Community Organizer 2.0

I had the pleasure of presenting to the Israel Venture Network Fellows today about social media strategy, campaigns, and fundraising. I am really struck me how much of online fundraising comes down to a combination of social media basics plus community organizing principles. The slide show (below) captures why online campaigns are the social proof of these concepts.

Amy Sample Ward, Ivan Boothe, and myself created a slide show for the workshop that we’ll be giving at the Nonprofit Technology Conference. As part of the workshop Bringing Community Organizing Into Online Campaigns, we debated the essential elements of a good online campaign (fundraising or otherwise), the basic tenets of community organizing, and the nature of community organizing. We came up with five basic community organizing concepts. These concepts apply perfectly to any fundraising campaign. They are:

• movement-building
• power analysis
• community accountability (transparency)
• being where the stakeholders are
• leadership development

With any online fundraising campaign, your organization will be speaking about the project and asking others to influence their online ties to do the same. Take the basic principles of social media and continue to use them to raise funds: have shareable content and share utility, utilize the power of influence marketing and the power of weak ties, offer a great product/content, recognize people who give, and thank them profusely. Allow others to have the conversation about you publicly. (And use this opportunity to recruit new stakeholders to your social spaces.) Now mix that with community organizing and this is what you get:

• Link your fundraising project to the larger cause movement to give it emphasis and compelling context
• Power mapping: ID influencers, key donors, and how the donors will share and influence
  
• Develop online influencers and key online donors into organizational leaders
• Be where the people are: make sure that online activity within the campaign occurs where your stakeholders are
• Transparency means: broadcast as much about the campaign, on the campaign site and social media, as it happens

I think of this presentation as a starting point: what else would you consider the “fundamental principles” of social network fundraising? What have I missed? What have I mentioned that’s essential?

(Thanks to Amy Sample Ward for providing the screen shots of the Tweetsgiving campaign example in the slide show, below.)

Resources:

Epic Change (the folks who bring you Tweetsgiving)

How Social Media Can Engage New Donors – slideshare presentation by Steve Drake

Bringing Community Organizing Into Online Campaigns – presentation developed for the upcoming NTC workshop April 9, 2010

I’m live blogging a reputation management session at SphinnCon Israel. The moderator is Vannesa Fox (ninebyblue). The speakers are Shira Abel (Abel Communications), Sam Michaelson (Fiveblocks), Dan Gerstenfeld (Interteam), and Gil Reich (Answers.com).

Shira Abel: How to Control the Noise (and deal with a management reputation problem)

Look at rep management issue as an opportunity. Companies and individuals are often judged by how they handle the issue and control the noise. The Lower Merion school system installed webcams in the laptops of students, and people found out about it, and the news media went crazy.  What should they have done? Think about breaking the story themselves. Do something immediately after the story breaks – silence costs reputation and trust. They should have given out as much info as possible…but they didn’t. If there is more information and noise coming from one side, then that side will win in reputation.

Gil Reich: How to use Q and A sites to build your reputation

Engage others. Create value. Be memorable. Bring friends.

Example: Best Buy Metals. Owner joins Yahoo! Answers and give out useful info, then talks about himself, then gives more useful info. As long as you are contributing value, you can get some self-promotion out of it. Other Yahoo! Answers searchers will see the answer and get value from it. Yahoo! Answers are also searched by Google – turns out that his answer is ranked #2 for this specific question.

Another example: give a lot of good quality, targeted answers to build up reputation in a competitive market. One guy’s answers are ranked very high in shopping because he answered a lot of questions about a specific product niche.

Answers sites: Yahoo! Answers is largest ranked (43 mil), WikiAnswers, then Linkedin Answers (for whole site).

Q & A Sites: Community Q & A sites get about 100 million unique visitors/month from the US alone.There are both consumer and B2B sites, many sites allow multiple answers, some are wiki sites, some have questions open for days and best answers are selected (opportunity for more traffic if your answer is selected), and consider horizonal vs. niche answers sites. Niche sites are stackoverflow, wikianswers. Aardvark is another one. Yedda is an Israeli site.

