image courtesy of Ric e Ette

A wise person once told me that when I’m frustrated with someone or something, it’s most likely because there are missing steps. In social media, missing steps lead to frustration with using social media and sometimes complete disbelief in its use or good for the organization. More often than not, if the strategy isn’t working, there are missing steps. Most commonly, missing steps occur because of the organization’s rush to become involved in social media without thinking about the strategic goals, failing to research and identify online stakeholders, poor selection of appropriate social media channels to use, and developing tactics without considering how they will move the strategy forward. The biggest missing step is lack of a social media strategy.

When an organization is rushed to develop its strategy, the missing steps become apparent when questions like these arise:

• How can we get donations out of this group of fans and followers online?
• If we have 4,000 followers, how come no one is signing up for our (fill in the blank)?
• How do we get more people talking about us online?
• Why isn’t anyone talking to us in our online spaces?

Below are four slides that I created which represent stepping stones to developing a social media strategy. The entire slide show can be found on slideshare (or click the icon to the left of the link).

The first image, the Social Media Funnel, represents the fundamental belief that stakeholders must be really engaged (by your organization) in online spaces in order to take the next active role for your organization.

When you are creating your social media strategy, it’s 75% preparation.

The flip side of creating social media content and engagement is listening for opportunities. Listening is part of the preliminary research needed to create a social media strategy, but it is also an ongoing process essential to tweaking the strategy, finding opportunities and stakeholders, proactive reputation management, and engaging stakeholders. If you want to create a listening dashboard, read how the National Wildlife Federation creates and monitors its amazing (free) listening system here.

Your URL isn’t just your website anymore, but everywhere you are on the web. A social media strategy should tie official social media profiles to the organization’s website to create a goal-oriented comprehensive web presence.

I would love to improve upon the steps in the images above, with your bright ideas.

I’m also curious to know: has your organization experienced any missing steps? How does this affect your social media implementation? Are you trying to fill in the missing steps, or move forward in a different way?

(And, if you liked this post, you might want to read its related post, The Cornerstone of Social Media Is Clarity.)

Image courtesy of Paurian

This is the Case of the 4,000 Twitter Followers Who Don’t Care - and why 4,000 followers means nothing without engagement.

I recently took on a new client that wants to leverage its existing social media assets (Facebook Page/Fans, Twitter followers) to drive more visits to the website. This company has been building a social media presence for over a year, and is unhappy with the lack of website visits resulting from social media.

I was told that the Facebook Group was active with almost 500 fans, and that the Twitter account had over 4,000 followers.  I was also briefed that, though there was not a lot of online fan feedback, the Twitter account included some committed followers. The highest priority for the client was to figure out why social media was not driving more people to the website – and come up with a better strategy.

I took on this challenge, and want to share a few observations about why social media isn’t working for this client:

Case Observation #1:

The most important number isn’t the number of followers, it’s the number of engaged followers.

4,000 Twitter followers seems like a lot. But how many really care about your organization? How many are willing to act on its behalf?

I evaluated “the 4,000 followers” on Twitter and “almost 500 fans” of the Facebook Page. I used Twerpscan, Twittalyzer, Twazzup, and Tweetmeme to analyze the Twitter asset, and discovered:

• almost 400 of their Twitter followers were pure spammers
• no one cared what the client was tweeting, and…
  
• most of the retweets were from twitter profiles related to the company
• the company did not engage in conversation online, and rarely thanked retweeters
• there was absolutely no Twitter strategy
  

What I discovered was that, of the 4,000+ followers, only three were truly interested enough in what the organization was tweeting. Three.

Twitter utilizes the concept of social media karma: give and give and then others will give back. This company didn’t offer help, advice, support or anything else personal.  Obviously, Twitter did not drive people to the website – no one cared enough about the company to go there.

Of the 400+ Facebook fans, most didn’t care enough to “like” a Wall post. The ones that did comment or “like” a post were often friends of the CEO or employees. All the posted was to its Facebook Page was company stories or related news. Of the 400+ fans, only one was an (unrelated to the company) engaged fan! Facebook drove little traffic to the website, which again is not surprising.

Case Observation #2:

Be wary when the CEO or Executive Director isn’t using social media on behalf of the organization.

This CEO was absolutely unwilling to be personally involved in using social media for the company. This is indicative of a CEO that does not understand the basic principles of social media. It’s critical that everyone in the organization have some direct contact with social media. An Executive Director that isn’t directly responsible for some piece of the social media is missing important information by not connecting with stakeholders directly. Not every CEO has to be responsible, but he/she should be intimately involved with the social media activities, and understand the basic principles of social media.

