Session 16: Mini-Retrospective for Social Media Campaign
Hi there. Welcome to this session of Online Notes – the project about creating an online system for hosting Cryptiquest project notes. The last session was about formulating the social media campaign. I intended to add the about page and a welcome message to the site, but I was unable to get to it yet. Meanwhile, the campaign was not as successful as hoped.
Here are the objectives and their result:
Goal: Use the creation of the site to find, connect with, and build an audience.
Objective 1: The site launch campaign will garner at least 20 interactions on Facebook (got 7 out of 20) and 3% engagement on Twitter (averaged 7% vs. 3% which is okay?).
Objective 2: The site launch campaign will garner at least 8 new followers (got 0 out of 8) on Facebook and 2 new followers on Twitter (got 0 out of 2).
Objective 3: This site launch campaign will bring at least 50 unique visitors (got 11 out of 50) to the Cryptiquest Projects site.
Objective 4: The site launch will correspond with the five year anniversary date of January 29, 2019 (which it did).
The campaign failed to meet a majority of its objectives and ultimately failed its goal.
The Story
On Tuesday, January 29, the first post went live on Twitter and Facebook at 11:00 am. This announcement was met with a less-than-tepid response.
The second post, which received more attention on Facebook and less attention on Twitter, was launched at 9:00 am. This post was SUPPOSED to be sent from the “developer” using the CQ StoryHammer account but neither Facebook nor Twitter allowed my to respond, retweet, or post an image from one account (within the social media platform) to the other (within the same platform). So I needed to improvise. I instead launched the post from the Cryptiquest accounts with the same message – completely doing away with the back-and-forth friendly banter.
The third post, which received the most attention on both platforms (but still weak by every objective standard) was launched at 4:00 pm on Thursday. Again, this post was published without the banter. Instead it was posted as if the “party was getting out of hand”.
The Crux
While the campaign was a dud, this was a great learning lesson for future attempts. Before I get to that though, I want to point out that a major reason this campaign was doomed because I didn’t reach out to new audiences and the audience I did reach out to wasn’t interested in project management tools or notes about projects I’m working on (and who would be?). But more specifically, this project was doomed because the goal was incorrect, which I’ll address in the Lessons Learned.
Lessons Learned
- Perform a “trial run” to test your approach. It was a damn shame to put all the work into having a friendly banter just to have it not work since I didn’t fully understand the limitations of the social media platforms. I would like to avoid that in the future.
- Know the actual goal of your message. I see now that thinking that this announcement was going to somehow increase Cryptiquest’s followership was outrageous. In hindsight, I think I tried to shove a square peg in a round hole (or a square “post” in a round “goal”, as it were). The real goal should have been to raise awareness of the site. That’s it. Now people are unaware of the site, unaware that new messages will be on their way, and why any of that will happen.
- Write out an hour-by-hour schedule. Overkill? Maybe. I know that for this campaign I had no idea when to post which is easy to lose sight of and panic about if, after launch, you receive a response that was unexpected. It would have been better to have that schedule scripted out ahead of time – by the hour.
Lessons Addressed
Addressing the first lesson, I believe a fix could be the creation of a Marketing Guide – which lists which outlets Cryptiquest has, their purpose and under what circumstances, approaches, and timings they should be used to disseminate information. This could include technological limitations and standard protocols (including how to test and pinpoint the goal of the message).
Regarding the second lesson, the goal of this campaign should have been to raise awareness of the project. I missed that this time but all is not lost. I can release a new message that explains all that stuff – linking to the PRESS RELEASE. You may not know about this thing, but I created a press release back in session 14 and figured I’d announce it to the world a week later. So, that’s where the education can come into play.
As for the third lesson, I could include a blank schedule with suggestions for the next multi-post campaign as part of the Marketing Guide.
Action Items
- Create Marketing Guide
- Inventory Cryptiquest media outlets
- Outline the suggested steps and conditions for each type of message
- Create ways to identity the goal of the message
- Create protocol for testing the feasibility of the approach
- Create a blank schedule for multi-post campaigns.
- Create new campaign for the Site Launch
- Use press release as the action item
- Explain purpose of site and that project updates will be on their way.
I will add these two items to the the All Project Deliverables list. In the next session, I think I will finally complete the About page and welcome message. Then, I have to work on that Marketing Guide, followed by the new campaign for the site launch before working on the retrospective of this project and its subsequent launch.
(Come to think of it, having a launch guide removes the marketing portion from the project and makes it an external thing. I like that.)
That’s all for now. See you next time.