Growing Blueberry Knowledge via Social Networks

Abstract

The All About Blueberries Community of Practice (CoP) is being built to guide blueberry producers in the southeastern region of the United States in methods to maximize productivity, decrease production costs, and increase the marketability of their crops. A CoP is defined as blueberry producers—both backyard and commercial—distributors and consumers, both adult and youth. The CoP is incorporating the best existing extension publications and developing new research-based extension recommendations related to blueberry production and consumption. The primary goal is to increase blueberry production and consumption of blueberries. The general public is inundated with information via the World-Wide Web. According to a survey by www.netcraft.com, 132,469 websites were added each day in 2009. The number of active websites increased by more than 300% between 2005 and 2009. For this project, Google alerts are being used to notify the CoP of blueberry information as it is posted online. The information is then summarized and posted to a WordPress blog. Postings on the blog are automatically posted to the Facebook fan page and then to a Twitter feed. All of these resources are free to use and free to access. The consumer audience prefers to receive information via a variety of channels, and this allows for optimizing the reach of the project. After the launch of the All About Blueberries site on the www.extension.org website, the CoP will transition to sharing the websites posted online as the primary resource of information. The CoP's goal is to build credibility as expert sources of information via these social networking tools and increase traffic to the extension.org website when it is published.

Keywords:

• blueberry
• Facebook
• Twitter
• WordPress
• extension
• Google Alerts

INTRODUCTION

The popularity of social networking sites is increasing each day. According to some experts, the reason for this is the “network effect,” or the amount of usage a product gets. The more people who use a product, the more popular it becomes. In the “Economics of IT, Network Effects,” Arun Sundararajan of New York University writes, “A product displays positive network effects when more usage of the product by any user increases the product's value for other users (and sometimes all users)” (Sundararajan, 2003).

Network effects were first studied in the early 1970s on the use of telephones by people communicating long distance. In “A Theory of Interdependent Demand for a Communications Service,” Jeffrey Rohlfs of Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, writes, “The utility that a subscriber derives from a communications service increases as others join the system” (Rohlfs, 1974).

In his presentation, “Network Effects,” Moreno Marzolla of the University of Bologna in Italy, says that people make some of their decisions based on beliefs they incur when they align their behavior with the behaviors of other people. For many people, this alignment occurs by their use of social networks because it is in these settings they determine what is “important.” Thus, the value of a social networking site increases as the number of people who use it also increases (Marzolla, 2010).

Because social networks have so much influence on the way people think these networks can be excellent marketing sources for businesses and other entities that have messages to relay. In “Website Marketing with Social Networking,” Pat Spence writes about how businesses can “get web traffic with Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.” She writes that, with so much competition for attention and business, “it's no longer enough to offer great products or services at competitive prices.” People need an “edge to compete in today's marketplace,” she writes. And, this edge can be found in social networking and relationship building (Spence, 2010a).

People do business with people they like and trust, Spence writes. In today's world of the internet, people need to be able to like and trust what they see on the web. This is where social networks come in. Social networks can create traffic for websites by allowing for “backlinks,” which are links from other websites to your site. Backlinks are created when posts are spread or “retweeted.” The more backlinks that are created to a website, the more likely that website is to get noticed, or “enhanced,” by search engines, thereby allowing for the site to be placed high on lists when a search is done on information provided on the site.

Having a successful marketing campaign is one way to increase website traffic and get high quality backlinks. In “Strategy for a Successful Marketing Campaign: Increase Website Traffic and Quality Backlinks,” Spence writes that having effective article marketing is key to successful website marketing (Spence, 2010b).

Internet article marketing involves articles about businesses, or products that also serve as advertising tools for companies. Internet articles contain information, such as content about an industry, service, or are articles for how to do something. These articles also contain links to the company's or organization's website. The All About Blueberries www.extension.org site will include information on how to do something—raise and/or eat blueberries.

