Winners and Losers...the September New Media Breakfast

SOCIAL MEDIA WINNERS AND LOSERS

DATE: Friday 28th September
VENUE: 29 Member's Club, Royal exchange Square, Glasgow

It's our birthday!
The September breakfast is the 3rd Anniversary of The New Media Breakfast; yes, it’s been three years since we started or monthly knowledge sharing events. We are pleased these have now become part of the regular calendar at No.29. We also thank No.29 for all of their support during the past three years; they really make it easy to host an event of this nature.

We also take this opportunity to thank everyone who has attended the breakfast since we started, we hope you enjoy coming along as much as we enjoy hosting them. We appreciate your support and hope you will continue to come along to the events.

The September New Media Breakfast will explore social media winners and losers. This is a topic we’ve had requested in the past so we’re pleased to be able to bring it to you now.

The Winners
ROI is a question we’ve been asked about numerous times, hopefully this breakfast will help you identify the possible returns you can expect by exploring some social media winners. We will look at examples where brands have used social media tools to become social and how they succeeded in their objectives.

The Losers
It would be wrong to simply focus on the winners, there are many social media losers out there and we can learn as much from them as we can from the winners. We will look at some of the social media marketing failures and investigate what went wrong; we hope this will help identify what not to do.

We need your help...
We are looking for assistance from you; do you have a social media success story or, do you know about a success that you would like us to highlight? Equally, please let us know if you know of any failures that we could perhaps review and share with your New Media Breakfast colleagues.

We hope you can make it along to this important breakfast to help us celebrate three successful years of New Media Breakfast and perhaps learn from other winners and losers.

FREE Social Media Training Day
We would also like to draw your attention to a very important event we are hosting in No.29 on the 31st October – a FREE Social Media Training Day for charities. This event is strictly on a first come first served basis so, if you know any charities that may benefit form the day please share the information about the day with them. You can find out the full detaisl and programme for the Charity Training Day here.

HOW TO BOOK
Venue: 29 Member's Club, Royal Exchange Square, Glasgow
Date: Friday 28th September 2012
Time: 7.30am for 8am
Cost: £10 +VAT

BOOK FOR NEW MEDIA BREAKFAST GLASGOW HERE:

No.29 MEMBERS GO FREE 

If you are a 29 Member you can attend the breakfast free of charge. Please email malcolm@fatbuzz.com with you membership number and he will add you to the attendance list.

We hope you can make it along to this event. If so, I look forward to seeing you on the day.

If you have found this post interesting please share it with your online community using either the Twitter, Facebook and Share buttons below. Thank You.

Crowdfunding - A Blooming Revolution

We are delighted to have Michelle Rodger from BloomVC as a new guest blogger on the fatBuzz Blog.  Michelle will be sharing her knowledge of crowdfunding with you in this and future blogs. If you have any questions for Michelle please leave a comment below or conatct her by email at michelle@tartancat.com

What do Barack Obama, Scottish Opera, a Chicago product engineer and a widow from Edinburgh have in common?

They have all successfully crowdfunded a campaign.

• Barack Obama crowdfunded $47m in $25 donations for his election campaign. 
• Scottish Opera raised £44k to fund a production by offering donors the chance to sponsor a star and join the backstage party. 
• Scott Wilson from Chicago needed $15k to prototype a watch strap for the iPod Nano – he actually raised $942k by “pre-selling” his product on a US crowdfunding platform. 
• And just last month, Elke Barber raised 50% above her crowdfunding target after her heart-rending story touched the hearts of hundreds of people worldwide. She can now publish her book for pre-school children who have lost a parent.

Crowdfunding is a new phenomenon. It’s an alternative source of finance for startups, businesses, community groups, charities and social enterprises, and it’s changing the financial landscape forever.

But the actual concept of crowdfunding, gathering money from friends, family and the wider community to support ventures, has been around for centuries. Remember the Darien Scheme in the1690s, when a quarter of all the money circulating in Scotland was pooled to establish a trading colony in Panama called New Caledonia. The venture failed, but that was crowdfunding in the early days.

The recent explosive rise in the use of social networking sites has brought crowdfunding to the fore. The ability to reach out and engage a wider audience than ever before means that someone with an idea can ask for backers to help them – and those backers could be on the other side of the world.

There are around 400 crowdfunding platforms out there, many are niche, some are equity-based (where you sell shares or more often parts of shares in your business) the majority are reward-based (where you offer treats or perks in return for donations, often pre-selling the product or service you’re raising the money to produce) but only a few are well known – Kickstarter and Indiegogo in America (both reward models), Seedrs and CrowdCube in the UK (equity) and Bloom VC in Scotland.

Bloom VC (Venture Catalyst) is the first crowdfunding platform of its kind in the UK, enabling anyone with an idea, anywhere in the world, to reach out and receive donations from across the globe, using their social networks.

What makes Bloom unique on a global scale is that it offers the same opportunity to community projects, third sector organisations and social enterprises.

