There are different ways to close the loop between social media and offline action as we get better integrating social media into our overall marketing and communications plans. Think in both directions - offline to online and online to offline. And, remember it is important to track your tactics to see which ones work.
Offline to Online: Window Clings and Sandwich Boards
I was in Oakland, CA and discovered Fenton's Creamery, famous for its ice cream. The line was out the door.
Lines are good because you can contemplate that important decision: What flavor? While I was debating between chocolate chocolate chip and coconut pineapple 95% fat free flavors, I noticed a small sandwich board sign promoting Fenton's Facebook Page. I "liked it" from my iPhone.
I posted the above photo on my Facebook page, primarily to test how different content sparks interaction on my own Facebook page. But as a bonus, I learned from Facebook expert Mari Smith, that sandwich boards and window clings with Facebook and Twitter IDS are an effective technique to close the loop between offline and social media.
Nonprofits: Increasing Engagement
In the nonprofit world, we've been focusing on the online to offline connection, or more specifically how to turn Slacktivists into Activists with Social Media. This excellent post by my business partner, Geoff Livingston, provides some excellent tips for encouraging deeper engagement from your nonprofit's online social media friends and fans.
Creative Ways to Track
I've also been reading about tips
to track how your online social network activities are driving offline
actions. While these methods are geared for small business, they could
be easily used by nonprofits. They include:
#1: Use Google Voice Number on All Social Media Profiles and Track #2: Promote Offline Events On Social Media #3: Offer Coupons Exclusive to Social Media Channels #4: Host A Tweet Up #5: Connect Social Media and Email Campaigns
This year, we are seeing the twin trends of greater awareness from nonprofits for the need to integrate social media with existing marketing and communications plans while at the same time audiences are yearning for greater social media engagement from the charities and causes they love
most. This could be a win-win situation for your nonprofit organization if stop thinking of your social media channel in a silo.
A few questions:
What are you doing to encourage offline ---> online action and what are you doing to encourage online--> offline action?
I'm working with a small group of Packard Foundation grantees on a social media lab where they are implementing different social media experiments. Part of the process includes regular check-in calls to reflect on what we're learning. I have been thinking a lot about actionable social media measurement strategies that are fit and trim and light on their feet!
Inspired by the Measure Everything: Is Your Nonprofit Facebook Page Worth It?,
I thought I'd share how I look at my Facebook page data.
I've been collecting it during the past 9 months, with a little bit of spreadsheet aerobics. It much easier to collect, analyze and take action with your data when you do a little bit each month or every other week. It is a lot like trying to get back in physical shape after
you've slacked off. It's much easier to do a 20 mile bike ride when
you've been riding everyday!
We know that good practice is to establish measurable objectives for your social media strategy and identify the audience before you executive. You should also be thinking about what to measure and an efficient method for collecting that data before you begin. And, of course, making the time to actually look and think about what the data means. We get so overloaded by meaningless data collection, that we're exhausted before we get to do the fun part: making sense out of it.
My Facebook page is focused on a listening and engagement objective - starting and maintaining a conversation. I view it as a focus group that offers content ideas for blog posts as well as to provide another conversation channel to share insights about social media. The target audience is people who work for nonprofits.
Here's my description:
This is a focus group and sand box to learn more about how nonprofits
can use social media effectively, especially Facebook. You are all the
experts here!
That statement guides how I engage and what content I share. That in turns drives my measurement strategy. It makes it a lot easier to cull down what I data points I'm collecting.
The one strategy step that I didn't do at beginning and that I'm doing now as my blog is going through a redesign under the capable hands of Allyson Kapin - is to figure out an integrated content strategy between my blog, Facebook page, and other social media outposts. This is multi-step process looking at your web site content, events, and social media properties.
You also need to think through the details of your content and engagement tactics. Your Facebook Page is like a garden that needs regularly tending. While automatically streaming content can give you some gains in efficiency, you can't be an absent landlord. You need to visit your page every day - especially if your engagement strategy is working and your fans are posting content, questions, or responses. One participant on my Facebook page, Maggie Leifer McGary discovered this as well about her nonprofit's fan page (check out her case study)
While it is possible to go back and download an export of daily metrics from the Facebook insights tool from the beginning, it can be a huge pain. It's better to set up your trusty spreadsheet at the get go so you can track monthly or every other week. The challenge, of course, is that you have to make it habit and grabbing data, cutting and pasting it into a spreadsheet. It isn't the most thrilling activity. I try to do it monthly, but maybe your organization add this to your intern's work tasks.
