CIL 2012 Day 3 - Leveraging Your Social Media to Gain Friends and Influence People

My first session on day three was a presentation by Julie Theado, Social Media Manager at Columbus Metropolitan Library on how that library effectively used social media as part of an effort to get a levy increase passed to address financial difficulties caused by severe cuts on the state level. This effort was a multi-pronged comprehensive effort and seems to be a good model of how to get support.

When the library started out in 2010 they knew that they needed to communicate their story to their residents, through as many channels as possible and they realized that their social media presence was not focused. They figured that social media would be a good way to promote relationships with their users and the media as well as manage their brand and monitor what was being said about their library.

They realized before they did anything that they needed an overarching strategy. In the strategy there was a social media plan that worked in concert with their marketing and strategic plans. It was the plan that they developed that established guidelines for what was posted to social networks, who they followed, and with whom they communicated. Established processes allowed them to answer questions and see what was being said.

They focused on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, with some additional focus on local bloggers, as those networks were the networks their customers frequented. Using the guideline that “the life of a Facebook post is 3 hours” they posted to Facebook several times a day. The also had chat events on Facebook, posted “Who Knew” items on Wednesday (which were cultivated from questions they'd get on the phone during the week) and they bought Facebook ads.

Julie provided an interesting story demonstrating how they used Twitter. On one occasion a Twitter user indicated that he was a new father and expressed interest in finding books to read to his newborn son. Using some suggestions from the youth services department they turned to Facebook and asked from their Facebook community suggestions for books for the father to read. When they had curated a decent list they tweeted the address of the list back to the father.

On another occasion they had a TweetUp that they got going using Twtvite and then discussed the levy at the TweetUp. This was a successful endeavor for spreading their message

By reaching out to area bloggers and getting the bloggers to come out in support of the levy increase, they were able to get some strong voices saying “vote for the levy increase” which they would never have been able to get from the media and which they could not do by law for themselves.

The levy wound up passing by 66% in a down economy, which was a great success. In the end they had these lessons which they had learned from the process:

• Think about your audience – LinkedIn didn't work for them as a customer outreach tool
• Watch being too self-promotional in social media – 70-20-10 rule
• Write punchy and conversational – too much copy can be difficult.
• Watch the frequency of your posts.
• Approach staff involvement with a strategy
• Don't be afraid to try something new.

Julie also had the following tips:

1. Quality vs. quantity. Creating quality experiences with your customers in social media is more important than the number
2. Measure your success by your measurable objectives
3. Monitor what is being said about you online. Facebook Insights, Google Alerts, NetVibes.com, Twilert.com, Issuu.

I found it to be an informative case study in how to successfully use social networking for issues like referenda and was definitely worth the time spent.