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.)

This is the second of two blog posts from the We Are Media Listening session at the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference. In Part One, I wrote about how the American Red Cross thinks about listening. In Part Two, I’ll pass along insights and tips from Danielle Brigida (National Wildlife Federation) on how to build a listening dashboard out of free tools.

With a limited budget, and one full-time social outreach staffer, NWF is on top of its mentions, shares them internally, and actively uses keywords to continually monitor conversation trends and find new fans. The are successful at converting listening to fans, engagement, and metrics. And to say the least, it’s quite impressive. Here are some takeaways from the session:

Build your listening dashboard into one central listening space, such as iGoogle or an RSS reader

Danielle suggests monitoring online mentions through an iGoogle account, or an RSS reader. Try to grab an RSS feed from each listening channel so that all new mentions are automatically updated and fed into your RSS reader or iGoogle page. Try to automate as much of the listening process as follows. (Many of these channels also offer automatic email alerts.) Example: Search for a keyword on BlogPulse, add the search query to a RSS feed reader. All new keyword mentions will feed into your RSS reader or iGoogle.

The really important thing is to know your keywords

Find the important keywords to monitor, and use basic query language to narrow your searches. Example: search ["national wildlife" - refuge] returns all mentions of national wildlife but nothing that refers to a refuge. Keyword searches can inform the questions people have about your organization – and will provide value to the organization. (Keyword research is also great SEO information to create blog post titles, content, etc.) Refine listening tools to get exactly what you want, and constantly search for new keywords, noting keyword trends. Some tools:

Google Keyword Tool: If you type in a term, it will show you the other terms that people are using when they are also searching for your term. I typed in the term “NWF”  and it returned a list of common phrases that people use to search for NWF. Here’s a screen shot:

Google Insights Search: It allows you to compare keywords. Great use for SEO in blog post titles, etc. Great for searching what people are talking about by geographical area, by trends, and more.

Wordtracker: Looks at how people are talking about a certain keyword. Shows how often people are searching for keywords over the past year. Keyword searches can also inform the questions people have about your organization – and will provide value to the organization.

What the NWF primarily uses to search for mentions

The NWF uses BoardReader, Socialmentions, IceRocket, Technorati, BlogPulse and a few others to catch all of the NWF online mentions. Danielle also thinks about where the conversations and traffic might be within social channels, and specifically search those sites internally periodically (such as internal YouTube search).

Other places they search

Backtype: It will keep your comments in one place. Can search for comments by keyword.

BackTweets: When searching twitter, it will pull up the redirected links/shortened links mentioned on twitter. Twitter’s internal search doesn’t bring this up.

Buzzzy: This is the search engine for Google Buzz. Can search by keyword to see if people are using your keywords.

IceRocket: A broad search engine to search the social platforms. Click on the “Big Buzz” tab of it to get all the recent mentions. Can create an RSS feed of any search query except for within the Big Buzz tab.

FollowerWonk: It searches all of the Twitter bios. Can search for keywords in a title. Example: the NWF might search for anyone who mentions “garden” in his/her bio.

Internal organizational sharing

Danielle pulls important and relevant mentions into the social bookmarking site Delicious. She’ll take any exact quote/mention within an article, and copy it into the “notes” section of Delicious. She tags it with a predetermined private tag for other NWF staff to read. Delicious will keep track of the top tags and the #of mentions of that tag/year. This helps anyone, including NWF, track what is being talked about most. Wendy Harman of the American Red Cross tracks every place that she has commented with the tag “comment” to keep track of where she has started relationships.

Google Bundles: Using keywords, you can create Google bundles for groups of people. Within Google Reader, expand the “all items” and open the “browse for stuff” section. Click “create a bundle” at the very bottom. Title it, describe it, drag RSS feeds that you want to include into the box. Click “save.” Click “add to my shared items” and then someone can subscribe to my bundle. So, if there is a large number of people and you want them to know what you’re reading, they can click the blue subscribe button and subscribe to your bundles! Can help staff and coworkers to become experts in a certain area.

Tracking stats through social sharing

AddThis: Track # shares and where they share, sends a weekly email summary.

