Image courtesy of Jarod Carruthers, Creative Commons License

Social media cannot thrive in silos. What is happening online affects the entire organization, not just the marketing department, or the development team, or the Executive Director. And while social media usage has truly penetrated the nonprofit sector, reports and activities are usually not shared throughout the organization. What results is a lack of organizational buy-in, misunderstanding of the benefit of digital engagement, missed opportunities, and role confusion. Instead of siloing information, turn it around. Knowledge sharing results in stronger organizations that have a broader knowledge base about its online stakeholders, and a wide net of useful information to meet organizational goals.

There are six essential pieces of information that should be shared throughout the organization:

1. Social media metrics

2. Social media roles and activities

3. Online mentions of the organization

4. Online mentions of a specific keyword, phrase, competitor, or conversation topic that is of interest to the organization

5. Digital campaign activities and results

6. Online identities, apps, channels, tools, and platforms: what you use to make social media magic

What is essential is that the information is accessible by all, shared routinely, and acted upon.

Ideas for establishing a knowledge sharing culture:

1. Establish an online space where all social media metrics are kept and accessible. Consider an online Google doc or spreadsheet, or a Dropbox for social media.

2. Create a weekly knowledge sharing internal newsletter or email: keep to high-level information gathered from online activities, and demonstrate the value of social media engagement.

3. A daily or weekly online mentions report. Summarize important online mentions so that every member of the organization may act upon the information.

4. Create an internal Delicious or Evernote account to bookmark articles, and mentions. The National Wildlife Federation pulls important and relevant mentions into the social bookmarking site Delicious. They copy any exact quote/mention within an article into the “notes” section of Delicious, and then tag it with a predetermined private tag for other NWF staff to read.

5. Integrate social media reports into weekly or regular organizational staff meetings.

It’s also important to establish an knowledge sharing feedback loop to determine what team members want to know, if the information useful, and how it can best add value to the work of the organization. Invite others to contribute to the online mentions report, or the internal reporting. Ask for feedback by email, or establish a short survey to find out the value of the knowledge sharing activities. Ask for feedback and questions in every report; encourage a knowledge sharing culture!

Knowledge sharing adds another layer of social media value to the organization, a feedback loop for your social media efforts, an integrated approach to being social. The more knowledge is shared, the stronger your social media return!

Image courtesy of rgtmum, Creative Commons license

I’ve often been struck by the idea that geosocial (geolocation) applications are an incredible opportunity for organizational engagement…waiting to happen. The sharp smartphone adoption curve, the increasing cultural acceptance of online location sharing, and abundance of geosocial apps creates a ripe environment for community-building. This year’s SXSW geosocial apps take geolocation to the next (somewhat creepy) level of hyper-local; the apps will notify you of friends within a specified distance of you.  (No more ducking into the aisle at the grocery story to avoid your neighbor.)

To be clear about language, when I write “geosocial” or “geolocation,” I am talking about those mobile applications that are tied to being at or near a place. The usually allow you to “check in” and notify other friends also using the application that you have visited. They may have lists to of places to view, suggested nearby places, or personalized suggestions. They usually integrate photo, Twitter, Facebook, and social network friends into the application. They offer the ability to add reviews and opinions about the location, its products or services, staff, etc. Yelp, Foursquare, SCVNGR, Foodspotting, MyTown, and the former Facebook Places are examples of these mobile applications.

According to geolocal mobile research, people check in primarily to receive coupons or discounts, and secondarily to meet friends, it’s the third reason that is the missed opportunity. The third most-popular reason people use a geosocial app to check in is to promote a location.

Close to 30% of the people who check in do so because they love the business.

This seems pretty like huge opportunity to deepen engagement, and I see two huge missed opportunities:

1. Create a community leveraging the application

Nonprofits generally offer specials, rewards, and tips on geosocial mobile application sites. However, that’s just the first step. The second step is more challenging: how can a nonprofit transform its geosocial presence into a community-building presence? If you manage a geosocial location, you know who has visited because you can see it on the back-end. Why not invite visitors into your other community spaces? Send them a Tweet or leave a tip within your own space to visit the other online community spaces. If your location is really active with check-ins and tips (a museum, or historical attraction for example), then respond to each review or comment, or leave the periodic tip thanking super supporters on Foursquare.

