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Aftertastes of DC Week 2011

14
November
2011

The menu was crowded with poignant medleys to satisfy every palette. From the opening to the closing party, savory selections were available to help fill the mind and satiate the craving for insight into the newest trends in the digital realm.

Amber Francis
EyeTraffic Media Office Manager

The second annual Digital Capital Week kicked off on Friday, November 4 and was packed with events through the 11th, offering something for every socialite, entrepreneur, hacker, Presser, artist, Wikipedian, non-profiteer, activist, fashionista, techie, designer, developer, innovator and networker.  A variety of panels, keynotes, activities, happy hours and mixers were available to over 10,000 digital lovers of every flavor.

The menu was crowded with poignant medleys to satisfy every palette. From the opening to the closing party, savory selections were available to help fill the mind and satiate the craving for insight into the newest trends in the digital realm.

While serving up a delectable array of meaty and relevant information, DC Week also filled our cups (literally) with happy hours, drink tickets and let-down-your-hair revelry. Thanks to hosts, istrategylabs and TechCocktail, attendees were able to feast their minds on the buffet of speakers and panelist who offered their expertise, knowledge, experience and insight. Hungry consumers were challenged to demand more from themselves while offering a cut above their competitors by serving only excellence. Nibble on this post by Lisa Byrne about her favorite session, these juicy Brightest Young Things and MetroMix albums, a delicious recap by NDI Tech or get a taste from Washington Post of the startups featured at the TechCocktail mixer.

Different from average conferences, the game changers that attended DC Week were regular people with impossible ideas and the ambition to accomplish them. These ideas are impacting the here and now as well as changing the face of the digital space forever.

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5 Ways To Start Measuring Social Media Metrics

31
October
2011

Only 50% of marketers measure their success on social media through formal monitoring of metrics, yet with the growing number of both free and paid tools being released into the market that allow you to measure marketing ROI, the marketers who choose to keep track of their social media marketing will be the ones who come out on top.

James Moreau
Social Media Manager

Only 50% of marketers measure their success on social media through formal monitoring of metrics, yet with the growing number of both free and paid tools being released into the market that allow you to measure marketing ROI, the marketers who choose to keep track of their social media marketing will be the ones who come out on top. Here are the top metrics to start measuring right away that will help articulate your success or need for adjustment in your social media marketing.

  • Followers – This metric is straightforward. How many followers have you gained or lost month over month? Facebook has an absolute number of followers listed for every Fan Page. You can calculate a Follower/Following ration for sites like Twitter. This metric lets you know if your activity, whether actively trying to acquire users or not, is organically or otherwise growing your audience.
  • Brand Mentions – How many times was your brand mentioned month over month? You can get a basic and free idea of this by setting up alerts on your brand name with Google Alerts. Other sites like Social Mention offer great, high level insight into your overall activity and brand mentions through social media. You really want to know if people are talking about you and where these conversations are occurring.
  • Shares – You can manually count the number of retweets your brand gets on Twitter or see right on your Facebook fan page wall which posts were shared as well as how many times. This offers insight into whether your content is being shared properly. Do you post during optimal times of day? Do you make your links shortened and easy to read?
  • Link Click-Throughs- Are people clicking links that you’re sharing? You can measure this by shortening all of your shared links with a link-shortening service like Bit.ly. A the end of every month, you can log into Bit.ly and look at which links got clicked the most.
  • Referral Sources- Whether you use Omniture, Google Analytics or Lijit for your web analytics, you can understand where all of the traffic landing on your webpage is coming from. Are people landing on your pages through Google? What about Twitter and Facebook? These facts help you understand where potential customers and new audience members exist and where conversations relevant to your brand exist.

By starting to measure these 5 simple social metrics, you’re already putting yourself at an advantage ahead of 50% of your competition in the B2B marketing space. These are the building blocks to knowing if your efforts of social marketing are paying off at all. Eventually as you grow more familiar with these metrics and feedback loops, your level of analysis, metrics and understanding can grow deeper and more integrated with your bottom line business objectives.

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What’s Going On In D.C.

29
March
2011

With that in mind, it should be no big surprise that the D.C. social media community is quite active and well… social!

Elizabeth Glomb
Online Media Coordinator

One of the greatest things about living in a big city like Washington, D.C. is that there is always something going on. Whether it’s a networking event or a sporting event, there is always something. In a recent article by Men’s Health Magazine, Washington, D.C. was named the #1 most socially networked city in the country, beating out other cities such as Atlanta, GA and Denver, CO.

With that in mind, it should be no big surprise that the D.C. social media community is quite active and well… social! In fact, this week alone we have two really great social media events brought to you by the Social Media Club of D.C. and the American University Social Media Club.

On Wednesday, March 30th, the SMC-DC is bring you an event entitled “Start Your Engines: Smart Social for Start-ups” and is being hosted by LivingSocial, one of the fastest growing start-ups in the D.C. area. The event also includes speakers Munish Gandhi, Founder of hy.ly; Peter LaMotte, President of GeniusRocket; Jon Carpenter, Director of Marketing for LivingSocial; and Chris Golden, Co-founder of MyImpact. It looks to be a great and informative event. Although it appears to be sold out, if you are interested in attending you should contact the organizers. Check out their event page for more details. If you can’t attend the event, follow the #SMCDC hashtag on twitter and you’ll be able to see the entire conversation.

