The Public Affairs Council’s Social Media and Advocacy Summit proved again this year that there is a lot we can share and learn from one another in the public affairs community. Whether you hail from an agency, the Hill, a brand or a trade association, there were great takeaways, case studies and feedback to help us all continue to hone our techniques and strategies.

Kathy Jeavons of Ketchum best captured the overarching lesson of the day: “It’s becoming clearer every day that social media needs to be part of a holistic public affairs campaign.” While today’s outreach advancements are rooted in new technology and capabilities, the sound strategies behind them are still based in the tried and true lessons of traditional outreach methods: Determine your goals before picking your tactics, do your research — and then it all comes down to effective messaging.

The following are some other key takeaways from the summit:

Have a mission statement for your social presence. Paige Fadden of Wal-Mart, Tammy Gordon of AARP andBen Tomchik of the American Insurance Association (Full disclosure: I work with Ben and AIA on their communications strategy) represent three organizations with vastly different strategies, engagement styles and levels of investment in social media. The common message from the presenters, though: Set goals early and then pick the tactics for achieving them. Too often, we are lured by a new platform or tool. But it’s important to focus our time and resources where our target audience wants to communicate with us, regardless of the latest trend.

Why was this campaign successful? It began with two months of research. Mike Connery of Powell Tate and Ketchum’s Kathy Jeavons outlined their methods for shaping a successful campaign. In short, don’t put your campaign elements in silos. Your tactics need to work together; and to achieve your goals, you have to do research before you begin your campaign. You can see this approach in action by looking at the success of campaigns such as“This is Personal,” from the National Women’s Law Center.

Personal stories are far more effective than blast emails. Tim Cameron, director of digital media, Office of the Chair, House Republican Conference, silenced the clangs of forks and knives during the lunch panel with those simple, horrifying words we all know to be true. Then he went on to relate that Congress is now using Correlate, a tool to batch emails with 85 percent or more message similarity. Therefore, incorporating tactics that enable the sharing of unique stories as part of a larger campaign strategy is now more important than ever. Successful storytelling campaigns, such as “Food Dialogues” from USFRA, allow individuals to share personal narratives that resonate with lawmakers and encourage others to join the conversation. While letters to the Hill will always be an important tool, it’s best to focus on personalizing messages and looking at alternative forms of delivery that fit the goals of a campaign.

So let’s all get on the same page and start our campaigns by establishing goals and doing our research before choosing our tactics.

New banner features:  Your YouTube banner – the customizable graphic that “lives” at the top of your YouTube channel – will now be optimized for a number of different platforms, including desktop, TV, tablet and mobile. This feature offers viewers a consistent brand experience no matter where they’re accessing the video from, which is particularly important as mobile video viewership is rapidly growing. The new design also allows organizations to include social media links on the banner, driving valuable traffic back to a brand’s other social properties. For optimal performance, make sure the image you upload is 2560 x 1440 pixels.

30-second trailer: Space for a short “trailer” or introduction video is available near the top of your channel, which can help introduce new viewers to your brand and encourage them to be loyal followers. According to YouTube, “This is your chance to let [new viewers] know what your channel is all about and encourage them to subscribe.” You can program your channel to play this trailer to all viewers or just to new (non-subscribed) viewers. The American Red Cross and AARP both have good short trailer examples.

Customizable playlists: Administrators now have more control over which content is curated on their channel. This content can be organized into three categories: related channels, interest lists and content playlists of your own videos. “Grouping together interest lists such as Star Wars and Doctor Who for our fans is great and will hopefully optimize specific categories for us,” Steve Zimmerman of ThinkGeek told Entrepreneur. “We can also highlight our older videos.”

Word to the wise: remember that managing a YouTube channel is a significant investment of time and resources which, if done well, requires a lot of maintenance. ClickZ’s Tessa Wegert reminds us: “If there’s one digital media trend we’ve seen emerge as a powerhouse this year thus far, it has to be branded content. Videos in particular can elicit a deep and impassioned response from consumers, and create an enormous amount of brand buzz. But many of them are one-off efforts that stand alone; they’re watched and shared, yes, but that’s often where the connection between brand and viewer ends.”

*Looking to drive more traffic to your organization’s page? Check out my previous post on SEO for organizations on YouTube.

Few people know that when James first started at Adfero as an intern in 2005, James had no accounting background and taught himself bookkeeping and basic accounting principles by reading introductory textbooks on accounting and financial management. Having since graduated from Georgetown University’s business school, James has consistently demonstrated natural business and leadership acumen throughout his eight years at Adfero.

“I can’t emphasize enough how incredible James’ professional trajectory at Adfero has been,” said Jeff Mascott, Adfero Group’s managing partner. “In just a short time, James was operating at an extraordinarily high level, executing tasks that most people in his field need years of experience to take on.”

As CFO, James plays an integral role in the strategic growth of the company. From creating budgets and managing company cash flow to designing methods for proper resource management and allocation, James is principally accountable for the firm’s financial planning procedures. As James ascended from Director of Finance and Operations to Vice President, and eventually to CFO, Adfero Group has grown by 43 percent year after year and maintained increasingly high levels of profitability.

