Image courtesy of Jeremy Levine Design

A recent Reuter’s article: Top Ten Trends in Sustainable Business, focuses on the best trends in “green business,” I’m struck by how many of the points are applicable to sustainable social media. Here are my top trends in sustainable social media (hat tip to Reuters):

1. A deeper understanding of what sustainable social media means

Sustainable social media is not about creating a Facebook page so people can find you, or tweeting your blog posts automatically, it’s about long term engagement. Sustainable social media means creating conversations, really listening to your stakeholders’ needs, bringing stakeholders into your company for their input, and creating long-term strategies for deeper two-way engagement. If you have a deeper understanding of what sustainable social media means, you’ll see the return in customer loyalty, volunteerism, deeper engagement, and a host of other actions.

2. Your employees are your secret weapon

True – they know and love your organization. Let your employees tweet, use Facebook, answer questions on Yahoo! Answers, post questions on Linkedin Groups, and more…on the organization’s behalf. They are the customer and client touch points. More and more companies are creating social media policies. You could create a social media policy for the workplace, ideally clear and simple, and as open as possible. Here are a number of collected social media policies.

3. Speaking with rather than to your customers

The beauty of social media is that it allows real conversation. That’s called Web 2.0. Your stakeholders are using social media because they are asking to be part of the conversation. Bring ‘em in! Dr. Phil asks his Facebook fans questions. Donor Tools asked its customers where they should volunteer via their blog. Where can you get the great ideas your stakeholders have to share?

4. Storytelling and social media dance the perfect tango

You have a back story. Your products, your services, and your organization have a back story too. People don’t want statistics and data, they want people, stories, and personal connections to the company. Use social media to give it to them. Here is a moving video about Abe’s Market that isn’t about Abe’s Market at all – but the producers who sell their organic goods to Abe’s. And I dare you not to cry at this moving video story from the organization Darius Goes West.  What’s your story? How can you use social media to convey the story? How can you gather even more stories from the people who are engaged with your organization? Stories sustain interest, and your social media efforts.

5. Transparency is the badge of social media trust

Social media begs transparency. Don’t hide anything because there are hundreds of people who would love to know the dirt and don’t mind digging for it. If you know your organization is hiding something, or not being as forthright as it should, it will come out… Eventually… somewhere on social media. And then it will be a big mess. Just look at Habitat UK. And here’s another true story: I know of a company that set up five twitter accounts so that the related accounts would retweet the company’s account. The same company also created a fake Facebook account to “friend” people and eventually encourage them to become a fan of the company’s Facebook Page. Fraudulent? Yep. Uncool? Totally. I’m waiting for someone to “out” them.

The more transparent your organization is, the more trustworthy your social media will be. And sustainable social media is all about building and maintaining trust.

6. There really is such a thing as ROI

People will argue that you can’t determine return on investment from social media. Or return on influence. Or return on insight. I disagree. You can clearly see the effects that social media has on sales, membership, website visits, conversion rates from social media channels, online campaigns, and more. To create ROI, it’s critical to determine ahead of time what your organization’s goals are for social media. If it’s more online mentions, measure that. If it’s donations, or memberships, then track the activity through social media channels. Sustainable social media means measuring the return.

7. Create a strategy. Then follow it, and adjust it.

Your approach to social media should be strategic. Without an overall strategy, you’re just throwing pasta at the wall and hoping some of it will stick. The trend is away from individual channel approaches, towards a comprehensive strategy (as it should be). To do that, review your organizational and program goals, internal capacity, time, and level of commitment to social media. Create a social media strategy that supports your goals, and gets your organization where it wants to be. Define the channels you want to use, how you will use them, and how using each channel will help your organization meet its defined goals. Implement your strategy and adjust as needed. Sustainable social media means having a recipe and following it so that you are using social media effectively to support the company’s goals. And adjusting as needed (see #9).

8. Website integration

Social media shouldn’t stand on its own. Sustainable social media strategy means that your entire web presence (including social media profiles and activities) ARE your website. It’s not just your URL now. I’m pleased to see more integration between websites and social in the last year. Examples are Facebook’s new “Like button” that you can put on your website, the social sharing features (tweetmeme, addthis, etc), integration of YouTube within websites and the blog on the home page. Until recently, the blog was always relegated to its own page, or a separate site. To create sustainable social media, you have to integrate the social into the website, while the website should also send readers out to your social spaces. It’s all one site.

9. Fear of Failure: to succeed, you can’t be afraid to fail.

Platforms change all the time, the audience becomes more savvy and jaded, and it’s a brave new world every day in social media. One day you think you understand a platform such as Facebook, and the next day Facebook changes the world. However, I’m starting to sense a fear of failure that may fossilize into a mindset as social media becomes more common. I hope not.

