Social Media Listening Literacy Skills for Nonprofits

Listening Literacy

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This is a draft for a listening curriculum that I will be doing for the first time as part of WeAreMedia Workshop later this week.   I will also be teaching this workshop for nonprofits in a number of other locations in the coming months.

1.  Getting Your Nonprofit Ready To Listen

Your organization has identified a social media objective, audience, strategy, tools, measurement, and experiment. You know your first step is listening, but before you jump into a river of conversations and keywords and even before you touch the tools, you need to be ready to listen.

Your organization may be skeptical about the value of listening through social media channels.  You need to begin with sharing some stories about how other nonprofits are getting value from listening.   You may need to begin with a small, low-risk listening project and share the feedback with others in your organization.  This is how the American Red Cross started. (Story is here)

GreenMedia Toolshed founder Marty Kearns says that listening is something that is done on an individual staff level, but for it to become an organizational process leaders need to build a culture of listening.   He encourages staff to listen on many different channels and to blog what they learn in order to share with members.  He notes that they have a 80% retention rate with members and "you can't do that without listening."  Listening by using rss feeds helps refine their services and help stay sharp and connected to experts in the field. 

Once people understand the value of the listening, you need to figure out what you will listen to.   Listening should be linked to real life decisions or your social media strategy objectives.  Once you have an idea for the what, subject it to the so what test.   Brainstorm how you will apply what you learn to actual decisions.  Finally, think about how you and your organization will manage your listening efforts.  It doesn't need to be an all-consuming activity, but you need to decide who will do the heavy listening, who needs the know what has been said, and who is empowered on respond or act on the information.

Beth Kanter, Examples of How Listening Returns Value for Nonprofit Organizations
Beth Kanter, Getting Your Nonprofit Ready To Listen

2.  Listening Literacy Skills

Whether your nonprofit is using listening tools that are free or a professional tool to take a deeper dive, after you figure out who will do the listening and how to make it actionable, it's time to address the nitty gritty of what and how. 

The most important listening literacy skills are

• Keywords Are King
  
• Pattern Analysis 
• Engaging effectively

It's important search for the basics or what we call "ego searches."  You'll also need to search on keywords or phrases that might uncover a client need or perception.     To figure out your keywords, do a little brainstorming offline and then maybe use some online keyword tools.  

Once you've started to monitor the results of keyword searches, it's important to put your pattern analysis skills to work. KD Paine has some excellent advice about how to shift through some of the listening data.  Finally, you'll need to start to engage with your network and have a conversation.  Your pattern analysis will tell you when to ignore something or when to address it right away.

Qui Diaz, The Big Dig
Beth Kanter, Listening Literacy Skills

3.  Use Your RSS Reader Like A Rock Star

If you are not using an RSS Reader, pick one and learn how to use it like a rock star.   There are different readers that offer diffferent features and almost all are free.  Here's a few:

• Bloglines
• Google Reader
• Netvibes
• Feedly
• There are many other readers - here's a comparison of features from Wikipedia

Make sure you establish good RSS habits.

• Set up aside a small block of time to read your feeds everyday
• Clean house often, RSS subscriptions tend to pile up
• Don't feel like you have to read every post on every blog, use the "Mark Read" option

Sink or Swim, Managing RSS Feeds with Better Groups by 43 folders
NpTech 101: How I read 2,000 Articles in 30 Days by Chas Grundy
Wrangling your RSS Feeds by Amy Sample Ward

4.    Set up your Listening Radar and Response System

Your radar will have different components: 

Ego Feeds:

Search on your organization's name, url, or other specific identifier.

Process

• Do search at site for the first time
• Add a RSS feed to your reader
• Monitor in your reader, engage when needed

Tools

• Google Alerts
• Technorati
• Blogpulse
• Social Mention
• Twitter Search
• BoardReader
• BackType

Dan Schawbel, Five Free Tools To Track Your Reputation

Persistent Search

Various Key word searches

• Other nonprofit names in your space
• Program, services, and event names
• CEO or well-known personalities associated with your organization
• Other nonprofits with similar program names
• Your brand or tagline
• URLs for your blog, web site, online community
• Industry terms or other phrases that illustrate need

Rinse and repeat above process. Put into different folders in your reader.

Tools

• Google Alerts
• Technorati
• Blogpulse
• Social Mention
• Twitter Search
• BoardReader
• BackType

Top Ten Free Monitoring Tools by Dan Schawbel
How To Set Up A Listening Post on Twitter by Beth Kanter

c. Listening to Bloggers

You'll want to identify and follow key bloggers in your nonprofit space, especially if you are planning to blog or doing any blogger relations program.

• Define Your Niche
• Find Bridge bloggers alltop.com
• Add them to your RSS Reader

Further you can check out their page rank, views, and technorati rating.   But the best advice is start small and spider out.

Finding Bridge Bloggers by Beth Kanter

d. Other Places To Listen

You can monitor social networks and YouTube for mentions of your organization and issue. It is important to do this type of listening as a prelude to setting up your own profile or placing videos on YouTube - and as an going part of your social media strategy.

• Social networks
• YouTube

How to Listen on Social Networks by KD Paine
How to Listen on YouTube by KD Paine

5. The Art of Responding

Engagement happens eventually. Once you have a policy around who will respond, you will get down to commenting and engaging in conversation.

