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January 2010 Archive

The following posts were made in January 2010. You may subscribe to the RSS feed for this archive if you would like to take your time reading through our posts.

Obama Versus the iPad

BY LAUREN MAYNARD

As I was listening to the State of the Union on my drive home last night, I was thinking about buzz. I wanted to know what actually got talked about more yesterday: the iPad or the State of the Union. Here's a quick look. Using Sysomos, I did a scan of online conversations from yesterday.  

Velocity of Conversation

TAGS: IPAD • STATE OF THE UNION • STICKY • TECH • POLITICS

Posted at 5:01 pm | 1 Comment | Share this blog post

Trophy Room and Room 214 Take Time to Relax

BY BRANDON WHALEN

Trophy Room put together a little video recap of our fishing trip to Antero reservoir. It is a beautiful location and an amazing place to fish.

Enjoy!

-Brandon

TAGS: ROOM 214 • TROPHY ROOM • TROPHYROOM.COM •

Posted at 5:23 pm | 3 Comments | Share this blog post

Facebook Fan Pages and Calculating ROI

BY LAUREN MAYNARD

Feelings and Marketing

In an excellent blog post this week, Brian Solis outlined his predictions for the role of a marketer in 2010. Out of eight high-level points, he made four that seemed particularly relevant to the building of strategy in a campaign: 

• Listen to and engage customers one to one

• Build relationships and not campaigns

• Create experiences not impressions

• Earn media and not buy it

What he's talking about here is a set of things I hear often. Listening. Engagement. Relationships. Experiences. I'd lump these under "feelings", something that doesn't mesh well with the traditional concept of measurement and ROI. 

Measuring Intangibles 

Just yesterday, Facebook rolled out some changes to Fan Pages that give a helpful boost to our effort to measure these intangible feelings. Fan Page administrators will now be able to get numbers on impressions for status updates. This means that we can gauge how many people see the information placed on a page through their own news stream; it no longer requires a user to come directly to the page. 

Facebook also gives us a handy impressions-to-interactions ratio which shows up as a feedback percentage.

What does this mean?

As astutely noted by our own Wendy Hofstetter, this relatively simple change could have some big impact:

• Reporting numbers on Facebook will be more accurate than the standard "pageviews" statistics previously provided. 

• We can more easily compare the return on Facebook versus other more traditional media by calculating a CPM (cost-per-thousand). Most companies use CPM as a way to gauge how expensive their advertising is (that's how TV, outdoor, Radio, Magazines, etc. are purchased). 

• We can begin testing what time of day is best for Facebook engagement. 

• We can understand what kinds of posts (videos, quotes, etc.) get the most engagement.

Why is this important?

Brian Solis had another point in that list: Look beyond the quantity of friends, page visits, eyeballs, readers, and viewers to measure changes in consumer attitude and intent.

Facebook allows brands to create meaningful interactions with consumers. At Room 214, Facebook allows us to keep our clients' fans updated with relevant information and content that the fans wouldn't necessarily find otherwise. We can solicit feedback, engage in direct conversation and create content that, if worthy, can be shared over and over again by interested parties.

That being said, a bottom line is a bottom line. Our clients need to understand how their money is being used. And we need to continue to interact with consumers in ways that produce repeat engagement, support, sharing, and evangelism. This new feature from Facebook gets us closer to creating relationships that we can quantify. It also helps us better understand what content isn't interesting; we can then refine our strategy and provide our loyal fans with things they'd prefer to hear, see and discuss.

TAGS: FACEBOOK • SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY • BRIAN SOLIS • ROI • ROOM 214

Posted at 3:23 pm | 1 Comment | Share this blog post

The Power of Online Conversations: Are You On Team COCO?

BY LAUREN MAYNARD

Here's a look at a noteworthy online conversation that's been everywhere this week. By now we all know about NBC's very public fumble with their weeknight talk show hosts. I'll admit that I don't actually watch The Jay Leno Show or The Tonight Show (this of course is the exact reason that NBC is having issues in the first place). I have, however, been fascinated by the way this has spread online.

