Beth's Blog: Nonprofits and Social Media

Guest post by Kate Bladow: My Name Is Kate and I'm a Listener

Flickr Photo by Nutmeg66

Online, I spend time listening, attempting to separate signal from noise.

This started when I was in high school. Occasionally, I would egosurf, or search for my name on the Web. After college, when I began to use a feed reader, my listening became more routine. I could search and quickly add that search to my reader. Then, I could be lazy and forgetful--available stories were brought to me on demand. I didn't have to remember to go and find them.

Slowly, I broadened the topics that I listened for, amazed that I could track what's important and not become overwhelmed. Hitting "Mark All As Read" in a reader is much, much easier than declaring e-mail bankruptcy.

Currently, I listen for information about several specific areas: me, Technola, Pro Bono Net, document assembly, and access to justice (legal aid, pro bono legal services, Legal Services Corporation, and so on). Over time, I've changed these areas, refined the key words and phrases that I listen for, and pulled in new sources as they've surfaced, like Twitter and LexMonitor.

Listening helps me to stay informed. I often "hear" things that I wouldn't otherwise. Listening also gives me the opportunity to observe and participate in conversations that don't, and won't, happen in my offline life. Laura Quinn, Michelle Murrain, and Holly Ross are not going to show up at my house and talk nptech. But they do talk online, and I can meet up with them there. Listening helps me figure out where those good conversations are happening.

Do you listen online? If not, I challenge you to start listening today. Just follow these steps:

1. Go to Google's Blog Search.
2. Search for your name or your organization's name.
3. Check out the results.
4. Refine your search terms, if necessary.
   Do this to make certain you are getting relevant results. For example, I don't have a very common name, so I use (Katherine OR Kate) AND Bladow. But someone with a more popular name might need to be more restrictive, say  ("Jonathan Smith" OR "Jon Smith") AND Massachusetts.
5. Subscribe with your reader or by e-mail, when you are satisfied with your results.

Ta Da! You are listening.

If you are listening already, I encourage you to step it up: refine your key words, add a new source, or move your e-mail alerts to a feed reader.

To learn more about listening, check out these resources:

• Beth Kanter - What is the value of listening to social media channels for your organization?
• Beth Kanter - Listening Literacy Skills: What keywords or phrases have brought you some insights?
• Amy Sample Ward - Live Blogging: 09NTC Mapping Your Social Media Strategy
• We Are Media - Module 1: Listening
• ProBlogger - Set Up ‘Alerts’ to Monitor What is Happening in Your Niche

So now it's your turn. Did you take my challenge? Either way I'd love to hear about what you are listening for, what tools you are using for listening, and any lessons that you've learned so far. If you aren't listening, tell me why not.

Come on. Speak up! I'm listening. - K

Kate Bladow is a Non-Profit Techie that works for Pro Bono Net by day and blogs at Technola by night

Becoming A Social Media Savvy Nonprofit, Nurturing A Social Culture Through Personal Use

 
Photo by Dietrich

I love the Red Cross's approach to scaling its engagement strategy by involving the whole organization - it is spelled out in their strategy handbook and policy guidelines.  The first steps are simple once you have policy/philosophy in place and the right mix of bottom up/top down adoption or acceptance of social media.

Here's how the Red Cross handbook states it:

Step 1: Get Social Media Savvy

• Initiate personal social media use:
• Explore the tools you’d like to adopt by using them in your personal life first. It’s easier to understand the culture behind tools like Facebook and Twitter when you spend some time posting your own pictures and experiences.
• Follow the personal online communications guidelines

Using social media as part of getting your job done is easier to imagine and put into practice if you're in the communications, marketing, outreach, or fundraising departments.   The listening as a first step is familiar - it's free market research, it's brand monitoring, it's an analysis of press mentions. 

Using social media listening is somewhat more difficult to imagine, perhaps, if you're managing programs or at the policy/funding level.

One of the approaches I've been thinking about lately is how professional learning through social media channels can be put into practice by using listening (and engaging techniques) for program development.  Before this can happen, there are a couple of culture shifts:

• Professional learning is and should be a part of your job and honored by the culture. That you feel it is okay to spend some of your work day investing in your knowledge and you gather wisdom from your professional networks, including via social media channels.
• The importance of carving out time for this type of learning.  It is difficult because you have shift gears from your Outlook calendar, answering emails, getting tasks done mind shift.  It's a shift from a getting things done sort of productivity to social productivity.  Or rather it is finding your social productivity sweet spot.
• Using social media is an enhancement to your offline professional networking and relationship building.  That you may use it to extend relationships with people you've met at conferences.  The shift is the comfort level in using these tools to develop or initiate new connections.  For me, personally, I've found that social media has connected me with people who are thinking deeply about a lot of the same topics and that by connecting via social media it has enriched my learning.  I think there are some generational differences as well as industry differences in comfort level of using social media tools to leverage your personal networks.
• The concern about information overload and too much unstructured information.  Attending to your professional learning using social media and networks requires making sense out of the leaves rather than being presented a knowledge tree.  The initial dip into the leaves can be overwhelming and unpleasant at first.

Beth's Monitor

Paying Yourself First

Jeremiah Owyang wrote a great post two years ago called "Pay Yourself First."   In a nutshell:

Every morning, for about 2 hours, I pay myself first by researching, reading, and writing blog posts...before I dive into email hell]

In the comment thread, there was a suggestion about putting a sticky note on your monitor.  I needed to do that for myself!

Getting Started: You Don't Have To Be Joey Chestnut

The photo above is Joey Chestnut who won the Nathan's hot dog eating contest in 2008.   His total for the day was 64 hot dogs.    In 2009, he won again, beating his own record by consuming 68 hot dogs. The thought of consuming 68 hot dogs makes me feel a little uncomfortable. No downright sick in the stomach. It's the same sort of discomfort that some people feel about approaching the task of listening for learning using the social web.

Doesn't listening require plowing through mountains and mountains of unstructured information?   Won't it make you dizzy and uncomfortable?  Don't you have to be Joey Chestnut to be successful?  NO!

To get started, think about just eating one small pig in a blanket!

Ask yourself how time you can allocate to listening for professional learning.  Is it a half-hour a day, an hour a day, or is an hour or two a week?   The point is to get started, block out that time, and start paying yourself.

Here are some steps to get started with listening for professional learning via social media.  The bigger questions is - are you ready make the shift?

How do you carve out time for professional learning via social media?  Has it been valuable?  If you're a leader in your organization, how to encourage professional learning?

What tools and keywords do you use for your organization's listening dashboard?

Carie Lewis, HSUS Social Networking Maven

I just discovered that Carie Lewis of HSUS has a blog!  Better yet, she shared her listening techniques.  She uses Igoogle which is a really easy, simple way to set up a dashboard.  Here's what she is listening for:
 

• Brand - mentions of your name, including acronyms, misspellings, etc
• Current - issues that people are talking about that involve you right now
• Detractors - people you know don't like you but talk about you
• Competition - people in the same space as you
• Staff - prominent people in your org, like your CEO

Here's a list of the monitoring tools in her toolbox:

• Google Alerts - I hope you know what they are and are already using them!
• Filtrbox - a paid monitoring service to make sure we catch everything
• Tweetmeme - tells you the most popular tweets about a subject
• Twitter Search - shows tweets containing a certain keyword (we don't use this anymore because we use Tweetdeck separately)
• Technorati - shows blogs that mention certain keywords
• Blogpulse - another blog monitoring tool
• Digg - shows most popular articles on the web
• Boardreader - shows forum posts by keyword

I'm looking for other folks willing to share a screen capture of their dashboard, the keywords they use, and a list of tools.   Leave me a comment and you'll be in my next presentation on listening!

