Social Media Archives • Page 2 of 2 • Kristin Magette

Viral Content: Careful What You Wish For

March 10, 2015 by Kristin Magette Filed Under: Growth & change, Social Media, Thoughtful work Leave a Comment

Going Viral. There are few phrases in the world of social media — and in today’s culture, for that matter — with more immediate meaning. We know the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge videos that filled our feeds. We know Justin Bieber, Susan Boyle and Gangnam Style. We know the Harlem Shake. And we know more sad cat, cute puppy and funny baby videos than we care to count.

It’s completely natural, in this age of information and sharing, to aspire to create viral content. And unless you’re breaking out a new superstar or the latest adorable child/animal, it’s only reasonable to admit that going viral is a pie-in-the-sky aspiration, at best. But in an age when celebrity status is currency, it’s also completely natural to think, Wouldn’t it be amazing if this went viral?, when releasing a message, video, photo or story that we know really is special. I can only imagine the conversations that took place at the ALS Association when they talked about this silly idea — this special idea — and contemplated how far the ice-bucket-dumping-cash-donating phenomenon would travel. I doubt anyone in the room that day predicted it would raise $115 million in two months, more than 3,500% of the money raised the year before. Viral, anyone?

Back in early February, I had a bit of a lucky spell. A Facebook post on my district page went viral. I also had two personal posts (here and here), shared just a few minutes apart with some reflections on the state of public education in my home state of Kansas. And in a way I’ve never personally experienced, these also caught fire with friends, with friends of friends and — I would come to learn — with complete strangers.

In that mad and crazy week, I learned some lessons I never expected, and a couple of them still bother me a little, sometimes.

LESSON ONE:

You will never, ever — EVER — be able to measure how far your content reached, or how many people saw it. (I almost wonder if the impossibility of measurement is somehow part of the definition of going viral.)

For someone who works in public relations — and who delights in the Facebook Insight data on a near-daily basis — the sheer inability to measure has been hard to admit. I kept thinking there just had to be a way to compile metrics on how far our post really reached, but I eventually conceded defeat. We were able to easily measure our reach from the original post, including shares and shares of shares. But there were too many original posts about our content on Facebook, often with zero connection to our first post. No matter the approach, I learned no amount of searching, measuring and piecing together would give me the complete picture. I’d just have be willing to settle on this highly scientific evaluation: An Unbelievably Large Number Of People That Destroyed Anything Else We’ve Ever Posted.

LESSON TWO:

The second lesson learned — and one that is still slightly uncomfortable to share — is the personal toll that viral content can take.

Anything that goes viral will attract haters. And let’s face it: If these people can find things to criticize on a video of a baby giraffe, they’ll surely find something to dislike about a strongly worded statement about school funding and state government.

But even the positive attention, which accounted for the vast majority of feedback on all three posts, took a toll on my mental health. The constant monitoring, the searching and counting, and just the repeated surprise and flat-out shock that these messages were on fire … these chronic hits of adrenaline made it very hard to tune out at the end of the day. At times the viral content was exhilarating, and the way it resonated with others was certainly affirming. But the roller coaster in a theme park is designed to only lasts a few minutes. As my social media roller coaster lasted hours, and then days, I wore down.

To be perfectly honest, this second lesson learned feels silly to admit. Why didn’t I just shut off my phone or stop checking stats? Why didn’t I reconfigure my personal posts to stop the strangers from seeing them? Why did I let Facebook friend requests from the adorable moms-I-have-never-met creep me out? What exactly was so hard? And why exactly did it affect me so personally?

I don’t know.

But more than once, I’ve thought of Jason Russell, the activist filmmaker and mastermind behind the Kony 2012 campaign. His video and cause went viral — 50 million views in three days! Unsurprisingly, this man was instantly in demand for high-profile interviews and phone calls, around the clock. But the intense attention generated by going viral — even though it was exactly what he aimed for — also brought Russell to a harrowing halt when he was hospitalized after a dramatic and very public psychotic break. Putting himself and his work out there for mass consumption took a psychological and physical toll that nobody would have imagined.

