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

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

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

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

The really important thing is to know your keywords

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

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

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

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

What the NWF primarily uses to search for mentions

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

Other places they search

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

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

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

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

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

Internal organizational sharing

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

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

Tracking stats through social sharing

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

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

How do you compile your dashboard?

Danielle Brigida (NWF) and Wendy Harman (ARC)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I do work with businesses to develop social media strategies, just as I work with nonprofit corporations. Yesterday, I gave a presentation at Nefesh B’Nefesh on the topic of Integrating Social Media Into Essential Business Functions. It was a lot of fun to think about using social media to support other business functions besides marketing.

Guess what? Social media is not just a platform for marketing and sales.

In fact, the idea for this presentation was formed when I began to investigate collaborative internal communication technologies for working on team projects. Then I started to wonder: what other business functions are supported by social media? Do social technologies actually increase efficiency in business functions? What would be the ROI of using them?

In a previous life, I was a small business consultant – thus, this presentation was created to answer these questions.

I looked at human resources, training, internal communication, product development, customer service, and sales/marketing. I purposely omitted a few areas (accounting, IT), but please chime in with your ideas for integrating social media platforms and technologies into all areas of business. At the end of the presentation, I offer the examples of Best Buy and The American Red Cross, two companies that have embraced social media.

I’m now beginning to to think about a similar presentation for nonprofit organizations. What are the essential organizational function areas that would benefit from social media integration? I’m thinking (out loud here) about member/client/organizational recruitment, program development, membership engagement, internal communication, human resources, and of course…fundraising. Do you already integrate social media into certain function areas at your nonprofit? Are you exploring this now? What are the ROI metrics? I’d love to hear your thoughts, and experiences.

Update: For some reason, I cannot embed this presentation into my blog, I’m linking to it instead. If you see a “tv” icon next to the link, hover over it and the presentation will pop up. (Some days, technology doesn’t work like you want it to.)

The culture of the social media-savvy company is the opposite of the culture of bureaucracy. Bureaucratic companies lose agility, ability to make immediate decisions, become wedded to old customs and routines, and sometime…lose the ability to innovate. (Think: US car companies. GM, anyone?)

Organizations become more bureaucratic as they become more complex, expand geographically, and need more accountability and reporting. A culture of openness throughout the company is often replaced with a culture of secrets and fear. Processes become cemented. Many approvals are necessary to create any new ideas. New ideas are easily dismissed as unnecessary or too risky. For a great example of this, read about “The Incompetence of American Airlines and Fate of Mr. X.” It’s not limited to for-profit institutions, either. I’ve had nonprofit clients with processes just as unwieldy as those described above.

And how do organizations like that implement social media? They “silo” social media to the hands of the very few, do not take risks, do not personalize engagement, are afraid of critique, shut down employee social media initiatives, and cannot add new social media platforms without many layers of approval. Yikes.

Here is a radical idea: It’s not that the company is excessively bureaucratic. It’s that the company won’t change.

If your company is scared of change, scared of transparency, scared of critique, and unwilling to change, its efforts will, in fact, fail. This type of company’s social media efforts will be compressed into the least interesting, least engaging tactics possible. Without ever producing any return on investment. (But you are probably not reading my blog. Maybe your employees are…)

The social media savvy company is agile, creative, willing to take risks, transparent (or at least transparent in its use of social media), interested in customer feedback, eager to listen, and can make rapid decisions when necessary. This sounds a lot like a young company’s culture. doesn’t it? It doesn’t have to be.

I don’t think that only young companies, or hierarchically flat companies, can effectively use social media. Zappos is the common example held up of the large company that embraces social media. Their company culture is young, open, interested in change, and very customer-oriented. Best Buy, the largest US retailer of electronics, beautifully embraced social media in 2009 and is really successful at it. The American Red Cross integrated social media to help them meet their programmatic goals and mission.

You work at one of these institutions. You want to help your company change. The key is a change in corporate culture, along with some shifts in bureaucracy. How?

A few suggestions:

• Start with education.  Offer training to the entire staff about what social media is, why it works, how it can help the company better fulfill its mission.
• Create a social media team that represents many different departments. Make sure it includes real decision-makers on the team.
• Insist that everyone in the company receive reports summarizing online mentions, the social media team’s major activities and goalposts, and its upcoming activities.
• Periodically, hold company-wide trainings about social media.
• Ask that employees be allowed to participate individually. Start small, with members of the core team. Expand.
• Secure a six-month commitment. Nothing long-term – but long-term enough to show that it isn’t scary, or the end of the company. It’s also enough time to show quantifiable results.

What are your suggestions? Have you faced these issues at your organization?