Acting as a person on geosocial applications (e.g. The Junior League) offers an opportunity to build community.  Begin to follow folks who have checked into your location, and comment on their check-ins around town. Susan Chavez of The Junior League says that The Junior League has used Foursquare to meet volunteers at conferences. Meeting your fans offline is a great way to solidify the love.

You can also create events on Yelp and Foursquare. Project Bread in Boston runs a yearly 20-mile Walk for Hunger, which is also listed as a Yelp Event. Stakeholders who not only donated time and raised money for the event also left a review. These are true superfans. Create an event, find out who those diehard fans are, and bring them into next year’s online planning group for the event.

2. Harness the love into an action that speaks to your mission

What if you used a geosocial app to meet your mission? All it takes is a bit of creativity and willingness to experiment. I know of two nonprofit organizations that leveraged geosocial to meet mission: one for advocacy and another to raise funds . Big Love Little Heart’s 100×100 campaign in 2010 asked its offline and online community to leave advocacy tips on the 100th day of the year and support a legislative bill. EarthJustice also leveraged Foursquare in a 2010 ad campaign. They posted ads at many San Francisco BART stations urging people to check-in in order to leverage a $10 donation per check-in to stop unsafe oil drilling practices. Urban Ministries of Durham launched a Foursquare campaign to raise awareness about urban homelessness by creating Foursquare locations of homeless urban venues.

It seems to me that using geosocial mobile apps for awareness itself doesn’t meet mission. Creating community and relationships, and moving stakeholders to action does.

With geosocial, half the battle is won already because stakeholders find YOU. Take it to the next level and don’t miss another opportunity to create community and deepen relationships.

Related:

Last week, I discussed the intersection of mobile, geosocial apps, and the new customer relationship at a workshop for the Center for Women in Enterprise on location-based marketing and geosocial apps. The presentation outlines trends in smartphone adoption, who is using location-based services and why, the decline in geolocation check-ins, what shoppers are doing with their smartphones, and the future of geosocial. The last five slides include questions to lead your thinking about developing your own geosocial mobile strategy. I’ve embedded the presentation below.

In March, I sat on a panel at SXSW Interactive with three fellow nonprofit community managers to discuss personnel/personal boundaries in online community management. Organizations and community managers are grappling with this currently, and the active Q&A (documented here) during the session was a testament to this fact. Idealware and Darim Online, with support from Balance Interactive, have just released a free Nonprofit Social Media Policy Workbook for nonprofits trying to figure out how to get a handle on the personnel side of social media.

Why do you need a social media policy? The workbook introduction sums it up clearly:

“A good social media policy will provide clear guidelines as to what staff should and shouldn’t do when posting and interacting with the community on a day-to-day basis, freeing them up to think more strategically. It’s also likely to help leadership feel more comfortable with the less-formal nature of social media by letting them establish boundaries for its use.”

In this simple yet complete guide, the authors walk through many of the critical social media policy issues with which organizations struggle: the reasons for a policy, applying organizational values to the policy, social media roles, what to say online, social media monitoring strategy, responding to criticism online, responding to other comments online, privacy and permissions, and thinking through copyright and attributions. Each section offers at least one highlighted example from an organization that has struggled with the same issue, and how the issue was resolved.

When I was an online community manager, I was left to navigate the world online community without guidance. I found myself making judgement calls “on the fly” about how much about myself to reveal personally when interacting within other online communities, how to deal with negative criticism, staying “on message” when developing personal relationships with community members, and whether or not to use my personal social media accounts to promote organizational efforts. The Social Media Policy Workbook is a godsend for organizations grappling with just these issues.

What I love about the workbook:

• It is non-judgmental and approachable. There are no set guidelines or clear preferences; policy positions are laid out along a continuum of choices that best fit the organization’s values, mission and culture.
• It is hands-on. It is really a workbook, and every section of the workbook includes probing questions, guided exercises, and space for answers.
• Real-world stories and experiences from organizational staff support each section of the workbook.
• The companion social media template.  The online template is not the workbook, replicated; it is a a companion piece  of sample language taken from existing social media policies of other organizations.
• It is short, sweet, and to the point. At 20 pages, it’s just the right length not to intimidate.
• Guided decision-making. For every decision, there are guided questions, simple worksheets, and space to add organization-specific data. For example, it includes a stellar worksheet intended to help leadership consider social media roles and responsibilities within the organization.
• It includes provocative questions. True to their introduction, “chances are good that you’ll find the conversations you have as a team are every bit as important as the product you end up with.”

