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.

I had a very interesting conversation with a board member of prominent nonprofit organization in New York City on Saturday: she asked me if social media can help her nonprofit raise funds from foundations. When I said “absolutely, yes,” she replied, “but no one believes me when I tell them that!”

Philanthropies and foundations are online. Really.

It’s not true that funders aren’t online. Philanthropy 411 wrote a series of blog posts last summer that listed where to find philanthropies on twitter, including 130 Foundations that Tweet, 21 Community Foundations that Tweet,  20 Funder Networks that Tweet, and a comprehensive list of Foundations, Staff, and Board Members on Twitter. Beth Kanter also published a post entitled 8 Nonprofit CEOs that Tweet, which garnered 25 comments by CEOs who added themselves to the list. More and more are online each week. You can easily find this out by looking at their website, or looking at Namechk.com

When I raised money from foundations, my organization was much more likely to receive a funding award if we had an established relationship with the grants manager. If you can’t establish a relationship with a grants manager in person, use social media to do it.

A challenge:

Build into your yearly development plan a social media strategy for getting to know the foundation officers you want to approach for funding.

As part of your entire development strategy, you’ve identified the foundations that you want to approach. Now search for them on social media. Find out where they are online. Spend the time to get to know their online personalities. Find out what groups they are involved in on Linkedin, chat with them on Twitter, become active on their Facebook fan page, comment on their videos.

In all probability, they will begin to notice you, and may soon follow you back or connect with you proactively in the same social spaces. If you have your online strategy in place, and an organizational commitment to social media, then you are ready for them to follow back and take part in the discussions happening in your social spaces.

Be ready for the funders when they come to visit.

Above all, develop an organizational commitment to using social media to create conversation and engage with stakeholders. You should establish several online spaces for funders to interact, view the conversation, and learn about the dynamics of your specific issues of concern. Social media spaces to consider:  website, mobile, social networks, blog, microblogging, video sharing, audio sharing, RSS feeds, and photo sharing sites.

Also consider the value that your organization can offer followers/friends within each online space: What are the broad topic areas you want to discuss? Will the discussions include how the information that you produce on the social media platforms add value and create loyalty? How will it create collaboration and awareness of how others are also addressing the issue?

For example: if I ran a local anti-poverty agency, I would focus on messaging that creates a conversation about local poverty, links it with other issues affected by poverty, and talk about what concrete steps would make a real difference. I would also highlight collaborative efforts, and others’ efforts, to show that you are most concerned with alleviating the cause, not just promoting your organization’s efforts (See related post by Ed Nicholson on this topic here.)

Can social media be a useful tool to raise money from foundations? Absolutely. But don’t begin the conversation unless your organization is ready for the funders to visit your social media spaces. Make your online spaces inviting, dynamic, and a great example of why they should fund you. Go out and find them. Then start talking!

Just as social media is an engagement strategy so is development work.

Start the conversation today.

Image courtesy of Numberstumper

Social media is FUN. You get to make new friends. And pass along really interesting information. You get to ask others to help you change the world and support your cause. You meet all sorts of wonderful, generous people. But what are you really doing? You are creating gathering places, living rooms for discussion, kitchens for cooking up ideas, in order to develop real stakeholders. Social media is, after all, an engagement strategy. You want to create online ties that engage, create relationships, and move people to act on behalf of a cause, company, or organization. After you spend all that time creating those relationships, you have to commit to maintaining them.

What happens when you can’t be there all the time that your stakeholders want to drop by? Or if you decide it’s just too much work to cook meals regularly for all of those guests? Maybe your organization realizes that it’s hard to maintain all those relationships, and just as difficult to post regular content.

This post is a look at the back side of starting a social media presence: the obligations of maintaining it.

It takes three to six months of work to build up an organization’s social media presence. I think it takes a minimum of three months to start seeing a return on that engagement. Don’t start if you can’t commit to maintenance. Select your platforms carefully – what do you have time to maintain, and which platforms will take more time and resources than your organization has currently? The hard truth is that you have to commit to keeping that virtual kitchen stocked with food, and the virtual living room accessible. That means keeping the blog fresh with new content, communicating regularly, creating real relationships on social networks, and offering information and conversation topics on platforms regularly.

If your company’s social sites are not tended to with care, then your organization is actually risking its online and offline credibility.

Here are some quick thoughts on the repercussions of not tending to your online presence:

1. People stop caring.

In the hyper-paced world of social media, your followers and fans quickly lose interest and forget you. Here’s the test: the last time you or your company took a break from creating regular online content (conversations, news, articles, etc), how many people asked you where you were?  There are a lot of organizations vying for time and attention online. Tend to those relationships regularly and cultivate lasting ones. The real test is creating relationships where someone writes to ask: “How are you? Haven’t seen you posting much lately.”

2. People stop spreading your news.

Viralness is a key factor in social media. If you aren’t maintaining connections, people are less likely to pass along your content. Relationships strengthens the desire to “do good” for others, whether that’s passing along content, recommending your site, or suggesting someone become of fan of your Facebook Page.

3. You lose friendship credibility.

If you’re not there for them now, will you be there later? If you post content randomly, or only sporadically engage online, how can they count on you? If you are a regular news source for information in your field, you need to continue to do that.  What if you posted content regularly, gathered a following, then stopped? When your organization decides to resume, it’s lost its credibility for being dependable, and for maintaining the site. It may very well have lost viewers it cannot ever regain.

It’s tempting to think that “no one will notice” if you are not maintaining your homes regularly, but someone always drives by. It’s also tempting to think “it’s all right if we don’t put up any new content for a month.” But someone cares, and misses it. That fan who would’ve done anything for your cause is a lot less likely to do that when they don’t know why you went away for a while…or when you are coming back.

There is a marketing credo that it is much cheaper to keep a regular customer happy than find new customers. No matter what type of organization you are, it’s easier to keep your existing following than to build a new one.

What do you think? Is your organization struggling with this very issue? How are you addressing the issues of time/maintenance/engagement?