A night with Randi Zuckerberg

I was lucky enough to attend the first annual Innovator in Residence presentation last Thursday night 3/22/12 at Millersville University's (my alma mater) Ware Center here in downtown Lancaster. Randi Zuckerberg, older sister of THE Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook, was the Innovator. She ran marketing at Facebook for 6 years and is a Harvard grad. In August of 2011, she left Facebook to start R to Z media and launch a new type of media platform. Here's a nice write up of her visit in The Snapper (I can't believe it's still called that!), the weekly newspaper of MU.

There was a social hour before her talk where I had an opportunity to meet Randi and have a fan girl photo op with her. She was very personable and down to earth. My coworker, Rhonda Kleiman, Economic Development Manager, was kind enough to introduce me to the benefactors of the Innovator in Residence program, Dr. Jane Hannigan and Dr. Kay Vandergrift. They were both professors in Library Science - Dr Vandergrift at Rutgers University and Dr. Hannigan at Columbia University. These are two of the most amazing women I have ever met. I really felt like I was rubbing elbows with a lot of intelligence that night!

The title of Randi's presentation was “Mastering Social Media & Creating a Culture of Innovation.” Here are my notes from her talk:

-In it's early days, Facebook used a demand-lead marketing approach. By only inviting colleges to join when there was enough deman and buzz for the site, they created a sense of scarcity that guaranteed success once a school was added.

-By pooling it's own users as translators, the site was translated into many languages in just 24 hours.

-The Facebook workplace operates under a culture of fun. Each year they have a hackathon where employees stay up all night creating something outside of their job. A good idea can come from anywhere.

-Facebook's Culinary Team Page has over 27,000 fans, but only 4000 people work there. So the other 23,000 people are just checking in to see what they are serving up daily. There are some amazing menus on there... This is the right way to do marketing.

-Randi's 10 Trends in Social Media (though I ended up with 12?)

1. The Sharing Economy - examples are:
   -airbnb - rent a home when they are out of town or rent a bedroom in someone's home
   -renttherunway - rent a designer $1000 dress for a night - live a luxurious life on a budget -suitedeal - fly on a private jet when it's not in use by it's owners



2. People as Platforms and Media Brands
   -each one of us is a brand/media company
   -Con - the Internet allows cutomers to complain with a digital microphone
   -Pro: good experiences can also be shared



3. Crowd-Sourcing
   -people want to participate in the creation of their favorite products
   -also can be philanthropic - ex. Target had $5 million to allocate to charities. It put up the list of charities they would contribute to on Facebook and let their fans choose where to allocate the money. So their customers and the charities did their marketing for them.
   -kickstarter is a site anyone can donate money to towards art projects. At the last Sundance film festival, 70% of the films were funded by this site. This site bave a bigger donation than the National Endowment of the Arts!



4. Mobile First
   -some businesses skip the traditional Website alltogether. Go straight to an App for the user experience - ex. Foodspotting App - recommend the best dishes within a restaurant, not just the restaurant itself.
   -Starbucks has an iPhone App that lets you pay with your Starbucks Card right from the app
   -Banks have apps that let you take a photo of a check and deposit it into your account (I personally have used my scanner at home to deposit checks for the last few years).



5. People as Curators
   -Be an expert by gathering others content and curating it. Pinterest is a great example of this. Though she didn't talk about it, we in libraryland know that LibGuides is great for this too. She showed her sister, Donna Zuckerberg's, Pinterest boards all about food. She's quite the foodie.



6. Fitness and Health Communities
   -a way to be accountable to your fitness goals
   -can map your workout and diet data against your friends
   -a personal example for me is Cafewell. My health insurance company allowed me to get a free digital pedometer through the company that tracks all of my steps via a USB connection to my computer. The community just recently completed our walk from the earth to the moon!



7. Facebook's Interest Lists
   -this is new in the last few weeks on Facebook. You can now create a filtered news feed (much like a Twitter list) and follow the news you really want to see. Read about it at techcrunch and mashable.



8. Facebook's Timeline for Brands
   -starting on 3/30 (that's about 15 minutes from me typing this), Timeline will go live for Facebook Brand Pages. This will give fans a rich visual experience. Read about it here and here.



