Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

Alistair Croll, Guest Post: Using Twitter for Fundraising - Lessons Learned from Beers for Canada

This was originally published at the Rednod blog by Alistair Croll, Sarah Severson, and Alex Bowyer.  Alistair Croll  is the co-author along with Sean Power of Complete Web Monitoring recently published by O'Reilly.

Last week, we helped out our friends at Visible Government with their Beers for Canada campaign. In the end, the campaign raised just over $1,000 in two days; donations will help open government data to citizens and promote transparency in public offices. We learned a lot about what did and didn’t work, and in the interests of transparency, we thought we’d share some of the lessons we learned along the way (and see if we can collect some ideas for next time.)

How it worked

A week before Canada Day (July 1) we built and tested a simple site that encouraged donors to “buy their country a beer” — basically making a donation. We told a few key bloggers and Twitter personalities about it beforehand; then, on June 30, we started talking about it online. We continued to mention it, and amplified what others were saying, until midday on July 2.

From the outset, this was a short-term campaign built around a single day. We did this to give it urgency and purpose. We chose to start talking on June 30 because so many people were out the office (and away from their computers) on the holiday itself. But it’s important to realize the differences between a short-term campaign (minimal upfront work, strong word of mouth, modest goals, and real-time virality through Twitter) and a longer one. The timeframe also meant that most blog coverage only hit on July 1st (and thanks to all the bloggers who covered us!)

What worked? What didn’t? What would we have changed? Here’s a quick list.

What worked?

While this was our first Twitter campaign, we did manage to get some things right. Here‘s what worked:

• We built analytics into the process. We used bit.ly (to track viral spread), Google Analytics (for goal conversions), Paypal audit accounts (to see donation amounts) and Clicky (for real-time web analytics.) Clicky is essential for short-term campaigns because it provides minute-by-minute visitor information, whereas most analytics tools only show traffic daily.
• We made the action obvious. We had one simple goal for people to accomplish on the donation site: donate. We even broke it into three different tiers (beer, pitcher, and round) to make it straightforward.
• We didn’t build it all ourselves. We used Paypal for donations; while it has its issues, it’s also a well-known and trusted brand, and we seem respectable by association. We also used free services like Google Groups and Clicky. This means we didn’t need to code too much.
• We set up tracking with hashtags and keyword searches. This meant we could watch the activity online and amplify it or respond to questions.
• We had plenty of ways for people to reach us. We had links to the Visible Government website, and generated enquiries there. We also linked to the Google Group discussion, which added new members and triggered conversations.
• We had a great cause. The simple fact is that without a decent motive, you won’t have much success. People felt they were doing their civic duty by mentioning us, which helped spread. If your cause isn’t just, people will feel icky promoting it.
• We tested it a lot. Even though we didn’t find every mistake, the launch was surprisingly smooth because we verified it properly and used real infrastructure (from our friends at Syntenic.)
• We had a simple, catchy message. “Buy your country a beer” was strangely patriotic, and people liked it. Made To Stick is the bible for clear, simple messages. Early on in the design process, we were tempted to overload the message–something like, “Buy your country a beer and promote open interactions between federal government and Canadian citizens.” That wouldn’t have worked because it wasn’t simple. But “buy your country a beer” is intriguing. Remember that the tagline’s purpose is to provoke interest. Once you’ve got someone’s attention you can do things with it.
• Set up Reddit, Digg, and other social news aggregators. We put badges on the Beers For Canada website encouraging people to Digg us and promote us on other social news aggregators. This made it easy for people to support us and spread the word.
• We set the right kinds of goals up front. How do you know you won if you don’t know where the finish line is? One of the first things we did was set goals for the campaign. We wanted to see donations, of course, but we also wanted to see unique visits to the Beers for Canada site and how many went further to the Visible Government site. When we started we had no idea how the campaign would do so we focused less on numbers (500$ or 5,000 site visits) and more on what we wanted to achieve (visibility and engagement.)
• We used calendar meetings to remind promoters. This was a neat trick. When we asked people to mention us online, we sent them a calendar invite as a reminder. This way we knew when they’d do it, and since most of the people we asked had an iPhone or a Blackberry, they could do it from wherever they were–particularly important on a holiday (though as you’ll see below, in hindsight we could have spread those out more over a longer period of time.)

What did we learn?

Here are some of the lessons we’ve learned, and the things we’d have done differently.

Beforehand, in the planning phase:

• A short timeframe limits others’ ability to build online context about you. When you’re running a fundraiser, people want context. It’s a catch-22: If you do something quick and spontaneous, you’ll build excitement and mystery, but you won’t have the time to inform bloggers and the press about what you’re doing far enough in advance for them to provide details and perspectives. If you tell bloggers too soon, you lose the excitement.
• Plan out your whole message before you send the first tweet.We carefully crafted website copy but didn’t think enough about who would tweet what, when. In a real-time campaign, your copywriting isn’t done when you publish the site. It’s constant, and it needs to be planned.
• Schedule things, and have a single coordinator for the life of the campaign. At noon on June 30th, one of us put out our first tweet–and forgot to use the bit.ly URL that would track the spread of the campaign. This would have been avoided by having an initial schedule, and then having a single person adjust that schedule as things progressed and feedback came back from the analytics tools and the campaign. You simply can’t assume that ’someone’ will do it.
• Be transparent and obvious. Make sure the people affiliated with the campaign are clearly identified. I was personally thanking a lot of our supporters but my connection to either the campaign or Visible Government was not clear since it was coming from my personal account. Not only does this keep your campaign transparent it help you build you reputation and social capital making it more likely you will get those people back for a donation. One possibility would have been to temporarily change our avatars to include a visual cue–like the Visible Government maple leaf–for all those officially behind the campaign.
• Have a clear call to action. The website was pretty blunt about donations. We set it up, then told the world. What we quickly realized was that the Tweets themselves–not just the website–needed to be clear what we were asking people to do. Were we asking people just to tell their friends? To donate money? To watch the hashtag? To visit the site and learn more? In Twitter’s 140 characters, there’s only room for one call to action. You need to tell people what to do and make it easy for them to do it.
• Facebook is for slow burn, Twitter is for ADD. Twitter’s like speed dating: you see something, and quickly decide if you want more. By contrast, Facebook favors a groundswell of support: as more and more of your friends like something, you do too. The duration of your campaign affects which social networks you’ll rely on. We shouldn’t have wasted time on Facebook for a campaign of this duration.
• Define analytics goals better. We didn’t take the time to implement goal funnels within the system, which was a shame. What’s more, referral URLs are useless in a world where many Twitter users rely on Tweetdeck, Seesmic Desktop, or the Twitter client on their Blackberry or iPhone. To address this, we should have segmented shortened URLs using Google’s URL builder to inject metadata into the shortened URLs so we’d get a better idea of visitor source.

During the campaign:

• Personal claims of action work best. Megabloggers like Tim O’Reilly, Om Malik, Austin Hill, Michael Geist, Tara Hunt, Mathew Ingram and others generated a ton of traffic and awareness. But the messages that generated the most donations–rather than just visits–were those where the RT testified to an action. Someone who said “I just bought a round - you should too” generated far more actual donations than someone who just said, “check this out”.
• Have an FAQ–and update it. We drafted an initial FAQ that had lots of information in it, as well as links to Visible Government. We were able to direct people here if they had questions. But we were missing certain pieces of information (for example, why donations weren’t tax deductible) and took too long to respond to questions and update the FAQ.
• Vary the message. Tweets about hashtag visualizations showing campaign growth, mentioning who was blogging about us, and retweeting others all kept the dialogue going, but they were done ad hoc and should have been better planned.
• You only get one chance to make an impression. We live in an information-starved world. People will only click on a link once unless they think there’s new news. So if your first message says, “check this out,” they will. If after that you say, “donate to this cause” they’re less likely to: they’ve already seen it. Only when there’s new information–”50 people have bought their country a beer”–will the audience consider revisiting things.
• Make the site interactive. If we’d provided people with somewhere to comment or share their thoughts–or even to suggest how the donations should be used–we’d have had more raw material for the campaign and could play back these comments to the online community that was discussing it. This also gives people a reason to check back and see how the discussion is progressing. Again, with a 36-hour campaign, this may be a lot more effort than you’re willing to expend, but we might have been able to use a Subreddit or some other already-built system.
• Spread your messages over time. Lots of people agreed to help spread the message, but it happened all at once and the initial message quickly lost traction. It would have been far more effective to have one person mention us, then let the second person tell the world all the great things that happened after the first mention, and so on. By firing all of our guns at once, we didn’t let the message “snowball” and build on existing momentum. A campaign like this needs lots of ’seeds’ to get the message out.
• Give donors a way to tell others automatically. We made it possible for people to tweet the site from a link on the site. But we should have had an option, selected by default, that made a tweet saying, “I just bought the country a beer and you can too.” This should have included a different shortened URL or analytics link, so we could differentiate first-visit traffic from viral donor traffic.
• Respond in person. You can’t plan for everything so make sure you are ready to answer any questions both publicly and promptly. Also, thank people for their donations — but respect their privacy; if you can thank them through direct messages, great. If they made a sizeable donation, you can acknowledge it by saying, “someone just donated $100″ (or in our case, “someone just bought the country a round.”) Don’t single out donors publicly as they may not want the attention.
• Keep people updated. If you’re tracking donations, tell people about the progress. Celebrate big donations or interesting blogs. The more you can show people that others are doing things, the more engaged they’ll be. Appeal to their inner lemming. We could have build a dashboard for statistics (donations, reddit ranking, retweet count, page views, etc.) We did discuss the amount of transparency we wanted (which is ironic for a transparent government initiative.) The real dilemma here is that you need to wait until the news is newsworthy. If we’d said, “hey, we have a total of $14 donated!” people would have discounted the success of the campaign.

After the campaign:

• Have a next step. There’s a lot of positive sentiment about Visible Government now. We have some great ideas for how to use the money, including the forthcoming Code for Canada contest and an initiative to get computer science students to develop transparency applications. It’d be great if we had this ready to discuss when the campaign ended, because it would allow us to continue and amplify the engagement that the campaign generated. Plus, it’d let people feel good about what they’ve done. In other words, every campaign is part of a bigger picture of long-term connection with donors, markets, and audiences.

The results

Even though we didn’t focus on the numbers too much this time around, we still set some goals so we’d know what we were measuring. Not only did this give us a measure of success it helped evaluate the experience as a whole and focus us to come up with these lessons. We could clearly look at graphs and numbers and say “Yup. Nobody talked about us for over 4 hours,” and then wonder why.

• Viral spread versus megablogger attention. This campaign was promoted almost entirely on Twitter and using our personal and professional networks to spread the word. We were fortunate enough to have some really influential people blog and tweet about it. But we didn’t see the viral growth among others’ networks that we’d have liked.
• Conversion funnels and donations. Though tens of thousands of people read the tweets (these people have over a million followers collectively!), we only saw 1,642total visits, but that translated to about $1,000 in donations. Conversion rates were less than 0.2%, which we attribute in part to the passive message we used at first. In other words, the tone of the campaign emphasized attention (”visit this page”) over conversion (”please donate”).
• Attention generated. Our bounce rate — the number of people who saw one page, then left — was only 51%, which is great: over 25% of visitors wanted to learn more about the campaign. What’s more, Visible Government saw a huge spike in attention. Compared to the previous week traffic spiked by 300%! We also have several conversations with the press underway as a result of the campaign.

In the end this was a quick-and-dirty campaign that raised some well-deserved money and got good visibility on a national scale. Along the way, we learned a lot about campaigning in a digital world, particularly one based on real-time word of mouth.

Now we want to hear from you. What’s worked for you before? What else should we consider for next time? What did we do wrong?

[Disclosure: Rednod’s Alistair Croll is on the board of directors of Visible Government]

What are the best Twitter measurement tools and how are you using them?

"Watching Websites" a presentation covering the book "Complete Web Monitoring" - Podcamp Toronto PCTO09

View more presentations from Alistair croll and sean power .

I finally had the pleasure of meeting Sean Power at SXSW (he's the guy in the orange hat).  He's an example of one of my loose ties strengthened through online social networks.   It's also an example of how online social networks can connect you to people in your professional area who may not have met and open the door to valuable informal learning.

Let me explain.

I connected with Sean via Twitter when I was researching tools and techniques for listening and ROI.  I asked a question on Twitter and he answered.   He introduced me (virtually via Twitter) to Alistair Croll, co-author of their forthcoming book called "Watching Websites," a deep dive into web metrics and monitoring.

I've been thinking about how you measure what your organization does on Twitter.   Given Sean's and Alistair's knowledge in this area, we engaged in a couple of really useful "micro" chats on Twitter about different measurement tools.  Alistair suggested a taxonomy.  So, one thing led to another and we starting batting around some ideas, along with my very smart colleague, Rachel Weidinger

A disclaimer.   If you're looking at measuring or improving your strategy via Twitter, you'd start with your objectives first and identify key metrics.  Then look at the tools.   I'm starting with the tools because I want to better understand the options.  Later, I hope to circle back and look at the tools in context with actual Twitter use by a nonprofit (anyone have any great stories?)

Here's a first draft and by no means complete:

Who's Talking 

• Individual (a single Twitter user)

Ranking: Follower, following, message volume
Behavior: When do they Tweet?
Relationships on Twitter: Who do they know/interact with
Relationships off Twitter: Whose influence bleeds past Twitter?
  

• Aggregate (a Twitter user's followers or friends)

Scoring: Most/Least Active
Social Network Analysis: What are the relationships between people who I follow or friends

What are they Saying?

Volume:  Line graphs, Ranking, Hashtags
Sentiment: Language parsing (tag clouds)
Keyword association: Topics   

Where are they saying it?
Geomaps

   

When are they saying it?
Trends over time
Seasonality, Outside influences,
Building up/ Wearing Away of relationships

So what tools are out there?  What can they measure w/Twitter?  We got as far as listing the places where Twitter tools are aggregated:

Twitter Apps Wiki
Twitter Apps That Give You Insight
WeareMedia Toolbox: Twitter
Laurie Lee Dooley's Delicious List
Brian Solis: Twitter Tools for Community
ComMetrics: 100 Best Twitter Tools

The next step is identify the best ones for measurement.  I'd love some nonprofit examples.   How are you measuring or tracking your Twitter strategy?   What tools are you using?   How are you applying the insights you glean?

New Twitter Tool Mailana Helps Me Visualize Strong Ties In My Network

To see Mailana live map

Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote a piece called "The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Heros" using a tool developer Pete Warden's service Mailana.   The tool is quite fascinating because it combines a light weight social network analysis (see this page to learn more about the methodology) of your twitter friends with search.

