Image courtesy of fotologic, Creative Commons license

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to offer a workshop on the topic of creating a social media strategy to a group of budding entrepreneurs. It’s a big, meaty topic, and no two strategies are ever developed in the same way. Over the years, I’ve developed a methodology of what goes into strategy development, and focused on that methodology for the workshop. There are four elements to developing a social media strategy: evaluating current organizational assets, researching competitors (and comparables), choosing appropriate channels for ongoing participation, and measurement. I might add developing online campaigns (as relevant) to that mix.

Before creating a strategy, however, organizations should have a sense of these three things:

1.) Realistic commitment to social media (time, personnel, budget).

2.)  The value the organization can offer on the social media channels.

3.) What the organizations wants to get back from its social media engagement, such as brand awareness, sales, members, volunteers, specific project goals, or other.

These are your starting points, and will likely be refined throughout the strategic development process.

Preparing to Be Strategic

Preparation for the strategy involves two parts: evaluating your internal assets and evaluating the competition. Social media implementation is helped or hindered by your existing assets: brand messaging, amount of staff time, size of your mailing list, freshness of website, ease of website revisions, content management system, and size of budget for social media efforts. Spend the time to consider your existing assets and what may need to be built before you create a strategy.

Environmental Scan and Competitive Analysis

80% of the time spent developing a social media strategy is spent researching and evaluating competitors and comparable organizations, and particularly looking at how they are and are not utilizing social media. An environmental scan goes beyond “what is the competition doing” to thinking about “why are they doing that,” “why isn’t that working for them,” and “wow, that’s a phenomenal idea.” The scan should paint a picture of who is using social media effectively, who isn’t, why, and what that tells you about the online audience and market.

Go beyond raw status metrics of number of followers or subscribers, and think about what the value is that others are offering within their social media channels. I spend time looking at websites, and whether or they are inherently social and engaging. At the end of your competitive analysis, you should have a pretty good idea of which channels your organization wants to use, why, some tactics within those channels, and a few campaign ideas. Don’t rip off others’ ideas or tactics. Rather, think about what’s out there and how that inspires your organization’s messaging and social media activities. The scan is about looking and finding opportunities for your organization.

Designing the Strategy

During the workshop, I discussed a few approaches to designing online engagement and engagement theory. Design your organization’s online engagement by thinking about the social media funnel: create engaging content and environments, develop trust, then move people to action. Create a social media strategy that incorporates “programming” online engagement, offers co-creation opportunities, and creates spaces for online fans to discuss what is important to them.

Perhaps the most important piece of the social media strategy is knowing what “the conversation” will be about within your social media channels. I don’t mean conversation about your organization, but instead, about what is important to your supporters. What is it that your online stakeholders want to talk about? What can you post online that offers value? How will you engage them in this discussion? How will you encourage them to take the actions you want them to take?

I’ve included a very bare-bones social media strategy included in the presentation, for reference and perspective.

Measurement

Measure what you need to know. If the bottom line action for your organization is to enroll in workshops, that’s a key metric to track. If it is volunteer turnout, track that. It’s less important to track numbers of followers than whether or not they are actually taking the actions you want them to take. One note: keep in mind that there may be several stages leading up to actions, and it is valid to track those as well. For example, while volunteer turnout at an event is the end action, capturing email addresses of interested volunteers could be one intermediary metric to track.

Evaluation

Most strategies don’t talk about evaluation, but it’s important to think about it now, while you’re creating a strategy. How will you evaluate success? Who will evaluate it? How will all staff and board be kept up to date with the organization’s social media efforts? Importantly, what will you do when you know something isn’t working?

The Secret Sauce

The secret sauce isn’t methodology or theory or preparation. It’s a willingness to experiment, try, and admit failure. It is a key factor in growing your social media engagement, persisting with social media, and developing strategies that will work for your organization. If you have an organizational culture that supports experimentation and learning, then you’re more than halfway to the right strategy.

