Socially InvolvedHow Traditional Organizations can use Social Media to Increase Support, Drive Engagement and Raise Awareness

October 2009

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The social media landscape has become cluttered with tools, social media experts (who can be described as “tools” too), and pundits. The most common feedback received is that this landscape is overwhelming for most businesses — how do you find direction among all the clutter?

Socially Involved provides step-by-step guidance to those organizations who already understand the value of social media as a means to build engagement and awareness, but are looking for the tactical next steps of implementation.

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Why Use Social Media?

Good execution of a social media plan requires time and resources to manage; however, most social media tools can be implemented at a relatively low cost, and you don’t have to be a programmer to use them.

Your funders, your donors, your volunteers, your members and even some of your employees are already using these tools and they expect that you will be using them, too.

An online presence is timeless. If you only market through local resources (schools, churches, etc.), you are limiting your support opportunities to specific events associated with those organizations.

Social media is a great tool for affinity marketing — establishing connections with “influencers” so that you can use them for viral and word-of-mouth marketing.

The rise of online social tools is making a person’s physical location ever more irrelevant. Volunteers can contribute their time in two-minute increments on their mobile phones. Your neighbor isn’t just the person living or working on your street or in your town — it’s the person or group whose ideas and activities relate to yours (and your audiences’s) online.

85% of social media users believe that a company should go further than just having a presence on social sites and should also interact with its customers.

Define Your ObjectivesRaise awareness: tell people what your organization is about, what it does, and why it is important.

Build Connections: reach a broad audience to help raise awareness to quickly achieve your mission.

Be more Accessible: allow your fans to find you where they are and at their convenience.

Gather Information: listen to what people say about your organization.

Collaborate: engage in conversation with other nonprofits, share experiences and give each other valuable advice.

Generate Support: request donations and gain community support, keeping in mind you won’t raise lots of money through social media tools alone, it’s still about building relationships!

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Creating a Social Footprint

As Social Network users begin to amass more connections on social networking sites, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate friends and family from acquaintances, commercial interests and professional contacts. You need to Participate and create your own Social Footprint to understand the dynamics of how these relationships influence each other.

What is a social footprint? With every social network in which you establish yourself, you are also establishing your social footprint – think “six degrees of separation.” All of the connections you make in each of the social networks you join all contribute to how your social footprint is constructed.

The “hub” of your social footprint is… YOU. All of your social networking activity should be centralized around your existing organization’s communication / marketing strategy – both offline and online. The social networks you join should be extensions of that strategy and always be in alignment with it.

Your social footprint can be as big or small as you deem necessary for your organization and should be a visualization of your organization’s goals and objectives. That is, you wouldn’t want to establish a social footprint in MySpace if you aren’t targeting that audience.

Understanding your social footprint is important because it gives insight to where your target audience is gathering and who are they connected to, and to understanding who your most influential contributors are within each network. This enables you to effectively build campaigns and communication plans based on WHO and WHERE you will want to target your messages, leveraging your key influencers to keep the conversation going and actively contributing.

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Sitting at the Social Media Table

Yes, it can be a little daunting. This is where knowing your objectives and who you’re targeting comes into play. Every social media trend report shows that specific demographics flock to different social networks. However, depending on your objectives, you might want to use a combination of two or more social networking tools.

Social networks get people of like interest to connect to each other and share information. You can liken how they are used to tables at social gatherings.

Conference Table

For many members of LinkedIn, it is a place to display a resume for employers, a way to market product and services to potential customers, serve as a networking tool connecting with people in similar areas or industry, and a portfolio outlining your experience and accomplishments. Conversations focus on business recommendations and advice, just as they would at a conference or luncheon table.

Stick to your area of expertise and provide unique, individual perspectives on the topic at hand. Post meaningful, respectful comments — in other words, no spam and no remarks that are off-topic or offensive. Always pause and think before posting. That said, reply to comments in a timely manner, when a response is appropriate. Respect proprietary information and content, and confidentiality. When disagreeing with others’ opinions, keep it appropriate and polite. Be respectiful of the professional nature of the LinkedIn network. Refrain from sending messages, announcements or updates that would be construed as solicitations.

Dinner Table

Facebook connects people that *already* know one another — past and present, conversations on Facebook follow similar rules as do those amongst friends and acquaintances around a family dinner table, or even at a reunion table.

Share who and what you are, showing that your virtual profile is the same as your offline personality or brand. Be authentic.

Post content that highlights your personal interests and your professional areas of expertise.

Stress building relationships. Offering contacts a decent glimpse into what makes you YOU can have business benefits. It strengthens relationships and helps establish connections. People like to do business with people they know.

Be friendly but polite — make your social presence an extension of your face-to-face communication.

