I had the pleasure of presenting a workshop entitled “Data Driven Leadership” at the Massachusetts Nonprofit Network/AGM annual conference last week, along with colleagues Marc Baizman and Steve Backman. The question we addressed in the workshop was: what online data does a leader want in order to make informed decisions around programming, advocacy, fundraising, and advocacy?  Marc, Steve, and I have expertise in analyzing Google Analytics, understanding customer segmentation and databases, and identifying social media metrics, respectively. Each of us thought about how the data from our respective area of expertise could address this question, and demonstrated where to find those answers during the session. The hardest part was choosing what to eliminate from our presentation, as we only had one hour to cover this enormous topic!

Getting started

We created a DIY worksheet for the session entitled, “Make Your Data Work for You: A DIY Worksheet.” It offers sample questions to get you started thinking in the areas of marketing, programs and services, development, and volunteers and advocacy. For every sample question, it asks you to set the priority level, consider what data you’ll need to answer that question, and where you can find the answer. There are a lot of spaces for you to customize the worksheet to your needs. You can read and download the worksheet here.

We had a great time creating this workshop, and presenting it. However, the real challenge was trying to determine how to organize and prioritize all the data available. For every leader, thinking about the real organizational questions that the data could offer is the place to begin.

Below are summaries of our segments of the presentation, written individually by each of us.

Facebook Insights: Debra Askanase

I focused on four questions that have implications for advocacy, programming, and fundraising:

• How many people care about the organization, and how deeply?
• What do fans care about the most, and how deeply?
• What is the organization doing that reaches the most people?
• What do you know about who cares about the organization?

Facebook has made answering the question of how many people care about the organization, and how deeply, very simple: look at the “People Are Talking About” metric on the organization’s Facebook fan page. Facebook Insights is all about fan engagement now, and helping page administrators understand what content fans want to engage with the most.  For a deeper dive into the newest version of Facebook Insights, take a look at this post.

To understand the power of page post metrics, I highlighted a news story republished by Hebrew University that questioned of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Looking at the per-post measurements, this wall post had higher engagement than the general PATA metric, and was shared by so many fans that it had tremendous viral lift. By looking for patterns in per-post engagement, we can also see that similar news and science stories are popular with fans of The Hebrew University’s page. Knowing what fans are most interested in hearing about from the organization should guide future alumni communications and fundraising.

Lastly, thinking about demographics also offers programming, advocacy, and fundraising guidance. Facebook Insights break down the demographics of your fans as well as the demographics of who is talking about you (that PATA metric). In some cases, who is talking about your page, “the super-engaged,” may have different demographic characteristics than page fans.

Web Analytics: Marc Baizman

Marc focused on Web Analytics. Web analytics can be a great tool for you to use, but you need to clearly define what indicators are important to your organization, and then you need to take action based on the what the data tells you!  Marc focused on asking several simple questions which web analytics can help answer, such as:

• How many people look at our site?
• How do people find our website?
• What are people looking at?
• What do we want people to do, and are they actually doing those things?

While he offered these sample questions, you should formulate your own questions based on what’s important to you.  Remember that although Google Analytics is free, your staff’s time isn’t, so get help if you need to.  A good place to get FREE help is the Analysis Exchange, http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/ae/ae-business.asp

Smart Segmentation: Steve Backman

Steve focused on “smart segmentation.” Segmentation often comes across at first as an alien, corporate marketing concept. Steve discussed how any organization, large or small, with the best of contact management software or a collection of spreadsheets, can begin to benefit from a smart segmentation framework. In order to reach the largest possible audience, in the most effective way, you need to understand and operate from your organization’s constituent groups.

Organizations make take satisfaction in how their monthly email stats rise and fall, or overall response rates to a fund appeal, advocacy campaign, or event. To go deeper, you need to look proactively at how you characterize your contacts. You need to work through how to connect critical data from these separate connections and activities to generate a full picture. Steve encouraged data managers to have more passion in understanding their organization’s constituency and putting the available data at the service of organizational goals. He used quick examples from Constant Contact stats and Salesforce reporting to stress an overall framework: find indicators that support you goal and measures you can collect.

I love the new Facebook Insights. Unlike so many other changes that Facebook has sprung unexpectedly on us, the new Insights is a welcome change. I think it is such a significant change that it is a game-changer in the social media space. If I sound gushy, well, I am. With the new Insights metrics, Facebook is boldly telling the Facebook community and its competitors that the most important social network metric is real online engagement. As I’ve written before, if your page cannot ultimately move people to take action, then your organization is wasting its time with Facebook. Online engagement is how it begins.

