Image courtesy of Paurian

This is the Case of the 4,000 Twitter Followers Who Don’t Care - and why 4,000 followers means nothing without engagement.

I recently took on a new client that wants to leverage its existing social media assets (Facebook Page/Fans, Twitter followers) to drive more visits to the website. This company has been building a social media presence for over a year, and is unhappy with the lack of website visits resulting from social media.

I was told that the Facebook Group was active with almost 500 fans, and that the Twitter account had over 4,000 followers.  I was also briefed that, though there was not a lot of online fan feedback, the Twitter account included some committed followers. The highest priority for the client was to figure out why social media was not driving more people to the website – and come up with a better strategy.

I took on this challenge, and want to share a few observations about why social media isn’t working for this client:

Case Observation #1:

The most important number isn’t the number of followers, it’s the number of engaged followers.

4,000 Twitter followers seems like a lot. But how many really care about your organization? How many are willing to act on its behalf?

I evaluated “the 4,000 followers” on Twitter and “almost 500 fans” of the Facebook Page. I used Twerpscan, Twittalyzer, Twazzup, and Tweetmeme to analyze the Twitter asset, and discovered:

• almost 400 of their Twitter followers were pure spammers
• no one cared what the client was tweeting, and…
  
• most of the retweets were from twitter profiles related to the company
• the company did not engage in conversation online, and rarely thanked retweeters
• there was absolutely no Twitter strategy
  

What I discovered was that, of the 4,000+ followers, only three were truly interested enough in what the organization was tweeting. Three.

Twitter utilizes the concept of social media karma: give and give and then others will give back. This company didn’t offer help, advice, support or anything else personal.  Obviously, Twitter did not drive people to the website – no one cared enough about the company to go there.

Of the 400+ Facebook fans, most didn’t care enough to “like” a Wall post. The ones that did comment or “like” a post were often friends of the CEO or employees. All the posted was to its Facebook Page was company stories or related news. Of the 400+ fans, only one was an (unrelated to the company) engaged fan! Facebook drove little traffic to the website, which again is not surprising.

Case Observation #2:

Be wary when the CEO or Executive Director isn’t using social media on behalf of the organization.

This CEO was absolutely unwilling to be personally involved in using social media for the company. This is indicative of a CEO that does not understand the basic principles of social media. It’s critical that everyone in the organization have some direct contact with social media. An Executive Director that isn’t directly responsible for some piece of the social media is missing important information by not connecting with stakeholders directly. Not every CEO has to be responsible, but he/she should be intimately involved with the social media activities, and understand the basic principles of social media.

This CEO was using social media to “drive numbers to the website,” which completely misunderstands the basic fundamentals of social media. They are:

Engage with people first, create relationships, then move them to act.

Case Observation #3:

Their social media sites offer no real value to fans and followers

The company hadn’t taken the time to figure out what people were interested in reading on their social sites. Since the organization was not actually creating individual relationships with its fans, then it had to offer compelling and relevant news and data.  However, it wasn’t giving followers information that mattered to the followers. Not surprisingly, no one wanted to visit the website to find out more.

Case Observation #4:

You need a strategy for each and every social media platform.

Their overall social media strategy consisted of posting news and information. This is an appropriate strategy for social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg, but not at all for social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Additionally, the company usually posted the same information on both Twitter and Facebook. Fans of both sites were not even receiving unique value or reward for following the company in two places.

It’s important to realize that no two communities are the same online. Each has its own rules, expectations, and needs. You need an engagement strategy for each one of these communities. The strategy should consider the qualities of each social media platform, the needs of followers, how to best engage, and what your organization can offer its followers in terms of both engagement and value.

It’s Elementary, My Dear Watson

Social media is a tool to help your company meet its goals. But it’s more than that: if you aren’t using these tools properly, then it doesn’t matter how many fans, followers, or linkedin connections you have. They won’t care enough to do anything for your organization or company.

This case illustrates that it’s not about the number of fans and followers. It’s about the engagement. Create a strategy that brings your organization engaged followers and real relationships.

4,000 followers means nothing without engagement. And it never will.

Nonprofit organizations need to raise funds constantly. Fact. They also have programs, mission and special activities that must be funded. Fact. There’s all this trendy talk about leveraging social media to raise money – and the question I get asked most often is

When does social media lead to more money?