The data collection tools for Facebook are still evolving. There are some new third party analytic tools
(and some are free) that can more easily gather up metrics into a
spreadsheet than the insights tool, but you do have to talk with a
sales person first. They recently announced a new analytic product called "insights for your domain" which allows you to gather FB
insights data if you add a like button to your web site. (To install
the new Insights, you can visit the Facebook insights page
and click on the “Insights For Your Domain” button.)
It's still in the
early stages of development, but if and when more sites adopt adding
the Facebook "like" button, collecting this data will be become more
important to informing your strategy. alled "insights for your domain" which allows you to gather FB
insights data if you add a like button to your web site.
I don't look at all the metrics that Facebook insights provides because it I find it overwhelming and a lot of won't help me measure and refine my strategy. The key here is actionable data. What does that mean?
Measurement should inform specific decisions and/or actions.
Do not measure everything, but do measure what is most important to your goals.
The data you gather should help you learn
Here's my spreadsheet aerobics. I grab the monthly daily data from the insights tool and download into a spreadsheet. I have separate worksheet for each month and run totals. I look at the following metrics:
Total Interactions
Likes
Comments
New Fans
Unsubscribes
Page Views
Unique Page Views
Photo Views
I also have columns in daily spreadsheet for labeled "content" and "promotion". In the content line, I put a link to the actual post noting the type, voice, or if it was a fan posting. I also make notes about what promotional tactics I used. Then at the end of the month, allocate a half hour to look at the numbers for the month in comparison to other months - and look for insights and trends.
In reviewing my spreadsheet, I discover what works. For example, questions work, particularly those that accompany a link to a good post.
Questions Link to an article with a question Link to an article summarizing best tip Post w/ a live experiment or sharing something I did on the Fan Page
I've looked at frequency of posting and the sweet spot for me is 3-5 times per week. I haven't analyze day of the week because it was extra piece of data to collect and was more interested in click thrus by day of the week and found a good secondary study.
It is also important to track exactly how you promote
your Facebook page and what helps you recruit more fans. I keep notes
on when I've tweeted a link, speaking dates, posting updates in my
status about my fan page and all the multi-channel ways you need to
promote your page.
I also do the same sort of notes for different promotional techniques and I look at the increase (or decrease) in the number of fans:
Suggest to friends
Status updates
Tagging photos
Tagging a person
Visiting other fan pages and participating
Promoting through other channels (blog post, Twitter, speaking engagement, etc)
I've also discovered that it is important to identify as many opportunities to set up experiments that you measure and learn as you go.
This is where I've gleaned most of my insights - a combination of
quantitative metrics culled from Insights and what people are saying on
the page.
As look back on my Facebook page experience, collecting some data points related to objectives and spending some time to think about what it means is very valuable.
What are you learning from your measurement strategy? How have you kept your data collection trim, fit, and actionable? What is the most compelling thing you learned about your Facebook Page through measurement?
I had a lot of fun doing a panel with colleagues Jordan Viator, Carie Lewis, and David Neff called "The Real Housewives of Social Media." Our task was to present practical and tactical information about social media using metaphors that related to housewives. You can see the full slide deck here. I took measurement and since David Neff wore an apron and talked about kitchen tools and recipes, I riffed on cooking measuring techniques.
Jordan Viator decided to photoshop us and create flyers to promote our session. I'm still laughing.
My points were simple:
1) Measuring Cup: Identify the right results and pick the right metrics to measure it.
2) Egg Timer: Track your time because working on social media can give you ADOLAS (AD - oh look a squirrel!) If you track you time and have specific tasks, you know what you're getting for your time investment. It's just one step away from looking at ROI. I had a funny picture of a Squirrel and shouted out Squirrel at random points during the presentation. This started a twitter hashtag #squirrel.
3) Funnel: Measure the whole funnel! I shared some learnings from my Birthday fundraiser on Twitter and Facebook. I talked about the importance of finding influencers at the first step and shared a few tips and tools. I shared some thoughts about using Social Network Analysis tools to analyze your Twitter network.
I launched a Facebook Fan Page for my blog over the summer shortly after Facebook announced vanity urls. I resisted it for a year because I was concerned about having yet another social media outpost to feed and tune. I wanted to avoid automated cross-posting of social content because I think it isn't very effective.
What is the way out of this problem? Limited time and resources for maintaining and creating content on one hand, and a desire to get started. The secret sauce: Very focused objectives for your Fan Page and a selective strategy.
My Fan Page objective is:
To create a listening post to understand the questions and concerns from nonprofits about implementing an effective Facebook presence.
To engage and discuss techniques and tips for using Facebook effectively for nonprofits.
The type of content I share that supports these objectives includes: the best links on strategy and tactics for Facebook, discussion questions, and responding to people's questions. Measuring this requires some surveys of fans as well as counting the number of insights gleaned from posts and discussions from Fans. I have not done this yet.