Image by kodachrome65, courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons

What is your organization’s primary topic of conversation online? If you don’t know the answer to that, you may find that this is the thing crippling your online success. Without knowing and owning the online conversation topic, your organization is doomed to wander aimlessly about in the online desert. To get at this, I often ask this simple question: “What about your industry or issue is so interesting that you want to have a conversation about it?” Taking this simple question a step further, I’ll often ask: what topic of conversation is interesting to potential fans, can define your organization, but isn’t about the organization itself? Knowing your conversation, then owning it, offers a map through the online desert to real engagement, trust-building, and advocacy.

Community managers understand why “the conversation” is so important. If the online community manager mentioned the organization all day long, the community would soon leave. A great community manager understands what people want to talk about, knows the reason that they are there, and plans content accordingly. If you can figure out the conversation, and own it through offering great content and opportunities for the community to engage around it, you’re on your way to real engagement, real trust, real evangelists. The desert may be behind you.

You have to know the conversation first, then own it.

 The conversation is the strategy.

The three organizations below know their conversation areas, and they are working hard to own them. They’ve gone beyond news updates and random tweets, and have focused their updates  to encourage real conversations about topical areas. Read the updates from The March of Dimes, the Canadian Youth Business Foundation, and the New England Aquarium, and you’ll know they are in a conversation, and that conversation is extremely relevant to their supporters.

The March of Dimes‘ mission is to improve the health of babies by preventing birth defects, premature birth and infant mortality. The conversation on their twitter stream is very focused on supporting pregnant moms, especially around staying healthy during pregnancy. They constantly field questions from pregnant moms and support those who have children with birth defects and whose children were born prematurely. November is prematurity awareness month, and they are have planned a series of special twitter chats (#preemiechat). This week’s chat was with a NICU nurse, and the conversation was fast and furious. Their Facebook page currently features a custom tab about World Prematurity Day, November 17th, and the Twitter profile currently features this link as well. It’s easy to see how March of Dimes knows and really tries to own the conversation around premature babies and healthy pregnancy.

The Canadian Youth Business Foundation is a national Canadian charity, providing pre-launch coaching, resources, mentoring and start-up financing for youth ages 18-34. Their online conversation focuses on what it takes to be a small business, with a special emphasis on youth business. They work hard to own this conversation space in Canada. Their presence on Facebook and Twitter brings in a lot of inquiries from interested youth entrepreneurs, which is what they want.

One glance at the New England Aquarium’s Facebook page and it’s clear: their conversation is about how cool marine wildlife is and the relevance of marine conservation. They post videos of trainers working with seals, sea turtle rescue, blog reports about oil spill effects on marine life, and videos of deep underwater dives. You want to be part of this conversation because they bring you right into their animals’ lives, and the conversation about them is infinitely iterative. The important thing to note is that their “conversation” never strays from the aquarium’s educational mission. Updates are not just news, but opportunities for educational conversation and engagement.

What’s your conversation about?

Image courtesy of Daquella Manera, Flickr Creative Commons

My time is so stretched nowadays between personal life and professional life that when a new social platform such as today’s launch of Google+ comes around, I wonder: do I have time for yet another social network? Of course, I spent much of today hopping on and off of Google+ checking out what the other techies like me were doing with it, and exploring the Shiny New Platform. It really brought to mind how one decides which platform to dive deeply into and spend a lot of time on versus the platforms to skim or avoid. What we need is a well-defined decision tree for choosing where to dive deeply.

Every one of my experiences with a new social space involves at least these steps:

1. Think it’s the Next Big Thing so I have to

2. Sign up

3. Stumble around in the dark and try to understand the tool and whatever culture has been established

4. Pay attention to who is using it and how

5. Figure out the value to me (personally) and to nonprofit organizations (professionally), and dive deeper if need be

6. Think about the return on engagement

7. If I think that the return could be high, stick with it and create test scenarios

8. Evaluating the platform based on strategic objectives

Somewhere around step 6, I realized that I needed to create a decision tree.