I feel that the workbook would benefit from a section about how “personal” you want your organization to act or appear online. I struggled with this same issue as an online manager: do I sign the organization’s twitter updates with my initials? Should I add my name to any/some/all of the Facebook posts? Should I put my name at the top of our FourSquare account?  It would be helpful to include in the workbook a list of the social media channels, and ask which circumstances in which it is more or less appropriate to connect as a person rather than “a logo” online. Chapter two, “Your Organization’s Social Media Values,” could easily be modified to include this discussion.

I also wish that the workbook had included a discussion or decision-tree around posting within other professional spaces (LinkedIn groups, other Facebook Pages) as a staff person. How and when to identify the fact that you also work at a certain organization is an issue all staff encounter at times.

The Nonprofit Social Media Policy Workbook is an essential resource for initiating, discussing, and drafting your organization’s social media policies.

If you are looking for a starting point for your social media policy, look no further.

Lisa Colton of Darim Online and Andrea Beery of Idealware presented a workshop at the Nonprofit Technology Conference entitled “Maturing Your Organization’s Social Culture by Creating a Policy.”  Many of the workbook elements were discussed during the workshop. The talented Rob Cottingham graphically captured the workshop discussion in the illustration below. Enjoy!

Noise to Signal Cartoon

Image courtesy of JD Lasica, Creative Commons license

Last week, I attended the Nonprofit Technology Conference, and had the pleasure of attending an interesting session on “The Future of Nonprofit Storytelling.” Moderated by Rob Wu of CauseVox, it included an all-star panel of storytelling experts: Cara Jones of Storytellers for Good, Jenna Sauber of the Case Foundation, and JD Lasica of Socialbrite. (I am also a Socialbrite colleague.) The panel pondered some interesting questions and offered concrete tips on how to create compelling stories, defining what is a story, storytelling tools, and creating an internal culture of storytelling.

Rob Wu, the moderator, asked these questions of the panel:

• What is storytelling?
• How is storytelling different from marketing communications?
• How do you shift your nonprofit into a culture of storytelling?
• What are your tips for capturing stories?
• What tips do you have for storytelling and storytelling tools?
• Where is storytelling going in the future?

I’ve captured most of the panel’s comments, as well as a few audience questions, in the Storify story created from tweets and photos (below). There are a few highlights from the session for me. Among them:

On storytelling

Cara Jones offered a three wonderful nuggets of wisdom about storytelling:

“People will forget what you told them. They will forget what you did. But they will never forget how you made them feel.”

“Use video for motion and emotion. Break out statistics and anything you want them to read into a separate place so they can read and digest the stats at their own pace separately. Keep the story to motion and emotion.”

“Nonprofit stories have the unique ability to allow people to feel and want to be a part of something bigger.”

On tips and tools

JD Lasica joked (seriously), “never have I watched a video and thought, ‘ oh that video just wasn’t long enough!’”

Jenna Sauber advised nonprofits to consider episodic storytelling by breaking up longer stories into shorter ones with an arc.

Cara Jones urged storytellers: “Don’t fear the close-up video. Exaggerate emotion for the audience.”

JD Lasica reminded us that photos and other lightweight media also have impact as storytelling media.

On finding stories and shifting internal culture towards storytelling

JD Lasica suggested that “stories don’t have to live within your own organization.” Also, “you will find storytellers within your nonprofit in surprising places.”

Jenna Sauber talked about how the Case Foundation uses an internal editorial calendar, and captures ideas between posts through its internal communications system, Yammer.

Cara Jones had a great idea for getting staff involved: “When nonprofits encounter internal resistance to telling stories, ask the staff to tell their stories. When staff feels heard, they are likely to go out and tell others’ stories.”

JD Lasica also highlighted some good tips from the panel in his blog post about the Nonprofit Technology Conference here.

 The full session is captured in the Storify story, below.

Image courtesy of verbeeldingskr8, Creative Commons

If you do anything professionally related to online technology, you understand the immense amount of data you need to sort through daily. There are the daily content roundups, blogs to read, Facebook posts and to check, tweets to scroll through, and news sites. That doesn’t include whatever else arrives in your inbox. I literally cannot keep up with all that I want to know about social media technology and its use for engagement, fundraising and advocacy. It’s really…too much to know. That’s when I began trusting the curators.