That’s not the right question. The right question is:

When does engagement lead to more money?

Annual reports do not create a relationship. Email updates do not create a relationship. Alerts do not create a relationship. These are all examples of one-way communication. Relationships are about two-way communication.

I’ve also seen a lot of nonprofit organizations using social media fail to create relationships using these tools. Automatically feeding blog posts through a twitter feed does not create a relationship. Using your organization’s official icon and not associating a person’s name (in either the description or title) to the twitter account cuts short the possibility of a relationship. Publishing a blog but not commenting on other blogs or responding to comments on your blog…does not create a relationship. Consistent Facebook wall posts that do not engage or ask questions…stop conversation.

These methods of using social media are, quite honestly, no better than the old newsletter and annual report. If you are going to commit time and energy to social media, pick one or two platforms that make sense for your organization and act as if you want to meet people and learn from them. They want to talk to you, and you should want to listen to them. That’s why your fans and followers online are following your organization, after all. So talk. Yes, publish your newsy updates, but ask questions and listen…learn…engage…and respond.

Engagement leads to donations – really, it does – but you have to put the time into creating the relationship first. Or re-creating the relationship with your stakeholders. Social media is a great tool for doing this, as social media tools are merely platforms for creating conversation.

When you are listening, responding, and engaging –

then asking for money to support this great relationship is a natural extension of the conversation.

Really engaging with stakeholders is critical to creating stronger organizational relationships, but it is relatively difficult to really engage followers on Twitter. Having a conversation with followers is one of the easiest way of engaging, but it is hard to have a conversation with every one of your followers (especially if you have more than 100). Here are five ways that nonprofit organizations are creating spaces for real engagement on twitter.

1. Engage Followers with a Live Chat

Hebrew University joined Twitter a month ago and wanted to find a way to connect with their followers. Two days ago they held their first live twitter chat with Maya Sigal, a victim of the 2002 Hebrew University cafeteria bombing. The live chat coincided with an anniversary ceremony honoring the victims of the bombing to be held the following day.

According to Molly Livingstone of Hebrew University’s Public Relations and Development Department,  “we wanted to take the academic institution and make it a more personal place. We want to engage and have a community.  We decided that a live chat is a great way to reach out to people. We wanted our first live chat to be with Maya Sigal because the terrorist bombing was personal attack on the University itself.”  According to Livingstone, the live chat resulted in many new followers, and more direct messages to the University. Livingstone views direct messages from followers to mean that the University has created a  more intimate relationship with a follower.

2. Ask people to sign a petition

Several online platforms enable people to create and start petitions on Twitter. Act.ly and tiny petition are among the most popular of the platforms. Greenpeace USA has started a petition to get Trader Joe’s to adopt a sustainable seafood policy.

Here is a screen shot of the petition on act.ly:

3. Integrate Tweeting Into Your Organization’s Programs

The National Wildlife Foundation’s Wildlife Watch program is “a citizen monitoring program where the public reports animal, plants and natural phenomena sightings online to NWF.” These tweets help the scientists that study wildlife track animals around the US and monitor their activity and health.  The NWF asks people to send a tweet to @wildlife_watch with the hashtag #NWF whenever a person sees wildlife. According to Danielle Brigida, the program gets about six tweets a day. Now that’s engagement. Here is a sample of recent Wildlife Watch tweets:

4. Involve Followers in Program and Organizational Improvements

The Peery Foundation has invited its funded organizations, partners, and enthusiasts to participate in their strategic planning process on Twitter. Anyone can tweet ideas, at any time, or participate in a Twitter dialogue about the Foundation’s future using the hashtag #PFWhiteboard.  Here is a screen shot of tweets from a recent online strategic planning session of the Peery Foundation, run by @davepeery and @jessamynlau:

For more examples of philanthropies that crowdsource, check out this article from Modern Giving.

5. Find and Interact with Volunteers

ActionAid Australia is seeking volunteer bloggers to travel to a remote area of an ActionAid country and train locals to use social media (blogging, Twitter) to end poverty. Better yet, they’ve set up a challenge, the Toto Challenge (The Overseas Training Operation) and tweeted the heck out of it. They’ve asked people to nominate bloggers via Twitter, they’ve asked the nominated bloggers to interact with them on Twitter, they’ve asked people to vote, and they keep asking. They have taken this idea from the blog to twitter and back. It’s a great concept of how to promote your program on Twitter, and also use Twitter for engaging people in the program. Here is the list of volunteer bloggers that have been nominated to take the challenge.  Action Aid Australia has used the challenge to find and interact with volunteers on Twitter, as shown here:

These are but five ways that organizations have used Twitter to meaningfully connect with followers. Twitter offers so many possibilties for conversations and engagement. How has your organization used it for real engagement?

