Seven Steps to the Perfect Measurement Program

"The only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself."

 - Winston Churchill 

In her book "Measure What Matters" Katie Paine focuses on all aspects of social media measurement. In the third chapter of the book, Paine provides seven steps to the perfects measurement program and how to prove and use your results.

Steal a Base Steal a Taco

Last year Taco Bell introduced a campaign in conjunction with Major League Baseball during the World Series. The campaign promises to give free Dorito Locos Tacos to all of America if a player in the World Series steals a base at any point during the world series. The campaign took on the name and hashtag, #stealabasestealataco.

A Small Village With Big Aspirations

Ohio Northern University Public Relations and their accredited on-campus firm, True North PR takes on several clients a semester to provide its students with relevant real-life job experience.

This semester, we are working with the businesses and village administration in Edon Ohio.  Edon is a small town up near the border of Ohio and Michigan that has under 1000 residents. Together, over 25 businesses are participating in the campaign along with the village administration.

The team that is working with the village of Edon has come up with a baseline of deliverables for the village businesses and the administration.  Here are a few of those deliverables:

Social Media Marketing Workbook: Understanding the @ Sign or Handle on Twitter

Jason McDonald, in his book, "Social Media Marketing Workbook 2016"  includes a section where he focuses on Twitter and how it is utilized as a professional platform. He goes over the ins and outs of the platforms including the importance of understanding the @ sign or "Handle."

McDonald emphasizes that the @ sign specifies a Twitter account. The @ sign, often referred to as users "handle" does two things when incorporated into a tweet:

    - It becomes clickable. Any user who views the tweet can click on the @handle and see the account that is associated with the handle. 

    - It is present in the news feed and sends an alert to the user that has been mentioned using the @handle. This is called a mention and essentially means that someone has tagged you (your twitter account) in a tweet.

Along with mentions, McDonald makes a point to emphasize the importance of a retweet. Like a mention, a retweet allows a tweet to be linked to a user's account. McDonald would use the example; if Ellen DeGeneres recapped your joke on her TV show. That "retweet" of your joke would urge her followers to explore your profile, increasing your followers.

McDonald says that as Twitter users and professionals, we do not have to be famous to converse with influential people in our line of work. He recommends that professional and personal users of Twitter take advantage of the @ sign or handles to engage with these important people. Just like in the Ellen DeGeneres example, if someone important retweets your tweet, you are more likely to see the benefits of that mention.

To help you gain a better understanding of handles and the @ sign, I have embedded a YouTube video of Jason McDonald talking on the subject. Please take a moment to check it out!

Twitter Fiction

Andrew Fitzgerald is a contributor to the News and Journalism Partnership team at Twitter. His role in the team is to analyze Twitter's role as a digital storytelling modem as well as other social media platforms. He is an avid writer, editor, and tweeter.

In July of 2013, Andrew Fitzgerald gave a talk at Ted about how social media is becoming an ever-expanding realm of possibility. Andrew as well mentioned how we as social media users can discover and invent so many different means of storytelling through various social media platforms. He focused on Twitter and expressed how he sees the platform's potential as a fictional storytelling medium.

I have never noticed storytelling present on Twitter; however, this might be the issue that Andrew Fitzgerald was trying to uncover by giving this Ted talk.

The world of social media is a great channel for expressing stories if they can get any notice. Viewing a story unfolding live over Twitter would be something I would take an interest in. It would be as if you are watching the writer go through the writing process in real time.

This form of live storytelling could even allow the average everyday user to comment and add onto a digital-fiction story. Resulting in an expansive story that has been orchestrated by one writer, but expanded upon by many.

 If we can use the platforms for self-expression and storytelling, the structure of social media could change completely. Fitzgerald said in his Ted talk,

" I actually believe that we are in a wide-open frontier for creative experimentation, if you will, that we've explored and begun to settle this wild land of the Internet and are now just getting ready to start to build structures on it. Those structures are the new formats of storytelling that the Internet will allow us to create."

Take a look at Andrew Fitzgerald's Ted talk and get a sense of what he is trying to uncover with digital storytelling.

What do You See in the Mirror

When you stand in front of a mirror, can you honestly say that you have tried your hardest? (photo/JHDT productions)

Two balls, two strikes, the bottom of the ninth inning, your team is down by one with a runner on second, and you are up to bat. The pitcher throws you a nasty curveball on the outside half of the plate, you swing and miss.

Often, life throws a curveball when we are down in the count. Most of the time, we strike out, we fail. 

Failure is a fact of life; it happens to all of us at one point or another. We lose a job; we get cut from a team, we fail the exam that we have been preparing weeks for.

I recently went through a particularly taxing failure. I thought that the aspect of life that I had failed at defined me, for many years of my life, it did define me. I devoted countless hours a week on this aspect of my life and cared more deeply for this part of myself than any other. Just the other day, it was ripped from under my feet.

I had failed.

Some people say that a failure should not define a person; however, the way we react and learn from these failures does. I have often been told that in life if you can look in the mirror and honestly say that you worked the hardest that you could and learned something along the way, there is nothing to be ashamed of after you fail.

I realize now that I worked as hard as I could at my recent failure. I devoted all of my life to it and learned a great deal from it. Sometimes, you can do all of this and still fail, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Often these failures open new doors in our lives that would not have been possible before.

Failure is a necessary fact of life, it may be confusing and painful at first, but in the end, it teaches us to work hard and strive for greatness.