Social Media Platform Decision Trees

It’s hard to know where to spend most of our limited time with social media. For now, Facebook is the “must be there” platform for nonprofit organizations, complemented by the use of it as the water cooler where friendships are made and maintained. But what about the next Shiny New Platform? It’s worthwhile to answer some gateway questions that will help you make the decision to dive deeper or not. Entry-level gateway decisions may include:

• Is this where your target audience meets and engages?

• Does the tool itself do what you need or want it to do?

• Will it serve the goals of your organization or project objectives?

If you’re answering yes to all three, I recommend diving deeper and staying within it until you decide a.) It’s not the right platform, or b.) You need more information and activity on the platform to know how to proceed. You’ll have to dive deep, initially, to understand its real value and know if it is the right channel for you to use.

Once you’ve decided that a platform might be right for your company, further decision refinement questions might include:

• How much time do I need to invest to see a return?
• Does my organization have the capacity to maintain our presence effectively?
• What metrics are built into the platform? If not, how would you begin to measure use, engagement, ROE?
• Who in the organization is the right person(s) to own this?
  

I’ve created a basic decision tree to illustrate some of these social media platform decisions:

I have to make the time for initial exploration on every Shiny New Platform. My goal is to try to understand its potential value and perceived value as quickly as possible. I’ll be doing this with Google+, and hope to publish my initial thoughts on it next week.

What is your decision tree? How would you refine this social media platform decision tree?

Image courtesy of Anssi Koskinen, Flickr Creative Commons

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of social media ROI, and how to measure it. However, the more I think about it, the more it comes down to this: can we measure effective engagement with stakeholders, and how we move them to action?

Within social media, the ROI is actually Return on Engagement (ROE).

All other activities are those leading to ROE.

The ROI discussion needs to focus on defining meaningful engagement, how that happens, and comparing the return on engagement from campaign to campaign or from ask to ask. Amy Sample Ward writes, “is ROI limiting our community impact?” I think it is. Understanding and defining ROE is a much better measurement of the health of your online community and the long-term the success of your online strategy.

Recently, I participated in the To Mama With Love Mother’s Day fundraising campaign for Epic Change. This campaign raised over $30,000 in just five days. almost doubling last year’s success. Stacey Monk, Epic Change’s founder, asked why this year’s campaign was so much more successful than last year’s. ROE provides an easy answer: there was a much larger core group of highly engaged stakeholders who felt ownership planning and executing the campaign.

The planning group was inclusionary, transparent, stakeholder-owned, and accessible. Stacey formed a private planning group and invited anyone willing to commit to helping To Mama With Love raise funds and awareness, and she asked those people to extend the invitation to their friends. I was a member of the group and we were given a lot of opportunities to own the campaign. Ultimately, this was the group that acted: we blogged about it, personally asked friends to give, tweeted it, and propelled it forward. I suspect that Stacey Monk invested a lot of her time over the past year creating a “tribe” of Epic Change stakeholders, which paid off during this campaign. In this case, you can measure the outcome: $30,627.

Brandon Murphy, of 22Squared, a digital agency, created an incredibly interesting case study documenting the real value of social media, which is…Return on Engagement. 22Squared contends that really social digital media should focuses on objectives such as advocacy, trust, loyalty, and influence instead of reach, awareness, and simple engagement.

22Squared analyzed the social media activities of 100 popular corporate brand, and those effects on consumers. They defined four types of online consumer activities: engage, contribute, participate, and create. Comparing the impact of the actions of consumers from each of the four action categories with each other, they found: Those who participated and created generated 2.5 times more conversations than the lower-involvement “engage” group. They also influenced four times as many purchases as those brands using social media without higher-involvement participatory engagement.

Thinking back to To Mama With Love: the planning group involved all four types of action: we engaged, contributed, participated, and created. We blogged about it, tweeted it, and created heartspaces. Also, any website visitor who wanted to make a donation to To Mama With Love had to, at the very minimum, engage by making a donation, and then create by making a heartspace. TMWL set itself up to create real return on engagement. Those who participated most likely tweeted and posted updates to their social spaces about the event, too.

