Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

Trick or Tweet? Some Halloween Social Media Fun for A Good Cause

I was taking a trip down memory lane through my flickr stream and a search on the word "Halloween" and realized that 30 years ago today I had my first date with my husband! 

I also found this photo from 1964.  When I was kid, our folks let us collect candy, but I also remember those orange boxes and collecting money for Unicef.

So, here's the social media version of collecting money for charity on Halloween from FutureNow.

There are 2 goals for Trick or Tweet:

1. Connect lots of interesting people with other interesting people they didn’t know before.

2. Do some good with our Tricks (there is enough tricky things going on in our worlds).

Here are the rules:

1. Send a Tweet to someone and ask Trick or Tweet.

2. If they say Tweet then you must provide them with a couple of interesting people they should follow (these people should have less than 1000 followers currently). At the end of your tweet add #TrickorTweet. If you don’t provide them with someone new, then you owe a Trick.

3. If they say Trick then send them a link to this page { http://tinyurl.com/trick-o-tweet } where they will have to contribute using the Chipin widget below to charity. The maximum we ask anyone to donate is $20 for the day. Every cent we collect will be sent to charity. We’ll split the proceeds among three charities; Reading is Fundamental, The Center for Autism and the charity that is mentioned the most in the comments below from your suggestions. UPDATE: Chris and I will give our donations to our respective preferred charities, the money collected will go to the top 3 companies voted for in the comments below.

Let’s have fun, connect people and do good. Have a happy and safe Halloween.

And, hope you'll consider mentioning my favorite charity in the comments - The Sharing Foundation - helps Cambodian children.  Go leave a comment now!

And here's another social media halloween campaign to help kids with Cancer.

Prioritizing Your Web Marketing Budget - What Slice of the Pie Should Social Media Get?

Geoff Livingston live blogged the Network Solutions Solutions Stars Video Conference -- by a team of Internet marketing and social media rock stars.  The advice is geared for small businesses, not nonprofits, but a lot of it relevant and translatable.   The topics addressed include:

• Building Web Presence
• The Social Opportunity
• Start with Listening
• Strategy Drives Outreach
• You Need Social Networks
• To Blog or Not to Blog
• Visibility Through Search
• Rising Above the Noise
• Time Demands

One of the messages that came through from this group of experts is that social media can give you a lot of return for your investment.  That investment is staff time as many of the tools are free.  Then again, time is one of the most valuable resources a nonprofit has ...   And, as Geoff points out social media does take time and it can take away from core operations - if you let it.   Geoff offers some time management techniques for social media strategists or what I'd like to call "Social Productivity" (I'm developing a workshop on that one ...)

So, if you incorporate social media - and allocate the time - and no matter how efficient you are - something will have to give.  Where does social media time/money fit within the overall web marketing budget?  What are the right proportions?

It just so happened that after reading Geoff's posts .. via my social network I stumbled upon colleague  Stephen Blyth musing about allocating money on a nonprofit web's strategy. Quoting some notes from a workshop presented at Craigslist Foundation Nonprofit Bootcamp by Colin Delaney of ePolitics and Laura Quinn.  (Resource list and Powerpoint Here)

Here's a screen capture of one of the slides that illustrates the structure they used:

They divided the pie into equal thirds as follows:

• Website (as a home base)
• Email Communication (to talk to your friends)
• Online Outreach (to reach new friends) (They included social media/networking, search engine optimization, etc)

They recommend that you allocate time and budget equally 1/3 between each.

This sounds good, but I wish that the sections were as clear cut as the illustration.  Are those categories mutually really exclusive?  I kept wanting to blend them ...

Especially after viewing this slide show and especially this slide ..

Welcome to the Social World

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: socialproducts internet)

What do I know, maybe I'm drinking too much Koolaid, so here goes ..

Homebase: Home base is your website and it could also be your blog or both. Not everyone needs a web site and a blog - that age old question - to blog or not to blog?  Some organizations consolidate.   A blog is a form of social media and I wouldn't necessarily classify as "outreach."  I might also add some of the costs of content creation for videos/podcasts/photos that live on your site (or blog) and on other social networking sites.   And, of course, the cost ensuring that you have set up RSS feeds or what Chris Brogan classifies as "passports."

Outbound Communication:  I'd put together all the one-way or "talking to you" tactics here. This is mostly email marketing -- crafting and putting out solid email communications - your email newsletter and CRM.   Perhaps search engine optimization and search engine advertising costs.   Email will probably not become extinct - so it is important to continue to track its effectiveness.

Online Outreach and Relationship Building:  This would include time spent on setting up social networking profiles, uploading content on places like flickr or Youtube, etc.    It would also include the time spent listening, participating, and joining the conversation.   To prioritize your time, you might concentrate your activity on 1-3 sites, but there are some good reasons to at least set up a presence on many sites.

I've probably muddied the waters here.   How are you thinking about the integration of social media into your overall Internet marketing budget?  How are you making decisions about how you allocate your time and money on social media and in the context of your internet marketing budget?   If you incorporate social media, what are you letting go of or cutting back on?  Why?

4,393 Reasons Why I Like TweetDeck And Other Ways To Drink from the Fire Hydrant

Photo by Spike 55151

I read recently that the reason for "senior moments" - you know when you can't quite recall someone's name in an instant - is because the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information.   And, while some research indicates this slowing down is often to the brain's long-term benefit, one wonders what the impact is of too much Internet information that comes through our RSS readers.  Or rather, too much uncategorized, random, noisy information that comes from working on the social web.

About ten days ago, shortly after I finished presenting at the Share Our Strength Conference my mobile phone started to vibrate wildly because it was getting many incoming text messages.   What's going on, I wondered.  

As it turned out, it was direct messages from scores of Twitter followers thanking me for the follow.  Due to some technical glitch, my Twitter account started to automatically follow the 4, 393 people following me.   All of a sudden my Twitter stream exploded with a sea of tweets from people who were new to me.

The human mind craves order and categories, so while it fun to discover new people through a John Cage like exercise in randomness, I wondered how I might be more efficient at following a large number of people.   

A couple of weeks ago at the New Marketing Summit, Chris Brogan did a 10 minute demo of his work flow  to answer the question, "How do you keep up with all this?" (I captured it on Qik)  He mentioned Tweet Deck.

It lets you have replies, all tweets, and twitter profiles in different panels on the screen.  You can also create groups of followers.    A few reasons why I'm finding this an efficient way to use Twitter:

• Replies:   The replies panel not only picks up people who have used the @reply convention at the beginning of the tweet, but anyplace in the tweet.   The Twitter web interface doesn't - so if you want to know who is talking about you, you had to do separate search on twitter search.

• Retweets:  It does this automatically - rather than cuting and pasting.   Also gives a choice of different URL shorterners.

