Monthly Archives: July 2008

Meet Sarah Lacy at East Village Books on Saturday, August 2nd

July 28, 2008 / posted by Nathan T. Wright

Sarah LacySarah Lacy, author of Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good, will be in Des Moines this Saturday, August 2nd for a book signing/reading event at East Village Books. Afterwards, Sarah will be joining us for conversation and frosty beverages at a Des Moines TweetUp at The Royal Mile. Everyone is welcome to attend!

I finished Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good a couple of weeks ago and found it to be an engaging window into the minds, psyches and social awkwardness of web entrepreneurs. Also interesting to me were the lessons learned from the original dotcom bubble and how they impact emerging tech companies today (going public vs. not going public). Sarah also writes for BusinessWeek and co-hosts Tech Ticker on Yahoo! Finance.

To help promote her book, Sarah asked her fans to make videos of themselves jumping off something while shouting the title. (I call this the LacyJump; no relation to the ShalerJump.) Here at Lava Row, we knew we could create an epic LacyJump with former gymnast Hillary Brown (@hillabean) on staff. Hillary’s video can be viewed below:

On behalf of the entire tech community in Des Moines, we are so excited to have Sarah in town this weekend! Don’t forget to stop by East Village Books and/or the TweetUp on Saturday and say hello. (Oh yeah, she’d appreciate it if you buy a book, also.)

RSVP on Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/869511
RSVP on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=32730788248
Juice interview with Sarah Lacy: http://tinyurl.com/5jedk3

Fine-tuning your social media listening strategy

July 24, 2008 / posted by Nathan T. Wright

Social media has given power to the people, and with it, your consumers now have the ability to publicly share their experiences about your company, your customer service and your products online. (Sometimes positive, and sometimes negative.) Conversations that once took place inside coffee shops and bars are now public record across all sorts of digital channels.

If you’re currently participating in the “listening” basics (tracking mentions of your company name in Google News Alerts, Google BlogSearch, Technorati, etc.) you will immediately find out when a customer starts talking about your business within social media channels such as message boards, Twitter, or blogs. Whether these conversations are positive or negative, you can — and should — dip into the conversation stream with them.

Yet, the larger an organization is, the less time they can devote to following up on every single online reference or mention. So how do you discriminate?

First, check out the user who is posting the information. Let’s say the environment is a message board, and the user is very active within that space. He/she has over 3,000 posts. This is somebody you want to pay attention to, and potentially follow up with. Even within self-organizing communities like user forums, leaders (influencers) still emerge.

Now, say there are 10 blogs that have posted glowing reviews about your product or service, but you only have time for a few “thank you” follow-ups in their comments area. Do some research into who the bloggers are first. Determine their reach and influence. How big of a voice do they have? Are their readers actively engaged with the content? Are the readers leaving comments? If you see a lot of “Comments: 0″ you may want to pass.

There are billions of conversations happening right now on the web — some of them about your company. Depending on your organization’s size, developing an ability to filter through the stream of information, prune, and identify key influencers will be vital to your social media strategy.

Hillary Brown joins Lava Row as Social Media Strategist

July 7, 2008 / posted by Nathan T. Wright

Hillary Brown joins Lava Row as Social Media StrategistI am thrilled to announce that Hillary Brown will be joining Lava Row as a Strategist in Social Media, New Media and Emerging Media on July 15th.

Hillary spent the past three years at Los Angeles-based Passenger, a provider of branded online communities for Fortune 500 companies. Her responsibilities included community management, digital strategy and utilization of social networking, viral marketing and consumer-generated media to develop branded discourse. (Translation: She knows a ton about the web.)

Before Passenger, Hillary managed guerilla, word-of-mouth and street marketing promotions at A.D.D. Marketing for a variety of entertainment-focused customers. Across all her previous positions, the roster of clients that Hillary has helped develop online strategy for is impressive: Apple, Nike, Nestlé, ABC, DreamWorks, X-Games, Activision and Target, to name a few.

Hillary’s extensive knowledge of new and emerging mediums makes her an invaluable addition to the Lava Row team, and I am so excited to have her on board. She is a Des Moines native and graduate of Iowa State University. Hillary can be reached at hillary at lavarow dot com or @hillabean on Twitter.