Trusting the curators was a strategy I employed to begin to figure out what to read, what I needed to read, and what others that I trusted thought was important to read. We cannot read it all. We cannot begin to imagine trying to read it all. We must trust to the curators.

Trusting others to curate content has become my primary means for gathering relevant information about social media and particularly, nonprofit technology.

Finding good curators

I think of a good curator as someone who is knowledgeable about the industry, and provides consistently trustworthy content. Mai Overton has a good addition: that a good curator is “someone who consistently provides valuable insight.” I often find curators through their blogs or recommendations from others, and then begin follow them on Twitter or Google+ to find what they are curating.

Choosing curatorial platforms

There are many strategies for finding new, quality, and relevant content. Several social media platforms will allow you to sort through volumes of information, and isolate it by topic, idea, or curator. My top three preferred platforms for sourcing and sorting through qualified curators and their content are Twitter, Scoop.it, and Google+.

Twitter

At a 140 Conference in Tel Aviv in 2010, a panelist was asked by another panelist to list the names of blogs she reads. She replied that her Twitter stream is now her blog reader, and she’s not embarrassed to say so in public.  Jessica Kirkwood, an ultra-connected colleague of mine, shared with me recently that she “uses Twitter lists to curate and follow people who are tweeting out relevant information for her to read.”  She no longer uses an RSS feed reader at all.

While Twitter is a constant stream of information, much of it includes data and links to articles with data. The key to using it as a curatorial platform is to carefully create lists. I use Twitter lists and TweetDeck columns to focus on the people that are tweeting out relevant information about nonprofit technology, community management, nonprofit technology, and fundraising. I prefer to limit my lists to less than 100 people per list.

Scoop.it

I love the curatorial platform Scoop.it. Scoop.it is best described as a board for curated topic-specific content. I curate a Scoop.it board on Facebook research and best practices, for example, and “scoop” articles from around the web that are relevant to my curated topic. I follow 38 other topics, on everything from LinkedIn Tips to Nonprofit Digital Engagement to Just Story It (a board about storytelling). There are also a few boards about content curation, such as this one. Every day, Scoop.it emails me a summary of some of the new articles uploaded to boards that I follow. If you only have 30 minutes each day to read the latest news in your industry, start with Scoop.it; it serves up the newest information in a very readable format.

Google+

I love that I can curate who I follow through Google+ circles. I curate my circles by type of expertise, to fine-tune the content and knowledge information. Some of my circles are nonprofit technology, social media (not nonprofit), fundraising, data geeks, and gadget geeks. I’ll often view my Google+ stream through the lens of one circle at a time, in order to find content trending topics, and look at what my curators are thinking about. A benefit of Google+ is the ability to engage in robust discussion about an article or idea.

Delicious

I use the social bookmarking platform Delicious to bookmark anything on the web that I want to remember and go back to. You can follow users or “stacks” (content-specific bookmarks) or search for information by tags. For example, this is a stack that Avi Kaplan created for anyone wanting information or examples of Online Organizing.

Pinterest

The newest shiny social media platform, Pinterest, has become a darling of the social media world. If the content you want is visual, this is an ideal platform for you.  Howard Lake created this Pinboard called Charities’ Facebook Page Covers, for example.

There are so many other curatorial platforms that I haven’t named. What’s important is to find what works for you, and why. What’s your curatorial strategy?

Israel Loves Iran, the Facebook meme started by an Israeli graphic designer, does something unique: in one sentence it challenges historical thinking about the relationship between Israel and Iran, and at the same empowers citizens of both countries a way to make a difference. This campaign to prevent war is based on hope and goodwill. What is so refreshing about this is the positive spin on a very serious subject: nuclear and conventional war. It’s storytelling at its best, and begs the question posed by Stacey Monk and Vanessa Rhinesmith in their excellent South By Southwest Interactive session: Can positivity change the world?

That one question pushed me reconsider traditionally negatively inspired messaging campaigns, and how to rethink them into positively messaged campaigns. For example, the Humane Society ran a very effective online video and petition campaign to boycott Canadian seafood, supported by an extremely graphic video of how baby seals are clubbed and killed. Though the campaign garnered a lot of signatures and momentum, would it have been even more successful if it were positively messaged? What if it were a campaign that illustrated the beauty and joy of the baby seal, the cuteness of the baby seal, and how the world is more beautiful because of more seals? Katie Smith tweeted this session takeaway:

And this is where the internet meme Israel Loves Iran comes in.

