As Jordan and I produced the Rhode Island World of Flavors Competition, I crafted a social media campaign specifically for the event. Here are some of the online tools that I used:

Wordpress and StudioPress: I built a beautiful website for the event, www.RIWorldofFlavors.com. I know only the most basic html, which I have picked up in the course of starting my own company. Using Wordpress, I was able to quickly and easily create and customize a site. I used a template from StudioPress (formerly known as RevolutionTwo) which, for a low price, gave the site a very professional feel. I added in one important WordPress plugin, WordPress Stats, which allowed me to keep track of which external websites were generating incoming hits. This information was extremely valuable and we monitored it closely. I also created specific landing pages for the site. For example, if you came to our site from Google, you would land on a different page than if you came to our site from Facebook. Each landing page offered a unique discount code on tickets, so we could see exactly which clicks were converting into sales. (Cost: $60 for the site template)

Facebook. I teach a seminar at the Rhode Island Economic Development Center called “Introduction to Facebook for Small Businesses,” and the World of Flavors Competition gave me a great opportunity to practice what I preach. I used three different Facebook Applications for to promote the event: Facebook Pages, Facebook Ads, and Facebook Events.

I created a page specifically for the RI World of Flavors. The page started simply with a graphic and some basic information, but as we acquired more media, such as video from our appearances on Fox’s The Rhode Show, we added that to the page. I promoted the page using a Facebook ad campaign, targeting people within a ten-mile radius of Providence with food and restaurant-related terms in their personal profile. We quickly amassed hundreds of fans in a short period of time. I ran a parallel Facebook campaign driving people to the Wordpress site, but I preferred the Facebook Fanpage campaign because Facebook has recently enabled people to become a fan of a page with a single click in the right column of the site. With this one click, I could easily connect with this person repeatedly at no cost. When we drove them to the Wordpress site, we would not be able to reconnect with them again later unless the opted in to our email newsletter, which takes comparatively more effort.

Once we had fans, we connected with them on a regular basis by regularly posting status updates. Among the many improvements Facebook has made in the past year, one of the most significant is allowing Fanpage status updates to appear in the newsfeed of fans. Now, when I post a status update on the World of Flavors fanpage, all of my fans will see it on their homepage. Jordan and I made a point of offering peaks behind the scenes multiple times a day to engage fans.

I should note that while we used status updates extensively, we did not use updates very often. Facebook fanpage updates are essentially email blasts to fans. In Facebook, these blasts don’t land in the user’s inbox, but in a special section of the inbox just for updates. Frankly, it’s easy for Facebook users to ignore or miss their updates (I do), and so I don’t rely on this feature much.

Finally, I created a Facebook Event for the World of Flavors and promoted this event with a Facebook Ad campaign similar to the one for the fanpage. During the ramp up to the World of Flavors, Facebook made a significant improvement to its ads by allowing users to RSVP to an event with a single click in the right column, very similar to the way they can become a fan of a page with a single click. I like to supplement the Facebook Fanpage with a Facebook Event because once a person RSVPs or is inivted to the event, you can send them a message. Unlike Fanpage Updates, however, these messages land directly in the user’s Inbox. (As a marketer, this is great; as a Facebook user, however, I find that my Inbox gets clogged with messages about events that I RSVPed to even though I have no real intention of attending.)

Overall, we noted that we had more incoming hits on our Wordpress site from Facebook than all other sites combined. We found Facebook to be, by far, our most effective online marketing tool. (Cost: About $.70 per click)

Incorporating Video with Eyejot and Ping.fm. I have raved about using Eyejot and Ping.fm on this site many times now, but we used it quite effectively here. Eyejot is primarily a video email service, but the site offers a Firefox widget which allows you to share any site with a customized video sidebar. So whenever we signed up a new restaurant for the Competition, I would leak that information using Eyejot. I would go to the restaurant’s website, record a video, and share it through social media.

Ping.fm has been a trusted weapon in my marketing arsenal for a long time now. The site lets me post status updates to all of my social media outlets - Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. - with one fell swoop. At my request, David Geller, the founder of Eyejot integrated his service with Ping, so I can know post video updates to all of my social media outlets at once. I made a habit of regularly creating video updates (many featuring our newly adopted kittens) and we saw significant traffic increases from these updates in particular. Unfortunately, Ping does not yet integrate with Facebook Fanpages (reportedly because Facebook has opened up that API yet), but I was able to develop a convoluted workaround using a Twitter hashtag, described here. (Cost: Free)