How to become an answer god: Ask questions, answer questions with useful questions, interact and follow-up when you’ve answered or asked, don’t lose control and remember everything is listed by google…forever.

Quick ROI Analysis – answering questions at 7 mins per answer is a lower cost/conversion than cost/conversion on a successful PPC campaign. Over 90% of people who use business Q & A find it useful for business-survey results. (This is my favorite quote: “if there are A-listers in the industry you are stalking, then you can use Q & A to attract their attention.”)

Dan Gerstenfeld: 67% of top executives regard their company’s online reputation as vulnerable. How would you want your company to be presented in a crisis situation? Take control of the situation by putting info on it on your website: answer questions, give information (positive and negative), and the SERP results will reflect how you are proactively handling the issue.

How to be proactive? Define an overall PR and social media marketing strategy. Adopt a hands-on approach with good listening tools and handle all responses yourself. Be proactive. Network with others online. Create a place online that people know about, that people will know where to go to if a crisis breaks out. Optimize your content online.

Sam Michaelson: Reputation Management Pitfalls for the client and the service provider

Client pitfalls: biggest thing that clients do wrong is not being prepared in advance. Look at the names of people in the company  – and buy the domains of their names as well as the defensive use of the names (such as thispersonsucks.com). Own your own name! Make sure you own your own keywords and properties related to the top ten search results.

Another pitfall: Clients forget to use simple means when they are available, such as calling someone to take down the bad info if you know the person. Sometimes it’s that easy!

Service Provider Pitfalls: Really bad to optimize pages that have comments on them because you never know what the next comment will say. Optimizing pages that might change (news sites, wikipedia). Don’t forget to take control of the top ten sites…bad things may be coming.  Not setting clear expectations may be a problem – you will always get a client coming back after months thinking you’re giving them poor results. Not optimizing sites you build into top spots. Missing what the client really wants. Misunderstanding the perception of your role.

A few conclusions:

1. Have a reputation management plan and be proactive.

2. How you handle a reputation management issue affects how people see you in search engine results.

3. Think about a Q & A answers strategy to build your reputation AND rank for search engine results.

4. There are a lot of missed opportunities and pitfalls in brand management – avoid the big pitfalls.

I’m a SphinnCon Israel, a conference about SEO and search marketing, and live blogging the sessions. The first session is a moderated panel entitled SEO Fundamentals. The panelists are Eli Feldman (RankAbove), Menachem Rosenbaum (TENS Technology), Uri  Breitman (TBWA Digital), Itay Paz (Itaypaz.net), and moderated by Barry Schwartz (SearchEngineLand.com and RustyBrick). OK folks, this session may be a bit techy, but hopefully by capturing this information for you, you’ll gain some information about how to use search engine optimization to help your blog, website, cause and brand! Let the live blogging begin:

Eli Feldman: The old way of thinking about search engine results = above the fold on Google search results, and everyone will look “above the fold.” Now: there is “fully integrated universal results” and it takes up spot from the SERP. Live results are added. Videos are groups on first page. The big changes – get all types of results on the first page, options to search by types of search, and lots of different kinds of search options.

Major change for video is coming: Google has started grouping video results in the regular search results. You see them in packs of two or four on the page. If the video makes it to the front page, you’ll get better rank all the sudden because of this. It doesn’t matter if your video was ranked 89, because if Google shows it with a high-ranking video on the Google search page, your lower video’s rank is pulled up.

How to get video to come into the Google results and take advantage of the “packs:” utilize the video sitemap (like an XML sitemap), liste in sitemap index, include new tags (content, player, thumbnail location, categories, if family-friendly). If your URL is too long, it won’t show up in Google search – it must be less than 60 characters. Will only show up if it is family-friendly.

We are seeing Google show live results, latest news results, on search returns. You can go to trends.google.com and see the latest news trends/news results. If you are in a newsworthy area, your company may come up on the trends results.