Are You A Listening Organization?

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of presenting at the annual Community Media Workshop: Making Media Conference where I gave a keynote last year.   It was great to catch up with my Chicago colleagues, Thom Clark, Gordon Mayer, and the rest of the crew at CMW.   Also, a wonderful opportunity to hang out with David Krumlauf, Judith Sol-Dyss, Steve Heye, Marc Van Bree, Kara Carroll, Michael Hoffman, and other fantastic Chicago peeps!

The big buzz at the conference was the release of "The NEW News: Journalism We Want and Need " which is a report on the state of local online news in Chicago commissioned by the The Chicago Community Trust.  The Nonprofit Communicator blog has a round up of local reaction.

Secret Sauce: Chicago Workshop Final Slides

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I taught two workshops (notes are on the wiki.)  My workshop was in a fixed seating theatre, but I managed to make it interactive and I think a little fun.  The morning workshop was on  "Social Media Strategy: The Secret Sauce" that offered some pointers on formulating a social media strategy and measuring its success.   The secret sauce, of course, is a combination of metrics, experimentation, and listening based on David Armano's thinking, and KD Paine's, social media measurement wisdom.  

I added a new section about Twitter as Focus Group based on Nina Simon's work with the Smithsonian.  The participants, after viewing the focus group data, had to suggest ways to apply the insights for a social media strategy.  It was a fun exercise and participants were brilliant.  Judith Sol-Dyss made a recommendation that made us all laugh.

Listening Bootcamp: Chicago Workshop

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In the afternoon, we took a deep dive into the listening techniques.  I never dive into the tools, this session began with a focus on how and where listening fits in the organization and the work flow.    I demoed a lot of different techniques in real time with suggestions of keywords or examples from the participants.   Given that we were not in a computer lab, this workshop was delivered as masterclass format.  I would love the chance to delivered it as a hands-on, shoulder-to-shoulder workshop with clusters of small groups doing the exercises together on the computer versus demo.  

This workshop was an intermediate level workshop and several participants needed more of the introduction to listening. 

At the beginning of the workshop, I asked participants how they wanted to improve their organization's listening:

• How do we get started?
• How do we make our listening less haphazard and more holistic?
• We're listening, but how to move strategically into engagement?
• How do you organize listening within your organization?
• How do you work effectively with an intern or junior staff member who is doing the nitty-gritty?
• How to use listening beyond just listening for our brand or during a campaign, but use it as a community focus group?
• How do we spread out the listening within our large organization in an effective way?
• How do we use listening beyond marketing and outreach?
• How do we prioritize what to listen for?
• How do we avoid information overload?

We a lot of discussion on different models for structuring listening within an organization. 

Here are three concepts:

(1)    Centralized Listener:   If the organization has a full-time person responsible for overseeing social media strategy, the listening tasks would fall into this person's job description.  The social media person, would be the organization's professional listener or ears.   They would probably would listen daily doing deep listening with a mix of free and paid tools, would summarize and distribute regular reports to other departments, be the first-responder in the social media space, track trends over time, key listening efforts to strategy implementation and metrics, etc.   The listening task could easily be 10-15 hours a week, especially if this a large volume.

(2)  Listening Team:  This might work for smaller organizations where there isn't a full-time social media staff function, but social media is being integrated into job descriptions of the marketing/communications team.   In one organization that I worked with that had senior communications people who were less facile with social media and younger, more junior staff members who were more comfortable.  This group undertook several months of two-way mentoring - brief sessions learning about the tools and each other's work flow needs.   This happened through regular meetings where the senior managers got familiar with the tools and the process, actually getting hands-on with the understanding that they wouldn't be "going in the weeds."   And the younger staff members, who would go in the "weeds," gained a better understand of how to summarize the listening data, what required a response, when they could response and when they needed to bring it to the attention of their boss.

(3) The Listening Organization:  This model would be one where the listening activities are not solely for marketing and outreach, but other program departments might also integrate into their work flow - either for customer support, program development, research, or self-directed professional development.  This would require identifying the right people, training them, and to share the information across departments, if needed.

This brings me to - how are you organizing your social media listening?  Is it for marketing and communications functions only?   Is it centralized or decentralized?   What is an example of your organizational or individual work flow?

Update:  See this post, The Five Levels of Engagement which talks about the engagement piece - which is part of the work flow of listening.

A Social Media Cliff Hanger: Making Sure Your Parachute Opens

I'm preparing for a day of trainings in Chicago on Wednesday at Making Media Connections. Last year, I gave the keynote and a workshop, and this year they invited me back again. I'm going to be teaching two intermediate/advanced workshops, one on mapping metrics to social media strategy and the other on listening.  (The secret sauce by the way is David Armano's Listen, Learn and Adapt)

I read an interesting post called "Jumping Off the Social Media Cliff" which raises a great question, "Are you a lemming or a base jumper?"  In other words, are you embracing social media because "everyone else is ..."

What I mean by that is a question as to whether your organization is following others blindly into the chasm of social web participation or are planning and preperations being made first? Are the right people being educated and given the proper tools? Is there a plan with a specific objective?

Chasing after the competition into Facebook, Twitter and blogging without a plan is the Lemming approach. You can almost visualize swarms of companies jumping off into the abyss following competitors, self serving social media consultants and momentum created by mainstream media hype, each yelling “weeeee, social meeeeeedeeeeahhhh” and then realizing (maybe too late) with wide open eyes that they’re not prepared (no social media policy, no roadmap). There’s no chute, and the ground is coming up fast.

The reference is lemmings blindly committing suicide by jumping off cliffs in the Arctic is a bit of an urban myth.    Contrary to what you may think when view the above Disney clip from the movie White Wilderness, lemmings do not  hurl themselves off of cliffs and into the sea.  

The film crew induced lemmings into jumping off a cliff and into the sea in order to document their supposedly suicidal behavior.  According to snopes.com, rodents actors were placed on a snow-covered turntable and filmed from various angles to produce a "migration" sequence. Next the creatures were transported to a cliff overlooking a river and herded into the water. The entire sequence was choreographed using a handful of lemmings photographed to create the illusion of a large herd of migrating creatures.

The reference to base jumpers is an activity that employs a parachute or the sequenced use of a wingsuit and parachute to jump from fixed objects, with the parachute unopened at the jump.  Based stands for the four categories of fixed objects from which one can jump: Building - Antenna - Span - Earth

Community Media Workshop: Chicago

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So the point is that if you are going to jump off the social media cliff, make sure your parachute opens.  And to tease out that metaphor a bit more, that means having:

• Having a clear objective
• Knowing the audience
• Deploying the right strategy
• Have the expertise/time or capacity
• Understand cultural barriers to adoption
• Pick the right tools

Oh, yeah, there's also the secret sauce:

• Listening before, during, and after a project
• Learning - using qualitative insights and hard data points to understand what is and what isn't working
• Adapting your social media effort or organization based on your learning or experiments

I found a fantastic example of Twitter as a focus group in Nina Simon's blog post, "Everyone's Smithsonian.'  Not only does she illustrate the valuable qualitative insights you can glean from social media listening efforts, but shows how to apply them to a museum context. Nina's secret sauce is:

1. Listen to and understand what your visitors/users need.
2. Confidently and clearly state your institutional mission, values, and capabilities.
3. Develop relationships via any and all useful platforms that allow you to connect 1 to 2.

