Last month I had the extreme privilege of being selected by NASA to report live at the launch of STS-132, the last scheduled mission for the space shuttle Atlantis.  After a thorough screening process I was issued press credentials and allowed 2 day access to the historic NASA Launch Complex 39 Press Site next to the Vehicle Assembly Building where they prep the shuttles (and the Apollo Saturn V rockets back in the 60’s and 70’s), put them on a giant crawler and move them out to the launch pad.  The funny thing is: I’m not a reporter.  But here I am at the final launch of Atlantis with news crews and media outlets from around the globe.  I’m meeting astronauts, NASA engineers and getting up close and personal viewing at the launch pad where Atlantis proudly stands getting final prepping for launch. How did I, a non-reporter, manage to trick NASA into giving me press credentials for a shuttle launch?  It’s simple: Twitter.

Space shuttle Atlantis blasting off!

I have a Twitter account and am an active participant in social media.  NASA recognized the value of social networking and how they can use it to reach a greater audience.  They also realize that people’s media habits are changing.  Reading a paper in the morning and watching the evening news at night is no longer the norm.  The internet is quickly replacing the older titans of media.  As proof, I confess I haven’t really read a newspaper in years.  I also don’t get a single TV channel.  I do have a TV, but it’s sole purpose is being hooked up to a DVD player.  I gather the bulk of my news and media via the internet – never from a single source, of course, but Twitter is one of those sources I use to know what is going on in the world around me.

Giving others special behind the scenes access can pay off big in social media. At the Tweetup, NASA gave us special access to the shuttle on the launch pad.

To reach people like myself who don’t rely on traditional media for our news and instead rely on a network of trusted sources, NASA turned to social media outlets such as Twitter to help get their message out.  They began hosting “Tweetups”, which is just Twitter speak for a meetup.  I was selected to be a part of the STS-132 Tweetup that they hosted at the press site, a two day event covering the day before launch and then launch day.  NASA selected 150 Twitter users for the event – as long as you could commit to being there and passed the screening process then you where good to attend.  An incredibly smart move by NASA, as us Tweetup members where paying our own way, more excited to be there than the paid reporters and sharing our enthusiasm with hundreds of thousands of combined network connections through Twitter and our various social networks.  Talk about ROI and maximizing your marketing dollar!

I talk to a lot of clients about social media and how effective it can be when done right.  The STS-132 NASA Tweetup was no doubt done right.  Granted they are NASA, launching people into space on rocket boosters, so it’s a little easier for them to generate buzz and a groundswell of support via social media than someone who is looking to promote their furniture store, for example.  Well, I guess if you tied a rocket to a La-Z-Boy recliner that would help get more attention, but it might also get you arrested or severely injured, so let’s stick with safer methods.   To get attention online you can use examples of what NASA did in whatever social media you participate in.

First off, NASA uses social media.  I mean they really use it and use it on a regular basis.  I can’t tell you the number of NASA employees and astronauts I follow on Twitter.  They have a huge presence on Facebook and YouTube too.  Websites and blogs plus Flickr accounts are also part of their online strategy.  As the owner of a small business, you probably don’t have the human resources that NASA does, but you don’t have to have the same financial resources.  Time is the main currency used to pay for marketing via social media, so if you can spare some time, you can capitalize to some degree on social media.

Close up photo of Atlantis the day before launch.

Second, NASA is consistent with social media.  It’s not an on-again off-again affair.  They have a social media mission and stick with their flight plan.  Inconsistent activity in social media will lead to inconsistent results.  If you have a blog and can’t keep up with the overly optimistic goal of one post a day you set for yourself when you started, then re-adjust your flight plan.  Maybe one blog post a week is better for you.  It’s better to to make a mid-course correction than burn out from an unrealistic schedule.

Next, NASA is an event.  If you have a furniture store, it may be hard to organize willing participants for a furniture store tweetup, but who knows, maybe it’s not such a stretch.  Maybe you have a loyal and local following online and you host an event you call the “Couch Potato Summit” where guests get comfy on their favorite seat in the store and discuss, tweet or blog a shared topic of interest.  Now you are hosting a networking event where people are tweeting about the event and mentioning “at Joe’s Furniture discussing politics and boy is this Camden sofa nice.”  This of course, is just an example, but with a little thought you can find a way to bring your network together in an entertaining way that helps you stand out from your competition.