There is so much more to photosharing than uploading images from the latest event!

Yes, everyone likes to see themselves online, but Flickr is so much more than uploading images from the latest event. Flickr combines the power of visual storytelling with the very nature of a social network – engagement and conversation. Three arts organizations (Houston Ballet, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and Luce Foundation Center for American Art) are innovating ways to use Flickr creatively, and in the process offering backstage passes to the organization, amplifying programming, and engaging stakeholders in real decision-making.

1. The Houston Ballet: Giving Fans a “Backstage Pass”

The Houston Ballet uses Flickr to offer a “backstage pass“  to all of its fans.  In particular, the ballet company offers its enthusiasts (and all Flickr browsers) visual insights into the organization’s activities and administration.

One of the more fanciful and wonderful Flickr photostreams comes from the Houston Ballet’s “Tour of Houston Ballet’s Warehouse.” What person doesn’t want to walk through the warehouse of the a famous production company?  Here is one of the photos:

This boat hangs from the ceiling of the Houston Ballet's warehouse

As described on the Houston Ballet’s Flickr Photostream, “this is a photo tour of our warehouse in Houston’s 5th ward. We hope you enjoy this behind-the-scenes look at our productions’ ‘home away from home’ when they’re not in use at Wortham Theater Center.”

The Ballet also has another great “behind the scenes” photo shoot – making head casts for a scene in one of their ballet. Here is a screen shot of the Flickr photostream for the “Marie” head casts:

What does this do? It offers Houston Ballet fans added value for subscribing to the Ballet’s photostream. It makes them feel special, too. How often does one get to look into the closet of a major ballet theater, or learn how they put their sets together? The Ballet has made their photostream an unique web destination for exclusive “backstage” information.

2. MassMOCA: Adding Dimensions to Current Programming

The Mass Museum of Contemporary Art (MassMOCA) uses Flickr to crowdsource a set of images for the Flickr Finds section of its blog. MassMOCA asks readers to upload photos of a specific topical nature to the MassMOCA Flickr site. They post a roundup of the best photos on their monthly Flickr Finds blog post. The photos usually relate to one of the concurrent exhibits. It’s a great way to create excitement around a current exhibit or an organization.

Here is a screenshot of a Flickr MassMOCA group message:

The blog post Flickr Finds: Tree Logic features selected photos from uploaded Flickr images of the “upside down trees” outdoor sculpture exhibit. Here is an excerpt from the blog post:

What does this do? It adds another dimension to exhibitions and creates enthusiasm on the Flickr and blogging platforms. It also extends the life of exhibitions and creatively engages fans. Lastly, it offers added publicity for MassMOCA: every photo uploaded to the MassMOCA Flickr group also appears on the photographer’s photostream and is indexed and tagged on Flickr as MassMOCA!

3. The Luce Foundation Center for American Art: Using Flickr for Crowdsourcing Decisions

The Luce Foundation Center for American Art is “an open study/storage facility displaying about thirty-three hundred objects from the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Here, our visitors can see works that would otherwise not be on view due to space restraints in our main galleries.” The Luce Foundation Center occupies 20,400 square feet of the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum’s collection.  According to the Smithsonian’s blog Eye Level, the Smithsonian American Art Museum lends work out, often for 12 months to other institutions, leaving gaps in the display units. They write:  “for this reason, we decided to open up this process and ask our online communities for help. Using Flickr, we can share a photo of a case (in the Luce Foundation Center) that needs a replacement artwork, provide information about all of the other works in the case, and challenge people to search our collections in order to find an appropriate substitution.

What a wonderful way to engage stakeholders in the decision-making process and offer them a “backstage pass” to the  art collection!

Here is an example of one of their photos from the Fickr photostream for Fill the Gap campaign:

Case 34B from Fill the Gap photostream

This is a screen shot of a part of the the comment stream related to this particular case (Case 34B):

In the end, a piece was selected by the Foundation from among the ideas submitted for Case 34B:

Case 34B - Gap Filled!