Add content into this media, or around this media, as much as you can. Example: put up an image, add text to it with context and captions, tags, comments, translation. In YouTube video, you can add transcripts. For Flickr, you can add info about the type of camera used, and other meta data.

Rules for Video SEO: optimize every aspect of the video (title, description, tag), look at internal backlinks from you tube (comments/groups), external backlinks.

Itay Paz: SEO tips, tricks and fundamentals

Important to have good tags, of course. However, it’s all about content nowadays. Valuable content = traffic generation. Hard to trick search engines with lots of mediocre content. Site maps are critical: build as many site maps as you can – Google likes it. Write about trending topics and “hot” news, which will help bring traffic to your site and help you with rank. Google likes Wordpress – a lot, indexes it almost immediately. Use the SEO plugs inside WordPress for SEO – there are a lot of ones to choose from. Incoming links: have to have valuable links pointing to your website. Friendly URLs – keywords inside a URL is a good idea. Control outgoing links – think about the number of outgoing links and not having too many outgoing links. Be SOCIAL – if you put out a lot of content on networks, you’ll gather incoming links and traffic. Blogs give great traffic and links into the website.

Uri Breitman: Talking about keyword research – it’s important to do keyword research for everything, even to prepare to meet with an SEO team. Use the Google Keyword Tool and use it every day – it’s amazing. Then, go back and research using the keywords you found. Find new keywords in the search, then go back to the Keyword Tool, and it involves re-thinking and re-researching. Check the guys who are ranked above you because they know what they’re doing. Prioritize with what you should do with main keywords.

In order to figure out keywords, think about this: Who am I? What is my core business? What would I search for if I were going to search for my company? What would a client look for? Call clients! Ask clients how they found you, and how they found your competitors.

Google Keyword Tool is great. Using that, check the “broad match,” the “phrase match,” and the “exact match.” ALWAYS check the exact. Look at what the competition is doing, and the prices for top keywords in AdWords. Can be a good indication of what’s going on in the organic search field. Beware of keywords that attract a lot of competition, but don’t generate SALES.

Prioritize: most popular keywords, most suitable keywords. Go for regional keywords which may have best conversion. First-step keywords (the ones you thought about at the very first of your keyword search) may not have been the best keywords.

Finalize your list:  make a short list, have modest objectives, (don’t get into street fights over keywords!), it will take time to move your site up, prepare to make changes, and use web analytics for keyword traffic data so that you can monitor every small change, check rankings using 3rd party tool (not your own computer which will give you the wrong results!)

Menachem Rosenbaum: How to judge link building success? What happens if you are building links and you don’t see results? How to judge results quickly? Google webmaster tools is how Google sees your website on the internet. Look at the diagnostics crawl stats in webmaster tools for crawl information. If we want Google to crawl as many pages as possible. Each website has a www.yourwebsite.com and a yourwebsite.com URL. Make sure that you have a www.yourwebsite.com that redirects to the one with the www. in the beginning to get the most crawling of the site from Google. Bottom line: the more often Google comes back, the more authority you have. Lower crawl stats, or crawl stats not improving, it reflects in your ranking.

Takeaways:

1. Video search returns in Google can be a huge boost for your video. Optimize for a higher chance that will happen.

2. Social search within Google is huge, and will continue to grow.

3. Google Keyword Tool is great, and critical for your site. Use it as a guide.

4. Content is still king. Good incoming links are also incredibly valuable.

Two new data sets about the value of social media came across my laptop recently: Idealware’s “Using Social Media to Meet Nonprofit Goals” survey of nonprofit staffers using social media, and the State of Small Business report from Network Solutions and the Center for Excellence in Service.

The results are so similar to the nonprofit survey results that the conclusion is hard to ignore: social media actually is an effective tool for customer retention and attraction.

Social media is actually perceived by those doing it to work! In particular, the top benefits are seen as reaching new audiences and enhancing existing customer/audience relationships.