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There are many factors that can help you decide between causes, pages and groups. However, use the following guidelines to make the best choice:

Causes

Causes allow Facebook users to become public supporters of a charity, recruit others and donate money. It tracks the top recruiters, donors and fundraisers for each charity, enables designation of a beneficiary (must be a �01(c)(�) that is registered with GuideStar) and sign petitions.

Pages

Facebook Pages can be thought of in much the same way as normal profiles on the site but are better for organizations, businesses, bands, movies, or celebrities who want to create a customized presence with which to interact with fans or customers over the longer term. Organizations can use Pages to leverage the real connections between friends on Facebook, empowering Fans to become brand advocates, raise awareness for your cause, and show support. Page posts appear in News Feed and have the flexibility of customizable tabs, giving Pages a stronger voice to reach their Fans. Pages can have applications as well.

Groups

Facebook Groups are set up for more personal interaction. Groups are great for organizing on a personal level and for smaller scale interaction around a cause. Groups have administrators that manage the group, approve applicants or invite others to join. Administrators can also appoint “officers” who are nominally in charge – however, being an officer doesn’t mean the person has the ability to administer the group. Because of these privacy settings, Facebook’s groups are analogous to clubs in the offline world. Administrators can invite members to join via Facebook mail and email, and public groups can be found via Facebook search.

Causes, Groups, Pages — Oh My!

•Can integrate Facebook applications

•Can create a friendly (vanity) URL ( > 1,000 Fans)

•Messages appear in the “Updates” section of fans’ Home page

•Provide for the same interaction similar to personal pages with mini-feeds, videos, links, and status updates

•Messages appear in the members’ Inboxes

•Can restrict access, so that individuals who want to join must request access, giving tighter control over membership.

•Can restrict access based on certain ages and locations.

•Directly connected to the people who administer them, meaning activities can reflect on you personally

••Can create and invite people to events

•Can designate a beneficiary

•Can setup transaction features for donations

•Is a Facebook Application

•••Allows Facebook users to become public supporters

•

Groups

•Indexed by external search engines such as Google

E-mail blasts restricted ( < than 5,000 members)

••Visible to all people, even those who are not members of Facebook

PagesCausesHigh Level Differences

•Can integrate Facebook applications

•Can create a friendly (vanity) URL ( > 1,000 Fans)

•Messages appear in the “Updates” section of fans’ Home page

•Provide for the same interaction similar to personal pages with mini-feeds, videos, links, and status updates

•Messages appear in the members’ Inboxes

•Can restrict access, so that individuals who want to join must request access, giving tighter control over membership.

•Can restrict access based on certain ages and locations.

•Directly connected to the people who administer them, meaning activities can reflect on you personally

••Can create and invite people to events

•Can designate a beneficiary

•Can setup transaction features for donations

•Is a Facebook Application

•••Allows Facebook users to become public supporters

•

Groups

•Indexed by external search engines such as Google

E-mail blasts restricted ( < than 5,000 members)

••Visible to all people, even those who are not members of Facebook

PagesCausesHigh Level Differences

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Account Management

ConnectTweet - If you have multiple Twitter accounts for your organization, applications such as ConnectTweet aggregate the separate accounts into one Twitter stream. (Best Buy’s Twelpforce uses this method.)

TwitterFriends - Allows you to analyze your Twitter habits to improve the efficiency and efficacy of your Twitter use. The tool also analyzes how socially relevant you or other people in your extended network are, helping you find new, influential Twitter users to follow and adapt your own tweet style.

SocialOomph - Formerly known as TweetLater, SocialOomph gives you the ability to schedule tweets, auto follow anyone that follows you (as well as unfollow), and send automated welcome (direct) messages to new followers.

Buddy Media — This “Twitter Management System” service helps brand advertisers keep track of trends and conversations taking place on the service, as well as click-through rates of links posted to it.

TweepML - With TweepML you can create and share public lists, or groups, of Twitter users. Others can then view your list and follow everyone on it with just one click.

Engagement and Demographics

Tweetmeme- tracks the most popular links on Twitter every � minutes by looking for new content and tracking who else is talking about it. It ranks the content based upon who and how much a particular item is being discussed. It also categorizes the content into blogs / videos / images and audio.

URL shorteners such as bit.ly, tinyurl.com and ow.ly enable click-through tracking on links contained with your Twitter updates.

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Twitter management applications such as HootSuite and Twitterfeed not only track click throughs, but also measure the popularity of your different links, provide insight to referring sites, and geographic demographic data.

Measuring Trends and Influence

Twist – Twist allows you to see trends in keywords or product names based on what people are saying in their Twitter streams. Type in keywords that you would like to see trends for and Twist will produce a graph showing the frequency of your keywords over 24 hours, 7 days or �0 days.