L-R: Sarah Granger, Beth Kanter (standing), Qui Diaz, Danielle Brigida, Wendy Harmon

I had the privilege to attend the 2009 NTC Conference session entitled, “Mapping Social Media Strategy to Metrics: Listen, Learn, Adapt.” Beth Kanter was the featured moderator and speaker. Other panelists included Danielle Brigida (National Wildlife Federation), Wendy Harmon (American Red Cross), Qui Diaz (Livingston Communications) and Sarah Granger (Future Campaigns). The session was set up as a moderated discussion – and I mean discussion with Q and A – between Beth, the panelists and the audience about the role of listening, metrics, learning and adapting social media practices for engagement and listening. She started the session by noting that she wanted to “bring the room expertise forward,” and I think that really expresses her style of moderation. The audience was also encouraged to twitter using the hashtag #ntcmap to add to the conversation. For further thoughts from Beth Kanter about the session and to view her slides from the session, visit Beth’s Blog. Additionally, Rob Cottingham created great visual notes from this session here.

I found the session incredibly informative: it was rich with real social media campaign examples, uses of metrics, listening tools and techniques and – most importantly – real sharing. I left the session armed with a great list of new listening tools, the importance of listening and learning from it and the sense that we are all still struggling with the best way to use social media for insight and its utility. However, this is my most important take-away: this is all new and we will all fail using social media in some way, but

Failure is just an opportunity to Adapt. Adaptation is real success.

These are the notes that I took during the session:

The Listen, Learn, Adapt phrase was borrowed from David Armano, who also has a blog. David says we need to reap INSIGHT before we can reap dollars, which seems to be the fundamental underpinning of Listen, Learn, Adapt.

How and why does listening provide value?

Wendy: It is our foundation. The ARC is mentioned over 400 times a day. Listening gives us insight about how people feel about us and what they want from us.
Danielle: It is the foundation. We have a place to act. We are nothing unless someone else thinks we are something.
Qui: Listening is important because it lays the foundation for effective strategy, it also helps you evolve strategy and campaigns.
Sarah: Listening has two parts- listen to community and members for quality, and utilize the quantitative statistics we have received.

Then the audience wanted to know more about the mechanics of listening, which I found very informative. Here are some ideas:

Beth:”Use your RSS reader like a rock star.” Make RSS feed from hashtags and keywords from twitter. She shares some things, skims a lot, and deletes liberally. She urges people not to read hours’ worth of material. “You don’t have to smell every flower as you leap through the field.”Wendy: I aggregate and distribute the data as appropriate for internal audience in the field. We gather data per region.

Beth: how manage the data? Answer (A): practice! Beth: how do you share the info? A: We gather data each morning, distribute it in emails to the appropriate people internally, If it involves a sensitive issue, we contact the appropriate person. Wendy sources the information and sends out daily summaries. Beth: is that useful to get people to buy into value of social media? A: Yes, they have an ambient awareness of what people are saying about us at minimum.

Danielle: We use a Delicious (social bookmarking platform) account. For every mention, we tag it with “education” and “program name” and then count the # blog mentions. Internal staff looks at it by keywords to see the mentions per day.

Sarah: Google alerts are helpful. We develop an online page to keep track of the mentions per campaigns and organization.

Qui: For our larger clients or brands, we need reports. We set up media citation reports – similar to media clippings. This could be a document with a clip about a blogger and metrics (their Technorati authority,etc) about the blogger and a response recommendation.

Insight/Knowledge sharing on listening from audience members:
Joe Soloman (@engagejoe):  Netvibes is a great tool. Create tabs of different RSS items you follow and make it open for others to listen.

Amy Sample Ward: uses Netvibes and is writing a blog post about Netvibes to be published soon.

Dmitri: Feed Digest customizes feeds and tags. Reposts on twitter and FB to groups. etc. Nonprofitcommunicators.org is his site.

Follow up:  number of hours of week spent by panelists just listening?

Wendy:  2-3 hours in AM of concentrated, then “ears open” through out day. At least 10 hours focused listening a week.

Danielle: 5 hours a week – one hour every morning. I organize my work flow with Google Alerts and use the RSS reader in AM.

Qui: I encourage small nonprofits to dedicate a 1/2 person  to the job, 10 hours a week for monitoring and response.

Sarah: Our nonprofit is heavily online. I listen 15% of the time.

Beth: There is more listening info at the We Are Media wiki – see listening toolbox. Also search Beth’s blog in the category on listening.

What is the learning process from social media and how do the panelists involve their organizations in the process?

Danielle: NWF learning is ad hoc. Our learning process favors qualitative data over quantitative data. We compare qualitative information to the quantitative data and move on from there.

Qui: Listening is everybody’s job. You want to make sure everyone listens and can take what they are hearing to right responder.
Sarah: We share qualitative data by email. Track, analyze, report with excel spread sheets.

Audience Insights on sharing learning process:
Lynn from Monterrey Institute: We use Yammer. It’s like “twitter for groups.” It is open source and great for information sharing.
Amy Sample Ward:  Net Squared has 3.5 people over 4.5 time zones. They use Delicious and send tags to each other. People send links to different staff.

Using Metrics to Track Strategy: Real Case Examples

What are some specific stories of using right metrics to track a strategy?
Wendy: It is important to measure what  your metrics will tell you if you have reached your goal. Our goal is to offer real-time, valuable information to the public in times of disaster. We aggregate information and post it to a blog and on twitter. We  measure whether or not we are helping people and if they got this information. We also measure whether or not the media also uses our site. Specifically, we measure # retweets (manually), # members of the media that use our site.

