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’ve been looking forward to the promise of “social media+fundraising” for a while now. There are plenty of fundraising solutions that leverage social media, relying on fundraisers to tweet, share, and post their fundraising pages to their social networks. There are also fundraising solutions that fully rely on and live within a social platform, such as a Facebook fundraising application or a fundraising widget you place on your blog. Then there is the newest evolution: fundraising that innately utilizes the social media platform. In the slide presentation (above), I describe in more detail the three categories of social media fundraising, along with my thoughts about how social media fundraising has finally “arrived.”

Sharing is huge

A Share This report states that sharing generates more than 10% of all internet traffic. In order of frequency, most people click on links shared within Facebook, followed by “other” (blogs, social bookmarking, etc.), email, and Twitter. Facebook is the largest sharing channel, at 38%, which is why so many online fundraising pages are shared – and shared again – on Facebook.

Social fundraising is growing

By all definitions, online fundraising is growing. Social fundraising is also growing. Network for Good’s online giving study’s quarterly giving index illustrates that, despite the current poor economic outlook, social giving is still rising. In Q1 and Q2 of 2011, social giving increased (though Q1 giving may have been skewed by Japan tsunami relief fundraising). The 2011 Nonprofit Social Network Benchmark Report on US nonprofit social media use has some fascinating stats showing that Facebook is the social media platform most nonprofits are using if they are participating in social media fundraising. The catch? A very small percentage of US nonprofits have raised significant money using Facebook.

Social sharing of fundraising pages yields results: Social media fundraising that leverages social networks

When fundraisers share their fundraising pages to their social networks, giving increases. Blackbaud recently issued a report and created an infographic about the power of peer-to-peer sharing. Blackbaud found that Twitter and Facebook posts convert 0.25% of impressions into donations. It also found that Twitter users increased donations nearly 10x more than those who did not use Twitter. FirstGiving found that for every share to Facebook, 5 people returned to a fundraising page. FirstGiving also found that the value of a share to Facebook was worth $10.87 in donations.

Peer to peer online donation solutions (such as FirstGiving, Razoo, Crowdrise, Donors Choose), where a fundraiser creates a fundraising page and shares that page, are increasingly used by nonprofit organizations. It is clear from all the data that the culture of online donations is growing. Sometimes these solutions are also called social media fundraising, because they rely so heavily on social media for amplification. These solutions are ideal for leveraging an organization’s base, and increasing donations through personal social network sharing. However, it’s just as important that the nonprofit also have a vibrant social media presence to amplify these efforts and engage with fundraisers.

Giving that relies on or lives exclusively within a social network

Social media fundraising can also be defined as fundraising that happens within a social network, rather than shared to the network. Most examples of these fundraising solutions live within Facebook. Examples include Causes, fundraising tabs that you can add to a Facebook page or profile (such as the What Gives and FirstGiving solutions), as well as fundraising applications developed for a Facebook Page. These fundraising solutions rely on Facebook to thrive: you have to connect using Facebook, and they count on fundraisers sharing with their Facebook friends for amplification. Other examples include Google checkout for nonprofits on YouTube or fundraising widgets placed on a blog. This type of fundraising is growing, but certainly is not mainstream, and best used where you have the most supporters and know you can energize them.

Innately utilizing a social platform for donations

This is the promise of social media fundraising. What if someone could donate just by tweeting, posting an update, Liking a comment on Facebook, giving a Linkedin recommendation, or writing a blog post? This is the true convergence of social media and fundraising. A few companies are offering these types of social media fundraising solutions: Help Attack!, Twitpay, and Givey.co.uk.

