#smstrategy16

Show me the money! Marketing strategy, including social media marketing strategy, must be tied to revenue, or risk becoming irrelevant to the business. The metrics we need to associate social media marketing activities to the desired business result (revenue) include: conversion rate, lead generation, and inquiries. Notice these activities represent late to early stages of the marketing funnel, which in effect provides a nested set of metrics.  Why focus on these three (traditional) metrics as opposed to “likes” or “community engagement”?

Most business organizations include a sales team, often rewarded by commission. Typically the Sales organization has a strong voice within management, and this directly influences the perception of marketing activities. If marketing is not clearly helping sales to drive revenue, it risks losing support – or worse. On the other hand, if marketing activities are clearly and visibly tied to revenue, then support, budget, and commitment will improve.

Social media + law = HEADACHES.

I think part of me already knew that, so last Tuesday’s social media (SM) marketing class wasn’t quite as painful as it was for some of my classmates. During class, I learned (re-learned) a couple of important lessons about the law:

Right to privacy isn’t a new argument for me. Coming from the journalism world, I’m very familiar with laws governing celebrity’s images, public figures like government employees and more. 

I also knew that once I published something to the internet, it was public property -- anyone could take it and share it. Even with privacy settings, someone could download my images and post them on their own, with no privacy, and BOOM. There goes my face (or whatever) out into the wide, wide, world.

While I’m totally fine with this (and understand what rights I’m giving up when I participate in social media), my main sadness remains with the lack of privacy laws around revenge porn. 

What happens between two consenting individuals should stay that way, without any fear of revenge. Let’s work on that, eh, government?

Quite literally the oldest line in the social media “book,” if you will: once it’s out there, it’s out. Like, permanently.

As I learned from a data recovery program I used on a corrupted compact flash card just last week, NOTHING IS EVER REALLY GONE (which was wonderful for my “lost” photos, not so wonderful for people trying to erase digital pasts).

And while becoming a digital forensic specialist sounds like a really cool job, it also means there are people out there who specialize in digging up what others want to keep hidden.

So think before you post, but also truly consider fits in with what you want your digital reputation to be.

My biggest takeaway from Tuesday’s class is the processes v. best practices question. I think it’s important that my marketing team takes the time to sit down and really examine what we consider our rules for engagement on our social media channels. I fully understand our legal responsibilities (and our legal rights) and familiar with best practices for online communities, but as a marketing team, we’ve yet to define (and post) what our own rules are.

To Do #893476 After the Certificate Class is Over:

Create rules of social media engagement 

Post said rules in a visible place on our social media accounts.

Create a web page or web pages focused on social media engagement on the department’s website.

Rebuild the marketing section of the RL&H website.

Last week we had the opportunity to pick Molly DiBianca’s brain about legalities involving social media. Since social media has become very popular among mainstream, questions of privacy and speech have emerged even more!

Molly touched on the subject of privacy claims in social media.  She noted that right to privacy claims are really difficult to claim in court. Once someone has shared information in any way (unless in a profession where private information should be legally kept private), it is considered being published.  Once information is published, that person loses any privacy rights to it.  So if intimate information is shared with a friend and they in turn share it on social media, the friend that told her intimate information does not have a privacy claim.  As long as the friend received the intimate information legitimately, there would not be a claim.  The only crime they would be charged for is being a bad friend.  

Molly also talked about a case in relation to free speech, the Rosario versus Clark County School District case. The Plaintiff, Juliano Rosario was charged by his school for cyber-bullying.  He was a member on the basketball team.  After a game, he took to twitter to express his feelings about the school administrators in a negative manner.  As a result, he was suspended or expelled from his school. The plaintiff tried to contest the ruling with a case, claiming the discipline was a violation to his First and Fourth Amendments.  But because he was sharing this information through Twitter, he was publishing it. He may have not directed the tweets to the school administrators but by him publishing his thoughts online, that would be considered being directed towards them anyhow.  The plaintiff’s claims were dismissed due to the fact that his comments were obscene, racist, violent, offensive, and hateful which are unprotected by the First Amendment protection. It was also unprotected by the Fourth Amendment because he published his thoughts publicly to his followers, which allow them to share or re-tweet these thoughts. 