PostRank: First create an account, then add your blog into PostRank (mostly used for blogs). It creates an engagement metric based on number of social shares. If you click on the engagement metric, a drop down menu reveals how people are sharing it.  It is a very small cost/month to get the advanced analytics. It shows you a graph that maps out when your highest engagement was with a certain post.

How do you compile your dashboard?

Danielle Brigida (NWF) and Wendy Harman (ARC)

I just returned from the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference in Atlanta, and loved the sessions. Over the next few days, I’ll publish my notes from several of the valuable workshops. This blog post is taken from my notes at the We Are Media Listening workshop, presented by Danielle Brigida of the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) and Wendy Harman of the American Red Cross (ARC). Today’s post is the first of two blog posts from this workshop. Part One reviews how and why the ARC listens online, and Part Two describes how to build a listening dashboard from free online tools.

I was struck by how the American Red Cross thinks about listening as a tool for building community, internal professional development, and organizational development.

This is how the American Red Cross thinks about online listening:

Listening is about relevancy. The ARC is mentioned about 700 times a day across many social media platforms, and ALL of their social media content is informed by listening to the things people care about.

Listening can spur organizational change. The ARC has made several adjustments based on what people are saying about the organization. Example: during Haiti, everyone knew about the text code to donate, but also the people trapped in Haiti were using that code to tell the outside world about the situation. Lesson learned: ARC needs to figure out a way to separate out different conversations during crisis.

Listening is about reputation management. The ARC actively seeks to connect with people who are upset or happy about our work, and offer help and resources, and this is a very proactive way to manage reputation.

Listening gives us great data to help us do our work better. There is also a big market research element to listening: because there is so much social data to analyze, the ARC can become much more informed about the data from listening.

Listening is about professional development. Wendy also believes that every person in the internal organization should be familiar with what is going on in his/her field; what it is that they do daily. Knowing what is going on makes employees better at their jobs.

Social media is open to everyone: volunteers, chapters, and employees. Listening builds community. The ARC created a flow chart of its response strategy. It also created a social media handbook for the chapters. For employees and chapters, the ARC encourages anyone to respond and engage but the ground rules boil down to #1: disclose your relationship to the ARC and #2: talk only about what you know. Through listening, local chapters and the larger ARC build communities of trust and communities of care.

How the ARC monitors online mentions and keywords: They use Radian6

ARC uses Radian6, a paid listening service. At the click of a button, Radian6 creates  big-picture graphs depending on what kinds of information you want. Easy to share most important conversations. Example: Radian6 can produce a graph of the intersection between the keywords American Red Cross, Haiti, Donate, Flood, and Blood. One can see from this graph how to best connect with people and what most care about from their conversations. It’s also easy to view where people are talking about “American Red Cross” online: mainstream news, twitter, blogs, etc.

Radian6 also makes it easy to find relevant keywords to keep an eye on them. The application will create a cloud graph of the words most closely associated with the organization over the last 90 days (Ed note: interesting feature!). Cool feature: users can run a “river of news” to see why there is a spike in mentions. The river of news will show all the mentions at any points, which can help organizations identify trends, missed conversations, and other items.

In part 2: Danielle Brigida explains how to build a killer listening dashboard out of free listening tools

So many more organizations and people are engaged in social media today than they were a year ago. What that means is that so many more people are talking about your company, your competitors, your employees and your brands today than they were a year ago. At least, that’s the potential.  According to Forrester Research, the number of US regular social network users has doubled since 2007. So, are you monitoring the conversation? Have you set up your listening posts? Simply put, email alerts (daily, or in real time) are the best way to make sure you are not missing out on any online mentions  relevant to you or your company, positive or negative.

I’ve compiled what I believe is the “do not miss,” list of (free) email listening tools your organization should use. There are a lot of great paid listening systems out there, but this list is about free tools and ones that send email alerts. If you use them, you will catch 95% of the online mentions relevant to you and your company. And, to back it up, I use these personally.

My question to you is: what are the other essential free listening alerts out there? I’d love to know about them.

In no particular order, here are the six free listening tools you cannot do without:

1. Google Alerts

Be sure and sign up for the comprehensive alert. Since Google is now indexing most social media updates (Facebook, Twitter, comments, etc), this is the one “must have” alert. Sign up for as many as 10 at a time, for free. Once these alerts are verified, you can sign up for 10 more. Don’t forget to sign up for video alerts (video comments, tags, etc) separately.