What does this do? It creates an interaction between static works of art and the fans who love the art. It makes everyone a “citizen curator,” and a stakeholder in the outcome of the Fill the Gap replacement selection. It creates enthusiasm and publicity for the collection of art. Most importantly, it utilizes the crowdsourcing aspect of social media to engage fans, create deeper connections between them and the organization, and…select art for exhibition.

Think about using Flickr to offer “backstage passes,” crowdsource ideas, extend the life of your programming, or engage stakeholders in real organizational decisions. What are you waiting for?

Does your organization use Flickr creatively? Do you know of one that does? Let us know by referencing the organization (and Flickr site) in the comment section below!

The slides embedded above stem from a presentation that I made this morning to a group of professional businessmen and women in Efrat, Israel. They wanted to know: how can I extend my network through social media? After I left the meeting, I began to think – why isn’t the CEO and Executive Director of every corporation personally engaging actively on at least one social media platform or network? Isn’t this the obvious way to extend the reach of the company? Social media is all about the personal connection – and all stakeholders crave that personal connection and engagement (and direct access!) with company decision-makers.

If you are the Executive Director of a nonprofit organization, or the CEO of a business, you shoud extend the reach of your company just by participating in social networks.  Think about Microsoft and Bill Gates, Virgin and Richard Branson, or Donald Trump and Trump Enterprises. These men built their businesses strategically, and leveraged their personal brands as well. Richard Branson knows that he represents his many Virgin holdings (record company, airline, etc) whenever he blogs, and he wants to extend himself online in order to further promote his business interests.
Your organization is no different. Your CEO, your Executive Director, is the face of the organization publicly. He or she represents your company at public events, on memos and letters, and on the streets of your town. The question is – why limit  your CEO’s presence just to the streets of your town?

• Businesses and organizations are no longer local
• Opportunities are no longer local
• Customers, stakeholders, donors are no longer local

Neither should your CEO be local. He or she should be actively engaging on social networks:  meeting potential collaborators, stakeholders, enthusiasts, donors, customers and connectors.

If your company or organization has a standard company profile on social networks such as Facebook (page) or Linkedin (company profile) or Twitter (company identity that tweets) or any of the many other social networks, that’s great. But now – ask yourself – shouldn’t the CEO or the Executive Director also be on those sites personally connecting and extending the company’s brand?

The answer is YES.

YES figure out who the company wants to reach.

YES the CEO should be active on at least two social networks

YES the CEO should consider blogging to create depth for the company’s brand.

If your CEO or Executive Director doesn’t know how to get started, I’ve created a very basic Powerpoint presentation at the top of this post for beginners.

When the CEO begins to actively engage with his/her stakeholders online, exciting and magical things happen: your stakeholders find and connect with you, they tell others, and the organization’s brand awareness grows. Not the least of all – the CEO connects directly to the people that care the most about the company. That’s priceless for customer relations and information-gathering.

Beth Kanter, social media strategist and thinker, has also recently written a blog post about nonprofit CEOs who tweet on Twitter. The list is growing as people add their names in the comments section. It’s an informative post about the specific benefits a CEO will gain from actively using Twitter, and reiterates several points made here.

If you’re just getting started, or your CEO hasn’t yet decided to start “friending” “tweeting” and “linking” – the slide show offers a few very simple tips and introductions to social networking for business and branding.

image by roadsidepictures

There is no such thing as a local business anymore. Nor a local organization.

Consider the local mini mart, the most local of all types of stores. In general, people won’t walk more than 10 minutes or 1/2 mile to their local food mart. Why does the mini mart owner need to interact with his customers via social media? If people want something, they’ll just go there. It’s a fair question, easily answered by another:

What is Local?

I respond: Local is a Mindset. So is Social.

Local is You Talking. Social is Engagement and Conversation.

The local mini mart owner/manager is thinking old-school: bricks and mortar, customers searching for twinkies, chips and coffee, and lottery players seeking millions.Re-think your mindset out of Local and into Social about the same customer.

This time, the customer is sitting at home, wishing she had a pint of mint chocolate chip ice cream. Does the local mini mart have it? Send an email or a Tweet. Can she swing by in her car, illegally park on the sidewalk (hey, they do it all the time in my neighborhood) and get out in 2 minutes? You betcha – IF – she could submit her order via Twitter with an approximate purchase time, and could be sure it would be ready when she arrives. What if she told her friends via Facebook that she was heading down to the local mini-mart for ice cream? She could take orders from them if they were also coming over to her house later. The Facebook update is free publicity for the online or email ordering feature at the local market. That is Social. Not Local.