• Profile View:  You can click on the person's avatar/profile and it shows up in another screen.  (See above).  This is useful if the number of followers you have surpasses the dunbar number because I don't always remember people by name - and the visual helps.   Another reason to make sure your profile is filled out too.

• Groups:  This feature is awesome.  I can group together people I'm following by topic or association.  For example, I can group all the nptechers I know, and easy scan their tweets.  This helps make pattern analysis easier.  More here

When you first set up TweetDeck, it only imports 100 of your friends and then it takes time for the rest to be imported.  Here's why.  The founder of TweetDeck is on Twitter and he is listening and answering questions.   If you want some good introductory instructions, do this. The interface cues were new to me, so if you all of sudden loose your three column view and can't find the icons, make sure Tweetdeck is full screen.

The software is still in beta - so it may crash on your or you may encounter some bugs.  I've had some performance issues.   Also, it meters your use of the Twitter API, so if you go over a limit, you'll have to wait a bit.

Now of course, I enjoy discovering new people and new ideas - so I do keep the ten minutes a day of dipping in the full unflitered stream to discover something - but I also now have the option to be focused.

TweetDeck was one of the 7 filtering tools mentioned in this post by Mashable.  Given my interest in information coping skills, this will come in handy for those who have mastered the basics.

So, if you love Twitter, Tweedeck will help you love it more and more efficiently.

Are you using Tweetdeck?  How has it saved you time in your Twitter work flow?   What other Twitter apps have helped you save time or be more effective using Twitter?

eMetrics Panel Slides, Notes, and Blog Posts: ROI of Blogging, Twitter, and Digg for Nonprofits

E-Metrics: Followers, Friends, and Fans - Expanding Your Online Community

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: blogging nptech)

Marshall Kirkpatrick has a great post over at Read/Write Web about keeping momentum.  In that post, he describes one technique - make yourself a public case study.  So, in that spirit,  I'm sharing my presentation from last week which is a case study of my blogging ROI.  My main point is that you just think of ROI as math, then you're missing the a lot of the value of doing an ROI analysis.

I had the honor of presenting on a panel at the eMetrics Conference with Jonathon Coleman, Nature Conservancy and Laura Lee Dooley. World Resources Institute - two of the most savvy and smart nonprofit social media practitioners who are also metrics geeks.   What a combination!  

Our session is on the social media metrics track and one of a few that are geared for nonprofit folks.

Followers, Friends, and Fans: Expanding Your Online Community
If you aren't on facebook, twitter, friendfeed, technorati, and delicious, should you be? And once you jump into social media, how do you track and measure success? Tips, tools and stories from the trenches from three people who focus on online engagement and have more links, friends and followers than some small countries have citizens.

I also wanted to blog both Laura's excellent Twitter Digg deck and Jon's concise and smart case study of Digg.   They follow below.

Why Twitter Matters

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: microblog analytics)

Building Buzz Without a Budget

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: webcontent content)

In addition, WebMetrics Guru and Search Marketing Gurus took awesome notes! A bonus is Laura's Twitter links in Del.icio.us.    If you want follow web metrics bloggers, check out this list form All Top.  Laura has also compiled a list of live blog posts done at the emetrics conference - a very valuable resource.

Citizens Driving Election Day Reporting With Twitter Vote Report

Allison Fine just twittered me that Twitter Vote Report is now live.   They need everyone's help to get the word out on Twitter and the effort will only work if a lots of people are using the system.

If you currently use Twitter, send a message after you vote that begins with #votereport (this is critically important for ensuring that your message gets to the right place.)  Then write some or all of the following:

#[zip code] to indicate where you’re voting; ex., “#12345″
#machine for machine problems; ex., “#machine broken, using prov. ballot”
#reg for registration troubles; ex., “#reg I wasn’t on the rolls”
#wait:minutes for long lines; ex., “#wait:120 and I’m coming back later”
#good or #bad to give a quick sense of your overall experience
#EP+your state if you have a serious problem and need help from the Election Protection coalition; ex., #EPOH
If you don’t use Twitter and want to go to www.twitter.com, sign up then follow the directions above.

If you want to participate by cellphone but don’t want to use Twitter, you can:

Send a text message to 66937 that begins with “#votereport”
Key in a report by calling (567) 258-VOTE/8683
Download and use the iPhone app (coming soon)
Please participate — we need lots and lots of voices heard on Election Day!

That’s it — let’s go and “tweet” this election!

Here's the background information from the press release.

A volunteer network of software developers, designers, and other collaborators have teamed up with the award-winning blog techPresident to launch Twitter Vote Report.  Individual voters will use their cell phones to report on their individual experiences – the good, bad and ugly. How long is the wait in Cleveland, Ohio? Are the new optical scan machines staying up and running in Palm Beach County, Florida? Is failure to bring ID to the polls thwarting first-time voters in Indianapolis? With Twitter Vote Report, we’ll know the answers to those questions straight from voters from all over the country.  

Twitter Vote Report was inspired by a techPresident blog post on October 6th proposing the use of Twitter for election monitoring. In less than a month, volunteers across the country, with no other resources than their know-how and volunteer time, built www.twittervotereport.com to stream individual messages from Twitter and that will aggregate messages into maps and graphs.

Voters will use Twitter and the code, or hashtag, #votereport on Election Day to report whether they had a long wait, or voting machines were faulty or if there were registration problems – or if everything went well.

Voters can also send a message to Twitter Vote Report by:   
•    Sending a text message to 66937 beginning with #votereport
•    Calling to (567) 258-8683 (258-VOTE) to leave a message by touch tone keypad
•    Downloading the Twitter Vote Report iPhone application

Participating in the Twitter Vote Report project are an impressive range of organizations including the Election Protection Coalition, Rock the Vote, Credo Mobile, Common Cause, Plodt, YouTube, Twittervision, NPR’s Social Media Desk, Independence Year Foundation, The Center for Community Change, Student PIRGs, PBS, Video the Vote, Election Suppression Wiki, Women Donors Network, and Demos.  In addition, Current TV will be using the #votereport information as part of their special election coverage throughout the day.

Matt Cooperrider, a key architect of the effort, called Twitter Vote Report “the best aspects of grassroots activism and digital technology combined with an open source ethos to really change the way we participate in elections.”

"The goal of Twitter Vote Report is to expand the ways in which Americans participate in the electoral process this Election Day," said Nancy Scola, associate editor at  techPresident.  Andrew Rasiej, founder of techPresident, added, "This Twitter campaign is an ideal example of the combined power of social media and impassioned citizens to participate in our democracy. Power and control is shifting from politicians and campaigns to people and we'll be able to see that in real-time on Election Day."

Please visit www.twittervotereport.com to learn more about how Twitter and other technology tools will be used on November 4th to track voters Election Day voting experiences.