Facebook believes that you need to know how engaging your content really is. And they want you to do something about that.

Everything about the new Facebook Insights is focused on helping page administrators understand how well their page’s content is being received, shared, and talked about within Facebook. No longer do we have to count up Likes, fan posts to walls, and comments on posts, and pull together the online engagement percentage. And what’s more, we can dive deep, very deep, by post. By who is seeing the posts, and where. By how the content is being shared, and what type of content is being shared. That’s just the beginning. The Facebook metric that matters now is engagement. Here are but three examples of how Facebook is highlighting engagement.

Likes vs. PATA

Think about thee bold statement Facebook is making when it shows this publicly on every Facebook page, for all to note:

In one glance, which number is more important? With simplicity and sharpness, Facebook turned the Like numbers game into an “how many really care” numbers game. Brilliant.

Engagement by post

You can also drill down by post. New Insights is designed to help you understand which posts created the most Reach (impressions, who saw it), or highest number of Engaged Users (who clicked on it), or highest number of those who Talked About This (Liked, shared it, commented on a post). The old Insights offered a blanket number of impressions and feedback percentage by wall post, which merely offered a sense of reach and interest. A post like this one (below), which 2,200+ Facebook users could have seen, only had 56 clicks on it and 9 users who commented or Liked the post. The real engagement metric on this post is 56. And nine people who were really engaged.

What types of posts are the most engaging? Figure that out and improve your PATA score. Go get’em!

How you reached people: understanding how content engages

I also love that you can tell which of the wall posts took off due to either organic, paid or viral traffic. Look at those posts, figure out what happened there, and create more content like that. Understand the difference between the posts that “go viral” and those that are seen because of organic traffic. Greater reach ultimately will attract new Fans and people Talking About your page and posts.

So this is the future of measurement. Thanks goodness. Facebook has made the first move in this direction. It’s is a great start.

Twitter, YouTube, Google+, you’re next.

Image courtesy of escuchoelecodetuvoz, Creative Commons license

Last week I spoke at the NYC Social Media for Nonprofits conference on creating and measuring return on engagement. In fact, social media engagement should have been the untitled conference theme. Almost every speaker presented a case study or spoke about his/her use of social media for successful engagement, from how to use video to engage (Charity:Water’s September Birthday campaign) to how to create multi-channel fundraising engagement (Big Duck). And you know what? They’re right. Without engagement, social media ultimately fails. However, you can design your social media activities to create online engagement, which is the focus on my presentation. My conference presentation covered five core concepts about how to design real online engagement for the highest return on engagement:

• Numbers do not equal return on engagement (see this post on the Case of the 4,000 Twitter Followers Who Don’t Care)
• You can design social media activities for real engagement
  
• How to leverage relationship ties organizationally to convert fans to superfans (and increase ROE)
• Align SMART goals with social media design
  
• Three approaches to measuring return on Engagement (ROE): community commitment, fan trust, and SMART goal achievement

When researching data and gathering ideas for the presentation, what really struck me were two related ideas:

1. A co-creation strategy resonates with your fans and encourages the highest levels of real engagement.

This study on the true value of social media clearly demonstrates that a user-generated content strategy and co-creation strategy moves more fans to influence a purchase and talk about brands than any other type of social media action.

2. A successful co-creation strategy relies on two of the four elements of social tie strength: trust and reciprocity.

Organizations can easily leverage trust and reciprocity, two of the four elements (the other two being time and intensity) to create stronger ties with online stakeholders. Examples of trust and reciprocity include: online authenticity and transparency, real sharing of organizational thinking and decisions, fans helping each other within a shared group, organizations asking fans for their opinions. All of these are real engagement activities that strengthen relationships because they demonstrate an organization’s ability to offer reciprocity and extend trust.

Combine trust and reciprocity with co-creation. What do you have? Engagement.

The last part of my presentation is an approach to social media measurement.  I see three important measurements:

1. Did you meet your SMART goals? Is the online community taking the intended actions that you want them to take? Defining the goals that your organization wants to achieve is critical – it’s how you will ultimately know whether or not your social media strategy and activities are working.

2. The ROE of fan commitment and trust. There are three levels of fan commitment: Making a simple, non-intensive action (Liking your page, joining your group, following), active engagement (RTing, conversation, uploading content, sharing your content), and making a deeper commitment (taking a pledge, joining a planning group, donating money, volunteering). The deeper commitment usually relates the action you want them to take (see “Did you meet your SMART goals?” above). Track the numbers of fans at each level, and how successful you are at increasing these numbers.