A great example of a local shop using a Social mindset is Houston’s CoffeeGroundz, which created a Twitter account (@coffeegroundz) and unexpectedly realized that they could do a brisk business with Twitter takeout orders. You can read the whole story, in detail on Pistachio Consulting’s blog, here. CoffeeGroundz is a great example of Social, not Local.

Consider the PTO, the local Parent-Teacher Organization of the local elementary school, the most local of local organizations.  A tired parent receives a note about his child, or an email from his child’s school, about the meeting. He goes. The typical meeting consists of parents talking about why the school isn’t doing something or that it should do something better. The PTO wants new ideas, wants to use them, and hopes to involve parents in school improvements. Maybe you attended, maybe not. Either way, you get an email update about what happened. Are you engaged? Are you ready to act? Nope, you’re happy eating mint chocolate chip ice cream and can’t be bothered. The PTO is too Local.

Now consider the Social PTO. The Social PTO is all about making it easier for  you to engage, act and motivate others to create real changes in the school.

You receive the next PTO meeting invitation via one or more of these methods:  email, a group text message on your mobile phone, a Facebook Event invitation, and/or a listing on the PTO’s chat group (such as a Yahoo or Google group). You are asked to contribute ideas to the agenda ahead of time via an online site. You are asked to invite others to the meeting through the Facebook share application, and you proudly display the meeting as a Facebook Event on your profile.  If you can’t go, you can follow the meeting either via live web video, updates on the group site, a #hashtag on Twitter, or real time Facebook group updates. You are able to text your questions to the the vice-chair during the meeting with an assurance that they will be addressed. The meetings are more efficient with the use of pre-sent questions and agenda submissions. The PTO has created easy, potentially viral methods to further engage and recruit people and their ideas. You are engaged and ready to act. The PTO is Social, not Local.

Next time you are about to go to your neighborhood meeting, send a Tweet on Twitter asking if anyone wants anything from the local mini mart. I’ll take some mint choco chip ice cream, please.

It’s all Social now.

image by FelipeArte

I recently wrote about methods for measuring “Blog Conversations” on your blog.  Blog conversations are the dialogue between an author and his/her readers, or between readers themselves on a blog. For any organization, direct conversations with stakeholders reading a blog have important benefits across all sectors: programming, efficiency, fundraising, program delivery, volunteer activity, organizing, and management.

For the non-profit organizational blog, engaging stakeholders is the goal.  Your organization is not just its name, but a real company with real people who engage in the blogosphere, and want to be involved in every part of the organization. Give them that opportunity.

Here are some of the types of blog posts that could increase the level of blog conversation on your non-profit blog. These are just a the starting point; I’d love to hear about other ideas that could increase the level of “blog conversation!”

• Use the blogging platform to crowdsource new ideas. Float ideas and listen to how they are received. Use the reader feedback to tweak your ideas for new programming, organizational change, program delivery, organizing campaigns, and almost any other organizational decision where involving stakeholders means that your decisions will be better received.
• Involving donors in the blog conversation brings in the money.  Why not ask your donors why they donate and what would make them want to donate more in a blog post? You will certainly bring them into conversation on the blog, and guess what…people they know might read it as well.
• Ask small and big donors to guest post about why they donate. Ask them to ask their friends to read it.
• Review activities and ask for feedback. Did your organization just hold an annual meeting? Did participants just complete a big training program? Did you hold a clean-up day in the neighborhood? Have you just completed a large fundraising campaign? How was that last speaker series received? Any type of initiative that your organization has completed should elicit feedback. Send the blog link to the participants and ask for their feedback. One upside is stakeholder involvement: their opinions are valued by your organization and they are more likely to continue their involvement. The second upside is that you can respond to the concerns of your stakeholders. The last is obvious: feedback improves activities!
• Use the blog as a call to action. Once you’ve got an active and involved readership, you can ask them to act. Ask for a needed donation and blog about whether or not the post readers moved to donate.  For this strategy to work, though, your organization needs both people who read the blog and people who actively comment on the blog.  Many organizations post calls to action. But are the readers involved enough to move from their chair, pick up the phone, and call? Or look at another website? Creating posts that involve readers will lead to an increasingly involved membership overall…who will act when called upon. Blog conversations bring in new volunteers. They demonstrate that your organization is active, committed, and open. Volunteers want to participate, be recognized and become involved in an organization that includes their voices.