GoogleAds. I created a GoogleAds campaign to drive traffic to our Wordpress site. I selected two dozen or so keywords (usually something food-related like “restaurant” and something geographically-driven, like “Providence”) and produced all the possible combinations. I then set up an ad campaign taegeting people within the Providence area. I used several different variations on the text and monitored them closely to see which produced the best results. (Turns out “20% Off” was more effective than $10 Off,” but we actually got more clicks when we didn’t offer any discount!) I am a big proponent of GoogleAds, but I don’t think we converted many of our clicks to actual tickets sales. (Cost: About $.75 per click)

Google Alerts. Although Google Alerts is not a social media tool in the strict sense, I set up a an alert for the term “World of Flavors” to see what other people were saying about the event. This is how I was able to monitor our press coverage as it happened. For example, as soon as Gail Ciampa, the Food Editor for The Providence Journal, posted a story online about our event, I was alerted both by email and by RSS feed. (Cost: Free.)

Event-listing Websites. I have built my own event-listing website, QuickWhatsUp.com (recently named “Best Local Event Listings of 2009″ by Rhode Island Magazine), but that’s no reason not to employ other websites as well. We posted the event on numerous sites. Some of those were broad event-listing sites, including WhoFish.org and Going.com. Others sites belong to local media outlets with event-listing capabilities, such as ProJo.com/TheBeat (The Providence Journal uses a white-label website company called Zvents to handle its event listings) or Turnto10.com, NBC’s website. Still other sites were specifically restaurant-related, such as FoodReference.com. Interestingly, FoodReference.com generated the most incoming traffic after Facebook. (Cost: Free. Never pay to list your event anywhere.)

Email and Blog Outreach. QuickWhatsUp.com has its own email database and we included the event in our email blasts (I use Constant Contact to generate the company’s emails. We also developed Strategic relationships with some specific newsletters, such as the Providence-based email newsletter and blog Live DownCity, and a local Food and Wine newsletter. We only paid to be included in one local email newsletter, run by ArtTix. We considered this an experiment, and even though it only cost $150, we only saw about 20 incoming hits from the newsletter. The cost-per-click was significantly higher than Facebook. Moreover, it did not allow us to repeatedly connect with those incoming users the way our Facebook Fanpage does. (Cost: $0-150)

Twitter Outreach. Most of our Tweeting was done automatically through Ping.fm, but we made a habit of using TweetDeck to monitor any replies, retweets and direct messages we received regarding the event. Interestingly, we connected with several potential sponsors through Twitter, including SwingJuice and Glee Gum. We also connected to a couple of restaurant-focused Tweeters, who promoted our event through Twitter ticket giveaways. (Cost: $0)

Text Message Outreach. QuickWhatsUp.com maintains a text message database through ClubTexting, and we promoted our events through blasts. However, because we did not have a list specifically dedicated to restaurant-related events (we had never done one before!), these may not have been the most our most effective tool. (Cost: $100/month to maintain the ClubTexting database, though they now offer a pay-per-use model at $.05 per message.)

Other Tools. We used several other online tools in the production of the event, though not necessarily in the promotion of the event. These include Batchbook Blue, Shoeboxed, Brown Paper Tickets, Formspring and more. I recommend checking them out.

Hopefully, this gives you some insight into the creation of a social media marketing campaign. Of course, we employed tons of traditional marketing as well, including print, radio, television, posters, flyers, banners and more. Much of this was necessary because our event needed to attract an audience that isn’t always the most web-savvy. Nonetheless, social media marketing proved to be extremely cost-effective for us.

I’ve put together an electronic press kit for Rhode Island singer/songwriter Greg Lato.  His career is really taken off - he just released his new album, Monday Morning Breakdown. We held the release party at McFadden’s a couple of weeks ago.  he’s also one of only fifteen people in the nation who have been invited to participate in a workshop in New York City by the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Vanessa Zaman also recently profiled Greg for the CW 28 Vodcast.  Here are some recent videos:

[wpvideo qUH2TJqz]

#qwu: Da Blog: Behind the scenes of the World of Flavors Competiton: http://ping.fm/fohgA

The Phoenix has an in-depth look at the military’s Human Terrain System program.  This is the program that my friend Michael Bhatia (Brown ‘99) was a part of when he was killed in Afghanistan.  Mike is not mentioned by name, but his picture appears beside the article.

In particular, I took note of this passage, which sums up my feelings about the program:

The debate about the morality of the HTTs is “a red herring,” says Barfield, who contends that arguing over the fine points of fieldwork and data storage only allows the anthropological community to avoid the real question of whether anthropologists will continue to sit on the sidelines or begin to play a role in public policy. “Anthropologists are always complaining about being ignored,” he adds, “but now someone is listening to us and people are getting cold feet.”