This CEO was using social media to “drive numbers to the website,” which completely misunderstands the basic fundamentals of social media. They are:

Engage with people first, create relationships, then move them to act.

Case Observation #3:

Their social media sites offer no real value to fans and followers

The company hadn’t taken the time to figure out what people were interested in reading on their social sites. Since the organization was not actually creating individual relationships with its fans, then it had to offer compelling and relevant news and data.  However, it wasn’t giving followers information that mattered to the followers. Not surprisingly, no one wanted to visit the website to find out more.

Case Observation #4:

You need a strategy for each and every social media platform.

Their overall social media strategy consisted of posting news and information. This is an appropriate strategy for social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg, but not at all for social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Additionally, the company usually posted the same information on both Twitter and Facebook. Fans of both sites were not even receiving unique value or reward for following the company in two places.

It’s important to realize that no two communities are the same online. Each has its own rules, expectations, and needs. You need an engagement strategy for each one of these communities. The strategy should consider the qualities of each social media platform, the needs of followers, how to best engage, and what your organization can offer its followers in terms of both engagement and value.

It’s Elementary, My Dear Watson

Social media is a tool to help your company meet its goals. But it’s more than that: if you aren’t using these tools properly, then it doesn’t matter how many fans, followers, or linkedin connections you have. They won’t care enough to do anything for your organization or company.

This case illustrates that it’s not about the number of fans and followers. It’s about the engagement. Create a strategy that brings your organization engaged followers and real relationships.

4,000 followers means nothing without engagement. And it never will.

I’m live blogging the Affilicon Israel 2009 conference session on Video Sharing and Ranking. Arik Czerniak, Entrepreneur, former CEO of Metacafe is the speaker for this session. He tweets at @arikcz.

If you upload your videos using TubeMogul to all different sites, to syndicate the videos, then you will double your views.

Here are some very interesting statistics:

Video audience attention span:

• after 20 secs, 20% leave
• after 1 min, 50% leave
• over 2 min (75% leave), and
• only 9.5% stay for a video over 5 minutes.

Make it SHORT and DRAMATIC. Implications for advertising? Do it within first 15 seconds.
Life span of a video: 35% of views made it first 4 days. 50% of views in first 14 days.75% if views in first 44 days. Most of the views are in the first two months.

Takeaway: Viral videos are a RARITY. They rarely snowball to gain more and more. “Evergreen” video (generate same number of views continuously)  are just as rare.

How do make the video viral? No “magic bullet.”

What constitutes an “actual view?” As soon as it loads.

Ingredients:

• Make awesome content
• Choose a right thumbnail: the small picture to be displayed
• SEO the tags and metadata: don’t be stingy when adding tags and metadata
• Promote it like crazy

Content:

• Make it short
• Inject interesting “passable” content: humor, celebrities, animals, cute kids, and sex

Promote:

• Let it bubble to the top
• Web 2.o: submit to sharing  sites
• You can utilize guerrilla marketing tactics
• You can “buy” views (he didn’t explain this very well)
• Use a through-broker to go viral

Landing pages: with video works better than without. Rich media improves click through rates (flash).

Optimize videos by analyzing traffic sources. Look at where people drop off the video and test the video with revisions to see if people will drop off less  than previously.

Case Study: etoro

How did they get 2.9 million views on their video: Forex Tracking Online? There is no sound on the video. The speaker thinks that they used an affiliate to market the video. Here is the first:

Then they made a funny video, that included humor and sex.

Spent 20K They used KetaKeta to market it and got 160K vies. High cost, but high branding impact and B2B. Hard to track the ROI.

Summary:

• It’s really hard to make a viral video. If you want to, follow the tips above.
• Video marketing is still brand oriented
• Video does improve landing page conversions for a product
• Still in the exploration stage.

