In Conclusion: Alternative Avenues

In addition to the traditional social media channels we’ve described below, there were others that we posted to in the hopes that we could drive just “that much” extra traffic.

Scribd.com

                Scribd is a document sharing website that allows for both commenting, social sharing and self-publication for sale of personal works. On the site you are able to label the category of your document, “Research”, as well as tag it for discovery. Our team chose to not only post our poster, but also our description in order to fill in the requirement that the piece be a document. While we did get 35 reads, and a number of click-throughs, but again it didn’t lead to any submissions. In the future, we would most likely add something more robust to give the impression that our research was more extensive and examine the best use cases for Scribd to ensure we’re using effective categories and tags.

Various Blogs

                Our team found a number of valuable blogs on which we tried to post, but were unable without prior permission. For example, the Red Cross blog/forum would’ve been an ideal place to solicit advice, however, they are the only ones approved to do so. With more time, we would’ve attempted to reach out to Red Cross ahead of time with a blog request and worked directly with them to be posted. This would’ve attracted passionate individuals and those with experience in disaster relief. There were other opportunities such as this that we didn’t spend enough time researching and therefore their success was minor even if we were allowed/able to submit posts.

Yahoo! Groups

                Yahoo! Groups at the beginning was VERY exciting for us. Not only did we believe that we could easily post to these pages, but that the individuals had opted-in to receive and comment on information related to disasters. In our Advocacy class we learn that statistics and change are more effective to those who are highly involved and have personal experience with the topic. The problem we ran into with these groups was two-fold, first, only some of them were open and the others required approval to join the group. This took time and we didn’t have any! Second, some of the groups hadn’t been posted to in a couple of years, and in one case, four years. All we could assume is that the group was developed after a specific disaster and faded over time, meaning the members are no longer highly involved. I don’t know that we wouldn’t post to these going forward, but only with enough time to ensure we were successful through other channels.

Yahoo groups - Disaster Survivors (64 members)

Yahoo Groups - California Disasters (1,400)

Yahoo Groups - Disaster Communicator’s Forum  (419)

Yahoo Groups - Disaster Watch (329)

SUDDEN Response Yahoo Groups (452)

We’d love to gather your thoughts on other forums we could’ve utilized!

‘Reaching Out’ with Facebook

 

We wanted to utilize “the world's most popular social media platform” to spread the word about our idea challenge [“6 Ways to Promote your cause on Facebook”], our first step was to create a Facebook Page.  The first obstacle we came across was when I created a Facebook account to use for marketing purposes in this project. When I tried to name the account “Disaster Relief Solutions,” I received an error message, so I had to use my own name because Facebook does not allow accounts without legitimate names. Nevertheless, I was okay using my own name because it would not be connected to my personal account. I was able to use this ‘project account’ to make a Facebook Page for the project called “Disaster Relief Solutions.”

We posted the flyer image we created on the Facebook Page to help us generate interest. According to our research, photos are shared by Facebook users more often than any other post; therefore, the flyer presented the opportunity to expand our audience [“Strategies”]. As a result, we had a few Facebook users join our Facebook Event and “Like” our Facebook Page; we even had a Facebook message from a user asking for more information. We were excited about someone reaching out to us; however, we were also hesitant about his validity and legitimacy.  This illustrates the difficulty of using a platform like Facebook to connect with strangers. Our Bit.Ly link had over a hundred clicks; however, the Bright Idea platform still had no posts from external users.

Where did we go wrong?

The nature of the marketing ‘Blast’ led to problems. Our strategy was to post on all participant pool Facebook pages during the initial challenge timeframe – three days.  This required posting frequent updates with the intention of generating interest.

 In hindsight, we should have done research regarding Facebook policies before implementing this strategy. We learned the hard way that Facebook “reserves the right to reject or remove Pages for any reason” [“What You Cannot do on Facebook”]. It turns out, if you post more than a handful of times from one account in an hour, Facebook will block you and mark you as “illegitimate”… and this happened to us on day one. Therefore, we had to use our own personal accounts for the remainder of the challenge.

If we could do it again…

Evidently, it would have been more effective to spread out the timing of our posts. We should have been more cognizant of the rules for posting on Facebook. An effective approach would be to post every other day, maximum. Moreover, the best time to post is at 3pm on Wednesdays [“Strategies”]. We could have used this information to schedule automatic posts via a program like Hootsuite. However, this effort would not be effective if the timeframe isn’t long enough for implementation.