3. The ROE of community commitment. This measurement is trying to get at how committed the community as a whole is. As social media measurement expert Lauren Vargas told me, “give management a number that they can hang their hat on.” It makes perfect sense. Instead of reviewing a spreadsheet of many different trends and statistics, combine them into a number that represents the totality of your measurements. Slide 32 of the slide deck talks about defining the discreet metrics that capture fan engagement, assigning weights to them (they have to add up to 100, but you can’t have them all weigh the same), and creating an overall weighted community commitment score. How this score changes weekly is the community commitment benchmark.

(Credit to Lauren Vargas with inspiring this measurement approach.)

I’d love to hear your thoughts on designing and measuring online engagement.

I had the pleasure of presenting on the topic of Ramping Up Your Facebook Engagement to a group of NYC nonprofit organizations last week,  convened by my colleagues Michelle Perrault and Seth Giammanco at Minds On Design Lab. Seth and Michelle took the time to ask attendees what they wanted to get out of the session, which really helped to customize the presentation and make sure it was appropriate for all levels of expertise. The presentation covered understanding Facebook post engagement, matching goals to engagement, practices for designing Facebook Page engagement, practical ideas for creating engagement on the Page based on recent research, and measuring engagement and ROE.

What I love most is learning from the other attendees. I asked the attendees to share what they are doing to create Facebook engagement successfully, and heard about some great practices. Planned Parenthood has recently been able to move its Facebook fans to successful defend the organization against legislative attacks. MASA Israel has found that including a media image (photo or vidoe) with every wall post update increase wall post engagement. MASA Israel has also developed a successful Facebook application that streamlines the program enrollment decision-making process. The Partnership at Drugfree.org held a successful Facebook wall chat, most recently with the actress Melissa Gilbert.

The Importance of the Newsfeed

Most fans never visit a Page, but instead rely on the Page’s content to show up in their newsfeeds. A recent ComScore study reports that “Facebook users are 40-150 times more likely to consume branded content in the newsfeed than to visit the Fan Page itself.” However, the problem is that not all content will show up in the Top News section of the newsfeed, which is the default newsfeed setting. Facebook uses an algorithm called “EdgeRank” that dictates which content will be featured prominently in an individual’s newsfeed. EdgeRank takes into account three factors: how recent was the content published (on a site, on a Facebook Page), how much interaction did the piece of content create, and how regularly the individual interacts with the organization or brand. Thus, if an organization publishes a video to its Page, and no one Likes or comments on it, the video may never show up in the Top News newsfeed of someone’s wall. However, if an individual often Likes, shares, or comments on that organization’s content, there is a higher likelihood that the video will show up as part of the Top News.

Setting Goals is important

A recent Idealware study on the use of Facebook reveals that nonprofit organizations that set Facebook goals felt that goal-setting correlated with Facebook Success. In particular, organizations saw success correlated to the Facebook ofa goals of driving constituents to action and attracting particular kinds of constituents. A recent Hubspot report of Facebook brand pages reveals that businesses with 501-1,000 Facebook fans saw 3.5 times the amount of website traffic than Pages with less than 25 fans.

Designing Facebook Engagement

Creating Facebook Page engagement is challenging, which is why it is so important to help your fans engage through good Page design. There are four elements to good Facebook Page design: creating a welcoming portal with a custom welcome Page, identifying what the main conversation within the Page will be about, offering unique content to your Fans (found only on Facebook), and creating a content calendar. In addition, you can design your calls to action for a higher return on engagement, as shown by this study by the PR firm 22Squared.

Practicing Engagement

The slide deck offers some good practices for creating more engagement, taken from a variety of sources. Ideas include posting five days a week, what time of day to post and which days of the week garner the highest engagement.

Measuring Facebook Engagement  

The last section of the presentation covers thinking about how to measure Facebook engagement, including mapping goals to actions and deeper benchmarking goals. The slide (below) from the presentation demonstrates this approach to Facebook measurement and quantifying ROE.

How are you using Facebook to create engagement?

Image courtesy of Jeff the Trojan, CC license

I’ve been thinking about the concept of Return on Engagement (ROE). Instead of focusing on number of followers, we need to focus on the number of engaged followers. Just measuring the number people who follow your organization online tells an incomplete story. How many of those followers are likely to actually care about your campaigns? We need to focus on engagement strategies, and design engagement.  While we are learning every day more about how to design social media engagement, it is trickier to measure it. The next step is thinking about measuring engagement.

