Entrepreneurial Activism

I recently gave a talk at Edith Yeung’s meetup group: “The San Francisco Entrerpenuer Meetup Group” during the middle our social media campaign for TEDx Silicon Valley, but now that the event has ended I wanted to reflect back and expand the points and share the lessons I learned.

For TEDx Silicon Valley I strategized and executed our whole social media campaign for our first inaugural event on December 12^th, 2009. The result of the campaign was our event was attended physically by 200 people at Stanford’s campus, the event was watched virtually on UStream by over 100,000 people in over 45 countries worldwide, and we generated 11.8 million social media impressions worldwide. I define a “social media impression” by the number the times a piece of content was seen by others on the social graph, for example each tweet by Hiten Shah with ____ followers would generate _____social media impressions.

First a short story about my experience and then I’ll lay out 6 tips to help you with your social media campaign for your event. If you want a short and abridged version of what I learned skip down to the 6 tips and start from there.

Photo by Shirley X. Lin

My story began 2.5 weeks before December 12^th, 2009 when we had around 30 fans on our TEDxSV facebook page and less than 100 followers on twitter. When we started the campaign at first we were only releasing speaker announcements, new initiatives, and updates about what the team was doing. We did this continuously for a week and half with some success, fans/followers increased but our overall engagement and conversions did not increase.

The real turning point of our campaign happened a week before our event. Ron and Andrej, two of the creators and team members for TEDxSV, really pushed me to become a leader of the campaign instead of just executing it.

We assembled a team of 20+ TEDxSV members and volunteers (from our waitlist) who wanted to help spread our social media message, and my role shifted from releasing everything myself to informing and inspiring our new team of people. I did this by creating a small email list of our small team, and on a daily basis I would write out a list of all our releases for the day, interesting new stories, ideas on how the team could participate, and inspiring the team to share this info with their friends and own social graphs.

The tipping point of this effort came the day before the actual event. The team created so much buzz around the event that it eventually spread to the key influencers in our market (Chris Anderson, Robert Scoble, Dave McClure, etc) who picked up the event and spread it to their large networks. The result of this was extreme leverage which literally took our event global in a few hours before the event.

Literally thousands of people began talking about the event, watching the event, and spreading the message during the event and I didn’t even have to participate to keep up the conversation anymore. During the event my role shifted again from pushing out the message to serving the community that was built around TEDxSV. People began asking questions about the schedule, how to view the event on their mobile phones, what the speakers background were, etc and my job was to answer all of these questions and to repost interesting things our community was talking about.

Before I share the 6 tips on leading a social media campaign, I first want to thank Rachel Masters, Jen McCabe, Jen Barr, and everyone on the team who helped out with the social media effort. All of this would have never been possible without all of your help and individual contributions.

Here are now 6 tips on leading a social media campaign

1. First have an end goal in mind and know what you are trying to accomplish with your social media campaign. For us at TEDxSV it was getting as many people as possible to watch the UStream channel and to start conversations around the talks.
2. Have some basic metrics set up to know where your baseline is, know if you are moving closer to your goal, and using metrics to motivate your team (or yourself).
3. The purpose of your social media campaign should be to empower others to take your message and spread it to their individual networks. If you do so correctly you gain the benefits of leverage and multiply your efforts
4. Building upon #3 make it as easy as possible for others to participate. This includes creating pre-made example tweets and status updates people can use and doing the work in finding relevant contact (relevant news, blogs, etc) and giving it to your team.
5. Solidify a few social channels and do them well. For TEDxSV our main channels were twitter, facebook, and UStream
6. Ramp up your social media campaign during the final days before your event. The amount of content being created by your audience should expand exponentially right before your event to build up buzz around what you are doing and eventually reaching that tipping point as I talked about in my story.

Take this list and be inspired to tap into the social graph to its full potential right before your next event. If you have any other points to share, add, or improve upon please share them in the comments section. Much of what I learned was from our team and our community and I encourage you to improve this and share it with others.