To refine a content strategy, I used the Fan Page insights metrics tool, particularly the stats on interactions and Fan Page growth. My experiments were quite granular: What gets more interactions - sharing video or photos or links? Does sharing link with a 2-sentence commentary work better than sharing with a question? How often do I need to post content to keep fans engaged and attract new fans?
The Facebook Insights tool lets you see trends Fan acquisition and subscription. Here are some metrics that I use to harvest insights on those questions.
Total Fans / Unsubscribers: Total number of fans over time, overlaid with the total number of fans who have chosen to hide your posts in their News Feed (unsubscribers).
New / Removed Fans: The number of people who have become a new fan of your Page or stopped being a fan of your Page.
Page Views: Total number of times a Page was viewed per day.
Media Consumption: Total photo views, audio plays, and video plays for the content you have uploaded to your Page.
Unsubscribes / Re-subscribes: The total number of times fans unsubscribed from your Page, and the total number of times fans re-subscribed to your Page.
Over the past few months, I've discovered the formula that works for my fan page. It would be interesting to compare across Fan Pages of other nonprofits - particularly the question of frequency of posting and Fan growth. The M&R social media benchmarks study is a good start, although the benchmarks are based on a small sample size.
Sysomos did a benchmarking study of all Fan Pages on Facebook that looked Fan Page "popularity" (number of fans) against content posting frequency. It found that frequency of content posting doesn't no correalate with popularity. I'd love to see a drill down of the M&R Benchmarks and Sysomos metrics for just the nonprofit Fan Pages (vetted to ensure they are nonprofits).
Right now it is limited to three different ways to analyze your Fan Page. You can what your fans are interested in based on what other Fan Pages they have joined. It also gives you a visual representation of geographic location of fans, but only US distribution.
Is this a meaningless set of data or useful? It might help you with:
Identifying cross-collaborations with other Fan Pages
Decide where to participate on other Fan Pages on Facebook to raise awareness of your Fan Page
Share links and content from these pages on your page
The service is basic and there will be more advanced features. What I'd like to see is a social network analysis of active fans and their relationships with others. This would be useful to help identify influencers.
How do you track and measure your Facebook Fan Page against your objectives?
How are you using metics and experiments to improve your Facebook Fan Page content strategy?
Anil Dash just made the same discovery that I made a couple a months ago about the impact of being added to the Twitter Suggested List.
Being on Twitter's suggested user
list makes no appreciable difference in the amount of retweets,
replies, or clicks that I get.
A lot of followers doesn't equal influence. As Stefano Maggi points out, there's more to influence besides numbers, there is also affinity. Geoff Livingston said it another way: relationships matter more than numbers. We did an experiment to prove our point.
There's
no way to maintain strong ties with that many people with such fast
growth. Anil Dash has come to this conclusion as well:
Twitter followers who come from the suggested user list don't form
real relationships or respond to the suggested users like "normal"
followers do. If I'd have continued gaining followers at the rate I had
been before being on the list, I'd have about 10% as many followers,
but I suspect I'd have exactly the same number of replies and retweets.
Before being on the list, a typical link that I tweeted would get
between 250 and 500 clicks; After being on the list that hasn't changed
at all.
So, the point here is that numbers in social media don't
matter as much building relationships one person at a time and how you define the value. Chris Brogan makes that point. And that also means, as Seth Godin suggests bullhorns are overrated.
The most interesting part of Webinars is the q/a. Someone asked Tara a question about measuring Whuffie or influence. Her response:
This is one of the biggest reasons I don’t like to measure Whuffie. I get the question time and time again when I talk about the book. The question I *should* be getting is ‘what can I do with my Whuffie?’. We should be less concerned about how many followers one has and more about what that person does with that many followers. Not only is Whuffie left better in the non-fungible, ephemeral realm, but it is inconsequential. The measure needs to be in the impact. If we concentrate on our influence, we forget the end goal. We get caught up in our ego.
She pointed to this video from Chris Brogan about overnight success - and how important it is to focus on the results of the work, not the hype or number of Twitter followers. Tara goes on to say:
Focus on the big prize. All too many times, people stop at the influence part:
how popular is that person? how many followers do we have? who is
talking about me and my company? how much love do people feel for me?
While she was talking, I thought about the diagram I had just finished in the book I'm co-writing with Allison Fine. The chapter is called learning loops is about tracking and reflection. We make the point that the focus should be on the impact or the change in the real world.
In early October, I had approximately 20,000 Twitter followers and today that number is almost ten fold. In October, I was placed on the Twitter Recommended User list along with a handful of other nonprofit and philanthropy Twitter users. I tried to leverage this for other nonprofit/charity Twitters by adding lists of Twitter users to my Twitter landing page.