Ronny Edry and his wife Michal Tamir are Israelis deeply concerned about an impending war with Iran. Ronny uploaded a poster (seen at the top of this blog post) to his Facebook Page with the message: “Iranians, we will never bomb your country, we love you.” Ronny’s poster hit a nerve with his message is that we are all one humanity, and the government does not speak as one voice for the people.

Ronny started a movement that has grown exponentially: over 16,000 people Like his Facebook page, thousands on Facebook have changed their avatars to include messages of peace and love, and other Facebook pages and groups that have arisen with similar messages. CNN picked up the story, Mashable, and the Israeli English-language paper Ha’aretz.

What is more, thousands of Iranians are doing the same.

This is slacktivism, true, but slacktivism with passion and energized activism behind it.

I lived in Israel from 2007 to 2010, and every single spring, friends and relatives would comment, “this summer, there will likely be war with Iran.” It wasn’t and “if,” but “when.” I lived and worked in a peace-loving community of Jerusalem, and though no one wanted war, we never discussed how we might prevent war. The old pattern of “Iran has nuclear capability, and wants to eliminate the State of Israel, so we must disarm this threat” was rarely challenged.

In one day, Ronny Edry changed the message and started something big. A movement, in fact.

I’ve been thinking about Israel Loves Iran and what makes it so powerful. I believe there are a few elements:

• By simply reframing the message, Israel Loves Iran created hope where there was none.
• Empowerment. Individuals feel empowered by the message and the hope; they feel that they may actually able to prevent war between the two countries.
• Timeliness. As I said, every Spring this conversation occurs. Why does it have to be the same?
• The truth. No one wants the war. Why does it have to happen?
• The humanity of it all. Individuals having a conversation, messaging each other, and realizing that they share a common goal.

What could other causes learn from this?

• Re-framing the messaging from negative to positive creates changes, hope, and momentum.
• Individual to individual connection. What is it that connects people on a real and individual level to the cause?
• Motivation. What is the motivation to act? Is there urgency and timeliness? How can you put pressure on the motivation to act?
• Empowerment. How is your cause actually giving individuals the power to affect the outcome?

I welcome your thoughts on Israel Loves Iran, and what we can learn from it.

(For more on how the story unfolded, view this visual history.)

I had the privilege of joining three seasoned social media community managers on the “Personal/Personnel Policy: Social Media Boundaries” panel at South By Southwest this year. Vanessa Rhinesmith (Director of Outreach at Start Some Good), Jess Main (Director of Operations at National Center for Media Engagement), Amy Sample Ward (Membership Director at NTEN) and I presented examples of how we have negotiated the boundary between personal and professional involvement in social media.

There are a few themes that organizations and their online community managers face when executing social media strategies:

• How should the social media manager convey the personality of the organization without “muddying” organizational branding?
• To what degree should the organization’s employees acknowledge that they work for the company within their personal social media profiles?
• How should an organization capture and share the knowledge the social media manager has about the community?
• What happens when the organization relies on one staff person for its social media engagement, and that person has little or no guidance?
• What happens when the loyalty of the online community is more with individual staff than the organization?

The panel offered a wide variety of examples of these situations, and our engaged audience asked even more questions. Much of the discussion was captured in the numerous tweets by audience members (displayed within the Storify story, below). Jess Main wrote an excellent synopsis of the key takeaways from our session in a blog post. Her takeaways are:

1. Don’t be afraid of the customer service aspect of engaging online.

2. Plan for the future of your social media presence.

3. Create a guidelines document for how people representing your organization should communicate in social media. (The National Center for Media Engagement has published a Social Media Handbook that includes guidelines for creating social media policies.)

4. Share social media account information internally to assist with knowledge-sharing.

5. Don’t be afraid to say “no”to personal friend requests and follows.

I’ve created a Storify story out of the tweets from the session, when is embedded below. Thank you to a great group of participants during the session, including @NTEN, @Kate_Voth, @mosylu, @wiscTW, @carissaO, @ccampbel, @oxfam, and @ageekmom.

Other resources:

Amy Sample Ward captured more discussion highlights in a Storify story published here.

