Tag Archives: Mashable Connect

Optimizing Presentations for Social Sharing

Posted on May 24, 2011 by | 3 Comments

Social networking has changed live presentations forever, providing instant feedback and audience interaction.   Additionally, tweets from the presentation find wider audiences for speaker messages beyond the conference center or exhibition floor.   If your goal as a speaker is to raise your personal profile, or that of the organization you represent, optimizing presentations for social sharing will build additional visibility for your messages.

A presentation I saw a couple weeks ago at Mashable Connect got me thinking about this, when I found myself frantically tweeting soundbites from Ian Schafer, the CEO of Deep Focus.   Over the 20-minute presentation, I tweeted more than a dozen times.

My tweets from Ian's 20 minute presentation.

Every other phrase Ian delivered, it seemed, was noteworthy  – and tweetable.   Ian generated quite a bit of conversation that day among the well-connected folk at Mashable Connect, and I’m sure if tally numbers of followers of those who tweeted his presentation, you’d find that the 300+ people in the room represented a larger audience in the hundreds of thousands.   The ability of social networks to amplify a message is truly undeniable.

Live blogging meets Twitter. MBooth Communications used tweets in their entirety as blog posts.

My thoughts on this idea of optimizing presentations for sharing in social networks is pretty simple – it takes time to put together and rehearse a presentation, and you’d be nuts to not fully leverage those efforts by ignoring the potential visibility social channels can deliver.

Ready-made audience targeting

One reason why thinking about the social layer when preparing a presentation is important relates to targeting. Marketers, public relations pros and digital media mavens all spend a lot of time targeting audiences.  Conferences and trade shows are appealing because they promise access to a focused audience. And as events grow increasingly virtual and interactive, smart presenters can tap into related conversations in the social stream.

Editing is crucial

When writing for the social layer,  editing is your most important tool.  Attention spans are short, and Twitter’s 140 character limit enforces brevity.   If you want to encourage your audience to share and tweet your messages, you need to serve up ready-made tweets from behind the podium.  The same qualities that make a line “work” in a presentation also make it easy to tweet – it has to be short, on point, and memorable.

Extemporaneous, or well rehearsed?

One thing that struck me about Ian’s presentation – both during the presentation and when I went back and looked at the deck – was the number of tweetable pearls he delivered (seemingly) extemporaneously.  Whether or not the tweetable gems sprinkled throughout the presentation were off the cuff or rehearsed, the effect was the same – they felt fresh and authentic, and captured the audiences’ attention.

Optimizing the presentation itself:

  • Write the tweets for your audience:  Keep slides sparse — text slides should display just one bullet point or phrase per slide, not a whole list or paragraph.
  • That said, rehearse pithy, tweetable comments that you deliver off-slide.  People multitask during presentations and may not even be looking at your visuals.  But they will hear you, and if you drop a tweetable gem into their laps, they are more likely to act.
  • Keep it short – very short.  The best tweets are the short ones.   They’re easier for people to tweet and are more likely to inspire reader actions.  Just because Twitter gives you 140 characters doesn’t mean you need to use them all.
  • Use visuals that will photograph well – from smart phones.  If you have a visual that really drives your point home, be sure it’s not too complex.
  • Rigorously employ hashtags.
  • Put the hashtags – and your Twitter handle – on each slide.
  • As soon as you can, thank the people who tweeted your presentation.  Using any related hashtags, offer them links to the deck and any additional elements.

This is just one more example of how communicators need to be thinking beyond the specific remit of a particular project, considering how to gain additional visibility by engaging the people following and tweeting about an event or topic.

What other tips would you add?

Author Sarah Skerik is PR Newswire’s vice president of social media.

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The Death of the Impression & Scaling True Engagement

Posted on May 19, 2011 by | 4 Comments

Just as the advent of social media has triggered sea-changes in the media landscape and roiled  public relations, big advertising has also been affected. Generating impressions is a metric that’s fast falling by the wayside. Instead, advertisers are setting the bar higher.  Generating engagement is now an outcome many are building into their plans, but delivering engagement on a larger scale poses a number of challenges.

A recent blog post on the Harvard Business Review site titled “Coca-Cola Marketing Shifts from Impressions to Expressions” awoke me to this trend and got me thinking about what the implications are all communicators – public relations and otherwise.

“Impressions only tell advertisers the raw size of the audience,” stated author Joe Tripodi, CMO and chief commercial officer for a little company in Atlanta called Coca-Cola. “By definition, impressions are passive. They give us no real sense of engagement, and consumer engagement with our brands is ultimately what we’re striving to achieve. Awareness is fine, but advocacy will take your business to the next level.”

At last week’s Mashable Connect conference, Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer drove the engagement point home, stating, “Advertising impressions are dying a painful death. The impression apocalypse is nigh.”


This new emphasis on developing engagement stands traditional campaign timelines on their heads. Earning attention and engagement happens over time – taking longer than budgets last, as Shafer pointed out – and also outlasting traditional measurement cycles.