2. Backtype Alerts

Backtype has two functions: it compiles all of your blog comments into one space. I heard someone describe it as “backtype keeps track of all my comments, like crumbs left in the blogosphere.” However, you can set up email alerts as well for any phrase, word, name, etc. I recently found out that there was a discussion going on in the comments of someone else’s blog about one of my blog posts – I was happy to know about it so that I could join in the conversation. Don’t miss out on the mentions of your company in someone else’s blog comments!

3. Socialmention Alerts

Similar to Google Alerts, this is a comprehensive search and alert listening system. The best part is, it’s free and sent to you by email!

4. Boardtracker Alerts

Ever wonder what people are saying about your brands in the message boards? All public message boards are open for search, but Boardtracker seems to pick up the ones that everyone else forgets. Don’t forget this one and miss out on the discussion about your brand features, organization’s last fundraiser, and more.

5. TweetBeep Alerts

TweetBeep is a Google Alert – but for twitter. It searches the search.twitter.com site for mentions of the specific keywords or phrases that you input. You are allowed up to 10 free alerts, and they are sent as an email to you either hourly, daily, or as they occur. If you are not always on twitter, or checking in to the search feature of Twitter, this is a great alert system.

6. Filtrbox Alerts

I find Filtrbox to be one of the more interesting alerts out there. Though the company says that it offers real time social media monitoring on twitter and other platforms, I primarily receive Twitter alerts from them, and frankly think it misses a lot of Twitter mentions, too. However, on a few critical occasions, they have delivered email alerts to me when all my other listening posts were silent. For that, I am loyal to Filtrbox as an alert when every other alert fails.

OK, I lied: the following is not an email alert, but it does come to your online RSS reader. It’s so important I thought I should share this:

Create RSS Feeds on Delicous and Flickr

This may not be obvious, but many times people will tag a social news site or photo site with your name, the name of your company, your organization, your brand, etc. For example, there are many Flickr photos that people have uploaded of their activities on charity walks to raise funds, and tagged with the name of the charity. However, did those same people also upload the photos to that charity’s photo group? Just to be sure, create an RSS feed of any tag name that you want to keep track of and send all those mentions to your RSS reader.

If you want to create a feed of a tag just search for the tag, and look for the RSS orange icon somewhere on that page. See my Delicious screen shot (below) with a search for the tag “livestrong” and the RSS feed at the bottom left of the screen.

Delicious tag "livestrong"

Do you use any of the six tools for listening mentioned here? How would you rate them? Are there any other ones that you cannot do without?

image courtesy of j_a_n

How can organizations best utilize the social bookmarking site Delicious? Though not the largest of the social bookmarking sites (it is 7th of the top 20), it is one of the easiest sites to mine for information. It is deliciously simple (pun intended!) to use, and there are over 180 tools, add-ons, and related resources to help you to take advantage of this platform. I can think of three broad ways organizations can use Delicious: for public/private information-gathering, intra company collaboration, and sharing news with stakeholders. I’m sure there are more! How do you use Delicious?

Information Gathering (public or private)

Use Delicious to gather relevant information: stay on top of the latest industry developments, competitor news, research new possibilities, and monitor tags of your own organization’s name. Use Delicious to search for these items or articles of interest to your organization. Remember, you can determine whether or not each bookmark will be seen publicly, and you decide if you want others to know what you are researching!

1. Follow Users:

Find and follow fellow industry professionals that upload bookmarks.  Select the “add a user to network” option in order to collect all of your favorite users’ bookmarks in one place.  Here is a screen shot of how to add a user to your network:

2. Follow Tags:

You can  “subscribe” to specific tags of interest in Delicious. This action sends all your subscriptions directly to your Delicious home page. Alternatively, you can also create an RSS (really simple syndication) feed to automatically update whenever new articles with the subscribed tag are bookmarked. You can also create an RSS feed of any user’s bookmarks.

As an example, I searched Delicious for all tagged information about the electric car, and subscribe to the RSS feed for all future articles tagged “electric car.”