WeAreMedia: Wear E-Media - Week 3 T-Shirt Winners

The We Are Media Festival of Tools continues this week, but we wanted to make sure you're not only prepared with the right Social Media tools, but that you're wearing e-media!  That's why we're sending a fabulous T-shirt to the following contributors as a small token of thanks:

• Danielle Brigida
• Wendy Harman
• Dave Cormier
• Laura Lee Dooley

You can still win a t-shirt - just contribute something to the WeAreMedia Nonprofit Social Media Tool Box - this week we're working on social networks and fundraising widgets.

A Woman's Investment: A Web 2.0 Fundraising Campaign to Support Women Entreprenuers in Philippines

A Womans Investment - invitation to contribute

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: wonderwebby quotes)

Jasmin Tragasa, who lives in Australia, is managing consultant and social media advocate at IBM with a background in new media and design.  She's asking women around the world to contribute a sentence, just one sentence, on the theme of "A Women's Investment."    She invited me to contribute one sentence for a social media fundraising project she's leading to support female entrepreneurs in the Philippines.

Some of the contributors so far:

Anita Pahor, Women’s Opportunity Director, Australia
Kieran Cannistra, Innovation Editor IBM, USA
Cindy Lenferna de la Motte, Director at Fashion Collaborative, Australia
Amy Palko, Less Ordinary, Scotland
Suzanne Male, Publisher, Smink Works Books, Australia
Silvia Guccione, Director, Pomodoro Italian Cooking School, Australia
Michelle Zamora, AP SOA Marketing Leader, IBM, Australia
Nina Simosko, Global Chief Operating Officer, SAP Education USA
Lindy McKeown, eLearning Consultant, Australia
Renee Wolforth, Attorney, Washington, USA
Bonnie McEwan Owner, Make Waves: Impact Marketing for Nonprofits USA
Debbe Kennedy, Founder, President, and CEO Global Dialogue Center and Leadership Solutions Companies, USA http://www.puttingourdifferencestowork.com http://www.globaldialoguecenter.com

Phaedra Boinidiris, CEO, WomenGamers.Com USA

Joanna Young, Confident Writing, writing coach, Scotland
Janette Toral, digitalfilipino.com Australia/Philippines
Linda Griffin Founder ClearWind LLC, USA
Sacha Chua, Philippines and Canada

She is going to create slide show featuring all the sentences that people have contributed and use that to support her fundraising campaign.  (You can see an example of a slideshare (and some early contributions) here.)  She is hoping to raise $10,000 for a group of female entrepreneurs in the Philippines.

The money Jasmin will raised will be used to help 15 to 30 entrepreneurial poor (mainly women) to form a Trust Bank. They will co-guarantee each other’s loans to start small businesses and support their families, working together so that all may succeed in their individual businesses.  The Trust Bank is established in a community where over half the residents are living below the national poverty line (typically $1-2 a day.)

In addition to the loan, the money raised will also provide enterprise development services, including training in business and management skills, social and community issues such as health, sanitation and community participation - and personal development. The members will meet each week to make their repayments, discuss issues relevant to their businesses and personal lives, and receive business training and mentoring.

Photo by Beth Kanter

"When a woman invests, the effort will bear fruit and sustain others." 

Now, like other contributors, all I need is a sentence and a visual. So, simple a request, yet difficult.  I flipped through my flickr images and settled on this basket of apples from last year.   It symbolizes the harvest, the fruit of hard work.   So, here is my sentence:"When a woman invests, the effort will bear fruit and sustain others." 

If you'd like to contribute, write a post with a sentence linking back to this post and leave a comment for Jasmin.  You have until October 31st to participate.

Beth Kanter, BlogHer Editor for Social Change and Nonprofits, writes Beth's Blog.

Ideablob October Contest: Only A Few Days Left To Vote

You're looking at widget created by Lend4Health as part their participation in the Ideablob contest to win $10,000 for new small business ideas. They have enough votes to become a finalist, and they're one of eight content entrants in the "final showdown." If Lend4Health can accumulate the most votes between now and midnight Central time on October 31 (see countdown), they will win $10,000 for Lend4Health!

Here's what they plan to do with the money:

With this money, I plan to improve and expand the Lend4Health concept so that more children and families can benefit. Your vote also helps get the word out about the biomedical approach to treating autism -- an idea that certainly deserves to be heard!

I was all set to vote for them and went over to the site. You need to register and go through a verification process.  Then I looked at the other projects and noticed Nate Ritter  - whose used Twitter during the San Diego fires also had an idea.  

So, I guess I have 48 hours to make up my mind ....

Update:  You can vote for more than one project!

WeAreMedia: Social Networks - Build the Nonprofit Social Media Tool Box

Source: Nielsen Online

The We Are Media Festival of Tools is starts the last week of work on the Nonprofit Social Media Toolbox with a focus on social networking tools and widgets and apps.

So for today, our focus is on social networking sites.  According to this recent Nielsen study there has been explosive social networking growth over the past year.  The top social networking sites include some familiar names - Myspace and Facebook.   What is interesting is that nearly half of the biggest social networking sites are also among the fastest growing - and they are all most popular among age groups over 25.

Gartner VP recently published a report from analyst Andrea Di Maio, who says citizen social networks will complement, and may replace, some government functions. "Today, the primary role of social networks for governments is to facilitate the exchange of information and to establish novel collaboration patterns, often across organizational boundaries," Gartner's report says.  It argues that blurring departmental boundaries, increasing horizontal exchange among departments, shrinking budgets, and a growing trend in which control over storing information is relinquished to third parties are all fueling the adoption of social media within government organizations.(And perhaps nonprofits?)

For the social networking section the WeAreMedia tool box, we have included the definitive list of every social network in the world, but what would be really helpful to have the short list of where nonprofits have had some results.   So far that list includes the big ones like Facebook, Myspace, Ning, and LinkedIn.  And, it should include some of the focused social networking sites for nonprofits, like Change.Org, so the quesiton is what others to include on the social networking part of the tool kit?

Office Life:How To Befriend The Boss On Facebook

In addition to links to the various site, we would like you recommend the best of the best how-to posts or videos for the specific social network.   The example of above comes a collection of screencasts about Facebook. (Hat tip to Kari Dunn Saratovsky of the Social Citizen's Blog for find the one above).  We have lots of resources with tips and examples related to strategy in other sections of the WeAreMedia project, what we're looking for here are the pure how-tos related to the specific social networking sites referenced.

So, go over to the wiki and add your best how-to resource and you could win a t-shirt.

Advocacy 2.0 Guide: Cross-Posting

Global Voices Advocacy has released another guide in its Advocacy 2.0 series called "Cross-Posting" writting by Sami Ben Gbarbia. 

This one offers a brief introduction to how to use cross-posting for online advocacy campaign. It reviews different web 2.0 tools, highlights successful examples where cross-posting has been used for advocacy. The guide also includes the pros and cons of the cross-posting technique.

