It is probably a phrase that you have heard dozens if not hundreds of times over the course of the past few months. Hell you have probably uttered it to people you’ve met as well.

Question is, do you really think about what your story is?

You don’t have to answer that now.

But knowing your story and why others should care is something that everyone participating in social media, blogging or managing a brand’s social presence or community should do.

The social media space continues to fill with more and more clutter each day. You don’t have to be a scientist to know that standing out and gaining valuable mind or eyeball share becomes more difficult each day.

So instead of relying on gimmicks and industry statistics, take a step back, and look at what you are doing.

Individually

• What makes you stand out?
• What perspective are you bringing to the table?
• What value does your story have to the audience?
• Why should they come back?

For a company

• What do your customers or stakeholders care about?
• What content do you offer them?
• Why should they come back to your website or community?
• Why should the relationship continue after the purchase?

While I could go on with things to think about I won’t. There is no need to get preachy because this is something we all know deep down.

In the past 240 words I have talked about stories and why people should care more but have yet to tell you my story and why you should give two craps about what I have to say, so here goes.

I’m a thirty-something husband father, who worked in sports PR before moving over to do the same thing for Vistaprint, a company that provides marketing materials and solutions to small businesses. I moved over to social media at Vistaprint after getting Stephen Baker’s Beyond Blogs BusinessWeek thrown at me in a team meeting. I started this blog to talk the things I geek out about and draw from life experiences.

So if you’ve read this far; thanks, I appreciate you for checking out this site.

Now to the real question: What is YOUR story?

Image - prettybooks

Leading the charge of education to community managers is the Community Roundtable and its founders Rachel Happe and Jim Strorer. Over each of the past three years, the CR has produced the State of Community Management Report. This report offers insights and research from the group and sheds light onto the general health and status of the space.

The 2012 State of Community Management report is a good read overall but had five underlying themes that really stood out to me.

Evolution – communities are not built overnight. They grow in both adoption and maturity over time. This report breaks community maturity into four separate stages. It also offers tips for community managers to get from one stage to the next. This report can also be used by future community managers to show executives the long-term commitment needed to get a community off the ground and on its way to success.

I’ve got friends in all places – to have a successful community, a community manager will have to have friends in both high and low places. The first place for community managers to look for friends is also one of the more unlikely places – the legal department. While lawyers might seem scary and always willing to say no, they can be one of a community manager’s best allies as they can not only dispel executive fears, but can also offer guidance on how community related issues have played out in the legal space. They are also good friends to have in terms of keeping you above board (especially important for regulated industries and publicly held companies). Some other areas to look can be product managers, communications executives or the IT department.

Users, not platform define your community – while there are various areas for communities to form and live, the technology does not define your community. Facebook, blogs, forums and company-hosted communities are great and vary in price and user experience, but none of them really matter unless you have users willing to cohabitate in a community around a company’s brand. It is up to community managers to remember this and leverage input from community members as the group evolves. Users need to feel like they are vested in the group to continue to participate in it.

Internal recruiting – in a perfect world, a lone community manager could handle all facets of a community. In the real world this is not possible and the more successful the community becomes, the more others in the company will want to get involved. The best thing to do is take a deep breath and realize that while this may be scary, community managers can set the tone for others to get involved with the community and its members. One easy way is to set training and testing for employees before they are given the OK to jump into participation.

Measurement is important – as with all things in companies, measurement is truly important. With that said it is also important for community managers to keep measurements concise and in a format that executives can understand as this will help avoid alienating them. It is also important to keep in mind that while measurement is great, do not expect too much too fast because community growth and adoption does take time (sometimes years).

Check out the report embedded below if you are a community manager, aspiring community manager or an executive trying to figure out if there is a value in having a customer community.

I appreciate you coming to this site whether its your first or 50th visit. Let me know how I can repay you in 2011.

I stopped on my bike ride this morning to focus on two words that always stand out to me on my ride: Get Some. For me, these words always get me thinking about business and personal development. What are your goals? Mine are to be a published author within a year, to start a family and to continue to provide value not only to my community, but also to my team and coworkers.

What are yours?

Not sure Los Spurs is proper Spanish

First some background, a friend of mine Cynthia Lee created Motah, her slang for motivate, a website dedicated to collecting video stories from kids who’ve done something positive or inspiring. Cynthia is a former News Anchor and Report who “left the business to broadcast all positive stories through Motah.”