The Bloom reward model enables individuals or startups to create an online elevator pitch for their idea, detailing what it is, why it’s important, how much money is needed and for what. Using video and images to create a compelling story and offering exciting and attractive treats in return for donations, the pitch is uploaded onto the crowdfunding platform, where the project owners share it with their social networks both online, using Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and offline among friends, family, neighbours and colleagues.

But it’s all or nothing; if project owners don’t reach their target by the deadline (30,45 or 60 days) they don’t get a penny, and the donors don’t pay.

A great idea needs nurturing. It needs cultivating and supporting, it needs loving care and attention. A great idea needs to flourish. But great ideas often get left wilting in the shade because there’s no money to support the nurturing and growing process, and limited support for growth.

Crowdfunding allows great ideas to bloom. It’s an inclusive way for anyone with an idea to reach out for financial support without having to give up equity or control of his or her business. It’s not a loan, so it doesn’t need to be paid back, and it’s not an investment so you’re not selling shares.

Crowdfunding is revolutionizing how we raise money, and will ultimately change the funding landscape permanently.

In our next blog, we’ll tell you how to create a killer crowdfunding campaign.

If you have found this post interesting please share it with your online community using either the Twitter, Facebook and Share buttons below. Thank You.

Exclusive FREE Social Media Training Day for Registered Charities

FREE SOCIAL MEDIA TRAINING FOR CHARITIES

8th October 2012
MORE PLACES NOW AVAILABLE
We are delighted to announce we have just agreed with No.29 that we can have some additional attendees at the Charity Training Day. So, if you haven't booked your place please make sure you do so as quickly as possible.  We have over 100 already booked with a very limited number of places remaining.

fatBuzz is pleased to announce a very special event for charities in Scotland - a free social media training day.  We have always been committed to helping charities whenever we can, however as a commercial organisation, there is only so much we can do on a one to one basis.  Borrowing the motto from The Entrepreneurial Exchange, we believe in the notion we should 'work hard, play and give something back'; that's why we are running this exclusive event.

We are fortunate to have the support of No.29 Private Member's Club, Commsworld, Orb Group, The Networking Coach and, Bloom VC to help us run this important training session specially for registered charities in Scotland.

We intend this to be an intensive day of presentations to help charities understand the potential of social media and demonstrate how they can use the various tools to tell their story and create emotional connections. We will explore how to raise awareness, and support fundraisers and fundraising events; every topic will be tailored to charities with the aim of helping to make the most of their time when engaging in social media.

EVENT DETAILS

Date: Wednesday 31st October

Venue: 29 Private Member's Club, Royal Exchange Square, Glasgow

Time: 8:30am for 9:00am until 5:45pm

HOW TO BOOK

Thanks to generous support, we are able to offer this event entirely free of charge.

You must be a full-time employee or official representative of a registered charity to attend the event. We would like as many charities to be represented as possible, therefore we are initially limiting attendance to 2 people per charity.  

If you would like to come along please email Fiona Macdonald fiona@fatbuzz.com with your name and the name of your registered charity.  Alternatively, you can call Fiona on 0141 427 0727. Places are limited and bookings will be taken on a first come basis so please reserve your place as soon as possible.

PLEASE SHARE WITH OTHER CHARITIES

We are keen to have as many charities as possible on the day so, please share this post with any relevant people you know who may be interested in attending.  We have also included share buttons at the top and bottom of the page to help you share this post on your social media platforms.

PROGRAMME

The programme below outlines the topics and the timing of the presentations. (May be subject to change)

8.30 - 9.00

CHECK IN 

Guest arrive at 29 Glasgow - Tea and Coffee on arrival 

9.00 - 9.10 

INTRODUCTION - Gordon White, fatBuzz 

Speaker introductions and purpose of event

9.10 - 9.30 

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING - Gordon White, fatBuzz

Introduction to social media

• Why the third sector should be using social media?
• Back to Basics - Simplifying Social Media Marketing

9.30 - 10.00 

BLOGGING - Gordon White, fatBuzz

The power of blogs and why they should be the ‘hub’ of your social media activity

• Blog platforms
• Content
• Building and audience
• Sharing and syndicating your blog posts

10.00 - 10.10 

Q&A
10.10 - 10.25 

CASE STUDY - Mark Wright, Commsworld

How charities are benefiting from well planned communications 

10.25 - 10.40 

NETWORKING BREAK

Tea and Coffee  

10.40 - 11.00 

INTEGRATING ONLINE AND OFFLINE MARKETING - Mike Smith, Orb Group

Why you should consider promotional merchandise in your overall marketing strategy?

11.00 - 11.30 

PODCASTING - Gordon White, fatBuzz
Why you should consider podcasting as part of your marketing mix

• Podcasting options
• How to capture content
• Editing content
• Publishing your podcast
• Finding your audience

11.30 - 12.15 

FACEBOOK - Gordon White, fatBuzz
How charities can make use of Facebook for awareness, raising funds and, supporting fundraisers.

• Branding
• Tabs and iFrame Pages
• Using the timeline
• New functionality
• Liking, Commenting, Sharing and Tagging
• Photos and Video
• Syndicating content to your page
• Insights

12.15 - 12.45 

Q&A SESSION
12.45 - 13.15 

NETWORKING LUNCH

Buffet courtesy of No. 29

13.15 - 13.45 

CROWDFUNDING - Michelle Rodger, Bloom VC
What is crowdfunding and how it could work for charities?

