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Basic Social Networking tutorial

Monday, April 23, 2012

Step 1

Sign up for Twitter. Your username will be the URL for your twitter profile. If you choose JohnSmith as your username your twitter URL will be http://twitter.com/JohnSmith

You'll want your username to be your business name. If your business name is taken (tonyspizza for instance), instead use a good keyword that will help search engines find your twitter profile. If you run a pizza joint try pizza or pizzadelivery or NJsbestpizza. Though your twitter username isn't pivotal to your success, it is important so be sure to spend some time thinking of the perfect name.

(If you need help coming up with a username, try this keyword tool. Simply enter a keyword related to your business and click "Hit Me". This tool will bring up a list of the most commonly searched keywords. The higher the number the better the keyword. Sift through to find a good one and see if it's available.)

After your account is set up click on "settings" in the menu bar at top right corner of the screen. Make sure all the fields in the "account" section are filled out. Pay special attention to the "One Line Bio". You'll want to write a sentence or two about you including keywords that are relevant to your business. When people search for new people to follow, this one line bio will make or break your chances at appearing in their search. If you run a pizza place you might write something like "Making real New Jersey pizza is my life. I have the best sauce recipe around. I love snowboarding and video games."

Now, anyone searching for any combination of these words on twitter (pizza, sauce, recipe, snowboarding, New Jersey) will find this profile.

Also, be sure to jot down the user name/email address and password associated with the account somewhere so you don't forget it.

Step 1 complete!

Step 2

Sign up for Facebook. *IMPORTANT* when signing up for Facebook, do not use a generic email address such as info@yourdomain.com or facebook@yourdomain.com. Use an email address with a name such as Joe@yourdomain.com. Generic names are often rejected.

Also, be sure to jot down the user name/email address and password associated with the account somewhere so you don't forget it.

Facebook will take you through a setup process. When you're done, go to the email account you used to set up your account, find the email from Facebook, open the email and click on the link to confirm your account.

Click edit my profile. Under the "info" tab fill in any and all info that applies to you in the Basic info, personal info, contact info and education and work categories. Next, under the Photo tab add a few photos of yourself, your family and anything that is important to you. And select a picture as your profile picture. This is the photo that people will see when they look at your wall and when you post status updates.

People in your social network don't want to be friends with a company, they don't want to see a company, they want to see the real you. So be real. Don't use your company logo as your picture.

Step 3

Sign up for Zannel. On it's own, Zannel may be the least important of any networking tool. However, link Zannel to your facebook and twitter accounts and it instantly becomes your network's main hub. Want to make a post, but dread the thought of copying and pasting it over and over? Just type what you want into zannel and it will update your entire network.

You can also link Zannel to Flickr and youtube.

Here's how you hook it up:
After you've completed the registration process, click on "my connections" toward the right of the screen. Click on Twitter and follow the instructions to link your account. Then click on facebook and let it guide you through the set up process once again.

You're all set. Now, any post you make on Zannel will automatically post to your wall on facebook and on twitter.

Step 4

Make as many accounts on the various social networking sites listed here as you need. Odds are, you'll only need one per business.

The next thing you need to know about is writing content. Let me start by saying that no one wants to follow you on twitter or add you as a friend on facebook so they can read your advertisements. If your plan is to tweet "Buy from me! 10% off today only!" and variations of that on a daily basis, you may as well through in the towel right now. As the name suggests, social networking is about being SOCIAL and building relationships. Talk to people on twitter and facebook. Offer helpful advice, links to interesting articles or videos that relate to your business. Some people have found moderate success in doing contests, but don't give gimmicks the spotlight.

Going back to the pizza shop owner: you might tweet pictures of your daily specialty pizza at around noon. Don't throw a call to action in. Just say something like "I burned my hand... but it was worth it!" The image will be enough to let your followers know what you do. When you socialize with them, and get to know them they'll want to give you their business.

Just figure on adding social networking to your daily routine. Keep a smart phone like an iPhone or Droid handy so you can easily take pictures and tweet them right then and there. I recommend the simplytweet app for iPhone users.

