Beth's Blog: Nonprofits and Social Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Twitter Matters

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Building Buzz Without a Budget

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

Emetrics Reputation and Relationship Management in A Social Media World

I got to meet KDPaine at the eMetrics Summit!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All the old dynamics are changing and its impacting everyone!

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

It's no longer about reaching eyeballs. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit: Keynote by Jim Sterne

Flickr Photo by Powerbook Trance

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

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

• Increased Revenue
• Lowered Expenses
• Increased Customer Satisfaction

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

He talked about different categories of metrics for the web:

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

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

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

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

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

The big five to measure:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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