Marshall's post will shows the top five people I'm having conversations with on Twitter and who respond to me:

1. Marnie Webb is the co-CEO at Compumentor/TechSoup. You should get to know Marnie; once you do you'll wonder why you waited so long.
2. Amy Gahran, see Jeffrey Levy's list above. Gahran has a lot of conversation with a lot of awesome people.
3. Jonathon D. Colman does SEO for REI.
4. Beth Dunn is a consultant and MBA candidate.
5. Dr. Mani is an Indian entrepreneur and heart surgeon.

I don't understand by @ntenhross (Holly Ross, Director of NTEN) and @amyrsward (Netsquared community builder) aren't in my cloud. I think it's because they're not in the malina database, but you should follow them.  There's lots of friends in my network that you explore.  Here's a mosaic:

Get your twitter mosaic here.

What's interesting to me is looking at my map and identifying sub-communities or spokes and hubs.  They identify different nooks and crannies of my network.  For example, I can clearly see the Aussies I met or connected with as part of my trip to teach there last year. (Those folks are:@silkcharm, @dnwallace, @edwardharran and @divabat).  I can see in this inner circle at least 8 or 9 hubs.

Speaking of Austraila, I also met Gary P Hayes after I session I attended at the Sydney Writers Festival.   He left a comment pointing to an excellent post called "Twitter Long Tail - Broadcastization & Pre-Twitter Reputation."  The post is chocked fulled of statistical anaylsis answering this questions:

Ever since I joined Twitter (GaryPHayes) I have been fascinated by the subtle ‘etiquette’ of being followed, following and timely updates (as well as the enormous growth and creative potential twitter now affords). It is also interesting watching those traditional media brands and celebrities with a non-twitter and web 2.0 online reputation enter into the fray. What effect do they have? Do they corrupt this young new channel before it has found it’s own feet or is the invasion of old brands and celebs part of its maturation?

I can also click on a map of someone in my network, KDPaine, for example, and see who her inner circle is.  I can also search by keyword and she who she talks to about that.  For example, I searched KD Paine's map on the word "metrics"  Presumbly, because these people are talking to KD Paine (and she is responding) and the tweets contain the word "metrics" - these might be people I'd want to connect with because I'm interested in this topic.

1.		jasonfalls
2.		kanter
3.		serena
4.		silkcharm
5.		curtmonash
6.		thornley
7.		mcp85
8.		dough
9.		andrewcherwenka

There's something just a little bit creepy about this.  While we've opted to have all these conversations in public, the tools let people track more granular information about you - who you talk to and what you talk about it.  

What's your takeaway from this tool?  How would you use it?  Do you think it raises some privacy and security concerns?

SXSW: Social Media Nonprofit ROI Poetry Slam - Slides, Links, and Poems (long)

SXSW Poetry Slam Slides

View more presentations from kanter.

Today, I am moderating a panel at SXSW about Social Media Nonprofit ROI in the format of a poetry slam.   The panel will be in room 18BCD at 5: 00 PM.   The description:

What works and rhymes? A creative report on non-profits, social media, and effective ROIs delivered as poetry slam and expertly judged including interactive crowd participation. Come measure success.

This post includes all the links and additional ROI resources that will be mentioned or discussed during the session.   I'm writing this post for the benefit of our "Twitter Backchannel Moderators" who will be live tweeting the panel and posting these URLs to Twitter.  To follow the Twitter stream or ask questions or make comments, use the #ROI hashtag.

Who knew that there were poets on Twitter?  One of them @peoppenheimer  was kind enough to critic and help my own poem's meter and rhyme!  Thanks!

Session Content

1. Introduction by Beth Kanter

Poem

Welcome!  At the SXSW Nonprofit Poetry Slam
Four brave panelists will cram
Their ROI stories into five minutes time
And present their Powerpoint slides in rhyme

Expert judges will listen and let it rip
and share many a metrics and measurement tip
Our expert judges will impress
sharing their wisdom in five minutes or less

Dear audience you will also have a turn
Don't just sit back and passively learn
Ask questions, make comments, share your expertise
Use this twitter hashtag as your mouthpiece
Should you want to stand up in Q/A and recite
a Social Media Nonprofit ROI poem, we'll hand you the mic

So, listen geeks and you will hear
How these four nonprofits persevere
to apply David Armano's listen, learn, and adapt
KD Paine's measure, calculate, and map
to their twitter, blog, youtube, or facebook app
Best of all, their managers don't think social media's crap

They made their directors understand
How social media improves their brand
extends their programs and services too
They will share this in poetic form like haiku
or limericks, rap or spoken word
giving you insights you never heard

So now you know the format of the panel
and how to participate in the backchannel
It's time to introduce our judges, moderators, and presenters
For the next hour, they be our mentors

Our backchannel moderators will scan and flag
any questions or comments that use the hashtag
they'll toss urls into the twitter stream
so extra meaning the audience can glean
Moderators in the front row
please stand up and wave hello

Our judges are experts in what they do
Now, I'm going to introduce them to you

First we have the queen of measurement, KD Paine
Who knows more about the topic than anyone can claim
All hail to the measurement queen
Put her blog url in the twitter stream

Our next judge is Holly Ross
She's the nonprofit technology boss
Oh my god, take a look
She just published this new book

Geoff Livingston is judge number three
He is an expert in social media strategy

And now I'll introduce our presenters one by one

First up is Danielle Brigida, NWF's Social Media Maven
She will tell her story spoofing Poe's, The Raven

Carie Lewis from the Humane Society is next up
Her poem is about a photo contest featuring cute pups

Our third presenter is Wendy Harman, from the American Red Cross
Inspired by Dr. Seuss she gets her points across

David Neff who speaks to the beat of a drum
shares how social media leads to some income

And, now it's time to get started with our great fun
Let's hear poem number one

2.   The Return by Danielle Brigida, NWF

NWF Description of Case Study

While strategy plays an important role within the National Wildlife Federation, initially it was very hard to determine one for our social media presences. Social media brought instant returns but many of them fell within categories that aren't quantifiable. However, what we discovered was that social media (once internally accepted and acknowledged) could truly compliment and improve engagement with our programs. The example I talk about in the poem covers the initial use of NWF's twitter accounts and then continues to how we actually starting using it to improve and grow one of our programs- "wildlife watch". http://www.nwf.org/wildlifewatch

Not only that, but it shows how we took our return from this experiment and placed it within the programs website to show more dynamic content and interaction possibilities.

NWF's Twitter presence has grown because while I want NWF to still serve as the roll-up account for all of the programs, I wanted to give a chance to some of the program managers to create friendships with Twitter users from their specific audience. http://www.twitter.com/wildlife_watch is a great example of this. While we have a number or random staff also creating relationships with people that are interested in what they do, the programs allow for a very specific audience to collect information about what they are most interested in.

Poem: The Return by Danielle Brigida, NWF

Once upon a non-profit theory, measurement was weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious meetings with little to account for,
While I nodded, nearly napping, an idea for a strategy came a tapping,
What if measurement could include social interactions and what they stand for?
I shall investigate - I muttered - to know what ROI could account for
Instantly I knew, this was something I must explore

Ah, distinctly I remember, I wanted the opinion of a member,
Because it is each separate inspiring member, That I do wildlife justice for
So I tweeted, questions and links, to see what each member thinks
But from my stats surcease of sorrow, I realized - some things you can’t keep score
Aside from rare and radiant traffic spikes, there was nothing traditional to record
I thought this it is, and nothing more.

It was our executive VP who had unfounded belief in me,
Thrilled me filled me with fantastic insight I’d never known before;
So that now, to still the ADD of my moving mind, she stood repeating
"Remember at NWF it's revenue, reach and engagement that we push for
Keep this is mind for what you measure - for this is all I will implore
Only this and nothing more.

Suddenly, my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
You sure? said I, for Madam, truly it's a return hard to account for
But the fact was I kept tracking, never loafing, never slacking
And so slightly traffic came tapping, tapping on my website door,
I used listening to confirm I saw it - then I recorded to be sure
Not just linkbacks here but something more.

Deep into the analytics peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing
Listening, and dreaming dreams no marketer ever dared to dream before
Instead of traditional ROI abounding, I saw something even more astounding
And the only thing I could think was How can I measure engagement more?
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word "explore"
Merely this and nothing more.

Back into my cubicle turning, all the questions within me burning,
Soon again I started tweeting more strategically than before.
'Surely,' said I, 'surely there's a chance for program assistance;
Let me see then, a potential instance, and this mystery explore -
Let my mind be still a moment and this mystery explore; -
'Tis a test and nothing more!'

Wildlife watch - an idea release, it holds the key engagement piece,
For people who spot all from crickets to geese, can use twitter to tweet
With NWF as the hash tag; Wildlife sightings perhaps would not lag; (for all to brag?)
Updates made by phones to twitter, are searched more easily than before -
Searched using Twitter Search with no URL to look for -
Perhaps with this we will engage more.

With the wildlife we're compiling, We could keep the scientists smiling,
And lose the grave and stern decorum that was our storytelling before,
'Though tweets are short and fitted,' I said, we'll increase the total submitted
Ghastly grim and empty forums we'll be faced with nevermore!
Tell me what thy wildlife name is on the twitter feed-but be sure!
Share the findings, 'forever more.'

Then, methought, the air grew denser, social media had no censor
There were still those unbelieving, even worse were those misperceiving
That Twitter was the answer to all their programs' problems evermore. 
`At last,' they cried, `thy God hath lent thee -- social media -- the angel -- sent thee
Traffic, comments, tweets and other means of engagement to record.
Yet it is important to remember, that goals determine the ROI accounted for
Forget this, `Nevermore.'

So there I was, sitting lonely needing support, but thinking only,
For Social media change we needed to move past communication days of yore
A little birdy told the web team "We should use a twitter stream"
And the idea, instead of dying was kept alive and continued flying
Till I found myself crying `Wow this is much easier than before -
With Twitter, Facebook, Digg and Stumbleupon gone are the days forgotten lore.
Doubting social media, `Nevermore.'

Though I feel the time spent disputing could be better spent recruiting
On the social sites that are intuitively fantastic for good rapport
It is my job to continue thinking how to keep goals and return from sinking
But trying to pinpoint every intangible value is simply uncalled for
Though I love data, traditional numbers are so far from social media at it's core
It's the relationships I adore

As for complete measurement, we're still waiting, we're still waiting
And anxiously anticipating metrics that assign value even more;
And my hopes have all the seeming of a marketer still dreaming,
That my efforts not in vain, will yield intangibles and metrics all the same
And that all the hours invested carefully will open future media doors
This I hope and so much more.

Links

Wildlife Watch: http://www.nwf.org/wildlifewatch/
Wildlife Watch Twitter:http://www.nwf.org/wildlifewatch/Twitter.aspx
My twitter feed: http://www.twitter.com/starfocus
NWF's Twitter feed: http://www.twitter.com/nwf
NWF's Staff on Twitter: http://blogs.nwf.org/arctic_promise/2009/01/nwfs-staff-on-twitter.html
Hashtags: http://www.hashtags.org "search #nwf"

3.   Carie Lewis, Humane Society of the US

Carie's poem is about the Humane Society's experiments with photo contests and how to use metrics to improve your social media strategy.

How Do You Measure Success: Dollars or Doggie Treats?
Spay Day Photo Contest Page
LOL Seals

4.   Wendy Harman, Red Cross

Wendy will share a story about how they used metrics to refine their social media strategy for their Online Disaster News Room

Presentation Key Points

• set goals:
  • decrease number of incoming media calls
  • increase transparency about disaster response
  • disclose “process” of responding to disasters
  • offer real-time valuable information for people affected and their families
  • offer reliable situational awareness 

• set audience
  • media: local and national
  • affected people
  • affected people’s families and friends in other areas
  • general disaster-interested public 

• picked tools
  • wordpress bc of ease of publishing. Can teach field to use. Has rss capability. Has tagging and category capability so media can subscribe to only what they’re interested in receiving.
  • Flickr bc have established presence there and can cross post for bigger influence. Everyone likes photos.
  • Utterli bc often our volunteers only have a phone and no computer or internet access. Utterli lets them use phone to tell us stories about their process. 

• launched pilot program in 2007 to see if it worked
  • looked at site views and hits. Yes we did
  • looked at incoming links and rate of growth. Analyzed which types of content generated most activity
  • asked media partners if it was useful and what we should add or take away. We made adjustments
  • asked our chapters if it was valuable to them in telling their story and getting info out, made adjustments based on their feedback 

• analyzed overall progress against original goals
  • saw increased press for each disaster based on newsroom
  • saw exponentially increased hits and links for each disaster
  • saw increased field engagement
  • saw that we were recreating the wheel each time and needed to adjust to one URL
  • saw decrease in time spent handling media calls (and those that did keep coming could be easily solved with a “have you checked our disaster online newsroom?”
  • saw increase in understanding the process of responding to a massive disaster, which means fewer negative stories about how we’re not there quick enough or not handing out enough money.
  • Collected hundreds of “thanks” from people affected via Twitter and regular channels saying the info we provided on newsroom helped them navigate their situation better.
  • Gained lots of social media fans. Can invite them to engage with us on our other platforms and by subscribing to our email program. 

• Looking forward
  • Trained 100 disaster response volunteers in submitting their info, improving content
  • Brought in experts like Andy Carvin to advise us
  • Brought in experts from mainstream media to advise us
  • Moved to single URL 

• Goals 2.0
  • Move disaster online newsroom to prominent redcross.org position
  • Change design to mimic look and feel of official site
  • Move from huge disasters only to documenting daily disasters such as home fires
  • Teach chapters to document their own disasters on their own newsrooms so we can aggregate a national picture of data of how much the org does in a day when you won’t hear a word about it. Goal to lead to increased sustained donations rather than episodic giving, increased understanding.
    

Wendy's Poem is a spoof on Dr. Seuss's One Fish, Two Fish.

INTRO

One ROI, two ROI, red ROI, blue ROI
Black ROI green ROI, old ROI, new ROI

This project might take its toll, but then again it might have soul…
Say …. It’s hard to prove social media’s role.

Yes!

Some goals are talking and some are listening.
Some are energizing and some are embracing.

Sometimes you have numbers and sometimes you fudge.

Why?

I do not know, go ask the judges!

SET GOALS

We hoped to show the underbelly
Of what it’s like to respond to disasters smelly
So everyone can understand
The stuff that comes as a surprise and the stuff that’s planned.

We wanted less calls and to show our vols
Because the vols are juggling lots of disaster balls.