A list of social media boundaries resources and session notes will be permanently stored in a Google document at http://bit.ly/SXKeepItReal.

In late February, I noticed that things looked different on Causes.com. The Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) began running a campaign to send 50 nonprofits to the Nonprofit Technology Conference, and the new layout and actions within Causes caught my eye. Causes features videos, commenting, sharing, and of course full Facebook integration with the new Timeline. Causes looks and feels different from its previous iteration; it feels like a campaign center and no longer a Facebook add-on or a stand-alone online fundraising website.

Raising funds for a cause isn’t just about asking for money; successful fundraising campaigns include storytelling elements, peer to peer fundraising, and a campaign center. Causes has all of these elements built into its new platform, including video integration, petitions, sharing elements, polls, and commenting features. While Causes is still intimately tied to, and perhaps overly reliant on Facebook as its primary social media messaging channel, the latest Causes iteration comes closer to fully engaging users and creating a campaign center than many other online fundraising platforms.

Integrating polls, petitions, additional commenting features, and promoted storytelling elements could make Cause a serious contender as a robust online campaign site. There really aren’t any effective online petition platforms, and Causes’ new petitions features seems to be a smart move for the online petition space. I’m not advocating for eliminating the campaign from the website here, please note.  Rather, Causes could certainly be a viable primary online site where campaign engagement lives, for those nonprofits that cannot create micro-sites or campaign-specific websites.

I asked Susan Gordon, Director of Nonprofit Services, and Sydney Fleischer, Director of Community and Support, about the changes at Causes. Their answers are given, below:

What was the motivation for changing the platform to allow additional actions?

The huge upgrade of the design and tools on Causes comes from a commitment to be the best place to change the world through collective action.  We built off our strengths of Facebook integration and social promotion and launched a much wider suite of actions than joining a cause and donating. Organizers and nonprofits needed more from our platform so we focused on their campaigns, what’s creating offline impact, and released several new actions on the platform.  Plus, when Facebook announced at f8 last September that they were launching Custom Open Graph, we set out to build a set of tools that would enable people to take action in a social way, involving their friends and networks to come together and make meaningful change through our platform.

Please describe the new platform capabilities (I mean actions, primarily, such as voting, signing a petition, sharing, etc.)

On Causes, organizers can create campaigns around online pledges, fundraising asks, share your story campaigns, polls, quiz questions, and recruitment drives. We’re adding an online petitions tool very soon. Each of these actions is free to create, appears as a beautiful and easy-to-understand page, and is sharable through our integration with Facebook’s Custom Open Graph.

How would you describe the newest iteration of Causes as opposed to the previous iteration to someone?

The previous version of Causes looked very much like Facebook and was focused on being the best place to give online. The newest iteration has its own look and feel, is more streamlined and user-friendly and most importantly is now focused on being the best place for taking collective action.

How does this iteration fit into any trends you are seeing in online fundraising?

The world is becoming more social everyday and we’re seeing nonprofits try to utilize Facebook fan pages to grow their supporters. With Facebook’s Custom Open Graph, it’s now easier than ever to make fundraising go viral and I think nonprofits are trying to find a way to tap into that – and Causes is the best place to do so.

 How will these changes affect the ability to raise funds through Causes?

We believe these changes will improve nonprofits’ ability to raise funds. As all good fundraisers know, there’s a ladder of engagement to create lifelong donors.  Now, Causes helps nonprofits bring individuals up that ladder – from joining a cause to taking a wide range of actions and then, eventually, to donating.  Plus, there will continue to be a give option right in the same place as all of these new actions which makes that transition particularly easy!  We’re planning to add more actions, redesign our home page experience and increase virality to ensure that Causes is and will be the best place to take meaningful and impactful collective action.

And by the way, there’s still time to donate to the NTC scholarship campaign!

On Friday, I gave a presentation on how social media is impacting journalism and the newspaper industry for the New England Press and Newspaper Association‘s winter conference. I had the honor of sharing the panel with Boston Globe reporter Milton Valencia and Crowdsourcing author Jeff Howe. Milton spoke enthusiastically about why Twitter matters to journalists, and Jeff explained the virtuous cycle of reporting and online community that makes reporting better. During the presentation, I identified four areas impacted by social media: the changing definition of an authoritative news source, the concept of news participators, how news is shared, and the changing news cycle.