Additionally, NASA used hashtags with Twitter.  Prior to the tweetup, I’ll admit to not using  hashtags that often with Twitter.  With only 140 characters to work with, hashtags just seemed like a way to take up too much valuable Twitter real estate.  Now I realize it’s a great way to segment content and to pinpoint a particular audience you want to reach.  I used a number of the event related hashtags throughout the tweetup, such as #nasatweetup, #nasa, #STS132 and #Atlantis.  This allowed me to reach a larger audience than just my normal Twitter followers, because someone may not have been following me, but they may have been following the hashtag of #Atlantis on Twitter to keep up with any news going on with the launch.  As a result, I had the highest number of retweets of my content I’ve ever had on Twitter – and many of those retweets where by individuals that didn’t follow me, but saw my tweet due to using a hashtag.  Many of those individuals are also now followers.

Astronaut Janice Voss was one of many representatives of NASA participating in the social media event.

Finally, NASA continues the dialog.  After the tweetup I attended, which was at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, they hosted a tweetup at Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas and made sure to keep the KSC participates involved.  A special page was setup on NASA’s website to aggregate all activity of the tweetup participants and to encourage more interaction.  A month after the tweetup and I still get emails from the NASA team that put the event together.  This team also continues to use Twitter to communicate with all participants, including those that attended previous tweetups prior to STS-132.  Sometimes at the tweetup, it was hard to determine who was actually at the event and who was involved remotely, as so many people where engaged in the event.  Now as an alumni of the event, I keep up much more with NASA and look forwarding to future tweetups, regardless of whether or not I’ll be selected again as an attendee.  This is moving beyond being an event, to being a destination.

On a final note, I couldn’t help but notice how the launch of Atlantis related to launching a website.  All the behind the scenes activity leading up to the launch, the maintenance of the spacecraft, the monitoring of data after launch, getting media promotion, coordination of different technical processes, teamwork, etc.  While we at NetSource realize we are not launching rockets into space, it is a great feeling to be a part of events that generates so much excitement.

We all know about Twitter and Facebook – how could we not as they have been beaten into our brains over the last year.  Most of us are likely fatigued from the overload of media attention they have generated – Facebook this, Twitter that.  Yet if you use these tools to help promote your business, you know the importance of keeping up with any news related to these two social media giants.

On a smaller scale, Twitter and Facebook are not the only games in town to pay attention to as there are newer players on the social media field.  These newer players are helping to define the future trends in social media and networking.  Here are 4 trends to watch and the web apps that are behind them:

1. Screencasting:

Screencasting is the ability to share your computer screen with others for the purpose of a tutorial or business presentation.  If you have ever attended a webinar, an online meeting, or viewed a tutorial video on YouTube, then you have experienced screencasting.  Screencasting will continue to grow and become a part of the social media fabric for 2010.

Screenr - Screenr.com is an ingenious tool.  If you are familiar with Jing or Camtasia by TechSmith, then you will be familiar with the concept of Screenr.  Basically, Screenr allows you to record a screencast and publish it online using nothing more than your browser and microphone.  No downloading of a program required and Screenr hosts the file for you and even lets you send a tweet to your Twitter account to share the screencast video with your Twitter followers.  The web app is amazingly simple to use and get started with, although you won’t have editing abilities like you will get with a paid application like Camtasia.  A great use for the program is to create mini-presentations, such as talking through a PowerPoint presentation on your screen.  It is a free online service so take note that your recordings will need to be limited to 5 minutes.  You can also post your screencasts to YouTube or embed the screencast into another website or blog.

2. Social Media Aggregators:

With so many social media websites out there, it can get difficult to manage multiple logins and to remember to post information to all of your open accounts.  Much of the time the information you post on Twitter may be the same information that you planned to post on Facebook.  Social media aggregators put multiple accounts from various social media websites under one umbrella.  Via one login, you can make a single post that is shared over multiple social media websites.  Also, you can view all of the content posted to multiple social media sites that another user that you follow has posted – it aggregates, or combines, these multiple streams onto one timeline.  Think of a social media aggregator as a social media hub or command center where you can manage all, or most, of your social media activities.  While social media aggregators are not new, their popularity is set to explode in the months ahead.

FriendFeed – Some out there may question listing FriendFeed as a trend in social media.  After all, since being purchased by Facebook, the Friendfeed platform is almost dead in the water.  However, FriendFeed is (was?) an innovator in social media aggragation.  They are now owned by big money via Facebook.  The technology will be leveraged on Facebook and new FriendFeed competitors will build on FriendFeed’s innovation and fill the gaps that FriendFeed’s lack of development leaves.