We wanted to share what we’re doing much quicker
And as a kicker to have a spot for aggregated info. It’s slicker. 

 

WHY USE SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS

From there to here and here to there,
The Red Cross wanted one place to update response info from everywhere.

 

Social media tools made it easy
To do just this when the wind gets breezy.

 

DEFINE THE AUDIENCE

We thought media would like to see. And people affected and their families.
Oh me oh my. What a lot of audiences came by.
Some have influence, some need sustenance, some are curious and some need assurance.
Where do they come from? I can’t say but I bet they’ve come a long long way.
We see them come and see them go. Some are fast and some are slow.
Some are high and some are low. Not one of them is like another.
Don’t ask me why. Go ask your brother.

DEFINE the METRICS

Say, let’s define our metrics. 1, 2, 3. Where do we want our newsroom to be?

1, 2, 3, 4 …..  5, 6, 7,  …….  8, 9, 10,

Our benchmarks are 11.

11? Social media is something new. Hits and page views just won’t do.

Try, try, try. Did you ever try before you buy?

We tried a guide with just one disaster at a time.

We looked at growing views and hits, from one to the next.

We looked at incoming links and popular subjects.

We asked media partners about their use and what we should add or take away.

We changed to suit them along the way.

We asked social media experts what we could do better

And we altered how we arranged our letters.

We asked our chapters if it helped them get info out

They say the newsroom increased their clout and helped them understand what social media is all about.

CHOOSE the TOOLS

What are my tools? We chose the following jewels

Wordpress is the main platform and fuel.

Flickr helps us to show the story. We cross post from our presence there and illustrate our response in all its glory.

Utterli is for the ears. Makes it easy for you to hear real time updates from our volunteers.

We’d be nowhere without the volunteers. They’re full of info, blood, sweat, and tears.

ANALYZE PROGRESS

Where to go from here? We look at what we’ve accomplished and cheer.

We analyze what went right and whether we fulfilled our original goals almost or quite.

We like our newsroom and this is why. It does all the work when the piles get high.

Hello there success, how do you do?

Tell me, tell, me, what is new?

Well, we got thousands of mentions by press

And many hundreds linked to us I must confess.

Our own chapters learned the newsroom address

We asked everyone is this valuable and useful?

Their answer was yes! Yes! Yes!

It isn’t perfect. We have room to grow.

By watching the pilot program flow.

We moved from multiple to a single URL

So we can begin to document not just big disasters but also small.

We had enough positive feedback from our tryout

That we’ve decided to go all out.

We’ve trained volunteers by the hundreds

So we’re increasing the quality of the content from our embeds.

CONCLUSION

So we tried a little experiment

To see if we had an accident or accomplishment

We collected qualitative and quantitative evidences

Evaluated them against our expected consequences.

We found our challenges and successes

We continue to change and grow and press

All the while measuring and analyzing and treasuring.

1 ROI, 2 ROI Red ROI Blue ROI

Full of actual numbers and intangibles

Now I look forward to your reply.

Disaster Online Newsroom
http://newsroom.redcross.org

Blog
http://blog.redcross.org

Twitter
http://twitter.com/redcross 

Facebook Page
http://www.facebook.com/redcross

Flickr Group
http://www.flickr.com/groups/americanredcross/ 

YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/user/AmRedCross

5.   David Neff, American Cancer Society

David will be perform a spoken word and video poem about using Twitter to recruit blood donors and the Austin Twestival.

Poem

When I am in a cinematography state of mind,
my words can open the eyes of the blind

Im going to use verbs that ya'll might never have heard but don't be scared
let my words flow over you like a wave. Social Media is not old Media
foot in the grave.

It's just another channel, another avenue, another street.
Social Media helps your campaign bounce to a different beat
Makes your campaign quite l33t

You see Communities Listen, Communities respond, To them
your word is bond.

Austin is no different. Motivated volunteers have an event. Doesn't
cost your non profit a mint. Twitter crowd rolls through. Donating
and bringing there whole crew.

Social Media for Social Good

Communities Listen, Communities Respond. To them your volunteer
word is bond.

DJ BETH DO YOUR THING <VIDEO ROLLS>

Now Communities Listen, Communities Respond. To them your non profit
word is bond

DJ BETH DO YOUR THING <VIDEO ROLLS>

Social Media for Social Good

This is the last big mistake your non profit could make
if you don't try you won't succeed. Between the Social
Media lines you must read.

I'm about to bail. I don't have time for the fail whale.
My time is already a mess. I hope I have explained this
all in 140 characters or less.

Links

http://austin.socialmediaclub.com/2008/07/02/tweetup-blood-drive/

http://www.wearemedia.org/tactical+track+module+4

http://austin.socialmediaclub.com/2008/07/05/blood-drive-tweetup-a-success/

http://austin.twestival.com/

http://austintwestival.com/

http://www.fispace.org/2009/01/twestival-2009-even-the-fail-whale-needs-clean-water/

If you were in the room or not, and have some great examples or resources about nonprofit social media and roi - drop them in the comments!

Now I know why Technorati ranking hasn't changed in months!

One of the metrics that bloggers track is "Authority" or the number of blogs linking to a blog within the last six months. The higher the number, the greater the level of Authority a blog earns.  Most bloggers use the Technorati index to benchmark authority ranking.

The last six months, my Technorati rank has been the same, I have not moved the needle.  I thought Technorati might be busted or maybe the Technorati monster escaped.  Or maybe, gasp, I'm doing something wrong.   But in post on Techcrunch, Brian Solis explains.  The post is called  "Are Blogs Losing Their Authority to the Statusphere?" and a must-read. (hat tip Geoff Livingston)

It goes back to the definition of authority. Links from blogs are no longer the only measurable game in town. Potentially valuable linkbacks are increasingly shared in micro communities and social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed and they are detouring attention and time away from formal blog responses.

As the social Web and new services continue the migration and permeation into everything we do online, attention is not scalable. Many refer to this dilemma as attention scarcity or continuous partial attention (CPA) - an increasingly thinning state of focus. It’s affecting how and what we consume, when, and more importantly, how we react, participate and share. That something is forever vying for our attention and relentlessly pushing us to do more with less driven by the omnipresent fear of potentially missing what’s next.

We are learning to publish and react to content in “Twitter time” and I’d argue that many of us are spending less time blogging, commenting directly on blogs, or writing blogs in response to blog sources because of our active participation in micro communities.

I've noticed this myself.  This leaves an issue of how do you measure authority.   Brian poses the question as:

Will we need a separate Technorati-type index for measuring the authority of content publishers on Twitter and other micro-media in their own right? Of course we do.

He does mention a couple of tools that can help you measure influence:

• Backtype
• Twinfluence
• Retweetist
• Tweetbacks

He goes on to describe a new tool that will debut at SXSW

Klout will debut a new service that helps bloggers and content publishers measure Link Authority and a conversation index by tracking the frequency of shared URLs tied to the weighted stature of those sharing them compared to other links shared during the same time frame. The service will eventually provide a foundation to compare source URLs ranked within the service over time.

Hmm .. Lots of think about on the plane ride down to Austin.

What's Your Social Media Baseline?

Photo by Caveman92223

I'm enjoying how Robin Broitman aggregate links about social media. Take her ROI and Measurement list. (I've definitely added that link to my social media metrics personal learning space)

She recently pointed to a blog post called "Ten Ways To Measure Social Media Success" by Chris Lake.  What I found most valuable was the tip about getting a baseline measurement before you begin.  A baseline is a measurement that you can use as a comparison to measure progress against a goal or do before/after comparisons.  Chris suggests:

Before you start the clock it is a good idea to benchmark where you’re at...

1. Make a note of the obvious numbers (number of Facebook fans, Twitter followers, Digg links, Delicious bookmarks, and referrals from social media sites, plus existing website traffic).
2. Make a note of the less obvious benchmarks (such as SEO rankings and referrals, customer satisfaction scores and other business data). 
3. Make a note of ROI benchmarks. How much are you paying to acquire customers via other marketing channels? How vast is that advertising budget, and how is it being split up? And what proportion is being directed into channels that you cannot accurately measure? 
   

There is a comment in the post from Dan McQuillan who has been mulling over measurement of social media from the nonprofit perspective.  His post "The Apollo and Dionysus of digital evaluation" talks about finding the right mashup between numbers and stories using mythology metaphors.  

What's the technique that converts the Apollonian distancing of neatly printed tables to the DionysianSavvy Chavvy - then, maybe, it'll be pretty clear what's working and what the impact really is. celebration of shared sensations of change? I think one of the consultants at the CES session cracked it when she said that the lab coats of traditional expert evaluation were starting to give way to self-evaluation and user-led evaluation. Maybe what makes the difference is not just the social media but the people who's hands it's in - when the cameras are held by the young people (as they have been at some Make Your Mark events), where users are making the podcasts and the online communities are as self-managed as as Savvy Chavvy - then, maybe, it'll be pretty clear what's working and what the impact really is.

Dan points over to the Measurment Camp Wiki that I need to explore further.

Riffing on David Armano's Listen, Learn, and Adapt: Need Your Organization's Adaption Stories!

Listen Learn Adapt

View more presentations from kanter. (tags: listening roi)

These is a rough cut where I've riffed on some of the ideas in David Armano's "The Collective Focus Group:Listen, Learn, and Adapt" and extended them to nonprofits and social media.  I was inspired  wondered how and if it might translate to nonprofits and social media.  I think that listen, learn, and adapt is the secret sauce to social media strategy success!  Now say that five times fast!  

What I need is your input -I'd love to hear about your social media "adaption stories" - please leave me a comment.

I think "Return on Insight" can co-exist with traditional "Return on Investment" approaches for social media, not replace it.   More on that later.

I'm also using this for the upcoming WeAreMedia Workshop in San Francisco which has a section on experiments and measurement.  I'm also doing a session at the NTC in April called "Mapping Metrics To Strategy: Using Measurement To Improve Your Social Media Efforts" with panelists Wendy Harman, Red Cross, Qui Diaz, Livingston Communications, Danielle Brigida, NWF, and Susan Granger, PDF.  

Listening

Listening is knowing what is being said online about your organization and your field.  Listening is the first step, but you do it before, during, and after the project.  In other words, you never take your listening ears off.  It becomes part of your organization's culture. 

It can be hard to retool an organization's culture to do listening as a daily part of the work flow, particularly if it isn't valued or there are concerns about negatives.

The Red Cross has overcome these hurdles.   They use social media to achieve goals of increased transparency and increased donations of blood, time, and money.  In that order.   Listening is an important piece of the strategy.  This was over two years ago.

As Wendy Harman, Red Cross Social Media Manager, observes, "When Katrina hit, we knew people are talking but we’re not listening to conversation. First, it felt like we were going to do battle.  But now, the process of listening has changed concerns into strong interest about what people have to say."
 
The first project was to listen to what was being said on blogs about the Red Cross.  As the chief listener for the organization, Wendy honed her listening literacy skills using free tools like google alerts, technorati, RSS reader, and delicious.  She would listen, aggregate, analyze, and distribute to key subject matter experts within the organization on a consistent basis.

Listening leads to engagement.  Wendy documented many different stories and shared these internally. The examples would show how engaging with people changed them from complainers to fans.  Here's but one example from a blogger:

“I took an American Red Cross class I thought was less than satisfactory. […] Someone found my blog post and told the local chapter director. He called me to talk about it honestly. […] They care about me and they’re willing to go the extra mile. […] This gives the American Red Cross HUGE points. I am now significantly more likely to take another class than I was before.”

They've had months and months to hone their work flow and the Red Cross Social Media Team has it down to a science.  They determine what comments need action, whether to say thank you and build a relationship, repair a customer service issue, or ignore.   They spend time reading other posts by the blogger to help make this decision.  They now use this approach with other channels, like Twitter, for example.

Because of the volume and using free tools, Wendy had to do a lot of heavy cut and paste to analyze, summarize, and distribute the information. With a better understanding on the value that continuous listening provides the organization, they are now investing in professional tools, like Radian 6.

Key points:

• Relationship building lays groundwork for future campaigns to raise time, money, and blood
• Identifies influencers
• Documentation creates internal value
• Listening skills and tools upgraded
• What works used for future campaigns

Learning

“If you don’t launch, you don’t learn.”   David Armano

Learning is using experiments with metrics and the right questions at the right point to understand what works, what doesn’t.  This is where the pavement hits the road.  You won't be able to reap the full potential of social media unless you begin and get past any social media stalemate.

What does learning actually mean?  You have to think like a scientist, documenting your experiments at the beginning, middle, and end.  You also need to observe like a primatologist, like Jane Goodall. Perhaps that a bad analogy - certainly your donors aren't primates.  Armano describes this as digital anthropologists sifting through qualitative data and metrics to reap insights.

I'll share my process and I understand that I'm probably a crazy person.  I also know there is some resistance to document while you're doing, but I think it is essential to learning - especially at the practitioner level.    Here's what I do:

1.  Document on the fly

I don't wait until the end of the project.  I grab a little something everyday.   It could be as simple as opening up a google document and dropping in a few bullet points or cutting and pasting a comment.  The point is - you need to steal five or ten minutes from the doing to reflect in action.  Since I'm a visual person, I also use flickr as a documentation tool - I do a lot of screen shots with snagit and annotate. I also bookmark posts that reference the project using a unique project tag.  If I'm working with a team versus solo, I'll also share some summaries of the most important learnings.  I also tweaking as I go - mostly messaging and mostly clarifying.

2. Pick the right hard data points
 
I know from experience what the most important metrics are to track for different types of projects.  They are different depending on the audience and goals.   Here is where more is less is really important.

3.  Harvest your insights
 
At the end of the project, I do a wrap up with all the bites and pieces I've collected.  I do a "by the numbers" summary,  I look patterns and trends in the comments or visuals, and look at what other nonprofits are doing in the space.  The important piece is to ask questions, not just look at numbers.

4.  Hit the Pause Button

I usually write something up that anwers the question - "If I were to do this again next step, what would I do differently?"   I don't wait until the day before I'm going to do something similar again.   You best insights come right after you've completed the project and had a day or two of distance.   Then you have captured those thoughts and when you begin planning for the next iteration - you have not lost those valuable insights.

A few points about social media metrics. While some of the measurement concepts for social media remain the same as traditional Web analytics, there are some new ideas to embrace.  Steve Rubel wrote about this in a post called "Page Views Are Officially Dead" two years ago.  Page views may not be dead, but you need to use engagement metrics. I've written about this as it relates to blogging quite a bit.  Again, it isn't the numbers in isolation.  It is the time that you spend looking at metrics in the context of your strategy and asking questions.

