Myth #1:  ”It’s best to just wait for people to organically find and follow me. If they want what I have to offer, they’ll find me.”  There over 75 million Twitter accounts. You are a needle in a haystack. And even if you are a well known name or brand, you will remain buried in the haystack if you don’t do something to poke through the straw.

Myth #2:  ”My friend with 10,000 followers sent out a tweet about me and included my @username in the tweet. Jackpot!” Sure, it’s absolutely great for someone to tweet about you and perhaps that will lead to interest from some people, but one tweet at one point in time among the hundreds of other tweets that people see on a daily basis is rarely going to capture people’s attention in a major way unless there is something really retweetable about you announcing your entrance into the Twitterverse. So unless you are an established public figure who already has a natural following or your friend tweets that people should follow you to see naked photos, you’re going to need to find more than one friend who is willing to do your bidding for that approach to work in a significant way.

Myth #3: “I used one of these fancy tools to grow my Twitter audience and now I have 100,000 followers! I am awesome and influential!” This is also usually a wrong assumption. Tools for growing your audience are great if you’re finding the right audience in the process, but out of the 75 million Twitter accounts in the world, there are a lot of people who will follow you back just because they expect you to do the same and they have no interest in participating in meaningful conversations because it takes away from the time they’re spending promoting their shady marketing scheme. If you have 100,000 followers, your influence is measured in the interaction you have with that audience and in the way they spread your ideas to their own followers.  If you have 100,000 followers but only interact with a couple people per day and no one ever retweets you, you are not influential (and you are probably being largely ignored).

Building a meaningful Twitter audience simply comes down to searching for likeminded people and taking an interest in them by following them, with the hope that they’ll take an interest in you. Most importantly, introduce yourself in a non-annoying way and be a good Twitizen. Think schoolyard rules – don’t harass people, don’t be rude, and don’t be a bully. Be friendly and introduce yourself to people who also seem friendly and then work to maintain the relationship.

Field of Dreams was a lovely movie, but “if you build it, they will come” is a myth.

You can follow Caressa on Twitter at @MAOTravels and you can track news and updates from the Miss America Organization at @MissAmericaLIVE.  You can also find Miss America at Facebook.com/MissAmericaOrganization.

Social Action Network
The online campaign consists of four main components:

• The main website, www.PickensPlan.com, is where visitors are introduced to the Plan, asked to join the movement and encouraged to take action. The main site is video-centric with clips of Boone communicating directly to supporters, along with behind-the-scene footage of his travels. The site also features extensive background information about components of the Pickens Plan and has a blog that is updated with energy news on a daily basis.
• Connected to the main website is an Action Center that hosts “email Congress” campaigns, petition drives, and other ways for the Army to take action at any given point based on current organizational priorities. All of our action programs are connected to social networking tools that make it easy for Army members to quickly spread the word about an initiative.
• Push.PickensPlan.com is the Plan’s Ning-based social action network; it provides a venue for the most committed activists to organize and collaborate by City, State and Congressional District in support of the Plan. Members of Push are the Special Forces of the New Energy Army and drive the off-line aspects of the campaign (in-person Congressional contacts, letters to the editor, local events, etc.). Push is the hub of the virtual grassroots organization the Pickens Plan has become.
• The Pickens Plan maintains outposts on social networks including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and MySpace. Conversations about energy reform and calls to action are facilitated by campaign staff on these sites on a daily basis so that supporters can connect with the Pickens Plan in the venue in which they are most comfortable.

Results
1.5 million members of the New Energy Army were recruited during the first 9 months of the campaign. To date, members of the Army have sent over 1.2 million emails in support of the Pickens Plan to their elected officials, and over 40% of supporters have taken action at least once on behalf of the Pickens Plan. 91% of the Congressional District Groups have a volunteer District Leader, and 2/3rds of those groups have established personal contact with their Member of Congress since the beginning of 2009.

Through regular updates and constant engagement, we have been able to maintain a high level of interest from supporters for nearly two years, and as legislation makes its way through Congress, the Army is always ready to take action at a moment’s notice. Many Members of Congress have indicated that the efforts of the New Energy Army have been highly influential in the push for energy reform and their decision to support key legislation.

As a resident of CenPho herself, Heather wanted to do her part to get the word out about all of the amazing things that were happening in this urban center. At the time, Central Phoenix was going through a “rebirth” of sorts and more businesses and residents were moving to areas of CenPho that were going through major revitalization efforts.

The initial format of the website was a blog that listed hundreds of businesses in Central Phoenix and included an informational profile for many of those businesses. Visitors could also leave comments about their experiences at those venues and read what other people had to say.

Five years later, CenPho.com still serves as one of the strongest community outlets for educating people about life in Central Phoenix. It has since evolved from the blog format into a multi-faceted social media initiative with a focus on Facebook, Twitter and Ning. We communicate with an online audience of over 4,000 fans and residents on a daily basis, over 90% of our followers/fans are people who live in the Phoenix metropolitan area, and local business owners regularly tell us how our social media activities are directly responsible for sending customers their way.

Within days, we created and launched a comprehensive online campaign that in the ensuing 6 weeks recruited over 15,000 fans solely through word of mouth efforts, resulted in nearly 100,000 multimedia views, generated earned media reaching hundreds of thousands of viewers in the days leading up to the pageant, supported conversations around 4 of the top 10 worldwide trends on Twitter the night of the pageant, and helped build the audience of 4.5 million who tuned in for the television broadcast – an increase of 1 million over the previous year’s audience.