As Ehren Foss, CEO of With Help Attack! explains, “we wanted to make the message itself a donation. We wanted to figure out methods for giving that are contextual to each specific platform, so that the very act of being online could be a donation.” With Help Attack!, for example, fundraisers can choose to give by assigning tweets, Facebook posts, using certain key words or hashtags, etc, until they reach their pledge amount. Ehren writes that “HelpAttack! donors frequently tell us they make more updates than fewer, hoping to reach a certain level of giving (“three more Tweets to $25!”). In addition, many donors choose to share their pledges with their networks on Twitter and Facebook. ”

Givey and Twitpay offer similar services, but neither are as developed or offer as many ways to give as Help Attack! A fundraising solution like these are great to use during an online or fundraising campaign to raise awareness, increase donations within a limited amount of time, and energize your base. I suspect that you will also need to educate your fundraisers about this brand new way of fundraising merely by tweeting or posting.

I think the future of social media fundraising has just arrived. I can’t wait to see how it matures.

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 privilege of presenting a webinar to the Darim Online community June 1, 2011 about how to use Linkedin for nonprofits. When I was preparing for the webinar, two things struck me: why cause-focused groups may not work well on Linked (more on that below), and how much Linkedin offers. The presentation focuses on five ways to best utilize Linkedin professionally: be goal-oriented, optimize both your personal and company profiles, utilize groups, and use Linkedin Answers.

If I had to offer three tips about using Linkedin effectively, they would be:

• Think about why you and your company want to be one Linkedin, and how you use it will follow
• Identify a combination of 10 keywords and keyword phrases that best describe you, and 10 others that best describe the organization. Integrate these keywords and keyword phrases into your personal and company profiles
  
• Complete all employee personal Linkedin profiles to 100%, as well as the organizational profile
  

Start with your Goals

The key to using any social media platform effectively is to use it to meet your goals. Decide first why you (or your organization) would want to use Linkedin (such as finding collaborators, funders, or colleagues). Once you know why you want to use Linkedin, how you will use Linkedin follows. For example, if you want to use Linkedin to connect with foundations then you might:

• search for people who work at those foundations
• join groups that they have joined and participate
• ask for introductions through mutual Linkedin connections
• use Linkedin Answers to ask a question about contacting foundations

Identifying your goals will dictate your Linkedin strategy.

Optimize your personal profile

One aspect of optimizing your profile is completing it fully. Be sure to include your photo, a summary of who you are, keywords and interests, and a summary of what you’ve accomplished in every position. It’s also important to have at least five recommendations, since you can search Linkedin by number of recommendations.

Use the “advanced search” option to understand how you can be found, and include those in your profile.  Some of the search parameters are by industry, geographic location, number of recommendations, and position titles.

Optimizing your profile also means placing important phrases and keywords within your profile. Think about 10 to 15 keywords and keyword phrases that describe you professionally. Specifically, place keyword-rich content within the summary, specialties, and interests sections.

Optimize the company profile

If your organization doesn’t have a company profile, create one on Linkedin. Identify the 10-15 keywords that best describe your organization, and integrate them into the company profile for the profile to be search-ready. If your organization has a blog or Twitter presence, be sure to add those to the company profile to personalize the company. Also, if you want to highlight specific products or services, do so through the “new products and services” feature.

Utilize the power of groups

Real connecting happens within groups. Search for groups related to your profession and industry. I also recommend joining groups your professional colleagues belong to as well. If a group is inactive or not valuable, leave. If it is, spend time within the group answering questions and offering help. When you find yourself in an interesting discussion, invite your colleagues to connect with you personally on Linkedin after the discussion has concluded. I tend to see the same group of people commenting on group discussions, which helps me to  know them through our participation.

When groups are managed by nonprofits, and the discussion is about the nonprofit or a specific cause, they tend to be inactive. I looked at many public nonprofit-administered groups while researching this presentation, and most were very inactive or not lively. (I cannot comment on private groups, though.) I suspect that cause-specific or nonprofit-specific groups aren’t very active because Linkedin users want to discuss professional issues, not organizational mission. I also think that mission-based discussion has limited appeal while industry-based discussion has much broader appeal and basis for discussion. Additionally, Linkedin is not best used as a platform for recruiting people to become direct stakeholders; there are other platforms much better suited to cause-focused discussions.