I like how she connects the dots between objectives, listening, relationships, and platforms.

What are your nonprofit's super power listening tips for using Twitter?

Photo by Esparta

A few weeks ago I did a book giveaway for the Twitter Book.  Readers from nonprofits who wanted to a chance to win a copy of the book had to leave a comment saying how they were using Twitter and how they hoped to improve their results.  There were so many great responses, thank you.  The winner chosen at random is:

Tara Pringle Jefferson
Public Affairs Associate
The Cleveland Foundation

Her comment:

I read the brief preview of the book and can't wait to read the rest. Here's my shot at the answers:
How is your organization currently using Twitter?  Right now, it's just me sending out the tweets to our followers. I try to send out at least one per day, usually an update of our latest blog posts, podcasts, or news about Cleveland/the nonprofit field. I'm currently trying to convince our CEO to join Twitter, since he honestly doesn't have time to blog.

What are your objectives?
We want people to engage with us. In the community, there's a bit of the "Ivory tower" mentality surrounding us, when in fact, we spend more time out and about in the community than people realize. We want to share that news, and let the community and other nonprofit leaders know just how much we want to make a difference.

What audience do you want to reach?
Right now, it's a mixture of other nonprofits, residents of our city, and nonprofit professionals. We'd love to get more Average Joes to follow us and see that we're just as committed to the city and its success as anyone else.

How are you measuring success?
We're looking at followers obviously, not only the number of followers but how many retweets we get and replies. As one person tweeting for an organization, it gets difficult to determine what the voice should be, and even more difficult when people reply to you. We're just looking at Twitter as a conversation tool to see how many people care what we have to say and those that do, do they find it useful or interesting

One of the great uses of Twitter is as a listening tool.  It's an excellent way to get started.  As the Twitter Book suggests, Twitter gives you superhero powers: the ability to read people's thoughts and the ability overhear conversations.

One of the illustrations of this for nonprofits, can be found in Nina Simon's slideshow "Everyone's Smithsonian" see slides 10-20).  

If you want to be a super hero though, you have to use the search features and application on Twitter like a rock star.  Here are some tips and pointers that I learned from reading the Twitter Book:

1.  Twitter Search:  Simple key word searches can yield valuable information.  However, sometimes you'll need to hone your search using the "Advanced Search."  I also learned that Twitter search has some tricks too.  You can remove a search term by putting the (-) minus sign in front of it.  Also, you can search for either of two words by inserting the word "or."
2. Trending Terms:   I've been playing a game for the past couple of months.  I look at Twitter search terms and then see if the terms are related to headlines.  Lots of times there are #hashtags trending, but often they are cryptic.  "What is the Trend" gives you a list of trending #hastags and the ability to fill others in what they mean if you are closely involved.
3. Retrieving Older Tweets:  Apparently the search stream on Twitter only goes back as far as three months.  But you can try a google search by using site: twitter.com/account name.
4. Keeping Track of Tweets that linked to your blog or web site.  I search for my user name and name, but because of the URL shorterner, you can't always find who mentioned your blog without your Twitter handle.   There's a tool called BackTweet
5. Finding People:  Twellow searches through user profiles and also has different categories of listings.

What are your power listening tips on using Twitter?  Do you have an example of how listening on Twitter has provided value for your nonprofit organization?

Newsmastering for Professional Development 2.0 Dashboard: Online Community Management Aggregator and Report

My colleague Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/Write Web gave me a sneak peak at their Guide to Online Community Management Report and Aggregator.   This is a premium service and it well worth the investment.

The report condenses and summarizes the best thinking about online community management from a cadre of experts - those are online community manager practitioners and gurus.   If you're new to the topic, it is a great way to get up to speed and will would definitely help you inform your strategy.

The other half of the guide is an online component to help you keep up to date.  It's called the RWW Community Management Aggregator.   It is a mashup of RSS feeds on one page that includes:

• The ten best or "must read" blog posts from selected blogs.    The filtering of these posts is handled automatically is based on the number of comments, inbound links, and other signs of engagement.  (Hmm .. sounds like a mashup of RSS run through Postrank)
• The Twitter accounts from a small group of gurus/practitioners in online community management
• Blog roll
• Exportable OPML feeds for all blogs and hot posts

It strikes me that this a fantastic model for professional development 2.0 for online community managers or what education technology bloggers like Stephen Downes call "Personal Learning Environment."  Or a listening post (it's what I have patched together for my blogging listening post, although I it isn't a pretty as Read/Write Web's Online Community Management Aggregator)

It is a premium service, you have to pay $299 - but if I was planning an online community strategy or a practitioner, I'd sign up for this service in a heartbeat because setting up such a system is very time intensive.  Also, if I was new to the field - it's really overwhelming to play catch up.  The combination of a synthesis of knowledge from the past year or so, along with a way to step into the river of news about online communitymanagement best practices without drowning is worth the price of admission.  

 I'm also thinking about the recent social network nonprofits study and this is exactly the type of strategy advice that some nonprofits need to get better results with their online communities.

You learn more about the report and aggregator here.

Mapping Social Media Strategy to Metrics: Listen, Learn, Adapt #09NTC

Mapping Metrics to Strategy

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Yesterday, I facilitated a session called Mapping Social Media to Strategy.  Here's the description:

The session will share an overview of why the sequence listen, learn, and adapt is critical to implementing a successful social media strategy. We'll take a look at how to use both qualitative and hard data points to refine and adapt your strategy as well as the role of continuous listening and learning through implementation of pilots. We'll examine what can and can't be quantified as well as various metrics and analytics tools. All this will be shared through a lively mix of discussion and case studies.

Takeaways:
1. How to listen to improve the results of your social media strategy implementation
2. An understanding of the right metrics to use and how/when to incorporate qualitative information
3. An introduction to analytic tools and individual/team reflection processes

The panelists included Sarah Granger, Danielle Brigida, Wendy Harman, and Qui Diaz.   Some of my key takeaways from the session:

• It was really great to have this session after Clay Shirky's keynote because we took a deeper dive on the themes that emerged.  Specifically,  the them of informed failure.
• The "Oprah" style worked really well. I wanted to get away from the expert at the front of the stage and have an informed discussion between panelists, audience, and myself.  
• Didn't have the right Oprah set up for the mic, but it worked.  My fault for not requesting it or rather waiting until the last minute to test a new delivery format.
• The discussion was fantastic. I'm glad that at least two really smart people I know of were live blogging.  Jana Byington Smith from ROI Philanthropy lived blogged.  Amy Sample Ward captured great notes
  
• It gave me an opportunity to think about how to reteirate the content for a full-day workshop I'm doing in Chicago in June.
• The secret sauce to this format is not over rehearsing - get people who have in the trenches experience, ask them to prepare sound bites for the questions.
• I like delegating the tasks to others in the room I know - like keep timing, take notes, share knowledge. 
• As much as possible, I tried to avoid the Q/A ask the expert - by getting audience to share what they know both in the room and the back channel.  Here's the unique   That's the richest.
• Good feedback and sharing on the back channel using custom tag #ntcmap

As promised, here are some of my collections of posts/resources on this topic:

Social Media Listening Bootcamp Wiki (my personal learning space)
Riffing on David Armano's Listen, Learn, and Adapt
WeAreMedia Wiki
Considering the ROI
Listening
Tool Box

Update: 

Podcast by PodcstedTecnologia

Boston Interactive Blog live blog

Ask Debra did an awesome job of getting notes - kudos

Rob Cottingham's Visual Notes

John Haydon did an excellent interview with Wendy Harman

United Way Social Networking Spring Fever

 
Lynn M. Tveskov (Photo from Lynn)
Manager, Community Impact Leadership
United Way of America

March comes in like a lion and goes out like lamb, especially true in New England.  This morning I got an email from Lynn M. Tveskov from the United Way of America letting me know that UWA has caught social networking spring fever!