Yesterday, I interviewed Jake Brewer who is the Internet Manager at the Energy Action Coalition about how they use metrics to generate insights about their YouTube Channel.

“We don’t really care about views as much as we care about comments.  If we get 1,000 video views that is good.   The comments are a focus group with our influencers.  If they like it, they’ll spread it and that helps get to our objectives.”

Rachel Happe has a great list of social media metrics and it is a good starting point.   If you're a metrics geek and want to go deeper, visit my personal learning space for Social Media Metrics.  But do me a favor, please.  Please don't get so obsessed with metrics that you loose site of how you're going to use them!  And remember,

• Objective, audience, strategy and link to your metric
• Pick the right ones! 
• Numbers alone are meaningless
• Combine with other measures and qualitative data
• Harvest insights

Adapt

The definition of adapt is using insights to make corrections to improve results the next time around.  You have to be nimble and that can be hard.

I've watched the Carrie Lewis at the Humane Society do a fantastic job of adapting the organization's social media projects.   In 2007, the Human Society implemented its first photo petition campaign to protest Wendy's treatment of animals . They tracked the number of photo submissions they got, but they also listened carefully to the responses they got from participants.

As Carrie Lewis mentions in the comments in the blog post , "Since this was our first run at a photo petition, it was difficult to get across exactly what we wanted people to do without writing a book. So every person that wrote in and needed help was answered personally. This gave us a good idea of how to more clearly explain ourselves next time." This particular photo campaign had many technical glitches and ultimately the number of submissions was less than impressive. Did HSUS proclaim that photo competitions were a waste of time?

No.

The next iteration of a photo contest, LOL Seals , made it as easy as possible for people to participate. That's what they had learned from the first campaign. The first contest, they asked people to upload their photos and tag it themselves, which meant they had to create a Flickr account and know what “tagging” was. The second contest, they used the Flickr API which made everything automatic -- from tagging and uploading without the user having to even touch Flickr. They had about 3,000 submissions and captured about 2,000 new email addresses.

They've recently implemented an online photo contest that combines wisdom of the crowds with person to person fundraising.  There is a web and Facebook version.   It looks, from the outside, like a great success so far and this would not have happened with out these earlier versions.

It's much easier to adapt your social media project than to change other things in your organization that social media might shine a light on - customer service, programs, and services.   And to make changes on those areas, it may require thinking staffing, work flow, and of course, involving leadership and others in your organization. 

Armano has a some excellent organizational culture questions:

• Are you launching initiatives that can be easily updated? Are you enabling a "culture of rapid response?"
• Are you building a culture in which "failure" is acceptable?
• Are you allowing your teams to create "pilots" prior to scrutinizing them through traditional ROI exercises?
• Are you planning initiatives that will help your organization learn prior to backing major marketing campaigns?

Conclusion

• Don’t take off your listening ears
• Think like a scientist, observe like primatologist
• Evolution is a good thing

Listening Literacy Skills by Beth Kanter
How Listening Returns Value for Nonprofits by Beth Kanter
Nonprofits Need Different I and R Words by Beth Kanter
How o harvest insights by Beth Kanter

Now, it's your turn.  What are some of your organization's social media adaption stories?

Using Metrics To Harvest Insights About Your Social Media Strategy

Photo by Dwinton

You need to pick the right hard data points (fancy way of saying metrics) that will help you harvest insights to improve your social media strategy.  For blogging, you have to use a couple of different tools to get the different metrics you need.  The tools include Google Analytics, PostRank, Feedburner, and others. 

Analyzing Your Blog Content With Metrics and Insight

Of course, you need to set overall goals for your blog and understand your audience.  Next, you need to know the right metric(s), the tool or combination of tools to collect the data, and how the tools measure the metric. Most importantly, you need a thinking process - either alone or as a team - to harvest insights.    

If you want to assess reader interest in one blog post versus another, I'd suggest the following process.

Reader Growth:  This is content consumption.  There are two different profiles:  subscribers and visitors. Subscribers have made a commitment to regularly receiving (and hopefully reading or at least scanning) your blog.  Visitors are people who visit your blog.  You should be looking at monthly trends over time.  This will tell you a lot about reader satisfaction with your content.  

• Hard Data Points:  Look at the  Feed Subscribers trends from Feedburner and Unique Visitors Trends from Google Analytics. Understand how Google Analytics calculates unique visitors and how Feedburner calculates subscribers, but please don't get so hung up on geekiness part of measurement that you don't have time to harvest insights.

• Insight Harvesting:  Is the number of visitors and subscribers going up and to the right.  If not, why?  If yes, why?  If no, why?  Think about your publishing frequency, length of posts, and mix of topics.  

Reader Engagement Index:  This how much your readers are interacting with you and your content and sharing your content with others. 

• Hard Data Points:  For this, I use PostRank scores and pick out all posts that scored a perfect 10. It is based on analysis of the "5 Cs" of engagement: creating, critiquing, chatting, collecting, and clicking.  Understand how the model works, but don't get distracted.

• Insight Harvesting:  What are the topics?   Are these posts longer more in-depth, or short and focused on on-topic?  Do they have round up a lot outside resources? What's the tone, formal or informal? Are they tips?  What is the quality of the conversation in the comments?   What did you learn from the conversation?  If you have a group blog, are there differences between authors?  Why? Did anything surprise you?

Reader Bookmarking:  This is bookmarked content for later retrieval which is some indication of reader value. 

• Hard Data Points:   You can find out about bookmark saves from PostRank numbers, although the program doesn't make it efficient to grab data over time.  Remember bookmarked items can also influence your blog traffic (positively).

• Insight Harvesting:  What was the topic of the post?  Are they tip posts, resource roundups, or other formats? Are there patterns?

Conversation Rate: This is the commenting and conversation that is happening on your blog.

• Hard Data Points:   You can get the most commented posts from PostRank.  If you use wordpress, Joost Blog Metrics will give you a post to comment ratio.   

• Insight Harvesting:  What is the style of the writing?  Do posts with more questions in the title and questions in the end generate more comments?  Did you do any outreach to encourage commenting? Is there a conversation happening between people who comment? What do you do to facilitate it?  What's the quality of the commenting - are you learning?  Are the comments positive or negative? 

Authority:  This is the number of links to a post.  This metric gives you indication of the value of the content - that people were linking to it.  It can also influence traffic.

• Hard Data Points:   Do an analysis of the number of links to a post using Yahoo Site Explorer.

• Insight Harvesting:  Pull out the top 25 linked posts. Analyze the types of posts (content and format) that get linked and the impact of that linking in referrals using Google Analytics.  Are there any patterns? 

Page Views:  The number of times a page (unit of content) was viewed.  Not sure how much this will tell you about your content quality, but it will perhaps give you some insights about your outreach.

• Hard Data Points:  You can get this from Google Analytics.

• Insight Harvesting:  Why are these blog posts getting higher page views than others?   What is the referral traffic?  What was your outreach strategy? 

Industry Index:    I don't use this one yet, it was suggested by a Kynam Dom in this comment. This is evaluating your performance in relation to other blogs in your space using the same metrics. 

• Hard Data Points:   There isn't a nonprofit or nonprofit technology blogs version of the Ad Age Ranking of marketing blogs, although there are ways to do this privately.  You could analyze your blog using services like compete, commetrics, and Alexa - Alan Benamer has done this. 

• Insight Harvesting: Where is my blog on the index, high or low? What are the qualities that top five blogs have in common? How does that compare to my blog?

Resources

Five Steps Towards A Metrics Driven Company by Andrew Chen
How To Find the Right Chart for your Numerical Data by Digital Inspiration
ComMetrics FAQ
The Chart Chooser

Questions

• What is your thought and reflection process for insight harvesting?
• What reflective questions do you ask while looking at your data?
• What are some insights that you've harvested about your social media strategy?

Unpacking Engagement Metrics for the Nonprofit Blog

Source: A New Model for Social Media (and Traditional) Measurement by Don Bartholomew

I'm noodling around with a couple of ideas so this post does a lot musing ..   

A few days ago, I asked "What are the best metrics to track your blog's ROI and make improvements?"   I've been trying think through a benchmarking process that would identify metrics to track, how to track, and how to reflect on the data to make improvements in your blog.

Laura Lee Dooley's blog post "The Social Media Metrics Lottery" pointed to and summarized Don Bartholomew's thoughts on engagement as well as other posts on blogging ROI from the corporate sector.   Laura goes on to share how she, as social media strategist for a nonprofit, thinks about it.   What happens after a nonprofit donor or stakeholder is satisfied with the engagement.

The areas of the blogging ROI analysis included:  author contribution, readership growth, reader engagement, authority, cost, and value.  Reader engagement consists of metrics for:

• Conversation (commenting)
• Reader Sharing (bookmarked items)

I pulled these metrics from a tool called Postrank that uses a model called the "5 C's of Engagement" in some email back and forth with Melanie Baker, the community manager for Post Rank, Sue Waters and I asked her if she could unpack the 5s a bit further and tell us a little bit about how it worked.  Here's what she shared:

Basically we track all these different ways people respond to and share content (like blog posts). However, not all activities are created equal, so to speak. It takes more work on the part of the reader and shows more interest (i.e. engagement) to leave a comment or write your own blog post responding to someone else's, for example, than it does to just click on a post to read it, or click a button to bookmark it. So trackbacks and comments get more weight than clicks and views.

Additionally, PostRanks are calculated one of two ways, either comparing a site's content against its own past performance only (feed-based PostRank). Our website shows feed-based, folder view in Google Reader with our extension installed shows thematic, as an example -- thematic is comparing the posts of all feeds you've added to a specific folder against each other. So in that case you can compare TechCrunch to Mashable, for example, if you wanted to, but with feed-based you're not being ranked against any sites/posts but your own. So you'll never get really low PostRank scores because your blog doesn't get hundreds of comments per post and millions of pageviews like TechCrunch does.

Now feed-based PostRank doesn't rank new posts against ALL past posts back to the beginning of your blog, but it analyzes back a ways based on time frame and posting frequency (among other things). Analyzing on more than one basis prevents rankings being skewed for publishers who only post once a month, for example, as opposed to those who post 10 times a day.

Once a feed is in our system, we regularly check for new posts that have been published, and start gathering the engagement metrics for the new post as they start showing up. We also check for metrics for existing posts for a set length of time. (We've done analysis that shows a fairly standard "engagement curve" for when and how engagement metrics show up for any post.) When a post is first added to our system after being published, it has a PostRank of 1.0, since it won't have any engagement yet. And as readers start to respond -- commenting, tweeting, bookmarking, etc., the PostRank score will go up over time to a maximum of 10.

Because feed-based PostRank analyzes your posts based on your own previous posts, it's possible to have a post ranked 10 on one blog with, say, 5 comments, 20 pageviews, and 6 bookmarks, if you don't usually get that much engagement, but have a post rank 10 on another blog with 200 comments, 10,000 pageviews, and 300 bookmarks if that's high for that blog's engagement, but not freakishly high.

Should also note, re. freakishly high, we do analyze for things like the digg/slashdot effect, so if one post in someone's blog gets a really unusually high amount of engagement compared to the norm, we don't allow that to completely skew the analysis afterwards, e.g. "dooming" the next bunch of posts to a PostRank of 1.0 because they're nowhere near what just one post got.

Hopefully that explains the fundamentals of how the analysis works. There's also some info on the differences that appear in PostRank scores for posts depending if they show up on the website or the widget (relates to feed-based vs. thematic PostRank), but I'm working on a blog post for that, so will send you the link when it's up.

I usually don't get into the carpet fibers about how different analytics tools do the measuring because I don't find it as interesting as the conceptual model AND of course reflecting on what it means for my blog.  But, this is the type of question people will ask and sometimes it is because they want to challenge the validity of the data.   (I love this post by Avinash Kaushik, "Data Quality Sucks, Let's Get Over It" that teachers you art of linking data to action.)

One of the interesting points for me in learning how the tools works is the "thematic" ranking - comparing feeds from different blogs to one another.

In the original post, I asked a couple of questions:

• Is there any value or meaning to looking at traffic trends via page views?
• How do you understand the impact of using Twitter to share your blog post links or if other people Re Tweet or share them?
• Is there a formula or set of sharper reflection questions?
• I'm doing this an individual, how would you use an analysis like this to help with planning or making the case for social media (blogs) to your executive director?
• What are tools or techniques are there to collect data, summarize it, or reflect that are efficient?
• How do you use qualitative information and perhaps survey data from readers effectively?  Do you need it?

Kynam Doan  left a comment suggesting adding a metric that measures your blog's performance in relation to others in your market space.   Alan Benamer has indexed nonprofit web sites based on compete rankings and looking at readership.   The one thing I don't like about this sort of analysis is that it encourages competition.   I'd like to do this type of analysis to get a sense of what the industry average is for commenting on nonprofit blogs - so you could set some goals.  

What do you think?

What are the best hard data points and qualitative insights that can help you improve your blog?

Inspiration forHow To Think Like A Social Media Marketing Genius Presentation by Beth Kanter

For the past two years, I've been doing an annual Blog benchmarking process that attempts to do a ROI analysis.  Figuring out the Return on Investment for your blog can't be done with a single metric.   I look at several metrics proposed by Avinash Kaushik   These include author contribution, audience growth, conversation rate, and authority  Then I look at the amount of time in my work flow and reflect on productivity. The last step is difficult: Translating tangible and intangible benefits into a dollar value.   I do that with a grain of salt.

The most valuable part of the blog benchmarking process is the reflection process and linking insights to making improvements.  This is the stuff that can't necessarily be counted, but if you ignore it completely you really miss out on the opportunity to improve the quality of your blogging, which presumably increases the blog's ROI.

At the end of 2008, I did a "Best of Beth's Blog" analysis using PostRank. It takes your RSS feed and applies engagement metrics,  analyzing the types and frequency of an audience's interaction with your content.  Each blog post is given a score from 1 to 10, representing how interesting and relevant people have found your content.  The more interesting or relevant an item is, the more work they will do to share or respond to that item so interactions that require more effort are weighted higher. PostRank scoring is based on analysis of the "5 Cs" of engagement: creating, critiquing, chatting, collecting, and clicking.

Of course, you can't really translate a high engagement score into a dollar amount or look at it in isolation without relating to your blogging goals.  Measuring engagement in social media as part of an ROI process is tricky, if not a bit controversial.  Read "What Is The ROI for Social Media" by Jason Falls which includes an interview the queen of measurement, KD Paine.  Here's the ah ha insightful quote:

To illustrate that point for all our measurement and metric geeks out there, what you are trying to do is assign multiple choice scoring to an essay question. It’s not possible.