Here are some highlights from the Idealware survey of 459 nonprofit staffers using social media:

1. Nonprofits believe that social media is helping them to enhance relations with their existing audience and reach new audiences through the top platforms.

Most organizations feel that most social media channels are effective for enhancing existing relationships and reaching new supporters. The least effective platforms are MySpace and Linkedin. Blogs, video-sharing, Twitter, and Facebook are felt to be the most effective tools.  The surprise to me is that video-sharing is perceived as highly effective for enhancing relationships.

2. Most nonprofits are using a combination of Facebook, Twitter, video-sharing and blogs to reach out and enrich relationships online. The data shows that there isn’t a relationship between the size of the organization and the number of channels it is using. The responses show that, in general, nonprofits are using and regularly updating one to three social media channels.

I’m not surprised that Facebook is the most popular channel used, but I am surprised that 56% of nonprofits are using Twitter and 80% of them  update Twitter regularly. Two other points to consider: the blog is not dead (45% of nonprofits have one) and video sharing sites once again prove to be popular (49% have them).

Conclusions: Nonprofits are finding value in Twitter, Facebook is widely adopted and “known to work.”  These platforms must be seen as engagement tools to be taken seriously at this point. The blog, though time consuming, is the long form to express your message and enhance relationships with existing supporters. Video-sharing is the crouching tiger. Regularly maintaining one to three platforms is an industry standard.

3. Nonprofits are not yet satisfied with the results of social network fundraising. I don’t think this is any big surprise, as both social network donors and donation strategies are still in their infancy. The survey reveals that, of all the social networks, 41% of respondants believe that Facebook is most effective for raising money. (And that is the highest percentage of approval of any network channel.)  I suspect respondents mention Facebook because it has an affiliated fundraising platform, Causes, that is simple to use and easily accessible. Let’s see what next year’s survey results bring: I’m guessing that they will bring higher satisfaction and a stronger sense of nonprofit social network fundraising effectiveness.

This is also the only platform where Linkedin is rated on par with Twitter, video-sharing, and blogging, at 30% effeciveness. The Idealware study remarks that this is surprising, but I don’t find it surprising at all: Linkedin is an incredibly effective channel for targeted donor research and deeper interaction with potential donors and foundations within Linkedin Groups.

Here’s one more set of similar survey results: the performance of social media tactics for US small businesses in December 2009.

According to “The State of Small Business” report, small businesses are also using social media to successfully attract new customers, increase awareness, and stay engaged with existing customers.

Two data sets, two different user groups, same results: social media is effective for reaching new customers and strengthening existing relationships. Irrefutable evidence of the power of engagement.

This is a guest post by Hannah Katsman. Hannah and Hadassah Levy gave a fabulous presentation at the Kishor social media conference on Tips and Tricks for Social Media Time Management, and I asked if she would write a guest piece for this blog.

In our talk to Jewish professional women on time management and social media, we wanted to address two contradictory concerns: when it comes to social media some people don’t know where to start, while others can’t seem to stop! The concept of social media, or just learning one new platform, can be overwhelming on top of an already hectic schedule. But once you do get the hang of it, social media may eat up time needed for other important work.

No one is an expert at every platform, and it’s essential to allow a generous amount of time for learning. But once you become comfortable, you can set aside time to update status and respond to contacts. Time spent on social media should be devoted to building relationships, making connections, and answering questions.

Social media like Facebook and Twitter can be compelling and even addictive. One attraction is anticipating a response to an email, comment or status message. This anticipation keeps our adrenalin up and prevents us from focusing on more productive work. While some important discussions take place in real time, when we sense the adrenalin going up it may be a signal that it’s time to turn off the software or website. The response will wait until we get back.

Tools are important.

If you find yourself repeating a particular task, chances are that someone has invented a way of automating it.

