As I said before, make sure that people have skin in the game. If youre out there trying to push an agenda or evangelize something, and nobody has a reason to care, youre never going to get anywhere. You have to engage people by: Giving them something tangible or important to work on, something that has an impact or bearing on their job. Answering the question, whats in it for me? like I said. Give the participants power. This can be a scary proposition, but its tremendously surprise - empowering. Can participants set an agenda? Can they insert their concerns in the guidelines? Can they represent their unit in the next round of policy formulation? How can they have a tangible impact that means something to them?

One other thing I recommend people do, but which is difficult and which I certainly havent licked myself, is to de-fang failure. I know it can be done by recasting failure as an experiment which turned into a learning opportunity at the time, as I mentioned at the start. I know that commodifying the word can also go a long way: failure doesnt have to mean catastrophe. It can mean a calculated risk that didnt pay off, and that gave you valuable information you can activate to drive a future result. But Id be lying to you if I said this was easy: a big part of defanging and commodifying failure often comes down to knowing that your boss has got your back, so that you dont feel vulnerable when failures happen.

So lets ladder all this up: where are we? I think were at agility, the idea that an organization that can change direction, that can react smoothly to different pressures, different stimuli and threats, will succeed. Agility also refers to a very specific business process employed in IT, but for this purpose, it means not trying to plan everything out in exquisite detail in advance, but rather learning by doing, focusing on goals and sprinting toward them. These are qualities that are not easy to inculcate in bureaucratic, hierarchical structures like government, but which can be done. You know youre going to be asked for a detailed project plan and the worlds biggest Gantt chart the first time you try to do any of these experiments. To be an agile organization means shifting the conversation from rigidity and slowness and tried-and-true methods, to calculated risk, discrete goals, people over processes, and minimum viable products. In the end, a lot of what youre going to need to do is marketing. Its meta-marketing: in order to market your institution better online, you need to create your own internal marketing campaign, your own guerilla marketing strategy to drive acceptance and organizational change. This needs to be no less rigorous or planned out than any other marketing campaign - just because its internal doesnt make this planning any less essential. So start marketing. Start communicating. Be the evangelist your organization needs. Heres where I leave you with a quotation. More than anything else, it tells you everything you need to know about the task ahead. Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world. Archimedes said that. Happy levering.