I attended a panel this week that was hosted by Ogivly Social here in DC on the topic of Social Media and Paid Influencers. There were two main take aways for me.

First, the person who came to the panel with me pointed out that a lot of what they were saying felt like iistening to me “preach”...lots of talk about authenticity, engagement vs vanity metrics and community building. While the focus of the panel was on brands it was striking to me that 1 of the Influencers for Hire flat out said when asked about non profits “If you aren’t will to pay my rate, I won’t help” while the other one said “If your brand as a non profit is consistent with my brand we can usually find a way to work together”- guess which influencer is my new best friend?

Second, it reinforced for me what I’ve always thought is the main difference between corporate social meda and the work we do in the electoral/advocacy/non profit space: Our audiences are way more engaged and invested in us than the audience of a corporate brand. They are loyal to us because they care about what we are doing. They know we aren’t just trying to sell them things. It’s important to remember that as we head into a crazy electoral cycle...our online communities aren’t an ATM...engage with them genuinely and they’ll show you the love in the all the ways.

Webinar: Mon 5/4 and Tue Cinco de Mayo (what...it’s a big deal in Arizona!) - both days at 1pm Eastern/10am Pacific...the 4th in my webinar series with ActionSprout...this time we will be focusing on Facebook Metrics...you won’t want to miss this one.

Training: Excited to announce that June 19 & 20 in New York City I will be leading a Social Media Strategy Training co-hosted by Organizing 2.0 and the New Organizing Institute. Registration starts next week so keep an eye out on my Facebook/Twitter etc for all the details!

The Secret to Online Success: What Makes Content Go (BLEEPed by ME)
I hate their use of the V word but some interesting insights into some of the psychology around what kind of content catches fire.

How Click Farms Have Inflated Social Media Currency
No commentary...just read this one.

From Twitter to Instagram: A different #ferguson conversation
Interesting comparison/contrast between the 2 platforms.

Twitter’s new homepage is a start, but it’s not enough to save the company from stagnation
Repeat after me “oh Twitter...stop trying to be Facebook lite…just be you!”

#AADigital: Are Attention Metrics the Future?
This is a good food for thought piece on the future of social metrics- attention metrics. We see some of this already in FB Video metrics.

Facebook Two HUGE bits from FB this month...let’s start with the good...introducing Riff- a stand alone app that lets you create video chains (that are website embeddable) that was inspired by the Icebucket. I can’t even begin to describe how excited I am about this tool- more next month when I hope to have a case study to share.

And now for what on the surface seems bad... Facebook announced another algorithmm change...and it appears to hurt pages ...I wrote this about it for epolitics.com… and then I saw this post that shows that the change is really hurting larger pages while smaller pages don’t seem to be getting hurt as much. The jury is still out but I can tell you that across pages I have access to data for the hit seems to have been pretty minimal thus far...I plan to do a thorough analysis at the end of May and I’ll write up what I find ...so don’t panic and stay vigilant with your genuine engagement.

Smaller News: This one is only as you create new pages right now but I’m hoping it’ll go retroactive as well...you can now designate a targeted page audience when you create a page.

TwitterAds on profiles? It’s being tested… and this one I am NOT a fan of: now you can DM literally anyone which explains the recent increase in DM Spam, of course.

Netroots Nation 2015 To be held next year close to home in Phoenix, Arizona this is a don’t miss conference!

Another month, another brand full of social media fail.

Beth