There's no way to maintain strong ties with that many people with such fast growth. So, the point here is that numbers in social media don't matter as much building relationships one person at a time.
A lot of followers doesn't equal influence. As Stefano Maggi points out, there's more to influence besides numbers, there is also affinity. Geoff Livingston put it another way: relationships matter more than numbers with Twitter following. We did an experiment to prove our point.
The bottom line is to focus on the results of your social media strategy, don't get distracted by meaningless metrics like the number of followers, and value the relationships.
The success of your blog, or any social media effort, depends on your willingness to solicit feedback and take corrective action when necessary. If you want to have a successful blog that supports your organization’s goals and adds value, improvement should be continuous. You need to pick the right hard data points, or metrics, that will help you harvest insights and improve your blog.
Analyzing your blog content First, you need to set overall goals for your blog and understand your audience. Next, you need to know the right metrics to use, and employ the proper tools to collect the data. Most important, you need a strategy—either for yourself or for a team—to gather insights from your metrics. Remember, it isn’t about the numbers alone.
Avoid Analytophilia Alexandra Samuel coined that phrase in a post on social media analytics and metrics about the greatest peril of social media: analytophilia. It's about obsessing on raw numbers and constantly checking the number of Twitter followers or retweets or Facebook insight clicks. She recommends that you don't go into your analytics or stats program without composing a specific question first. I've been advocating this approach for a long time and offer you a set of data points and questions.
Here are seven tips to help you start measuring social media efforts.
1. Readership growth This means content consumption. There are two different kinds of web viewers: subscribers and visitors. Subscribers have made a commitment to regularly receive (and hopefully read or at least scan) your blog. Visitors are people who occasionally visit your blog. You should pay attention to monthly trends of content consumption over time. This will tell you a lot about your readers’ satisfaction with your content.
Gathering insights: Is the number of visitors and subscribers increasing? If not, why? If yes, why? Think about your publishing frequency, the length of posts and the mix of topics.
I get a notice when someone unsubscribes to my blog. I send them a personal follow-up e-mail asking why. I’ve received excellent feedback from my inquiries about how to improve the blog’s publishing schedule, topics and more
2. Reader engagement index This looks at how much your readers are interacting with you and your content, as well as how they are sharing your content with others.
Hard data points: For this, I use the PostRank tool, which ranks your blog posts with a number from 1 to 10. I pick out all posts that score a perfect 10. The scores are based on analysis of the “5 Cs” of engagement: creating, critiquing, chatting, collecting and clicking. You should understand how this model works, but don’t get distracted by trying to find flaws in how engagement measures are constructed.
Gathering insights: What topics do the posts that receive high scores cover? Are these posts longer and more in-depth, or short and focused on one topic? Do they include information from a lot of outside resources? What’s the tone—formal or informal? Do they include tips? What is the quality of the conversation in the comments section? What did you learn from the conversation your readers started? If you have a group blog, are there differences between authors? Why? Did anything surprise you?
I have discovered a number of patterns in my highest ranked posts—for example, length, titles, the number of ideas covered in a post, the tone, style and so forth. This has been the single best source of improving the quality of the content on my blog.
3. Reader bookmarking This measures whether readers are bookmarking your content for later retrieval which provides some indication of how much they value it.
Hard data points: You can find out about bookmark saves from PostRank numbers, although the program doesn’t make it efficient to grab data over time. Remember bookmarked items can also positively influence your blog traffic.
Gathering insights: What was the topic of the post that was bookmarked? Are the posts focused on providing tips, resource roundups or other formats? Are there patterns? And if so, what are they?
4. Conversation rate: This is the amount of commenting and conversation that is happening on your blog.
Hard data points: You can get a list of the most commented on posts from PostRank. If you use Wordpress, Joost Blog Metrics will give you a post-to-comment ratio.
Gathering insights: What is the style of the writing? Do posts with more questions in the title and questions in the end generate more comments? Did you do any outreach to encourage commenting? Is there a conversation happening between people who comment? What do you do to facilitate it? What’s the quality of the commenting—are you learning? Are the comments positive or negative?
5. Authority This is the number of links to a post. This metric gives you an indication of the value of the content by showing you how many people are linking to your content. It can also influence traffic.
Gathering insights: Pull out the top 25 linked posts on your blog. Analyze the types of posts (content and format) that get linked and the impact of that linking in referrals using Google Analytics. Are there any patterns?
6. Page views This is the number of times a page (unit of content) was viewed. I’m not sure how much this will tell you about your content quality, but it could give you some insights about your outreach.
Hard data points: You can get these metrics from Google Analytics.
Gathering insights: Why are certain blog posts getting higher page views than others? Look at the referral traffic (including which sites visitors to your site click from or what keywords they searched to get to your site or blog). What was your outreach strategy?