Katie hit the nail on the head near the end of her round table discussion when she said, “Ultimately, the key question to ask when measuring engagement is, ‘Are we getting what we want out of the conversation?’” And, as stubborn as it sounds Mr. CEO, you don’t get money out of a conversation.

 

I'm also having some problems with lumping all the engagement measures together, although it's good for a quick and dirty analysis.    Is  the number of comments the sole measure for success of a blog?  Some education technology bloggers, like Tony Karrer suggest looking at the number of views and delicious saves as does Sue Waters in her post, Life is One Big Top Ten.  Chris Brogan recently provided some insights about bookmarked blog posts and how they can help increase traffic.  And notice that he doesn't just take a list of most bookmarked content, that's only the first step. He's done the reflection process about why a blog post get bookmarked (what's the format or criteria) and what happens when a lot of people bookmark a blog post.

Recently, Chris Brogan did an analysis of most linked to content using Yahoo Site Explorer and while it isn't clear whether it includes links to yourself it sparked an insight for me that different blog posts might have different objectives.  Maybe I'm getting into the carpet fibers too much, but something like this:

• Comments for conversational
• Outbound links for influence
• Bookmarked saves for value of content
• Twittered - for velocity

Nina Simon discussed why commenting metrics shouldn't be the only metric to use to help you reflect on your blog and make improvements.

Conclusion and Questions

Here is what I'm leaning towards for a benchmarking process:

• Raw Author Contribution:  Frequency of publication and number of words.   Setting a goal for publication schedule and consistency and looking back to see if you've stuck to it.  Analysis of words in posts.  If you use wordpress, Joost Blog Metrics can give you these numbers easily.  What is the optimal publication rate for your blog that builds readership? 

• Reader Growth:  This is content consumption and there are two different types of consumers and you're looking a monthly trends over time.   You can look at Unique Visitors Trends from Google Analytics (grain of salt about looking at numbers only) and the  Feed Subscribers Trends from Feedburner.   What you want to know - is the number of visitors and subscribers going up and to the right.  If not, why?   If yes, why?   One thing I'd like to separate but can't is subscription delivery - via email versus RSS.   I get great information by asking those who unsubscribe via email why.

• Reader Sharing:  This is bookmarked content for later retrieval and some way to look at Twitter mentions (not sure if that is even valuable).  You can find out about bookmark saves from PostRank numbers, although the program doesn't make it easy to calculate.  Also, you need to reflect on the type of post and your goal.

• Conversation Rate: This is the commenting and conversation.  You can get the most commented posts from PostRank.  If you use wordpress, Joost Blog Metrics you can get a comment to post ratio.  But you have to ask yourself, what did you learn from the conversation?  What's the value of that?  If I just took raw numbers, this blog would be all about giving about books and software because those tend to be my most commented posts.  The value of comments to me  - ideas for future posts and deepening my own learning.  Ha, try to measure that or translate into a dollar amount.

• Authority.   This your influence or authority rank and it is problematical.  I've used my  Technorati rank [it has issues] and just compared against myself for year before.   But for some reason, my Technorati rank hasn't updated in six months.   What's up with that?   Another way to do this might be number of links to a post using Yahoo Site Explorer. Best use of this is to analyze the types of posts (content and format) that get linked and the impact of that linking (through referrals in Google Analytics)

• Cost (what!).  For me, this is all about my time since my hosting costs are minimal.   So, this is an opportunity to do a work flow analysis of your blogging and think about how to make it more productive.   

• Return on Investment;   This is where we do the math and attempt to make a business cause.  You know, compute the cost of your time and subtract it form your income.  To me, that's not useful.   You need to look at both tangible and intangible benefits and translate them into some value.

Questions

• Is there any value or meaning to looking at traffic trends via page views?
• How do you understand the impact of using Twitter to share your blog post links or if other people Re Tweet or share them?
• Is there a formula or set of sharper reflection questions?
• I'm doing this an individual, how would you use an analysis like this to help with planning or making the case for social media (blogs) to your executive director?
• What are tools or techniques are there to collect data, summarize it, or reflect that are efficient?
• How do you use qualitative information and perhaps survey data from readers effectively?  Do you need it?

What do you think?

My New Year's Resolution: Use Social Media Efficiently - 52 Tips

Flickr Photo by RedRaspu

Convio invited me to share my number one New Year's resolution as part of its "Now is the Time" campaign.  The goal is to encourage nonprofits to make New Year's resolutions to that help them more efficiently and effectively move people to support their organizations.

On January 1st, I wrote about my goals for 2009 using Chris Brogan's process of selecting three words or larger concepts to frame them.  My three words: streamline, weave, and Einstein.   I'm drilling down into the concept of "streamline" to brainstorm 52 ideas to help make your organization's social media strategy and use more effective and efficient.  

Why the number 52?   In a week, I will celebrate my 52nd birthday.  The image above is deck of cards and there are  52 cards in a deck.    This gives me the opportunity to brainstorm 52 different tips, one to write about in more depth for each week of 2009.   Putting a resolution into action with baby steps is the best way to succeed. 

Why Your Nonprofit Should Streamline Social Media 

Social media is still relatively new.  Many nonprofits and individuals have jumped in without thinking strategically.   Amy Sample Ward lays out a 5 things to think about before you get into the execution of a social media strategy for the first time. 

But, maybe you've done some of that thinking and implemented a few focused social media experiments in 2008 and have gleaned some insights.   Good for you!  Great work.   Perhaps you're looking to make your strategy more effective, less time consuming, or see measurable results.  Or maybe you just jumped in as an individual and need to refine an organizational strategy.   The tips below are for you. 

The economic crisis has changed the external environment.  So, it is important to think about that as part of considering how you need to revise your goals.  The tools are changing, so if you've settled into one way of using a particular social media tool or set of tools, don't set yourself on automatic pilot.  Are you using the social media tools most efficiently and effectively given the environment, the changes in the tools, and your goals? 

One of our most valued nonprofit resources is our time, especially in these days of tighter budgets and cutbacks in funding.   Now is the time to hit the pause button and ask yourself if you are investing your time in the right way in social media.  And please note that I'm NOT saying that this is an either or proposition and that you discover you are not investing wisely with social media to stop doing it. Social media is here to stay, but we have to use it smartly and in a streamlined way.   That's what the tips below will help you do.

There are many different options to executive a social media strategy, but only so much time.  Think about what is most effective for your organization's goals, mission, and capacity.  Think about how you can be efficient if you are tasked with execution of the strategy.

Mapping Strategy to Metrics, Benchmarking, and ROI

• Do an annual ROI for your blog (and other social media activities) using benchmarking and metrics
• Learn to use the tools that help you measure success
• Don't set up a presence on every social network in the world all at once. 
• Do research first and implement one presence at a time with specific goals and metrics.
• If you've set specific goals and metrics to measure those goals over time, if after 3-6 months you have no tangible or intangible results, don't be afraid to move on or change something.

Use Help Applications That Streamline Social Media Tasks

• If you are not reading blogs and web sites in an RSS Reader, make that your New Year's resolution.
• If you are using a RSS reader,evaluate if it is still works for you.
• If you have started following too many people on Twitter by choice or accident, use Tweetdeck and create groups.
• Set up a social media dashboard with google apps for your listening, separate it from your work email and tools.
  

Make Time for Reflection

• Build in daily or at least weekly time for reflection on your social media strategy and use to make improvements.
• Ask, how much progress are we making towards our goals?   What are our successes and challenges?  What needs to change?
• Step back and hit the pause button every now and then to determine if you're in a trench and how to get out
• Stop twittering from your cell phone in the bathroom and use that time to think about how you could be more efficient using a particular social media tool.
• Do a regular task analysis of your social media work flow looking for redundant actions or where you've simply lapsed into automatic pilot or bad habits.  For example, are you bookmarking everything you come across into del.icio.us by habit or just the resources you actually need to retrieve?  Are you impulse adopting tools?
• Learn from nonprofits and other organizations that have shared their social media case studies
• Starting a personal blog which is an excellent way to build reflection time into your day

Take Breaks

• Remember to turn the damn computer off and take a walk
• Try a "Day without YOU FILL IN THE BLANK."  It can help you evaluate whether a tool is really valuable.
• Take a hiatus from using a particular tool (a Twitter Hiatus can be good for your resetting goals or understanding any bad habits.)
• Understand how information overload might be effecting you and take a break to assess and rethink
• Get a memory upgrade

Create Good Social Media Habits

• If you are just beginning a social media plan, use the Power of Less Challenge to establish good habits form the get go.
• Live in a tool or technique for at least month before adding something new.  Try tweaking the strategy for several months in a row by building in reflection time.
• Attend NTEN's NTC Conference in April and attend the social media tracks
• Try to attend at least one social media industry conference (ask for nonprofit pricing or scholarship, if not already available)
• Attend some of the FREE social media gatherings or meetups in your city and network with other nonprofits like Net2Tuesdays
• Attend some of the FREE gatherings for social media professionals like the social media breakfast or Social Media Club and get advice or help learning.

Use Time Management Techniques

• Set a consistent schedule for your social media tasks and stick to it
• Use a time out timer to help you track time spent and keep on track
• Use Stephen Covey's Pick the Big Stone's Method and ask yourself if you only had time for three social networking sites what would they be?
• Allocate specific chunks of time for your social media execution. 
• Don't live on Twitter, your blog,  Facebook, or your email.   Check in once or twice a day.
• Write down your social media tasks and get those done during your social media time.  Avoid getting distracted
• Build in or schedule time for discovery and serendipity which is a good thing for social media, but not so good if you don't track it or manage it.

Filter

• Be your own filter
• Understand what filtering means and why it is important for social media
• Be a digital curator with your electronic information, not a packrat
• If you're using Google Reader, use the Reader Trends page to figure out what blogs you're actually reading regularly and unsubscribe from those you are not.   
• Use these filtering tips to make your social bookmarking and RSS reader more efficient.
• Get the most out of your RSS Reader so you can scan more in less time and get new ideas
• Use tools like PostRank to filter your feeds so you can easily pick out the best content
• Don't limit high quality information, filter out the crap
• Rethink your relationship with information, goals, and work and streamline accordingly.

Simplify

• Learn the techniques of simplify and apply to your social media use
• Do you have a friending policy?
• Are you just accepting everyone on every network? Do you need to prune?
• Ask yourself, do you just want to collect friends on a social network or develop a deeper relationship?
• Figure out a following strategy on Twitter that works for you - so many people, so little time.
• Figure out what your optimal number of friends and followers for your goals
• Redesign and recharge your blog

Slow Down

• Explore tools that help you slow down that river of RSS information
• Rediscover your blog and blog at a snail's pace  or grow a slow online community

Other Nonprofit Tech Bloggers Writing Resolutions

• A View from Judi Sohn 
• Beaconfire Wire
• Connection Café
• Donor Power Blog  
• Everyday Giving  
• FI Spac
• Mobile Commons  
• NTEN Blog  
• Social Actions Blog  
• Tech Soup 
• Robert L. Weiner Blog 
• TREW Marketing Spotlight

Are you thinking about making your social media strategy and use more efficient or effective?  What tips or resources are using to accomplish that goal? 

Best of Beth's Blog 2008: Finding The Top Ten Posts In Less Than Five MInutes!

One of the things I've been wanting to do for a while is review my blog content for the year and select the "Top 10" posts or the "best of" posts. Once a year in June, I do an overall benchmarking and ROI analysis of my blog using particular metrics.  But, a top ten post would focus on the content itself - and also jump start some thinking that I need to do for a redesign of this blog.

I use a variety of tools for this analysis, including Google Analytics, Feedburner subscriber counts, and manually tracking comment to post ratios (typepad doesn't have a nifty plugin like wordpress to automate that grunge work) 

A tool that use to evlauate my content is PostRank.   It takes your RSS feed and applies engagement metrics,  analyzing the types and frequency of an audience's interaction with your content.  Each blog post is given a score from 1 to 10, representing how interesting and relevant people have found your content. The more interesting or relevant an item is, the more work they will do to share or respond to that item so interactions that require more effort are weighted higher.

PostRank scoring is based on analysis of the "5 Cs" of engagement: creating, critiquing, chatting, collecting, and clicking.  It uses sources such as how many delicious bookmarks, incoming links, how many times mentioned on Twitter, how many comments, etc.

PostRank has recently brought back its "Top Content" widget"   The widget displays you top ranked posts over the last month or so.  (You can actually go back and review your entire feed.  I did this and noticed some posts from October that received higher ranks but aren't included in the widget.)

This analysis took all of five minutes.  Then I spent another hour going back through the 1,000 plus blog posts and pulling out those that scored in the "best range" which was 8, 9, or 10.

Scored 10

• How Much Time Does It Take To Do Social Media?
  