Source: Chris Holden / Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-holden/kony-2012-timeline_b_1387729.html

Mercifully my experience has only a teeny tiny shred in common with Jason Russell’s. But in the midst of my three posts — one professional and two personal — I glimpsed the way that going viral can scrutinize, overwhelm and ultimately break a content creator. Maybe it’s Introvert Kristin bleeding through here, but a real and lingering internal pressure lurks when content goes viral. I just couldn’t shake the sense that everyone wanted a piece of what I made, they wanted a piece of me, and they wanted it now. At the height of the sharing, I felt hollowed out, I felt overexposed and mostly, I just felt spent. I had no more to give.

But time passed, and much like a swarm of bees people moved on to the next round of content — content that someone else had created and shared. Whew. And now with the benefit of hindsight, these challenges seem more understandable, less bewildering.

Ultimately, I’m a communicator, and the messages I offer reflect my passion, my ideas and my creation. I can’t separate all my content from myself.

When it counts the most, it’s personal.

I imagine I’ll always create content that I hope will catch fire — after all, that’s the whole point of social media. But now, when I prepare to share that special idea with the world, I go in with open eyes. I prepare to feel overwhelmed and vulnerable. I prepare to care for my mental health. And I know that it will pass.

But of all the lessons I’ve learned, perhaps the simplest applies best: Be careful what you wish for … it just might come true.

From the Front Line of Viral Content

March 2, 2015 by Kristin Magette Filed Under: Social Media, Thoughtful work Leave a Comment

It’s true: The content I create on social media — personally and professionally — is hardly viral. There are times when it’s popular, of course. A charming photo of my kids on a personal account, or exciting news from our schools or community on the district’s Facebook page. And there was that one time a pie recipe pin on Pinterest went a little crazy. (Update: More than 1,100 people have since pinned the second-best coconut cream pie recipe I have.) Coconut cream pie aside, my content rarely broke the sound barrier.

Until now.

I live and work in Kansas, where the legislature is more or less at war with public schools. School funding, collective bargaining rights, school board election laws, criminalization of sex education — you name it. (I could write a whole set of posts about these struggles, but I’m not in the mood for rage right now.) This landscape, however, has set up conditions ready for viral content. Information is flying at a dizzying pace, and good people across the state are ready to share messages that resonate.

When people want a torch to carry, give them one.

But first, a little background. On Feb. 5, Gov. Sam Brownback announced an immediate cut to school funding — $81,000 in my small district — before the fiscal year ends in June 30. As we normally do, the superintendent and I wrote a message to our employees, and we adapted another version for district parents and the community at large. It just so happened that the governor’s announcement, which came around 2:30 on a Thursday afternoon, also came at a time when both the superintendent and I were in our offices, available to put our heads together, write and push these messages out. (This is sheer good luck; most days, we would not both be in the same place at the same time, and the message would have waited until the next morning.) On this day, we had a message ready to push out just a couple of hours after the news was first announced.

Knowing the level of support and engagement we have within our Facebook community, I expected that his candid letter would be popular with our regular fans. And with a handful of likes and comments — and 90+ shares — I wasn’t disappointed.

What I didn’t expect was that people who are unconnected to our community and district — often living hundreds of miles away — would begin taking up our torch and sharing it on their own. I knew we were in uncharted territory the moment I saw a tweet in my feed with a link to the district web page where the superintendent’s message actually lived. And our district does not tweet — these were people who saw the post on Facebook and took it to Twitter. (And look, I’ve seen Outbreak. I know when a virus jumps from pig to human, it’s a big deal.) Over the next few days, I found dozens of tweets — many with dozens of retweets — that linked to that single page on our website.

Searching through Facebook and Twitter, I tracked down posts from elected officials, statewide organizations, well-connected social media users. It became impossible to keep up; even Facebook’s insights can’t capture impressions and engagement when others are simply posting a link to the website. We’ll never know how many people our content reached that night, and into the weekend. But by the following Monday, here’s what I could put my finger on:

37,412 visits to the superintendent message page on our website. (Our other high-traffic pages — the calendar and the lunch menus — typically bring in roughly 2,000 visits in a month.) It’s interesting to note that 99% of these web page visits were referred from from mobile devices and were referred from another site, not from a search engine.
More than 100,000 post reach from our district Facebook page. (Most weeks, this number is typically in the range of 2,000.)
394 shares from the Facebook pages of two state-wide education advocacy groups that posted a link to our web page that Thursday evening. These shares are separate from our original post and in addition to the 90+ shares originating from our page — not to mention our post reach.
3,713 bitly clicks from our Facebook post (or shares from our post) to the website page.

To put this in perspective, the Eudora Schools Facebook page has 1,900 fans; our town has 6,500 residents.