Thinking about Return on Engagement, instead of Return on Investment, changes the approach to social media. Instead of focusing on followers, think about how to create an engaged group of stakeholders, and what online activities will create that engagement. When designing your next social media strategy or campaign, integrate and encourage high ROE activities to yield more successful outcomes.

I’m presenting a free online webinar entitled, “What’s the ROI? Measuring the ROI of Social Media” on May 18 at 3pm EST. These are some of the things I’ll be talking about, along with another case study and information about what to measure. In the meanwhile, I’ll continue to think about ROE, and look forward to your thoughts on it as well.

Resources:

Amy Sample Ward’s social media metrics template is a great engagement metrics tracking starting point, and her blog post on DIY Community Engagement Metrics.

Flickr image courtesy of smallritual

The old minimums aren’t working in social media. Old minimums? Yes, your minimum viable (social media) participation.  I call this the MVP. In companies, we often talk about a minimum viable product, which involves the smallest amount of energy necessary to get a product out the door. For too long we’ve been offering minimum viable participation as our social media strategy, just to get something out the door. The problem is that this isn’t going to work much longer. The old MVP will no longer offer return on investment.

Social media participants are savvier than ever before, and smarter than ever before about what is expected from organizations.

The new MVP requires real participation.

Listening to what people are saying about your organization, company, or cause is no longer satisfactory. Listening is expected. Just as your friends expect that you will listen to your phone messages.

Responding isn’t enough, either. Everyone expects a response. Failure to respond in a timely manner can cause all sorts of social media chaos when there is an upset stakeholder tweeting like crazy. However, responding is a minimum. Just like not returning your phone messages is…rude. Responding is expected, and it is part of the old MVP.

Responding with platitudes to an irate client or customer isn’t enough either. As Andrea Greer writes, ” What I find particularly insulting are the responses that don’t reveal any humanity whatsoever. The “thanks for your concern” platitudes. Those responses never fool anyone into thinking the company actually appreciates the input. I’d say you’ve fallen flat on your face—splat!—when you are responding that way.” She calls these “splatitudes.”

The new social media minimum, the new MVP, is Participation. Posting content, that’s the old minimum. Participation means actively engaging in your social media spaces, soliciting feedback, become a community resource and asking others to post their events and news, and encouraging conversation about things people in your community care about. Use the medium to encourage conversation, as the Catskill Animal Sanctuary does with their critter cam and videos on their Facebook Page. The new MVP is the vibrant page that cultivates conversation and participation, whether that be on Flickr, YouTube, your blog, Facebook, or Twitter.

Oceana offers a great mix of information, conversation, and listening on its Facebook Page:

And something else: participation is what creates social media ROI. Participation is what moves people to vote for your nonprofit in a contest. Participation is why people will sign your petition and donate to your fundraiser.

Social media as we know it today includes everything from location-based applications to blogs to social networks to photo and video sharing. And everything in-between. In the beginning, if you wanted to be part of the conversation, you just had to know what was going on. You had to know about emerging platforms, you had to listen to the conversation and respond when necessary. That’s no longer good enough.

The new minimum is participation.

It’s time to think about your participation strategy, not your social media strategy.

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?

In early 2009, we asked all members of TuDiabetes.org, a social network for people touched by diabetes, to share their diabetes poems as part of a contest we ran. It was called No-Sugar Added Poetry. In July 2010 the Diabetes Hands Foundation (the nonprofit that runs TuDiabetes) published a compilation with 39 of those poems, offering profound insight into the challenges, hopes, and fears of those living with diabetes through the power of their poetry. The end result was the No-Sugar Added Poetry book.