To attract more traffic to your website, Spence writes it is important to use different keywords for different articles on the same general topic. “(This) will help maximize website exposure by increasing the odds of being picked up by search engines,” she writes.

In the article, “How Internet Search Engines Work,” Spence explains what is needed to attract more traffic to a website. She begins by stating it “requires effective and consistent search engine marketing strategies to earn a high ranking,” or to have your website place high on a page when a search is done. There are several different search engines, including Google, Yahoo, Ask, etc. These engines use “complex and evolving algorithms” to determine which websites rank in a search, and these rankings have to be “earned,” she writes (Spence, 2010c).

To “earn” a high ranking, a website needs to have a high number of visitors. This puts new websites at somewhat of a disadvantage because they have not had time to earn a “following,” as those sites that are more established.

There are several ways to increase website traffic including participation in social networking. To explain this, Spence uses a small Charleston, West Virginia antique and art shop called Purple Moon as an example of successful social marketing on Facebook. According to Spence, the shop owner uses his Facebook site daily to post fun or historical facts, such as in this March 19, 2010 post:

“The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.”

–New York School artist Willem de Kooning, who died on March 19, 1997

The shop owner includes a photo of an artist to educate the public about the artist. The owner also posts invitations to store events. He occasionally posts information about special antique finds, usually with links to interesting stories associated with the pieces. None of his posts read like sales pitches, but instead, are casual, informative, and entertaining. Because he is personable and people like to read his postings, this store owner has created a “following” of people who buy from him because they “know him, like him and trust him through his personable use of the resource (Facebook).”

The All About Blueberries CoP is using Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress as its social networking sites to relay its message about the importance of eating blueberries and the processes involved in growing them.

Facebook

According to the Facebook Factsheet, Facebook was founded in 2004. It is a “social utility” that helps people communicate more efficiently with friends, family, and coworkers.

In an interview with TIME magazine, Facebook Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Mark Zuckerberg tells reporter Laura Locke that Facebook is focused on authenticity, and this has contributed to their success. It is a violation of Facebook policy for people to misrepresent themselves.

“Our whole theory is that people have real connections in the world,” Zuckerberg says. “People communicate most naturally and effectively with their friends and the people around them. What we figured is that if we could model what those connections were, [we could] provide that information to a set of applications through which people want to share information, photos or videos or events” (Locke, 2007).

In the 6 years since it was founded, Facebook has experienced phenomenal growth. According to Jeremiah Owyang, founding partner for customer strategy for the Altimeter Group, Facebook's global audience has grown to almost 400 million active users (Owyang, 2010).

Facebook statistics show:

•	There are more than 400 million active users.
•	Fifty percent of active users log on to Facebook in any given day.
•	The average user has 130 friends. The All About Blueberries page has 170 fans.
•	People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook.

Twitter

Twitter is defined as a “miniature blog,” or a “micro blog,” that is less time consuming than Facebook. A blog is a site where people can post information to share with other people without having to spend a lot of time on creating an elaborate website. In his article, What is Twitter?, Daniel Nations, a programmer who specializes in Visual Basic, PHP, Microsoft SQL Server and Javascript, writes, “(Twitter is) a great place for keeping people informed on what you are up to without the need to spend a lot of time crafting an entire post on the subject. You just say what's up and leave it at that,” he writes (Nations, 2010). For people who don't want to spend time creating Facebook posts, Twitter may be an easier alternative.

But Twitter does more than regular blogs do. Nations describes Twitter as instant messaging, or “social messaging.” “Twitter has become the perfect social messaging tool,” Daniels writes. “Whether you are out on the town and want to coordinate with a group of people as to what hot spot to hit next, or keeping people informed of developments at a company-sponsored event, Twitter is a great tool for quickly communicating a message to a group of people.”

In addition to being a social messaging tool, Twitter also is a “social media marketing” tool, Nations said. It is a new form of getting messages out and is reportedly widely used (Aune 2008).