Women, especially mothers, are used to multi-tasking. Writing a grocery list while waiting for a doctor’s appointment is an effective use of time. But when we switch between windows and tasks on the computer, our minds take time to adjust. Answering an important email makes us feel like we accomplished something, but it costs us our concentration. Frequent responses to email and status messages makes us less productive, not more.

To minimize distractions and multi-tasking, I suggested a technique called Pomodoro. Spanish for tomato, the name recalls a standard kitchen timer. Pomodoros are uninterrupted 25-minute blocks of  time. Large tasks are broken down into a number of pomodoros. For a lengthy blog article you might need four. Smaller tasks, like replying to emails or updating Facebook, can be combined into one. Tasks that come up in the middle of a pomodoro get noted and added to a future one. At the end of the day, you have a written record to analyze how you spent your time.

Other speakers emphasized a point often mentioned by Debra: To get results from social media, you need a strategy. This is the best time-management tool of all. When you sit down at the computer, keep your goals in mind. Use the tactics and platforms that generate results for your business or non-profit, and drop the rest.

Hannah Katsman (pictured) was born in the US and moved to Israel nearly 20 years ago. She writes on parenting and life in Israel at A Mother in Israel. In her newest project, Cooking Manager, she helps home cooks save time and money in the kitchen. You can find her on Twitter at @mominisrael and her fan page, Facebook.com/CookingManager.

Hadassah Levy of Jewish Ideas Daily helped prepare the talk, and designed the Powerpoint presentation.

I had the lovely experience of presenting the keynote overview of social media at the Kishor Social Media Conference in Jerusalem, along with my colleague Talia Klein of Sparkeo.com. For the address, we were asked to create a presentation that would be appropriate for an audience unfamiliar with social media. However, we were told that half of the attendees would have a moderate level of familiarity with social media. In other words, make it for everyone. That’s pretty daunting. When you work in social media day in, day out, it’s hard to remember what you know that others don’t know. It’s even harder to figure out how to convey all that information through a graphically compelling presentation.

To prepare for the presentation, I asked friends and social media practitioners what they would want to know about social media. I also wanted to know what would help them to understand social media. Talia and I reviewed a few of the best social media presentations on slideshare.net, and considered what they hold in common. In the end, the presentation that Talia and I crafted embodied these basic principles of presenting social media to the public:

Presenting Social Media Publicly: A Few Ideas

1. Put it in historical perspective

It’s crazy to think about, but five years ago, how many of us had social media profiles? Or more than one profile? And how often did we use social media? How much time did we spend? Graphs or charts about the explosion of social media and current demographics relevant to the topic of the presentation convey powerful messages.  Final word on this from a colleague: “people love graphs and charts. You have to have those in any presentation. It’s a pretty picture.”

2. Talk about the future, too

Historical trends help your audience understand the big picture, sure, but what’s coming up in social media is even more important. Extend your graphs with informed thoughts about forthcoming trends and changes in your sector.

3.  ROI

You talk about social media without talking about the return nowadays. Whether it’s Return on Influence, Interest, or Engagement, people want to know “why.” Look at other campaigns, ROI case studies, and your own data. ROI depends on goals, and picking the right goals and the right metrics is critical to understanding ROI.

4. Tell it like a story

This isn’t unique to presentations about social media. Presentations should tell stories – and answer the question: why should I care? The very best presentations decks on slide share pull you in with great storytelling, and keep you interested until the end. Social media is a complex subject. Storytelling breaks it down and makes it accessible.

5. Offer case studies

Case studies make it real and bring it all together. If you’re talking about social network fundraising, walk your audience through a case study. If you’re talking about creating online communities, then look at a few niche online communities and what makes them successful. If you’re talking about engagement ROI, look at actions fans have taken for an organization.

Are there any other principles of presenting social media to the public that you think are critical to include in the list above?

Here’s the Kishor Social Media Overview – enjoy!

