A supporter spotlight is an opportunity for you to shine a light on one of your supporters and talk about how great they are. It can be a blog or a Facebook post, a short video on Instagram or whatever else makes sense for your brand. The primary thing is that you are shouting someone important to your brand.

And support spotlights are win-win-win.

In this episode, we'll cover the what, the how and the why. Listen now below, or wherever you stream podcasts.

​​​​​Find other episodes of Step Up Your Social here.

Supporter spotlights are win-win-win. ​

Before we delve into our 3 wins, let’s real quick define the term “supporter.”

A supporter isn’t someone who buys your products — it’s someone who waits in line to be the first one to buy your product. Or regularly tweets or posts about themselves using your product.

It’s not the person who donates to your organization, but the person who calls on all their friends to do the same.

It’s not the person who comes to your event. But the person who shows up early and stays late to help set-up and tear-down.

Put shortly — your supporters are the people without whom your brand couldn’t exist.

A supporter spotlight is quite simply an opportunity for you to shine a light on one of your supporters and talk about how great they are. It can be a blog or a Facebook post, a short video on Instagram or whatever else makes sense for your brand. The primary thing is that you are shouting someone important to your brand.

So that’s the what. Now let’s talk about the why and breakdown the 3 wins involved in a supporter spotlight.

Win 1 — you are showing the world that your company or organization is bigger than just you and your paid staff.

There are people — not motivated by a paycheck — who care about you, your product or your mission.

Introduce these people to your audience. In the process you’ll inspire other members of your audience to want to dig deeper and learn more about what makes you, your product or your service so special. I mean after all, someone got up at 3am to buy that thing you sell. It must be pretty amazing!

Win 2 — This one is the most obvious. A supporter spotlight is literally a digital thank you. If your supporters are awesome, and treat you right, why wouldn’t you want to give them a shoutout for being so great.

Win 3 — This is the one that can really help you move the needle.

When you write up your supporter spotlight — you want to make it not just about how great your supporter is generally. You want to make it about why your supporter loves your brand the way they do.

Let’s say you’re a nonprofit that focuses on planting trees and gardens in urban areas. There are a lot of reasons someone might be excited about your work. Maybe it’s the after school programs you run. Maybe it’s the environmental component of your work. Maybe it’s the fact that you are beautifying the city by turning brown lots into community gardens.

When you write up your post thanking your support for being so great — clarify what it is that he or she loves about your work. And be specific. Because invariably, that person is going to share your supporter shoutout with his or her own audience. And guess what — if that person loves that you have an after school program for kids — that person probably has a lot of friends in their network that also have kids. And those people MAY have heard of you, but now you are providing this supporter an opportunity to introduce you and your brand directly to his or her friends and family… in your own words! You are talking about how great you are, but from the perspective of someone who already loves you and your work!

When I served as the digital director on a governor’s race, we did 45 such supporter spotlights throughout the final 30 days of the campaign. In every one, we introduced the supporter we were spotlighting, talked about where they lived and what their role was in the campaign. Then we talked about what got them excited about the candidate.

If they were a teacher, and liked that the candidate had a great education policy, we talked about that. If they were a nurse, and they were excited about the candidate’s healthcare plan, we talked about that. If they were in a union, and liked the candidate’s union stance, that was the focus of the post.

So when we shared our supporter spotlight, we were showing the world that the campaign was bigger than simply the candidate and his staff (win 1). We were thanking the people who had been working tirelessly to help get us to election day (win 2). And we were talking about why our supporters was so passionate about the candidate in a way that we knew would resonate with their own personal communities (win 3).

We knew that the teacher would have lots of teacher friends, the nurse lots of nurse friends, the union member… you get the idea. So when they invariably shared our spotlight, that allowed us to reach directly out to their friends and networks, talking about how great we were on an issue that we already knew was near and dear to their heart.

Win. Win. Win.