7. Industry index This metric involves evaluating your performance in relation to other blogs in your space using the same metrics.
Hard data points: I use the List of Change, which indexes several hundred nonprofit blogs across different metrics.
Gathering insights: I review other blogs on the list to see if there are ideas that I can incorporate into my own blogging. Where is my blog on the index—high or low? What are the qualities that the top five blogs have in common? How do they compare to my blog?
This may seem like a lot of work, but it takes me about an hour every month to gather up the numbers into a spreadsheet and then set aside some time for reflection on how I can improve my blog. It is an essential part of my blogging process and success.
This article was originally posted at CW Bulletin.
Michael Quinn Patton, an evaluation guru, visited the Packard Foundation yesterday. I participated in a lively exploratory conversation about "How do you evaluate network effectiveness?" along with others on the Packard Foundation organizational effectiveness team. I also had an opportunity to hear his thoughts on the state of the
evaluation field, how it has changed and get a deeper understanding of developmental evaluation.
Michael Quinn Patton uses metaphors and stories to talk about evaluation in everyday language. He is a genius at connecting evaluation to other people's contexts. As a result, I had several "ah ha" moments and found a couple of connections for thinking about social media strategy - especially how we address culture change, social media measurement, ROI and the whole larger question of social media for social good.
By way of this post and video, I'm sharing some of Michael Quinn Patton's thinking about evaluation. I invite you to share your thoughts and reactions in the comments.
But first, some context.
Patton has written several books on the art and science of program evaluation, including Utilization-Focused Evaluation (4th ed., 2008), in which he emphasizes the importance of designing evaluations to insure their usefulness, rather than simply creating long reports that may never get read or never result in any practical changes.
He is also the author of a book called "Getting to Maybe" about social change. The big idea in the book is described below:
Many of us have a deep desire to make the world around us a better place. But often our good intentions are undermined by the fear that we are so insignificant in the big scheme of things that nothing we can do will actually help feed the world’s hungry, fix the damage of a Hurricane Katrina or even get a healthy lunch program up and running in the local school. We tend to think that great social change is the province of heroes – an intimidating view of reality that keeps ordinary people on the couch. But extraordinary leaders such as Gandhi and even unlikely social activists such as Bob Geldof most often see themselves as harnessing the forces around them, rather than singlehandedly setting those forces in motion. The trick in any great social project – from the global fight against AIDS to working to eradicate poverty in a single Canadian city – is to stop looking at the discrete elements and start trying to understand the complex relationships between them. By studying fascinating real-life examples of social change through this systems-and-relationships lens, the authors of Getting to Maybe tease out the rules of engagement between volunteers, leaders, organizations and circumstance – between individuals and what Shakespeare called “the tide in the affairs of men.”
This is one to definitely add to the plane reading list and a theme of my talk at Mashable Conference on Friday.
I'm not an evaluation practitioner, so I wasn't sure exactly whether there would be any connection to my work in social media. What I discovered, is that through his engaging storytelling, I got inspired by evaluation.
As Patton shared with us, the field of evaluation is dynamic. When he approached updating the fourth edition of his book, he thought it would be just about updating the stories. In the course of writing the book, he realized the field had changed. Most noticeably in the rise of cross-cultural, international evaluation program work. The question of how to adapt evaluation methods to other political and cultural systems in developing countries was big challenge because evaluation, over the past three decades, has been deeply rooted in the Western ways of thinking.
He then launched into a series of "creation stories" or "beginning" stories to explain the difference between traditional evaluation approaches and "developmental evaluation" (an evaluation of a program that helps you improve it.)
In the beginning, God created heaven and earth. God saw everything. Everything is good. So the 7th day he rested. How do you know what you created is very good? What are you criteria? What are the outcomes? Aren't you a little close to the situation to make an objective assessment? His rest was greatly disturbed by these questions. So, on the 8th day he got up and created evaluation (hell.)
The above story is a metaphor for the traditional summative approach to evaluation - create something, then evaluate it's impact, but don't change the program.
He pointed out that this was very difficult to apply to programs in
developing countries. He realized it when started to look at creation
stories in different cultures.
Maori in New Zealand Creation Story
In the beginning, father sky and mother earth - embraced. Such a fierce embrace - only darkness was in between them. Children were born into this space but they became unhappy and plotted to push the parents apart. It became clear that they would have to join together and need the strength of the oldest. A lot of bickering followed and failed attempts by the younger siblings. Having observed failed attempts, the oldest said said they would have to put their backs into it - back against father sky and feet against mother earth. The push the parents apart. Father sky was crying - and that became rain. Pushing apart parents, had exposed the nakedness of his mother. He began to plant trees to hide her body. They had never planted a tree before. First they tried roots in the air, leaves in ground. It failed. They tried laying them on the ground. Finally they succeeded by planting the roots in the ground. They then grew forests and the eldest child became the god of the Forrest.