Intra company Collaboration

Why not use Delicious for sharing information within the company? Create a custom organizational intranet for sharing bookmarks! No copying and sending the URLs by email, no re-posting to your company’s intranet. When everyone in the company is encouraged to share articles, the volume of intra company news sharing increases.

Two options for intra company news sharing:

1. Encourage employees to bookmark and share tags using one company password and user ID, but mark each bookmark as the “do not share!” All employees can log in to see the newest bookmarks, or subscribe to the company’s bookmarks.  Here is a sample screen shot:

2. Create individual employee accounts, and employees tag bookmarks with a set of agreed-upon tag names. To share the information, employees in the company subscribe to each other’s networks, bookmarks, and specifically-named identifying tags (e.g. conversationprogram221).

Sharing News with Stakeholders

Create a news feed on the website of bookmarked news about your organization. This displays a vibrant, crowdsourced “News” section of the website, or a scrolling news widget out of your Delicious bookmarks.  Here are two variations on this idea:

1. Whenever your organization is mentioned in the news, bookmark it to Delicious and tag it with your company’s name. Create an RSS feed for all Delicious tags with your company’s name. Place the RSS feed on the front page of the website or the sidebar of your blog. You could put the RSS feed in the “News” section of your website, but that’s not as fun!

2. Create a public RSS feed to your website of all tags relevant to stakeholders. For example, if your organization’s mission is advocacy for the electric car,  create RSS feeds for the tags “electric car,” “alternative energy automobile,” “automobile efficiency,” and other related tags.

Of course, don’t forget that bookmarks are public by default. This means that you are already sharing information with your stakeholders. Ask them to subscribe to your bookmarks! Tell them that this is the way your organization offers news to other Delicious users. And…don’t forget to mention your Delicious account on the website!

How does your organization use Delicious? Please share your stories with us in the comments section below!

How do you gather and process all the online information that you need to know? Amy Sample Ward opened up her blog reader to the public with her guest post “Want a Peek at My RSS: Here It Is!” on Beth Kanter’s Blog. That post pointed me to some wonderful blogs, but left me wondering about how everyone gathers information online apart from reading blogs.

Today, I’m sharing my information gathering and processing system with you. What I’m hoping is that at the end of this, you’ll write your own post about this topic to spread insights.

I acquire most (3/4) of my information from blogs I subscribe to, and articles that are tweeted. Social media communities (Linkedin discussion groups, Facebook friends or business Pages, and the nonprofit news site Idealist News), online media (New York Times and its blogs), and industry reports give me everything else. I do crowdsource occasionally to supplement.

I spend a not-insignificant amount of time reading news on blogs and twitter. I spend at least an hour a day reading blogs. Currently, I subscribe to 44 blogs. I read them using Google Reader. After looking at Amy Sample Ward’s Netvibes reader, I’ll be switching to Netvibes.   I divide the blogs into “must reads” (Jeremy Owyang, Beth Kanter, Mashable, Inside Facebook, Network for Good, NTEN), others that add value, and the ones that are outside of my immediate world but offer interesting perspectives (Online Journalism Blog, Museum 2.0, eJewishPhilanthropy, NYT’s Gadgetwise blog).

Twitter drives a lot of my reading. Twitter is, in fact, my supplementary RSS feed. I spend at least an hour a day on Twitter, and jump on and off throughout the day as I have time. I use TweetDeck to organize and read tweets easily.  I have divided my TweetDeck Twitter client into columns that make sense of who I’m following (nonprofit organizations, nonprofit professionals, new media, Israelis, friends/family, and a changing current search column).

I join Linkedin Discussion Groups based not only on who I want to meet, but what I want to learn. I belong to Social Media Mafia, Nonprofit Professionals Forum, Chronicle of Philanthropy, Web 2.0 for Nonprofit Organizations, Nonprofit Technology Network, and a few others. I ” fan” certain Facebook pages primarily for information gathering. I am a fan of Hubspot, Web Analytics an Hour A Day, Customers That Click, PitchEngine, Tech Soup, and Facebook Marketing Solutions, among others.

Finally, I utilize crowdsourcing on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, and Linkedin if I want information about a specific topic. I don’t always get everything that I need by crowdsourcing, but it gives me a good start and direction.