For reference, some great social media slide decks:

Social Media for Nonprofits

What the —- Is Social Media

Yes, I DO Mind the Gap

How To Think Like a Nonprofit Social Media Genius

Olivier Blanchard Basics of Social Media ROI

50 Social Media Tactics for Nonprofits

In the digital age, no one is interested in only your services and products. We’ve grown up in a competitive world. But now it’s a cooperative world: coopetition is becoming the means to success.  We are no longer isolated geographically, culturally, or demographically. Nonprofits may serve local clientele, but their online presence is global. I know that it’s counter-intuitive to recommend your competitors. But in the Web 2.0 world, it’s exactly what the culture demands. I contend that nonprofits must, and should, be ready to retweet, repost, and support competitors online.  Why?

Collaboration doesn’t mean you’re fighting over scarcity of resources. It means you’re making the resource pie bigger.

I’ll go ahead and write the objection that I hear you saying out loud, right now: We’re all competing for limited pools of resources.

Answer: That’s been true for a long time, and it will always be the case. However, through collaborative efforts, you have the potential to bring in even more traffic, clients, and funding sources.

Joe Waters, of Six Figure Cause Marketing, says that he is trying to convince nonprofits to collaborate with cause marketing. He tells me via twitter: “Trying to do that w/cause marketing. Working w/other npos for mutual benefit. 50% of something is better than 100% of nothing.” Right on.

Two great examples:

John Haydon, a social media consultant, works with nonprofits to help them get more customers, build communities, and increase awareness. Not only that, but he sends out an auto-DM to his twitter followers recommending other consultants. He’s even recommended me, and I’m in the same consulting space as him.

Here’s the beauty of what John Haydon has done – he’s expanded the pie, not cut it into smaller pieces. Every one of the consultants he recommends can potentially collaborate with him on a project, refer projects to him. etc. I’m sure he’s also gotten leads and traffic from those he’s recommended as well. Can your nonprofit create an auto-DM recommending other great local nonprofits to follow?

28 Days, 28 Ideas is an effort of 31 Days, 31 Ideas, eJewish Philanthropy, the JTA, Jewcy, Jewschool, Sisterhood@the Forward and the Jewish Federations of North America. They have banded together this February to create a platform to share one great idea a day for helping the Jewish world. 28 Days, 28 Ideas is also intended to expose media outlets to each others’ readership.  Each organization is posting its ideas, and contributing to the 28 Days, 28 Ideas blog (which the twitter stream promotes). By doing so, they are reaching new audiences, and gathering ideas that could benefit everyone. The participatory organizations are actually making a new pie – Jewish social ventures – that they are now associated with creating!

An award-winning offline example:

EmployAlliance is a collaborative project that won the US Secretary of Labor’s 5th Anniversary New Freedom Initiative Award. It is a collaboration among six nonprofits that find employment leads for their disabled clients. As Dave Stevens, a career counselor at the Chicago Lighthouse mentions, “I now work with people who are blind, so when I get a job requiring sight, instead of letting it go fallow, I pass it along to other local agencies for people with disabilities via EmployAlliance, which in Chicago is under the Chamber of Commerce.”

I’m sure each of these organizations demonstrates success through the number of clients successfully placed. They probably also compete for similar funds. However, together, they are a stronger recruiting team than apart. Make the pie as big as it can get!

Remember that social media is about sharing and giving. Mention great blog posts that your competitors write on your nonprofit’s blog. Share good posts to your nonprofit’s Facebook Page. Tweet about the great work other nonprofits in your town are doing. Support each other’s Linkedin groups.

Get rid of the idea of competition, and embrace the idea of coopetition. Mmmm, more pie.

I read a fascinating blog post at The Community Roundtable entitled The Value of Community Management. The blog post considers the value, specifically the financial benefit, that community managers provide to managed social communities. Several readers who manage online communities wrote in to offer their data about the difference community managers make. Reading the discussion, I realize there are a number of points that are fully applicable to social networks such as Facebook Pages and Groups, Linkedin Groups, Google Groups, and others. They apply equally to for-profit and nonprofit-sponsored communities.