She forwarded me this fabulous handout titled "How_to_Listen_to_your_Online_Community" written by Meghan Keaney who is the Director of Communications for the United Way of Massachusetts Bay & Merrimack Valley.  (Their blog is called "Speak United")  Meghan used the materials in the WeAreMedia Wiki (and my blog) and customized it for the United Way.  

The handout explains the process of listening and how the tools.   My favorite part is advice on how to respond and a story about how a negative comment was an opportunity.

When not to respond:

• If the blogger or commenter is talking about another United Way.
• You wouldn’t talk on behalf of another United Way to the media, don’t do it here either.
• If the blogger or commenter is clearly baiting, being antagonistic, or trying to incite a fight.
• You only have so much time! You don’t have to respond to every comment about United Way.
• Respond only, when you think it’s productive or important.

Hints on responding about United Way:

• Be transparent -- say that you work at a United Way.
• At the same time, stress that you’re speaking as an individual.
• Don’t pick fights or get pulled into them. They’re not productive.
• Don’t speak negatively about another organization or individual.
• Answer thoughtfully, ask questions, your goal is to learn and inform.
• Provide a link to relevant content on your website

A United Way Story

Here is an example of how responding can turn a negative comment into a learning experience:
Note what happens when the negative comment from “o2fishmore” is responded to by one of our partner agencies (gtarbox). Gtarbox is able to correct the inaccurate information and refocus the original poster on how the agency can help her. United Way then provided additional information about the investment and calling 2-1-1 for help.

Lynn pointed out a few stellar examples of United Ways using social media:

Finally, Lynn pointed out some examples of how United ways are using social media.

Facebook

United Way International 
United Way Campus and Youth Engagement group  (Mike Brooks)

YouTube

UWA Flash mob video (PSAS)
United Way Alternative Spring Break Videos

Detroit, Michigan - United Way for Southeastern Michigan has been using social media for years.  http://www.uwsem.org/ - especially blogs (you'll see links on their home page.)

Here's the individual blog (vs. the organizational blogs I’ve also provided) of a United Way CEO, Patrick Jinks.  He's been blogging for years (he's at a small United Way in Danville, VA):  http://unitedwayleadership.blogspot.com/

United Way of San Diego County, San Diego, CA - http://www.uwsd.org/  - on a Team of local United Ways that helped inform UWA's own social media strategy.

United Way Silicon Valley, San Jose, CA - http://www.uwsv.org/ - another California member of the team that helped UWA with their social media strategy.

United Way of Orange County, Irvine, CA, is on twitter:  http://twitter.com/UNITEDWAYOC

United Way of Central Ohio, Columbus, OH http://www.liveunitedcentralohio.org/ - looks to be a heavy user of flickr, including for their Alternative Spring Break:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/liveunitedcentralohio/

United Way of Greater New Haven, New Haven, CT - http://www.uwgnh.org/ - another member of that committee that helped UWA.  They are actively blogging, too:  http://uwgnhnews.blogspot.com/. 

Networked Effect: Listen, Learn, Adapt, Respond ....

Kismet!  Nancy White had a post pointing out this video she found on David Armano's blog that she found through the network effect.   These are two people in my network  They should be connected because they have a couple of things in common - the networked approach and visual thinking - although they apply this knowledge in different contexts.

Looks like David is evolving is listen, learn, adapt to incorporate respond.   Maybe adapt should be as KD Paine once said, "Stop doing stupid things."  To read his specific advice, click here.

Listen
There are close to 100 comments on the video and over 33,000 views of the video. Track all mentions and embeds of the video and listen to how people are responding to it…

Learn
The video is mostly complimentary but shows Trader Joe’s warts and all… Remember, a brand isn’t what you say it is—it’s what they say it is. What can Trader Joe’s Learn if anything?

Adapt
Use the video as fodder to figure out how your orginzation will respond to these types of inevitable situations…

Respond
Engage your customers in the comments…. Then go back to listening—lather, rinse and repeat.

I heart Trader Joe’s. And this video. It’s catchy as hell and one of the best advertisements they never made.

As Nancy says,"That old network effect. It is real. Powerful. Ignore it at your own risk."

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)

Getting Your Nonprofit Organization Ready To Listen

Flickr Photo by PaulGi

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.

Here's a few steps:

Why are you listening?

Here are a few conversation starters that you may want to have with your social media team on staff to help you prioritize your listening.

• What are people saying about our organization ("brand")? 
• Are there negative issues/complaints that we need to correct?
• Is there an articulated need that we can help fulfill?
• Are there insights we can gather than can help us improve a program?
• What do they like or dislike about your program or service?
• What ideas might they offer for new services or marketing/fundraising campaigns?
• Who are the influential voices in the social media space covering your issue area or topical domain?
• What communities have already formed on social media outposts around our organization, issue, or topic area?  Does it make sense for us to maintain a presence there?

List Five Ways You Plan To Use the Information

It is important to link your listening to actual decisions or action.   Next, have a brainstorm session with your team about how you will use what you learn.  

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Internal Process

There are many different ways that you can organize your listening.  

• Who in the organization will do the listening?
• Who is empowered to do the responding?
• What is your policy about responding?
• Do you have to respond to every comment?
• How much time will you allocate to listening every day?
• How will you share the information with your team?
• Not everyone has to do the deep dive or heavy lifting, how will you organize your team effort?
• How will you analyze the results of what you heard, analyze patterns, and share insights?
• How will we you know if listening has be useful?

Qui Diaz, The Big Dig: Online Listening and Research
Amy Naslund, How and Why of Listening
David Alston, Top Reasons To Listen
KD Paine, 27 Different Types of Conversations
Beth Kanter, Listening Literacy Skills
Beth Kanter How Listening Returns Value for Nonprofits

At what point in the life of your social media project can you use a traditional ROI Process?

I've been doing a lot of  thinking about "ROI, Social Media, and Nonprofits" in preparation for a book chapter and several upcoming presentations, workshops, and webinars over the next couple of months.   Yesterday I took a deep dive into David Armano's "Listen, Learn Adapt" and translated it for nonprofits.

I've walked away with a feeling that the Return on Insight process is something that you don't stop doing.  And, it also includes measurement - not just qualitative information.

I've also been thinking about traditional ROI processes in the nonprofit technology context.  I contributed a chapter on traditional ROI processes to the forthcoming book from NTEN, "Managing Your Technology To Meet Your Mission."  This chapter focused on how nonprofits can use an ROI analysis for IT investments, like a client management system or hardware upgrades.

In the past year, I've been looking at the question of how, when, or if you can use a traditional ROI process for your social media effort.  A traditional approach begins with defining value.  A traditional approach culminates in a financial calculation that could go something like this.  Or it might compare the cost of one approach to another or the cost of not investing.   It answers the "Was it worth doing?"

I've come to the conclusion "Return on Insight" can co-exist with traditional "Return on Investment" approaches for social media, not replace it.  

My question is: 
At what point do you shift or incorporate a traditional ROI process for your social media effort?    

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?

Listening Literacy Skills: What keywords or phrases have brought you some insights?