Even a few weeks later, it’s humbling to review these metrics and think about the rate that our little message was consumed and shared. My intuition tells me that the Thursday evening timing was an important factor for this post to go viral. Had the news come on a Friday — or had our message been delayed for any reason — there would have been far fewer people hanging around on social media into the evening, engaging with and sharing content. But regardless of why or how, this experience has revealed the opportunities — and the challenges — when content goes viral.

When pie goes viral

September 1, 2014 by kristinmagette Filed Under: Social Media Leave a Comment

Whether I’m at work or not, social media is part of my daily life — and the time I spend on Twitter and Pinterest are my favorite. The rapid, continuous flow of new ideas, perspectives and things to try? That’s a slice of heaven for this information junkie.

And so, in late July, Pinterest was the logical destination in my quest to find the perfect recipe for the birthday that my son and husband share. After a fair bit of discernment and negotiation, they agreed that coconut cream pie would be the thing to cap off this grand double-birthday-day. Yes, Pinterest is a trigger for inferiority complexes across the social landscape. (Even I must dial it back when I start feeling guilty for not a) making my own soap b) packing a bento box with whole foods for my son’s school lunch c) owning a jar of Modge Podge.) But when it comes to finding a great recipe — one that is blogged about, photographed, explained, reviewed and shared — there’s no place I’d rather start.

In one evening, I scanned dozens of coconut cream pie recipes and very mindfully pinned the four most decadent, well-conceived recipes I found. A few days later, I selected the most promising — The World’s Best Coconut Cream Pie Ever — and made the most ridiculously crave-worthy coconut cream pie that any of us had ever had. I even made sure to go back and leave myself comments on the pin, indicating that I had made it, and we’d loved it. (Such comments are important to me, as I cannot be expected to remember which coconut cream pie recipe we fell in love with. Most days I’m lucky if I can remember my e-mail password.)

But as we were licking our plates after the birthday dinner, something else was happening in the Pinterest world.

Although I use social media a lot, the content I post never goes viral. Two or three retweets, or a half dozen “likes” or repins is viral in my humble world. So imagine my surprise when one of the recipes — not the one I made and left two comments on — did something much different. Somehow, that pin has gone viral.

It started like any other, with three or four repins over a couple days. And then it got going, five or so at a time. A few weeks ago, I’d hit nearly 100 repins, but it seemed to be tapering off. But then last weekend it caught fire again, and by Tuesday I was up to 180 repins. It was at that point that I announced to my husband (and on Twitter), “If this thing hits 200 repins, I’m going to have to make it to at least see if it’s any good.”

So today, with 225 pins and still climbing, I made The Absolute Best Coconut Cream Pie. We ate it. We loved it. But it wasn’t, however, as good as the first pie we made. The one on my Sweet Tooth board with no likes or repins? That’s the keeper.

Unlike the astoundingly viral ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, coconut cream pie — even the very best one — can’t change the world. But this mini-viral pie pin has made me think a lot about posts that catch fire, and it’s been a reminder that viral can be based on very little substance or validity. Researchers have found that viral content is typically highly emotional, tapping into anger, humor and other strong emotions that are universally experienced in social spheres. My pie pin couldn’t possibly have made anyone overly angry or giddy, so I point instead to the pass-along nature of Pinterest — one person pins, and her followers see it. One or two of those repin to their followers, and a few of those pinners do the same.

My hunch is, this exponential exposure is responsible for the ongoing flurry of repins. That, and the fact that a recipe for coconut cream pie (whether or not it deserves to be called “absolute best”) is, at once, aspirational, attainable and entirely delectable.

Not as different as we look

August 29, 2014 by kristinmagette Filed Under: Social Media, Thoughtful work Leave a Comment

Although I work in K-12 education, many of the very best social media practices I use came from colleagues in the varied worlds of small business, non-profit and corporate. Virtually everything I do – the way I build our school district’s online community, the way I craft our messages, the way I handle an angry parent or patron – all of these are heavily influenced by the smart people I know (IRL and on Twitter) who manage social media in all kinds of sectors.