L-R: Sarah Granger, Beth Kanter (standing), Qui Diaz, Danielle Brigida, Wendy Harmon

I had the privilege to attend the 2009 NTC Conference session entitled, “Mapping Social Media Strategy to Metrics: Listen, Learn, Adapt.” Beth Kanter was the featured moderator and speaker. Other panelists included Danielle Brigida (National Wildlife Federation), Wendy Harmon (American Red Cross), Qui Diaz (Livingston Communications) and Sarah Granger (Future Campaigns). The session was set up as a moderated discussion – and I mean discussion with Q and A – between Beth, the panelists and the audience about the role of listening, metrics, learning and adapting social media practices for engagement and listening. She started the session by noting that she wanted to “bring the room expertise forward,” and I think that really expresses her style of moderation. The audience was also encouraged to twitter using the hashtag #ntcmap to add to the conversation. For further thoughts from Beth Kanter about the session and to view her slides from the session, visit Beth’s Blog. Additionally, Rob Cottingham created great visual notes from this session here.

I found the session incredibly informative: it was rich with real social media campaign examples, uses of metrics, listening tools and techniques and – most importantly – real sharing. I left the session armed with a great list of new listening tools, the importance of listening and learning from it and the sense that we are all still struggling with the best way to use social media for insight and its utility. However, this is my most important take-away: this is all new and we will all fail using social media in some way, but

Failure is just an opportunity to Adapt. Adaptation is real success.

These are the notes that I took during the session:

The Listen, Learn, Adapt phrase was borrowed from David Armano, who also has a blog. David says we need to reap INSIGHT before we can reap dollars, which seems to be the fundamental underpinning of Listen, Learn, Adapt.

How and why does listening provide value?

Wendy: It is our foundation. The ARC is mentioned over 400 times a day. Listening gives us insight about how people feel about us and what they want from us.
Danielle: It is the foundation. We have a place to act. We are nothing unless someone else thinks we are something.
Qui: Listening is important because it lays the foundation for effective strategy, it also helps you evolve strategy and campaigns.
Sarah: Listening has two parts- listen to community and members for quality, and utilize the quantitative statistics we have received.

Then the audience wanted to know more about the mechanics of listening, which I found very informative. Here are some ideas:

Beth:”Use your RSS reader like a rock star.” Make RSS feed from hashtags and keywords from twitter. She shares some things, skims a lot, and deletes liberally. She urges people not to read hours’ worth of material. “You don’t have to smell every flower as you leap through the field.”Wendy: I aggregate and distribute the data as appropriate for internal audience in the field. We gather data per region.

Beth: how manage the data? Answer (A): practice! Beth: how do you share the info? A: We gather data each morning, distribute it in emails to the appropriate people internally, If it involves a sensitive issue, we contact the appropriate person. Wendy sources the information and sends out daily summaries. Beth: is that useful to get people to buy into value of social media? A: Yes, they have an ambient awareness of what people are saying about us at minimum.

Danielle: We use a Delicious (social bookmarking platform) account. For every mention, we tag it with “education” and “program name” and then count the # blog mentions. Internal staff looks at it by keywords to see the mentions per day.

Sarah: Google alerts are helpful. We develop an online page to keep track of the mentions per campaigns and organization.

Qui: For our larger clients or brands, we need reports. We set up media citation reports – similar to media clippings. This could be a document with a clip about a blogger and metrics (their Technorati authority,etc) about the blogger and a response recommendation.

Insight/Knowledge sharing on listening from audience members:
Joe Soloman (@engagejoe):  Netvibes is a great tool. Create tabs of different RSS items you follow and make it open for others to listen.

Amy Sample Ward: uses Netvibes and is writing a blog post about Netvibes to be published soon.

Dmitri: Feed Digest customizes feeds and tags. Reposts on twitter and FB to groups. etc. Nonprofitcommunicators.org is his site.

Follow up:  number of hours of week spent by panelists just listening?

Wendy:  2-3 hours in AM of concentrated, then “ears open” through out day. At least 10 hours focused listening a week.

Danielle: 5 hours a week – one hour every morning. I organize my work flow with Google Alerts and use the RSS reader in AM.

Qui: I encourage small nonprofits to dedicate a 1/2 person  to the job, 10 hours a week for monitoring and response.

Sarah: Our nonprofit is heavily online. I listen 15% of the time.

Beth: There is more listening info at the We Are Media wiki – see listening toolbox. Also search Beth’s blog in the category on listening.

What is the learning process from social media and how do the panelists involve their organizations in the process?

Danielle: NWF learning is ad hoc. Our learning process favors qualitative data over quantitative data. We compare qualitative information to the quantitative data and move on from there.

Qui: Listening is everybody’s job. You want to make sure everyone listens and can take what they are hearing to right responder.
Sarah: We share qualitative data by email. Track, analyze, report with excel spread sheets.