Supporters of Conan O'Brien have joined forces to (loosely) create Team COCO. This team has some major traction, and it's all because Conan O'Brien's core audience is a group of Facebooking, Youtubing, non-traditional TV watching 20-somethings like myself. What I find most interesting is that the online conversation, one large enough to effect a sea-change in the world of late-night, is being held almost entirely outside of the reach of Conan O'Brien, Jay Leno and NBC.

There's also an online store where you can buy a tshirt and print of this now well-known image. In case you're too broke and/or busy to buy a t-shirt and attend a rally, you can simply download and print out an image of Conan's hair and either wear or display it. He's also had tremendous celebrity support (catch this great video of Jimmy Kimmel on Leno).

Even google search appears to be on Team COCO.

So what?

Conan's ratings, which have consistently been lower than his CBS counterpart David Letterman, have been up dramatically this week. Last night he beat out Letterman's 1.0 rating with a 1.9, a number which represented Conan O'Brien's all-time high. And, regardless of all the negative press, NBC has enjoyed a huge increase in viewership for The Late Show with Conan O'Brien.

Does this mean NBC will reverse its decision? No. The timing and fate of both NBC shows remains undecided. But it is without a doubt that NBC, any other network shopping a Conan show, and Conan O'Brien himself will take this extremely vocal audience into account as they move forward with decisions. It's a tough debate with this group; you've got an audience who doesn't affect a traditional metric (live viewership) but still will take the time to speak in a collective voice loud enough to make headlines. 

So if you've got a group who is going to talk, it's important prepare for their reaction. I'd venture to guess NBC had no clue the effect of their conversations regarding late night. It looks like it's had both positive and negative effect thus far. I'm interested in the outcome.

TAGS: ROOM214 • CONAN O'BRIEN • JAY LENO • NBC • PR • SOCIAL MEDIA

Posted at 2:28 pm | 1 Comment | Share this blog post

#Haiti, By Way of Twitter

BY LAUREN MAYNARD

Social media helps information spread like wildfire, and there is no better example than what is happening today with information, relief, and fundraising efforts regarding the devastating earthquake in Haiti.  

Wyclef Jean, Yele, and the Red Cross 

At about 3pm MST on January 12th, both Wyclef and the Red Cross had their first tweets about the earthquake. Within an hour, Wyclef had started tweeting about texting a code to Yele to donate $5 for relief efforts. The initial was response was so overwhelming that the Yele servers went down.

Wyclef tweeted throughout the night with news updates, re-tweets of those who donated then tweeted, and his travel plans. A 3 hour gap in his tweets represented the time he was flying to the Dominican Republic; from just before takeoff to the moment he landed, he let the world know what he was doing, what others were doing, and how we could help.

The Red Cross has followed suit, letting us know (with less frequency than @wyclef) that they committed $200,000, then moved that number to $1,000,000 and that we can help by texting to donate $10.

Twitter as a news feed

As power and phone lines are out across the country, many major media outlets have turned to Twitter to monitor what is going on. CNN created a list of twitter users with useful updates on the situation. Twitter has essentially become the communication hub for all live information out of Haiti. 

It's almost impossible for me to write this article as every 30 seconds (this is in no way hyperbole) Twitter is giving me more information on relief efforts and Twitter accounts raising funds, as well as painting a picture of on-the-ground devastation. 

The effects of crowdsourced reporting

Reporting through traditional media is often emotionless in its attempt to be unbiased, and the circumstances in which it breaks from this mold are always noteworthy. I distinctly remember watching Soledad O'Brien report on Katrina in 2005 with an emotion that was unusually humanizing (she later won an award for that work). She was overwhelmed, she was passionate, she was angry. I felt like, in the moment, I was on the ground with her in a way that I couldn't be with other reporters. Still, the world I saw in 2005 was through her eyes only. 

At this moment, I can see Haiti through the eyes of hundreds of people through eyewitness accounts, both written and visual, updated the minute they themselves have seen it*. There is no comparison to this ability to see news real-time through the eyes of many. I'd love to hear about other experiences people have had with Twitter as a successful news source, and thoughts on how this will impact major news outlets.

*(I'd also note that this began to happen with Iran in 2009, but significant internet blockage prevented the same thoroughness of accounts).

TAGS: TWITTER • HAITI • EARTHQUAKE • WYCLEF • RED CROSS • CNN • ROOM 214

Posted at 2:40 pm | 3 Comments | Share this blog post