9. Incentive Advertising within Games
   -Usually pushed at the moment of 'leveling-up' - I can vouch for this one. Has caused me to pay the .99 or 1.99 for certain games my 5 year old loves to play on my iPod (you know, Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, etc.) to avoid all of the adds.



10. Subscription Shopping
    -think of the old wine of the month clubs or CD of the month clubs. This is a huge boom right now. People are looking for a voice in the noise. Example is Birchbox - have a beauty box delivered to your door. Someone else picks out samples you can try out for $10/month to cut through all of the possibilities. Let someone else do your filtering. Thinking about this, I would LOVE to have someone listen to all of the information noise online related to what I do and present me with an executive summary once/week that I could just read to stay up on everything without having to do all of the filtering myself. I'm sure people are making careers out of doing just that. Hey, that would be a pretty cool job. If that's all I had to do all day, I would love it. My problem is I have to do that AND do my job!



11. Video and Livestreaming
    -This will be the main focus of her new company. Example are the press conferences she did in Facebook during her time there. She launched the live streaming industry with her media partnerships around the US Presidential Inauguration and was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2011 for her innovative TV/online coverage of the 2010 mid-term elections.



12. Gamification of Everything
    -Gympact - declare how many times/wk you are going to go to the gym and check in while you are there. Do it enough and you will get paid to go to the gym.
    -Withings - for the VERY brave, a digital scale that tweets out your weight!

What a whirlwind tour of our digital reality these days. I thoroughly enjoyed Randi's talk and look forward to seeing great things from R to Z Media!

Old Spice Man Rocks the Library World!

Okay, this is just so brilliant! I love social media and this genius campaign from Old Spice just blows me away.

But the icing on the cake is that Andy Woodworth was able to get a resonse for libraries! Take a look:



Way to go Andy!! You should go read his whole post about the experience. It contains a lot of great links too.

And way to go Old Spice, you have just broken new ground in social media marketing. So, are we all ready to watch the copy cats now?...

Social Media ROI: Socialnomics

Yep, still singing the same song here, BUT are you listening?

Did You Know 4.0

VoiceThread - Free Online Tool Brings Voices of Donors/Beneficiaries Together

Here is a free online tool that brings the voices of your donors and beneficiaries into your nonprofit's storytelling -VoiceThread

Impactix describes this tool very well in their post:
"A VoiceThread is a multimedia slideshow of photos, video, or documents that allows people to easily leave comments and join the conversation. Visually, it’s a slideshow screen surrounded by a mosaic of little avatars of all the people who comment on the image. When you click on the avatar you hear them or see what they’ve written or drawn. People can comment in five simple ways: by telephone, by computer microphone, by web cam, by writing text, or by drawing.

Wondering how you might use this free tool?
-How about getting your donors to add their voices to a story about a common cause they all support, telling why they support it?
-How about showcasing your grantees’ work by asking them to add their comments to a VoiceThread story you create about an issue they’re working on?
-How about showing how real living human beings are affected by the work you do? Ask them to add comments to a VoiceThread about how one of your programs has helped them.
-Honoring someone special? Create a VoiceThread testimonial to them including all the voice of people whose lives they’ve touched
-Trying to build a social movement? Here’s a very visual way to start—tell your VoiceThread story and ask supporters to add their supportive comments. Watch the little avatars multiply!"

Here's a great intro explaining how this all works. And a great Educator Guide that helped me. Wouldn't this be a great tool to rally support for libraries in PA right now?! I decided to throw an example out there to do just that. To see this right in VoiceThread rather than embedded, click here:

Social Media is Growing

Check out this post from Adam Singer's blog, TheFutureBuzz that reports some amazing statistics on social media, Web 2.0, crowdsourcing and internet usage. If you are still in the dark about these technologies, your patrons certainly are not!

If you've been following social media and want a way to increase your knowledge quickly about a certain subject, area, topic - here is a somewhat complex cheat sheet from the ReadWriteWeb on how to quickly find the most popular information coming out about that topic. A great strategy instead of just randomly reading stuff. I have it on my list of things to do - let me know how you make out!