Coca-Cola, according to Tripodi, is starting to measure “expressions,” which it defines as any level of consumer interaction with Coke content – such as a Like on Facebook, the action of sharing something with friends, or uploading a photo or video showing or mentioning Coke.   Consumers can generate a lot more messages about a brand than the brand itself can, noted Tripodi.

The mechanics of earning interest, attention and engagement are different from traditional media buying, as well.    “The people who buy breadth aren’t good at buying depth,” Schafer noted.  “Tonnage isn’t engagement. You have to earn depth.”

And thus, the real underlying challenge that the social layer presents to all communicators – the fact that brands need engagement to happen in scale – but the consumer needs to be respected.

In the afore mentioned HBR blog post, Tripodi captured this dichotomy nicely, noting, “Now information flows in many directions, consumer touch points have multiplied, and the old, one-size-fits-all approach has given way to precision marketing and one-to-one communications.”

One-to-one communications – that certainly doesn’t sound like scale.  But one-to-one communications are, in fact, the currency of the social layer.  And the platforms that deliver these one-to-one communications work – Schafer highlighted the fact that Facebook offers better engagement rates than standard display.  And there are some efficiencies to be found in the social layer – the platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Zynga et al do gather audience in one place.   And they are building real power.  Case in point: Facebook, according to Schafer, is delivering 1/3 of all display advertising.

Schafer went on to pose a few questions professional communicators are going to be grappling with over the coming year – if they aren’t already, including:

  • Can agencies who trade in reach and frequency also establish engagement and connections?
  •  How will we measure the lifetime value of engagement?
  • And what are engagement parameters? What makes our customers better customers?

Ultimately, Schafer concluded that we need to start thinking about what each dollar spent in an advertising budget (and I’d throw PR and marketing into that mix, too) contributes to the lifetime value of the customer.  Understanding that value point will be necessary in order to deliver scale.

Sarah Skerik (@sarahskerik) is PR Newswire’s vp-social media.

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Shock and Awesome. One Exec’s Twitter Journey.

Posted on May 18, 2011 by | 1 Comment

Twitter, @syfy style. Enthusiasm, engagement, and a little snark. (It's all good.)

Craig Engler is the general manager and senior vice president of Syfy Digital, the wildly popular network devoted to science fiction programming owned by NBC Universal. He’s also the voice behind @syfy, and at last week’s Mashable Connect conference, he charted his evolution from Twitter neophyte to a popular and influential presence.

Craig had a couple false starts on Twitter, but decided to check out what was being said about Syfy and, specifically, the upcoming finale to Battlestar Galactica.  Right off the bat, he was struck by the volume – and degree – of misinformation bouncing around on Twitter.   Craig jumped into the conversation, setting the record straight and having good conversations with some of the program’s devoted fans.  And from that moment, he was on Twitter for good.

Admittedly, as his engagement deepened and his followers grew, Craig found that dealing with snark and the Twitter audience’s expectations for real-time availability were daunting.

“The low self esteem of the internet comes into play when you’re everybody’s friend and you’re away for 10 minutes,” Craig noted. However, as difficult as it is to talk to tens of thousands or millions of viewers at once within the social layer, he told us, brands can no longer afford not to do so.

“There is so much information and so little context that people don’t know what to do with it,” he says, describing his interactions through the @syfy presence as a combination of conversations, polling, sharing information and responding to queries.

Unsurprisingly, shortly after he re-established himself on Twitter, Craig found himself in receipt of a cranky tweet from a viewer unhappy with a recent Syfy program.  Really unhappy – as in the the last kind of tweet an exec wants to see in a brand’s stream. Craig recalled the shock and horror he felt upon seeing this tweet, and posted a slide that captured his own feelings at that moment:

Click on the picture to see the tweet that elicited this reaction.

But then he got his wits about him.  He fired a note back to the unhappy viewer,  who tweeted that a program was so bad she had go to the emergency room – conveying his wishes for a speedy recovery.   Humor – and humanity – won the day – the viewer was flattered and amused by Craig’s rapid response.

A larger and more important lesson was looming for Craig, however, namely the power of your audiences’ enthusiasm.

“When people understand your business, people are inspired to do things to help your business,” he told us.  And being active on Twitter enabled him to find and communicate with the enthusiasts who ultimately have helped spread Syfy messages and correct misinformation.

Craig illustrated this point with a specific example.  When he wants the followers to amplify a message – he asks them to do so, adding “If you’re a fan, please spread the word!” to tweets about programming.  He noted that adding the “if you’re a fan” language is crucial.  It cuts down on the “I hate your show, why would I tweet that,” responses.  And, even more importantly, the call to action – asking fans to help spread the word – works.  His followers re-tweet @syfy messages in droves.  The business results are significant: 47% of Syfy followers have sampled a show they weren’t already watching after seeing it mentioned in the feed, Craig revealed.