1. Active management of an online community creates real value for the organization

Tom Humbarger was the paid, active community manager until his position was eliminated. From that time forward, his company chose to manage the online community passively. Tom wrote a blog post about what the effects of active vs. passive community management. His data shows that growth, number of visits, number of page views, and time on site decreased dramatically during the absence of a community manager. The full article is well worth reading here.

As an example, this graph illustrates the dramatic drop-off in the number of site visits once active community management ceased.

2. Similarly, active management of a Facebook Page creates real value for the organization

I was the active manager of a corporate Facebook Page for a period of three months in 2009, until the company decided to eliminate all managed social media. From that time forward, the company decided to auto-fed blog posts to the Facebook Page, with no added interactions. During the time of active Facebook Page management, the Page grew at a rate of about 8 fans a week, had a post quality of 21, drove about 8 visits a day to the site,  but had a conversion rate from Facebook Page to website registration of almost 25%. Since the Page became inactive, the number of new fans/week has dropped to less than one, there are almost no website visits, zero conversions, and the post quality is zero.

Community Roundtable blog reader Maggie McGary also saw similar stats in her nonprofit’s Facebook Page: she writes in the comments that the number of visits from Facebook to her nonprofit organization’s website plunged during a one-month absence from active Facebook community management.

Community management, whether you define it as managing a private community, or a community on a social media platform, is critical to community growth and moving people from the managed community  towards organizational goals.

3. Active management also encourages relationship-building, which leads to loyalty and community growth

When I was a community organizer, we used to call this “relationship organizing.” Simply put, friends bring friends to organizations, and remain involved because of them. I used to try and map friendships, recruit influencers, and ask them to bring friends into the cause. In online communities, we develop cyber friends that influence us to participate and keep us active. I have started participating more actively in certain online groups because I have developed friendships with other members over time. I also recommend these groups to my friends, and feel increased loyalty to the sponsoring organization. I would never have created these online ties if the group wasn’t active and well-managed.

I asked Hildy Gottlieb, who managed the monthly twitter chat for consultants to community benefits organizations, if there are online ties between the participants of the monthly #npcons chat, and if these ties arose from the chats. She responded emphatically: “Oh goodness yes. There are many people who have met through these chats, who are now having some pretty engaged and higher level conversations throughout the month because they feel they know each other from that involvement.  It’s just like any other involvement or community- the more you put into it, the more you get out of it.”

Simply put, a well-manged online community leads to real value for both the members and the community sponsors. That’s a win-win situation.

Have you managed a social network? Can you add your data to this conversation?

Have you seen the effects of passive management on a social  community?

Why is measuring reach important? The number of times an article is tweeted or shared on Facebook or dug on Digg represents the comparable value of the information to the public, your readers, and your target audience. It also represents potential engagement: if your target audience likes what you are publishing, they’ll come back.

Social sharing is the simplest form of public approval and feedback. Think of it as a feedback loop.

It’s incredibly easy to share an article on Twitter, “like” a Facebook article or link, or save an article to a social bookmarking or social news site. With a few analytics tools you also know exactly which type of information you are publishing that others value enough to share are save. And, most importantly, articles (or videos, podcasts, etc.) that are shared also expose your organization’s message to new audiences. Social sharing is a represents the feedback loop of potential reach, reaction, analytical feedback, and organizational learning.

It’s all the more important, then, to access analytical feedback in order to produce relevant content that extends your organization’s reach and message. Ideally, relevant content moves your readers to action!

Four “must have” analytical tools for your organization that offer social sharing insights:

1. Tweetmeme Widget and Analytics

Tweetmeme is a service that aggregates popular links on Twitter. It is also a widget with analytics. If you are publishing online content, and want to encourage your readers to share it on Twitter, the Tweetmeme button is just the powerful widget you need. The button can be displayed above or below the content, and offers a simple way for readers to tweet articles from  your website without leaving the website. (A pop up appears asking to allow Tweetmeme to access the user’s twitter and tweet the URL.) Most importantly, once you add the Tweetmeme button to your blog (or site), the Tweetmeme button publicly displays the number of times an article has been tweeted and you can see who has tweeted it.  Whoever tweets or retweets your organizaation’s content is a potential fan or stakeholder.