So find the people who help keep your brand going and thank them. It’s the least you can do! And you’ll probably grow your brand in the process!

You start a new Facebook brand page. It's only natural to invite everyone you know to like the page.

The problem is, you're actually hurting your page's future growth when you invite people who like you — but don't care about your brand — to like your Facebook brand page.




​In this episode:
• We dive into the Facebook algorithm
• Talk about the difference between "good" and "bad" likes
• Cover helpful tips to grow your page with the right audience
• The importance of using a brand page for your page (as opposed to a personal account)
• And a whole lot more

​​​Find other episodes of Step Up Your Social here.

On Friday night, I went to see a Grammy winning bluegrass legend wow his crowd with songs spanning his 40+ year career.​

Because I’m both a bluegrass nerd and a social media nerd, I streamed one of his songs via Facebook Live.

It was late on a weekend night and it didn’t get a lot of views in real time. But over the next 36 hours or so, it was watched a few dozen times. (And now I can go back and rewatch the band anytime I want on my personal Facebook page!) But truth be told, by Sunday night, I wasn’t thinking about the video anymore than I was about the drive to and from the show.

But then Monday morning, something interesting happened — my video was “liked” by the bluegrass legend it featured.

Now let’s be clear: I don’t think that this artist liked the post himself (although he might have). More likely it was a member of his marketing or management team.

But the notification that he had liked my video popped up, and I have to be honest — I got excited. Like, more excited than I probably should have.

I work in social media for a living. I know how this works. I know he probably has some marketing agency liking positive mentions of him online. But you know what: it still got its intended effect out of me!

Having him like my video felt like getting a high five or a quick hello from a bluegrass legend.

Does that handshake mean that we are suddenly best friends? Of course not.

Does it mean I can suddenly shred on the mandolin like he can? I wish!

Am I still excited enough that I immediately want to tell all my friends about it? Yup.

Liking that post cost him literally nothing (save for whatever he’s paying his agency to manage his social media—but that’s a story for another post). Yet it added to my excitement about the show.

Social media serves many roles, not least of which is customer service and community relations.

Think about yourself as a movie star. When you walk down the street, people recognize you. You can't stop and have lunch with every fan. You can’t even stop and take a picture with them all or you’d never get anywhere. But you can nod and smile to everyone who waves at you.

That’s what a "like" or a "favorite" is on social media — it’s a head nod from a celebrity. It doesn’t suddenly make you best friends or ensure that they will buy your product/go see your next movie/buy your upcoming album. But it shows the fans that you are real, and that you respect them as people, not just as consumers. And it only takes as much time to create that connection as you need to give a single click of your mouse or tap on your phone.

If you see a celebrity on the street, and you wave at them, you are going to tell your friends one of two stories:

“Oh my goodness, I just say this famous person on State Street. It was so cool!”

*** OR ***

“I just saw this famous person on State Street. He was kind of a jerk.”

You’re the celebrity. Which would you prefer?

Recently, I spoke at Social Media Breakfast about Using Social Media to Build a Movement (Even Without a “Real” Budget or Staff).

We covered many topics and concepts, but the one that seemed to garner the most buzz was the concept of the Digital Guide.

So let’s break it down.

What is a Digital Guide - An Overview
A Digital Guide should offer everything that you supporters (more on defining your supporters below) need to help you tell your story. They are typically created for a particular event or campaign.

Let’s say your company (“Sneakz”) makes and sells tennis shoes. You are having a grand opening for a new location. You want buzz online. Your official social channels are of course going to be posting about the event in advance and, once it starts, promoting how great it is going. But official accounts ≠ buzz, no matter how often you post or how great your content is. Buzz is what happens when many parties all come together to post about something.

What Goes Into a Digital Guide
First of all, you need to give the details of the event. Who, What, When, Where, Why.

Is there an RSVP link or a place to buy tickets? Do people need to reserve their new Sneakz in advance or can they just show up and buy them? If there is pertinent information, share it.