Craig closed noting that social media gives audiences direct access to employees – in Syfy’s case, everyone from network execs to actors to show runners – and they don’t know what to do with it.  However, an engaged brand presence can effectively generate and channel audience enthusiasm, and garner important feedback.  At this juncture, the @syfy is one of the most influential presences on Twitter, and is invaluable to the network.

Craig offered a few cautionary tips, reminding everyone of the importance of being polite and keeping the brand above the fray.   He also noted that once you start developing connections in the social layer, you can’t stop.  However, it was pretty clear to me that ceasing to Tweet is about the last thing on Craig’s mind.

More Twitter tips from Craig:

http://mashable.com/2010/11/05/tv-executives-twitter/

Author Sarah Skerik (@sarahskerik) is PR Newswire’s vice president of social media.

Many thanks to MBooth Communications and Rob Longert for use of the OMG monkey photo.

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The Human Lens

Posted on May 16, 2011 by | 1 Comment

I just returned home from Mashable Connect, a new conference produced by the good folks at Mashable, and held this year at Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Over the next few days, as I synthesize the copious inputs from the event, I’ll share key learnings here. In the meantime, I thought I’d write about an observation sparked by the fireworks show at Epcot my fellow attendees and I enjoyed last Saturday night.

The Disney folks are geniuses when it comes to delivering experience, and the fireworks show was no exception, blending lasers and physical elements with an extravagant display of fireworks, all synched to music.  The word “immersive” is a good one to use to describe the experience. We were surrounded by visuals from all sides and above us. The whole of Epcot played a role in the show. As the fireworks started, a forest of cell phones, cameras and video recorders sprouted from the audience, glowing eerily as people all around me hoisted their devices high. Good idea, I thought, and scrambled for my own Flip.

Within a minute or two, however, I put it away. The experience was too big to capture, and, furthermore, focusing on recording it was diluting my ability to enjoy it. I stuck my Flip in my pocket, and enjoyed the show.

Too much sharing, too little ‘stickiness’?

Watching the paltry little video snippet I did capture later, I patted myself on the back for my decision. Despite my ideal vantage point, what video I shot totally paled in comparison to the real event. And putting my camera away allowed me to experience it unfettered.

I also started thinking about how we experience, record and share events, and how brands can play a role in shaping that sharing in a way that will help the make the event more memorable for the audience, and will build the desired online buzz for the brand.

Is the drive to share de-humanizing experiences?

We speak a lot about the humanity of social communications and the social layer.  Social media give brands the opportunity to ‘humanize’ their images and a space to let down their hair a bit, so to speak.  Conversely (and maybe perversely!) it also seems that the drive to interact within the social layer is turning many into Tweeting, status-updating documentarians, recording every moment through the lens of our pocket-size devices.

Enjoying the fireworks for what they were – namely, a grand-scale experience to which no recording device, no matter how sophisticated, could do justice – as a human, with the full range of my senses was fun and memorable.  Concentrating on capturing each shot and framing each video well would have diminished the experience and made it less memorable for me personally, without a doubt.

The experience was a reminder to put away the camera and participate.  Our memories have served our race well for centuries, and have fueled the craft of storytelling which has shaped almost every human culture.  I wonder if we’re not creating a ‘storytelling’ gap when we capture video of every moment, and thus rendering the old act of recounting adventures verbally – which in itself drives more interaction between the storyteller and his listeners than sharing a video does.

Optimizing events for social sharing – good idea or creepy?

Because I’m a communications nerd who knows well the benefit of using visuals in PR and digital communications, I also saw some interesting analogies for brands – and those of us who craft communications on the behalf of organizations.

Here’s my theory.  I believe there are opportunities for us to encourage sharing of experiences in ways that will reflect well on the brand, and give audiences content they’ll really enjoy – and at the same time increasing our brands’ ability to communicate effectively. By encouraging the audience to truly participate and take in the event fully, our messages will be stickier, and audience enthusiasm will be greater.  I guess what I’m really talking about, then, is optimizing an event for the social layer.

For example – if you’re hosting an event that would lend itself well to video (but not grainy cell phone video, such as the fireworks) why not have the event shot and edited professionally, to capture as much “awesomeness” as you can? Edit it quickly, and get it into your audience’s hands pronto.  Who wouldn’t love to get a spectacular video recap of an experience they enjoyed from the organization sponsoring the event?  Communicate that you’ll provide the videos beforehand, and leave your audience free to enjoy – and internalize memories – of the event.  Seems to me that you’ll create more traction with the audience, who will be equipped to tell the story, since they participated fully as humans, not the aforementioned digital documentarians.

Put another way – I’m not going to share the pathetic video I started to shoot at Disney.  However, a professionally done recap of what I saw, offered in a sharable format, would absolutely find its way onto my Facebook page and Tweet stream.

What do you think?  Is this idea of optimizing events and experiences for social sharing a good one, or does it smack of creepy corporate control?

Author Sarah Skerik is PR Newswire’s vice president of social media.

Image courtesy of Flickr user ShashiBellamkonda. Shashi is the social media swami for Network Solutions, and is a great person to follow on Twitter (@shashib)

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