Audience Insights on sharing learning process:
Lynn from Monterrey Institute: We use Yammer. It’s like “twitter for groups.” It is open source and great for information sharing.
Amy Sample Ward:  Net Squared has 3.5 people over 4.5 time zones. They use Delicious and send tags to each other. People send links to different staff.

Using Metrics to Track Strategy: Real Case Examples

What are some specific stories of using right metrics to track a strategy?
Wendy: It is important to measure what  your metrics will tell you if you have reached your goal. Our goal is to offer real-time, valuable information to the public in times of disaster. We aggregate information and post it to a blog and on twitter. We  measure whether or not we are helping people and if they got this information. We also measure whether or not the media also uses our site. Specifically, we measure # retweets (manually), # members of the media that use our site.

Danielle: We measure the Wildlife Watch program. We ask people to tweet #nwf/(name of wildlife they see). We measure with hashtag.org. We use url shortners (bit.ly or poprl.com) to track retweets. Laura Lee Dooley (World Resources Institute) wrote a post about URL shortners from a measurement perspective.

Qui: Offers a corporate case study. Network Solutions (a domain names provider) had negative brand perception. They had to change their reputation. We assessed the current brand conversations  and found that they had a 58% negative comment and blog ratio. We used some tools (she recommends Radian 6 for about $500 a month, but it does misses some things) but the best is to search manually on all the platforms (such as icerocket. twitter, board tracker, etc). We knew the baseline metric: 58%.  They implemented a campaign to counter this. The metric after the campaign was around was 18%. (Editorial note: I wrote about this specific campaign previously here.)

Organizational Resistance to Social Media: Strategies for Adoption

Audience question for panel: Share a story about when metrics are impressive but the boss doesn’t get it.
Danielle: At NWF we started with activist change. Of the many people on NWF’s  MySpace, only 400 people were interested in becoming activists, which was disappointing. It’s important to listen to what EVERYONE is saying to get good ideas. Even one good idea. I was in wrong department looking at revenue at NWF and converts, but switching to the educational department was the right place for new media.
Sarah: The key is biting off small pieces and educating people step by step. Find a champion and work with that person.
Beth: Organizational change is slow. Discussions change opinions.

Analytics Questions from the Audience

1. How do you deal with folks that just click and nothing else?

Beth: Look at cocreation networks online. Shows ladder of engagement and an overlay of # views and influence. You want all of them in your eco system. Probably have less influence than the people who are spreading.

Danielle: look at WHAT they are clicking on. for ex- if just educate.
Qui- if click through, give them good “calls to act” with opportunities to engage with the organization on the other end.

2. What are the ways of capturing offline data points to influence social media stuff? Do you collect offline data to measure online social media?
Danielle: every program has an offline component. All offline components have an online component. Example: if you are outside, have smart phone, and see wildlife, you can and tweet about wildlife with nwf hashtag.
Wendy: if you are online, you will often write about an offline activity. Example: people donate blood and write about it.

Qui: Do an initial qualitative assessment. Ask how people initially use the web and computer, and then ask later how they’ve changed behavior.

Adapting – “we’re evolving!” Examples of Listen, Learn and Adapt

Beth shares a great “adapting social media after listening” story by Carie Lewis of the Humane Society of US (HSUS). HSUS asked people to hold a sign meme to protest Wendy’s restaurant’s treatment of animals, and upload photos to Flickr. Only 2 or 3 people did it because of technical issues uploading to Flickr. Failure? Not exactly. HSUS listened online as people complained about difficulty to upload it.
How  did HSUS adapt?
When they created their LOL Seals campaign and made it as easy as possible to upload and caption photos. Used a Flickr API to upload a photos that people could caption, and they captured the user information too, such as  2500 email addresses. What is that value?
How has HSUS further evolved its use of social media?

HSUS then wondered if their main target group was really on Facebook (55+ women), so they developed a Facebook application: upload a photo of your cute pet, ask people to vote on which pet is cutest, and raise money for Humane society. Garnered 13,000 installations, which spread the information about the contest. HSUS raised about $600K through it.

Panel:
Qui- Network Solutions example. They reached out to people, and looked at who referred the most traffic for an online event. Now NS knows who will send the traffic and this will streamline its time investment. They initially tried to use Linkedin but it sent no one to site, so they’ve learned and will not use it for that again.
Danielle: We tweak our social media strategies all the time. Can’t ever be satisfied. With a Twitter hashtag, when more people use it, it’s part of wildlife watch program and up on website.
Wendy: We have few campaigns because want to build overall presence on platforms. We tweak constantly. Look back two years and we can see how we operated differently, but this was accomplished through incremental changes.

