~ Presentation notes and links ~

SOCIALNOMICS VIDEO

http://www.socialnomics.com

Social media is a word of mouth engine. But how do you make it work?

1) You have to find people who care about what you care about.
2) You have to build relationships with those people
3) Through those relationships, you build community around your cause and you can then turn on that word of mouth engine.

1. LISTENING

It all starts with listening. Listening is how you find people on the social web who care about what you care about.

Beth Kanter, How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

“Listening is knowing what is being said online about your organization, field or issue area. Listening uses monitoring and tracking tools to identify conversations that are taking place on the social web. It is a prelude to engaging with your audience. At its very basic, listening is simply naturalistic research, although more like a focus group or observation than a survey.

Listening is not simply scanning a river of noise. The process involves sifting through online conversations, from social networks to blogs — many voices talking in many places. The value of listening comes from making sense of the data and using it to inform your social media strategy.”

What are your listening goals? The Red Cross has the following as their listening goals:

• Correct misinformation
• Be informed about public opinion
• Track conversation trends
• Identify influencers
• Build relationships.

KEYWORDS – narrow down to 5-6 to start with. Be as specific as possible.

• organization name
• organization url
• execs/personalities/key people
• other similar or competing orgs
• programs/products you sell
• industry terms
• Special events you’re running
• Causes you support
• Campaigns you’re managing

As you start doing searches in Google based on the keywords you just wrote down, look out for Talkers.

These are the people who are talking about those things you care about; and perhaps they are people worth following on Twitter, or worth subscribing to their blogs, and worth building relationships with so that over time they will help you spread the word about the good things you are trying to accomplish.

Start with what we all know – Google. Test some of the keywords you’ve just come up with right in Google. Check out the search “options”. Be creative with it. Click on links and results and see where they take you.

Email alerts

When you are starting out with listening, we recommend setting up email alerts first. Here are four free tools for this purpose.

Remember your main goal at first is to FILTER your search results so that you are finding the most relevant conversations and the most relevant talkers.

Google alerts – searches blogs/news/video/images
http://www.google.com/alerts

Tweetbeep – searches Twitter
http://tweetbeep.com
Bonus link: While we’re talking about Twitter, here is a great resource by Frank Barry called 13 Twitter Search Examples for Nonprofits – this might be good for getting you started.

Backtype – searches blog comments
http://www.backtype.com/

Social Mention – searches lots of social sites
http://socialmention.com/

If you’re just starting with this, we suggest setting up alerts to your email and having everything go to a specific folder while you’re getting used to filtering with the right keywords.

Once you’re a bit more comfortable with this, you can set up all of these same searches to go into an RSS reader.

VIDEO – RSS IN PLAIN ENGLISH – http://www.commoncraft.com

Google Reader – http://www.google.com/reader

Every tool we mentioned earlier for getting alerts to EMAIL can also be set up so you get your alerts by RSS subscription into Google Reader.

Proactive listening in outposts like Facebook

Everything we’re talking about so far is for listening to public social sites, what we call outposts, namely blogs and Twitter.

• Some outposts are not yet searchable by Google though (or it changes all the time), and in those cases you’ll need to proactively go and search sites like Facebook or LinkedIn.
• Use these same keyword searches to find groups or pages, for example. [http://www.facebook.com/search/?init=quick&q=williamsburg]
• It’s important to note that in order to join any groups, you as an individual need to be the one joining and connecting with other individuals. This is where building relationships comes in.

So we’ve spent a fair amount of time on the listening part, because it’s really the most important thing you can do to get started. If there is one thing you do when you get home or back to the office, it’s to set up your Google alerts for the keywords that make the most sense to you.

Bonus link: Set up your listening dashboard in 30 minutes or less

2 – BUILD RELATIONSHIPS

So now what? Based on the alerts that you’re now receiving, you’ll be able to see where it makes sense for you to concentrate your efforts. So now you want to start responding, and building your own presence in those sites that you have identified as being the most important.

We think there are three simple ways to start building relationships:

- be yourself
- tell your stories
- find social objects [definition: Hugh MacLeod ]

There is a huge community of nonprofits on the social web, so there are a ton of examples you can look at.

Blogs

Alltop is a “magazine rack” site, basically an aggregator of blogs, and they have a great directory for nonprofit blogs. Go to http://nonprofit.alltop.com/

Twitter

Twitter account that follows nonprofits – http://twitter.com/nonprofitorgs
26 Charities and Nonprofits on Twitter – http://mashable.com/2009/03/19/twitter-nonprofits/
20 of the top nonprofits on Twitter – http://www.razoo.com/articles/Nonprofits-on-Twitter

Facebook

NonProfit Orgs (Page aggregating lots of nonprofits on Facebook)

Youtube

Nonprofit channel – http://www.youtube.com/nonprofits

3 – BUILD COMMUNITY/Q&A

This part is over to you. Once you know your goals and what you want to accomplish and you’ve figured out where you should concentrate your social media efforts, based on where people are talking about the things that are relevant to you, and you’ve established your own presence there, you can start to build community by providing value. By being part of the conversation.

• Community is not built (engineering), it is cultivated (gardening)
• Your organization is not necessarily at the center of the community (and that’s okay)
• All community happens in small groups
• Relationships are as important as content

Good luck – go forth and be social!