TweetEffect - TweetEffect matches your timeline with your gain/loss of followers along a timeline. By analyzing your last 200 tweets, TweetEffect highlights tweets that have resulted in you gaining or losing followers in five minutes post tweet. Note: your tweets are not the only factor in gaining or losing followers so take this with a grain of salt.

Twitalyzer- measures five fundamental aspects of a person’s or company’s use of Twitter: Influence — based on the number of followers you have, Signal-to-noise ratio - tweets containing hash tags, and URL’s and references to other profiles using the @ sign, Generosity - the number of times you retweet others, velocity - measured by the number of times you retweet others, and Clout - others retweeting your posts.

Twitter Grader - Twitter Grader measures the power, reach and authority of your Twitter account. This is calculated based on the number of followers you have, the power of your followers, how many updates you post, your follower/following ratio and engagement based on retweets. Note: The tool only checks people against others who have already been graded .

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Network and Distribute

Tag and Title Well. Tag and title your videos with relevant keywords—that’s how users will find your content as they navigate YouTube.

Embed. Broadcast your videos over the web by embedding them on your website and encouraging supporters to do the same on theirs.

Click “Subscribe”. Subscribe to the YouTube channels you’re interested in to stay up-to-date on their content; they may return the favor.

Engage and Interact. Draw attention to your work by interacting with both allies and adversaries through video responses, text comments, or joint projects.

Spread Your Message. Share links and the embed code on your Facebook page and web site. Use Twitter to spread the word quickly.

Measurement

Measurement is relative with YouTube, it depends on what your goals are.

Video viewcounts — the more people who watch your videos, the more people you are exposing to your cause and message.

Google Checkout — measure success through the number of donations you have received if you have embedded Google Checkout.

Referring Site — measure success of your YouTube channel by the number of people it is driving back to their own websites.

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UNEP and You (Twitter for Trees) Creating a Viral Marketing Campaign on Twitter

Methodology

UNEP planted one tree for every new Twitter follower of @UNEPandYou between May and June �, 200�, up to 100,00 trees.

As part of The Billion Tree Campaign, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) encourages people, communities, organizations, businesses, civil society and governments to enter their tree planting pledges. The campaign strongly advocates the planting of indigenous trees and trees that are appropriate to the local environment.

To promote engagement, UNEP pledged to plant one tree for every person who who followed @UNEPandYou on Twitter by World Environment Day on � June.

The Twitter effort seeks to raise awareness of the World Environment Day initiative by not only getting followers, but also rewarding them with an actionable result. With social networking platforms like Twitter, programs such as “UNEP and You” become important and effective ongoing campaigns for environmental activism.

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Results

10 ,�00 people followed the @UNEPandYou page by World Environment Day weekend

The Billion Tree Campaign has passed the four billion mark , in a crucial step towards its target of seven billion trees planted by the end of 200�

Links

Official site: http://www.unep.org/

Facebook Group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=�278112�46�

Facebook Cause: http://apps.facebook.com/causes/12011

YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/unepandyou

Twitter: @UNEPandYou

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Driving Youth Activism

Resources for Youth and Civic Engagement

From Inspiration to Participation: A Review of Perspectives on Youth Civic Engagement Summarizes these different perspectives while focusing on the importance of the common ground of each viewpoint. This report also presents information on the importance of civic engagement as well as the four approaches to fostering youth civic engagement.

Engaging Young People in Community Change Includes eight core principles to creating effective youth engagement strategies. These principles can be used by youth workers to lay the framework for youth action in their own organizations and communities. The report also describes how to make programs work for youth and other tips on promoting youth voice.

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Recruit online. Today’s youth is wired, to the extreme. Use online volunteer matching services such as Volunteer Match. Post opportunities on your own website but change them frequently so your pages look fresh and appealing. Respond immediately to inquiries.

Speak in a youthful way. Make your opportunities relevant to the interests and needs of young people. Young people like language that is quick, fun, and exciting. Emphasize involvement and how they can contribute.

Facilitate teamwork. Develop teams among your youth volunteers and train team leaders. Encourage group participation and let your volunteers learn from each other.

Encourage participation. Let young volunteers participate at every level. Listen and then act on their suggestions. They will not trust you if you invite engagement and then ignore their input.

Appreciate your youth volunteers. If you don’t truly appreciate the contributions of young volunteers, don’t even bother. Young people are shrewd detectors of bull and will demand honesty and behavior that matches your rhetoric. Walk the talk.

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Provide Educational Opportunities

Offer a variety of internships that can appeal to the particular interests of each student and meet the needs of the projects. Leverage your social networking sites to promote these internships and provide an online form or e-mail contact so teens can inquire about the internships.

Your intern could be the ideal person to implement and update your social networking profiles.