Another improvement would be to contact the individual Facebook Pages early to gain permission to post on their site. This move would also help us get more “Likes” on our Facebook page. Gaining followers on our Facebook Page was not easy  because people generally only “Like” pages they are familiar with. Therefore, implementing this strategy to gain more “Likes” would increase our credibility. If given more time, we could have teamed up with key government agencies through the social networks to have a joint effort in reaching our target audience.

Finally, we would have focused on attracting more attention to our site by creating a YouTube video with the potential of going viral. According to our research, posting “intriguing or fun info that relates to your type of business” is key in promoting via Facebook [“Strategies”]. Our group, for example, had discussed creating a video with a compilation of disaster pictures and sad songs to “pull on the heartstrings;” however, this idea was not feasible with our timeline, so we decided to concentrate our efforts elsewhere.

In conclusion, we learned a lot in our marketing efforts on Facebook, and if we do a similar project in the future we will be able to develop a more thorough and more feasible plan.

Sources:

“Strategies: Using Facebook to promote your business for free”

10/strategies-rhonda-abrams-facebook/56918858/1

“6 Ways to Promote your cause on Facebook”

http://www.wheel.ie/funding/fundraising-guide/six-ways-promote-your-cause-using-facebook

“What You Cannot Do on Facebook”

http://www.marketinggum.com/what-you-cannot-do-on-facebook-page-admins-read-these-rules/

Using Twitter to Create Awareness

     Our team has some experience with Twitter, and we focused on utilizing the various expertise among us in order to successfully launch a Twitter version of our campaign. The first thing we did was create a Twitter handle, of which you can see a screenshot in our previous post. After our presentation from Deidre Walsh, it was confirmed that Twitter is best used as a quick and easy way to disseminate industry information to those who have specific interests related to the challenge. Therefore, we needed to find those people and understand how to show up in their feed. We chose to post every couple of days using the hash tags and key Twitter accounts found below. Each of our posts included one or two of these references, a TwitPic of our poster and a Bit.ly link to our innovation challenge page. Due to the limit of 140 characters, however, we were forced to leave off the TwitPic in some instances to ensure that the targeting was complete.

Hash tags:

#disaster

#disasterrelief

#disasterrecovery

#hurricane

#housefire

#typhoon

#tornado

Key Twitter Accounts:

@RedCross

@DisasterRelief1

@DU_BreakingNews

@DirectRelief

@Disasterpeace

            While we did create a marketing plan for Twitter, and followed through on that plan, not everything went well. It became clear via our research that Twitter fans do not trust Tweeters who have few to no followers. This was almost impossible to accomplish because of the short time frame we had to post about things other than our challenge. After failing at getting a large number of followers (well none) we proceeded to use Jaime’s Twitter account @JLSutton to post about the challenge because she has over 500 followers, aka more credibility. This proved successful to an extent but we still didn’t work the Twitter system quite right. Due to the fact that all of these disaster accounts and hashtags have so much activity, we would’ve needed to post to them every couple of hours in order to remain near the top of any one person’s feed. Finally, we didn’t have the bandwidth to truly create unique content and ended up having posts about the same things one after another, which looks like spam to a new follower. If you look at the following from Mashable you will notice that we did do many things correctly[i]:

·         Tweets with hashtags get twice the engagement of those without, yet only 24% of tweets during the time of the study used them.

·         Using one or even two hashtags in a tweet is fine, but if you add a third, you'll begin to see an average 17% dropoff in engagement.

·         Posts with images have double the engagement of those without even though users can't see them until they click on them.

            If we were to do over, there are definitely some things we would change and do differently. These include creating a HootSuite account and using it to schedule multiple tweets for any one day, and multiple per day, so we could stay relevant in the targeted feeds. The following graph from Mashable shows which days and times are most effective:

The article also explains that the optimal number of tweets per day is four and after that you experience diminishing returns.

With more time allotted we would work to begin posting earlier on our project Twitter account to gain followers prior to asking them for something.  In relation to this we would also begin following key members of this target group prior to launching the challenge. According to experts, the more individuals you follow the more follow you, and once they follow you it is good practice to personalize that relationship through a direct message. In conclusion, Twitter did yield quite a few click-throughs to via the Bit.ly link but none of these individuals followed through with challenge entries. Overall, we learned that Twitter is not a format that you can immediately start using in the hopes of gaining results. It is a platform that is better developed over time, with a very specific target and strategy.

           

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[i]  http://mashable.com/2012/06/26/marketers-failing-twitter-study/

[ii] http://mashable.com/2012/06/26/marketers-failing-twitter-study/