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 how to find those answers during the session. We also 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.

Facebook's newly-revised Insights is such a significant change that it is a game-changer in the social media space. 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. 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. Facebook believes that you should know and need to know how engaging your content really is. And they want you to do something about that. In this post, I analyze why it is such a bold move, why engagement matters, and what a game-changer the new metrics has become. This is the future of measurement.

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. The 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, you can design social media activities for real engagement, how to leverage relationship ties organizationally to convert fans to superfans (and increase ROE), aligning SMART goals with engagement design, and three approaches to measuring ROE: community commitment, fan trust, and SMART goal achievement.

I had the pleasure of presenting on the topic of Ramping Up Your Facebook Engagement to a group of NYC nonprofit organizations last week. 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. During the presentation, I also heard about some great ways that nonprofit organizations are using Facebook successfully to engage and move people to action.

Measuring engagement is critical. If we don't know how engaged people are in our social spaces, we won't have a clue if our campaigns to move them to act will work. I think there are three kinds of measurements: status, engagement, and activism measurements.

We all want to know what everyone else has been doing successfully, and finally, there are some hard numbers backing up the best practices. A few recent discussions and surveys have zeroed in on how fans respond to Facebook posts, want to interact with posts, and when they are most responsive.

Stop trying to measure sentiment. Measuring the change in online sentiment is the wrong ROI to measure. Instead, measure online engagement, and worry about your lack of engagement.

Share 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 [...]

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. This blog post includes four slides that outline steps to creating a comprehensive, goal-oriented social media presence and strategy.

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