Patton points out that they were not sure what they were trying to get too. They didn't know what a forest looked like. They had a general sense, but had to go through a listen, learn, and adapt process before getting it right. This is the essence of developmental evaluation.
A group of people like Adam and Eve were there in the beginning. In the mist, a grass hut appears with no doors or windows. They surround the grass hut. There are noises and they are frightened by it. They spend the day debating - and end up not doing anything because they can't decide. Frozen by fear, they go to sleep. The next morning, the hut is there. The noises continue. The uncertainty is making them crazy. They love the place where they are and they don't want to leave. They decide they have to open up the hut. They cut a door. Out comes the clan, the medicine people who have knowledge. They thank them and share their wisdom.
Developmental evaluation involves asking a lot questions. This story is about the scariness of asking questions, looking at a program, campaign, activity and ask are we prepared to learn about it? Do we stay in that place believing it is okay? The story is a metaphor about the fear of asking questions and the knowledge that comes with it.
I also see this as a metaphor for the fear of engaging from social media. What if we get a negative comment? What if we loose control? That fear keeps nonprofits from engaging.
Some other takeaways from his talk about evaluation:
Evaluation needs to be relevant and meaningful. It isn't a horrible alien thing that punishes people and makes judgments.
Need a culture of inquiry, sharing what works, what doesn't. A willingness to engage about what to do to make your program better.
Evaluation is not about getting to a best practice that can be spread around the world in a standardized way and to answer the question, "Is everyone following the recipe?"
Program development has to be ongoing, emergent. It isn't a pharmacy metaphor of finding a pill to solve the problem.
Real-Time Feedback/Evaluation is different from development evaluation which is directed towards a purpose to do something. Police use real-time evaluation to allocate their resources. For example, if crime increases in a neighborhood, they know how to allocate patrols.
Developmental evaluation speeds up the feedback loop.
The other conversation I participated in was focused on network effectiveness and how to evaluate it. Stephanie McAuliffe captures is must better than I did, so go read her post. Patton observed that thinking about networks has changed. He shared one framework that describes what the network does:
Networking/information sharing/learning
Coordination
Collaboration
Partnerships
The framework assumes that networks can move up or down through these phases. The question is when do the networks move to these other levels? He talked a lot about ebb and flow - that a network could be doing "information sharing/networking" and that you can measure it by looking at how people are connecting and their trust.
The connection here for me about social media is the notion that it isn't just a "campaign" - where you flip on or off switch. It's about this ongoing building of relationships with the people in your network. What you measure is engagement and trust.
Also, there is a catalytic moment when the network needs to scale into coordination or collaboration to take action. He describe how some networks work while in the "networking" phase - they imagine different scenarios or "fire drills." Another metaphor was disease - going from chronic to acute.
He also mentioned the importance of someone playing the role of being a network weaver who captures the lessons/stories in real-time. Someone who doesn't own the purpose.
Evaluating network effectiveness looks at two different criteria. Outcomes as related to purpose. Is the network focused on problem-solving, networking, connecting fragmenting programs, a campaign, sensing network, etc. The other criteria is process - what are the tasks and processes.
What connections are you making between social media and the thinking of Michael Quinn Patton?
We recently launched a new blog here at Blackbaud Internet Solutions. It’s been an exciting endeavor and given us a lot of insight into using social media for nonprofits and fundraising! Our main goal is to help you learn how to leverage our technology and the tools that make up social media. With that in mind I’d like to share 4 Keys to Building a Successful Web Site based on similar tactics we’ve deployed on this blog.
Before we go too far, let me start by saying, “Content is King.” Without great content, the following tactics and tools are limited at best. Focus on producing great content all the time. Put these tools in place. Then use what you learn from them to grow your site! Off we go.
1) Learn From Your Content
If you’re not learning you’re getting dumber! Use Google Analytics (GA) to see things like how many unique visitors you’re getting, what content is being viewed the most, what keywords or phrases people are using to find you and where people are coming from when finding you. This information is invaluable to your nonprofit – Giving you the ability become more effective with your online efforts. You may not know exactly what to do with this data all the time, but to be without it is to let opportunities slip through your fingers.
Think about how you could use Google Analytics – learn from the content you’re publishing to promote your nonprofit's fundraising event. What content is being viewed for the longest time? What content is producing the desired action of registering, donating or taking action? How can you optimize, modify and adapt?
This is only a glimpse into what you can do with analytics. For real meat check out some of the below posts by Avinash Kaushik – this dude will make you drool over the possibilities!