• Twitter As Charitable Gift Spreader
• Should There Be A Social Actions Category on Digg?
• How Long Does It Take for 250 Super Connected Gnomedex Geeks to raise $2,500 for Cambodian kids?
• Help Me Send Leng Sopharath To College in Good Health!
• Working Wikily: The Power of the Newbie
• Where Are The Gen-Y Bloggers Who Write About Nonprofits and Social Change?
• Thinking Strategically About Social Media
• Twitter Demographics
  
• Social Change Behind the Firewall
• Twitter is the Second Highest Referral After Google
• Arts 2.0 Examples
• Ten Web 2.0 Things You Can Do In Ten Minutes
• The Cute Dog Theory
• Pimp My Nonprofit Panel at SXSW
• Transparency and Social Media: Dealing with Criticism
• Interview with Jonathon Colman
• The Intangible Benefits of Social Media
• Reports of the Death of Social Networking for Nonprofits Are Not True!
• Harry: A Green Geek
• Online Fundraising Predictions From Around the World
• Thanks Teresa Crawford For Helping Us Swim Upstream
• Don't Let $50,000 for the Sharing Foundation Slip Away!
• Why Is Pharoth Wearing A Foo Camp T-Shirt?
• Social Media ROI: Compare With Paper
  
• An Internet Lesson in Rural Cambodia
• You're Never Too Old To Change the World
• Success Metrics for Your Social Fundraising Plan
• Donor Solicitation Techniques on Twitter
• Sharing Foundation Has Supporters in Finland
  
• Blogging Behind the Nonprofit Firewall: ROI Approach
  
• Social Fundraising: Leveraging On and Offline Connections
• Calling on the Twitterverse and Connie Reece Answers First
• $10 will help a Cambodian Youngster Get A Better Life
• Why Nhung Sun, A Cambodian Blogger, Supports The Sharing Foundation
• Bloggers Who Create Community Award
• New Year's Resolution: Do Something About That Pile of E-Waste
  

Scored 9.0-9.9

• Micro Fundraising and Trust
• If your organization Tweets, will they donate?
• Social Networking: Part of Your Job or Just for Fun?
• Your Organization's Social Networking Strategy Doesn't Have To Be Like Mastercard
• Prioritizing Your Web Strategy Budget:  What Slice of the Pie for Social Media?
• Social Media In An Economic Downturn
• Microblogging in a Museum Context
• The What, Why, and How of Facebook Fan Pages
• Gnomedex Real Time Fundraising Experiment
• Online Community Engagement Strategies
• Vote for All These Awesome Nonprofit Panels At SXSW
• Measuring the Value of Your Blog
• What's the sweet spot between personal productivity and social productivity?
• Information Coping Skills: Turn off the damn computer and go for a walk
• Organizational Versus Personal Voice on A Blog
• How To Share the Social Media Workload in Your Organization
• Twitter on Paper Icebreaker
• Nonprofit Blogging Policies
• The Kids in Cambodia Say Thank You
• Graphing Social Patterns:  My Slides
• Giving Good Poke
• America's Giving Challenge: We Came In First!  Thank You
• Effective ROI StoryTelling Techniques
• Social Media Metrics: Distributed Influence
  
• ROI: You Can't Quantify Love or Can You?
• Using Metrics for Continuous Learning
  
• You're Not Going To Ask Us To Give You An Outhouse for Your Birthday?
• Birthday Greeting
• Beth's 51st Birthday Challenge
  
• Is Facebook Causes A One Night Stand?
• Harry's Fundraising Video
• How Do Social Networks Incorporate the Ladder of Engagement
• Spell my Twitter Name Correctly
• Intergenerational Wired Fundraisers: A Conversation

Scored 8.0-8.9

• How To Think Like A Nonprofit Social Marketing Genius
• Be A Voice for Darfur: Great Example of A Multi-Channel Campaign
• Social Media Breakfast:  Help Leverage A Tyson Foods Donation
• How To Set Up A Listening Post on Twitter
• Fighting for the Arts With Social Media
• What Color Is Your Nonprofit's Blog?
• Teaching Your Kids About Philanthropy
• Microblogging Reports Worth Your Attention
• E-Metrics Panel Presentation
• Blog Action Day: Can One Person Make A Difference
• Information Coping Skills: How Information Overloaded Are You?
• BackType: Another Listening Tool
• Twitter Isn't Pointless, It's Pointilism
• Working Wikily: The Secrets of A Wiki Gardener
• The Best Free Sources of Social Media Audience Research
• Advice on How To Not Pitch Bloggers
• Let the Change Blogging Meme Hit The Road
• Tips for Using Your Social Networking Presence for Professional Networking
• What Happens When You Treat Social Media Like Communications Media?
• Walking the Line Between Social Media and Old Skool
• What is your blog conversation strategy?
• Social Media ROI Case Study Slam
• How Nonprofits Can Get The Most Out of Flickr
• Eight Secrets of Social Networking for Nonprofits
• Social Media: Start With A Proof of Concept Pilot
• You Can't Quantify Love
• ROI and Nonprofit Technology Presentation
• Twittering and Forgetting
  

Tony Karrer suggests also looking at the number of views and delicious saves, so will do that in the next day.  And, I love Sue Water's just picking your favorites without looking at the stats. 

See also:
Are you tracking your top ten posts from Wild Apricot Blog
Life is One Big Top Ten by Sue Waters
E-Learning Today by Tony Karrer

E-Metrics Presentation: How ROI Thinking Can Help Expand Your Blog Community

Photo by Smitty42

IN two weeks, 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.

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.

It's a little bit intimidating to be in the presence of social media measurement gurus like KD Paine who session is earlier that day.

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

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

I'm going to start the session with an overview of ROI thinking - mostly making the point about how measurement is more than math, but how it can help you figure out what is and what isn't working in social media.    I'm using my experience benchmarking my blog with key metrics.  I've decided rather than show how wonderful and perfect everything is - I'm going to drill down on how metrics can really help you improve results if you're not getting them at first and how to determine the return on investment.  I've done it with a lot of story telling and loads of humor. 

Laura and Jonathan will be sharing awesome case studies based on their experience.  Laura will focus on Twitter and measuring success.  Jonathan will focus on using Digg.   From what I've seen in the draft slides, their presentations will rock.

I suspect we may have several different types of people in our session:

• metrics measurement geeks in nonprofits and government - it's their full-time job
• measurement geeks that might work with nonprofits - understand it in a business context
• nonprofit and government folks who need to get more advice re: measurement in social media

For conference presentations, you can necessarily ask in advance what people's level of experience is with social media and measurement (beginner, intermediate, or expert).   So, if you are attending E-Metrics or were going to attend and come to our session, what would your burning question be?

What advice would you offer Working Films about measuring the impact of their social media strategy?

I get lots of email requests like this and can't answer all them or blog either.  Every now and then I like to share these queries and see what you, dear readers, think.

Dear Beth:

I want to compile a report for my Executive Director about the impact of our online organizing strategies. When looking at our google analytic stats, I usually note the number of visitors, sites that people come from and keywords. But sometimes, those stats don't really tell us anything. What are some things that I should be looking for? I want to be able to tell the story of our online campaigns in a narrative way.  Any ideas/links/resources would be helpful!

The organization I work for is Working Films.  We are a national nonprofit that works with documentary filmmakers to help them create their outreach plans. The films that we work with touch on serious social justice issues, so we link them up with organizations who are already doing work on the issue.

Our online organizing strategies include:

A screening headquarters for supporters to sign up to host/attend screenings of the films we work with. (this will be launched by the end of the month)

Keeping an updated blog about what we are working on and to show the diverse voices of our staff.

Building an online presence on Social Networking / Web2.0 Sites

• MySpace - to stay connected / reach out to potential supporters
• Facebook - to stay connected / reach out to potential supporters
• Twitter - to announce new blog posts, breaking news related to our work, and to ask supporters  (followers) questions to get to know them better.
• Wikipedia - editing articles of films, events, and organizations that we are closely linked to in order to mention our affiliation with them.
• YouTube - to host trailers and clips of the films we work with.
• Flickr - to host photos from events we have attended and hosted. For people who have hosted/attended screenings to share their experiences by uploading their photos

Here's a couple of tips/observations - but hoping the readers will jump in with comments and suggestions.

• You've got a lot going on here!   My first question is out of all the stuff you're doing here, what is most effective?  Do you have the staff/capacity to give all the time that is required to get results? 

• Let's start with your blog.  You need to set up a benchmarking process.   About a year ago, I decided to benchmark my blog using some tips suggested by Avinash Kaushik.  I've continued to do this on an annual basis to compare the results against my goals and have found it very useful.

• For each of the social media tools you are using, you might want to set up your google analytics so you can track referral traffic.   Which one of these is sending you traffic. 

• Also, are you directing your potential supporters to a spot on your web site where they can sign up for your email list or get into your CRM?   

• For narrative stories, you need to keep a journal - and screen capture or write down notes as you go any stories related to how your social media strategy help you reach a goal.

This post by Colin Delaney called "Measuring the Effects of Social Media Marketing" may give you some additional pointers as will this how-to post from Mashable.

Okay readers, I'm handing over the mic to you.  What advice you offer?

Using AideRSS as a blog improvement tool

Last week, I did my annual Blog ROI benchmarking and I started to noodle around with the question - How can I use AideRSS as a tool to help me evaluate engagement and improve my blog?

Aide RSS wrote about measuring social engagement on a blog which that looks at a number of different metrics.  You can do an analysis of your blog feed here.  Here's a recent analysis of the "best" posts on my blog and I need to go figure out what the numbers mean.

I didn't get much further on figuring it out, but ProBlogger did in this post "Using AideRSS to Help Identify Hot Topics on Your Blog."

You won’t simply want to repeat past topics that have done well but will probably do better to extend upon them.

AideRSS can be used in lots of ways to track other blogs and help find great content on other blogs but for me this analysis of my own posts has become a valuable tool.

How are you using AideRss?

From Social Media StarFish To Conversation Prism

Illustration by Brian Solis and Jess 3
(Click through to see the larger image)

Darren Barefoot created a visual called "social media starfish" in his book "Getting to First Base." It was a remix of  Scoble's white board.  Brian Solis has created the next reiteration - the conversation prism.  (Perhaps it  inspired this visualization of the Digg Community activity)
 

The conversation map is a living, breathing representation of Social Media and will evolve as services and conversation channels emerge, fuse, and dissipate.

I'm seeing a remix of the Social Media Game cards.  However, the existing "tool cards" have about 3/4 of the tools listed above - but people get so overwhelmed with choices.   The holy grail would be a grid that shows prism category, lists the tools, and column that describes possible applications or uses.   

WeAreMedia Module 6: Considering the ROI (Return on Investment) of your organization's social media strategy - Let's Play Mad Libs!

Photo by Usonian

In the previous WeAreMedia modules, we covered how to develop a social media strategy and map. It is now time to consider the ROI (Return on Investment), an evaluation process and analysis of benefits, costs, and value of a social media strategy over time. While your initial foray into social media may not require huge investments in infrastructure or technology, you will need to invest one of your most valuables -- your time. So, how do you know it is worth it?

An ROI process can help you measure the contribution to your organization's mission, give you a framework to track your strategy, set priorities, and helps you focus on results, not tools. This module covers the four basic building blocks to using ROI - benefits, metrics, value, and financial formulas as well as how to use quantitative and qualitative information to help you learn how to improve your social media strategy or understand the impact over time.

This week we'll be building and discussing Module 6: Considering the ROI.   For today, we're going to have some fun.  The first step in an ROI process is to figure out the benefits. Benefits describe how a social media strategy might enhance your organization's programs or improves services or increases efficiency through reduced costs or increased revenue. When starting to think about benefits, you should brainstorm all potential benefits whether or not they appear difficult to support or quantify.

• How will the social media strategy contribute to effectiveness of staff to serve our stakeholders?
• How will the social media strategy help us build better relationships with our key audiences?
• How much time or money can we save?
• Will the social media strategy translate into earned revenue or increased donations?

Did you ever play mad libs?  They were fill in the blanks sentences that ended up being humorous.   So, wouldn't it be fun to have a social media and nonprofits roi mad lib?   

Here's what you need to fill in:

Our organization (fill in the name) is implementing a social media strategy that includes (fill in the blanks). The key benefits are (list)

Can think of any benefits?  Well, go read this blog post by Chris Brogan, "12 Ways To Sell Your Boss on Social Media" and then add your organization's social media ROI mad lib here:

 

Measuring the Value of Your Blog: Reflections Over the Last Year

My blog is worth $314,448.78.
How much is your blog worth?

I'm thinking  about writing the description for the WeAreMedia Module 6: Considering the ROI for this week.  Okay, I'm procrastinating.

I was inspired by Connie Bensen, a community strategist, who shared a post celebrating the success of her blog over the past year.   About a year ago, I decided to benchmark my blog using some tips suggested by Avinash Kaushik.   A year ago, he said that measuring outcomes for social media is, "an evolving art (not quite a science yet) and you have to be up to the challenge of both thinking a bit differently and be ok with leveraging several different tools."   I think this statement still holds true, although with more people thinking about ROI and Social Media, practice is evolving.

Measuring the success of social media efforts can't be done with a single metric. I think there will be different metrics for different strategies, organizations, and tools. 

Kaushik suggested these metrics for benchmarking blogs:

• Raw Author Contribution (posts & words in post)
• Audience Growth (content consumption – Unique Visitors & Feed Subscribers)
• Conversation Rate (measuring success in a social medium)
• Technorati “Authority” (measuring your impact on the world!)
• Cost (what!)
• Return on Investment (what’s in it for you/your business)

So, here's a comparison between last year and this year and another opportunity to consider improvements.

1.  Raw Author Contribution (posts & words in post)

I don't think this metric has any meaning in isolation.  Does an abundant production of  posts with more words per post make for a better blog?   It is not useful to know how many posts you write on a monthly, weekly or daily basis or the number of the words for comparisons either.  For example, in April 2007 I wrote 52 posts, but in April 2008 I wrote 61.  What does that mean?

This metric is only meaningful (to me) when considered against a goal.  My goal was consistency which for me means to blog daily or 30 posts per month.   This is not foolish consistency.   My reason for daily blogging  was it would improve the quality of my thinking and writing.  I believe it has also helped with increased reader numbers and possibly reader retention.  Avinash Kaushik agrees.

So, calculating this number help me see if I've kept this promise with myself.

Many people ask me "How often should I post?"  As if there was a magic number that would guarantee success.  So, if you are just starting up, pick a frequency that you can sustain over time.   

Calculating benchmarks should not take you more time than it is worth.  My blogging platform, Typepad, does not have a way to easily and automatically measure the number of posts and words in post in a given time period.  So I'm not spending time to generate god's spreadsheet of monthly number of posts and words per post.  I just sampled one month.  (Word Press users can use General Stats plugin.)

2.  Audience Growth

If you're blogging, who is listening?  And how has the audience grown overtime?  This can be measured by unique readers or  "How many people read your blog?"  That's a hard question for me to answer because as Kaushik notes and all of us bloggers know all too well -- many analytics programs do not track RSS feeds.  And, while we you can track the subscriber numbers, you don't necessarily know who is actually reading.   RSS reading patterns are changing.   

Kaushik makes a distinction between "on-site" visitors or unique visits as calculated by your analytics program and "off-site" visitors.

Now, when I go back and look at my "on-site" visitors or monthly unique visitor or visits in my analytics program, Google Analytics, that number is steadily growing.   In early 2008 it was slightly lower for several reasons.   My blog turns up in the first three  Google results when you Google the word "Beth."  A year ago, I decided to tweak my blog title from "Beth's Blog" to "Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Are Using Social Media" because I had a lot of referrals from Google for the word "Beth."    So, I changed the title and the unique visitors when down slightly.   

And I think that's a good thing .. Why?

The unique visitor count doesn't include the people who aren't looking for information about social media and nonprofits!  I want people who find me via a google search to want to stick around and join the conversation, not click away.  While the immediate impact was to drop in monthly unique visitors, it has now started to grow.

I know I need to do more with SEO, particularly with blog post titles and the like.  Maybe I need an SEO makeover and advice from Bill Snyder and Jonathan Coleman.  Or study bloggers SEO resources in more depth.