I can’t possibly remember everything that I want to remember, and consider the social bookmarking site Delicious to be my personal recording secretary. I bookmark and tag whatever I think I’ll want to remember. I also utilize Friendfeed in much the same way – it’s a record of my social media activities (status updates, links, tweets, etc) – and it is searchable. Ideally, I’ve tagged important articles. But if I forget, and I tweeted about it, then I can search my Friendfeed by keyword.

I’m sure there are great ways to gather and process information, which I haven’t yet considered. I’d love to learn from you. I hope that this post will inspire a series of posts about this topic. I am very curious how other people gather and process information in today’s online, ever-social world. It’s a jungle out there, and we have to manage it somehow. But maybe we don’t have to do it alone.

How do you gather and process the online information you need?

This is the story of the “flip side” of online reputation management – when monitoring one’s online reputation brings an unexpected bounty of good news.

I won an award. A great, wonderful award. How did I learn about the award? A Google alert arrived in my inbox!

I always recommend that companies set up online “listening posts” for mentions of the company name, staff names, and industry keywords, at a minimum.  It is impossible to stay on top of all the chatter and noise online without them. If we want to know what our fans, critics and friends are saying online, we have to be listening to them. You never know when a critic will write about your company in their personal blog, mention an employee personally on Twitter, or talk about your organization’s programming on a host of online forums and social media networks. Unlike Domino’s, we don’t want to be caught unaware of a viral video that puts our company in a bad light.

What we cannot forget is that the flip side of reputation management is listening to the good things people say about your company online.

And that’s what happened to me two days ago. First, the Google Alert arrived at 10pm to my email inbox:

Google Web Alerts only offer a short excerpt of the online mention, which is not often enough to understand the context. It is advisable to click the hyperlink and read it for yourself.  I wanted to know more, so I followed the link back to WebHostMagazine.com and found this:

Wow. Pretty cool, I thought.

Two hours later, this TweetBeep (a type of Twitter alert) arrived in my email inbox:

So, of course, I traced the alert back to the original Tempus Group online “tweet” and found this:

Which prompted me to respond with this tweet to Tempus Group:

The lesson here? Don’t forget to set up your listening posts!  For monitoring Twitter, I use TweetBeep, Twitterfall, and a TweetDeck “search” is always open for “@askdebra.” I use BoardTracker to listen for keywords mentioned on discussion forums, listservs and chat groups. I use Google Alerts to catch any links or keywords scanned by Google, and I have set up a watchlist on Technorati to monitor certain keywords mentioned in blogs. I also created an alert on Socialmention to pick up anything that the other alerts missed. Of all of them, Google Alerts, Socialmention and TweetBeep are by far the most useful.

In fact without Google Alerts and TweetBeep, I would have missed a great honor and award!

Which listening posts do you use, and which are most helpful?

Image by p_champie

Last week I gave an “introduction to social media” presentation to the Board of Directors of a multinational nonprofit organization.  This was the normal “what is social media” overview, a review and overview of the popular platforms (Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, blogs, etc.) and summary of how to get started in social media.  By the time I was 10 minutes into the presentation, I had heard three objections to using social media, and these objections kept coming at me throughout the entire time I presented. It has been a long time since I was in a room of people scared of social media. I’m going to take this opportunity to address their objections one at a time. At the end of this blog post, please tell me if you think I’ve satisfactorily addressed the concerns, and how you might add to these responses.

1. It’s not safe! What about the BU Craigslist killer? (someone REALLY asked this question in the presentation)

The”BU Craigslist killer” was actually Philip Markoff, a Boston University medical student who looked for massage ads on Craigslist and then attacked the women giving massages. In essence, how is this any different than if Mr. Markoff had responded to a newspaper print ad?  Did social media promote the massage ads? NO. Craigslist is not social media, but an online classified advertising site. In this instance, for massages. Is one of your nonprofit’s core services providing massages in hotel rooms? If yes, then you might have to worry. But if your core mission is about helping save the whales, or feed the homeless, or provide rehab services to veterans, then you really don’t need to worry.

When I asked my Twitter followers for their responses to this question, my personal favorite was from Teresa Boze, who wrote: “I’d tell them most household accidents happen in the bathroom… watch out for the toilet bowl monster.”