Measuring engagement is critical. If we don’t know how engaged people are in our social spaces, we won’t have a clue about whether or not our social media campaigns will work. I know that there must be a strong relationship between online engagement and online activism, similar to the extremely high propensity of volunteers to donate. There has to be a standard rule of “this many active people in our social media spaces translates into approximately this many people who will take action.” I’d like to figure out an engagement to activism rule-of-thumb, but we need case studies and a lot of people willing to measure engagement and activism.

In an attempt to formalize my thinking around measuring engagement, I’ve defined three different kinds of measurements: status, engagement, and activism measurements. We need all three measurements to understand the strength of a company’s online presence, stakeholder engagement with a cause or organization, and what percentage of them are moved to action by the organization.

Status measurements are those social media numbers everyone quotes: followers, tweets, friends, connections, group members, views, tags, etc. Status measurements are non-contextual, in that they are separated from all context of the online community or conversations. Status measurements don’t tell the right story, or the whole story.

Status measurements lead to ROE, but cannot be used to measure ROE.

Engagement measurements capture how often individual members engage with the organization within the organization’s social media spaces. Engagement activities include a person commenting on a blog post, Liking a Facebook or Linkedin update, sharing a blog post, favouriting a video or re-tweeting messages. The activism measurement looks at the number of people who are affirmatively taking the action that your organization wants them to take, such as sharing a link or donating money. By its nature, the activism percentage is a comment on the influence an organization has to move its online followers and friends to action. Both the engagement and activism measurements are contextual, and can only be understand within the context of the online community.

Engagement and activism measurements are used to gauge the strength of the community, and its potential for ROE.

I’ll take a stab at measuring engagement:

1. Online Engagement percentage

Total number who engage in some way with your organization’s social media spaces or within them/Total number of people in the same social media spaces

For example: 1200 people from the Facebook Page and Linkedin Group engage with those sites monthly/6,700 people who follow us on those spaces = 18% are actually engaged with the organization online

2. Online Activism percentage

Total number who took action that you asked them to take, from your social media spaces/Total number of people within your social media spaces

For example: 280 people from the Facebook Page and Linkedin Group completed a survey on your site/6,700 people who follow us on those spaces = 4% are willing to take action for your organization

To glean information, compare the engagement percentage with the activism percentage. Are they similar? How far apart are they? Look back at the social media activities that your organization encourages its stakeholders to take. Think about what activities you can build into your social media communities that will positively affect the activist percentage, and change those activities.

Ultimately, I’d like to know: what is the maximum online engagement percentage to expect? What is average? Does it vary by industry or cause? What affects the online activism percentage? Is there a rule that links the activism percentage to the engagement percentage? What moves each of these percentages upwards or downwards?

I created a slide presentation (below) about this subject that I was supposed to present with Nonprofitwebinars.com May 18. However, due to technical difficulties, it has been postponed until July 13. The slide deck has a lot more information about measuring engagement, and includes a review of two online communities that are highly engaged. If you are interested in attending the free webinar on July 13, sign up using the side widget to the right of this blog post.

Image courtesy of Robert S. Donovan and Creative Commons

Everyone wants  to know the secret formula for on-page Facebook engagement. It seems that the new buzzword is “engagement,”and followers aren’t as important as engaged followers (thankfully). A few recent discussions and reports have zeroed in on how fans respond to Facebook posts, want to interact with posts, and when they are most responsive.

How often to post updates

A recent Linkedin discussion around the question “How often should you post on your nonprofit’s Facebook Page, and when?” seems to typify the public discussion. From this discussion (79 comments) within the Social Media for Nonprofit Organizations group, the comments can be condensed into the following practitioner recommendations:

• Post a minimum of three times a week for engagement.
• Some organizations seem to feel that posting daily is a necessity, but never more than thrice-daily. It seems to depend on the size of the Facebook page and the organization.
  
• Relevant content is of primary importance; if it isn’t relevant, it is best not to post anything.

Within the comments, Shelly DeMott Kramer mentioned Dan Zarella’s recent webinar about how brands use Facebook. The webinar was based on his extensive research, which shows that the most successful brands post content to Facebook daily.

Based on my experience posting for other nonprofit organizations, I believe that daily Facebook posting is must for a vibrant and strong brand. However, if you are trying to build your brand that has few followers, posting three to four times a week can be sufficient, until the page reaches a critical engagement mass.