James is also a fixture of our office culture. His sense of humor is infectious, and, though his day-to-day job requires him to have unwavering integrity and high ethical standards, James’ colleagues describe him as an “easygoing guy who is a pleasure to work with,” and someone who “makes people look forward to coming to work.”

We look forward to July 18, when Washington Business Journal will reveal the winner of the award. Regardless of the final results, we are incredibly proud of James and the work he has contributed to our firm.

The first event offered attendees insight about the benefits, functions and capabilities of using Google Analytics. If you are interested in seeing which pages garner the highest number of visits or how long someone stays on your site, you must add a simple line of code into the back end of your company’s website. Attendees were encouraged to do this immediately as Google Analytics does not start tracking information until the day the tracking code is added.

Adfero’s Senior Technologist John Jones and R Street Institute’s Director of Digital Marketing Zach Graves reviewed some basics of Google Analytics including:

• Unique visitors: The number of people who visited your site. They might visit multiple times and look at numerous pages, but they are only counted once.
• Pages per visit: The average number of pages each unique visitor views.
• Traffic sources: Where the traffic is coming from (e.g. Twitter, a search engine, etc.)
• Time on site: The average amount of time your visitors spend on your site.
• Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who landed on your site and then left without visiting another page.

During our second session on Web Analytics, John, Zach and Adfero’s Director of Interactive Services, Gary Nuzzi, walked attendees through some more advanced techniques, including goal funnels, A/B testing, and heat map generation. The experts discussed a variety of free and paid-for tools that can help you bring a higher level of sophistication and accuracy to your analytics.

Before delving into a discussion of the tools, the panelists emphasized that determining which metrics are relevant to your organization is one of the most crucial steps when assessing web metrics. For example, traffic to your website may not be the most important thing to measure; you may instead be looking at how many people are signing up for a newsletter or signing a petition on your site. Once you have determined what your what your most important metrics are, you can begin measuring and making decisions.

• Goal funnels: If your website has a multi-step process (e.g. writing to Congress) goal funnels allow you to look at what percentage of people drop off – leave your website – with each successive step. This percentage value is called a conversion rate. Using goal funnels can help you make better decisions about how you design your website to minimize drop off.

• A/B testing: Known as “Google Experiments” within Google Analytics, A/B testing is a common way to test changes to your website and determine which changes produce positive results. For example, if you have a blank field for an email newsletter signup, you can use A/B testing to see if the field is more successful on, say, the top of your homepage (option A) or the bottom of your homepage (option B). When you employ A/B testing, you can choose the percentage of visitors who will see option A versus option B, and make design decisions based on the option that performs better. A commercial software product that offers more robust tools for non-developers is Optimizely.

• Heat Maps: Various companies, such as Crazy Egg, offer heat map data that tracks which areas of a webpage that users are focusing on for longer times. This can be done by analyzing the movement of a users’ mouse or by tracking users’ eye movements. (The latter method is much more complicated and expensive.) Both features let you see what’s “hot” on your website (and what’s not), so that you can make changes that increase conversions.

No matter how involved you choose to be with your website’s analytics, being mindful of this data can help you make the case for change in your organization.

Join us on Friday, June 14 for get{smart}’s next event, Facebook Advertising 201 for Advocacy & Grassroots. Find out more here!

One of the most notable features of this very well funded, high-profile advocacy effort is that it does not involve an aggressive email component, instead relying primarily on Facebook and Twitter to disseminate its message. The campaign organizers have provided an option for volunteers to call their Senators, though this feature seems secondary to the list of virtual events that are taking place across the country.

Electronic communication has made it vastly easier for constituents to become involved in public policy, and email has ruled this space for the last decade. Members of Congress receive tens of thousands of email communications each year; an entire private industry has been built around contacting lawmakers and it is increasingly easy for constituents to send a “form” email to their Member of Congress on virtually any topic or issue. In 2011, a survey of more than 250 congressional staff found that in-person visits, individualized postal letters and individualized emails are considered among the most effective advocacy strategies on the part of constituents. Constituent communication via a form email was not considered nearly as effective as any of the aforementioned strategies, and leaving a comment on a lawmaker’s social media page rounded out the bottom of the list.

So it’s somewhat interesting that the organizers of the March for Innovation decided not to include email to Senators as part of its strategy, opting instead for a massive social media push. The campaign has provided a range of tools to enable volunteers to act on behalf of the movement, including pre-written tweets (#iMarch), Facebook posts, and even a custom-designed Facebook profile image. Though there is pre-written email language for volunteers to send, the campaign organizers instruct advocates not to send emails to their lawmakers but to their friends and family, “encouraging them to iMarch.”

Is social media advocacy truly on the rise? Could it be that large-scale social media movements, such as the Human Rights Campaign’s marriage equality effort, are having more of an effect on Members and their staff than former methods of communication? Today in POLITICO, a representative from the campaign emphasized that the purpose of the March for Innovation is really to go beyond Washington. “This is digital,” Carlos Gutierrez said. “This gets out to a lot of different people all around the country. A lot of people around the country are being exposed to this; it’s not just an inside Washington thing.”