On a more serious note, if your organization promotes conversation on sites geared to teens, then you do have a responsibility to ensure that the conversation includes safeguards against teen predators. Just as in real life, if you bring teenagers together, there should always be a responsible adult present.

2. What if our biggest rival pretends to be us online?

Sheena T. Abraham responded (via Twitter) to this objection with “that’s why you have to build your own online credibility as much as you can, build trust with the online audience.” This is one great answer to the question! If an organization builds its own relationship online with its stakeholders, then this is what will likely happen when a rival impersonates the organization:

• the real organization’s stakeholders will notice and alert the real organization of the problem
• the phony organization will not have the ability to create a phony online profile because the real organization has already claimed its online profiles at KnowEm. The truth is that “it’s almost impossible to get your brand name or username back once it’s been taken” on a social media site, unlike buying back a website domain name, according to the KnowEm blog.

Secondly, listening for mentions of your organization online will alert you to this phenomenon, and your organization can quickly address the issue of the “phony brand name.” I cover this topic further in depth below.

Go get your social media online profile and begin to engage!

3. Social media means a lot of work and we don’t have the staff time to do that.

I hear that. I’ve worked at nonprofit organizations with two staff people, with 20, and everything in-between. No matter how many staff people your organization employs, they will always be overtaxed, overworked, with no time to do social media. This will never change. It is the nature of not-for-profit organizations. A good social media strategy takes into account how social media will help your organization better fulfill its mission (engage with stakeholders) and create real benefits to the organization  (listen to members, engage with stakeholders, vet new program ideas, measure responses, etc.) With that in mind, how do you not have the time? Amy Sample Ward writes on Twitter that “organizations want a person or department to “own” the task/responsibility instead of seeing it as a tool to aid all departments’ work.”

Carie Lewis from the Humane Society of the US (she’s their Brand Ambassador) holds a 9-minute staff meeting every day to inform each and every one of the HSUS employees about “what’s going on that day – PR, what people are talking about on Twitter, etc.”

Wendy Harman, of the American Red Cross, writes that “We distribute a daily social media update email that contains a sampling of most relevant mentions.” Everyone must be involved. No more silos.

If social media activities let your organization to grow, soar, and be more efficient, then determine your staff time and resources and create a social media strategy that will accommodate organizational limitations.

4. There is no place in our organization for social media.

Organizations are used to placing departments in silos. The organizing department…organizes the community. The fundraising department… raises money. The research department…researches. Where is the “social media department?” The organizations that implement social media most effectively include everyone in social media, whether it is merely apprising them of the latest activities or including them in the strategy sessions. Social media is the entire organization’s “new website”…its composite brand identity. Every department must be involved in some way.

Amy Sample Ward again writes (via Twitter) to those that argue “there is no ‘home’ for social media in any of the organization’s departments, obviously I would argue there is home in ALL of the departments for it.”

5. People will attack us online with negative critique.

I have news for you: if you are worried about this, then they are already attacking you online. If your organization is worried about negative critique, then the best thing that you can do is to be where your critics are…online. The dissatisfied clients/customers of your nonprofit organization will find a way to critique your organization no matter what – via Twitter, blog posts, commenting on forums and discussion boards, and many other places. The very best action your nonprofit organization can do is create a social media presence, listen for any and all organizational mentions online, and develop an online presence. By developing a loyal brand following online, your organization is positioned to respond quickly to all negative remarks, and leverage the loyalty of your followers to pass along your online responses. For more detailed suggestions on how to engage in proactive reputation management, see a prior post on this subject.

The final thought comes from Danielle Lanyard via Twitter: “nonprofits were built on an old corporate model where nonprofits are defined by differences from competition vs. a collaborative model which is social media.” Social media leverages the collaborative experience, knowledge and information of everyone online to fulfill the organization’s goals. The knowledge gained, productive collaborations, extended organizational reach, and increased stakeholder (and donor!) engagement should far outweigh fears about using social media.

Thanks for reading! Do you have other suggestions for overcoming objections to social media? Have you heard these objections before? Are there other objections that you want to add, and how you have addressed them? I welcome your participation in this conversation!

