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?

I was struck by this article that the brand itself is the second-most trusted source for information about a brand on a social networking site. Wow. Does that strike you as wild?

It does…and it doesn’t. While we know that, foremost, consumers trust online peers’ recommendations about brands and products (second only to friends and family), what strikes me about these survey results is the proven value of social media. Social network activities by an organization – when implemented well – create trust, enthusiasm, and credibility. That can translate into moving fans to action. That’s ROI.

While most brands initially hopped onto the social media bandwagon to generate sales, enough companies are communicating effectively and passionately using social media that they are creating a credibility scale for others to meet. You know who I’m talking about – the brands that are genuine, real connectors with stakeholders, and are transparent. These are the brands at the top of the credibility scale, and the ones that are still in it for a quick customer are at the bottom.

A report by Lightspeed Research about what US consumers want from brands online states that the top demand is “to improve their knowledge.” Specifically, consumers want brands to offer relevant news and analysis, new ideas and thinking, useful applications that consumers can download, and to create a space where consumers can interact directly with the company or staff. This type of content moves a company way up on the credibility scale.

Brand consumers want real value from social media, and real conversation.

This is what puts a brand or organization at the top of the credibility scale.

I imagine the credibility scale to look something like this (comments and improvements welcome!):

Nonprofit organizations: social network users are definitely looking to you for credible information about your organization and the cause. And they want to connect with your staff in an online space, in a real way. How can you reach the top of the credibility scale?

Here are a few ideas for nonprofits reaching for the top of the scale:

• More transparency about the successes, failure/challenges, and realities of the organization. Fans are looking to you for the real deal. Give it to them.
• Integrate more stakeholder content into the website, and the social media. Is there a way to vote or “thumb up” content? How can you use social voting to show how popular a concept or campaign is? How can you better integrate your social fans’ thoughts into your online spaces?
• Stream into the website how social media fans are referencing your work: create a social bookmarking feed of stakeholder-tagged content about organization, create a scroll of your tweets, showcase a Q&A on the website that comes directly from fan interaction on the social sites.
• Double-up your efforts to connect online with your fans: spend more time chatting with them, listening to them, and offering value to them.
• Ensure that the content you offer has value to your stakeholders, as mentioned above. Don’t think “here’s an article about what we just did.” Think “here’s an article about what we did, but we want to know how to improve it to better serve you.”
• Offer added value in the online spaces that you don’t offer elsewhere. Great examples: Seafood Watch offers added value with its iPhone app, BullyingUK displays user-created posters on Flickr, and Epic Change highlights the Twitter Kids’ tweetstream.

If there is an argument for social media improving brand credibility, which is a great ROI, then these survey results seem to verify to be the argument. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the brand credibility scale, and social network brand credibility in general.

I do love thinking about flow charts. Visualizing flow charts helps me to develop processes. My flow charts constantly iterate as I learn more. One challenge I’ve struggled with is that of creating a social media flow chart. There are a lot of aspects of social media flow that which make it difficult to create just one chart : the flow from strategy to implementation, the flow from listening to implementation and back, the process of creating a strategy, the relationship between platforms and the website, and the implementation process.

Inspired by the Delcor’s Flow Charts for Social Media blog post, and the blog-centric social media strategy work flow, I began to map out a basic social media flow chart. However, that’s now how it turned out. Instead, I created a  conceptualization of the relationship between social media, customer experience, and the customer’s decision to purchase or take action in support of an organization.

My thinking on this topic is influenced by both my experience developing and implementing social media for nonprofits and businesses, and Tara Hunt’s wonderful book The Whuffle Factor (not an affiliate link).  In The Whuffle Factor, Tara emphasizes throughout the book two key points: creating amazing online customer experiences with the brand and always thinking about how you want your customers to feel when they interact with the brand.

My thinking boils down to this:

Create social spaces that develop customer loyalty and have room for real engagement, add value to the brand (or program) experience, and lead to the intended results for the organization.

When developing a social media strategy, I keep in mind these three questions:

• How will the brand/program/organization deliver exceptional value and engagement to stakeholders through social media?
• How will social media encourage brand/program/organizational loyalty?
• Will the strategy support business/organizational goals to produce intended results? (increased volume  or type of sales, clients, participants, more volunteers, etc.)

My flow chart is embedded below. I’m curious how you would approach the same idea, modify this chart, etc. If you have your own flow chart, I’d be more than pleased to feature it in a separate blog post.

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.

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.)