The compilation showcases what can be accomplished through crowdsourcing, putting people’s stories together as they live with a chronic condition and describe their experiences with diabetes through poetry. As Dr. Bill Polonsky, CEO of the Behavioral Diabetes Institute, writes in the foreword, these poems “speak to the emotional effort of trying to figure out how to fit the uninvited guest of diabetes into life.”

I was humbled to read the submissions from the participants. It was very difficult to choose from so many beautiful poems. The ones that we included in the book describe fairly well the stages of life with diabetes – from diagnosis all the way to acceptance.

We learned a lot of valuable lessons in the process:
•    Publishing is a crazy world. We found a great self-publishing company called SelfPublishing.com that made the most sense for us, striking the best balance between quality and cost. But, regardless of the solution you choose, publishing is a book is a LOT of work.

•    Once you print the book, the marketing and PR begins. We realized the message to different audiences would vary from people touched by diabetes to people who like poetry, for instance.

•    We’ve invited members on TuDiabetes to host book parties as a way to connect with others and raise diabetes awareness and get the book in the hands of people who may have not otherwise gotten it. We documented the first book party we did in Berkeley to show others how they could go about their own.

•    We held a daily giveaway of the book on Twitter, to get the word out about the book. People re-tweeting a message about the giveaway were entered for a chance to win a copy.

•    Getting your store set up and running may make the most sense financially: your organization retains the most money from the sale, compared to selling through Amazon.com, for instance. But don’t underestimate the costs associated with fulfillment.

•    E-Commerce… the “E” does not stand for “Easy.” From setting up the Diabetes Hands Foundation store through Volusion to getting a Virtual Merchant set up (they let you accept credit cards on your store and/or points of sale), it was a LOT of work. But we quickly saw more people paying with credit card than via PayPal.

The lessons continue to pour in and I hope to continue to share them so that other nonprofits may be able to learn from our successes and avoid our mistakes. In the meantime, we’d love to hear your thoughts about the book.

No-Sugar Added Poetry can be ordered at: www.bit.ly/askNSAP.

Manny Hernandez is a nonprofit executive, social media author and consultant and a diabetes advocate committed to connecting people touched by diabetes and raising diabetes awareness. He is the president of the Diabetes Hands Foundation (DHF), a 501(c)3 nonprofit that runs two social networks for people touched by diabetes: TuDiabetes.org (in English, started in March 2007) and EsTuDiabetes.org (in Spanish, started in August 2007). He has had LADA (Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults) since 2002 and has used an insulin pump since 2005. He has also been a columnist for dLife.com since 2007, he wrote “Ning for Dummies” (published in April 2009) and collaborated on “Twitter For Marketing for Dummies” (published in the Fall of 2009).

Diabetes Hands Foundation is a nonprofit that connects people touched by diabetes and raises diabetes awareness.

image courtesy of Dunechaser

Social media strategy and practice is so much richer when ideas are shared and commented upon. Beth Kanter famously sets up wikis to share and gather knowledge for almost all of her projects, and uses her official Facebook Page to source ideas and get feedback. Linkedin groups emphasize knowledge-sharing. Brands have marketing and project management teams that collectively think about their social media. We are all trying out social media in new ways, while dealing with a geometrically increasing amount of data and information, and staying on top of ever-evolving platforms and new channels.

We all need a social media support team.

Last week, I had the privilege of working with a nonprofit team to brainstorm for two days about their social media. Not only was it fun, but what came out of the two days was so much better than I could have developed on my own! I developed a draft strategy to present to the team. Using the strategy as a starting point, we created a much better social strategy together that what we began with. Why? Group dynamics, internal organizational knowledge, individual capabilities and strengths, and group energy. We were able to access the resources and knowledge within the group members. We all think differently. Most importantly, we all respect each other.

Even if you are the only person at your organization working on social media, you can still create an external informal (or formal) social media advisory team.

I have an informal team that I call upon to help me think through ideas. My team is both long-distance and local. My “team” includes a web developer, a PR professional, a marketing VP of a brand, an SEO expert, a fundraising expert, and a local social media implementer. I call upon them individually, as I see the need for their individual expertise, to bounce ideas off of them. I skype and share documents with another nonprofit social media consultant for feedback. Most importantly, there’s a strong element of trust – I trust that my teammates are unselfishly providing their best advice, and I in turn am ready to offer it to each of them at all times.

