Des Moines Foursquare Badge

My #drakesocial class is trying to earn a Foursquare badge for Des Moines by creating a list with the best venues that Foursquare users should visit. I think it's pretty exciting and will give Des Moines a chance to show off how great it really is! We enjoyed picking venues as a class that we felt really represented the uniqueness of Des Moines.

The blog post that inspired us: http://bit.ly/xvFN5r

The site where you can post your comments with ideas on what we should include on the list: http://bit.ly/xdNQcS

The list itself: http://4sq.com/DesMoinesBadge - make sure to follow it!

We have been promoting our list through the #drakesocial blog, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and our own blogs. Currently, 150 people are following the list. We are second behind the Baltimore list, which has 331 followers. We even created a picture for others to share:

We have reached out specifically to influential social media users, including business and community leaders, and asked them to follow and recommend following our list. I think that we should continue to share our list with others through these mediums tied with our #drakesocial hashtag. If others haven't already, we could also promote our list through LinkedIn by posting a status update. We could also create a discussion within an appropriate group about our project to get others specifically interested in social media, Foursquare, traveling, etc. interested in what we're doing.

If we really wanted to get crazy, we could promote the list more at Drake by requesting the Times-Delphic to write an article about it and could also put up some posters around campus. They could be put up in Olmsted, Meredith and Spikes. We could also create table tents for the dining facilities.

It would also be pretty cool if we created a YouTube video to go along with our current promotions. We could go to all of the venues we put on our list and actually show how great they are. This would be entertaining and also generate excitement, which could encourage others to share the video, hopefully ultimately resulting in more followers for our list.

Do you have any other ideas? Let me know!

Yeah Des Moines!

I've already learned that I have a lot to learn

As I completed my first week of Social Media Strategies at Drake University (J99), I learned that I have a lot to learn about social media and the strategies on how to successfully use it. So I am thankful that my professor, Chris Snider, will teach me all that I need to know!

On my own, I've understood how to use social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to socialize with my friends and family. And with a little guidance, I learned how to create an appealing professional profile on LinkedIn that allows me to extend my networking circles and potentially help me get hired someday. However, I have minimal experience with these sites from a business perspective and also with using them to build my own personal brand. We are also using Google+ in this class, which I recently created for this class and haven't really attempted to use much yet.

As I listened to Chris lecture on Thursday, I learned about a lot of "unwritten rules" of social media, particularly Twitter. They all made perfect sense to me. Here is my summary for the week:

• Relationships are important to business success
• Listen first! Conduct research and listen to your target audience before creating a social media account and interacting with them. This can help you choose effective social media to utilize.
• socialmention.com
• Google alerts
• Don't tweet about you, tweet about them
• Use social media to show how you are donating money - don't say, "If we get X number of followers/fans, then we will donate $X"
• It's not genuine
• People can get annoyed
• If you do social right, people will share the word
• Magic to getting followers:
• Be helpful
• Useful
• Informative
• Relevant
• Actionable
• Generous
• Credible
• Entertaining
• Fun
• Funny
• Give kudos to others - this includes in real life
• Devote 20 minutes a day (maybe more) to sharing up and coming people's interesting posts -Chris Brogan
• Make your work "able"
• Clickable
• Linkable
• Shareable
• Embeddable
• Commentable
• Understand who will see your posts on Facebook and Twitter by how they are posted
• If you post to Facebook through Hootsuite, then there is only a 70% chance it will be seen instead of 100%
• If you start your tweet with a mention, it won't go into the newsfeed of your followers unless that follower follows you and the person you mentioned
• It's not about how many followers you have - you can only maintain 130 relationships
• Use lists to organize those you follow
• Be SOCIAL - engage and don't just post things about yourself
• Be a pointer to and curator of awesome content.
• Have ratio of 1:4 - 1:9 of your content: others' content
• Friendorfollow.com - evaluate those you follow and your followers
• Track the clicks your links get through bit.ly
• Use the photos on your Facebook page to reinforce your brand
• Be prepared to be ignored

I really enjoyed learning about how to use Twitter from a professional and business strategy perspective. I've always been unsure about the proper "etiquette" on how to interact with others professionally. I'm beginning to feel more comfortable about maintaining meaningful, professional relationships on Twitter.

I'd also like to comment on something Chris mentioned about Google+. He said that it would likely be a successful tool professionally because it was recently integrated with Google search. I think that raises a good point. So many people use Google to search for things throughout their typical day. It will likely prove to be very beneficial to have the capability to see items related to your search within Google+ on the column on the right side. This could help businesses, recruiters and those wishing to be hired. I'm thinking I should probably pay attention to the rest of the Google+ lectures later this semester.

More to come next week!