Give the reader the context to understand the event from 30,000 feet. The story of the day isn’t that you are opening a new store -- it’s that you are growing! Or that you are entering a new market. Or that people are so excited about your company, one store just wasn’t enough to contain your product.

The better your supporters understand how you see this day, the easier it will be for them to help tell the story you want to be told.

Share who your partners are, what time it starts, the address of the new store. If it’s something people should know, put it in the guide.

But Who Are My Partners?
The company that makes your laces by hand. The mall into which you’ll be moving. The online store selling some exclusive design of your Sneakz.

Who are the companies/organizations/brands, etc., without which you couldn’t thrive? Those are your partners.

Where Are You Online?
If you want people to write about you online, make sure they know how they can find you. Share your handles and relevant social media platforms. If you are working with a younger audience, you probably don’t have to explain how to use your tags (@s). If you are releasing a new line of orthopedic shoes and are hoping to target baby boomers, you might need to offer some instructional sections.

The question you should be asking when constructing your guide is: what do our supporters need to join us in telling our story?

What’s Your Hashtag (#)?
You should have a brand hashtag. Something you are encouraging your customers to use when they want to show off their #Sneakz. Or maybe it’s more personalized: #MySneakz. Or more active: #GetSneakz. Whatever your overarching hashtag is, include it.

If you have crafted a hashtag for this specific event, share that as well. Maybe you created a hashtag for anytime a store opens: #SneakzToYou. Or you could go hyper-specific: #SneakzMadisonEast.

Don’t just share your hashtag(s), but give examples of how they can be used.

• #SneakzMadisonEast are coming. Can’t wait to pick up my new pair of @Sneakz.
• I only wear @Sneakz. And now I can get them around the corner! So awesome. #SneakzMadisonEast.

Encourage people to create their own content, to add pictures or videos, to get clever–so long as they tag you and include your hashtag(s), a positive post is a great post!

Distributing Your Digital Guide (Who Are My Supporters?)
It’s an internal document. DO NOT publish it on your website or to your social media channels. Rather share it with your employees, interns, rapid response team, top-level fans, volunteers, etc.

Distribute this guide with anyone who will (or should) actively be working with you to tell your story throughout the event or campaign.

A Story Comes in Three Parts
Make sure to remind your supporters that every story has a beginning, a middle AND an end. Remind them (again and again) to tag you and include hashtags in EVERY post. Give sample content for each of the three.

• Before - The event is coming
• Middle -What an awesome event we are having
• End - Wow! What a great event

Now What
Creating and sharing a Digital Guide is not the end of telling your story… it’s the beginning!

You should be actively monitoring social media for both mentions of your brand and usage of your hashtag. If people are posting, engage with them.

• Share and repost their content.
• Like it.
• Comment on it.
• Thank them for being involved in your brand’s story.
• And of course, post yourself, always following the guidelines you set out in your guide.

As long as you keep asking yourself what your community needs to tell your story, and including or excluding information/samples/information accordingly, you are doing it right. There isn’t one correct Digital Guide, there’s only the one that works for you.

Create a guide for your next event. Learn from it. Tweak it as needed for future events. Learn from what worked AND from what did not. Ask your supporters what else they need to support you.

You might find it worth holding trainings, especially for staff and interns. If someone doesn’t have a Twitter or a Facebook account, they probably won’t create one just to tweet about you. Unless you help them to do so! Never underestimate the power of working with someone on their journey into social media. Trainings are an investment that will pay for themselves many, many times over.

Need a staff training or help creating a Digital Guide ? Drop me a line. These are services I offer. Or just have some questions about finishing touches or need a fresh set of eyes to help you see what you missed? I can help you there as well.

Continuously ask what your supporters need and then give it to them. They are your best asset for creating buzz and telling your story.

There are countless tools and sites out there to help optimize your social media presence. I want to share one that offers a great solution to a very common problem.

