Beth's Blog: Nonprofits and Social Media

What type of Tweets get retweeted most? Bites of Wisdom

 

Screen capture here:

I've been running small experiments on the art of retweeting for a couple of weeks and it's time for a reflection. 

My tweets usually fall into one of several types:

• Retweets of others:  Verbaitem sharing of someone's message that I feel is important for followers to know about.
  
• Share Links w/Brief Comment:  This comes from my daily scanning of resources about social media, nonprofits, and philanthropy and picking out five good links and passing them along with a 140 character annotation.  These are a few gems that I've bookmarked on delicous and slightly different than those streamed on my blog.  (And usually doesn't include the best Facebook links which are shared on my Facebook Fan Page)

• Live Tweeting:  If I am at a conference or meeting, I'm usually live blogging or tweeting.  I like to live tweet because it forces a discipline of listening.

• Closing the Triangle:  This is a network weaving technique of introducing people in your network.

• Crowdsourcing Questions:  I use this when I'm developing training materials, particularly for case studies or sometimes for demos of Twitter as a crowdsourcing tools.   Usually I ask a question, and try to get people to answer in another place like a google document or wiki.

• Bytes of Wisdom or humor:  I share some geek humor now and then.  I also share some meta reflections or wisdom about what works or doesn't work in using social media for nonprofits.  

I generally try to avoid public replies that don't provide context or may not be valuable for everyone.   So, unless the reply can incorporate one of the above, I may do it privately if the person is following me. 

Which of these do you think gets retweeted most often?   After some rapid experimentation and testing different types of tweets and measuring results, for me -- wisdom/humor.  It may be that those tweets are not as frequent.  I think it also has to do with several factors - your content strategy - and also how you've built your network.

I was tweeting wisdom because Janet Fouts asked me to help with a project "Bite Sized Social Media for Nonprofits."  (You can participate or help spread the word.)  I shared the above Tweet about rapid prototyping.  Why not participate and see if you get retweeted more often?

What's useful beyond the retweeting is that you tend to get back insights in the replies.   For example, Katrin Verlcas replied with this insight.  I asked her to elaborate and she shared this about SCRUM, a methodology for agile development in software.   Ah Ha! Been looking for methodologies for agile prototyping for non-software development and this is something that can be informative for another project.

What are your different types of Tweets?  What works or doesn't work in getting retweeted more often?  How are you using a scrum approach to improving your social media use?

Some Resources:

Just getting started with Twitter?  Here's the five minute start.
Also, see my Twitter Primers or WeAreMedia.

Going Deeper:
Mashable Retweet Guide
The Science of ReTweets by Dan Zarrella
The Art of Retweet by Beth Kanter
Backtype Releases Tweet Count by Mashable
How to Track Retweets by CIO
Twitter as Network Weaver's Best Friend by Beth Kanter
Twitter Research Reports Worth Reading by Beth Kanter
Talk Twitter to Me by Beth Kanter
Twitter Retweet Links from Beth's Delicious

Avinash Kaushik on Failing Fast (Win A Copy of Web Analytics 2.0)

Over two years ago, I made a screencast about Web Analytics for Nonprofits that covered the basics of using google analytics, web metrics, and some nonprofit case studies featuring Laura White and the Idealist.  That's just about when I discovered Avinash Kaushik's blog, Occam's Razor and his first book on Web analytics.

I reached out to Avinash and he was very generous with his time, helping us understand traditional web metrics as well as Google Analytics.   Through our conversation, we also touched on the metrics for blogs. I've learned a lot about metrics from Avinash.

Avinash has just published his second book, Web Analytics 2.0.  It's a desktop bible for anyone who has to gather web analytics data as part of their job.   What I like best is that it takes the mystery out of social media metrics.   It gets even better:  Avinash is donates all proceeds from his books to two charities:  The Smile Train and The Ekai Vidyalaya Foundation.

Harry and Sara say "Thank You Avinash" for the Google Schwag!

Avinash Kaushik sent me a copy of his new book and it's so good, I'm keeping it.  But, I'm purchasing a copy to giveaway to the reader from a nonprofit who leaves a comment about how they might best use this book.  (Don't forget to fill out the comment form completely, so I can track you down if you win.) 