The guide highlights how to use RSS tools like Twitter Feed and Feedburner to automatically post content from your blog and other sources to Twitter and Facebook.  You may wonder why do this?  The guide explains why:

For some digital activists from countries with widespread Internet censorship use this tactic to automatically keep their audience updated about new "mirrors" to their blocked/censored website and blogs. So, instead of spending time sending emails and filling their subscribers' mailboxes with email updates, applications like Facebook, Twitter are doing the job of displaying the new URLs to their website, bypassing censors
and getting the message out.

Message in A Box: New Toolkit from Tactical Technology Collective

Message in-a-box: Tools and tactics for communicating your cause is a new web resources that includes tactical guides to using a wide range communications tools for social change, packaged with some open source tools for creating media.  This resource is for small to midsized nonprofit organizations.

This guide is a one-stop place to find checklists, strategy tips, and how-to guides for creating everything in you need to implement a communications strategy - from quick guide for a print strategy to selecting a content management system.  It also includes tips and resources for developing an Internet Strategy
sharing content on mobile phones, and an email strategy.  

The guide incorporates some tutorials and how-to information social media strategy, most notably a Blogging guide for activists and campaigners for using blogs for grassroots organizing and citizen journalism written by Sokari Ekine who blogs at www.blacklooks.org.  There is also a rich section about how to incorporate the use of video -- from creating your own to using works created by others.

The tools section is an annotated directory of open source tools that describe the tool and include links to downloads, manuals, and tutorials.  

The content incorporates and points to materials created by others in the citizen journalism and activism fields and is packaged as self-paced tutorials and checklists.   There are a few content areas that I do not normally included in the other many similar guides available.  These include:

•  Quick Guide to Images:  Advice about how to incorporate images effectively in your campaign materials.
• A Simple Guide to Animation Creating short animations can be an effective way to communicate about your cause.  This short tutorial steps you through some easy ways to create animation.
• Primer on Search Engine Optimization A good primer for those just beginning to think through a search engine optimization strategy.
• A Guide To Open Content  This section explains creative commons licensing and open content in easy to understand terms.

Well, I'm off to add links in the appropriate places in WeAreMedia.

I'm the Social Media Tourist of the Future and Other Excuses Why I'm Not At PodCamp/Word Camp Hawaii

Sara with Roxanne Darling after the session about Tourism 2.0

The amazing Roxanne Darling and many dedicated Hawaiian social media leaders have organized Podcamp and WordCamp Hawaii.   The event is bringing together over 500 participants to the Hawaii Convention Center to meet some of the top podcasters, bloggers, videobloggers, social media experts, and web gurus.   I attended yesterday very briefly in the morning (with my entire family!) and heard a session called "Using New Media To Capture Outbound Chinese Tourism" with Roxanne Darling and and Christine Lu. (Kids sat through the session because they feel asleep due to jet lag!)

Kids are not smiling because they are muttering
when are we going to the beach?

I usually attend conferences alone and the family stays behind.  But when I told my family I had an opportunity to go to Hawaii, they insisted on coming along.   So, decided to take an all too brief family vacation.  This is a first for me - to have my family with me and to actually enjoy the location where I'm working.

Hanging with Neenz from All Top. 

I probably wouldn't have gotten to the beach or enjoyed Island culture if my family wasn't here, I would have been blogging the whole time!    We did get a chance to hang some social media geeks.  My kids just loved Neenz from All Top, not only because she gave them all top stickers with the donkey word on them, but because she said to us "Go to the beach now!"

So, that's my excuse for leaving podcamp so early ....  I just couldn't listen to sessions about Tourism 2.0 without experiencing Hawaii as a Social Media tourist.   So, we headed off to the North Shore, and I tweeted, flickered, and streamed our fun.

My husband and I visited Hawaii 15 years ago before the Web was around.  To prepare for that trip, we did months of research.  We picked up some guide books from the library and wrote away to the Tourism boards for maps, brochures and suggestions.   We didn't have a way to connect easily with other Tourists or know which of our friends could give us suggestions.

This trip was different.  While we checked out the Hawaii Tourism web site, it didn't influence our final decisions -- many which were made by reaching out to my social media friends and network.  I didn't do the amount of advanced planning either - making many decisions in the moment. 

I posted a status alert on Facebook and asked for some suggestions on Twitter. Friends messaged me about where to eat, what to see, and what to do. That's how we made many of our choices.

Sara enjoys Shaved Ice at Waiola

I learned about Shaved Ice on Twitter from my friend Paul Henderson who has lived in Hawaii. While I was eating Shaved Ice, I tweeted it and shared the experience with some followers.

Our North Shore experience started with a visit to the Dole Plantation to ride the Pineapple Express, wander the world's largest maze, and eat Pineapple soft ice cream.

But what a great reaction from my twitter friends was the Coi Pig out

Next we headed up to Waimea Valley where there was a beautiful botanical garden and waterfall. I didn't have a signal, so I fulfilled my one Hawaii experience goal - do macro photography of exotic flowers and birds. Harry and Sara got to frolick in the falls.

Qiking the Hawaiian Sunset at Sunset Beach

We left just in time to catch sunset at Sunset Beach - I twittered the sunset at sunset beach with my toes in the ocean. Unfortunately, I dropped my treo in the sand and it touch screen no longer works - much to the glee of some followers who telling me how jealous they were! Sorry guys. Or sharing my fun with their friends by retweeting.

We found ourselves up on the North Shore and looking for the perfect place to eat. We wanted a place with great food, good wine by the glass list, and kid friendly. I tweeted this and luckily Michael Ni who does PR for Hawaii Tourism suggested Ola's where we had a superb meal (I had the garlic shrimp and a wonderful salad).

The kid's meals were great, but best of all were served on a frisbee. So, after they finished, they could play on the beach while my husband and I enjoyed the ocean view and breeze.

The waiter gave us the check and asked how we heard about the restaurant. I told him Twitter. He wasn't familiar, so I showed him how to Twitter and also about live streaming. He was excited and said he was going to tell the owner about Social Media -- I did an interview with him via Qik.

Then onto Polynesian Cultural Center - and the spooky zoo ride, Unfortunately, it was sold out because we got there too late. (Ah, an excuse to go back to Ola's!) We'll visit today, but earlier. Now, all we need is a hiking place and a beach suggestion nearby ... so @kanter me. Aloha!

Social Media Club Workshop in Hawaii: Reflections on Social Media Game - Aloha Version

Hawaii Social Media Game

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: hawaii socialmediaclub)

Many thanks to Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells of the Social Media Club for organizing fantastic Social Media Workshop and inviting me to participate. I learned some much from them and Roxanne Darling - who was also instrumental in making this workshop happen and who gave an informative presentation about the power of social media to support tourism goals.  A big Mahalo to the generous sponsors (Viddler, Chimp, HTDC, Hubspot, KnowHow Cafe, and Viddler).