Please also visit Amy Sample Ward’s blog,  who continues this conversation by inviting her readers to contribute their own Comeback Lines to Social Media Objectors.

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)?

Domino's Pizza, image by Adam Kuban

Hasn’t every nonprofit or business had the “customer from hell?” I remember one client that kept threatening to sue our organization for every minute perceived slight: she wasn’t receiving the services she wanted, she thought our processes weren’t fair, or she didn’t get a spot in every program we offered. I can only imagine if she had been tech-savvy with a blog. Her posts could have gone viral, spread to our funders, our other clients, and local politicians. From there, it would have been no time until her discontent would have affected our funding sources, donors, and political standing. Did we have listening filters in place? NO. Should we have?

YES!

Domino’s Pizza is in the middle of a bad dream. They probably could not have imagined that two employees would create a video of themselves violating all sorts of health regulations while making pizza for delivery. (The employees claim it was a prank.) These two employees uploaded their video, and…guess what? It went viral. Within a few days, the video had been viewed more than a million times on You Tube. The astounding part to me is that Domino’s corporate had no idea that this video was out and garnering attention until a blogger notified Domino’s of the video.

The real takeaway for me is: why did a blogger notify Domino’s of the prank? Why wasn’t Domino’s Pizza listening?

As reported in the New York Times: “’we got blindsided by two idiots with a video camera and an awful idea,’ said a Domino’s spokesman, Tim McIntyre, who added that the company was preparing a civil lawsuit.” As further reported by the New York Times, “executives decided not to respond aggressively, hoping the controversy would quiet down.” Additionally, it was The Consumerist that tracked down the franchise location and employees, not Domino’s Pizza, and notified Domino’s. Domino’s should never have been blindsided; they should have had reputation management filters and screens in place. The result: “the perception of its quality among consumers went from positive to negative since Monday, according to the research firm YouGov…”

Wow. Domino’s missed the boat. Well really, they missed the video.

What happened?

1. They weren’t listening. Not at all. Until now.

There are enough cases of one blogger bringing down a company’s reputation a notch to warrant online reputation monitoring for every company.  I previously discussed one woman’s charge against a You Tube video ad by Johnson and Johnson.  The “Motrin Moms” campaign led J&J to take the offensive video off the air. Blogger Jeff Jarvis single-handily coined the term “Dell Hell” and drowned Dell’s reputation…until Dell started paying attention.

2. They didn’t respond immediately.

According to the New York Times, “as the company learned about the video on Tuesday, Mr. McIntyre said, executives decided not to respond aggressively, hoping the controversy would quiet down.” They should have learned from Dell. Dell didn’t respond in any timely way to Mr. Jarvis’ repeated complaints, which fostered other Dell consumers’ frustration, and eventually led to stock decline, executive firing, and customer abandonment. Read about the way that Dell has dealt with its reputation issues, and Sony has not, in this insightful article.

3. They let the citizen journalists and social media participants define the news story.

The video garnered one million views in a few days. It was discussed all over Twitter. Since Domino’s didn’t respond quickly online, they lost control of the story.

I’ve just finished an amazing book, Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online, by Andy Beal and Dr. Judy Strauss. (I’m sure they are listening online to me now.) They emphasize that brand control is shifting to citizen journalists and the obvious follow that companies do not control their own reputation anymore. They are right to say “search engines are reputation engines,” and we need to pay attention. Are you paying attention?

All of this brings up for me this point: No person or company is immune. Not even nonprofits.

Gather together your online monitoring toolkit and start listening. What are you hearing?

If you’re looking for a tips, tools and an overview, here are a few online and offline resources:

Radically Transparent, by Andy Beal and Dr. Judy Strauss. A comprehensive overview and do-it-yourself guide to reputation monitoring.

My earier post, Listening Tour, on how to set up a simple online monitoring system.

Dan Schwabel: Six Free Tools for Online Reputation Management

ReadWriteWeb: review of other free and paid reputation monitoring tools

Lifehacker: Using RSS and MonitorThis

Chris Brogan: Five Tools I Use for Listening

MissionCreep: 4 Methods and 40 Free Tools for Listening to Online Conversations

Interactive Insights Group: How to Search the Social Web – Ultimate Toolkit

Social Media Answers: Reputation Management and Monitoring Online