Remember, “Content is King” so provide an easy way for readers to subscribe to yours. More and more people are reading content, your content, via RSS through tools like Google Reader so make it easy to find on every page of your site.
Tip: Use Google FeedBurner which will allow people to subscribe via RSS or email. You will also get some great statistics which will help you with number one above.
Another Tip: Not sure how to get RSS from the Blackbaud Sphere CMS. Check out How to Use RSS in Sphere.
Use a social bookmarking plug-in like Add This so people who like your work can easily share with their network. Make sure to put this in an easily seen and easily accessed area of every piece of content. You don’t want to make it hard for your readers to share, do you? As with number one and two above you get additional statistics from Add This which further helps you to evaluate the impact of your web site and how you can continue improving.
"AddThis buttons can be found on hundreds of thousands of websites, and are currently viewed over 20 billion times a month by users all over the world, in over 20 languages."
New services such as bit.ly, tinyurl and budurl are emerging. They allow you to take any URL and shrink it! For example you can take the link to this page which is normally pretty long and shrink it to this http://bit.ly/4webways. A couple great things you will love:
It’s easier for you to pass out in your newsletters, mailings and other printed publications
It’s easier for your readers to share
You get more statistics for analysis! (See #1 above).
"We don't want to argue that Bit.ly is the next Google, but the technology it's brought to market could be very important in the indexing of the social web. Bit.ly shortens links so they are easier to share, like TinyURL. The service creates a redirect from a short Bit.ly link out to a longer link on any web page. Allong the way the service analyzes the page being linked to, pulls out the key concepts discussed on that page, and then provides real-time statistics about where the link is being shared and how many people are clicking on it."
These are 5 things that you can implement pretty simply. Don’t put them off. Have questions? Please ask below and I’ll do my best to help out.
What am I missing? I know you have some great tips to share with the community here so please take a minute and help us out.
This article was originally posted on NetWits Think Tank at http://bit.ly/HkGc2 by Frank Barry:
Frank is a Consulting Manager at Blackbaud Internet Solutions. At work he helps nonprofits with technology, social media & online strategy. He also spends some time speaking at industry conferences. The rest of the time he enjoys family, learning, sports, food, friends & movies.
Facebook is an ever growing force in the internet space and it looks like it will be for a while. With 200 Million users (and growing) it’s hard to ague otherwise. Facebook is also a great tool for nonprofits. It’s free, it gives you an immediate way to build a tribe and engage people in online community. Facebook also gives others the ability to share their affinity to you with their friends, family and co-workers. That said, you can’t just throw up a page and expect to be successful. You have to be thoughtful, strategic and knowledgeable. Four tips to help you get started.
1. Create a Page not a Group or Cause
Facebook pages give you a ton of great features that Groups and Causes do not. There is a place for each of the Facebook page types, but the generic “Facebook page” is the place to start. Here are a few reasons why:
People can find you via Google. More people can find out about your Nonprofit because your Facebook Page gets indexed and is searchable inside and outside (i.e. Google) of Facebook. Which also means you can boost your search engine rankings (SEO).
No limit on the number of people who can express their support for your nonprofit by becoming your fan
Pages Have Access to Users’ Feeds - When Facebook users become a “fan” of your nonprofit page, they will be notified of your status updates every time you make one! Then they can comment, share and/or like your wall posts which then shares it with all their friends – now that’s viral.
Communicate with your fans regularly just to stay in touch or with special news, offers and information.
All the great features of Facebook are available - writing on the Wall, uploading photos, and joining discussion groups.
Add applications to your Page and engage your users with videos (YouTube Box), photos (Flickr Box) reviews, flash content, and more.
2. Participate and be a community like the Lance Armstrong Foundation
Lance Armstrong Foundation (LAF) is doing a great job participating and building community with their Facebook page. If you take a look at their page you’ll notice that there are hundreds if not thousands of people interacting there (I’ve added an image to the right – notice the red box towards the bottom). It’s not just LAF “shouting out” or broadcasting to their fans. As a matter of fact you’ll notice that the LIVESTRONG representative is talking with the people, sharing things, commenting, liking wall posts and more. They are fully interacting.
So what’s that mean for you?
Be active daily. Share news, video, photos, stories and what ever else makes sense for your organization.
Engage with your fans. Comment on their wall posts. Like things they share. Help people connect with others.
3. Get folks to engage with you in more than one way like the ONE Campaign
Check out the ONE Campaign Facebook page. Did you see that? They set up their page to go to a custom tab where they show people how to engage with them beyond Facebook. They do this with compelling imagery, a simple form and the ability to get to their main web site. Very nice!