I think the more important metric here is RSS subscriber trends or what Kaushik called "off-site audience."  People who subscribe via RSS or email are making a commitment a level of above those clicking over from a google search or referral.   

If I look at the RSS subscriber trends, that is a whole different story: 

My readership those who subscribe has continued to grow over time In June 2007, I had 1,260 subscribers.  In June 2008, it has more than doubled.  The dramatic rise a year ago was I consolidated several RSS feeds so Feedburner was reporting aggregate statistics. (Thanks to Chris Blow, a reader, who helped me figure it out).  The dramatic dip had to do with feedburner issues.  With all that aside, I'm pleased with these stats! Thank you readers!

During the last year, I added the option to subscribe via email -- and only a small percentage of subscribers (less than 200) are email subscribers.  What is interesting to me is that when I get a notification when people unsubscribe and I typically email and ask why.    Some unsubscribe because they feel my blog is too technical and they are looking for pure marketing or fundraising or nonprofit news - and I refer them to other blogs.  Some tell me they are simply overwhelmed with email.  I try to encourage those email subscribers to consider switching to RSS and point them to some resources.

This also reinforces for me the need to streamline and simplify my messy categories and add a page or link for newcomers to the blog.  I continue to explore how to improve my writing/blogging and I continue to put into practice these tips for increasing readership.

3. Conversation Rate (measuring success in a social medium)

Conversation habits in the comments in the blogs - it's what makes them a social media..  And, the good news is you can measure it!

Conversation Rate = Number of Visitor Comments / Number of Posts

I had to compute mine manually by counting them in typepad.  A time consuming pain.  Why doesn't typepad have this integrated into its platform?  Anyway, since I didn't want to spend all day on this and since I couldn't really slice and dice the data easily, so I only compared two months - May, 2007 and May, 2008. (I did not include spam comments or my own).   

Last year, I had a ratio of 1.4 and simply want to improve the quality of the conversation taking place in the comments.   I've been thinking about and blogging about - take for example conversation readiness and conversation strategy posts I wrote recently.  I've also read and re-read every single word Amy Gahran has written on the topic.

When I first started blogging, I hardly received any comments at all.  So,if you're just starting out and worried about the lack of comments - this is normal.  It takes time.   But here are some tips to help encourage comments.

| View | Upload your own

One reflection exercise is to look at your posts and notice which ones attract more comments than others.  Those that are simply announcement or share a pointer to an event or resources do not get comments. I had less of those in May, 2008 compared to May 2007.   Posts that summarize viewpoints from many different sources, posts that ask questions at the end or in the title, and posts that tell stories seem to attract more comments.  When I asked people to comment - particularly when incentives like book giveaways are offered that also ups the commenting. 

So, should I consider this a success?  Well, that award goes to you dear readers who are willing to contribute your thoughts and provide insights.

Aide RSS wrote about measuring social engagement on a blog which that looks at a number of different metrics.  You can do an analysis of your blog feed here.  Here's a recent analysis of the "best" posts on my blog and I need to go figure out what the numbers mean.

4.    Technorati “Authority” (measuring your impact on the world!)

Kaushik admits to mixed feelings about Technorati and I know Amy Gahran has tracked and written about the drawbacks to Technorati.  Nonetheless,  Kaushik says he is a fan:

If you just stick to your blogging and write great content then there is no better authority, at the moment, that will provide you a metric to compare your impact on the blogging universe. It is a simple metric, there are 70 million blogs and if they were ranked from one to seventy million then what would your rank be.

Again, I have not consistently written down and charted my technorati rating, but I do know that trend has been to more or less go up.  My technorati rank increases when I'm in the heat of a fundraising campaign and reaching out to people to spread the word.  Last year, my number of outbound links was at 484.  It currently 575.

Kaushik's advice is:

For your blog, personal or professional I recommend a goal setting exercise.  Do a quick Technorati search for all the blogs in your own ecosystem. Create a goal to beat the highest listed blog in that ecosystem in x months, where x is aggressive. :)

That goal setting exercise seems right for businesses, but nonprofits?  I try to link to and encourage as many nonprofit bloggers as possible and help them increase their technorati rating.  Why would I want to make it into a football match?

Setting the goal is step 1, but of course a strategy is needed. What is most important for me is to track and reflect on what makes that technorati rating rise.  It has to do with reciprocity.

5.   Cost (what!)

Kaushik suggests asking:

What is the cost to your life, business, time of your blog? Compute it and you’ll be surprised.

I was surprised to read that he invests 25 hours a week on his direct blogging process (answering email, writing, researching, maintenance.) I haven't tracked my time on "direct blogging process" and it is also hard to separate from other work because the two are so intertwined.  Take for example, I writing this post because I'm trying to think through some ideas for ROI and Metrics for a project I'm working on.

And, I blog on multiple sites, but I cross post here. 

Oh, this is sort of hard to precisely measure.

Kaushik adds that he blogs for the love it:

Interestingly this is a addiction and I don’t think that the investment is going to go down. But at least I know, and so should you.

I'm not sure I'd go as far as saying I'm addicted ... okay, okay, yes I am.  However,  I have found the daily discipline of writing extremely important to my professional learning.  So important that I get crabby when I don't blog.  The key for me is that the topic I'm blogging about is close to my work and my passion.

I probably spend at least 10-15 hours per week on direct blogging work for this blog.  And given the tracking tasks outlined, that will probably go up. 

6. Return on Investment (what’s in it for you/your business)

Kaushik does not provide an ROI, but mentions the "happiness" factor related to blogging.

All because it makes you happy. And there is no price that you can put on a ROI of happiness. If you are one of those (and I am!) then for a moment leave that aside

I have to agree.  He does say that we need to look at ROI:

You (and I) should track ROI. Use what you have: job offers you get, proposals for marriage, increase in salary at work, sales driven to your ecommerce website from the blog, reduction in the cost of PR because now your blog is so omnipresent and a big bull horn (for businesses this is big), number of paid conference speaking engagements, and so on and so forth

Last year, I used a widget that calculates your blog's worth using your technorati ranking.  Last year, my blog was worth $271,000.  This year $314,000.I have to admit that number is hilarious!  If I made that much money, I'd stop working and I'd contribute more of my time to worthy causes.

The ROI is hard to compute because there are so many intangibles. Like the fact that blogging forces me to do a certain level of reflection everyday and that makes me think more deeply about my topics. And, then readers comment and help me get smarter which in turn deepens my expertise.   But, over time, the blog has changed from just a professional development tool to a marketing and business development tool.

And, what about the readers who learn from my learnings?  That's really intangible and hard to measure.  For example, I got this comment in my LinkedIn the other day:

Your blog and portfolio items have made a tremendous difference in my work 

It's been a busy spring! You've really been a huge help. Thank you for taking the time to help us newbies along. I especially appreciate both the quality and the personal nature of your posts and learning tools."    

Conclusion

The numbers and data alone are almost meaningless unless you take those numbers think about how to make improvements, set goals, and reflect.   The reflection involves qualitative data -- anecdotes, reflections, stories, and pattern analysis.

I have some clear ideas of what I need to do to make improvements - so this exercise has been worth it.  I most likely need to integrate more regular reflection into my routine.

So, dear readers, have you set goals for your blog (or web site?) What metrics or qualitative or quantitative data do you use to measure them?  How do you reflect on them?

How To Develop a Social Media Plan in Five Easy Steps

Flickr photo by Terry Bain
Terry / aXis / You Are a Dog / the book / the blog // We Are the Cat / the blog

I found Mashable's How To Develop a Social Media Plan in Five Easy Steps Via Britt Bravo who forwarded me this link.  I was searching for the perfect illustration for "five" in flickr and since you all know how much I like dogs, I couldn't resist this photo. 

Last week, we explored questions about how nonprofits go about planning their social media efforts and various resources are summarized here.   I found 3 really good planning templates. Two had an organizational lens and the other was adapted from some more traditional communications planning questions.

We used a map metaphor, inspired by and adapted a post by Chris Brogan.  We created a worksheet with more detailed questions adapted and remixed from CCTV's wiki. (The original worksheet was developed from recommendations from the Spin Project and the "Smart Chart" developed by Spitfire Strategies.) Amy Sample Ward contributed a workshop group exercise based on Forrester's POST method.

I like the framework that How To Develop a Social Media Plan by Mashable presents.   It is good for a project lens - after you've thought through the organizational capacity and outcomes questions.

Step 1: Listen

This is the best practice for the first step.  If you attend any presentation on social media - you'll hear as the first step - listen.    I like the suggestion of using alltop to find blogs to read - really easy and streamlined.

Step 2: Prepare

These steps are about figuring out who in organization is going to have the conversations.   In many nonprofit communications plans we call this the messenger.  I'm thinking the "discussant" or there's probably some better terms - evangelist?  The section on strategy points over the some for-profit slides, but I might point people here

• Find people
• Set rules of engagement
• Determine your strategy

Step 3:  Engage

Yep, that is the fun part.

Step 4:  Go Offline

This is a really important step.   Does anyone know of good posts that elaborate on this point and are written from a nonprofit perspective?

Step 5:  Measure Success

What I like best about this section is that the focus isn't on numbers only - these are reflective questions related to learning.  The action - feed -reflection process is very important.  I've tweaked the questions so they are more nonprofit friendly. 

– Did we learn something about our stakeholders that we didn’t know before?
– Did our stakeholders learn something about us?
– Were we able to engage our stakeholders in new conversations?
– Does our staff have an effective new tool for external feedback and reputation management?

In summary, The Mashable How To Develop a Social Media Plan is a simplified, step-by-step approach that's really practical and useful for nonprofit organizations.  I would love to see an example of a nonprofit's social media plan.  Anyone have something share?

An Interview David J. Neff about American Cancer Society's Sharing Hope Project

Skip, David's dog

I'm doing a series of blog about lessons learned from nonprofits in adopting social media projects as the Cute Dog Theory.  (If you want to do an interview and have a dog, feel free to add your dog to the NpTech Dog Group) David J. Neff is the Director of Web, Film and Interactive Strategy for the American Cancer Society.  He has been with the American Cancer Society for seven years since he graduated from college.   He agreed to do an interview with his organization's socal media project, SharingHope.tv.

1.   Tell me about the project - give me your elevator speech re: project. 

SharingHope.TV is the place for people to share their stories around cancer. Whether you
are a survivor, pre-vivors, a caregiver or just someone with a story to tell SharingHope.TV
is the place to share that story in Video, Audio, Artwork or Photos.

2.  What were the objectives?

We wanted to give people a good enviroment to share their stories of hope in anyway they wanted. From video to audio to photos.  YouTube has like 7 hours of video uploaded every 3 minutes. A firehose of information. We want to be the gardenhose of information. YouTube has tons of trolls and comment spam. We want a friendly enviroment where people can share and learn. I believe our community does just that.

3. How did the project unfold?

We said if we are going to do this let's make it happen. In the American Cancer Society we have a group called the Futuring and Innovations Center. Think of them as Venture Capatlists for non-profits. They liked the idea and funded it within two weeks of me submitting the idea. The within 6 monhts we have a fully functional "Beta" Web Site up adn running. We are doing Beta for 6 months then Gamma then BAM we take the labels off and start advertising.

4.  Define how you overcame challenges.

Our biggest challenge was explaining to decision-makers why didn't use an existing platform like YouTube or Flickr or Facebook.  We felt that there was not one single platform that caters to the millions of people who care about cancer and want to share their stories. Now hopefully they have that platform. Our main challenge right now? How do we tell people about it? How do I get people to test it and break it and make suggestions.  I'm reaching out to bloggers.

5.   Let's talk about numbers.  How much did it cost?  What were the results?  How are you measuring them? .

Well the costs are I have to do this all for under $25,000. That's the grant money I have. Right now with hosting and staff time it's costing me about 2,000 a month. The programming was around $4,000. The days of million dollar web sites are dead. Open source and local talent. It's all about that.

We are learning to not give a crap about page view and hits. What I want at the end of the day is number of registered users and number of conversations. What are people commenting on? What discussions are they
having?

6.  What advice would you give to other nonprofits?

Video is the future! Imagine a world where your customer tells you what they want ......and you actually listen. It's what we are doing right now. 

Here's a few inspiring videos on SharingHope.TV that David would like us to see:

http://www.sharinghope.tv/video/1706386
http://www.sharinghope.tv/video/1857977

The Struggle To Measure Social Media Effectiveness

Rachel Happe has a good post about how to look at the value part of social media ROI equation.  She identifies some good questions to get at defining the value:

- What is the value of having a better conversation?
- What is the value of meeting someone?
- What is the value of getting more accurate information faster?
- What is the value of being able to drive consensus around an idea faster?
- What is the value of building trust?
- What is the opportunity cost of not innovating?

I would have liked to have added these questions to the Social Media ROI Case Study Slam panel, maybe for future reiterations.   I'd like to see variations on the Justin Perkin's Social Media ROI Calculator to incorporate some of those.

Rachel goes on to say, that "The things he can measure easily (activity) are not the things that provide insight into the real value to the organization."  Ah, yes, was going to ask about the intangibles.  She points to EMC blogger talking about the difficulty of measurement.  Doesn't sound too much different from nonprofit or not?

At some point, our free ride will come to an end.  The company will realize they're spending a big chunk of change on this stuff, and there will be a clear need to formalize metrics around the paybacks we're getting from a multi-headed investment.

But, I'm not quite sure what we'll measure, or how we'll measure it.  Some real work will need to be done around an "E2.0" balanced scorecard, and how well we're doing against it.  And, I don't think anyone has really done this yet, as far as I know.

Sure, we're poking around with "buzz measurement" tools, and anyone can capture page views, but I keep thinking we're missing the real value of having people meaningfully engage with each other. 

Sometimes, I think we're trying to measure a great conversation, or a wonderful party.  The qualitiative aspects seem to outweigh the quantitative ones.   Sure, we could construct a quantitative case, but that'd miss the point of what's turning out to really matter.

 

Rachel has a page listing social media metrics.

Are there any nonprofits that use KPI? (Key Performance Indicators?)

| View | Upload your own

This slideshow caught my eye.  It's about the difference between KPI and Metrics.  I discovered key performance indicators while researching the Google Analytics Screencast.   I jumped down the rabbit hole of KPIs and read everything by Eric T Peterson who is the founder of a company called, Web Analytics Demystified. Some of his books include:  Web Analytics Demystified, Web Site Measurement Hacks and The Big Book of Key Performance Indicators.   