One last important aspect to SMO is to check your facebook, twitter and zannel pages regularly for direct messages and such. Take some time getting to know the sites and before you know it, you'll actually be having fun!

SMO is the way of the present. Take a little bit of time each day to update and seek out new followers/ friends and in time, you will see results. Just remember to keep the content social and lighthearted. Don't spam the web with advertisements.

Also, consider seeking out other social networking sites such as myspace, youtube and flickr.
Be consistent and respectful and you'll succeed.

Part 1 - Building a Social Network Website Tutorial -

This is an extensive video and source file based tutorial series on how to build or create an automated dynamic member based community web site system from scratch using PHP, MySQL, and Flash ActionScript 3.0. The following series is filled with insight and code practices rarely shared for free, and unique original technology integration methods that have been created by Adam Khoury. Being in full control over your custom programmed systems will greatly raise the chances of you creating a unique and useful system for your members.

Whatever your goals might be, we give you the insight that will help you build your dream site. Starting a custom social or business network website is not difficult... nurturing it, and always upgrading it is the key to longevity and member satisfaction.
CONSIDERATIONS:
• You should have basic HTML, CSS, PHP, and Flash ActionScript knowledge to move more quickly
• You will need a good HTML editor(Dreamweaver), and Flash CS3 or higher (using ActionScript 3.0) (not free)
• You will need a web server with PHP enabled, and one MySQL Database will be needed (MySQL DBs are free)
• Security will be covered to a certain level, but do your own research on this subject to be smart
• Adam is building the system live... for others to test it from, and for proving his tutorial functionality live
• This means you can follow along as he releases series videos and source code... or wait until he finishes...
• Source code may get revisions as needed, any revisions will be discussed in the intro video made at the end

Part 1 - Building a Social Network Website Tutorial -

8 steps to set up your own metrics program

We’ll cover a lot of ground in the webinar, but I wanted to share these eight steps involved in setting up a metrics program:

1Get buy-in at the top. For any metrics program to work, it needs support from top management if the program is to gain traction across the organization.

2Identify a Chief Metrics Guru. It could be you, or somebody else comfortable with not just gathering numbers but exploring what they mean. Your colleagues will watch you evolve from Chief Metrics Guru to Number-Crunching Superstar. You may need a small team to help you out as part of their other responsibilities.

3Set goals. Here’s the most difficult part of any metrics program: Interview stakeholders across different departments to elicit and identify key goals and target audiences. Get beyond that set of departmental goals that were put in a bottom drawer nine months ago.

4Tie these goals to specific Key Performance Indicators you can track by creating an internal document. A KPI is simply a set of metrics that enables you to determine over time if you’re on course to hitting your targets.

5Identify the metrics tools you’ll use. You might start with Google Analytics, Facebook Insights or bit.ly and expand into some of these other free metrics tools, such as Kout, YouTube Insight or Twitalyzer. If you’re running a campaign, for example, make sure you track campaign page landing pages by using Google Analytics and bit.ly.

6Print out monthly reports and circulate them among key executives, department heads and perhaps even your board. This falls to the Chief Metrics Guru. While you should have some metrics programs, like Google Analytics, automatically emailed to your in-box each week, circulating a monthly report elevates it in importance.

7Spend time analyzing the data. Get into the numbers and start teasing out meaning and drawing conclusions. If you’re never surprised by what you find in the data, you’re doing something wrong, as my friend George Weiner, the CTO of DoSomething.org, likes to say. What caused that graph to spike, and how can we do that on regular basis? How can we use this data to plan better for next time?

8Refine and fine-tune. After you set up a metrics program, it requires adjustments over time. What started as guesswork evolves into meaningful patterns. So don’t be afraid to reevaluate and iterate as you go along.

8 steps to set up your own metrics program

We’ll cover a lot of ground in the webinar, but I wanted to share these eight steps involved in setting up a metrics program:

1Get buy-in at the top. For any metrics program to work, it needs support from top management if the program is to gain traction across the organization.