Flickr Photo by Incurable Hippie

I've been writing a lot about listening through social media channels in preparation for a live workshop for WeAreMedia next month in San Francisco.   I'm passionate about listening - the skills, tools, techniques, and how it translates to continuous improvement of strategy and understanding the value it provides to organization's mission.

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: Composing and refining keywords
• Seeing the Forest Through The Trees: Pattern analysis and synthesis of findings
• Engaging effectively:  Don't just listen unless your mission is market research or you're a peeping tom

I would really LOVE to hear about stories about what keywords you've used and how the resulting listening
brought some value. 

In the meantime, here's some how to tips.

The Basics

Give Me The Facts Mam

These are obvious.  But it helps to have them listed and even better to create a one-pager and get input from other staff members.

• Nonprofit Name
• 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

Andy Beal also suggests searching on intellectual property and your known strengths and weaknesses.

What Not To Search On

Try to avoid generic terms.  Like searching on google, it will bring you lots of noise.  If your organization's name or program names contain generic words, use Boolean operators like "AND" or "NOT."  (Need to brush up your Boolean skills, here's a tutorial)

Going Deeper

It's Not How You Talk About It Behind the Firewall

Once you've had a chance to scan results from the basics, you should keep a spreadsheet of phrases or words that people actually use to describe your organization and add these to your other phrases list.  This should give you a reality check and avoid assuming that your audiences uses the same words as your staff or you.

If you are using an analytics software program like Google Analytics, run a search engine referral report and see what words people are actually typing into search engines to find your site and try using some of these. Or the Goolge Adwords Keyword tool

Reiteracy is Social Media Listening Literacy

You may not know what is not worth searching until you try it and revise based on what you see.  Don't assume that you'll get it right on the first try, either.  It takes some and a little bit of a reiterative process to fine-tune those key words.

Use Some Creative Thinking Skills

Recently, a nonprofit that provided services to caretakers, including grief counseling, wanted to look at how caretakers and family members think or talk about grief and dying of an elderly patient.   After trying broad terms and got nothing, they tried phrases like "My elderly mother died of cancer."

Another way to play with key words is to add your organization's name or program, and the word "sucks" or other complaint word.   If you are a visual thinker, try the visual thesaurus to help you brainstorm.

Before You Use Tools, Think Offline

Remember that the more phrases and keywords you add, the more results you'll have to look at and that could get overwhelming if you're not using a professional tool.  So, if apply the so what test:

1.) List Your Keyword Phrase or Topic Word
2.) List 3 reasons why you're interested
3.) List 3 specific sub-topics or related ideas
4.) Review and pick the most relevant

Listening is only half, Connecting and Engaging is the other half

Unless your mission is to do market research and use listening techniques to feed research reports, you want to take the next step of actually engaging.

Danielle Brigida shared some wonderful insights about the other half of listening which is having that conversation.  "I spend a majority of my time listening and responding to questions, commenting on blogs, and tracking NWF's mentions and various programs. But also it's important to connect with people based on their interests (I will sometimes search twitter for "kids outside" and then compliment them on giving their kids a green hour!) 

This is probably where you're wondering about how to manage the work without getting information overload.  Amber Naslund from Radian 6 offers some good questions on how to manage the participation side of listening:

• Do we have to respond to EVERY brand mention?
• How much time does it take each day to do this?
• What’s the best way to handle negative comments? Ignore or engage?
• How does one person manage all of that information?
• How do we keep track of what happens after someone responds?
• Who should respond to brand mentions? What should they say?
• How will we know if all of this is making a lick of difference?

What else makes up listening literacy skills?  What are your stories about how your organization's listening literacy skills have returned value?

Updated:
Qui Diaz, The Big Dig: Online Research and Listening

She points to a few good posts on the value of connecting listening to action. Trust, Listening, and Doing Something by Valerie Maltoni
How To Survive A Social Media Revolt, by Mashable
In Social Media, Listening Is Only Half the Battle by Britopian

ROI (Results on Insights): Nonprofit Examples of How Listening Returns Value

Click to see larger image

I'm very tempted to start using Results On Insights for ROI thanks to Barb Chamberlain's comment in yesterday's post "What Are The Best I-Words For Nonprofits To Think About Social Media and ROI?" 

But what does that really mean? 

A few days ago, I asked for some stories "What is the value of listening through social media channels for your organization?"   I wanted to see examples from nonprofit organizations engaged in listening and conversation and the value it has to their missions, programs, or marketing efforts.   And you shared them!  Thanks.

Here's what I learned.

Observations

• Listening may happen at the personal, staff level as a best practice for doing their job whether or not it is embedded in the organization's culture.
• For listening to become an organization wide activity and more impact, it needs to be part of the organization's culture.  That happens when leaders model and encourage it.
• Listening is typically used by nonprofits to provide better customer service, correct misconceptions, and other ways to support external audiences.  Nonprofits are also using listening to support improved program implementation.
• Organizations use both hard data points and qualitative data to listen and learn.
• Having a structured way to collect and analyze qualitative insights can not only help with designing a social media engagement policy, but also harvest insights.
• Effective listening through social media channels means that individuals and organizations need to identify why they are listening and how they will apply what they hear.
• The value of listening is not in the act of listening in and of itself, but when an organization or individual uses the information to improve programs or marketing. This requires engaging in a conversation.

Correcting Misconceptions and Improving Customer/Stakeholder Relations

The AirForce Blog:   The image above is of the US Air Force Blog Assessment and Engagement process.  It is an excellent example of working through how an organization might respond to comments on a blog, but even better it is map for insight harvesting.    As David Meerman Scott notes in his analysis of their social media strategy, the goal is "to use current and developing Web 2.0 applications as a way to actively engage conversations between Airmen and the general public." 

If you were still thinking about ROI as Return on Investment you'd never be able to make a case!  With such a clear policy for response, it is obvious that the blog generates valuable information to shape and improve a marketing strategy.

As Pudding Relations suggests "Take a look and see if you can use it to enhance your own thinking around social media with, ahem, military precision."

Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center is listens by searching for discussions about blood donations in their local area says Courtney Martin.   Although there is low volume, the listening has provided a lot of value. "We've been able to answer questions for people who want to donate blood but don't know the rules, or who have misconceptions. When we found someone who'd had a negative experience at one of our facilities, we were able to respond to her concern and leave her with a good feeling about our organization.  It was our first true social media success story, and helped validate our social media use to the powers that be at our organization."  

No doubt, the listening also provides great content ideas for their blog.

Network for Good has some terrific stories about noisy, angry people becoming champions for their services because of active listening and then open engagement with them on social networks or in the comments of blogs.  One example is from the GiveWell Blog which posted a complaint about the Network For Good's fees. Network for Good's Vice President,  Katya Andresen, left a comment in response which lead to a conversation and this follow up post from GiveWell.   After some back and forth conversation, including asking for his input when they changed their fee structure, GiveWell became a supporter and user for Network for Good's services.

Getting Ideas for Campaigns or Programs

GreenPeace Whale Trail  asked their online visitors for campaign ideas and they got some great ones, like the Great Whale Trail, where they tagged whales and then tracked them using GPS/Google maps. This drove traffic. (Hat tip Miriam Kagan)

Improving Program and Service Delivery

Green Media 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.  A lot of their listening is through filtering information from friends on social networks which saves them a lot of time and helps the organization "work smarter."