The problem
How often have you logged onto Twitter and seen people in your feed posting links to their Instagram pics? Probably pretty often. And how often have you actually clicked through to see those pictures? Probably a lot less often, right?

Fair enough. Who wants to click a link to see if the content is worth exploring?  

Wouldn’t it be nice if, without any extra work, you could post your actual Instagram pictures (as opposed to links to those awesome pictures) directly to Twitter, just like you can post them directly to Facebook? You can! And it’s easy. Let me explain.

Why post to Instagram at all?
You could post your pictures directly to Twitter, skipping over Instagram outright. But Instagram has amazing filters and very engaged audiences. The goal isn’t to minimize networks—rather it’s to minimize the amount of work it takes you to positively engage with multiple networks.

Instagram is owned by Facebook, posting there directly is as easy as hitting share. But when you try to cross-post to Twitter, they only tweet out a link. They are seeking to drive your followers away from Twitter and to Instagram. Which might be good for them. But it’s not good for you.

The solution
It’s simple. Set up an account with “If This, Then That.” (www.IFTTT.com) Once you have an account, you can set up all kinds of cool tools (they call them recipes).

• IF it’s going to rain, THEN send me an email.
  
• IF someone lists a new printer for sale on Craigslist, THEN send me an alert.
  
• IF I change my Facebook profile picture, THEN automatically change my Twitter profile picture.
  

Clearly, there’s plenty you can do with this site. But to solve this particular problem: sign up, set up a recipe so that IF you post a picture to Instagram, THEN it will share it to Twitter. You can search around in their “Recommended Recipes” or just follow this link.

Give IFTTT access to both your Instagram and Twitter accounts and confirm the recipe. Then anytime you post a picture to Instagram, it will automatically tweet out the same picture to your Twitter network. With no additional work, you will reach twice as many networks! (3x if you are already sharing directly from Instagram to Facebook.)

Now instead of your feed looking like this:

It will look like this:

Which do you think are going to get higher engagement rates?

Let me know if you need help setting up your recipes. Happy sharing!

Recently I went into Madison Sourdough (on Willy St. on the Near East side). Great restaurant, amazing bread (obviously!).

For those who haven’t been, it’s a pretty simple ordering process: you walk in, order at the counter, get a table number and then they bring your food to you. Nothing novel or groundbreaking.

But their table number got me thinking about how a business can use (or fail to use) all of their available real estate.

Here was my number:

Many restaurants would simply hand out a sign with the number on it. What a waste of valuable real estate that would have been!

Rather than simply serving as a function of the ordering process, this placard worked to both inform me that Madison Sourdough is online (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest) and to encourage me to post about them using the hashtag #MadisonSourdough.

Many customers are going to automatically post pictures of their meal online anyway. You might as well make it easy for those happy customers to give credit to the restaurant. And for those who might not have thought to snap a picture of their lunch and put it online, you get a chance to offer a little nudge in the social media direction.

So here’s a question: what real estate is your business/organization utilizing? And more importantly, which opportunities are you missing?

People are going to post about you and your brand regardless, you might as well be working with them.

A little while back, Facebook added a new feature for brand pages: the call-to-action. It is a simple button, next to “Like” on your cover photo.

Setup is extremely simple. Go to any brand page for which you are an admin. If you have not yet set one up, you will see this:

When you click the button, you will get this pop-up:

Click where it says to “Choose a Button" and you will see this dropdown box:

These are your options. Facebook does not allow you to create your own, one of these will have to do. If you aren’t sure what to select, I’d recommend using "Contact Us" (as do they—it’s the default). You can add in a url and then when people click the call-to-action, they will be taken directly to your page.

Rather than sending people to your contact page though, I’d send them to a page that does a better job of introducing yourself. They are only one click away from your contact page (or at least they should be!) and in the meantime you are better off introducing them to your brand via your homepage (or your blog/about us/services page...) then sending them to a contact us page that puts all of the onus on them.