There appears to be two exceptions to the inactive nonprofit-administered groups rule: One is Autism Speaks, which has a very lively Linkedin group, though I’m not able to comment on why this is the case. The other exception seems to be professional associations. For example, the alumni group of the Prince’s Scottish Youth Business Trust (a youth business mentoring program) is a very active group for business class alums to connect with others and possibly do business together.

Linkedin Answers

Linkedin Answers is both a wonderful research tool and means to find new connections. By subscribing to the RSS feed of a certain category of questions (such as Social Entrepreneurship) you can stay up to date on the latest industry discussions, and also answer questions yourself. If your answer is selected as the “best answer,” you win the “best answer” designation, which enhances your professional credibility. Also, questions reach the entire Linkedin community, not just your personal connections.

Other Linkedin goodies

I love looking at what’s going on in the Linkedin labs. Most recently, I’ve enjoyed Linkedin Maps (visualize your own network) and Signal (trending news stories shared by your connections) from the labs. Check back each month for new labs products.

Resources

Joanne Fritz of nonprofit.about.com published a great article with many tips for nonprofit professionals using Linkedin. Fast Company also published an article with five Linkedin tips you didn’t know. Read the excellent Net2 Think Tank discussion about using Linkedin for change. Allison Fine interviews Amy Sample Ward and Estrella Rosenberg on how nonprofits can use Linkedin on the December Social Good podcast. Linkedin has a nonprofit learning center you can visit, as well. Drop in on the informative weekly Linkedin Twitter chat at 8pm every Tuesday, hosted by @LinkedinExpert and @MartineHunter.

If you’d like to watch the recorded webinar that I presented with Darim Online, you may view it here.

What is your Linkedin tip? What is the most useful thing about using Linkedin that you’ve found?

I’m heading next week to present at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service in New Orleans. One of the sessions that I’ll be participating in is the Interactive Strategy Forum, which features more than 20 discussion tables, staffed by nonprofit technology leaders, offering timely discussions and Q&A on a wide spectrum of topics. My discussion topic is “Creating an Action-Ready Online Tribe by Getting Personal.” This is really a discussion about creating personal organizations; getting the organization out from behind the logo and creating relationships personally online. I’m really looking forward to talking about why organizations must create personal connections online, and discussing how to implement this concept.

One concept I’ve discussed before is that of The Social Media Funnel. It is simply the idea that, in order to move people to take an intended action online, you have to start by engaging with them personally and building trust. Nonprofits invest in social media so that they will see a return on engagement. Online fans will share, donate, and create something on behalf of an organization because they feel connected to a person or a cause – personally.

A huge question for implementation is: can the organization bridge the divide between logo and person? In other words, how can an organization be personal enough to create online friendships and meaningful relationships with individual fans and enthusiasts? The concept of The Personal Organization emerged from this consideration.

I’ve coached a lot of nonprofit organizations on how to use social media, and I’ve implemented social media for organizations. The implementation is never as effective as when it’s done personally. Most organizations are afraid of getting too personal. However, there are a wide variety of choices available and implementation examples. There are nonprofit CEOs that tweet, organizations where much of staff blogs, organizations that create private Facebook groups for online evangelists, and organizations that encourage staff to spend time participating in Linkedin groups. Florence Broder, formerly of The Jewish Agency, wrote a guest post for this blog on the difference it made when the Jewish Agency got personal on Twitter.

Each organization must decide how to be personal, and who within the organization will be doing that. Will the executive director tweet? Will the entire staff tweet? Should staff members “friend” online Facebook fans? Will each department head blog? The answers depend on your goals and where you want the entry points for personal connection to be located. The truth is that organizations make it much harder on themselves by forcing their logos to act like a person on their behalf. There is a reason why the UN High Commission on Refugees has Goodwill Ambassadors that are the public face of the refugee agency.

A critical factor in organizational success on social media is making the organizational presence personal.

For the Interactive Strategy Forum, I’ve prepared a handout of ideas for making the organization personal on Linkedin, Twitter, blogs, and Facebook. I also prepared a supporting slide deck that participants will be able to view and download from slideshare, and a shared Google doc that summarizes tips and ideas for how to create a personal organization. I am embedding it here, prior to the conference, because I know I have not captured all of the ways that organizations are already personal online. There are so many choices and iterations! I look forward to hearing about them in the ensuing discussion and comments.

