I just ran my first mission on Empire Avenue. Here is what I learned.
What is a Mission?
Missions drive social engagement. I setup my Mission to ask people to visit http://www.jbspartners.com and click on the social sharing buttons on the left side of the page. You can click on the ones right here on this page if you like. 🙂
Each mission provides an award of Empire Avenue currency, in this case 1,000 eaves. I arranged to have 30 missions available to whoever wanted to participate.
The 30 Missions cost me 60,000 eaves. I opted to mail all shareholders, which cost another $2,875 or so I think because I have 474 shareholders and this was my first Mission. I can see that sending Mail for a second Mission is more than twice as costly at 5,850 with the same award and number of Missions.
Before the Mission I had small numbers of social mentions;
- Likes – 26
- Tweets – 15
- Google+ – 11
- Stumble Upon – 2
- LinkedIn – was added during the Mission, started with 4
Mission Description and Text
Title: Provide Social Sharing
The Details…
Likes 19Mission: Please click on the social sharing buttons on the left side of http://www.jbspartners.com to Like, Tweet, G+ and/or Stumble please.
Thank you very much!
What you see is a very simple and brief title that is clear about what the mission is. The Mission text makes it even clearer. I said “please” twice, at the beginning and end on purpose and followed-up with “thanks”.
Mission Results
- Likes – 41 (+15)
- Tweets – 63 (+48)
- Google+ – 28 (+17)
- Stumble Upon – 2 (+0)
- LinkedIn – 6 (+6)
Mission Lessons
The sharing tools that I installed uses the page name instead of the meta title to share the page. So, on Twitter every link was described as “Home” instead of something much more meaningful and helpful.
So, I got a lot of tweets like this;
Home http://www.jbspartners.com/ via @fairminder
Home jbspartners.com via @fairminder
— AnneThomas (@annehthomas) January 3, 2012
Instead of like this;
WordPress powered Websites, Blogs, and Marketing.http://www.jbspartners.com/ via @fairminder
WordPress powered Websites, Blogs and Marketing. jbspartners.com via @fairminder
— Steve SchraderBachar (@MortgageMinute) January 3, 2012
To resolve this I need to add a custom navigation menu which will allow me to change the Home page title to anything I want while keeping the navigation text simply “Home”.
19 people “Liked” the mission on the mission page. This likely helped spread the word inviting others to do the Mission.
I also posted news of the Mission on the Team Zen Facebook page. I think the shareholder was the primary driver though.
The mission only took about two hours after being launched in the morning around 10am EST.
Reactions
It is interesting to translate virtual the social currency and “spend” it in a way that may bring value to the JBS Partners website and my business.
I will try this again for sure. I might try a lower Mission reward (500 eaves) and see if it works as well. I am only asking for a click after all.
This generated a lot of Tweets in one day, more than 50. So if you are a Klout watcher, this is sure to nudge your score up.
I would like to try specifically asking for Just Stumble Upon. It may be that folks don’t have accounts. However, I have seen a lot of traffic generated by Stumble Upon so it is worth going after with the right kind of content.
I am a satisfied Mission customer.
Have you tried an Empire Avenue Mission? What was your experience?
You can read more Empire Avenue success stories here.
Thanks Jim. Your thinking is much like mine when it comes to the value of social media. You can’t ignore the bottom line, but at the same time social media relationships just like offline relationships often take a while to build and don’t usually “convert” on the first contact.