The Phoenix > News Features > Culture wars.

Another interesting paragraph was this one:

“Right now,” says Barfield, “the teams in Afghanistan have no experience with Afghanistan — they [the military] have a misconception that, if you train someone in anthropology, you can plop them down anywhere and put them to work.” In a country such as Afghanistan, with two official languages and many local dialects, two major sects of Islam, dozens of tribes, and more than four main ethnic groups, anthropological expertise will get you only so far — it’s Afghanistan expertise that is needed.

It’s worth noting that Mike had studied Afghanistan (among other regions) specifically.  In fact, he had just published a book on Afghanistan.  It sounds like the loss of Mike was a big one for the military, because he was one of the few social scientists who specialized in the region that was willing to go.

Yesterday, I posted about the newspaper politics between The Phoenix and Motif Magazine, particularly as it relates to the WBRU Rock Hunt.  I argued that playing politics can hurt the local artists who get caught in the crossfire.  George Marshall of the Rhode Island Interntaional Film Festival posted this response on Facebook:

We experienced something similar with Motif when the Phoenix worked with us last year in promoting the Festival. As some sort of warped pay-back, we were trashed in an editorial add-on to the release on the Fest’s calendar in Motif. This is far too small a market to have these types of peevish games and at the end of the day, the focus should be on the artists, not the petty BS. Burning bridges is just plain bad business and dumb.

Here is the second half of the article by Adam Geller of the AP about my good friend Mike Bhatia, who was killed in Afghanistan last year:

Bhatia would have to make a place for himself. The many months he’d spent in Afghanistan as an academic provided unique insight on where to start. But from the moment he returned, it was clear he was on new and treacherous ground.

via `Professor’ pays a heavy price - Nation & World - The Olympian - Olympia, Washington.

May he rest in peace.

Adam Geller of the Associated Press and I have spoken a few times over the past several months.  Adam has been writing an in-depth article on the controversial program that embeds social scientists with the military known as the Human Terrain System.

Adam chose to examine this program using the story of Michael Bhatia as a focal point.  Mike was a Brown graduate (’99), an Oxford scholar, a visiting professor at Brown’s Watson Institute, a resident of Providence for over five years of his life and a good friend.  As the editor notes:

Michael Bhatia loved Afghanistan, and he lost his life there — the first social scientist to die in a controversial Pentagon experiment that teams soldiers and scholars. The first of two parts.

via 1 man’s odyssey from campus to combat - International Herald Tribune.

After Michael’s passing, I devoted a good amount of time researching the HTS program and the controversy surrounding it.  I am grateful to Adam for delving far deeper into it than I ever good, and for this article which gives me a deeper understanding of the program that led to Mike’s death.  I am also grateful for an an in-depth article that looks at both the program and the human being.  Please take some time to read it.

My good friend Michael Bhatia was killed in Afghanistan last year.  Mike graduated from Brown with me in ‘99 and returned as a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute years late.  I received this email concerning him today:

Seth,

It’s been a good while since we last spoke and a surplus of news has
diverted my attention too many times since then. But I wanted to get
back to you and let you know the article on Mike Bhatia we spoke for
some time back is going out for publication this weekend.  It is being
published in two parts, slated to run Sunday and Monday. AP distributes
articles and photos very widely, and I don’t know which newspapers or
websites will be publishing these. I do know that your time, patience
and insight were very helpful. Thank you for taking the time to speak
with me and sharing Mike’s story. I look forward to staying in touch.

Best,
Adam

Adam Geller
National Writer
The Associated Press

For anyone who’s wondering how we got into this economic mess, Jonathan Jarvis put together a great video:

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Sorry, but I couldn’t resist:

Sounds Funny was created by Professor Trevor Cox to raise money for Red Nose Day 2009.

Trevor Cox is Professor of Whoopee Cushion Acoustics at the University of Salford and is best known for his work concerning the dynamics of rubber devices. He pioneered the concept of optimised whoopee cushions to improve sound quality, leading to his designs being used around the World. He has authored numerous scientific papers on the subject, including “A new paradigm for achieving realistic flatulent sounds”, which appeared in Nature in 2007.

In 2006, Professor Cox presented two shows to 4500 kids at the Royal Albert Hall entitled ‘Beautiful Music Horrible Sounds’ for the Royal Institution/RAH and created the world’s biggest whoopee cushion to help kids understand the science of sound. Since then the World Record has been broken by someone else, but Trevor is not bitter about this, not at all.

You can be a part of the mayhem on Professor Cox’ website: Sounds Funny.