In the summer of 2009, as Motah was still coming together, Cynthia and another person involved in Motah, Heather Angel, met Wendy Welsh, who owns Outside the Box Events in San Antonio. These three women decided they wanted to host fundraisers for their charitable organizations. Together, they brainstormed on how they could gather people together and support their causes.

As the basketball season progressed Wendy, who used to be in promotions for the San Antonio Spurs, knew that since the Spurs weren’t doing very well this season, ticket sales weren’t doing very well either. Wendy, Cynthia and Heather thought of a mutually beneficial event. They met with the right people at the Spurs and pitched a partnered event that would help them sell tickets and promote their organizations. This was the beginning of the first Spurs Social, which they held on March 10^th.

Cynthia, Heather and Wendy promoted the event strictly through Facebook. For $30, you got a game ticket (not nose bleed seats), free parking, all the concessions you could eat, two alcoholic beverages (for those 21 and older) and your named entered into a giveaway for Charter Level Seats (close to Courtside seats). Additionally, all Spurs Social ticket holders were able to get into the AT&T Center an hour before any one else to mingle.

In all, they had about 35 people attend the first Spurs Social. Cynthia acknowledges that they didn’t market the event as well as they could have, especially since all of the marketing was up to them. They did not get any TV coverage or additional sponsors. However, the Spurs told them they were pleased with the turnout of the first Spurs Social and would like to continue the partnership.

In anticipation of a low turn out, none of the charitable organizations received any money, but all three got name recognition. Cynthia said it was still worth it.

”Any type of mixer you do helps get your name and logo out there,” she said. “I also made some good contacts that night. Face-to-face time is invaluable when you’re trying to promote your business. I attend at least one networking mixer a week”
“We realized that the Spurs Socials were events that would just take time to catch on,” Cynthia said. “We are not giving up on the Spurs Social because it’s a fun event that just needs some time.”

In fact, if the Spurs make the playoffs, they plan to have a second Spurs Social. Cynthia has even put together a plan to help make the event more successful. She said they will promote the event more in advance. They plan to do this by being a guest on at least one local morning news show (there are four in San Antonio) and continuing their Facebook presence.

“TV is still a powerful medium,” she said.

What lessons can you learn from this? While Facebook, Twitter and new media are great for reaching your audience, you can’t ignore traditional means. Finding the right balance between old and new is a skill. Just because the event doesn’t bring in hundreds of people doesn’t mean it was a failure. If nothing else, you’ll know what to do differently for the next event. Hopefully, you’ll have learned more and gotten more out of it. Even one contact from an event is one you didn’t have before. Finally, there is nothing wrong with starting out small. You can only grow from there.

About Aurora Meyer

So how does that start a conversation?

Last week, I blogged on how offline advertisements were being wasted by neglecting to add call outs to the company’s social media assets. While the wife was planning out our strategy to look at some condos and houses on the market, I decided test my rant’s viability in the coupons section. After pouring through the two-inch thick glossy pile of ads, I was left looking at only two that acknowledged their social media presence – Boston Market and Planters – kind of sad knowing that I looked at roughly 200 coupons and was hoping for a better showing than a pair of social media call-outs, but hey Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Now prior to seeing these ads, I had no clue as to the social presence of either of these mega-brands, so let’s give ‘em a look.

Boston Market

Now for starters the offers looked tasty, but the mere buttons noting Twitter and Facebook were kind of frustrating as they made me do some work to get to the chicken joint’s pages. Following the principle of vanity URLs in Facebook, it was pretty easy getting to the company’s page there. The landing page offered some more deals, which is good because it fits the consistency of the callout but also offers information on job openings, a VIP club and store locator. The added benefit is that they call out their catering menu, which could be worthwhile for those office managers looking at a health alternative to Chinese and pizza deliveries.

Since the Facebook search went so well, I figured I would type in http://twitter.com/bostonmarket. Instead of a scrumptious image of chicken staring at me, I saw the blue Twitter bird saying the account has been suspended. Now if I were an average consumer I would end my quest for the page. No worries, Google helped me and the account is http://twitter.com/BostMarket. The account looks fairly active but has only a limited amount to offer. For a brand as large as they are, I expect them to have more to offer. I will give them the benefit of the doubt for a slow embrace by the corporate home office of social media, but the URL is a complete fail. So while the company is heading in the right direction of maximizing their offline real estate, a URL is a must. If it’s too cluttered, simply alternate pages.