Beth: How does your organization look at learning, and change it from failure?
Danielle: There is no failure. Have to learn from everything. Have to assess investment continuously.

Beth: Sometimes it’s easier to change the social media strategy than the organization. Has anyone in the panel seen an example of how the organization has been changed by its use of social media?

Danielle: Initially I was the outcast because of my advocacy of social media. I needed organizational buy-in. I have to continuously track it. I advise that you fight for this within your organization, and keep doing it. I’ve changed my role and I still do email marketing, but I’m also an internal consultant when programs start. Now I say: if people don’t like social media, don’t start with them and find someone else who wants to use it.

Sarah: I worked with an organization that had some social media protesters. But as new people were hired, the adoption increased.
Beth: I’m an early adopter but working with resisters now. I’m learning from it and hope to write about it.

What the panel has learned today:
Wendy: If you are really interested and can see opportunities for the organization, just try it and adapt and learn.
Danielle: How metrics “bubble up” from using them.
Qui- Listen to voice of minority, too. There has to be a decision-maker in the org, too.
Sarah- Find others, colleagues and talk and learn from them.
Beth- Place your AV order ahead of time!

What Did You Learn from This Session (from reading this blog post, or in person at the session)?

image by 10ch

I’m at the NTEN 2009 Conference attending the session “What It’s Worth: The Value of Online Fundraising.” The session is presented by Allison Van Diest of Blackbaud and Clinton O’Brien, VP for Nonprofit Services with Care2. . Nonprofits use Care2 to recruit new donors and supporters and advocates for their organizations.

Goals of the session:

Why would you benchmark? How to make the case for fundraising tactics using measurements.

Purpose and value of benchmarking web metrics.

Review some 2008 industry benchmarks. from a March 2009 survey. What the data reveals, or doesn’t.

Case studies.

Purpose of benchmarking

Need them for goal-setting, comparison, prioritization, to make a case for resource utilization, forecasting results.

Sources that informed this benchmarking:

-1200 responders to State of Nonprofit Industry Survey 2008

-Blackbaud client data

-Care2 community data

-Q1 2009 State of Nonprofit Industry Survey: Return on Internet Investments:  93 valid responses. 97% of respondents had a website. 56% held email marketing or fundraising. 52% participate in social networks. 1/3 had revenue under $1mil, and 1/3 revenue over $10 million. Good mix of verticals in type of organization (largest group type was health care orgs at 17%). Most responders are fundraisers at the organizations.

Below is analysis of data from the Q1 Survey (93 responders), but integrated with other data from Blackbaud when noted:

Website benchmarks:

• 52% had a positive ROI on investment
• 26% made no investment
• 22% had negative ROI
• median amount collected through website transactions was $5,000 (this included organizations that didn’t collect any money also).
• Median ROI of website value was 110% (took the number in the center to get the median vs. mean number).
• From those that collected at least $1 in website transactions: $20K was median dollar amount collected through website transactions and 37% median ROI from website transactions .
• NOTE – Definition of “investment”: asked orgs to give a $ amount for website building and consulting amount and HR related website costs which was the self-reported “investment” from 2008

Need to consider the source: how did people get to the website?

• 63% of those with positive website ROI conducted email marketing or fundraising campaigns
• 46% of orgs with positive website ROI reported participating in social networks.

Note: these organizations may not have had a positive ROI of each channel, but did for the website, so reconsider how look at ROI for channels is a thought.

Email Benchmarks

Asked people to figure out value of an email: of those who reported doing email marketing, median number was 290,000 emails sent in 2008. Average return per email sent was $8.16  But-. average website return per email was $18.37.ISSUE:  How to differentiate whether email sent brought the money in or the website brought the money in? That is to be addressed. Most orgs aren’t sourcing if email drove the donation at the point of site.

(A side note: bulk of email campaign responses should be within 48 hours of email sent! However, it could different by audience, as an audience member notes. This audience member notes one of her clients receives the buik of return after two weeks! So there are exceptions.)

Median amount dollars collected as a result of email marketing is $1,000 (including those that don’t collect any money).

Median ROI from email marketing is 53%

Median amount collected from orgs that collect at least $1 from email marketing is $10,000.