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.

Seth Giammanco and I designed a workshop entitled “The Social Website” for the 2011 Nonprofit Technology Conference, which we presented last week. Seth is a principal at Minds on Design Lab, a print and interactive design and development studio and was the perfect partner with whom to design this session. We created the session to fill the demand for information about why, how and what kinds of social media an organization should consider using with its website. The session covered the goals of social media, categories of social media integration (types of social media to integrate with a website), examples of nonprofit social websites, additional resources, and a small group activity to design a social website based on a pre-selected scenario.

Goals of Social Media

After reviewing a LOT of nonprofit websites, we identified five primary reasons for integrating social media with a website. We also noticed that most websites had at least two primary goals for placing social media on their website, and sometimes more than two goals. The five basic goals of using social media within a website are:

• Build followers in a nonprofit’s social media spaces
• Create on-site engagement
• Develop a sense of community on the website
• Raise funds
• Create a call to action

Categories of Social Media Integration

While reviewing websites, we specifically looked at what types of social media sites were using. We categorized the (almost limitless) social media possibilities into five categories of social media integration: show, share, interact, co-create, authenticate, and open source. The intensity of resources needed to integrate social media into a website span the continuum from relatively simple (show, share) to a medium level of resources needed/medium level of ease of integration (interact, co-create), to the more difficult integration for the DIYers (authenticate, open source). We offer examples from each of these categories within the slide presentation (below).

Resources

Seth created an incredible micro site that features social websites, called Get Social: a blog of nonprofit social websites. Get Social compiles information about social websites, how to get started creating a social website, and includes screen shots of social websites by goal and categories of integration. Most importantly, this is a great site for you to share YOUR social website, as well as examples you may find on the web, by submitting a social website for inclusion.

Small Group Scenario

The small group discussions and scenarios were wonderful. In one of them, we asked participants to come up with ideas for creating a website for a local farmer’s market with the goals of building supporters, engaging people on the site, and creating a community.  Ideas included co-creating a recipe book, co-creating recipes for the fresh recipes of the week, mapping where the produce comes from in relation to the farmer’s market, showing feeds from the social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter and social media icons, using FourSquare to check in and create specials, among others.

It was such a pleasure to present at NTC and to have the good fortune of presenting with an incredibly knowledgeable website designer. If you were not able to attend, or you have any questions or comments about the session, feel free to leave your comments below and we’ll answer them!

I had a fabulous time presenting a webinar yesterday for Nonprofit Webinars about “The Power of Like and other social sharing tools.” I put together the presentation to answer these four questions: which Facebook tools (plugins) should I use on my website, why should I add share buttons to my website or blog, what is the ROI of Facebook Like and social sharing, and how does Facebook decide where to place a shared item within someone’s news feed?

The Facebook Like Button

The Like button is potentially one of the most powerful sharing tools around. If you place a Like button on your website, or on any content within the website, you have essentially created both a private messaging and a tracking system for site visitors that choose to Like your content. What many people do not know is that placing a Like button on the website will create a “hidden” administrative Facebook Page once one visitor Likes your content. Only the owner of the Like button can view this hidden Facebook Page. However, just as with any Facebook Page, a Page admin can send an update to the newsfeed of all of the people who “Like” the page. Think about the possibilities of integrating Like with a campaign: update page followers about the status of the campaign, urge them to act, ask them to share information about the campaign at critical points.

In addition, with the help of a website developer, organizations can track activities of people who have Liked specific content on your site. It is possible to place a tracking code on all visitors that have Liked a page, and track who returns to the site as a result of someone seeing the Like (who clicked on the Like or Facebook Share in the newsfeed and returned), what actions they then took on the site, and if they took the actions you wanted them to. At JustGiving, a UK online donation platform, they found that every Like on their site (which was shared to Facebook) resulted in six returning unique visitors. Of the returning unique visitors, 6% donated to a cause.