Twitter statistics show:

•	There are more than 106 million Twitter accounts.
•	The number of Twitter users increase by 300,000 each day.
•	Twitter gets more than 3 billion requests every day generated by more than 180 million unique visitors. All About Blueberries Twitter page, BluesberryBush, has about 50 followers.

Because it is easy and quick to use, Twitter traffic is steadily increasing.

WordPress

According to its homepage at http://wordpress.org/, WordPress is free software that can be used to create websites or blogs. The software comes with “thousands of plugins and themes” available for use on sites housed on wordpress.org. Plugins are programs that interact with hosts' applications to provide specific functions. For example, the WordPress.com Stats plugin allows users to gather simple, concise statistics with no additional load on their system.

WordPress is becoming a platform for many bloggers. WordPress statistics show:

•	There are more than 25 million WordPress publishers as of June 2010.
•	There are about 350,000 new posts on an average day.
•	More than 260 million people visit one or more WordPress.com blogs every day, and they view more than 2 billion pages on those blogs each month.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

The materials used were all free, web-based social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress. We relayed the message about our social networking sites by inviting people from our personal pages to view the All About Blueberries pages. Some of them became fans, or followers, and the number of fans/followers has continued to grow.

Until the www.extension.org site is built, information about blueberries for these social networking sites is being provided by Google Alerts and information we get from mailings, etc. Posting new information to your sites keeps people coming back. To help us constantly find new blueberry-related content, we utilize a free service called Google Alerts.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free content monitoring service, offered by the search engine company Google. This service automatically notifies users when new content from news, web, blogs, videos, and/or discussion groups matches a set of search terms selected by the user and stored by the Google Alerts service. Notifications can be sent by email, as a web feed, or displayed on the users iGoogle page. The All About Blueberries group has set the terms, “blueberry” and “blueberries” as its search terms for the alerts.

Using Google Alerts is easy. To set up an account, go to http://www.google.com/alerts and register. Some uses of Google Alerts include:

•	monitoring developing news stories;
•	keeping current on competitors or industries;
•	getting the latest on celebrities or events; and
•	keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams.

New postings are added to the All About Blueberries sites about three times a week to raise awareness and maintain fan and follower interest. It will be important to continue posting new content to these sites once we launch our www.extension.org site to ensure continuing interest.

We plan to use Google Analytics to track the number of visitors to the extension.org site. According to its homepage at http://www.google.com/analytics/, Google Analytics is a free web program that allows users to track website traffic to help determine their site(s) “marketing effectiveness.” This program allows users to gather information needed to “write better-targeted ads, strengthen (their) marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites,” by utilizing AdWords and AdSense reports to show publishers which site content generates the most revenue. The program also has tracking capabilities and e-commerce reporting to use to trace transactions to campaigns and keywords, get loyalty and latency metrics, and identify the best revenue resources.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The first post on the All About Blueberries Facebook Fan Page was on January 5, 2010. Since that day, 170 people have become friends and/or fans of the page. The All About Blueberries group hopes to capitalize on the growth of Facebook and utilize it as a resource to spread their message and share the valuable knowledge that will be available on their www.extension.org site.

CONCLUSIONS

Social networking sites are becoming an important part of today's society. In “Why Social Sharing Is Bigger than Facebook and Twitter,” David Armano of the Harvard Business Review, writes, “Social media has led to ‘social sharing,’ the broadcasting of our thoughts and activities. It's not a fad. It's a sociological phenomenon, accelerating at light speed.” He goes on to write “Social sharing is a major behavioral shift, the most important so far of the 21st century” (Armano, 2010). Social media is assuredly one of the fastest growing segments of information sharing and the Cooperative Extension Service would greatly benefit by utilizing this technology.

In the short time the All About Blueberries CoP has been in existence, it has garnered almost 170 Facebook Fans, about 50 Twitter followers and has been instrumental in starting several WordPress conversations. Once the www.extension.org site is launched and these social networking sites start posting its information, the number of fans and followers is expected to increase because this information will prove very valuable and interesting to the public.