5-step exercise in creating a measurement program

Now that you’ve read the don’ts, here’s what to do.

Typically, I undertake this very simple five-step exercise:

1Identify what the business objectives for your program/campaign are. Based on these, what do you need people to do? For a nonprofit organization, for example, it might be to increase members of an online community … because those are the people it can start trying to convert into members/donors.

That last bit is what’s most important. That’s what you’re going to work backward from, because while all roads might not lead to Rome, they should lead to that business objective. Your business objective(s) should be at the core of your measurement program. So before you do anything else, figure them out.

2Identify how you will measure the success or failure of these objectives.For example, if your objective is to increase sales, what percentage do you want your sales to increase by over the last fiscal year? If you want to increase the number of volunteers working for your nonprofit, then by how much? If your objective is to grow your email list, because that is where you convert the most prospects into customers, by how much do you want to do this? In what time frame?

Get as specific as you possibly can. This means not just quantifying what you’re trying to achieve, but identifying the time frame within which you’re going to try to do this.

3Now outline your communication strategy. The most important thing here is to remember that you don’t work out your strategy first. You look at what the business objectives are, and then decide how you can use various communication and marketing vehicles to achieve those objectives.

To do this, you must have an understanding of how your audience reacts to and uses different communication mediums. Because your program/campaign is probably going to be more effective if you include those mediums in your plan. This means that you didn’t seize the shiny new toy du jour and say, “Oh, everyone’s on ____! We’re going to use _____!” Or: “Let’s make a viral video like Stop Kony!”

You don’t have to be everywhere all the time. Be where it makes the most sense.

4Figure out how you’re going to track your efforts. This is the part that is a lot of fun for me. With so many of our communications moving online, it’s possible to track a lot of things.

But don’t get caught in tracking nonsense numbers. I mean – going back to the “don’ts” above – you might get an ego boost out of seeing your Twitter followers grow, but if that growth isn’t helping you reach your business objectives, what’s the point, exactly?

Tracking URLs has become commonplace now. Use them. Get comfortable with Google Analytics and Google’s URL Builder. You will be amazed at how much insight these tools give you, particularly when it comes to understanding what is driving actions, clicks, downloads, purchases, sign-ups, etc.

And that helps inform your strategy, to make it better, and even more effective. It will also tell you what’s not working, so that you can decide whether or not it’s important enough to fix. Smart tracking lets you know what worked, instead of making you guess what worked.

5Correlate. Even if you’re not a statistician, I’m pretty sure you already know this principle. Correlation is basically when one thing is related to another in a way as to have an effect on it.

For example, if you get a terrific “hit” in X blog that you know is popular with your target audience, and you see traffic to your site/desired landing page increasing more than usual when that post runs, there is probably a correlation between the two. This means keeping track of your outbound activities — e.g. new blog posts, news releases, e-mail campaigns, and so on — and watching what effect those have on your desired outcomes.

You should also be keeping track of everything anyway so that you don’t mistakenly draw a correlation where there isn’t one.

Free approaches to keep track of key metrics

Because most of the time I don’t have access to fancy dashboards, I’ve found the easiest way of doing this is combining a few things:

Using Excel or a Google spreadsheet to track outputs and outcomes
Making sure the time frame within which I’m tracking different things – e.g. traffic, downloads, purchases, whatever – is the same
Watching analytics at the same time, and regularly look to see if there is a correlation between outputs and outcomes.

If you’re keeping an eye on everything you’re doing, as well as looking at the back end, pretty soon you’ll be able to tell what’s working and what’s not.

And if you want to find the statistical correlation, Excel even has a formula to help you out, though I would work with someone who is really into Stats to make sure you understand what you’re doing.

That’s it.

Put these five steps to work for nonprofit, your business, your campaign. Rinse and repeat and I’m fairly certain you will be taking giant steps in demystifying measurement. Who knows, you might even start having fun! Take a look up top to see the presentation I gave at PRSA Orlando. I hope it’s helpful, and if you have any questions, give me a holler, or leave a comment, please!