Planters

While the guys over at Boston Market wet my appetite, the guys at Planters took it to the house with this ad. Not only does it promote the company’s presence at the Final Four and offer the Facebook logo, but it also gives the URL and lets you know what to expect with Follow Mr. Peanut to the Final Four. How could you not want to check out the fan page of a giant nut with a monocle and top hat? Well those allergic to peanuts have an excuse, but other than that, there is no excuse.

The page offers some pics and thoughts from the mascot, but is lacking the pizzazz of a page with static FBML. It would also be nice to have some kind of coupons or list of fun peanut facts, but that’s just nitpicking. The company is still driving traffic to the page so their fan total of 2,142 should grow rather quickly.

While the Sunday paper didn’t offer more companies that were driving more visitors to their pages, at least it is a start. Hopefully this trend continues to grow because two out of 200 is far from good. What do you think of the ads? Where could Boston Market and Planters have improved?

How are you giving back?

Keep it smiling and help out a good cause here.

Even the worst of the pink hats would not associate Curt Schilling with being a Yankees fan. Curt’s reaction here.

Here’s a video Congrats to him, click here if you can’t view it.

UPDATE – The video has been picked up by CNN & the BBC

If you are an author or flack for a publishing company or author and would like your book reviewed, feel free to contact me.

Fear the Turlte - Especially Mini Ones

Over the weekend, my wife checked into her school’s academic portal and was puzzled by what she saw – an announcement that it was last call to register for her law school graduation. While she was positive that she hadn’t seen an email, it is also quite possible that an email got lost among the various SPAM and junk filters. It could also be that we’re slowly but surely becoming desensitized to the genre as a whole. It also made me wonder why the school wasn’t doing more to engage with their students across other mediums. After all didn’t Facebook and MySpace first emerge on college campuses? And 27 percent of college students are the owners of smart phones; seems only natural.

So I decided to do some digging, and noticed that my alma mater, Seton Hall, did not offer easy access to any of their pages (if they have any), but I do know that the Alumni Association pesters the hell out of me on Facebook and LinkedIn. To see what other schools are doing, I sent a message to my friend Mandie who works for the University of Maryland. UMD is doing some cool things including linking the pages to the school’s home page, accounts for the sports teams (segmenting the information by interest) and also provides relevant updates for students, alumni and future students. It’s a great start and a leg ahead in the space. One thing that could be better would be more engagement at the individual level on topics ranging from billing questions to registration dates and event ticket information. Currently schools offer many tools for online collaboration and learning that are specific to their needs that work, but are often on platforms that are not always in the here and now for today’s students.  Here are some things that (are free for the most part) that I’d like to see implemented in our institutes of higher education on top of the existing tools.

Facebook – Facebook can be utilized to make it   much like Maryland has with their fan pages or even one for each class year, making it easier for the universities to send specific information to students like class registration, finals, class elections, career center hours, and even fan pages like UMD’s.  Professors can create groups or pages that post items like the syllabus or important information like due dates, class cancellations or office hours.

Google Docs – Collaboration is one of those buzz words that doesn’t appear to be going away any time soon. So what better way to start the future professionals of the world on collaborating? Using Google’s system can also cut down on the meeting times of students to get something done; students can work on their schedules to create a collaborated piece.

School Community – Now this can be anything from an internal school group to an individual Ning (or something similar) for the school. The environment can be completely segregated from the outside world and allow students to mingle with one another. The schools can also easily post information particular to its community including sports scores, pertinent school news and changes to any commuting routes.

Twitter – There is no better real-time source for school news. Many schools currently use the channel to send out school information like people speaking at the school, closings or campus events. This can become a useful two-way street for everyone from deans to teachers and advisors. Instead of set office hours, practitioners could offer their Twitter handle to answer easy questions or get a heads up that a student will miss a class. It also can help avoid my old favorite, the five-minute rule, as teachers running late to a class can easily Tweet their ETA or cancel their class due to an unforeseen event.

Wikis – Much like Google Docs, Wikis are a great tool for group collaboration. Perhaps the best use for a Wiki in the college setting is for a study guide that allows the whole class to pull together a document to prep for a final or mid term. Professors can also log in to make sure that nothing was missed.

These are just some ideas.  Do you think there are other tools that should be adopted by colleges and universities?

Photo: Mandie Boardman