I wanted to write some reflections about what worked and what could have been improved with the Social Media Game.  As I mentioned to the group,  it is always a work in progress and this Aloha Remix included some new ideas - the point system, the situation cards, and scenarios that were not all non-profit.

I best part of this experience was the learning that took place in the room and it is especially impressive because we had a mix of levels.  We had social media experts and gurus in the room - in addition to fellow workshop leaders Chris Heuer, Kristie Wells, and Roxanne Darling, we had folks like Todd Cochrane (father of podcasting) Lorelle the Wordpress Guru, Neenz the evangelist from All Top, Colin Devore who is a total expert in social media from Viddler. 

But we also had people in the room who were new to social media - trying to understand the concepts of listening, participating, sharing content, and online communtiy building - and who were just being introduced to many of the tools - like Twitter or Utterli.   

Would this mix of levels be a recipe for disaster?  Heck no!  It made the game incredibly rich - and a key learning.  In order to play this version of the game, you absolutely need a mix of knowledgable people in the room to facilitate the small groups. 

I also think the morning - which includes presentations and world cafe model - introduced all of the key concepts in the game - especially how social media relate to marketing, advertising, publicity, and public relations.  We didn't drill down into the tools at all - most mostly concepts and case studies.

It is making me wonder about how to remix this for a group where I have mostly beginners or don't have an expert at each table who is familiar with all the tools.   I have two workshops coming up where that might be the case.  Hmm ... something to ponder later while walking on the beach.

In addition, I saw some areas to tweak in the initial presentation, point system, and rules that might make it work smoother.  I also need to add a card or include viddler and all top into the deck.   In addition, Chris Heuer had a fantastic idea - to have a scrabble like board where people could lay all the cards.

I took some live notes over on the wiki, but Lorelle has a wonderful post summarizing the learnings from the game that can be taken into your practice. 

• Use the right tool for the job. Not every social media tool will work for every project.

• Target your audience. If you try to paint the world with your project, the return on your investment will be small. If you aim directly for your audience, your ROI may be much higher and less financially painful.

• Be willing to tell your client that they need to change. To achieve some marketing strategy goals, a business might have to change how it markets itself, but also how it does business. It’s a changing world and you have to change with it.

• Old thinking doesn’t work any more. While there is a lot of similarity between the old methodology of marketing and advertising, it really doesn’t work any more. Broad strokes don’t work any more. Customer service is where every advertising dollar must go. Happy customers have big mouths. Everything is social, it’s about the relationships not necessarily the numbers, and throwing money at a problem will not fix it.

• It’s pressure that cuts diamonds. While your plan may be great, it’s the reality in the progress of the project that truly defines the end result. The Social Media Game takes into account “shit happens” and you can win extra points and lose points based upon your decisions to that point. When you are forced to change your strategy and make extreme decisions because of limitations, constraints, and crap that just happens, you make clearer, cleaner, and better decisions, honing the end result often into a better result than you planned in the first place.

• It’s time to rethink and remix everything you knew about marketing. It’s a new world and it’s not too late to catch up. It’s not hard to understand social media, but it is time. Start today.

For those folks who asked if they could have copies of the card (the slide deck can be downloaded from SlideShare), the pdf files can be found here. I set up a wiki where I've collected links to others who have remixed and was hoping to create some templates and source material for people to remix it.

If you are thinking about remixing the game or have done so already, please do share what you learned and your version.  

Mahalo!

Social Media Club Workshop in Hawaii - Live Blogging Notes

Roxanne Darling presenting

Many thanks to Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells for organizing fantastic Social Media Workshop.

There are amazing people in this room - a combination of social media rock stars who are based in Hawaii - Roxanne Darling, Todd Cochrane, Lorelle from Wordpress, Neenz from All Top, Colin Devore from Viddler. (Check out the 15 Second Viddler Aloha Video!)

Chris Heuer started off with a talk called "Conversations Aren't Marketing"

Listening

What is Social Media?  "Being social with media."

The social media era where it is so easy to get access and use the tools.  It changes things quite dramatically.  We have to return to our fundamentals.  There are four c's:

• Context
• Communications
• Collaborations
• Connections

You can describe as the "tools" or you can describe it as media.  The latter is a problem because it does not describe well for newcomers.   It also can't be perfect.   Because of the broadcast era, the relationship between a business and a customer became less personal.   The social media tools allow us to scale personality and better relationships.

Social media makes things visible.

You can fail fast and fail cheap!

Important element of social media impact - what are the effects?   Gave an example of a blogger outreach program where they gave bloggers a product - solar powered batter recharger.  One of the bloggers got on CNN to talk about the product.

Net Promoter Score: 
How likely are you to promote this to your friends?
Use it - and ask them why.

So What?

• The way the entire market functions has changed drastically, we reached the digital tipping point.
• Broadcasting AT large crowds doesn't work
• Having conversations with people and always has
• Digital tools and social media enable these conversations cost effectively across great distances
• Ultimately, conversations with people we like and trust develop relationships

If you're going to listen, you need to respond, and then make change.   Example ComcastCares on Twitter.  Empower the "Frank" in  your company.

Marketing consists of human beings, not market segments. 

How do we join conversations:
1.  We lurk, we make a good comment
2.  Avoid seagull commenting - add value to the conversation

I don't want to work with anyone I don't personally llike or respect.

Social media isn't an object - it is what you do with it.

Professionally produced content may be seen as less valuable because it isn't seen as authentic!  Another twist on the topic.

Participating in your Community

You listen and participate, but the most important thing is educate your users, partners, venders, anyone in business with you.

Look within your company for people already using social media
If you've got writers, blog
If you've got storytellers, podcast
If you've got filmmakers, do some video

The key to success is finding out what networks to spend your time on

Step-by-Step

Product name, ceo, competitors in Google Alerts
Who are my customers?
Find the influencers - also find out who they are following
Start by participating in other people's blogs

Tool for Twitter - Twellow.com - searches through profiles
If there is a new service, shiney object, you don't have to use everyone - you can create an account with your organization's brand.

ping.fm - service is another that will cross-post.  Set up you preferences so if someone replies to you, you get a notice.  Even if you are not using. 

Hot Tip from Small Group Session

Check out the social media firehouse

#smcwsh

The Online Media Opportunity

Roxanne Darling
Video is the Killer App

If you want to own the marketplace, you have the ability and it's almost free.  Time is the new money.  It is your time - learn how it works and make the media.  You can earn the market place.

Gave examples of how people could use social media to leverage Hawaiin tourism.

Are We Speaking a New Language?  YES

We are talking about a lot of new apps, new terms and how can early adopters be your tour guides.  This group can help. 

Consistency and Frequency of Publishing is important to reaching a new audience

Start out with something really simple - like once a month.  Be consistency is more important than the exact number of times you publish.

Putting out content that is useful and entertaining

Shows a comparison between gohawaii.com and beachwalks.tv - is higher on engagement.

