Author Archive

At the Social Venture Network conference there were lots questions floating around about social media, but the one that seemed to keep coming up was: “how do I get new fans and keep them interested?” One of the successful method in the race for engagement on Twitter and Facebook has been to develop fun, creative and relevant viral tools for your fan community. This could be an application, widget, survey, poll or quiz. A great start would be to conduct the low impact exercise in developing your first Facebook quiz or poll with Quiz Creator or PollDaddy.

Just remember to ask yourself several questions before jumping in: How does this fit in with your content strategy and your brand? Who do you want to reach? What information do you want to share? What information do you want your fans to share? What can you do to encourage them to share it with their friends? Remember: It has to be fun, authentic and on brand.

NYTimes Gadgetwise: How to Create a Facebook Quiz
Quiz Creator makers LOLApps help with the instructions and we’re taking the liberty of reprinting them here:

STEP 1: Login to your Facebook account. Scroll to the bottom of the page. Click the Applications tab in the lower left corner. On the menu that pops up, click Browse More Applications at the bottom.

STEP 2: On the page of apps, there’s a Search Apps box near the upper left corner. Use that the box to search for the app Quiz Creator. I picked Quiz Creator because it’s simple to figure out and has fewer steps than some of the other quiz creators.

STEP 3: Click the Quiz Creator application. On the next page that appears, click the button Go To Application in the upper left corner. Another page will appear to ask you to allow the application to access your personal data. Click Allow. Finally, you’ll get to the page where you start creating the quiz.

STEP 4: On the first page, you’ll be asked to enter some basic information about your quiz. Follow the prompts and enter your quiz name — for example, “What kind of dog are you?” Fill in a short description of the quiz. Upload a picture from your computer to illustrate your quiz.

STEP 5: Enter the results of your quiz — golden retriever, Labrador retriever, German shepherd, French bulldog — as well as the descriptions the quiz taker will see along with their results. Follow the prompts to upload a picture to accompany each result.

STEP 6: Enter the questions for your quiz, and pair the answers with the desired result. For example:
Questions: What is your favorite food?
Answer: Anything – Labrador retriever
Answer: Caviar – poodle
Answer: Steak – German shepherd
Answer: Kibble – golden retriever

STEP 7: Click Next. This takes you to a page with a giant button: Install the Developer App. That pops open a new page. Click Allow. This is where the going gets tricky. Facebook requires lots of clicks to create the actual quiz application.

STEP 8: Go back to the previous page, where there’s another giant button: YES, I have the Developer App. Click that.

STEP 9: Take a deep breath. Exhale. You’re going to need to follow a bunch of instructions to pop up a bunch of windows. Some of them will direct you to yet other windows. The goal is to get some long, gibberish-to-you but important-to-the-computer text strings from one window, and paste them into another. Why do you even have to do that? I don’t know. Facebook isn’t the greatest at user interfaces, and it suffers as a result. Many people will abandon the process here rather than hang in there. You’re a Gadgetwise reader, though, so make me proud and curse this multi-window authentication process even as you complete it. But after a half dozen windows with instructions written by a software developer, asking you to please be patient type this into that window, you’ll suddenly have a page with your quiz displayed on it.

STEP 10: The final step in the quiz creation process requires you to invite one or more Facebook friends to try your quiz. Now you know why you get so many of them.

Using Our Powers for Good
The Social Venture Network’s Fall 2009 Conference in La Jolla this past weekend was a truly remarkable experience that seemed filled with the potential for world changing collaborations to happen and where words turned to action. It was was an amazing experience. Seeing Amy Goodman from Democracy Now engage with Arianna Huffington from The Huffington Post. Eric Utne from Utner Reader making himself  available to give me notes on love and life. Seeing venture capital firms and investors alike measuring organizations not just on their balance sheets, but on their socially responsible activities as well was refreshing.

Some of the brightest, hardest working and most passionate entrepreneurs trying to make a difference in the world today were there this weekend. They had important things to say. They are fighting for causes we all care about, that affect our lives and the lives of billions around the world. The Responsible Endowments Coalition for example, works to shift billions of dollars in university endowment funds into socially conscious and responsible investments. The Genocide Intervention Network, which empowers individuals and communities with the tools to prevent and stop genocide around the world. Lots of for-profit businesses doing significant work for our environment, local communities and others in need discussed collaboration and ways to make more of an impact.

Successful companies like Seventh Generation and Birkenstock spoke on the evolution of businesses and profitability through sustainability, diversity, philanthropy, and transparent business practices. SVN is truly a place where people do business with their heads and with their hearts. Yet, it also was never more apparent to me that social media is a quickly evolving beast that remains out the grasp of many ambitious entreprenuers.

It seemed to be one of the prevailing topics quietly discussed over the weekend: how to increase efficiency and effectiveness in the online channel, attract fans and promote awareness. I was amazed to hear about the struggles these unbelievable organizations have to go through to generate engagement and activate people to join their cause even as they are do incredible work for the world.

I attended my first SVN Conference last October and came back completely energized and ready to take action, to make the business green and looking for new clients who embodied similar ideals. Since then, we’ve worked on the Barack Obama campaign with great success to spread important content to voters under 30 in the swing states utilizing social media. We worked to mobilize street teams and potential fans to see the Sundance Award winning movie FUEL by building their social media platform. Currently we are working with the non-profit Conscious Alliance, an organization that runs food drives at major festivals and concerts to donate to Native American reservations. The list is growing and I could go on and on about the impact that SVN had on me and the business.

Once again I’m completely renergized from the conference this year and see some very actionable ways that we can help our community. We here at GMS are digital channel experts and have spent substantial time researching, building, and anticipating the future of digital marketing and social media. We are further along in our thinking and experience than much of our competition and believe that our ideas, tools and processes should be used for the power of good. Couple that with the goals and objectives that SVN members are striving to achieve, we feel like we can do some amazing things together.

The SVN Fall 2009 Conference this year opened my eyes to the impact I can have on others businesses in the socially responsiblity space. Especially for non-profits looking to grow their donor lists and boost the average donation without a serious increase in infrastructure. The beautiful thing about social media is that there is huge potential to grow marketing programs with accountability, efficiency and effectiveness. To make that magical combination happen, the mission, goals,  ideas, efforts, essentially the brand, need to translate into a content strategy, get it out there and share it. Listen to what the digital inclined have to say about it and build from there. Match up those things with our tools and best practices, and the technology suddenly becomes less daunting.

We’ve been developing a social media toolkit for SVN memebers and non-profits. We’ve been building this toolkit and best practices to be easily implemented into your current marketing efforts. This subset of the GMS digital marketing platform will give a big boost to your marketing and communications efforts. Reach out and let us know how we can help you make this happen.

We will be posting more strategies, tools and tips here with you in mind. Stay tuned.