World Institute. The social media maven and metrics expert is Laura Lee Dooley where the organization uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative data points to improve their social media strategy.  Laura's challenge is to get the right metrics to the right people on staff at the right time to reap insights.  She's recently retooled the organization's metrics dash board to include social media measures.  Using the hard data points and sifting through qualitative data, she drives reflective conversations with staff that reap substantial insights. Here's a few:

• People who are leaders in online conversations about our issues are not always the same as those who are leaders in the offline world. You should reach out to both audiences.
• People who choose to follow me or my organization do so because of the conversations we participate in and the issues we care about. Keeping the trust of those who follow and support us is an important responsibility.
• It is important to leverage the active social media networks that are already out there - jump in, listen, contribute and you will develop a core group of dedicated followers who will become advocates for you and your work.

LawHelp:  Kate Bladow who blogs at Technola says that listening has become a best practice for staff persons responsible for program management, even if it isn't being done as an organizational wide activity.  Notes, Kate, "I found out this week that a colleague and I both listen to social media channels on "legal aid" and "pro bono"  because we want to know if anyone is reaching out and looking for legal aid."  Kate directs those people to their web site where they can find legal information as well as referrals.  They also listen to identify people who are talking about wanting to take on pro bono legal work and recruit them as pro bono lawyers.

Kate also uses listening techniques for her personal blog as a way to build her community of readers interested in legal aid, pro bono work, and other access-to-justice issues.  Listening helps her aggregate stories for her blog and has helped her grow the readership.

People Helping People volunteer Cynthia has just started to use listening techniques as a way to convince others in the organization of its value.  Using a combination of Twitter, RSS feeds, and commenting on blogs, they ahve seen their search engine results improve.   Far more valuable is that they have identified and recruited some new board members and volunteers.

Danielle Brigida shared some wonderful insights about the how-to of listening and why it is essential as part of your organization's social media strategy.

Listening is a vital part of NWF's social media strategy. I spend a majority of my time listening and responding to questions, commenting on blogs, and tracking NWF's mentions and various programs. But also-- it's important to connect with people based on their interests (I will sometimes search twitter for "kids outside" and then compliment them on giving their kids a green hour!)

Paying attention to trends on the various networks is also incredibly beneficial because it makes it easier to be relevant. Listening helps you be less of a spammer and more of a do-gooder

Update:

Reflecting on these stories, I wrote a post called "Listening Literacy" which outlines the skills you need to do effective listening.

What is the value of listening to social media channels for your organization?

Source:
Center for Marketing Research
Social Media and College Admissions: The First Longitudinal Study
Conducted By: Eric Mattson, Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D.

What is your organization's return on insight from listening?   How you are using what you listen for to guide your social media strategy and what is the value it returns?  Please leave me a comment with your story.

The chart above shows that college admissions offices surveyed that are using social media tools are using listening to support their social media strategies.

The study describes how they listen:

The institutions monitoring social media reported doing so manually. Most were using simple Google searches using the name of their school. Those schools that monitor online activity as it relates to them tend to be schools with higher tuition, private rather than public. They tend to be users of all forms of social media including blogs, podcasting and video.  These schools are also more likely to research students online via social networking sites.  Perceived importance of social media to the school does translate into monitoring behavior. Those schools with a culture where online communications are respected as having value are more likely to fully embrace that activity. They are gathering critical strategic information by listening to what is being said about their institutions and their competitors in the social media world.

Using free tools to listen is good if you're just getting started.  Fine tuning your key words is the most important step in these beginning stages.  But trying to manually search for conversations on a regular basis can prove daunting if there is a high volume data to sift through.   Some nonprofits, March of Dimes and the Red Cross have migrated to professional listening tools, like Radian 6 which make it easy to prioritize conversations. I've been discovering this myself as I explore using Radian 6.  

• What is the return on the insights you've gleaned from listening?  Can you share a story of what you heard on the social web and how you used it?

The New ROI -- Listen, Learn, Adapt: Return on Insight - Does it work for nonprofits?

Photo by Jeff Pulver

David Armano has an article on BusinessWeek called "The New Focus Group: The Collective" where he urges companies using social media to make the last word in ROI insight, not investment.  The process is: Listen, Learn, Adapt.  He is describing what an organization with a "learning organization" culture does and applying it to social media.  He makes the analogy that the process of mining the data for insights is akin to anthropology and that the team should be "digital anthropologists."

When I've been talking about ROI and Social Media - I make the point that the most important part of the process is looking at the data to figure out how to improve.  I used the Einstein quote, "Not everything that can be counted counts, and what counts can not be counted."  My point was that the qualitative insights are just as important to hard data points.

But I love the phrase, "Return on Insight." 

It might be difficult for the nonprofits to drop the word investment and replace it with insight - only from the point of the view that the word "investment" translates in donations and funding.  And usually have to submit reports that demonstrate "impact."  Nonprofits need to learn the insights and also understand the value of the investment. .

Nonetheless, the reflection questions are very valuable and important to incorporate in your strategy planning and reflection process.

1. Are you actively listening to your customers in the places they frequent online?
2. Are you launching initiatives that can be easily updated? Are you enabling a "culture of rapid response?"
3. Are you evaluating current processes and updating them as needed?
4. Are you building a culture in which "failure" is acceptable?
5. Are you allowing your teams to create "pilots" prior to scrutinizing them through traditional ROI exercises?
6. Are you planning initiatives that will help your organization learn prior to backing major marketing campaigns?
7. Are you synthesizing qualitative insights in addition to analyzing hard data points?
8. Are you tweaking your strategy along the way—and adapting where change may be needed?
9. Are you empowering all members of your teams to think and act like "digital anthropologists?"
10. Are you evolving the tools and methods to measure success (i.e. going beyond clicks and impressions)?

Resources

David Armano, The Collective Focus Group Paper
Beth Kanter, How To Think Like A Social Media Marketing Genius
Beth Kanter, What Are the Best Metrics and Reflection Processes To Improve Your Blog
Beth Kanter, Social Media Listening Wiki
Maddy Grant and Lindy Dreyer,  Got Your Listening Ears On?
Chris Brogan, Listening to Blogs, Really Listening

New Listening Tool: Who Is Talking About You?

WhosTalkin is a new social media search tool that makes it easy to search multiple social media sources.  It has a clean interface where you an easily scan and click through to mentions of your organization on blogs, micro media, news, forums, social bookmarking sites, social networking sites, and other places where people are talking about you.  It is free, but if you want to grab the results in a RSS Feed, it looks like that will be part of pro service.   There isn't any functionality that lets you summarize or visualize the data, slice and dice the results, or integrate into your workflow like Radian 6.  

I listen in many different ways.  Powerful listening is done through Radian 6, but I also have a Rube Goldberg like set up of RSS feeds from about 25 different sources that search on my name, my blog url, and the various misspellings.  (I also monitor specific topics, tags, or keywords depending on what I'm researching)  WhosTalkin would eliminate the time to track down the places to search and the hassle of setting them up in your RSS reader.   You'd still need to hone your listening goals which are independent of any tool you might use.

My listening baby steps started with Google Alerts via email, but I found that it didn't catch everything.  And, the last thing I needed to do was get more email.   Google Alerts now has RSS feeds and I read those in my RSS Reader.  I am able to compare what source captures what. One thing you won't eliminate is the overlap.   After you've set some actionable organizational listening goals, if you are the person doing the listening, you need to have powerful scanning skills, pattern recognition, and a good sense of how to tweak keywords.  Otherwise, you'll get overwhelmed and distracted.

What my Rube Goldberg set up of RSS feeds doesn't have is a sweep through social networks. WhosTalkin has searches through the major online social networks.  It's fascinating to see who is talking about you in the LinkedIn questions.