More and better interaction

With podcasting you can also have subscribers, cmments, cross-postings, episode ratings, community chats, and mashups and more.

Leveraging Communities

Has set up a Ning.  Was concerned whether she could support it - but what has happened is that people are talking to one another.

Conversions

Measured this with a survey - after watching beachwalks - desire more or less to visit.  Comments "before I saw the show, didn't want to come."  She started her show with the worst tourism conditions possible.  Don't be afraid of the real deal.  

Hot Tip from Social Media Club Workshop: Social Media Fire Hose Tool

I got to meet Lorelle from WordPress! We did a modified World Cafe and during the full group sharing, we told us about a cool tool for listening called Social Media Firehouse.

WeAreMedia ToolBox: Micro Media Tools - Twellow

The month of October we've been focusing on building out the Nonprofit Social Media Tool Box and awarding t-shirts to contributors!. Today we're looking at Micro Media tools. This is any form of concentrated content created using social tools that broadcast text, voice, images, or video to targeted Web and mobile communities. The tools listed include one from each - text, audio, and video - but there are many, many others.  This includes Twitter, Utterli, and Sesmic.  This is the place to share all your great Twitter clients and more.

I'm sitting here in Hawaii at the Social Media Workshop and Kristie Wells just gave an awesome presentation on participation in social media. One thing I learned about was a search tool for Twitter, called Twellow.

Twellow.com is grabs publicly available messages from the Twitter.com micro-blogging service. We then analyze and categorize each of the users responsible for those messages into the various categories found at Twellow.com. By adding these people to specific categories we help you narrow your searching into specific niches where you can find who you are looking for. In addition to Twitter, we're actively working on adding more social media services to broaden your capacity to find people who matter.

Have some tools and tips to share related to MicroMedia?  Add them to WeAreMedia wiki here.

Emetrics Reputation and Relationship Management in A Social Media World

I got to meet KDPaine at the eMetrics Summit!

KD Paine's presentation rocked!  It included two excellent case studies and social media metrics- one on ASPCA and the other Georgia Tech. (some pics of slides are here).

She started her talk with "the word reputation is so 1990. Today, it's about relationships.  The notion that you can manage your reputation through social media gets you into trouble.   Social media is a world into itself and can't control it - do the right thing and see what happens. Listen, Respond, Stop Doing Stupid Stuff."

She talked about the importance of measuring your social media efforts.   This was a great positive spin -- rather than measure to show me or prove the impact, it's measure so you can quantify it.  "Social media has a huge impact, but if you don't measure you can't figure out the impact.   The reason to measure is to determine whether to continue or not.   PR people do things because they've always done it that way -- measurement helps improve."

"If you put a man into orbit, why can't we determine the effectiveness of our communication?" - James E. Grunig.

It comes down to what people are saying ....

Signs that it is the end of the world as we know it.  She gave these examples of how some companies are measuring the impact of their social media efforts:

• Best Buy measured the success of its internal network by how it reduced job turnover
• State Farm measured the success of its internal blog by improvement in morale
• ASPCA and MADD can track on-line donations and increased membership back to its public relations effort
• Dell measures ROI based on the number of useable ideas generated
• On Twitter, a start up company got 100 great marketing ideas for free, women raised $6,000 in a day and a wooden toy maker in NH got a nationwide contract

All the old dynamics are changing and its impacting everyone!

How do you know what tactic caused the sale?  People buy stuff because people recommended it. Where do they get the information?  Social media?  What has greater impact on sales or reviews on Amazon?  Structured product reviews written by people who the company didn't know -

It's no longer about reaching eyeballs. 

It isn't about the numbers.  It is about how to analyze the data.  It isn't about reaching the masses, but the right few people. 

ROI  ...  what's the ROI podcasting that cost $500 and sold more product that a $40,000 campaign.  Do the math - and you're going to do podcasts

She made the point that you can manage relationships, not reputation.  She break out the components of relationships:

Trust, Commitment, Satisfaction, control mutuality, exchange/control

She then showed how you might construct a survey to measure these aspects.

A key takeaway for me was a content or pattern analysis of what consumers were saying about Georgia Tech on Facebook - it was an analysis of over 4,500 mentions.   Someone in the audience asked if there was a tool to automate the gathering and analysis of this data.  KD Paine shared that they collected it manually - an academic designed a collection tool and they used college studies who combed through facebook and filled out the tool.  

She also presented a slide "Emerging Benchmarks for Social Media in Higher Ed" which included this metric - 12 comments on a higher ed blog is good.   I wonder if there is an emerging benchmark for nonprofits - which is probably too broad but would be interesting to be able to compare your blog comment numbers with sort of benchmark.

She also mentioned a measurement dashboard that integrates social media metrics along with pr and web analytic measures.

During the Q/A, I asked her when it is time for someone to move from "home grown" listening tools (e.g. technorati, RSS persistance search, etc) to an automated tool - like Radian6.   Depends on the volume - and what you want to accomplish.  I asked whether or not you were using an automated tool to collect data, what were some principles or best practices.  She talked about the importance of defining keywords precisely.

There was a slide that showed the 27 different types of conversations no matter where you have them.

So much of what she had to say is soooooo critically important for nonprofits who are looking an integrated social media strategy with communications.   Well, I'm off to go buy her book to I can learn more.  You should too.

eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit: Keynote by Jim Sterne

Flickr Photo by Powerbook Trance

I'm speaking at the eMetrics the premiere conference for Web measurement geeks.  Where else you could you pick up conference schwag like a google analytics toothbrush with the words "brush, rinse, and repeat" printed alongside the google logo?

The morning key was delivered by Jim Sterne, founder of eMeterics who is an amazing speaker.  His engaging and funny presentation was called "Tough Times call for Tough Measures."    While most of his remarks were geared for-profit sector, there is much that we can translate to the nonprofit sector.  He made the points that your metrics must get you to results - and the three most important results are:

• Increased Revenue
• Lowered Expenses
• Increased Customer Satisfaction

The underlying theme of his informative talk was about customer experience.  "Figure out who you are customers and what they want they will reward you with loyalty."   He asked, "how do you measure loyalty?"  Count the number of people who have tattoos with your company logo."   

He talked about different categories of metrics for the web:

1)   Types of visitors:  You have to get inside your customer's heads and what is important to them.  Chart of an emotional visit to Starbucks.   The last impression is the most important.  You have to figure out how to segment them and what it means by segment.

2.)  Customer Relationship Spectra:  What kinds of visits.  They visit one page and goes away.   There are bouncers, looky looky, hunger, gatherer, shopper, buyer, needy or desperate?  We need to focus on the buying process.  Don't focus on the selling cycle, focus on the buying process.  Translation for nonprofits - focus on the ladder of engagement.

3.) Measuring Loyalty:  How do you measure loyalty?  Count the number of people who tatoo your logo on their skin!