NOTE:

• Only 18% of organizations credit positive ROI on email programs, but 63% of organizations with positive website ROI say they send email campaigns. Question is are they tracked properly?
• Orgs with positive website ROI who sent email campaigns brought in 2.8 times the website revenue -takeaway is that targeted asks might be more effective than just having a donate now but’ont.
  
• Orgs that have 6 – 10 events “a-thons” a year averages $60K in online event revenue. All other orgs averaged $39K. Implications? Maybe affected by size or client reach of the organizations.

The amount of revenue earned TRIPLES if an organization engages in email campaign versus just offering the “donate now” button on the website.

Online Event Benchmarks

Only 15% of orgs offer online participation in an “a-thon” or “friends asking friends” type of event. But arts/cultural orgs are more likely to hold them. Median amount raised is $11,000 online.

Blackbaud additional data from its clients:

• friends asking friends  (FAF) emails have a 90% greater open rate.
• Average online gift size is $59.40.
• 32% of FAF emails resulted in a transaction.
• average participant sends 27 emails.

Social Media ROI

Remember: about half of those surveyed use social media. 17% of them put money into using the networks.

• Of the 17% investing resources in social media, 63% reported positive ROI.
• 92% participated in Facebook, 44% use Twitter, 33% use Linkedin, 29% use MySpace, 13% use other networks.
• Of organizations participating, they averaged participating in 2.4 networks each. Of those participating in only one network, all but one use Facebook.
• Median ROI was 125%, median dollars raised was $200, and AVERAGE revenue raised was $41K from those reported raising money.
• Orgs connect with a median of 600 individuals through social networks.
• Average value of networking individual was $1.60

Social Networks = Free Donors? (Clinton O’Brian from Care2)

The purpose of today’s session is to look at the monetary value of social networks, but we recognize there are other values.

Facebook Causes Report just published March 2009.

25 million users reached through FB Causes. It has raised $7.5 milion in 2 years.

179,000 causes participate. 46K participate. # people who have donated = 186K (.7%)

Only two nonprofits have raised more than $100,000 through Causes.

Average gift =$ 40.54. Less than 50 nonprofits raising more than 10,000.

From 2007 to 2008: Average money per user donated has increased from $.21 to $.31. Average amount per cause has increased from $31.25 to $41.

List of several case studies: Susan G. Komen Foundation, Save Darfur, and Birthday Causes. None of them raised a lot of money.

One interesting tool to help you figure out ROI of Social Network Investment is the Care2 tool. (Their blog is www.frogloop.com which engages with nonprofit professionals and share best practices.) It asks user to provide inputs on their social newtowrking and email investment and gives ROI for outputs, along with four-year ROI projections.

Commentary by Care2′s Clinton O’Brien- most organizations aren’t going to see a positive ROI from this calculator. The thing you need to think about is the opportunity cost by investing employee time in social networks. Question: What aren’t you doing?

Audience question about choosing among the different social networks:

Answer: MySpace is for a younger group, Facebook has the numbers and users, and a good activ base. One audience member offers that alumni groups are using Linkedin very effectively.

My Takeaways:

1. Email campaigns (and email related activities for raising funds) are still the most proven and effective investment an organization can make.

2. Don’t rely on social networks for fundraising, but they may very well drive people to donate on-site.

3. Track where every person comes from and why they decided to donate on the website. Are they a network member? Could this have raised their awareness and encouraged them to donate on the website?

What is the best measurement for a successful blog? Is it number of unique visitors, returning visitors, page views, incoming links, or Technorati ranking? Do any one of these typical measurement tools by themselves tells us what we need to know: who is engaged? Non-profit organizations want to engage stakeholders through social media and ideally move them to act on their behalf. We know that, without engagement, people are not moved to act.

Blogs are a particularly challenging platform for creating engagement. It’s easy to passively read a blog. How do you know if you’ve engaged?

Three metrics for measuring “blog conversation” are: number of unique engaged readers, average number of engaged readers per blog post, and number of posts that engaged readers in blog conversations.

1. What is an unique “engaged reader” and how should we count them? A blog reader that has commented at least once on your blog is engaged. When you count your “unique engaged readers” on your blog,  you can measure of the breadth of your engaged base. What does that mean for your organization?

• The engaged reader cares enough about the topic to participate. This defines the commenter as  a “critic” in the Forrester Social Technographics paradigm.  He/she also cares enough about your organization to participate and add to the blog post.  *This is a potential volunteer, donor, activist or ally.*
• The number of engaged readers adds weight to your organization’s credibility. You can call upon these readers to mobilize for a cause, or utilize this statistic for fundraising purposes.