I think the ideal team would include these knowledge proficiencies:

• social media strategy
• social media implementation
• website design and programming
• Facebook development
• SEO expertise
• fundraising expertise
• marketing experience (corporate or nonprofit)
• other tech capacities as needed: software development, database development, etc.

I use Linkedin Groups (especially the Nonprofit Professionals Forum and Social Media for Nonprofit Organizations) to ask for help, ideas, and feedback as necessary. Twitter is also a great place to ask for feedback and input, as well. I blog at Idealware, and we created a private blogger’s group to discuss blog post ideas. I also use the Community Organizer 2.0 blog as a channel for ideas and feedback.

Most importantly, my clients are also part of my team. I’m not a “guru” that goes off and works on the mountain. I start with a concept, pass it through the client for feedback, develop it further, pass it back through the client for feedback, and so forth. Ideally, I would facilitate a brainstorming session like the one described above, which greatly enhances any idea. In other words, clients are important members of any social media team.

I can’t create social media strategy in a vacuum and neither should you.

Social media is about connection. The core of it is about connecting ideas, people and places, and organizations to actions. There are so many ways to create your social media team, and so may different types of teams. When you develop social media in a vacuum, the ideas are just half-finished.

Who is on your team?

Yesterday Molly Livingstone of Hebrew University and myself presented at the 140 Conference in Tel Aviv. (Disclaimer: Hebrew University is a client of mine.) Currently, the university maintains two Twitter accounts, @HebrewU (English) and @HebrewU_heb (Hebrew) with over 2,000 followers. Additionally, they have a Facebook Page with over 7,500 fans, and an educational YouTube channel with 740 subscribers. We’ve all learned a lot in a year. At the conference, Molly and I discussed lessons learned, the challenges of working within an established institution, the importance of social media cheerleaders, and what has succeeded. I thought I’d share some of them with you:

1. Cross-departmental teams more than double the assets

Hebrew University put together a cross-departmental team to implement its social media that is able to access language, culture, and departments throughout the University. The team itself consists of two staff from the Media Relations and two from the Development department. Between them, there are two native English speakers, two native Hebrew speakers, two native-born Israelis, one native-born American, and one is a native-born British citizen.The team represents the largest majority of the university’s target audiences, as well as language and cultural diversity.

Most importantly, the their combined reach includes the Spokesperson’s office (and therefore the Office of the President), the alumni department, multimedia (who controls the YouTube channel), the development department, the Friends of Hebrew University associations (over a dozen worldwide), and media relations. Over the past year, the social media team has needed all of these resources at some point to support, amplify and assist in the social media efforts.

2. Social Media Cheerleaders are vital to success

When working with a large institution, it is fair to say that not everyone thought social media was a worthwhile effort in the beginning. Largely in part to a small group of social media cheerleaders within one of the departments, social media came into being. An initial “social media trial run” of three months expanded into six, then a year. Now social media is regarded as a worthwhile financial and resource investment. It would not have been possible without a few people within the institution pitching it and believing that social media is important to the university’s success.

3. Determine the communications theme and stay on message, on every platform

We determined early on that these are the primary messaging themes: put a personal face on the university, promote it as a world-class institution, and emphasize its strength in research and innovation breakthroughs. The team ran monthly twitter chats about an interesting facet of the campus to put that personal face on the institution. They still use Twitter to respond personally to people talking online about the university, engage, and talk about the scientific breakthroughs and research that come out of the university.

On Facebook, the university hosts a monthly “Expert on the Spot” video Q&A with a researcher or scientist. The Expert on the Spot features an expert talking about his/her research and inviting questions about it. This accomplishes two things: it is a means for the university to engage personally, and it highlights the innovation happening on campus.

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.)