Cliqset – If it can get a foothold, Cliqset is poised to be the next FriendFeed.  Cliqset has a FriendFeed-feel to it, but in my opinion, raises the bar a notch or two.

Flock Browser – What if your website browser was your social media aggregator?  It would be if you are using the Flock browser.  Firefox users have long been installing add-ons to give them more functionality and integration with social media websites.  Flock recognized this and built a new Firefox-powered browser that comes fully tricked out with every imaginable social networking feature and then some.  From the Flock browser you can Tweet, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, WordPress, Picasa, Delicious bookmark, Digg, follow RSS feeds and more.  Big deal, you think as you can do that from any browser, but with Flock, you login to the browser then you have instant access to all your online accounts.  Plus, all those accounts are available from a sidebar while you view other websites.  Online multitasking and social media aggregation at it’s finest.

3. Project Colaboration:

Social networking involves communicating and sharing content with others.  Combined with how it tracks everything on a time line, social networking is a natural for project collaboration. 

Google Wave – While there are many online project management tools out there, Google Wave is mentioned as it has had billing as a social media platform.  It’s true calling, however, seems to be in project collaboration.  It could be said that Google has made project collaboration a social media experience.  While not widespread as of yet, Google Wave has a lot of interest.  As more companies adopt Google’s cloud services, such as Google Docs, for business, expect those businesses to also experiment with Google Wave for client projects.

4. Analytical Tracking:

The first step for most in social media has been to simply get involved with it, to learn what it is and how to use it.  Now that the break-in period is over and acceptance has been reached, business users are wondering how to get the most out of it and to track what is working and what is not. While there are many analytic tools out there that can track anything under the sun, most of the free online apps aimed at tracking social media are geared towards Twitter.  However, watch for analytic tracking to expand to cover more social media applications.

HootSuite – While primarily a Twitter client for managing multiple Twitter accounts, HootSuite has built-in analytical tracking that makes tracking the success of your Twitter posts a breeze.  You can track how many clicks you get from each of your URL’s that you post in HootSuite.  By knowing how many clicks your posts get, you will get an idea of what content you share is of the most interest of your followers.  You can also determine if your activity on Twitter is paying off or if there is too little interest from your followers to legitimize the effort.

What trends do you see happening in social media for 2010?

Can you be instantly recognized on the web? I can and I will teach you how.

Most web applications these days as well as forums and web commenting systems allow you to have a picture and URL associated with your online identification. This picture is called an avatar. Are you using one? Don’t let the gray link-less man represent you. Leverage social networking to increase traffic and recognition. After all marketing your self is just as important as marketing your business.

First and foremost make sure that your user name across various sites is the same, this also applies to social apps like twitter. What if my preferred user name is taken? Use a very similar variant, or another popular alias you feel comfortable with. Two user names? You will see why this isn’t such a big deal here in a sec. This name is one piece of the puzzle to becoming recognized. Internet users who browse the same sites as you or are members of the same forum will see your name pop up and know that this post or comment is yours. Now seal the deal.

In your forum make sure you have a picture of yourself or the image of your choice prepared to represent you. Apply it to your profile so that with each post your picture accompanies your name, once again this goes for things like twitter as well. Next, this is a big one. What is an avatar. This is a similar picture that accompanies your name on sites you may visit and post comments on. You will be surprised at the amount of people who have seen your avatar on one site have seen it on another. This holds especially true with forums and niche sites where the same users are likely users of similar sites just as you are. I recommend you get a Gravatar this simple service adds a picture whenever you leave a comment or post on a site that makes use of this service i.e.most blogs. So now your name and picture are uniform across all the sites you contribute to. Now what?

All of this hard work should help you somehow right? Well it can. Add a signature with your URL in your forum profile, make sure you have your URL in your more info area in your twitter account, and make sure you attatch your URL in any comment you leave on a blog, a link will be applied to your user name or avatar. Now those people who recognize you online can track back to your site. And if you have been playing your social networking cards right, it will be plenty of users. The more sites you visit and contribute to the more people will be interested in visiting your site to learn more, especially if you are using these various channels to promote yourself as an expert of your field. It can pay off greatly, social networking is just one more way to connect with more people, all over the globe, and each of those people have equal potential to be your next customer. Greet them and let them know who you are on the web.

Want to learn more about harnessing the power of social networking to grow your online presence? Call us at here at NetSource at 1 800 709 3240 we can help.