2. Why measure “average number of engaged readers per post?” This tells you, in general, if your blog posts are engaging your stakeholders. Avinash Kaushik developed what he calls the “conversation rate” in his thoughtful piece on blog measurement statistics here. (Beth Kanter built upon Kaushik’s four blog metrics and wrote about this paradigm using her own blog measurements here.)

It is simply # reader comments that are not the author’s/ # posts. Discount pingbacks if they appear in the comments section. For example, I have a total of 23 comments that are not mine, divided by 25 posts.  This is an average engaged reader of less than one per post. Not a great statistic, but I’m just getting started.  My goal is three by the end of June, and I’ll let you know if I make it.

Why should non-profits care about this statistic?

• It gives you a sense of whether or not you are engaging your stakeholders enough for them to put down what they are doing and comment.
• It tells you whether or not your posts are generating interest in a conversation, which is really your goal. By involving your stakeholders, they are also contributing actively to the success of your organization.
• *The higher this statistic, the more likely that you will be able to mobilize your readers to donate or act on your group’s behalf.*

3. Number of blog posts that engaged readers in “blog conversations.” Not every post will engage readers. It is a good idea to step back every quarter and look at the number of posts that engendered real conversations — where a back and forth discussion occurred between your organization and its readers.  How can we measure this?  I suggest initial segmentation by: total # of posts/ total # posts with more than one comment.  You can further segment by: total # of posts/ total # posts with more than X number of comments.

Why should you care about engaging in blog conversations?

• Your goal should be a conversation that moves the post to another level and gives the commenter a real sense of contributing to the organization’s thinking and success. More than one comment per post leads to real conversations.
• *Programming starts with conversation.* If you are considering new programs, evaluating old ones or looking for any type of organizational feedback, you need to know that you people will give it to you. The higher number that this statistic is, the better feedback you will get on any conversation you want to initiate. You have created engaged blog stakeholders who are eager and interested in commenting and conversing with you.

To sum up: Use these metrics to understand the depth and breadth of the stakeholders visiting your blog. Utilize this information to raise funds, mobilize.  mine your stakeholders for valuable feedback and ideas, and understand their needs.

I’ve tried to come up with some easy-to-use metrics for a non-profit to measure blog conversations and engagement.However, I’m not a professional statistician or analyst.  If you have other additions or suggestions, please feel free to tell me and I’ll add them!

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photo courtesy of fooferkitten, Flickr

The kitchen is the social hub of the home, and the epicenter of important family decisions. When I was a community organizer, I would knock on doors and ask people if they had a minute to talk. I knew I caught their interest when they invited me into their kitchen. If they offered me something to drink, I was even happier, because that meant that they had time for a real discussion. My goals, in order, were to get invited in, get into the kitchen, get a cup of coffee, get them to engage meaningfully, get them to join the organization. Once I was in the kitchen, usually everything else followed.

The questions I’ve been asking myself lately is:

Where is the virtual kitchen? Where do online stakeholders hang out socially?

Time, I believe, is the key metric to use when seeking the “kitchen.”  Social networks, I believe are the kitchens: they are the social hub of the internet, and  where people get information they trust to make important decisions. Therefore, I think of the metric thus: time spent on social networks overlaid with demographic information about each network.

The chart below, compiled by Hitwise, offers fairly recent information on US trend. A good comparison to this would be the slide show offered here, using ComScore statistics, that analyzes time spent on the top ten social networks from July 2006 to July 2007.

If I were developing a communications strategy, I would cross-reference my target populations’ demographics with analysis of time spent on social networking sites.

For example, if my organization were running a youth group, we would be interested in MySpace, YouTube, PhotoBucket, and Facebook. However, if we were interested in asking Baby Boomers to advocate for legislation, then we would most likely connect with them through a friend-finding site like Classmates.com or a professional network like LinkedIn. This chart compiled by Rapleaf is a great resource for identifying the age and gender of social network users.

When you want to find your stakeholders, and really engage, you want to be in their kitchen, the virtual portal where they spend the most time. You want to be in the place where they are spending their time socially online, sipping their cups of coffee. Hopefully, this post helps your organization find your stakeholders’ kitchens. Enjoy the coffee!

Enjoy the Coffee! (photo by Jones G Gallery)

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