WeAreMedia Module 4: Tips for Generating Buzz - Crowdsourced in a few minutes via Twitter!

WeAreMedia Module 4: Spreading Awareness and Generating Buzz, is about how social media tools can help you spread awareness and generate buzz about your organization's programs or campaigns. What happens is that you share your message with enthusiastic supporters and they in turn may choose to pass it to others with a similar a interest in your organization or campaign. But first, you have to build trust, credibility and -- most importantly -- a relationship with those who might interact with your posted content.

Using social media to spread awareness is an excellent method for generating web traffic and visible support for your cause in the form of comments and other forms of engagement. Best of all, it is very low cost. Referrals from sites like Digg and StumbleUpon can be longer lasting than search engine results. But you should be aware that it may take a while before you have the ability to leverage your connections on these networks in order to generate large waves of web traffic. Finally, it's easy to get started!

I put the word out on Twitter asking for nitty gritty practical tips using Digg,  Stumbledupon, Twitter, Friendfeed as well as some general tips.   Wow, this section has come together beautifully - thanks to Suewaters, Jonathan Colman, Laura Lee Dooley, Jeff Gates, and several other wiki participants who did not register so can't thank them personally.  I'm sharing these below.

General Tips

• Be a good member of the community: promote others even more than you promote yourself (i.e., "treat others as you would have them treat you"). Linking and promoting others is a nice way to show you care about people
• The creative material or your message should be something that people want to share - newsworthy, controversial, timeliness, immediate usefulness, and even humor all work well
• Don't spam: a good rule is to make one post of your own content for every 5-10 posts that link to other sites
• Don't digg/stumble/link/tweet every single piece of your content. Save it only for your very best
• Try hard not to send too many self-promotional emails or make too many posts of just your own content. Wrap your self-promotion in something of value to others, instead.
• Sometimes, just doing really good work is worthy of others promoting you. Try it!

(General Tips Adapted from Chris Brogan's ebook "Personal Branding for the Professional
and Todd Defren's Produce, Propagate, and Promote)

Twitter

• Make your content Twitter-friendly. If you want “re-tweets” of your content, keep that summary to well-under 140–characters
• If you want people to re-tweet your content, append "please retweet" to your tweet
• If you retweet, give credit where it's due by including source of original tweet
• Build relationships with other Twitterers, respond back to their tweets regularly
• Learn more about the interests of your followers by subscribing to their blogs
• DM or @ new followers - recognize/thank them for following
• Use #hashtags to identify tweets specific to an event or theme
• Think of the 140 character limit as a challenge to be creative

Digg

• Don't just submit your own content: submit stories from all around the web
• Be a good community member and learn by watching people whose posts regularly become "popular" on the homepage
  
• Spend time building your reputation by digging stories and making intelligent comments
• Respond to "shouts" of stories that you like by digging them and letting the shouter know that you supported them
• Spend at least 10-15 minutes each day digging stories, making comments, and submitting new content
  
• Remember that you only have 24 hours to make your post "popular"; any longer than that and the post usually can't become popular anymore
• If you become friends with a powerful digger, occasionally have them post content on your site to Digg rather than doing so yourself
• Check with your IT/IS staff ahead of time to ensure that your site can handle a "Digg Effect" -- a giant waves of people all coming to your site at the same time
  

StumbleUpon

• Make friends; connect to other stumblers who have a lot of friends (100+)
• Don't spam, stumbles lots of other content besides your own site
• Find people interested in your topic and connect to them
• Find niche groups related to your topic and join them
• Stumble your friends' content and occasionally e-mail them, telling that that you did so
• Spend at least 10-15 minutes every day stumbling and reviewing content, making new discoveries
• If you become friends with a powerful stumbler, occasionally have them "discover" content on your site rather than doing so yourself

But, we don't have a single tip for using FriendFeed?   Can you help us out?  Leave your best tip for FriendFeed, or point us to a good tip sheet.  Leave a comment or add to the wiki.

 

Comments

[chris eaton]

thanks for this! its perfect to share with coworkers.

[frank]

Hey Beth ... nice summary of information here!

One thing that is helpful to remember: "It is better to give than to receive"

Anyone in the nonprofit space has seen it time and time again ... when you give a funny thing happens in that you seem to get back so much more.

I think the same holds true on the web and with social media ...

--
http://twitter.com/franswaa

[Jordan Viator]

Great social bookmarking advice here! I was just speaking with someone today about "best practices" around bookmarking sites and now I have the perfect reference to forward on. Thanks, Beth.

[Alyssa]

One of the best pieces of Twitter advice I've gotten is to make sure you fill out your whole profile, including adding a picture and a bio. If you're following a lot of people, you run the risk of being mistaken for a spammer, and having that info helps show that you're a real person/organization!

Thanks for all this info, Beth! It's going to be great to pass on to my coworkers who are just getting on board with social media!

---
The Women's Museum blog

[embroidered shirts]

thanks for posting some great ideals promotional items are technically a part of most businesses