Desert Island Facebook Social Plugins

In the presentation, I have a “desert island plugins” slide. If I had to recommend only three to use, I’d advocate for the Facebook Like button, Facebook Login, and either the Activity or Recommends feeds. Implementing Facebook Login enables your organization to capture a lot of data about Facebook users who use your site: gender, age, town, their interests, and much more. (Of course, this is only for those who allow Facebook to access this information, and a percentage of site visitors will not feel comfortable using Facebook Login for just this reason.) But here’s the best part about Login: every time a visitor returns to your site who has already used Facebook Login, you will have access to his/her updated Facebook interests and information.

The Recommend and Activity feed plugins are a great visua; way to show “social proof” of the popularity and usefulness of your website to site visitors. Visitors who are logged into Facebook will see a live feed that shows what site content their friends Like and are sharing with others. If a site visitor is not logged in, then the most popular Likes and Shares on the website will show in the feed.

Facebook News Feed Optimization

The presentation also covers the News Feed Optimization (NFO), also called Edgerank. Edgerank is Facebook’s internal search engine optimization(SEO) system. From what understand (and I’m open to more insights, please), both search within Facebook and how prominently a Liked or Shared item appears in a user’s news feed relates to three factors: how often a user who Likes the content interacts with your site on Facebook, how many times that content is commented upon/shared/interacted with on Facebook, and the recency of the content Liked or Shared. The takeaways: encourage visitors to Like content with a comment, and to return and Like other content so that it will appear in the Top News of that user’s Facebook news feed.

Social Sharing Tools

The presentation also shows the AddThis social sharing widget and analytics (as an example), social toolbars, and Disqus. If  you use other social plugins that have great analytics, or you want to share the ROI of using a social sharing tool, please share your expertise in the blog comments.

image courtesy of Shawn Campbell

The single most frequent question that I get from nonprofit professionals and organizations that want to use Twitter is “how do I get started?” The bottom line: always follow The Twitter Rule.

The Twitter Rule: Less Broadcasting, More Conversation

It is not intuitive to barge into conversations. It is not intuitive to talk with strangers. It is not intuitive to create conversation when you are used to broadcasting. It is not intuitive to be the personal representation of an organization instead of the mouthpiece behind the logo. Twitter forces you out from behind your logo, into conversations with unknown persons, and to initiate conversation in order to create deeper engagement.

I presented a free webinar for Nonprofit Webinars this week about The Twitter Rule, but more than that, about how to make sense of Twitter. The webinar covered how to develop a Twitter strategy that utilizes The Twitter Rule for success. Delving deeper, the slide deck (at the bottom of this blog post) includes:

• An overview of engagement theories (social technographics, participation inequality, ladder of engagement)
• Mastering the @tweet (who sees what when you send an @message…and who doesn’t)
• Strategies for following the Twitter Rule
• The Twitter profile – in front of or behind the avatar, or a mashup on both?
• Engaging Twitter practices
• Twitter etiquette
• Researching Twitter influence and networks to help you find the right connections
  
• Resource sheet of Twitter tools

If you fall back on the traditional (intuitive) marketing style of broadcasting (Webinar today! Call your representative! Save the whales!), then your Twitter strategy will fail. If you build friendships, conversation and trust, you are building up social capital.

If you spend the time to create relationships through conversation and passing along trusted and useful information, your Twitter followers will happily retweet, respond, and act. Why? Because you’ve built up your social capital first, through conversation, before asking your followers to do something for you. Those are the results of The Twitter Rule in action.

For more about getting started with Twitter, you might find these other posts useful: How the Jewish Agency Uses Twitter to Meaningfully Connect, Why Do You Participate in Twitter Chats, and The Case of the 4,000 Twitter Followers who Don’t Care.

Last week, I was honored to present a session on using social media to network members at the Youth Business International Global Forum 2010 in Mexico City, Mexico. Keren Shemesh (the Israeli YBI member organization) invited me to speak. YBI is a not-for-profit organization that leads a global network of 40 member organizations that help young people start their own business and create employment. YBI Network members (in 40 countries) receive assistance developing a specific models of supporting entrepreneurs through access to credit, volunteer business mentoring and business start-up support.