13.45 - 14.30 

TWITTER AND MICROBLOGGING - Gordon White, fatBuzz

Why Twitter is an important social media tool

• Branding
• Functionality - Following, RT's, Hashtags etc 
• Searching - On Twitter and via Tweetdeck 
• Lists

14.30 - 14.45 

TEA and COFFEE

14.45 - 15.30 

LINKEDIN - Belinda Roberts, WeDo Scotland
How charities can use LinkedIn to engage

• LinkedIn Personal Profiles, Groups and Pages
• Setup - Things to consider
• Managing and promoting your LinkedIn presence 

15.30 - 16.15 

VIDEO - Gordon White, fatBuzz
Why video?

• Video options
• Branding your video content
• User generated video content
• Sharing video content

16.16 - 17.15 

CONTENT - Gordon White, fatBuzz 

Most organisations struggle with content, we will explore the following:

• What do you talk about?
• How do we say it?
• Where do we say it?
• How often do we say it?
• How do we make it engaging?
• How do we get people to share it?

17.15 - 17.45 

Q&A AND CLOSING REMARKS

17.45

Networking in the Oyster Bar

We hope you are able to attend the training session and that you will share the event with others. Please use the share buttons below to tell others in your community about this very special event.

Content Explored...Angels' Share, Olympics 2012, Dragon's Den and 50 Shades of Grey

This is the second 'Content Explored' blog post where we look at how fatBuzz clients are using Content for marketing and awareness building. The first post was very well received; I hope this one will provide some inspiration and ideas for your own content.

The following examples are from recent social media activity by a number of our clients.  Where possible, I have provided links to each so that you can actually see the comtent and how it was used and shared.


Angels' Share

I'm going to start with a lovely blog posted earlier today by Dean's entitled, "The Angels’ Share - of Whisky and Dean’s Shortbread". The post is about the care and attention that goes into the baking process at Dean's; this would be a good post at any time, they genuinely do take great care over the production of their products and they have a fantastic story to tell. However, Dean's cleverly associated this with the recent release of the film, 'Angels' Share' which is centred round the 2% loss of product during the maturation process in whisky making.

Like in the film, Dean's lose up to 10% of the ingredients to evaporation during the baking process; this could be reduced if they baked the shortbread faster, but that simply wouldn't be Dean's.

This blog post prompted me to write today's 'Content Explored' post about how you can use the calendar and events as a source of material for your content; Dean's tapped into the film and its storyline, you should look for any similar opportunities.

London 2012
Along the same lines, our friends at Morton Fraser tapped into the enormously successful London 2012 Olympics by creating a special blog to feature the Olympic Sports in the run up to the event. The blog was extremely successful and highlighted their expertise and services offered by the Sports and Tourism Team. Some of the posts from the blog were published as articles in newspapers and magazines and Morton Fraser got the credit.

Morton Fraser also created podcast content looking at issues associated with hosting the Olympic Games.

This is one of our favourites: Mitchell's Dairy in Inverurie placed an 'A' Board outside their shop with the simple message, "Good Luck Hannah" ahead of Ms Miley's Olympic swimming event. They then took a picture of the 'A' Board and uploaded it to their Facebook page - this post, and the subsequent 'well done' posts, received massive support with in excess of 1100 likes and lots of comments and sharing.

This example serves as a useful reminder that content can be a simple thing like a snap shot taken in the spur of the moment - who would have guessed this would have created so much engagement?

50 Shades of Grey
On a much lighter note, our friends at John Dick and Son created a light-hearted post entitled, "Shades of Grey at John Dick and Son'. This post tapped into the incredible popularity (at least with half the population) of the book, '50 Shades of Grey'. They also ran a small competition on their Facebook page to sum up the book in three words - the winner received a lamp (with a grey shade!).

Following on from this, they created a blog post during the Olympics entitled, 'Gold, Silver or Bronze...be inspired'. This post featured some of the metallic finishes they have available in wall coverings and fabrics, cleverly tapping into Olympic fever.

Dragon's Den
During the last series of Dragon’s Den the contestants were tasked with finding deals to be sold on the Groupon site; this presented a clear opportunity for our clients, Today's Great Deal. During the programme they posted messages on Facebook to invite their community to say which of the deals they liked so that Today's Great Deal could source similar deals in Glasgow and Edinburgh - they got over 200 comments on the Facebook pages during the one hour programme

All of these are great examples of how you can use special events and regular calendar events to create content; is there something coming up that you can tap into for relevant content? Perhaps the forthcoming Bank Holiday, September Weekend, the Ryder Cup, or the Commonwealth Games in 2014?

Please also bear in mind it needn't be a major event; if you are a local business, tap into local events or an industry event that is specific to your target audience.

If you would like to discuss your content strategy please give us a call or drop an email to hello@fatbuzz.com, we will be delighted to have a chat.

If you've found this post interesting please use the share buttons below to tell your online community about it, there's a good chance they'll find it interesting too.