The Mission

• Promote the world’s largest scholarship program for women
• Build excitement for the Miss America 2010 pageant
• Connect with a new and younger audience
• A virtual pageant experience for contestants, volunteers and fans

Result

• Facebook
  • 11,000+ fans added between launch and pageant (and it is continuing to rapidly grow)
  • Total pageant day impressions: 90,085
• Twitter
  • @MAOTravels + @MissAmericaLIVE = 2000+ followers in just 6 weeks
  • 60,000 Tweets referencing Miss America related topics on pageant night – we were part of those conversations
• Flickr/YouTube/Facebook
  • 90,000+ photo views in first 6 weeks
  • 22,000+ video views in first 6 weeks

After the session, I was chatting with a small business owner who wanted to discuss the pros/cons of starting a Facebook page to promote her particular business. She looked at the platform, listened to a few of the basics and then promptly decided it wasn’t for her. In contrast, another business owner who I was chatting with looked at it and thought about all the possibilities that existed in an unfamiliar package. So the three of us stood there and talked about ideas for what types of things each might want to say on their Facebook page, should they decide to go that route. After a few minutes of brainstorming, it became clear that the platform could be a good idea for each of them for different reasons.

In the end though, it became a matter of resources. While platforms like Facebook are currently a free medium on which businesses and organizations can reach out to members and customers, it is by no means free in terms of the resources needed to manage the platform. For a small business such a thought might be prohibitive, but consider this. Can you afford not to? So here are a few suggestions for how to make “social media” less of a time suck.

1. If your time is limited (and for most of us, that is the case), then just pick a single platform to start with. Recognize that your initial efforts will take a little longer as you learn the subtleties of using a platform like Facebook.

2. Come up with a game plan for what you want to accomplish. Identify the two or three themes you want to post about. This will save you time in the long run. Since you are on top of your business, your themes are likely things you stay on top of anyway, so it should be fairly easy to find a little inspiration (maybe from an article in your industry publication, or something a customer said that got you thinking… there are many possibilities out there.)

3. Stick with it. Building a Facebook following doesn’t happen over night. It takes time and care and nurturing (and a lot of word of mouth). Think of it this way: Word of mouth is great for your business because each person that’s following you can make a personal recommendation on your behalf to someone who hasn’t yet heard of you—and that’s much more likely to turn into a sale or a new customer or, more importantly for the social media side of your efforts, A FAN!

4. Make sure you’re checking in regularly (but if you’ve got a game plan, this is most likely happening by default.) Regular check ins have another benefit, you’ll be engaging with your audience and having conversations with your customers, even when they aren’t physically at your business.

5. And last but not least, have some fun with it!

Prevention

Have a presence on your site, be a part of the conversation. Sometimes it just takes you being a participant in your community to prevent spammers from even attempting to post. They realize if you are there to moderate and steer the conversation they won’t be able to take over the page with their own agenda.

Moderate

This goes along with being a participant in your community. Keep your members on topic, participate in order to steer the conversation, but don’t censor. Allow dissent, as censorship only seems to escalate a negative situation by angering the spammer and causing them to further target your community.

Mobilize

Allow your members to defend the community for you and mobilize them to keep the conversations on topic. When you have brand advocates it is likely that they won’t tolerate spammers in your community and will take care of them without you having to interfere.

Ban

Every once in a while you will run into a relentless or abusive spammer, if that person continues to post messages that are harassing, inappropriate, or threatening its okay to ban the member.

On the other hand, if you just say the same exact thing over and over again and don’t find different angles and approaches for getting your point across, you run the risk of turning off your audience.

There is certainly value in taking an approach similar to @guykawasaki on Twitter. He is a user noted for tweeting the same message multiple times. For instance, he recently posted about 10 toxic foods we love to eat and repeated the same message several times throughout the day. The benefit is that if you aren’t online the first time something is posted, you are still able to join the conversation when he posts about it again a few hours later. He has more than 200,000 followers, so his approach certainly hasn’t turned away a significant audience.

Guy has one way of doing it, but I prefer to take a different approach with my projects. While it’s important to get the main message across—and for businesses, I recognize that it’s going to be a similar message each time—I try to say things a little differently each time, ideally highlighting different parts of the overall message in the process.

When I’m working on messaging for my projects, I think about conversations I have with friends and family. I’m sure everyone who knows me can relate to me talking a few times about a favorite adventure. And I’m sure there are a few folks who’ve heard my same stories before. But there are times when my group of friends consist of people who have heard the story before and some who haven’t. I try to find a way to not bore my friends to death who have heard that particular story, while also inviting the new folks into the conversation. I like to keep my friends coming back for more, and I take the same approach with my social media communications.

Our Villageous project @CenPho on Twitter offers a few examples of how to say the same thing differently each time. To get users to a particular online location at a certain time for a contest, we repeated the same message a few times throughout the day but took a different approach with each message to keep things interesting and build excitement. Here are the messages we posted:

• You have 5 minutes to get to the intersection at Central/Thomas for a surprise! Tweet us a photo & you’ll win a prize!
• Only 45 minutes until the surprise at Central/Thomas…Snap a photo & we’ll give you a fab CenPho prize!
• Live or work near Central/Thomas? Get there by 4pm this afternoon for a fun surprise! Take a photo & tweet it to us & we’ll give u a prize!

This approach allowed us to create a dialog that gave people a reason to keep listening to what we have to say, while allowing us to repeat the message to reach different people in the @CenPho audience.

So how do you repeat yourself without repeating yourself?