Trying is succeeding. Trying something new, solidly based upon strategic planning, is sustainable social media. Failure teaches important lessons to you, and to us all. It’s a big social media lab right now, and we’re always on the lookout for new combination that work. Don’t be afraid to try.

10. Stakeholders are upset if you’re NOT listening.

If you aren’t at least listening for mentions of your organization, key products/services/brands, then you’re missing out on the conversation. Customers are most often going to use twitter to complain and praise…and ask for attention. Set up web alerts of all types. It’s best to listen and respond. The expectation now is that you are listening. If you are not responding, little problems quickly become big ones. Listen and respond.

I think these are the big ones. What other trends are you seeing in Sustainable Social Media?

I asked Brenna Holmes if she would write a guest post for this blog after she commented on my last post, Understanding How Facebook Pages Grow. In this post, she details how the California State Parks Foundation’s Facebook Fan Page grew from 517 fans as of May 31, 2009 to over 45,000 fans today. Here is her story, as a Guest Author:

At the end of May, CSPF learned about state budget cuts that would great affect the parks. They alerted us at Adams Hussey & Associates (AH&A) and we quickly made plans for a full multi-channel effort to stop the budget cuts and looming 220 park closures. This effort included direct mail, telemarketing, emails, and social networking. As a main part of the online strategy, AH&A recommended daily updates to the homepage at www.calparks.org with the latest news, creating an Action Center on their site, and optimizing their existing Facebook fan page to promote issue awareness, discussion, and hopefully new activists and members for CSPF.

The Friend Get Friend campaign launched on Tuesday, May 26, on Facebook via an update to the 517 fans. The update (seen below) explained the imminent threat parks were facing and put a deadline – Friday, May 29 – and a goal – 5,000 fans to recipients.

“This year’s cuts are 10 times as bad, so we need 10 times the fans on Facebook.”

We also still have the message below on the fan page near the action links and logo. “Find us on Facebook” language and graphics are featured in every email and all over the site.  Here is our message:

By midnight on Friday CSPF had reached 4,467 fans – not quite the goal, but by Saturday they reached 6,263 fans! The second FB update was sent Monday, June 1 at 12:12 p.m. PST, stressing a 24 hour deadline, asking for fans and petition signatures. The California budget committee was scheduled to meet on June 2, so media coverage was at its height and we were in contact with the house file and CSPF’s partners online and on the phone. CSPF sent out emergency donation requests in all channels and had an online petition to stop park closures.

The chart below (from our Facebook Insights) shows the growth in NEW FANS daily.

As you can see the largest growth was on Monday, June 1, where CSPF gained 3,369 new fans in just one day.

A tight deadline always spurs action online and when supporters can get instant feedback on the effects of their efforts (seeing fan numbers grow) it makes them even more motivated. On average CSPF’s page still get about 100 new fans per day. And while the unsubcribes have increased over time, CSPF still nets growth on new fans and typically on daily page views and site interactions as well.

Since the launch of that second update, CSPF has sent four other FB updates and has made many status updates that send the messages into fans’ newsfeeds. Most of the time the updates give supporters the latest news, but they also sent acknowledgements, posted two subsequent petitions, and promoted an offline event – SOS Weekend and asking supporters to download signs and send in pictures of themselves with the signs. Many parks held large organized events that weekend too. Over 5,000 people went to more than half the state parks that weekend (June 20-21) and sent in pictures as well as posting them to the fan page. All of the updates encourage fans to post to the wall, upload pictures, share their stories, concerns, and hopes about California’s state parks system.

The graph below shows the number of interactions per post, which includes comments, photos, and “likes”, so you can see that the fans really use the page to talk to each as well as to CSPF. We have even seen supporters create videos and individual fundraising drives all on their own and promote their activities on the FB page.

The massive growth of this fan page caught the media’s attention and was mentioned on several TV news spots and in national news articles.  While Sacramento never made a public mention of the social media activist efforts, but CSPF’s “State Access Pass” bill came up for a vote. Thought the vote failed, this was the first time in many years that the legislature even brought it out of committee for a floor vote.

AH&A is still working with CSPF to save the parks. The California budget passed at the end of July will not close the originally proposed 220 parks, but 100 are still on the chopping block. CSPF has recently expanded its outreach to Twitter. Please follow @CSPFoundation and help us save California’s magnificent state parks and beaches! We are also focusing on converting the 45K activists from Facebook into full CSPF members, and of course maintaining activities and engagement on Facebook.

Adams Hussey & Associates will be publishing the full multi-channel case study on this campaign in the fall or winter of this year.

Brenna Holmes is an Online Account Executive at Adams Hussey & Associates. She is responsible for implementing innovative and successful email and social media campaigns by applying cutting edge Web 2.0 techniques. Brenna is also a graphic designer and a fervent foodie and wine lover – being from the Napa Valley, CA it’s only natural ☺ Brenna tweets as @bfholmes.

Brenna Holmes