As an illustration, you can view my blog’s Tweetmeme button at the bottom of this post. Below is a sample screen shot illustrating who tweeted my blog post entitled “Is Bureaucracy the Enemy of Social Media?” You can view more at Tweetmeme.com.

2. Facebook Share Widget and Analytics

Facebook rolled out a share widget in late 2009 that counts shares and offers analytics. Not surprisingly, there is a Wordpress plugin as well (which I added to this blog). The button works exactly like the Tweetmeme button: readers don’t leave the page, the widget uses permission-based Facebook sharing, and the it offers powerful analytics. In fact, the analytics are incredible: see below.  The only thing it does not show is who shared your article, liked it, or clicked on it.

Below is a screen shot of the Facebook analytics overview, as viewed in Wordpress Plugin Settings:

3. Add This Share Button and Analytics

There are a lot of social sharing buttons around, but AddThis offers exceptional value. Each week, AddThis offers site administrators detailed sharing analytics about where readers shared your information, total number of shares, sharing trends, and geographical sharing by continent. I think that most interesting feature of AddThis is the different methods that readers used to share content. You can use it to look at trends and understand how your readership prefers to share. Be sure to incorporate this feedback into your website. For example, if the most frequent type of share from your site is via email, then be sure to offer an email subscription service and an RSS feed via email.

I changed my website’s sharing button to AddThis on January 21. Here is a screen shot of my AddThis sharing analytics from January 21 -30, 2010:

4. Google Analytics Firefox Extension

The Google Analytics Firefox Extension offers a number of additions to Google Analytics, including social media metrics. This extension integrates the shares from your website to Sphinn, Mixx, Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Yahoo into your Google Analytics, displaying shares by content. I wish that it revealed shares to Twitter and Facebook, but the sharing widgets mentioned above more than make up for this.

One specific issue: I know that some of my blog posts have been “stumbled,” but have not shown up in here.  The extension displays StumbleUpon reviews, but not “likes” or “stumbles.” As far as I can tell, it’s the only fault with the extension: if a post is “stumbled” but not reviewed, it does not appear in this set of analytics.

How do you measure social media sharing? What other tools analyze online sharing activities? What have you learned from your use of them?

I do work with businesses to develop social media strategies, just as I work with nonprofit corporations. Yesterday, I gave a presentation at Nefesh B’Nefesh on the topic of Integrating Social Media Into Essential Business Functions. It was a lot of fun to think about using social media to support other business functions besides marketing.

Guess what? Social media is not just a platform for marketing and sales.

In fact, the idea for this presentation was formed when I began to investigate collaborative internal communication technologies for working on team projects. Then I started to wonder: what other business functions are supported by social media? Do social technologies actually increase efficiency in business functions? What would be the ROI of using them?

In a previous life, I was a small business consultant – thus, this presentation was created to answer these questions.

I looked at human resources, training, internal communication, product development, customer service, and sales/marketing. I purposely omitted a few areas (accounting, IT), but please chime in with your ideas for integrating social media platforms and technologies into all areas of business. At the end of the presentation, I offer the examples of Best Buy and The American Red Cross, two companies that have embraced social media.

I’m now beginning to to think about a similar presentation for nonprofit organizations. What are the essential organizational function areas that would benefit from social media integration? I’m thinking (out loud here) about member/client/organizational recruitment, program development, membership engagement, internal communication, human resources, and of course…fundraising. Do you already integrate social media into certain function areas at your nonprofit? Are you exploring this now? What are the ROI metrics? I’d love to hear your thoughts, and experiences.

Update: For some reason, I cannot embed this presentation into my blog, I’m linking to it instead. If you see a “tv” icon next to the link, hover over it and the presentation will pop up. (Some days, technology doesn’t work like you want it to.)