You know WHEN to post, but not HOW

Buddy Media identifies definitive best brand practices for Facebook engagement in its new report, “Strategies for Effective Facebook Wall Posts: A statistical review.” The study analyzed Facebook wall posts of 200 of the world’s largest brands over a two-week time period. Success was measured in relationship to number of comments and likes as a percentage of fan base.  The highlights are summarized in this chart, created by emarketer:

Other notable points from the Buddy media white paper:

• Do not shorten links with URL shorteners. Engagement rates are three times higher when posts contain the long URL than when they contain a shortened link. Perhaps, speculates the authors, fans are wary about what they are clicking on when the URL is shortened.
• Different industries have higher engagement on different days of the week. For example, the entertainment industry sees the highest engagement Friday through Sunday, when most brands do not post.
• To drive comments, ask a direct question and then ask for a response. Fans seem to like direction.
• If you want fans to like a post, ask them to do so in a forthright manner.
• When running a contest or other promotional offer, “softer sell” keywords resonate best. Fans are happier engaging in contests with the words “winning” and “events” than the words “contest” or “promotion.”
• As noted above, asking a question at the end of a post drives engagement. In particular, the words “where,” “when,” “would,” and “should” drive the highest engagement rates. Avoid asking “why” questions – this word has the lowest like rate.

You can download the entire report here.

WHAT to post to encourage comments

My colleague John Haydon just published a wonderful blog post entitled “16 Ways to Get More Comments on Your Facebook Page.” (Notably, it has been retweeted 312 times and recommended on Facebook 249 times.) Each of the sixteen ways cited in the blog post includes a link illustrating the example on Facebook. I’ve tried many of these methods, and I can attest that they drive engagement. Additionally, as I wrote previously, asking questions is also a great way to know more about who is engaging with your page.

We’ve come a long way towards understanding how to create engagement on Facebook. What have you learned?

image courtesy of tony newell

I’ve been exploring paid social media monitoring systems as part of my role at FirstGiving. Initially, I was pretty excited about being able to monitor social media sentiment. Measuring aggregate sentiment over time seemed obvious to me. However, it became clear that none of the tools monitored sentiment well. In fact, they were all terrible at returning real online user sentiment. Neutral tweets were marked as negative or positive, positive tweets were marked as negative, and so forth. After researching sentiment analysis, I was not surprised to read that automated sentiment analysis is slightly less accurate than flipping a coin to determine whether or not brand mentions are positive or negative. (I tried to tweak the returns by manually changing the sentiments to influence the automatic marking, but that had no effect on accuracy.)   I had been thinking that measuring sentiment analysis was the key to getting real ROI. I was completely wrong.

Measuring social media sentiment is the measuring the wrong ROI.

Sentiment analysis and measurement at companies is often driven by the need to prove the ROI (return on investment) of social media. Pressured to prove the value of social media involvement, the person in charge of social media will be tempted to prove his/her value by highlighting the percent change in positive online mentions. I would argue that measuring the change in sentiment is the wrong ROI to measure.

The right ROI measurement should be increased engagement and interactions.

Positive brand sentiment is nice. Does it move people to action? US internet users are likely to share information about your company and proactively recommend that someone make a purchase online, so engaging with stakeholders online supports that behavior. You really want to engage in such a way as to add value and create brand loyalty. Taking action as a result of social media is the ultimate ROI.

With the right engagement activity, loyal clients and consumers should naturally take the actions that you want them to take. Begin by measuring the level of online engagement with your organization, and make your plan based on that information. If your activists/clients/consumers are not talking to you at all online, that’s the engagement equivalent of negative sentiment. If they mention you in passing, that’s the engagement equivalent of neutral sentiment.

Let’s turn the ideal ROI of increased positive online sentiment on its head, and replace it with measuring increased positive online engagement with the organization. I wrote a similar statement in the comments of Shel Israel’s wonderful blog post describing his mixed emotions about sentiment analysis. Tal Wolgroch replied in the comments that “sentiment analysis is not about traditional ROI anymore. Those who try to measure it this way are playing a new game with an old rulebook.”

Stop trying to measure sentiment. Worry about your lack of engagement.

The State of the Blogosphere offers a useful spotlight on important trends and returns from blogging – many of which can be applied to the nonprofit sector. If you cross the results of the SOTB with the recent Idealware social media guide research and survey about how nonprofits use social media, the result is proof of the power of blogging to deepen engagement, attract new stakeholders, create thought leadership and expand services.