Non-profits need to change the relatively static, or “passive” non-profit blog into an active, participatory medium. I have seen too many blogs where the organization just posts its activities and nothing else. If that is the case, why not save time and effort and just send out an e-mail update?

What is the best measurement for a successful blog? Is it number of unique visitors, returning visitors, page views, incoming links, or Technorati ranking? Do any one of these typical measurement tools by themselves tells us what we need to know: who is engaged? Non-profit organizations want to engage stakeholders through social media and ideally move them to act on their behalf. We know that, without engagement, people are not moved to act.

Blogs are a particularly challenging platform for creating engagement. It’s easy to passively read a blog. How do you know if you’ve engaged?

Three metrics for measuring “blog conversation” are: number of unique engaged readers, average number of engaged readers per blog post, and number of posts that engaged readers in blog conversations.

1. What is an unique “engaged reader” and how should we count them? A blog reader that has commented at least once on your blog is engaged. When you count your “unique engaged readers” on your blog,  you can measure of the breadth of your engaged base. What does that mean for your organization?

• The engaged reader cares enough about the topic to participate. This defines the commenter as  a “critic” in the Forrester Social Technographics paradigm.  He/she also cares enough about your organization to participate and add to the blog post.  *This is a potential volunteer, donor, activist or ally.*
• The number of engaged readers adds weight to your organization’s credibility. You can call upon these readers to mobilize for a cause, or utilize this statistic for fundraising purposes.

2. Why measure “average number of engaged readers per post?” This tells you, in general, if your blog posts are engaging your stakeholders. Avinash Kaushik developed what he calls the “conversation rate” in his thoughtful piece on blog measurement statistics here. (Beth Kanter built upon Kaushik’s four blog metrics and wrote about this paradigm using her own blog measurements here.)

It is simply # reader comments that are not the author’s/ # posts. Discount pingbacks if they appear in the comments section. For example, I have a total of 23 comments that are not mine, divided by 25 posts.  This is an average engaged reader of less than one per post. Not a great statistic, but I’m just getting started.  My goal is three by the end of June, and I’ll let you know if I make it.

Why should non-profits care about this statistic?

• It gives you a sense of whether or not you are engaging your stakeholders enough for them to put down what they are doing and comment.
• It tells you whether or not your posts are generating interest in a conversation, which is really your goal. By involving your stakeholders, they are also contributing actively to the success of your organization.
• *The higher this statistic, the more likely that you will be able to mobilize your readers to donate or act on your group’s behalf.*

3. Number of blog posts that engaged readers in “blog conversations.” Not every post will engage readers. It is a good idea to step back every quarter and look at the number of posts that engendered real conversations — where a back and forth discussion occurred between your organization and its readers.  How can we measure this?  I suggest initial segmentation by: total # of posts/ total # posts with more than one comment.  You can further segment by: total # of posts/ total # posts with more than X number of comments.

Why should you care about engaging in blog conversations?

• Your goal should be a conversation that moves the post to another level and gives the commenter a real sense of contributing to the organization’s thinking and success. More than one comment per post leads to real conversations.
• *Programming starts with conversation.* If you are considering new programs, evaluating old ones or looking for any type of organizational feedback, you need to know that you people will give it to you. The higher number that this statistic is, the better feedback you will get on any conversation you want to initiate. You have created engaged blog stakeholders who are eager and interested in commenting and conversing with you.

To sum up: Use these metrics to understand the depth and breadth of the stakeholders visiting your blog. Utilize this information to raise funds, mobilize.  mine your stakeholders for valuable feedback and ideas, and understand their needs.

I’ve tried to come up with some easy-to-use metrics for a non-profit to measure blog conversations and engagement.However, I’m not a professional statistician or analyst.  If you have other additions or suggestions, please feel free to tell me and I’ll add them!