4.)  Types of Metrics:   We've got too much stuff to measure.  So, we turn to tools.   Problem with tools you keep doing one thing.  Or else you spend a lot of money on a complex tool.   It is so complex that something will go wrong.    Alternative is:  simple tool that is made too complex because it is doing too many things.  We've got more tools, more reports, and more stuff than we know to do with.

The second time you go through your data - you can't do discovery - you need to do analysis.  That's harder and takes longer.

The big five to measure:

Behavior:  What do they do? - Where are people going?  Google Analytics is free - strategic importance and feature set.  It will get you to the point to understand analytics well enough and why you need to move up to more expensive tools.

It takes more than tools!
Embrace testing, failure, curosity, persistant analysis, and refinement

Attitude: How do they feel?
Need to look at off the site - web 2.0 - your brand is not your own.  Need to keep track of what people are saying.
On Your Web Site:   World's best survey - why did you come?, is there problem? if yes, fix it.

Competition:   Ranking, clickstream, etc
American customer satisfaction index - how happy people are?  You can measure happiness. How do you compare?

Management:  How are you doing all of this?  It is really annoying, but important.

Outcome:   Every page has ROI.  Is it working at all?  Is anybody there?  Is it working well?  Are we increasing customer satisfaction, it is by segement.  Turn people into satisfied customers who will be repeat customers and tell their friends.

There was a lot more to his fast-paced talk - I found that his style was so engaging that I had trouble taking notes.    More from the WebMetrics Guru Blog and my flickr pics of some slides here.

WeAreMedia ToolBox: This Week We're Working Crowdsourcing, Micro Media, and Lifestreaming Tools

The month of October we've been focusing on building out the Nonprofit Social Media Tool Box and awarding t-shirts to contributors!

Week Three of the We Are Media Toolbox begins!  I'm really excited to see what we come up as in terms of tools, tips, and tutorials these three categories of tools that can help you spread buzz and generate awareness about your organization:

• Crowd Sourced News and Content:These tools organize and collect "the wisdom of the crowds" to popularize content, whether it's online video, articles, posts, images, news, blog posts, etc.  We're talking about tools like Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit and others.  Which ones are you using, what are the best tips and resources?

• Micro Media: Any form of concentrated content created using social tools that broadcast text, voice, images, or video to targeted Web and mobile communities. The tools listed include one from each - text, audio, and video - but there are many, many others.  This includes Twitter, Utterli, and Sesmic.  This is the place to share all your great Twitter clients and more.

• LifeStreams: Individuals and organizations who are active on the social web can port their activity across social networks into one, easy to follow, read, and comment activity stream. These services are powered by the RSS feeds that each network offers to its users and makes following activity across sites easier and in one spot.  This includes FriendFeed and Social Thing.

So, you want one of the cool WeAreMedia T-Shirts?  Come help us fill out the toolbox!

Share Our Strength Day of Service: Capital Area Food Bank 1,100 Boxes of Food Packed Today!

Click to play

Today I was part of an awesome social media capture team for the Share Our Strength Day of Service at the Capital Area Food Bank. Thought I'd share this video. Great work!

Share Our Strength Day of Service: Painting Murals in the School Cafeteria

I started my Day of Service experience at Friendship Public Charter School at the Southeast Elementary Academy in the school cafeteri where volunteers were hard at work painting two murals.   Both murals illustrate the idea of nutritional eating.   I met both of the artists and did live stream interviews with them.  I also talked to the volunteers about why they were so passionate about the issue of ending childhood hunger.

Latoya Middleton, photographed above, shows off her design while volunteers were busy painting in the design. The mural depicts mother earth who gives life and food next to a healthy selection of fruits and vegetables. Latoya was thrilled to her design come to life before her eyes.

 
Mural Artist Alex Volkonsky

I also met Alex Volkonsky who design depicts whimsical vegetables and fruits as well as a milk cartoon (emphasizing the need to children who need to drink their milk everyday for healthy bones).   I interviewed him about his work on qik.

I met Michael Farver one of the volunteers. Michael is a founding director and President of End Childhood Hunger. He is also a trustee of The Farver Foundation, a charitable foundation supporting hunger relief, child nutrition, education and community development, and helps oversee the distribution of over $400,000.00 in grants to more than fifty charitable organizations in Michigan and South Florida each year.

Michael also uses different social media strategies to get the word out about childhood hunger in America and spoke about why it is important for activists to incorporate a social media strategy.

Below are my flickr photos from the mural projects in the cafeteria.

Share Our Strength Day of Service: Capital Area Food Bank and Friendship Charter School

Today, I'm participating in a Day of Service along with almost 200 conference participants at two of their partner sites, the Capital Area Food Bank and Friendship Public Charter School - both organizations address hunger and poverty issues.  The Day of Service, sponsored by Tyson Foods, will be an opportunity for conference to give back to organizations in the host community.

We have a team of social media volunteers who youtubing, blogging, flickring, and Twittering the work by these dedicated volunteers.  Over at the blog, you can read some of the live posts or see videos about the Share Our Strength Day of Service.

The qik video documents some of the tasks the volunteers are doing today. The goal is to pack up thousands of food boxes for local pantries.  The large bins are filled with items that are collected in local grocery stories.  The volunteers sorted them into boxes and the boxes are being boxed up for 700 agencies, a combination of food pantries and soup kitchens - any nonprofits that are cooking or distributing food for those who need it.

In addition, they packed up 1,100 backpacks for kids filled with food items.   These backpacks are essential because these children will not have food over the weekend.

Social Media Game: Hawaiian Version - Beta - My Contribution to Hawaii Geek Week

Photo by Dan Zen

It's Hawaii Geek Week!   Here's my contribution. Part of the Hawaii Social Media Club Workshop. 

The Social Media Game

The goal of game:   There's no winners or losers.  The game is intended to help you think through a social media strategy and share tips and knowledge.

Instructions for Playing

1.    Introduction: Overview the key concepts in the game.  I need to create a very brief (10 minutes) high level overview of the tactical strategies, time, and potential resistance areas. I won't be going over the tools in detail as many will have been discussed during the early part of the day and they can ask one another in their small groups.  I will also give an overview of the rules.  I will hand out the tactical cards for reference.

2.   Objective: Divide into small groups.  Each group will be assigned an instructor/facilitator.   Each group will select one objective card at random. (5 minutes)

Here's an example:

Photo by Bitmask

TOURISM CAMPAIGN

You are a campaign team for a local tourist office and you want to get visitors to Hawaii to enjoy your local restaurants, hotels, and attractions. You would like to use social media to educate tourists who have select Hawaii as a destination to come off the beaten path. You also want to build relationships with people who have visited so they will return or tell others.