Technorati recently released its annual State of the Blogosphere (SOTB). This past year, 7,200 bloggers responded to a lengthy survey on every aspect of blogging (I also participated). Responders included hobbyists, self-employed, self-defined “mom bloggers,” part-time bloggers, and corporate bloggers. The resulting annual State of the Blogosphere is a snapshot of the world of blogging – who’s blogging, how they are doing it, what technical features are they using, what are they blogging about, and the benefits of blogging. (You can read the complete three-part State of the Blogosphere report and analysis from Technorati.)

Their are a some very compelling findings relevant to nonprofit organizations – specifically blog impact, promoting the blog, blogging tools, and the impact of using social media channels for your blog. Though the SOTB surveyed all bloggers, I’ve focused on survey replies from the “all bloggers” and “corporate bloggers” categories.

Blog impact: visbility, thought leadership, service expansion

From the results, it’s clear that blogging is effective at raising the profile of the organization within the industry. The SOTB survey asked “Which of the following statements describes how your blog has helped your business?” The results: greater visibility in the industry, prospective clients have read their blogs and purchased products or services, and the blog has helped their company to be regarded as a thought leader in the industry. (Additionally, in Idealware’s report, many nonprofits know that blogging is one of the top social media channels nonprofits use to enhance relations with an existing audience.)

Nonprofit takeaways: donors, potential clients, and potential collaborators may be reading your blog before contacting you. Blogging deepens relationships with existing stakeholders, too. If becoming well-known within your sector is an organizational goal, blogging can help you get there.

The relationship between Twitter and blogging

The SOTB shows the rise of Twitter activity by bloggers, and its effectiveness. 88% of all corporate bloggers have Twitter account. 37% of them believe that Twitter is a more effective driver of traffic to their blogs than it was a year ago. Corporate bloggers tend to use Twitter to promote the blog, stay on top of current news and industry buzz, understand current online buzz, and interact with blog readers. Most corporate bloggers automatically tweet their blog posts.

Nonprofit takeaways: Use Twitter to source industry news, promote the blog, and develop relationships with blog readers. If you’re not yet tweeting, the SOTB offers the compelling reasons you need to start.

The relationship between Facebook and blogging

The majority of bloggers use Facebook, and 62% of corporate bloggers have a corporate Facebook page and use Facebook to promote the corporate blog,  Corporate bloggers also use Facebook to market their businesses, interact with blog readers, and syndicate their blog posts. Almost 50% of bloggers feel that Facebook is more effective at driving traffic to their website than it was a year ago!

Corporate bloggers feel that Facebook is the most effective social media channel for driving traffic to the website, overall, followed by Twitter, with Linkedin an extremely distant third.

Nonprofit Takeaways: Opening a Facebook Page may be the single best thing you can do to drive traffic to your website. It’s also great for creating deeper relationships with stakeholders and interacting with them off 0f the website.

Other social media channels used by bloggers

The primary social media channels used by corporate bloggers are Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, Flickr and Delicious. This syncs nicely with the Idealware survey of nonprofit organizations, which found that most US nonprofit organizations are blogging, using Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, video sharing, and photo sharing.

Blogging tools

By far, most bloggers (87%) regularly integrate photos into their blogs, and 50% use video. Corporate blogs, on the whole, also include the ability for multiple authors, social sharing widgets (share on Twitter, etc.), RSS feeds, a commenting system, a search box, tags, and categories.

Nonprofit Takeaways: the tools listed above create community, simplify and amplify social sharing, and make your blog easier to find online. Integrating photos and videos into a blog adds interest. Photos and videos are great storytelling tools, too!

Attracting visitors to the blog

Aside from using Facebook and Twitter, bloggers are employing other means to attract visitors to their blogs. The most popular method is tagging blog posts, followed by using Twitter and Facebook. Given that this is a Technorati survey, it isn’t surprising that many bloggers list their blogs with Technorati and Google. Bloggers also recognize other blogs as a way of creating attention to their blog:  54% comment on other blogs and “hope for reciprocity,” and 49% link to other blogs in a blogroll.

Nonprofit takeaways: Use these tactics to bring visitors to your organization’s blog. Most importantly, be generous! Commenting on other blogs, linking to other blogs, and creating a blogroll to recognize other great blogs are worthwhile methods of gaining the attention of those other bloggers – and bringing them into your community.

What are your takeaways from the State of the Blogosphere?

Does your blogging experience differ from the survey results?

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.)

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.