Scalable Intimacy in Politics

March 31, 2010 by Mike Troiano · View Comments

I live in Sudbury, a dreamy little hamlet about 20 miles west of Boston. It’s very nice; we like it a lot.

Sudbury has the highest concentration of households with school-aged children of any town in Massachusetts, which makes for a very family-oriented town, and also puts a lot of focus on the quality of our schools. Each year the town sets a budget and struggles to live within it – like most towns, families, and people I know. When it can’t, the Town Fathers propose an “override,” meaning a right to raise taxes to cover expenses of the town over and above those that were budgeted.

Each year the proponents of this tax use the same slogan for this override: “Support Sudbury!” Each year they say that to maintain our first-class schools, fire, and police, we need to reach into our pockets and give a little more for the team.

Since 1999 the good people of Sudbury have “Supported Sudbury,” and this well-intended philanthropy has led to a series of challenges for the town well documented in this video highlighting some rather daunting facts and figures.

Anyhoo… I’ve had just about enough of this. And I met a like-minded denizen of the town, Bob Haarde, who’d decided to run for Selectman, and do something about it.

I met Bob for dinner at the local hangout, and we talked about how I might be able to help his campaign through the addition of a social marketing program. I offered to help, but told Bob that in the end, the program would succeed or fail not based on my talents, but based on his willingness to contribute substantive content to the channel, and to engage with the people drawn to that content. I agreed to get him started, and he agreed to create and post three pieces of original content to the system in the next 72 hours. This was important since time was short… the election was a week and a half away.

That night at my kitchen table I created and customized accounts for him on Posterous and Twitter, connecting them to each other and to a Facebook Fan Page I created from within Bob’s own Facebook account. I took the Posterous e-mail and sent it to him, with instructions to publish whatever he wanted to share with voters, described in a casual and personal way, along with whatever anecdotes he cared to share about the journey of a regular guy into his first elective office.

He began to do so, and after he’d added three or four posts I began following our fellow Sudbury-ites on Twitter, and sharing the page with my own local friends on Facebook. By the election this week – 10 days after they launched – we’d amassed 25 Twitter followers and 60 Facebook fans, collectively connected to hundreds more. The Posterous entries were being published to both channels, and being viewed natively between 50 and 100 times.

Bob Haarde is now Sudbury’s newest Selectman. He has the seeds of a coalition to deliver on his campaign promise (“Cut waste, not teachers.”), and a direct and ready channel to the network of local voters that got him elected.

And he won by 36 votes.

Filed under Backyard Boston, Driving Engagement · Tagged with Facebook, Greater Sudbury, Massachusetts, Politics, Posterous, Social Marketing, Sudbury, Twitter

Ten Steps To Build A Basic Content Hub

January 13, 2010 by Mike Troiano · View Comments

Using the Web to build your brand is less and less about creating destinations, and more and more about creating content useful to the people you want to reach, then empowering them to access that content wherever and however they like.

The key to this is creating something we call a “content hub.” A content hub is more than just a standalone site or application, it’s both the heart of a distributed network of information, and a destination for those that share the interest it supports.

Rather than explain the theory of a content hub in detail, it’s best to just build a quick-and-dirty one, and use it. Here’s the process I’d recommend to do exactly that:

If you don’t have a GMail account, create one, say acme@gmail.com. You’ll need this e-mail for all the logins, might as well use the same one.
Associate your logo with that e-mail in Gravatar.com; this will also come in handy later.
Create a YouTube account associated with the same Google ID.
Create a Flickr account. You may need a Yahoo e-mail account for this. Just create one.
Create a Twitter account, and customize the profile page to reflect your brand identity. Add an image, and a short bio line, for God’s sake.
Create a Facebook Page. You can do this from your personal Facebook account. If you don’t have one, you’ll need to create one.
Create a Posterous account, and activate the Group Profile feature to make it easier for others to post to the account. Connect your YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook pages to Posterous so that any content you send to Posterous bounces into the other accounts automagically.
Create a simple listening station in Google Reader. You’ll have access to Google Reader automatically having set up the GMail account above. Lots of smart people have described how to do this; just do what they say. Once you get the basics down, you’ll be able to pull any RSS feed into Reader, which I promise will come in handy at some point.
Click the Reader “Settings” at upper right, then the rightmost tab, which is “Send To.” Configure Reader to send content to the destination sites you created above.
Use the damn thing.

The “hub” of the system is your new GMail account. If you log into that each morning, you’ll have access to everything you need.

To distribute original content through the system, just use the Posterous account. This is dirt-simple straightforward… You can post everywhere by sending e-mail to post@posterous.com from your GMail address. Send images and they’ll go to Flickr as well. Send video and they’ll post to YouTube automatically, etc. Links to everything you create will appear on your new Posterous blog, and go out to your Twitter followers and Facebook fans, automatically.