3.   Audience: Next, each group will get a set of "people" cards.  I created most of the cards using the social technographics model from Forrester that is described in detail in the book Groundswell by Josh Bernhoff and Charlene Li.  (I'm hoping that participants will have viewed or seen Chris Heuer's video interview with Charlene as part of the promotion of the workshop.  Participants will be asked to consider who the audience might be for the various scenarios and how they might learn more about what they are doing on the social web.   I've included a card that points to these other free research sources but will also warn folks from getting bogged down with too much research and not enough action.  (15 minutes)

4.  Tool Cards:  Each group will get a pack of tool cards and choose tools to implement the online strategy to reach their objective.  Each tool is worth a certain amount of points and each group can only have up to ten points.   (I might need to tweak the point value).    (15-20 minutes)

5. Real Situations:  When the group is done with their strategy,  they will pick a situation card at random.  The situations include resistance, staffing, budget, time, experimentation, and metrics.   Depending on the situation, they can gain or lose points.  Once they pick the situation card, they revise their strategy.   If time permits, will let groups pick another strategy card. (15-20 minutes)

6. Full Group Report:  Each group will present their strategy to the full group and get feedback.

Almost two years ago,  I did a workshop with David Wilcox in Birmingham for LASA. We created a new game version (Social Media Game) based on those Drew Mackie and he had developed over the past 10 years. (You can find David's training games here.)   He has reiterated this game over and over for different audiences and circumstances and I've remixed the game for filmmakers and even took it to Cambodia.  I set up a wiki where I've collected links to others who have remixed and was hoping to create some templates and source material for people to remix it.

Next week, I'm bringing the game to Hawaii Social Media Club Workshop.  I got an email from Demetrio Maguidgad explaining how he remixed the game, how it worked!  I've shared details on the wiki here.   Now, I've remixed to give it some Hawaiian Aloha spirit.  The audience is both nonprofits and small businesses.

I'm going to remix this again .. so suggestions welcomed.

Demetrio Maguigad Rocks the Social Media Game and My Remix Ideas

Demetrio Maguigad, New Media Manager
Community Media Workshop

Almost two years ago,  I did a workshop with David Wilcox in Birmingham for LASA. We created a new game version (Social Media Game) based on those Drew Mackie and he had developed over the past 10 years. (You can find David's training games here.)   He has reiterated this game over and over for different audiences and circumstances and I've remixed the game for filmmakers and even took it to Cambodia.  I set up a wiki where I've collected links to others who have remixed and was hoping to create some templates and source material for people to remix it.

Next week, I'm bringing the game to Hawaii Social Media Club Workshop and was hoping to mix in some Aloha spirit.  But wasn't sure if I was going to have the time given the packed schedule to be truly inventive.   That was until I got this email from Demetrio Maguidgad explaining how he remixed the game, how it worked, and the files!  I've shared them on the wiki here.

Here's what I really liked about how he remixed the game.

• Pre-Determined Scenarios:  He gave them made up scenarios or objectives that describes the organization's purpose and what they want the social media to accomplish.  I've done the game using this approach (see the workshop notes and reflections from Meyer Memorial Trust) and keeping open-ended an letting one person in the small group be the "client."   
• Use of Points When Selecting Tools:   He only gives participants a choice of 18 tools and it is a wide range (more technical tools like Drupal, Joombla, and Mashups), but they have a budget of 10 points - so this naturally leads to a discussion of priorities.   On the cards, he defines the tools, provides a question, and url.  I like the addition of the URL.  When I've used this exercise, I've tried to keep it focus on tools for either external communication or internal collaboration, although he does color code the outcomes (collaboratoin, media content/networking, etc.)
• Scenario Cards:  I love this twist - these are the real life examples that get at issues of adoption, information overload, loosing control, etc.  There are good and bad scenarios that might increase or descrease an .org's capacity to implement.

How I might remix this:

• I'm going to add a few things:   I set of cards that describes the audience based on culling a few ideas from here.  Alternately, you could add a sentence into the objective cards that describes the audience.

• I'm going to focus on external communications goals - and use the How Much Time Does It Take To Do Social Media? or the categories that I organized the WeAreMedia tactical track:  listening, participate, share your story, generating buzz, and social networking/community building. 

• There are two concepts missing from Demetrio's set of cards that I'd like to incorporate are metrics - How do you measure success?   And, of course, the idea of a low risk experiment.  Maybe this doesn't require a set of cards, but it is a task the group thinks about once they pick their strategy and tools.  My gut is to keep it simple though.

Well, off to remix  ... what do you think?

Aloha Social Media! My Schedule Over the Next Week ...

Photo by DrumsWhistles

Next week is going to be a busy, busy week of work and travel and a little bit of a fun. 

On Sunday, I'll be in Washington, DC for the Share Our Strength Conference of Leaders. I'll be going out on the Day of Service which will take place at two locations, the Capital Area Food Bank and Friendship Public Charter School.  I'll be part of a social media capture team where we will use social media tools to document the work of 200 volunteers at both locations.   I'm excited about doing this work along side folks like that the crack web and social media team at Share Our Strength and Ed Nicholson at Tyson.

The next day, I'll be leading a workshop on social media strategies and tools and we hope to share some of the documentation work as an example of how the tools work.  The Day of Service event and session are sponsored by Tyson Foods.

On Tuesday, I will have the honor of presenting at the E-Metrics Conference with Jonathon Coleman, Nature Conservancy and Laura Lee Dooley. World Resources Institute - two of the savvy and smart nonprofit social media practitioners who are also metrics geeks.   What a combination!

Our session is on the social media metrics track and one of a few that are geared for nonprofit folks.  I'll be taking about how to use ROI thinking to build a community for your blog. The session description:

Followers, Friends, and Fans: Expanding Your Online Community
If you aren't on facebook, twitter, friendfeed, technorati, and delicious, should you be? And once you jump into social media, how do you track and measure success? Tips, tools and stories from the trenches from three people who focus on online engagement and have more links, friends and followers than some small countries have citizens.

I am also going to learn a lot by attending the sessions.  I'm looking forward to hearing social media measurement gurus -  KD Paine who session is earlier that day.

Next, I leave for Honolulu, Hawaii where I will be doing a session at the Social Media Club's workshop in conjunction with the wonderful PodCamp Hawaii.   The workshop leaders include:

• Roxanne Darling, co-owner of Bare Feet Studios, host of award-winning Beach Walks with Rox and Hawaii’s new media expert
• Chris Heuer, the founder of Social Media Club and a digital marketing veteran with 14 years of experience online.
• Kristie Wells, a community evangelist, customer advocate and President of Social Media Club

Charlene Li, author of Groundswell, isn't going to be able to make it over to PodCamp Hawaii or Social Media Club Workshop Hawaii, but Chris Heuer had the pleasure of interviewing her. In this interview, he focused on items more relevant to businesses in Hawaii -- especially small businesses.   I think a lot of what she says in the video is very applicable to nonprofits.  Enjoy the video.

This is also going to be a nice little vacation for me and I'm bringing the family along too.