Ultimately, we discussed speech and what is it. Speech is speaking, but it is also considered conduct or discussion.  Donating money, having a tattoo and burning a flag is considered speech because it is expressing yourself.  An expression is considered speech.  All in all a big lesson learned this day was to not share any information you would not like to have shared.

This class was very informative and I already checked out her interesting blog, which I tweeted about! http://www.delawareemploymentlawblog.com/

I sent you my photo by e-mail.  It was supposed to be private, but then you posted it on Facebook. Worse, my photo was reposted. I’m no celebrity, so my privacy was invaded right? I never gave anyone permission to publish my photo, right?

Oops my bad.  Molly DiBianca, a smart, articulate, and insightful Wilmington attorney says my act of e-mailing constitutes publishing. When I emailed my photo, I published it – so my privacy was not invaded. 

On Saturday, April 2, it rained all day.

But nothing could deter the nearly 400 runners who came to run for Preston’s Playground, my social media marketing class’ nonprofit. 

While it was my first time at a 5K (I’m not exactly the “running” type. Or jogging type. I speed walk sometimes), it was not my first time covering a large event. I’d brought with me my trusty work camera, Ava, a Canon EOS 7D Mark II, and had a rough plan for what I wanted to do: take photos, lots of them.

Thanks to my 5K inexperience, I wasn’t sure where to go first, but like many other things I do, I wandered around until I bumped into my classmates and we had a pre-race chat. After discussing what we wanted to do and where to go, we broke up and attacked the situation.

I covered our adaptive runners and took hundreds of photos/videos before and during the race, in addition to capturing at least the first 30 or so across the finish line. 

My major challenges were pressing the shutter button fast enough (this is one of the first times I’ve really used the DSLR to capture movement through photos) and trusting my classmates to do their part. We’ve struggled as a class to find our groove; some have more social media skills than others (or are finding it easier to pick up), while some struggle with the overall concept.

In addition, I know some of my classmates are the kind of people who need more direction than I do. I’m perfectly content to take a base assignment and run with it, making sure to ask questions to keep me on the right track. But not everyone can do that. (And that’s OK.)

While I didn’t learn anything new on how to cover a live event, it was another opportunity to challenge myself and push me out of my comfort zone. Even though I’m the one with the camera, I’m terrified I’ve annoying others and bothering them to take their photo. I’m always afraid they’ll say no!

Also, I learned that it’s important to create a plan for coverage of live events, especially if you’re working with other people. Doesn’t matter if they know how to use social media better or worse than you -- creating a plan unifies efforts and gives those who need more direction an outline for action, something to which they can refer back.

Nick’s Story Nick is an inspiration; his enthusiasm blew me away. Let me tell you why. A 5K race was held Saturday April 2nd at Christiana Mall to help raise funds for the construction of Preston’s Playground, a fully-inclusive park to be built in Newark Delaware. Nick was the first rider in an adaptive chair to cross the finish line, and with his running-partner pushing hard, the fourth participant overall to finish the race. Nick is 21, and attending his last year at Elkton High School. Regardless of his autism, mild cerebral palsy, osteopenia, and nonverbal communication, Nick is an extraordinarily outgoing and enthusiastic racer, and an inspiration.   With hundreds of runners, several running-partners pushing their riders in adaptive chairs, and the rest of us mere mortals just walking, the 5K race at Christiana mall drew us together. This was community building. I’m glad I was there. Social media plays an important role in broadening our reach and communicating our need, as a community, to raise needed funds for Preston’s Playground. Nick, and so many others, are the reason we need to build the park.