Peterson defines KPI as "numbers designed to succinctly convey as much information as possible. Good key performance indicators are well defined, well presented, create expectations and drive actions."    Now .. I'm interested in the best practices around using KPI and Peterson's book is a fantastic resource.  I thinking about what is translatable to nonprofits and organizations that have smaller budgets than Fortune 500 Companies used as examples in the books.

Social Media ROI Case Study Slam Panel at 08NTC: Carie Lewis, Human Society

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Notes

ABOUT ME
My name is Carie and I’m the Internet Marketing Manager for The Humane Society of the United States.
I run the org’s web 2.0 and online advertising campaigns.
I love animals and I love the internet, and I’m a self-proclaimed social networking junkie.

ABOUT THE ORG
The HSUS is the nation’s largest and most powerful animal protection organization.
Our mission is “celebrating animals, confronting cruelty.”
We’ve been responsible for bringing animal cruelty and animal welfare related issues into the media spotlight and on the minds of average Americans.

WHY THIS CAMPAIGN
What Vick did was a horrible thing, and dogfighting is a dispicable crime. It’s now a felony in all 50 states
But this case brought dogfighting into the spotlight and raised awareness to people that may have never heard of it before.
Since this brought dogfighting into the spotlight and put it on the minds of many Americans, we figured it was a good time to reach out to people.

WHY THIS CAMPAIGN
People were buzzing about the issue online and obviously outraged by their comments. We could tell by all the comments and images floating around.
We wanted to take that energy and give people an outlet to express their feelings about michael vick and dogfighting in general.
We wanted to be creative and capitalize on the media attention to bring dogfighting into the spotlight.
We wanted low cost and high impact

WHAT CAMPAIGN
In the middle of the Vick dogfighting drama, we launched a UGC campaign called the “Knock Out Animal Fighting YouTube Contest”
An Integrated campaign using website, email, social networking, video sharing, TV

PROCESS - contest
Asked people to go to our website to learn about the contest
Create videos about how they and their pets felt about dogfighting
Then, they uploaded it as a video response to our dogfighting video and filled out our submission form

PROCESS - contest
We picked a winner and also allowed people to vote for their favorite, generating a people’s choice winner
This gave people who didn’t or werent able to participate by creating a video a way to be engaged – important with higher-engagement leveled UGC campaigns

PROCESS - marketing
Email
Website
Social networks
Web badges
Blogger outreach

OUTCOMES
Both tangible & intangible
Increase list members (we don’t spend money on online marketing unless its tied to a donation, advo, or other list building campaign. That way can recoup the $ spent and justify time spent. Great thing about online marketing – trackable
Raise awareness – youtube video views
Get original contest – videos
Encourage engagement - # of votes for people’s choice award. High engagement contest – to be able to make a video – engaged in issue and also have equipment

OUTCOMES - tangible
Number of video submissions
Number of new list members from video / voting page advo (worth = $3 per list member)
Number of page views to the winners announcement on HSUS.org
Number of votes for people’s choice award
Number of youtube video views of winning submission

MEASUREMENT TOOLS - tangible
Sourced links for new list names from marketing – to quantify ROI
Page views from our stats program & Video view count from youtube – to quantify exposure
Time spent on page & Vote count from poll program – to quantify engagement

PROCESS / STRATEGY
Measuring buzz
-link love – google syntax to show you who’s linking to you
-referring URLs in stats program
-google rss alerts (can be set to daily, as it happens, etc.) – good for time-sensitive response (answer questions, defense, etc)
-do a regular google search for related terms
- Pr / newspaper coverage
Friend recruitment (TAF)
- bulletin reposts on myspace
Not just number, but quality of blogslook at technorati and alexa rankings

PROCESS / STRATEGY
Top 10 referrers were all from mail programs – aol and yahoo
Indicates that people were forwarding in order to share

MEASUREMENT TOOLS - intangible
# blogs / websites mentions and links
# comments on social networks / blogs
# related inquiries
# RSS subscribers (n/a)
Rating of youtube video
Comment content
Keywords leading to page to define interests
Referring sites (count, quality) to find out where people are coming from
Friend request / commenting trends in relation to other activities

WHAT I LEARNED FROM THIS CAMPAIGN - GOOD
people’s choice involvement
Timing w/ media
Using youtube – technical support on their end, cost effective, mainstream venue, increasing video views (it was on the homepage)

WHAT DO THE NUMBERS MEAN?
How do you know if it was successful? If the numbers are good? If it was worth your time?
Time spent = amount of outreach compared to number of venues
We do not use a formula to determine if a social media campaign was successful. We also do not track time – everything is an estimate.
Did you build a relationship with a blogger that will cover your stuff in the future?
Media coverage - Tv, blogs, newspapers

Was it worth it?Youtube UGC – yes – we had to start somewhere
Made a TV PSA that otherwise we would have had to pay to get an agency to do.
We learned - were running a flickr contest right now that takes lessons learned from wendys and has been successful.

KEY TAKEAWAYS ABOUT ROI, MEASUREMENT, and METRICS for nonprofits using social media
If you or your boss are stuck on time spent ROI, track as you go.
Pick one link and market it for consistency – will be easier to track – use a vanity URL. and have all resources available (related press release, web story, etc.)
One person to know where all the moving parts can be brought together to evaluate in the end. Also helps for communicating with UGC contestants and winners.
Disclose policies in contest rules - this is the easiest way to incorporate list building in UGC campaigns is to disclose that all entrants will be auto added to your email list and can unsubscribe at any time.
Next time, we’re thinking of having a celebrity judge so that we can collaborate with them and generate more excitement about submissions.
Most of my time was spent doing contest logistics since this was our first contest. Next time put more time into creating buzz.

The complete panel notes can be found here.

 

Social Media ROI Case Study Slam Panel at 08NTC: ROI of Listening, Wendy Harmon, Red Cross

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ROI of Listening

NTC Presentation Notes
3.20.2008

Slide 1
Introduction: Even liberal arts kids can measure. It’s not all about math. You can measure stories and connections through documentation, too.

Slide 2
American Red Cross background: Post Katrina, ARC knew there were negative blog posts about it but had no capacity to respond or even monitor. Hired social media integrator to “combat” bloggers and to increase organizational transparency.

Slide 3
Listening is the What: First order of business to get handle on existing conversation. Hundreds of mentions across social media platforms each day. Exponential increase in times of disaster, nature, man-made and PR varieties. We monitor and track all of it, and respond to a lot of it.

Slide 4
Why We Listen : ARC wanted to correct misinformation, to be informed about public opinion, to track conversation trends, to identify influencers, to create relationships.

Slide 5
Outcome of Listening:
Successfully correcting misinformation
Able to track conversation trends (for example, know that most people who post about blood donation also mention type of cookie they receive afterwords – this informs advertising, PR outreach to increase blood donations)
Instead of “combating” bloggers, found most are passionate and positive and want to help, so now engaging them and giving them tools to tell their stories on big platform.

Slide 6
Outcome of Listening:
ADOPTION: Sharing social media mentions internally is increasing ARC employee social media adoption
CUSTOMER SERVICE: Compiled data for each line of service (Blood, Disaster Response, International Services, Health & Safety, Service to Armed Forces, Preparedness) with info regarding various aspects of customer service and the “end user experience.”
STRATEGY: Able to inform PR strategy example: J&J sues ARC for trademark infringement, monitoring real time mentions informed immediate strategy.

Slide 7
Listening Process Step 1: The search
Not rocket science – just keyword search across social media platforms, lots of em (Technorati for blogs, Flickr, YouTube, Terraminds, Facebook, etc).
If have special circumstance, use special additional keywords to track. For example, did lots of J&J searches during first days of trademark lawsuit.

Slide 8
Listening Process Step 2: Blog Update
Cull all of the daily mentions into a daily update email that’s distributed widely to internal ARC audience.
Compile by line of service and/or subject matter, depending on day’s news.
Note which posts I need help answering, consult with subject matter experts.
Generally keeps everyone abreast of daily conversation.

Slide 9
Listening Process Step 3: Response
Determine who will get a response, whether it’s a thanks or something that needs fixing/addressing.
Spend time reading, watching, or looking at the other content before responding.
Use judgment in avenue of response: email, comment, or leave it alone.

Slide 10
Listening Process Step 4: Tagging
Tag all posts mentioned in the Daily Blog Update by line of service and other appropriate keywords
Over time, evaluate areas where people find their intersection with the Red Cross to be compelling enough to post about publicly.
Good for tracking past outreach

Slide 11
Listening Process Step 5: Reporting
Send monthly update of aggregated conversation data categorized by line of service or disaster or big event
J&J example: We watched mentions to determine where various industries stood so we’d know whether to back off or continue our aggressive PR push to shame them into dropping the suit.

Slide 12
Listening Metric: Authority
Use # of readers and tools like Technorati authority to determine influence of mentions.
Authority matters but is not everything. Sometimes most compelling story or most pressing issue comes from social media user with smallest influence.

Slide 13
Listening Metric: Anecdotal Evidence
Internal Feedback
“The blog update helps me do my job better.”
“Makes me feel more connected to our stakeholders.”
“Helped me understand the power of social media.”
External Feedback
Most one-on-one outreach results in positive public response
“I’m glad to see you here”
“Thanks for reading!”
“You really helped me.”
“Great to interact with a human being over there.”
Write it down!
Document all of the anecdotal evidence of return on investment and keep it in one spot so you can easily grab it when questioned.

Slide 14
Challenges to Measuring ROI of Listening
ARC is stodgy and slow to change. Lots of baby steps are necessary for organization-wide adoption of social media.
Culture shift is huge for this organization. It is happening, but slowly.

Slide 15
Challenges to Measuring ROI of Listening
Firewall. Only a handful of employees are able to access ANY social media sites.
If more employees were able to view and interact, impact of listening would be MUCH broader.
BUT – with some of the evidence here, I’ve nearly convinced senior leadership of need for opening access.

Slide 16
Successes in Measuring ROI of Listening
By documenting the conversation, created value. Everyone wants the feedback now.
Documenting successful one-on-one outreach with stakeholders lays groundwork for future social media campaigns.
Taking the baby step of listening has made the case for integrating appropriate social media tools in all ARC communications – opening the door to 2 way communications department instead of one way.

Slide 17
Successes in Measuring ROI of Listening
By reading and reaching out, created external value as a listener. Send message that you matter as a stakeholder by taking time to listen and incorporate your ideas.
Achieving higher degree of transparency.

Slide 18
Key Learnings in Measuring ROI of Listening
Listening is a gateway drug to increased social media adoption
Easy to aggregate conversations into data to recommend systemic change and to inform organization of trends and possible strategies.
Don’t forget the little guys – they can become passionate influencers with continued relationship building.

Social Media ROI Case Study Slam Panel at 08NTC: Eve Smith, Easter Seals

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The following is from an NTC 08 Panel called "Social Media ROI Case Study Slam" that I designed and facilitated at NTC.  Here are Eve's slides and her notes.

Hi, I'm Eve Smith, Assistant Director of Interactive Marketing at Easter Seals. I manage our online fundraising campaigns and integrated projects to attract new supporters and donors.

I’m going to share with you what we learned from participating in the recent Facebook Causes Challenge – as I was telling my colleagues before coming to NTEN, this is my “do as I say, not as I do” presentation.

Many of you may have heard of Easter Seals – we’ve been around for nearly 90 years providing help, hope and answers to children and adults with autism and other disabilities and support to the families who love them. We have a network of 80 affiliates in the United States, Puerto Rico and Australia.
When you think of Easter Seals, you may not immediately think of us on Facebook. But we’re there.

Like many of you, we learned about the Case Foundation's Giving Challenges when they were announced in December of this past year. There were 2 challenge competitions -- one with Parade Magazine and the other with Facebook Causes. Both competitions were based on attracting the most unique donors to your cause. The competitions ran from December to February.

We decided to test the waters and participate in the Facebook Causes Challenge. We thought this would be a good way to learn more about Facebook and the community.

We already had a Facebook fan page and a few causes, and we were eager to do more.

This seemed like a good opportunity. And we learned many valuable lessons along the way.

Our goals were pretty simple –

We wanted to identifying and get to know Facebook users who have an affinity with autism – We know they’ll be more likely to become our supporters and donors.

We wanted to see how well known the Easter Seals brand was in Facebook. And, we wanted to gather friends to build our cause and presence in Facebook for future messaging.

Let me just save you all the trouble in the future -- don't ever pick the last few days of a $50K challenge to compete for the daily challenge! The top fundraising orgs going for the $50K grand prize were driving up the daily totals to numbers we couldn’t compete with. 

Seems so obvious now, right, to not pick the last week of the contest for our push?

Learn from our mistake!

We published a post on our public autism blog -- they’re an audience more likely to join the cause.

Because of the tight timeframe, we decided to not solicit our house email list or engage our affiliates. We wanted to keep this a small experiment – we were really testing the concept more than anything else.

And, we know that our house file responds to email over about a three day period, so the single day challenge would have been over by the time many looked at their email.

We personally thanked supporters. But not as much as we should have – the groups who were really successful in the Challenge poked, prodded and motivated their supporters constantly, asking them to reach out to new people.

I estimate we spent about 8 hours in prep for the Cause, and about another 4-6 hours executing the campaign, responding and sending emails.

And based on the results, clearly that wasn’t enough. The results were, frankly, pretty dismal … We didn’t reach our goals or come close.

And we didn’t set a goal for gathering new friends, but we had 68 people join by the end of the 24 hour period which made us happy.

But … based on our experience, we’re on the new measurement train … and have a new way of measuring our effectiveness for these types of experiments.

For example, our Shine the Light on Autism Facebook cause keeps growing and attracting friends, even with little activity on our part. We're up to 163 members. The topic of autism has “stickiness” in Facebook and that’s a good thing for us because we’re launching a new campaign this month.

We’re also in this for the long haul – we’re not just looking for supporters for a day or a month. We want to engage with people for a long time.

We definitely learned some valuable lessons from the Facebook Causes Challenge.

One was we choose the wrong date. Clearly that was an oops.

Second, we learned it was really hard to carve out time from our very full schedules to take on this type of outreach. It was much more of a deep dive, then a toe dip, for sure.

Overall, that’s our big takeaway -- we learned that small experiments like the Facebook Causes challenge really do add up.

We're much better equipped to move ahead with a Facebook strategy than before the challenge.

We understand that its going to take a larger commitment of staff time and resources.

And that we know we weigh the risks and rewards about future experiments.

… So Whether you deep dive or just dip your toe, go ahead and test the water. I think you’ll find it’s just fine…

This is my contact information and I’d be happy to talk more about our work in Facebook and other social networks, and share what we’re learning to do, and not to do.

Thank you.