I  had the pleasure having lunch with Avinash over at the Googleplex.    The chapter that caught my curiosity was Chapter 7:  Failing Faster - Unleashing the Power of Testing and Experimentation and we discussed it in the video above.   He explains why experimentation is critical for success in using the web, particularly social media.

Avinash feels that in a world of finite resources, it is very important to experiment and fail fast.   With social media and on the web, experiments are fast, cheap, and scalable.  The learning that results is what brings your more success.   Experimentation also helps an organization make decisions based on audience feedback and analytics data, not your own hunches.  This try it, fix it approach leads to incremental improvements which in turn leads to better outcomes.

The F-word chapter (Failure) offers some really useful tips about creating and nurturing a "experiment culture."   I was thrilled to discover this part of the book because I'm designing a learning community/technical project that is based on valuing experimentation.   So, been working on a methodology for social media experiments.

While the advice in the book is geared for tests to improve a web site, these are translatable to social media experiments.   I've summarized a couple of the tips he offers about methods for testing.

(1)  The First Test: KISS:   The first experiment should be simple from an idea, execution, and measurement and use A/B method.   This is a technique for testing two or more versions.

(2)  Just Get Started:   Avoid spending so much time trying to design the perfect experiment with the perfect measurement tool that you don't actually implement.  Learning means implementation - even if you fail.

(3) Test to Learn, Not Validate Your Gut:  Don't think about testing as a way to support a decision that you're making based on your gut.  Do it to learn what works or doesn't. 

(4) Start with a Hypothesis:   Your hypothesis should embed a success metric.  For example, "My hypothesis is that our Facebook Fans are more likely to engage with us when we post links that have a question in the title."

(5) Make Goals Evaluation Criteria and Up-Front Decisions:   It is important to not only identify your success metric, but also establish the criteria to judge a victory.  

(6)  Design Tests That Solve A Pain Point for Your Audience:  Design your experiments so they address a point of pain for a customer or audience.

(7)  Learn, Learn, Learn:   If you're going to experiment, you need to analyze your data and learn from it.  Even if your social media experiment was a miserable flop, there is a lot of valuable learning.

(8) Evangelism and Expertise:    It is important to have someone who can preach and share why testing is important and someone who has the expertise in metrics and data. 

Finally, Avinash suggests that testing should be fun!

A Methodology for Learning from Social Media Pilots: Reflection

That's a chair in my son's kindergarten class from a couple of years ago.   The intention was not to shame or punish the child for "mistakes" in behavior, but provide an opportunity for reflection and learning.   Two weeks ago, I had an opportunity to have a discussion at the Community Roundtable on the topic "How do you create a culture that is not afraid to fail?."  There were many takeaways, including providing a safe place for social media pilots.

June Holley left a comment that was very thought provoking and wanted to elevate it into a blog post:

I've found that it's not just that we avoid talking about mistakes, we avoid reflection that explores all the breakthroughs we've made and never see because we're too quickly onto the next action. Here is a quick brainstorm of questions we could ask that might help networks reflect more effectively.

Questions to Help Deep Reflection Occur

1.What worked really well in this project?
2.Did it accomplish goals or outcomes? In what ways?
3.Did it fall short? Why?
4.What would you do differently?
5.What surprises came up during the project? What unexpected happened? What could you learn or capture from that?
6.What insights did you get during the project?
7.What processes did you use that worked well? Which didn’t work so well? Why do you think that was?
8.How did people work together? Were there conflicts? How were they handled? Did people get any new insights or perspectives as a result?
9.Were there people or perspectives missing from this project that you would include next time?
10.What skills and processes did you help people learn as part of this project? What skills and processes would you spend time on if you did this over again?
11.What were the most innovative aspects of the project? How did they work?
12.What did you do in this project that you could transfer to other projects?
13.What is the most troubling aspect of the project? What might you do to deal with it differently?
14.What skills came in most handy during this project? What skills did this project make you realize you need to acquire?
15.What really puzzles you about this project? What are unanswered questions you have about what happened?
16.What intrigues you about this project?
17.What would you like to learn more about that would help this (or other projects) in the future?
18.Where did we mess up? Make mistakes? Fall on our face? What can we learn from this?

What questions would you add to the list?