Journey by Dmitri Dawkins

Using Social Media to Activate Communities

// April 13th, 2011 // No Comments » // Social Media Marketing, Technology

Yesterday I presented at the Junior Chamber International St. Andrew general assembly. I spoke about Using Social Media to Activate Communities and Organisations. Unfortunately my talk wasn’t recorded, but please see my slides below with the main points, I suggest you view it on full screen:

Approaching Twitter Demographics

// March 30th, 2011 // 2 Comments » // Cool Stuff, Life, Social Media Marketing, Technology

Recently I was introduced to InMaps from Linked In. What it does is analyze your Linked In contacts and their contacts to show how your professional contacts are connected. It then colour codes them based on common links. Finally users who are more connected get bigger dots than others. See mine below:

This is pretty cool because now you can see how your contacts are connected. But how else can data visualisation help us?

Location:

I have been trying to track keywords and events based on location via social media tools for a long time. The issue with social sites like Twitter is that people don’t set their location correctly. For instance if a Twitter user enters Jamaica as their location then it assumes Jamaica, New York, USA, not the country. Also people use other terms like jamdown, jamrock, or just cities like Kingston or Montego Bay. When trying to find tweets from a specific area even if the person matches the keywords the location may be off.

So I first considered creating a list of Jamaican twitter users, however how will this be updated (migration etc.)? Then I thought of tracking interactions and then flagging users as Jamaican, but once again that would require alot of human interaction. Ideally I want something automated and dynamic. InMaps gave me a potential answer. Track interactions between users and then group them into subsets just like InMaps. Couple that with a metrics system, where a user with properly filled out Location or listed under multiple twitter lists with specific keywords or Klout has a higher metric than others. When users are associated with other users with higher metrics it helps to create focal points for the network.

Online communities are associated by content, relation (friends, family, groups, alumni) or location. By establishing the link between individuals online we can create a dynamic social mapping tool more accurate than what currently exists, even more accurate than what the user them-self knows. This would allow analysis of keywords by social-location-grouping or possibly by profession, education, and more.

What are your views?

Smirnoff Jamaica Goes Social

// February 10th, 2011 // No Comments » // Social Media Marketing

Smirnoff Jamaica is looking for a new photographer and they are using social media to find one. Recently the brand announced a photo competition on it’s Facebook page to have photographers upload photos and have their friends vote for them.

This competition is different from a standard one because of the additional publicity social media garners. Not only do participants purchase Smirnoff products to be featured in the photos, but they also encourage their friends to “like” the page in order to vote, which increases Smirnoff Jamaica’s online fan base. Also most voters will scroll through photos and other content on the page giving maximum return for the branding effort. So far 3 of my friends have entered and through social media I know they have reached out to thousands of Jamaicans to vote for their photos.

Below are some of the entries:

Photo by Michelle Hamilton

Photo by Brittney Hughes

Click on the photos to view them on Facebook, or view the whole album here. Remember to click “Like” for your favourites!

Know of any other cool social media marketing initiatives in Jamaica? shoot me an email pr@dmitridawkins.com thanks!

The true ROI of Social Media

// February 9th, 2011 // No Comments » // Social Media Marketing, Technology

Earlier I was having a discussion with @iniQiti on Twitter about the true ranking of social media efforts. He was telling me how his 3rd party twitter rankings were high and it helped build SEO (Search engine optimisation) for his twitter account. I disagreed with his trying to rate it via SEO or follower ratio or number of tweets, because I believe social media is about interaction. Thankfully Gary Vaynerchuck (@Garyvee) sent out a tweet featuring the video below which confirmed what I was saying:

What grades your social media efforts are interactions, how useful your tweets or facebook posts are, how it helps people, how it relates to others. Social media is building a relationship, with your friends, other personalities and brands. If your social media efforts do not help, or build relationships, then why bother? Now some people will add that hey, they are just trying to broadcast information  useful to their followers, this is also building a relationship because your followers then begin to trust you for quality content and in some cases understand you may not be able to reply specifically to them. The fact is trust, in social media people trust you for your content (opinions, blogposts, videos, photos, news, etc,). Changing or adjusting your content for better rankings or seo is not the aim, the community is the aim, build your community, word of mouth is a better recommendation than any search engine.

In all of your efforts, reporting, etc remember people first, ask yourself, are you helping someone or are you just pushing out useless content on a daily basis? It doesn’t matter if you have x amount of followers if they are bots, or you have no interaction, find your niche and provide for it.

Advertising at any cost? Kenneth Cole’s Point of view

// February 3rd, 2011 // 6 Comments » // Life, Social Media Marketing

Egypt, the most populous country in the Arab world, erupted in mass protests on Jan. 25, 2011, as the revolution in Tunisia earlier in the month seemed to inflame decades worth of smoldering grievances against decades of heavy-handed rule by President Hosni Mubarak. - New York Times

Since then people have been killed, injured and kidnapped in Egypt as demonstrations continue.

Earlier today Kenneth Cole, a popular clothing brand released this tweet:

Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo -KCless than a minute ago via Twitter for BlackBerry®Kenneth Cole
KennethCole

Here is an image just in case the tweet is removed:

I will put this in my books as what not to do for social media marketing. What do you think?

Update! Kenneth Cole has tweeted this in response to the uproar on twitter:

Re Egypt tweet: we weren’t intending to make light of a serious situation. We understand the sensitivity of this historic moment -KCless than a minute ago via Twitter for BlackBerry®Kenneth Cole
KennethCole

I am not sure if that counts as an apology, is there any way for them to recover from this blunder?

Update 2! A fake account has been created on twitter: @kennethcolepr which is tweeting more scenarios that Kenneth Cole tweets could disregard history. The smoke is building, will this go viral? 2700 followers in 2 hours.