How to Comment like a Queen by Vicky Davis
The Art of Responding by Beth Kanter

6.  Pattern Analysis

You'll want to be look for patterns and trends. This requires stepping back. Your tools are social bookmarking and the excel spreadsheet and, of course, your brain.

Using Delicious to Bookmark mentions

WeAreMedia Tool Box: Social Bookmarking

7.  Professional Listening Tools

With your system in place, you're may be ready for professional listening tools.  As with any vendor, do your due diligence.  The key value is if you have the volume that requires analytics and if the tool can support your work flow.

• Listening in a Blizzard by Beth Kanter
• Top 10 Reputation Tools Worth Paying For by Dan Schwabel, Mashable
• Listening Tools by Beth Kanter

WeAreMedia Resources
Tactical Module 1: Listening is the first step
Tactical Module 2: Participating in the conversation
Tool Box: Monitoring, RSS Readers, Commenting

KD Paine, Measuring PR and Corporate Communications (Must read)

Comments

[nonprofitnicole]

Hey, Beth.

Really interesting curriculum. I think the flow and the content all seem logical and well paced for folks at different levels. The specific articles that anticipate the reality on the ground for so many organizations are key.

I'm not sure to whom your presentation is addressed - orgs already pretty social media savvy, I assume - but coming from a smaller organization in a Midwestern city, it's very helpful to have content to help empower the social media advocate (ROI of listening, recommendations for RSS readers for colleagues who don't use them, etc) on hand. It can be awfully lonely to be the lone voice calling for social media in an organization, so I always appreciate your well-linked and resource saturated material.

[Nancy E. Schwartz]

Beth, a fantastic overview of how listening can really help orgs, and how to do it. What I find so interesting is how our/your perspective (drawn from a few years of being at/in/with social media at this point) enriches the analysis.

Go, Beth, go!

I feel so privileged to be able to share some of these thoughts with the folks I train, with attribution of course!

[dominic]

Hi Beth,

I really enjoy your presentation. Very practical and hands on.

If I may... We developped a screencast on how to find relevant blogs (it's using our own application but most of the advices are generic: http://www.screencast.com/users/laurentpfertzel/folders/Shared/media/87f301f8-7f8b-4252-b2b0-d00f6ab3aca8)

Also, you may want to check us out. Our solution kind of collapses your "search", "reader", "engagement monitoring", "twitter... search" and your nice spreadsheet.

I would love to get your feedback.

Best

[dominic]

Hi Beth,

I really enjoy your presentation. Very practical and hands on.

If I may... We developped a screencast on how to find relevant blogs (it's using our own application but most of the advices are generic: http://www.screencast.com/users/laurentpfertzel/folders/Shared/media/87f301f8-7f8b-4252-b2b0-d00f6ab3aca8)

Also, you may want to check us out. Our solution kind of collapses your "search", "reader", "engagement monitoring", "twitter... search" and your nice spreadsheet.

I would love to get your feedback.

Best

[Annette Schulte]

Shame on me, Beth. I have not been practicing good Google Reader habits and am visiting your blog again for the first time in too long. It's good to be reminded how damn smart you are! :) I recommend your blog highly to friends in non-profit sector, but it's great reading for any of us interested in social media. This, btw, is an excellent curriculumn outline.

[Edith Asibey]

Beth: this curriculum looks strong. Good work! One suggestion:
- Think about WHEN to listen: when is a good time to listen to what is being said about your org or your issue? Two examples:

1) You are writing a grant proposal for a new project or program. Knowing what different audiences/constituents are saying about your issue can help you make a stronger case for what needs to be done.

2) You are about to launch a campaign. Start listening BEFORE your campaign starts, so you will have a baseline to compare as you monitor your progress during the campaign.

- Although we could argue that one must listen at all times, I think orgs would have a bigger incentive to do it if they can see how listening helps advance their organizational priorities.

[Kevin Long]

Great hands-on tips Beth.

Having trouble convincing your board of directors to support social media? Use Beth's tips to get them to first 'listen' and then act. Non-tech people love the experience.

[Amy Sample Ward]

Hey Beth-

This is great! Thanks so much for opening it up and letting us give some feedback :)

I think it looks awesome! In section #2, I would add one more item to the the list of three you have now: Evaluation of Voices/Conversations. If you start getting a ton of Google Alerts for keywords in your sector, there needs to be a conversation about how to evaluate those alerts to figure out which ones to reply to, which conversations to join, and so on - there's no way to click through on every Google Alert and put a thoughtful reply or comment.

Thanks again.

[Angus Parker]

I noticed at the WeAreMedia training that a couple of people were confused about what an RSS feed was and how it related to a RSS Reader. I suggest you consider adding the Lee Lefever video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0klgLsSxGsU) to the training / perhaps as prereading. Also you could consider using the analogy Channel (for the feed source), Story (for the feed itself) and Aggregator (for the reader). Thank you again for such a valuable session.

[Beth Kanter]

Angus,

Thanks so much. I had made an assumption based on our syllabus requirements that people would have a base line familiarity with RSS. I was surprised that not everyone was using RSS Readers and this design is more of a 201. So, you're right on with that suggestion. In fact, when I've taught versions of this in other places, I have a series of slides that cover what is RSS and why you should be using one -- including the metaphor of netflicks versus going to the video store - which is directly from Lee's video.