Authority = Trust

In the age of social, a newspaper and its journalists must earn authority; who is an authority is now decided by news consumers. For decades (even centuries) there’s been a “paper of record” that has been considered the authority on what is news. No longer. According to the PEW report Understanding the Participatory News Consumer, 30% of internet users get news from a combination of friends, journalists, or news organizations that they follow on social networking site daily. Moreover, half of social network users who also consume news online get their news daily from people they follow within social networks.

Social network friends = news authorities. Along with traditional news sources.

In an attempt to take advantage of this trend, both The Washington Post and the Guardian (among others) have developed Facebook “social reader” apps. For example, one could use the Washington Post Social Reader’s Timeline app to share what you’re reading with your Facebook friends. What is incredible is that both The Washington Post and the Guardian already have 5 million app users.

Reuters has a different take on utilizing social network authority. Reuters recently launched Social Pulse, a social media hub that presents what is popular now with Reuters readers. What is interesting about Social Pulse is that it integrates both a sentiment analysis tool and its own “Klout 50″ (the 50 “most social” CEOs) into Social Pulse. I would also be remiss not to write that Mashable launched its own social network news sharing community, Mashable Follow, a while ago. News organizations understand that online friends are the new news authorities, and they want to be in the center of it all with social reader apps, private social communities, and methods of influencing reader recommendations.

News Participants

With the rise of social media follows the rise of news participants: people who have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated the news through social media. According to the same PEW report on participatory news culture, 37% of internet users are news participants. News participants are likely to be considered news authorities within their own social networks. News participants are also deeply engaged news consumers who drive traffic back to news websites. During our conference session, Milton Valencia added that many reporters (himself included) use Twitter to engage news participants in confirming reports, soliciting information, and conversation.

The Guardian has launched an experiment in opening up the news development process to the public, called Open News. The Guardian states: “Help the Guardian shape the news by talking to our editors and reporters about upcoming stories as we work on them.” The Guardian posts a daily editorial calendar online, asks for news input, and has a dedicated Twitter hashtag (#opennews) for talking about stories they are researching. In preparing for this workshop, I found a number of papers with blogs, many with Twitter accounts, but none with participation opportunities like the Guardian‘s. Is this a likely future trend?

Social News Sharing

How news is shared is also shaping the news industry. About 50% of adults who get news online receive that news through email or posts on social networking sites. After readers consume news online, the second most popular action to do is to share the news online (see slide deck at end of post). Again, this supports the conceit of news sharers as news authorities, since those who share news socially may be considered by friends to be trusted news sources.

It is important for news organizations and journalists to be part of online communities where news is shared, participate in online conversations, and share news themselves. Since 23% of the social networking users who get news online say they specifically get news from news organizations and individual journalists they follow in the social networking space, the industry appears to be moving in this direction.

Social Media and the News Cycle

The Holmes Report wrote an insightful essay on how social media changes the news cycle during crisis reporting (hat tip to Mari Tikanen for the link).

The breaking news and context stages of the news cycle are shortening, and the analysis and archival stages are lengthening. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and blogs are contributing to the shorter breaking news cycle and adding context to the stories. Google search, wikis, video, blogging, and Flickr contribute to the staying power of the analysis and archival stages of the news cycle.

Within 48 hours of Susan G. Komen’s decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood, Susan G. Komen has renounced that decision. No doubt the decision was impacted by how the story become viral nature through social media. However, the analysis and archival stages continue long afterward. For example, the community Pinterest board “Komen Kan Kiss My Mammogram,” which documents the backlash against Susan G. Komen, has over 1,200 followers and 1,000s of views. A wiki, Take Back the Pink, emerged shortly afterward to harness the energy and passion for women’s health in a positive manner. These are but two examples of how social media is lengthening the archival stage of the news cycle.

I have embedded the entire presentation below. Please feel free to add your thoughts in the comments below.

Resources:

Social sharing and the news: http://www.journalism.org/analysis_report/news_gets_personal_social_and_participatory

Social media and the crisis curve: http://www.holmesreport.com/opinion-info/11399/How-Social-Media-Is-Changing-News-And-Crisis-The-Crisis-Curve-Framework.aspx

How mainstream media outlets use Twitter: http://pewresearch.org/pubs/2130/twitter-news-organizations

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.