Make It a Family Event

Families are busier than ever. Many look for ways to work together as a group. Family volunteering is one way to do that and your organization can both help and benefit.

Busy baby boomer families are ideal prospects for these opportunities. Try setting up a family volunteer project and target baby boomers and their families. You might just strike gold for your organization and provide some quality together time for time-stretched families.

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L

Linkbait: A type of Web site marketing used to increase your Web site link popularity. Linkbait is actual content within a Web site or blog that is included by the author to encourage (or “bait”) other bloggers and webmasters into linking back to that content from their own page. The content is usually sensational in nature or, at the very least, interesting enough to catch other’s attention.

M

Mashup: The term mash-up refers to a new breed of Web-based applications created by hackers and programmers (typically on a volunteer basis) to mix at least two different services from disparate, and even competing, Web sites (also referred to as on-demand computing). A mash-up, for example, could overlay traffic data from one source on the Internet over maps from Yahoo, Microsoft, Google or any content provider.

Mashboard: Also called real-time dashboard, a mashboard is a Web 2.0 buzzword that is used to describe analytic mash-ups that allow businesses to create or add components that may analyze and present data, look up inventory, accept orders, and other tasks without ever having to access the system that carries out the transaction.

MicroBlogging: A form of blogging allowing users to compose brief text updates and publish them. These messages can be submitted and received by a variety of means and devices, including text messaging, instant messaging, email, mobile device, MP� or the web.

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Navigation: A menu of links or buttons allowing users to move from one web page to another within a site. Top navigation is what I use on this site. You will often see links as a footer on a site. That would be bottom nav or footer nav.

NetNewsWire: A free RSS news aggregator for the MAC New Media: The style, content and medium enabled by web 2.0 publishing and collaboration. Publishing mass media one way designed communications on the web is not new media. New Media is a style of communication characterized by collaboration and participation.

News Aggregator: A web-based tool or desktop application that collects syndicated content. NewsGator: An RSS company that provides us with FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, its own web-based feed reader and powers the feeds in Microsoft Outlook.

O

OpenID: A shared identity service that enables users of multiple OpenID-enabled Web sites to sign in under one single profile, or single user identity. It’s a free and open standard under which users are able to control the amount of personal information they provide on Web sites, and in particular social networking sites (SNS). To use OpenID across multiple sites, users must first choose an Open ID provider. Once you create an OpenID it stays with you, even if you choose at a later time to switch to a different OpenID provider.

Open profile: When referring to social networking sites (SNS), the term open profile describes a dynamic user profile that can be openly shared on (or exported to) other SNS where the user is a member.

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Permalink: Short for permanent link, a permalink is a direct link to a single entry on content on a blog. As a blog is updated with a new post, that specific post will get its own page with a URL that can be used rather than linking to the main URL of the blog. On many blogs the text “permalink” will appear below a blog post as a hyperlink that takes users to the post as its own page.

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About Elizabeth Lupfer

The Social Workplace was started by Elizabeth Lupfer as a means to provide insight, research and information on how to successfully integrate social media to drive engagement through community, collaboration, and productivity.

Elizabeth is a die-hard internet strategist with over 12 years of web experience that blends serious technical knowledge (that would make any geek blush) and business sense (that gives her the skills necessary to fake her way through communicating with key stakeholders at all levels). She also has an intensely ridiculous passion for the power of social media as a means to connect and engage audiences, both internally and externally.

As Chief Social Media Geek and Blogger for The Social Workplace, Elizabeth has authored social media strategies that successfully build engagement and interactivity with internal and external audiences for companies in the retail, technology and not-for-profit industries. Additionally, Elizabeth has helped companies generate ideas on using social media to build brand awareness, in particular, working with Moishe’s Moving with a YouTube campaign that creatively showed the lighter side of its brand.

During normal business hours, Elizabeth strives to create a best-in-class, self-service corporate intranet that brings employee transactions forward while also enabling ease of use and interactivity — simplifying and streamlining the customer experience overall while also meeting organizational and communication objectives. (In fact, that was taken from her resume ... verbatim.) This role gives her the opportunity to work with many, many talented professionals and access to resources across multiple lines of businesses, giving unique insight into the trials and tribulations of executing an employee portal strategy and standardizations across a corporate enterprise. Elizabeth is also an over-achieving member of the enterprise-wide Social Media Council for Verizon, representing the interests of Verizon Business and how social media can be integrated into internal and external communication channels to drive employee engagement and talent acquisition.

If you are developing a social media strategy for your organization, or are looking for methods to build engagement with your audience, feel free to contact Elizabeth ... she’d love to talk your ear off.

elizabeth@thesocialworkplace.comTwitter: @socialworkplace

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Socially Involved October 200�

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