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photo courtesy of fooferkitten, Flickr

The kitchen is the social hub of the home, and the epicenter of important family decisions. When I was a community organizer, I would knock on doors and ask people if they had a minute to talk. I knew I caught their interest when they invited me into their kitchen. If they offered me something to drink, I was even happier, because that meant that they had time for a real discussion. My goals, in order, were to get invited in, get into the kitchen, get a cup of coffee, get them to engage meaningfully, get them to join the organization. Once I was in the kitchen, usually everything else followed.

The questions I’ve been asking myself lately is:

Where is the virtual kitchen? Where do online stakeholders hang out socially?

Time, I believe, is the key metric to use when seeking the “kitchen.”  Social networks, I believe are the kitchens: they are the social hub of the internet, and  where people get information they trust to make important decisions. Therefore, I think of the metric thus: time spent on social networks overlaid with demographic information about each network.

The chart below, compiled by Hitwise, offers fairly recent information on US trend. A good comparison to this would be the slide show offered here, using ComScore statistics, that analyzes time spent on the top ten social networks from July 2006 to July 2007.

If I were developing a communications strategy, I would cross-reference my target populations’ demographics with analysis of time spent on social networking sites.

For example, if my organization were running a youth group, we would be interested in MySpace, YouTube, PhotoBucket, and Facebook. However, if we were interested in asking Baby Boomers to advocate for legislation, then we would most likely connect with them through a friend-finding site like Classmates.com or a professional network like LinkedIn. This chart compiled by Rapleaf is a great resource for identifying the age and gender of social network users.

When you want to find your stakeholders, and really engage, you want to be in their kitchen, the virtual portal where they spend the most time. You want to be in the place where they are spending their time socially online, sipping their cups of coffee. Hopefully, this post helps your organization find your stakeholders’ kitchens. Enjoy the coffee!

Enjoy the Coffee! (photo by Jones G Gallery)

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If you are not already engaging in meaningful, regular two-way communication now, before you institute web 2.0 tools, then your stakeholders probably won’t be quick to use your web 2.0 applications. Why?

I remember the building that I tried to organize into a tenant union that just wouldn’t organize.  Only one or two tenants would ever show up for organizing meetings, and even then, they defended the lousy landlord to me saying that he “would never sell us out.” (But oh, how he did!)

Why didn’t they care? Why didn’t they even want to listen? Because my organization, the “outside agitator” showed up in without any prior relationship and asked for a relationship. Why should they trust us? Had we seeded the ground for this organizing drive with informal conversations with leaders, hosted “house parties” to start the conversation about the landlord, or shown respect for their opinions and incorporated those into our organizing drive? No. Absolutely not. I went in, as the organizer, and told them that the landlord was planning to take advantage of a legal loophole to raise their stabilized rents and threaten their stability.  I made all the wrong moves, and it was no wonder that the tenants roundly refused to listen to me or even give me the time of day.

It’s not, as repeated in the movie Field of Dreams, “if you build it, they will come.” Rather, “if you engage already, then they will come (online).”

What do I mean?

You must be currently engaged with your stakeholders before implementing any web 2.o engagement strategy, or your social media strategy will fall short of expectations. Your stakeholders will only participate if they feel listened to, respected, and considered important. And they will feel this way if you create (or have) a communication strategy that currently fosters these feelings. If you’re not sure, here’s a communication checklist:

Questions to Ask Before You Implement Social Media

Thinking about it another way, how do you engage dynamically with your stakeholders and incorporate their ideas into your organizational development. If you don’t, create a chart (or list) of the ways in which you can begin to move your stakeholders from passive supporters to eager enthusiasts that can become your online Joiners, Critics, Collectors or Spectators. Once you implement a social media strategy, you want your stakeholders to participate, “evangelize” about your organization, and fully engage with your organization and others about your organization online. Remember my last post that profiles who is online?  The way you can motivate your stakeholders to become part of the small percentage of Joiners Collectors, Critics and Spectators is by creating a real relationship with them prior to implementing your social media strategy. When you do implement it, you’ll offer them a natural transition and outlet for continuing your conversations with web 2.0 applications.

Here’s a sample chart I’ve created to  jump start your efforts developing a dynamic communication strategy:

Beginning the Conversation with Your Stakeholders

Don’t expect them to show up at the organizing meeting when they haven’t been asked what they think. Take the time to build a real, two-way communication strategy before you begin to use web 2.0 applications. Once you’ve created that communication in your offline or web 1.0 world, then you can easily continue the conversation online, in your organization’s web 2.0 world.

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