It is another tool for your listening tool box! 

Listening Resources

• Listening in a Blizzard by Beth Kanter
• Top 10 Reputation Tools Worth Paying For  by Dan Schwabel
• 8 ways to get the most from listening tools from Liz Strauss
• How To Stay Informed on CTC VISTA Using RSS and Google Alerts by Morgan Sully, CTC VISTA Project (specific to this org, but can be used anywhere)
• Top 10 Free Tools for Monitoring Your Brand’s Reputation by Dan Schwabel, Mashable
• The Art of Listening by Brian Solis
• How To Set Up A Nonprofit Listening Post on Twitter
• WeAreMedia Listening Module (examples of nonprofits using listening techniques) 
• Way Beyond News Alerts by Gordon Meyer

Who do you currently listen for what people are saying about you, your organization or issue?  What tools are you using?  What do you think are the most skills for effective social media listening?

Google Alerts Adds Feeds! Less Email Clutter

For novices just starting to explore social media, I recommend google alerts as the first listening step because they didn't have learn another application (RSS Readers) to get started. I use google alerts, but always wished they had an RSS option. I get way too email that I can barely keep up. So, I was so happy dancing to hear that they have added this option.

Backtype: Another Listening Tool - Who's Talking About You In The Blog Comments?

Dan Schwabel's  5 Free Tools For Reputation Management introduced me to a new listening tool, backtype.  It solves the problem of monitoring blog comments where people specifically mention you.   People can make comments about you on other blogs and if you only track links from blog posts, you won't see it.   BackType lets you find, follow and share comments from across the web. I gave it whirl and it turned up some interesting results. 

You can also track other bloggers and see where they commented  -- I might do this only to study how the masters do it.   An old trick is to observe people who do social media really well and learn from observation.  It's interesting to observe Chris Brogan's commenting activity.

Update:  Based on a comment to this post, I'm adding some context to comment trackers.

These services let you track conversations that are important to your organization and issue. They also allow content creators to aggregate their online activity and expertise from across the social Web into one centralized, portable profile.

Questions To Ask Before You Dive In:

• What do you need track?
• How will you respond to negative
• comments?
• Will you respond to all comments?
• How to prioritize?
• Which tool is right for you?

Why Commenting and Comment Tracking Is Important

• Commenting is the life blood of blogging and key to building a community
• They’re a way to get more minds into the story.
• They’re a way to annotate someone’s thoughts such that the ideas can take on another dimension.
• They're a way to establish authority in your content niche

Click to see larger image

This diagram, credited to the “New York Times via Ed Philp,” (original source) illustrates the flow of comments on a blog. If you are reading many blogs and entering in many conversations, how to track where you've left comments? That's what this group of tools will help you do.

The Art of Commenting on Blogs

• What did they say well?
• What did they miss?
• Answer questions
• What are other people saying
• How does it apply to you
• Look forward
• Look backward
• Ask what if?

Comment Tracking Tools

(I found out about many of these tools from  Brian Solis, Conversation Prism)

SezWho - a social platform that gives the community of readers the ability to not only comment on the post, but also rank the quality and insight of other commenters as well as the post in general. When commenting or voting, the service asks for your email address and then tracks your individual comments and your ranking history to provide interested visitors with an amalgamated representation of your views and aptitude.

Disqus - a comment and discussion plugin for websites, blogs, or applications. Pronounced "Discuss", the plugin makes commenting more interactive by creating a community of discussion across the web. It is a free service with no inline advertisements. Users create a profile and are able to track their comments across the web while creating their very own comment blog.

coComment - a Swiss based comment service attempting to create conversations based on web comments. The service notifies users when new comments are left, and allows the user to post new comments to his/her blog.

co.comments - tracks your comments, and it notifies me automatically by sending the comment to your Google Reader account.

IntenseDebate - attempts to enhance and encourage commenting on your existing blog by adding features like comment threading, reply-by-email, and importing/exporting of comments.

Tangler - Enables the embedding of portable, global conversations across the web, similar to the way YouTube videos are displayed in blogs and Web sites. One widget, one conversation with multiple access points.

General Resource

How To Become An Authority in Your Content Niche by Dosh Dosh
How to Comment Like King or Queen by Coolcat Teacher Blog
Strategic Blog Commenting A Screencast by Amy Gahran
Strategic Blog Commenting: Blog Post by Amy Gahran
Commenting by Alan Levine
Power of Comments by Chris Brogan
How To Add To Blogging Conversations by Darren Rowse
Nasty Blog Comments:  Human Nature on Blogs from BlogHerald

Specific About Tools

How To Effectively Track Your Comments on Other People's Blogs with Co.Comment by Sue Waters
Why Disqus is Winning the Web Comment Battle by Louis Gray
Cocomment: Annual Week of Comment Blogging by Alan Levine

Using Google Apps for Your Social Media Listening Dashboard: Social Productivity

I've been thinking a lot about the concept of social productivity as it relates to using social media and chewing on a post that Chris Brogan wrote a few days ago called "You Can Do Your Job Without Twitter."  I keep thinking there has to be a sweet spot between social productivity and personal productivity.   

Marnie Webb left a comment about this in a nonprofit context.  There are many tasks in a nonprofit day-to-day life - like grant writing, hiring someone, or prepping a board meeting where personal productivity matters most - connectedness really doesn't play a factor in getting these tasks off the to do list.  She goes on to say that there are other activities that really require moving a network - and social productivity.   

So, the real question is - if you have both of these types of tasks to accomplish- they take different approaches, probably use different sides of your brain, etc.   How do you organize your productivity tools effectively?

The other day I got a Tweet from Joselin Mane a Boston-area social media strategy consultant from LITbel who has worked with small businesses and nonprofits, including El Mundo to let me know about his Social Media Kit. 

What caught my eye was his diagram of how one might use a collection of google apps to for social media listening.   The diagram shows the tools and on page 6 he lists the basic features for each of the tools.   I might tweak this dashboard and also add Google Analytics to keep an eye on your referrals.

(1)  Email  - to reply to blog comments, filter updates/alerts from social networking sites, catch google alerts related to your social media strategy
(2)  Google Alerts - set up on your key words, name, url, organizational issues or anything that is critical to monitor as part of your social media strategy
(3)  Google Reader - this would include feeds that you've set up for listening (persistent searches, summize searches, and the like) as well as critical blogs and web sites you need to monitor.
(4)  IGoogle - this would your customized gateway.  I'd set this up with the mission critical feeds to read, plus perhaps a google analytics report, google notes (for a to do list), etc

You could actually set up a specific gmail acocunt just for your social media activities and this would seperate it from your regular business email account and work flow.   I've been thinking a lot about this as a way to "time box" the listening and participation activities which can be open-ended and cause you to loose track of time.   This way, I'd have a "social productivity suite" -- which where I would do my listening, participating, and other networking work.   The "efficiency or personal productivity suite" would be the place for all business and work related email and activities that are not related to social media and don't require collaboration. 

Right now everything comes into one account and I have specific folders set up based on whether it is a social activity or not.  When I open my google/gmail accounts, I have to a purpose and a goal - and be very disciplined or else risk getting distracted.

This is probably more of an issue for those folks who work in nonprofits and have social media responsibilities as part of their work, not all their work.   Can we expect that down the road five or ten years that we might have "social literacies, skills, and competencies" at the nonprofit staff level?  Certainly we have a baseline of digital literacy skills, but what does that mean in web 2.0, social media context?

• What are your best tips or techniques for balancing social productivity with personal productivity?

