WeAreMedia: Listening for Nonprofits in a Connected World

Listening for Nonprofits in a Digital World

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As many of you know who read this blog, I am an early adopter of social media and set up my listening post 5 years ago to scan for people, trends, and ideas related to social media and nonprofits. Listening and engaging with people has been critical to any success I’ve achieved as a social media practitioner.

For the past five years, I’ve been teaching social media workshops for nonprofits and lately doing deeper dives on the techniques of listening both for nonprofits and in my role as Visiting Scholar in Residence at the Packard Foundation.  Today,  I had the pleasure of co-leading a deep dive on listening with practitioner, Wendy Harman, from the Red Cross for NTEN's WeAreMedia project.

The above presentation is a remix of a remix of a remix.  My sources of inspiration came from my personal learning wiki,  WeAreMedia listening resources, and Marnie Webb's slide deck.  Our session covered:

• Why listening offers value
• A Living Case Study of Red Cross Listening Techniques
• Six Ways To Make Listening A Practice

Last month I wrote a guest post for Brian Solis titled "Listening Literacy for Nonprofits" which outlines some of the basic how-tos.  But that was last month's thinking, the Webinar gave me a chance to reflect and incorporate new learnings, particularly with some of the professional tools.

Got to share my Radian 6 dashboard

Doing a living case study with Wendy Harman provided a chance to catch up her current practice.

My take aways from the session:

• Upgrade to paid tools like Radian 6 when you have large volume and you find you are doing a lot of cut and paste manual tasks - but remember that you still need to hone your listening skills - keywords - and that paid tools aren't magic

• Listening and engaging with the long tail - they may not be celebrities or influential bloggers - but when a crisis hits or need people to spread the world - they become activated like an army of volunteers

• Start slowly and spider out, you may be doing all the heavy lifting at first in terms of drinking from fire hydrant, summarizing, and analyzing - but it is a way to get others in your organization involved - even simple things like brainstorming keywords

• At first, it may seem like trial and error - but after you get familiar with the lay of the land, you know which keywords give you bang for your buck.

• Important to keep listening - even if nothing much is happening because it serves as your earthquake early warning system -- think of it of having a chronic illness going to acute

It's always a delight check out what people have added to the Wiki.  There's a new free listening tool in the tool box section!  SociafyQ provides free data analytic tracking for services including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and more - accessible through a web dashboard, XML and Dashboard and Yahoo! widgets.

In terms of process, I really liked the opportunity to have so many experts/practitioners on the call and have different voices answer some of the questions.  For the breakout sessions, we had a few technical glitches, but kept rolling with the punches!   I know it must have been intense for participates to take this deep dive, but left great learning artifacts that participants came back to and a whole community of people on the WeAreMedia wiki.

Comments

[Connie Bensen]

Hey Beth,
Awesome post! It just came up in my 'listening'. :)
Someone on my team asked today about examples of nonprofits and listening... I was going to send them to your blog, but thank you for providing a specific post on it.

And the slide deck is awesome!

Connie
Community Strategist
Techrigy/Alterian
@cbensen

[Connie Bensen]

Hey Beth,
Awesome post! It just came up in my 'listening'. :)
Someone on my team asked today about examples of nonprofits and listening... I was going to send them to your blog, but thank you for providing a specific post on it.

And the slide deck is awesome!

Connie
Community Strategist
Techrigy/Alterian
@cbensen

[twitter.com/herdpress]

Beth, do you recommend any tools for keeping track of people and correspondence in social media spaces?

[Debra Askanase]

Beth, Great post - and the slide show really nails the why, how and where of listening. I would only add that nonprofits are often scared or wary of digging deep into social media because they "might" encounter negative criticism. This post is a great comeback to that - listen, be prepared, respond, and turn the conversation. There are so many examples of the conversation being turned around that they are too numerous to mention. Would love to see a companion, follow-up post to this one that gives "success" stories about turning conversations around after listening and engaging!

[Amber Naslund]

Hey Beth,

As always, you're providing awesome insights and resources for people. Thanks for showing off your Radian6 dashboard, and some great takeaways for listening at scale. I especially love that you point out how listening requires some practice; tools aren't the silver bullet (even ours!), and the practice of listening really needs to be something you weave into your entire breadth of work.

Thanks, as always, for your support!

Best,
Amber Naslund
Director of Community, Radian6
@ambercadabra

[Roger Harris]

Hello Beth,

Listening is the first step in a social media strategy and perhaps the most important component of continuing use of social media channels. Without listening first, it's impossible to position outreach messaging appropriately and chances of success are low.

Radian6 is a great tool but, as you suggest, it's an upgrade. Free or lower end tools might better suit most of your readers' needs. Nathan Gilliat provides a list of 67 companies that offer various levels of social media monitoring tools.

[Beth]

have a url?

On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 6:22 AM, wrote:

[Beth]

Hi Debra:

Great point! I have two examples here - do you know of others? Perhaps
worth a blog post for you? Wanna guest post it here? B

http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2009/08/social-media-anger-management-tips-from-carie-lewis-hsus.html

http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2009/01/roi-nonprofit-examples-of-how-listening-returns-value.html

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 12:40 PM, wrote:

[Roger Harris]

Sorry, here is a URL for Nathan Gilliatt's report on social media monitoring companies.
http://www.socialtarget.com/research/guide.html

Please note the report is $300. (BTW I have no affiliation with or connection to Mr. Gilliatt, just that this is the most comprehensive review I have seen of social media monitoring companies.)

I have looked at several of these closely and will be happy to counsel your blog readers on possible solutions.