“Curating” content is even easier. Whatever is in Reader can be sent through the system by clicking the “Send To” button. When you do that a drop-down appears with Twitter, Facebook, and Posterous as options (remember, choosing “Posterous” sends it everywhere). Begin to poke around in the local blogs and start raising your visibility. Leave short comments on others’ blogs to draw traffic to your own, and create the personal connection you need to deliver on the brand promise. (Gravatar is already set up if you followed the above, so wherever you log in to comment on someone else’s blog and use your GMail address, your icon will also appear and give you some exposure.)

You can also access your brand “listening station” in Google Reader. Just click “Reader” at the upper left of Gmail, and you’ll pretty much be able monitor any appearance of the brand online. You should add some influential local bloggers to the feeds there as well, and create folders for whatever else you like to read on the web.

So what happens now?

Start posting. Share the content you find interesting in Reader. Build some relationships. Get to know folks. Help people, and watch them help you back.

If you need something more industrial strength, please give us a call. But for 90% of the businesses out there, the truth is this is enough to get started building the relationships that will help build your business.

10 Simple Ways To Boost Your Blog in 2010 (bloggingot.com)
A Facebook Proposal: Let’s Make Gmail Contacts & Google Reader Subscriptions Public (readwriteweb.com)
SocMed Managers Series: Association Headquarters (socialfish.org)
A Browser-Based Dashboard for Twitter (bitrebels.com)
How Do You Prioritize Your Social Media? (socialmediatoday.com)
Cool Websites and Tools [November 9] (makeuseof.com)

Filed under Driving Engagement, Getting to Imperative · Tagged with BASIC, Content Hub, Facebook, Facebook Page, Flickr, Gmail, Google, Google Reader, Posterous, RSS, Social Networking, Twitter, YouTube

Girl-Power

December 14, 2009 by The Team · View Comments

This past Thursday I attended the Massachusetts Conference for Women with the majority of my female coworkers from Holland-Mark. This was the first women’s conference I have ever been to and wasn’t sure what to expect. I was honestly thinking it would be a great place to network, but was also picturing a bunch of boring seminars that would allow for some serious doodling time. For the most part I was wrong about that last statement although some doodling did occur (I just can’t help it). The crowd was huge and slightly overwhelming, you can get a good idea of the size by the picture below, and there were rows of tables behind us!

The Opening Keynote speakers were really engaging, especially Marcus Buckingham (his accent and good looks helped some) and Tory Johnson. They were so great, in fact, that I went to both of their breakout sessions, taking my coworker Liz’s advice that no matter how interesting the titles of the sessions sound, if the person speaking sucks then the whole thing will undoubtedly put you to sleep (not her words, but that’s the idea). She was right because I really enjoyed the first two sessions with Marcus and Torey, and left the third session early because it wasn’t holding my attention at all.

Marcus’s seminar was called “Finding Your Strongest Life” (also the name of his book he is promoting). It’s sort of funny to me that a man is telling women how to be happy, but he made some really interesting and good points. The idea is simple, find moments in your life that invigorate you and pay attention to them, “cradle” them, and make them into something you can do every day. He made the point that happy women don’t multi-task, juggle, or strive for balance, because those goals are all impossible and only means you aren’t paying attention to your tasks 100%. He presented many statistics and facts that made me really think about my own life.

Tory’s seminar was not unlike Marcus’s although it focused a little more on what to do if you lose your job and how to bounce back. She explained that in order to figure out what you really should be doing for a career you need to write down moments of passion or moments where you feel you are “on fire”. Also, you need to be visible; she told her story about when she was fired from her job she sat around her apartment for eight months eating ice cream until she made herself get out and network. She said she had a hard time at first because she would go to events and only talk to her friends, which wasn’t productive at all. She encouraged all of us to meet at least three new people at the event. Although I find walking up to complete strangers hard to do and it’s something I need to work on, this women’s conference was a great place to start.

One comment I have about the seminars I attended is I feel like they catered to women in their late thirties and over. There was a lot of talk about marriage, kids, career changes after being a stay-at-home mom, etc. I absolutely understand that those topics are common for many women, but what about the twenty-somethings who are just getting their career on track? There was one point when Tory asked the audience “who is on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter?”, and MAYBE seven people (including me) raised their hand.

During lunch Suze Orman lectured/screamed at us about money. I find her to be intelligent and obviously knowledgeable in finance, but I honestly had a headache after she was done. I am not one who knows a whole lot about the finance world (definitely have an artist’s brain), and am constantly trying to figure out what I need to be saving for retirement or what I should be putting towards stocks, so I was excited when I got her free book.

Overall I really enjoyed attending the conference. I felt rejuvenated and inspired, feeling as if I could really do anything my heart desired as long as I am doing something I love to do. I know I wouldn’t have attended this conference if it wasn’t for the support of Holland-Mark. Whenever an opportunity arises where we can learn or experience something new, Holland-Mark encourages us to participate and I am thankful for being able to attend an event like this one.