Once the call-to-action is setup, it is extremely easy to edit. If you are an admin and you go to the page, you will see the call-to-action button. Click on it, and rather than it taking you somewhere, it will offer you this dropdown menu:

You can edit, test or delete it, view insights or promote it (pay to let people know it exists). You can see insights for it just to the right of your cover photo.

Don’t expect to see much traffic from it. It won’t be a driver, but it will give people an option to quickly and easily from your Facebook page to your site.

Just as important, to the (even remotely) trained eye, not having it will stand out as a red flag (why isn’t this brand page using all of the resources at their disposal?).

Click “Contact Us” (or whichever option you selected) and Facebook will offer up some very basic analytics.

The whole process should take less than two minutes. So heed this call-to-action and set one up today!

Do you own a business? Work in sales? Have a cause for which you want people to volunteer or give money? Maybe you are in a band or have an upcoming art show? If there is any capacity in your life that involves sharing what you do with others, then you need to develop an elevator pitch.

But what is an elevator pitch?

Let’s say you are asking people to volunteer for your organization. You bump into a friend/colleague/stranger on the street and the subject comes up. You have to make the ask, or they are certainly not going to give up THEIR Sunday afternoon to help you with YOUR cause. If the two of you wind up going to lunch together, or even coffee, then you have all the time in the world to walk through the organization you work with, the benefits of volunteering, how important their contribution will be... But 9 times out of 10 (or even 99 times out of 100), you don’t get to make your ask while waiting for a table. Most of the time, you have to make your ask while you are waiting for the light to change, or as someone is hopping into a cab, or in the time you share together in an elevator.

An elevator pitch is your opportunity to sell yourself, and your cause, to another person in the length of time that you might spend together in an elevator. A good elevator pitch is generally considered to be no more than 30 seconds.

But my ask is so much more complicated than I could possibly sum up in 30 seconds!

That might be true, but at the moment, your cause only matters to you. You don’t get 15 minutes to convert, you get 30 seconds.

Let’s imagine you are trying to explain a difficult concept to someone. You believe this concept to be EXTREMELY important. They have never heard of it and are not necessarily interested in learning about it. Are you going to hand that person a book on the subject? Or a pamphlet? The 1% of people who might be willing to read the book will surely become experts on the subject. But for everyone else, you will be lucky to get them to flip the pamphlet over before tossing it in the trash. You need to make your message simple, concise and extremely easy to digest.

Assuming that you can capture someone's attention in your allotted 30 seconds, then you might get a chance to expand on the subject. The goal of an elevator pitch is not to cram as much information in it as possible, it is to ensure that you get them wanting to learn more.

Whether it’s a client, a potential investor, a friend or even a stranger on the street, your elevator pitch should end with you offering them your business card. If they offer theirs in return, even better. Make sure and follow up!

But I don’t have a business card!

Why not?! Business cards are cheap, easy to get and extremely important. They show the receiver that you take yourself seriously.

So how do I create an elevator pitch?

First of all, elevator pitches are not going to write themselves, flawlessly and in the moment. You should practice yours. Ask a friend or colleague to listen and critique. Recite it in front of the mirror if you have to! Just get used to sharing your pitch on a moment’s notice. If it takes you 15 seconds to collect your thoughts, you just lost half your allotted time!

When crafting it, try making a list of your bullet points.

• Why is your company better than the competition?
• Why should someone volunteer with you, instead of with a different organization?
• Why is going to see your band better than catching a movie, or simply enjoying a quiet evening in?

If someone is properly engaged, you may have time to delve deeper into any one of your main points. The most important thing is that they walk away knowing that your company guarantees satisfaction. Or that you just won ethical salesman of the year. Or that your band was recently nominated for a Grammy.

Is that all?

Having a good elevator pitch does not guarantee success in your ask. But not having one all but ensures disappointment. So get to work.

Need help telling your story? Let's chat.