Starting Friday evening and going on all weekend is the Social Learning Summit 2011, which is being brought to you by the American University Social Media Club. For a really good price, you get two full days of panels and speakers talking to you about what’s next in education, and cover topics such as education, innovation and social media in the classroom. There are many interesting looking panels, and if you attend, you may even be able to see EyeTraffic’s own Andrew Bates on a panel about Start-Ups and Social Media. Whether your attending or not, make sure to follow the #SLS11 hashtag for whats going on at the summit.

If you can’t attend either one of these events this week, don’t worry. Like I said before, there is always something going on. And with the fact that D.C. is so socially connected, it wont’ be long till there’s another Social Media event.

Hope to see you around!

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Smart Social Networking Brought to you by SMCDC

24
February
2011

Get Geeky: Smart Social Networking

Liz Glomb
Media Coordinator

Last night I had the opportunity to attend an event put on by the Social Media Club of DC (SMCDC) called “Get Geeky: Smart Social Networking”. If you couldn’t tell by the title of the event, the topic was centered around how to network in the digital age using various social networking platforms and how to turn an online relationship into a business or job opportunity. Other topics that were discussed included how to manage your offline and online activity as well as the pros and cons of having your personality reflected in your online image.

The speakers for the event included Frank Gruber (@FrankGruber, CEO & Co-founder of TechCocktail), Shana Glickfield (@dcconcierge, Partner at Beekeeper Group), and Shonali Burke (@shonali, Principal at Shonali Burke Consulting) and was moderated by Alexander Howard (@digiphile, Govt 2.0 Correspondent for O’Reilly Media).

The panel brought up many interesting points, and after 2-hours of copious note taking, here were some of the highlights:

  • The Line between offline and online is becoming thinner, so you have two choices: wall up completely or be social.
  • Your relationships that form online can affect you offline (and vice versa)
  • Always be curious (Frank Gruber)
  • You don’t always have to be serious (Frank Gruber)
  • You are still a person, so use your personality
  • Don’t have a personality? Learn to behave (Shonali Burke)
  • Don’t ignore opportunities i other social media channels

If you happened to be on twitter and followed the #SMCDC hashtag last night (or you can go ahead and look at it now), you could have also read some of these great tweets from the event:

Twitter3 300x149 Smart Social Networking Brought to you by SMCDC

Twit 300x127 Smart Social Networking Brought to you by SMCDC

Twitter 41 300x146 Smart Social Networking Brought to you by SMCDC

Having spent a lot of time over the past few years cultivating an online network, I know that I have personally used many of the tips that were recommended last night and there were many more that I plan to implement. All together it was a great event and I encourage people to check out the #SMCDC feed when they get the chance.

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How’s that New Years Resolution Going?

31
January
2011

Keeping your New Year’s resolution just got more social (and mobile)!

Liz Glomb
Media Program Analyst

So it’s the end of January, and how many of you have already broken or given up on that New Year’s resolution you made for yourself to get healthy and/or get in shape? Are you lacking the motivation? Need moral support? Want something new and exciting to help you achieve these goals?

Why not incorporate some social media and mobile apps in to your routine?

This year I decided to try a slightly different approach to the new year’s resolution I seem to make every year, and decided to get social and mobile. By incorporating these two areas into my efforts for getting healthier and fitter, I hope to get more motivated to reach these goals.

Here are some ways that I’ve seen (and in some cases tried) to use social media outlets and mobile apps for my fitness goals.

Facebook Groups

What better way to get a whole group of people together, who all wish to achieve the same goal, and can hold each other accountable for your actions, than to create a group of your peers online. So what if you don’t go to the same gym or even live in the same State. Create a group with a simple goal in mind (example: do 1000 minutes of exercise a month), invite your friends to join, and go! With Facebook groups you can post your progress, post articles you find interesting that might help other people, ask for tips and advice, and of course cheer each other on. Creating a group like this helps to get a number of people into one space where they can find all the advice and motivation they need to help reach their goals.

Twitter and Using Hashtags

Creating an official hashtag for your fitness endeavor is useful in that you can get anyone who is on Twitter to follow the conversation. People create hashtags, which always start with the # symbol, and you can follow that hashtag to see what people are saying in that specific conversation. I’ve seen various health and fitness related hashtags pop up on Twitter, such as #twit2fit, #smsd (social media slim down), and #ww (weightwatchers). You can follow those conversations and see what people are doing and/or saying, or even create your own. Get people to tweet their healthy efforts with your hashtag and see what happens.

Mobile Apps

There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of mobile apps dedicated to health, fitness, and exercise. I think I have at least 2 or 3 I use on a daily basis. Some of the more integrated apps even allow you to update your Facebook friends and your Twitter following with your progress. Runmeter is an app that can actually post to Twitter and then speaks your mentions that you receive, so you can have people cheering you on as you reach specific goals you set for yourself. On the iPhone, the Nike+GPS will send you messages during your workout , to help you push through.

NikeGPS 200x300 Hows that New Years Resolution Going?

Hopefully you can use some of these tools and methods to help you keep your New Year’s resolution. If anything, it will definitely make your New Year’s resolution more social (and mobile!)

If you want to check out some other mobile apps, here are some links:

http://ipod.about.com/od/iphoneappsreviews/a/best-iphone-apps-running.htm

http://iphone-apps.toptenreviews.com/9-healthy-iphone-apps.html

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