Danielle: We measure the Wildlife Watch program. We ask people to tweet #nwf/(name of wildlife they see). We measure with hashtag.org. We use url shortners (bit.ly or poprl.com) to track retweets. Laura Lee Dooley (World Resources Institute) wrote a post about URL shortners from a measurement perspective.

Qui: Offers a corporate case study. Network Solutions (a domain names provider) had negative brand perception. They had to change their reputation. We assessed the current brand conversations  and found that they had a 58% negative comment and blog ratio. We used some tools (she recommends Radian 6 for about $500 a month, but it does misses some things) but the best is to search manually on all the platforms (such as icerocket. twitter, board tracker, etc). We knew the baseline metric: 58%.  They implemented a campaign to counter this. The metric after the campaign was around was 18%. (Editorial note: I wrote about this specific campaign previously here.)

Organizational Resistance to Social Media: Strategies for Adoption

Audience question for panel: Share a story about when metrics are impressive but the boss doesn’t get it.
Danielle: At NWF we started with activist change. Of the many people on NWF’s  MySpace, only 400 people were interested in becoming activists, which was disappointing. It’s important to listen to what EVERYONE is saying to get good ideas. Even one good idea. I was in wrong department looking at revenue at NWF and converts, but switching to the educational department was the right place for new media.
Sarah: The key is biting off small pieces and educating people step by step. Find a champion and work with that person.
Beth: Organizational change is slow. Discussions change opinions.

Analytics Questions from the Audience

1. How do you deal with folks that just click and nothing else?

Beth: Look at cocreation networks online. Shows ladder of engagement and an overlay of # views and influence. You want all of them in your eco system. Probably have less influence than the people who are spreading.

Danielle: look at WHAT they are clicking on. for ex- if just educate.
Qui- if click through, give them good “calls to act” with opportunities to engage with the organization on the other end.

2. What are the ways of capturing offline data points to influence social media stuff? Do you collect offline data to measure online social media?
Danielle: every program has an offline component. All offline components have an online component. Example: if you are outside, have smart phone, and see wildlife, you can and tweet about wildlife with nwf hashtag.
Wendy: if you are online, you will often write about an offline activity. Example: people donate blood and write about it.

Qui: Do an initial qualitative assessment. Ask how people initially use the web and computer, and then ask later how they’ve changed behavior.

Adapting – “we’re evolving!” Examples of Listen, Learn and Adapt

Beth shares a great “adapting social media after listening” story by Carie Lewis of the Humane Society of US (HSUS). HSUS asked people to hold a sign meme to protest Wendy’s restaurant’s treatment of animals, and upload photos to Flickr. Only 2 or 3 people did it because of technical issues uploading to Flickr. Failure? Not exactly. HSUS listened online as people complained about difficulty to upload it.
How  did HSUS adapt?
When they created their LOL Seals campaign and made it as easy as possible to upload and caption photos. Used a Flickr API to upload a photos that people could caption, and they captured the user information too, such as  2500 email addresses. What is that value?
How has HSUS further evolved its use of social media?

HSUS then wondered if their main target group was really on Facebook (55+ women), so they developed a Facebook application: upload a photo of your cute pet, ask people to vote on which pet is cutest, and raise money for Humane society. Garnered 13,000 installations, which spread the information about the contest. HSUS raised about $600K through it.

Panel:
Qui- Network Solutions example. They reached out to people, and looked at who referred the most traffic for an online event. Now NS knows who will send the traffic and this will streamline its time investment. They initially tried to use Linkedin but it sent no one to site, so they’ve learned and will not use it for that again.
Danielle: We tweak our social media strategies all the time. Can’t ever be satisfied. With a Twitter hashtag, when more people use it, it’s part of wildlife watch program and up on website.
Wendy: We have few campaigns because want to build overall presence on platforms. We tweak constantly. Look back two years and we can see how we operated differently, but this was accomplished through incremental changes.

Beth: How does your organization look at learning, and change it from failure?
Danielle: There is no failure. Have to learn from everything. Have to assess investment continuously.

Beth: Sometimes it’s easier to change the social media strategy than the organization. Has anyone in the panel seen an example of how the organization has been changed by its use of social media?

Danielle: Initially I was the outcast because of my advocacy of social media. I needed organizational buy-in. I have to continuously track it. I advise that you fight for this within your organization, and keep doing it. I’ve changed my role and I still do email marketing, but I’m also an internal consultant when programs start. Now I say: if people don’t like social media, don’t start with them and find someone else who wants to use it.

Sarah: I worked with an organization that had some social media protesters. But as new people were hired, the adoption increased.
Beth: I’m an early adopter but working with resisters now. I’m learning from it and hope to write about it.

What the panel has learned today:
Wendy: If you are really interested and can see opportunities for the organization, just try it and adapt and learn.
Danielle: How metrics “bubble up” from using them.
Qui- Listen to voice of minority, too. There has to be a decision-maker in the org, too.
Sarah- Find others, colleagues and talk and learn from them.
Beth- Place your AV order ahead of time!

What Did You Learn from This Session (from reading this blog post, or in person at the session)?