Blue Helm

Activate the masses through social media

It’s been a busy few months for us here at Blue Helm. We’ve worked with some exciting new clients –from leading financial advisors at Northwestern Mutual to community education experts at Utah Valley University to the ambitious health food company, SunDrenchers. By far the group we’ve collaborated with the most over the past several months, however, are the folks over at America’s Freedom Festival at Provo, who work tirelessly to organize and promote year-round patriotic celebrations throughout the state of Utah.

The Freedom Festival sponsors one the nation’s largest (if not the largest) Independence Day extravaganza every year called the Stadium of Fire, located in LaVell Edwards Stadium on the campus of BYU. Last year they invited the Jonas Brothers, SHeDAISY and Glenn Beck to perform. And the year before that was Miley Cyrus and Blue Man Group. Big stars like that, in addition to thousands of other dancers, singers, volunteer performers and a trillion pounds of fireworks, make this quite a show. Needless to say, this is no humdrum July 4th celebration, and the Freedom Festival needed a social media campaign to match this colossal patriotic performance.

We strategized here at Blue Helm for a while and decided that the Freedom Festival needed an online campaign that not only energized its thousands of fans, but activated them. How could we use the Freedom Festival’s existing social media platforms to galvanize its fan base into doing something, thus enhancing the admiration, loyalty and passion they have for the organization? What could we do to attract other members of the community to its cause? How could be grow its social media fan base, all the while galvanizing and motivating its existing fans into taking positive action?

To make a long story short, we organized Vote the Voice—a three-part campaign that invited people to vote for a future Stadium of Fire performer. You can read more about the campaign (and the viral stir it caused) here. We promoted the campaign extensively, utilizing Facebook, Twitter and the local media. But the response to Vote the Voice was more than we could have ever anticipated. Over 75,000 votes were cast, some from as far away as New Zealand, Saudi Arabia and the Philippines. Blogs and news sites from across the United States picked up on the story, and we were overwhelmed with thousands of comments, links and wall posts on the Freedom Festival’s social networks. Even now that the campaign has officially ended, fans continue to send us votes and comments saying who they want to see perform this summer.

Moral of the story: Choose a social media campaign that mobilizes your fans and prompts them to do something. The Freedom Festival’s fans are now expert lobbyists, motivating (sometimes begging) other fans to vote for their pick. And it turned out to be a PR coup for the Freedom Festival as well.

Activate your Facebook, Twitter and blog fans. Posting random updates that don’t ask your fans to do anything will result in a lower level of fan participation, thus undermining the point of using social media.

Photo by: Elisabeth Feldman

Recently social media super stars Chris Brogan and Julien Smith released a new book called Trust Agents. In a relatively short time, the book skyrocketed in sales and became a New York Times Bestseller. But how did a book written by two first-time authors become such a success in such a short period of time?

I’m sure many of you read that question, rolled your eyes, and said to yourselves: “Well, it’s because they have 100,000 people following them on Twitter, tens of thousands of people who read their blogs, over 2500 fans of their Trust Agents Facebook page and they’re connected to people with huge online followings.”

Yes, that all contributed to the book’s success. But we’re leaving out the most important factor: psychology.

The Psychology

The two psychological principles I want to focus on are the Foot-in-the-Door technique and the Law of Consistency. The Foot-in-the-Door technique states that if you initially get someone to commit to something small, they will later commit to something bigger. The Law of Consistency states that people have a strong desire to be consistent in their thoughts and actions, and will go to great lengths to attain or maintain the feeling of consistency. A person’s desire to remain consistent may drive her to commit to something very large, even if she was previously only committed to something very small.

Visit the links below to better understand these laws:

The Foot-in-the-Door technique

The Law of Consistency

How Chris and Julien used the psychology

The first Foot-in-the-Door commitment Chris and Julien used was to get fans connected with them through social media. It’s a very simple commitment to ask someone to follow you on Twitter, to be friends with you on Facebook, to connect with you on LinkedIn or to read your blog.

Chris and Julian then leveraged their social platforms to prepare their connections to commit to buying and promoting their book at some point in the future. In October 2008, Chris wrote a blog post that outlined some strategies they were going to use to promote Trust Agents. One of his points was to “warm people up with blog posts”.

The second Foot-in-the-Door commitment they used was to get their fans to join the Facebook page for their book. These Facebook fans had now committed to at least two requests. As a result, their internal desire to remain consistent (and buy the book) increased.

The third commitment was to buy the book, followed closely by the fourth commitment–to promote the book. As people committed to buying the book, they felt the need to be consistent and respond to Chris and Julien’s requests to promote the book. Chris admits where the success of the book came from: “You pushed. You tweeted. You blogged. You showed people twitpics. You took part in the Trust Agents community. It was all you.”

How you can use the psychology

These simple psychological principles are key to the success of any social media campaign. You have to get people to commit to something smaller in order to get them to commit to something bigger. Here are a few simple steps to help you employ these principles:

1. Network – Connect with people! It will take time to build a large network, but don’t forget that you are preparing a place to commit people to bigger and better things. Start building your network now!
2. Provide great content – People have committed to connecting with you, now reward them for making that commitment. Provide content that your connections want to read. This will prepare your connections for greater commitments in the future.
3. A larger commitment – Commit your connections to something a little bigger. You could get them to join a product page like Chris and Julien did, or you could just get them to make regular comments on your blog, maybe retweet a message or bookmark your post.
4. Ask for the big commitment – Don’t forget to ask. One the main reasons Trust Agents is so successful is because Chris and Julien asked people to buy and promote it. If you don’t ask people for their business or their help, they are much less likely to give it to you.