NpTech Summary: A Few Good Ways To Track NpTech With Social Media

The NpTech Blogs TwitterFeed

The NpTech Summary is a weekly compilation of resources tagged with "nptech" by those who follow all things nonprofits and social media.  Since conversations are getting more distributed and in addition to using the NpTech tag to discover, aggregate, and summarize resources, I'm incorporating nuggets from micro media sources, nptech bloggers, nptech friendfeed room, and networks.The summaries are more focused on a social media theme or a social media question related to practice. 

 

I've been thinking a lot lately about listening and the tools for listening. So, I thought I'd share a few sources that have flowed through the NpTech Social Media Stream about how to monitor nptech.  The number of nonprofit technology folks in the social media has grown by leaps and bounds, making the nptech meta feed quite a lot to consume, unless you've fully mastered the art of high volume scanning.  (I have, but for many people it is simply tooooooo much information.)

There are lots of niches, small aggregated collections of crowd-sourced links being share where you can dip your toes in the water and not suffer too much from information overload. 

Any one of these sources will give you quick sense of what nptechers are thinking about.  Although, be warned, you don't want to avoid the blind men and the elephant trap.   

1.  Follow social bookmarks tagged with NpTech on Del.icio.us: People are still tagging items into del.icio.us with the NpTech tag and I still use it as one of my best sources.  Just pop the RSS into your RSS Reader and you can quickly scan lots of resources zeroing in on the ones that you find of interest.    Use medium volume scanning techniques.

2.  Track the NpTech Group in Mag.nolia.com: This is a smaller volume that bookmarks tagged on del.icio.us, but I consistently find resources that I haven't seen elsewhere.

3. Follow the NpTech MetaFeed: Warning this is not for the faint of heart or those who can't deal with repetition and high volume.   This feed, created by Marshall Kirkpatrick, combined nptech tag feeds from a number of sources.   It's great for overall pattern analysis and a broad swipe.

4.  Follow the NpTech Blogs TwitterFeed: This is an aggregation of feeds from nonprofit technology blogs put together by @engagejoe. It isn't comprehensive, but it is a nice way to dip into what nptech blogs are saying.  He is looking for suggestions to add.  Here's a few Joe.

5.  Subscribe to a Twitter Search on "Nptech":  Still lots of good 140 character resource sharing happening via the #nptech has tag.  Easy to scan too, although tiny urls require you to click through.

6.  Scan Nonprofit Pulse: This site aggregates the tweets of 259 Twitter users identified with nonprofit technology.  There are two RSS feeds - top links and the tweets. 

7.  Read TechSoup blog, Netsquared blogs, and NTEN Blog. It's easy enough to pop the RSS feeds into your reader and these organizations aggregate resources and keep on top new developments in social media and nonprofits.   

8.  Subscribe to specific nonprofit technology blogs: Which ones, and how many - well that's up to you.   But there are more and more nonprofit blogs being launched and many are good.  I really appreciate the blogs that aggregate sub-niches of the field - take for example Social Action's roundups of social fundraising.   

9.  Join the NpTech FriendFeed Room: I have to admit it, I love the FriendFeed Room.  I wasn't going to put it on this list because it is nice and small.  It isn't a fire hose - it is a community - lots of great information shared here and conversation.

10. Follow the NpTech SlideShows on SlideShare:  The best place to find inspiration for presentations, particularly for presentations about social media and nonprofits.

There's are also some interesting ideas floating around for the future including NpTech-A-Matic.  It doesn't exist.  Peter Campbell's interesting idea using Ubiquity. 

How do you track the nonprofit field?  What ponds, rivers, or oceans do you swim through to find information important to your professional development as nonprofit technologist interested in social media?

The NpTech Tag started as an experimental community tagging project in 2005. A loosely coupled group of nonprofit techies and social change activists decided to use the tag "NpTech" to identify web resources that would create an ongoing stream of information to promote and educate those working in nonprofit technology.  Through TechSoup's Netsquared project, blogger Beth Kanter, was commissioned to write a weekly summary.

And if you’re enjoying this blog, please consider subscribing for free

WeAreMedia: Why Putting on Your Listening Ears is the First Step

My Listening Ears, Flickr Photo by niclindh

During the month of September and into October, the WeAreMedia project will be discussing the content in the tactical modules on the wiki. The first module is on Listening.

Why listening?  Learning how to listen using a couple of social media tools and the active task of listening is something that can be easily learned in a few hours and if an organization invests 1-5 hours per week in this task it will definitely return value to strategy development.   

As the ExperienceTheBlog suggests:

Simply put, the best way to use social media is to use it. Don't jump into the deep end of the social media pool, but you won't get any benefit nor gain any knowledge by staying dry and arguing over where and how to leap. Dip a toe into the water, test the temperature, and see what you learn about your consumers and your brands.

The point was driven home to me by a commenter from a nonprofit organization named Paulette who works for an arts organization who left this comment on the interview with Marc from the Chicago Symphony:

We're trying to figure out how to best engage in social media. I'm advocating for us to use it more as part of our outreach efforts because I think we're missing an opportunity to communicate with the new audiences we're always talking about developing for the arts. The ROI ideas were particularly helpful as you're correct, it is important to be adding more value than just "keeping up with Joneses." And I'm especially keen on the idea of listening first, as, of course, inevitably the push escalates to "act and get big results" long before you're actually ready for that.

I thought it was right on.

Defining Listening

I like how Josh Bernhoff definesit on this YouTube video from the Forrester Consumer Forum. "Learning from what your customers are saying."

In the chapter on listening in Josh Bernhoff and Charlene Li's new book, Groundswell they point out that listening is nothing new - it's market research. There is a difference between market research (using surveys, focus groups, and interviews to collect data) and listening (using social media tools). Market research generates answers, while listening using social media generates insights.

Bernhoff and Li point out in their book that there are problems relying solely on social media to do your listening. While you'll gain new insights, the people you're listening to are not necessarily representative of your total client or audience base. The other issue is information overload due to volume.

Why Important

As a listener using social media tools, you become a Jane Goodall observing your clients in their natural environment. On the social web,current and potential supporters for your nonprofit are sharing opinions, concerns, and ideas; some are even sharing their day-to-day experiences with your issue area or why they care or what might motivate them to make a contribution.  If your first tactical step is to spend 1-5 hours per week putting on your social media ears, you can glean the nuances of what's on your supporters' minds.

Help us flesh out the Listening section by answering these questions on the wiki:

• What are some basic beginner steps for listening?
• What are some advanced techniques for listening?
• What are some of the best resources or blog posts about social media listening?
• We are REALLY need examples, stories, or case studies about nonprofits and listening.   Share a "nugget" or drop a comment and I'll interview you for a blog post and addition the wiki.

Do people talk about dogs or cats more on blogs?

Screenshot of Trendpedia

Very interesting there are more posts mentioning the word "dogs" than the word "cats."   This graph was generated by a site called Trendpedia.  Here's the description:

Search blogs — discover who’s discussing what, where, when and how. Trendpedia finds trends in social media. You choose the topics, enter the keywords, and click “Search Trend”.

Trendpedia finds the articles online that talk about your topics. Trendpedia organizes the articles in a trendline that shows the popularity of the topic over time — you can track a topic’s trendline from three months ago up to today.

Trendpedia collects posts about your topic per day. Click on the trendlines to find the articles about your topic posted on the date of choice. Watch the articles appear in the tabs below, organised according to topic and date.

How might you use an analytics tool like this to evaluate your social media strategy?