And the greatest thing I’ve learned from this collaboration of learning and sharing is that we communicators – from corporate to government, and everywhere in between – are much more similar than we may appear on the surface…

We all have stakeholders, clients and customers. And these groups of people are vital to our success, whether we are selling, creating, helping, serving or educating. The best practices for building and engaging a social media community are consistent, regardless of the business, agency or organization. In addition, the online communities we manage also sometimes have angry people – occasionally even crazy angry people – and the strategies for handling these interactions are effective across all fields.
We all have employees who use social media personally and, sometimes, as part of their job. We know that boundaries and guidelines help ensure that our employees are the best reflection of our mission and brand. We also know that it takes a focused, strategic effort to empower, trust and monitor multiple “official” contributors to social media. Empowering multiple content creators leads to greater community engagement – but it also demands greater planning and management from the top.
We all have a reputation to protect, including our brand and the leaders associated with the brand. It may be a product or service. It may be a CEO, a manager, an elected official or a superintendent. It could be logos, intellectual property or simply the organization’s public image. We know that social media cannot be ignored in the work of brand and reputation management. Whether people are talking to us in our communities or talking about us in other communities, we must monitor, understand and, often, proactively engage, to ensure the integrity of our organization’s reputation.
We all – with rare and lucky exception – have people in leadership positions who get nervous about the role that social media plays in all of the areas above. How do we bring along governing boards and reluctant leaders? How do we demonstrate the value – quantitative and qualitative – that a strategically managed social media community offers to our organizations? And how do we help leaders to face fears, mitigate risk, and embrace opportunity?

It’s true: Not everyone gets to work in a place with school buses, recess, plays, spelling bees, concerts, science fairs and football games. But the strategies, perspectives, challenges and opportunities that come with social media and the organizations we represent – those are what we all share.

I originally wrote this as a guest post for the Social Media Club of Kansas City, where I will be participating in a panel discussion next week about social media in schools.

Jump in, the water’s great!

May 8, 2014 by kristinmagette Filed Under: Embracing Social Media: A Practical Guide to Manage Risk and Leverage Opportunity, Social Media, Thoughtful work Leave a Comment

We’ve just celebrated a cool anniversary in my school district. A couple of years ago, the leaders here decided that it was time to embrace social media as a broad tool in education. A communications tool. A teaching tool. A learning tool. We had an established Facebook page, and a few teachers dabbling on their own time. (Because, of course our school district filters didn’t allow them on Facebook or Twitter. I had double-secret-probation-extra-special filter settings to manage our district page at work.)

But two years ago, my superintendent decided that locking down social media was no longer the best option. No, the ostrich pose wasn’t going to serve our students well (at all). With the help of a nearby consultant with a hefty corporate social media pedigree and personal passion for local schools, we wrote policy and guidelines, we set up a few procedures to keep the internal lines of communication open, we provided training to our employees. And we reconfigured our network filters to allow adult users the privileges to access social media at work. Crazy, I know.

In the time since, I’ve been asked to share our story with different groups and in a few trade magazines. (I’m also writing a book on this subject, which is why my blog has been so sad over the past few months. But this whole book nonsense is another post for another day.) When I’m asked to share our social media story what always surprises me is, really, how simple our work has been.

Without a doubt, social media can inspire enormous fear and loathing in the hearts and minds of school districts, non-profits, public agencies and — especially — the boards that govern these groups.

We read the stories and see the reports on television about people making really bad decisions on the social media stage. In education, we see teachers and administrators who lose their jobs, kids who jeopardize their future goals, and parents who go a little (and sometimes a lot) crazy.

But the simple lesson that we’ve learned — over and again — in the past two years is that social media is no different than the other issues that we manage every day. We serve kids lunch every day because our food and nutrition services workers have been trained in safe kitchen skills and food safety. We transport kids on buses every day because our drivers follow specific vehicle, traffic and safety procedures. At the end of the day, our work is embedded with basic risk management. Social media programs included.

We believe that social media offers a huge reward. We can engage with parents in a content-rich, real-time exchange. We can create legitimate relevance and rigor for our students as they learn. (Show me the student who won’t bring their A game if told his or her work will be on a public stage.) We can encourage our staff to seek professional development through the enormous opportunities on Twitter. And now, we can serve as encouragers and guides to other districts and organizations, still wrestling with fear of the unknown, or unsure about the process of embracing social media.

Our story here means a lot of things to me. But I hope the most important take-away to you is this: Jump in (or wade in, or dip your toe in) and see for yourself — the water’s great!

Hi, I’m Kristin

Follow Me on Twitter

follow me

Hi, I’m Kristin

Follow Me on Twitter