The theme of the conference was Harnessing the Power of Networks. The presentation included an overview of social media trends and platforms. It also included an assessment of how network members are using social media channels to recruit new entrepreneurs, solicit loan opportunities, support and recruit new mentors, and create general country awareness of their role in youth entrepreneurship.

Despite the increasing popularity of social media, only seven of the 40 member organizations are currently using social media. (Others are concerned about the time commitment, face the issue of the digital divide, or don’t feel comfortable enough to use it.) The presentation below highlights the best practices and innovations among network members that are using Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter.

A few highlights:

Keren Shemesh (Israel) is using the photos application in Facebook to attract fans and promote its businesses.

Keren Shemesh created two contests using the photo app, which have driven visitors to the website, increased inquiries to the business loan program, and promoted the businesses they support. These are two of the most interesting uses of Facebook photos I’ve seen!

Contest 1: In July, the NGO asked business owners to upload one representative photo to a Facebook photo album, and ask friends to Like their business photo. The photo with the most number of Likes won a prize. The contest resulted in:

• friends exposing friends to the Keren Shemesh Page (peer to peer networking), and increasing number of Page fans
  
• expanding the Keren Shemesh network
• involving stakeholders in a fun and interesting way on the Page, with a low participation threshold
  

Contest 2: In August, Keren Shemesh created a photo album as a gift catalog for the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah). During the month before the New Year, Keren Shemesh uploaded a new photo a day from a youth business, including a special offer/discount for shoppers underneath each photo. By keeping up with the album (or viewing it on the wall) fans could take advantage of special offers. Keren Shemesh used this contest to expose its youth businesses to Page fans and viewers, and the businesses could gain new customers.

Youth Business Trinidad and Tobago (YBTT) understands the poser of cross-promoting.

YBTT cross-promotes its activities with those of other youth-focused organizations. The YBTT Facebook Group will usually post anything that the Youth Council of Trinidad and Tobago has places on its Facebook Group, and the Youth Council will do the same for YBTT, thus doubling exposure for both organizations. I also want to mention that they have effectively used the Group feature to directly message and invite members to events, plus post events on their Group wall. This has resulted in at least 50% of the attendees at quarterly Business Club meetings coming from the Facebook Group.

The Canadian Youth Business Foundation (CYBF) has positioned its Facebook Page to be the leading space on Facebook talking about youth entrepreneurship in Canada.

At least 50% of the CYBF‘s Facebook posts are now about the organization: helpful information for businesses in Canada, cross-promotes other conferences, and news about seminars and other entrepreneurship organizations. Their social media manager, Rachel Azagury, states that CYBF’s activities on Facebook generate a lot of private communication (“back yard” communication) and inquiries about the program. “Online – Facebook combined with our other social media spaces – is our first or second most popular loan referral source.” On every platform, CYBF positions itself as the organization talking about youth entrepreneurship, not just CYBF activities, becoming a trusted information source and online friend, and the place to go to for information about youth entrepreneurship.

The Prince’s Scottish Youth Business Trust (PSYBT) is using Linkedin to support mentors and promote knowledge-sharing…leading to cross-recommendations between mentors and businesses owners.

The PSYBT created a private Linkedin Group for mentors and businesses. In a YBI organization, each youth business is assigned a business mentor. Within this Linkedin Group, mentors are answering young business owners’ questions, mentors are supported by discussing mentor issues, and business owners are able to ask questions about business activities (a recent discussion ensued over the best way to make cold sales calls) in a safe and supportive environment. The bonus? Businesses and mentors are beginning to write Linkedin recommendations for each other! Margaret Gibson, of PSYBT, mentions that the participation was slow to develop and it is important to stick with it for at least six months before seeing results.

Are you doing any of these types of activities, or know of other “best practices” and examples of organizations using Linkedin and Twitter? Do you have any comments about the examples above?