Why is this important? Because we know that email is still a HUGE way people like to be communicated with. According to the “eNonprofit Benchmarks Study” done by NTEN (shout out to Holly Ross) email is still the “killer app” that reaches the most people. Open rates and click-throughs are holding steady.
We also know that having a ‘home base’ is vital to internet longevity. Facebook is an outpost, but your main web site should provide people with added value and ways to connect with your organization.
4. Stats, stats, stats …
Facebook Pages give you stats!! Awesome, I know. Administrators have the ability to see how well their wall posts and content are engaging people through the recently updated “Insight Portal”. You may be thinking “why do stats matter?”
As I discussed in a recent post (see 4 Keys to Building a Successful Nonprofit Web Site) stats are key to helping you improve your web site or in this case your Facebook page. By understanding your activity and performance, fan response, trends and comparisons, you are better equipped to improve your presence on Facebook. Actually, this data will likely help you improve your overall web efforts! Use the stats to gain valuable insight into what your constituents like, what type of content they interact with the most, what they tend to share with their friends and, maybe most importantly, what they don’t like.
User exposure- Actions and overall behavior relating to your Facebook Page.
Total Interactions - The total interactions metric captures all of the feedback Pages receive from Facebook users. Including media consumption and interactions per post, as well as the number of fans who have hidden you from their stream.
This number measures the aggregate count of Wall posts, Likes, Discussion posts and comments on any content such as photos, videos, notes or links in the past 7 days.
The goal of the metric is to provide an updated snapshot into how fans are engaging with your Page’s content.
Demographic Information - The locale breakdown and demographic information offers you access to detailed data about your fan base in an effective way that isn’t available on any other site.
Post Quality Score - One of the most important new metrics to pay attention to is your post quality score. That score measures how engaging your posts have been to users in the last 7 days. Posts that generate a high number of interactions (such as comments or Likes) per fan will improve the post quality score. Posts that do not draw interactions from fans will lower the post quality score.
Facebook offers many more great features, but I believe these are critical for nonprofit success on Facebook. If you don’t get these things right chances are you will have less of an impact on the community of people you are trying to engage and impact.
More Resources (I’d go through them in this order):
Frank is a Managing Consultant at Blackbaud - Internet Solutions. He Blogs at http://www.netwitsthinktank.com, regularly speaks at nonprofit conferences and loves to see how technology helps nonprofits further their mission.
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
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:
Listen to and understand what your visitors/users need.
Confidently and clearly state your institutional mission, values, and capabilities.
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.
There's one more benchmark that you may be interested in - your performance in relation to others in your market space.
My initial reaction was - yuke, that's competition. Then I thought about it for a couple of months. At SXSW, KD Paine shared some insights when asked a typical metrics questions - How many comments is a good a number?
She couldn’t answer that because you’d need to have some industry or nonprofit benchmark. And, if one does not exist - trade that information with your colleagues.
So, when Geoff Livingston mentioned the possibility of adapting some code that could index bloggers performance within a sector, I said - wow, this could help stimulate some reflective questions that could lead to improving the quality of our blogs.
So, that's why I opted in. I don't think in terms of competition. I think of sharing information so we can collectively make a difference. It's working in a networked way ...
If you want to think about ways to improve what we you're doing and our sector as a whole, then come join the List of Change. Let's have the collective conversation.
While this is currently being hosted on the livingstonbbuzz.com URL, Geoff Livingston's professional blog’s domain, the ultimate intent is to move the list to the Chronic of Philanthropy’s site when it launches its redesigned philanthropy.com. Thank you to Peter Panepento and the Chronicle team for serving as our partners in this endeavor.
If you think that this is not a good idea, please share your views in the comments. The dialogue is valuable. If you want to participate, you can opt in to List of Change.
Thank you!
Update:
In the comments over at Geoff Livingston's blog, Brian Reich left an interesting comment:
I think the idea of a list of the most important change blogs is great, and this will be a terrific resource. Thank you for leading the charge to put it together. But, I think this list only has limited value. Not every post on these blogs is useful or focused or even change related. Not every blogger talks about only change in the context of nonprofits or philanthropy or social change.
It would be even more valuable, I think, to develop a ranking/rating method/system and using it to aggregating the most important POSTS about change. I work with and speak to nonprofit leadership, social change advocates, corporate leaders and media all the time about these issues. They are overwhelmed. A list of blogs for them to follow or experts for them to chase alone is not all that helpful. People who are looking for guidance, and information, and support on these complex issues should be able to find the 100 articles that they should read, the posts that address specific issues or coordinate. It will come from this list of blogs, no doubt, but there are also other bloggers or thinkers who might have a single post that is a ‘must read’ or a conversation that people should be a part of. You won’t be able to find that easily from just a list of the important blogs.
Just a thought.
I think what Brian is describing is very valuable, but not the purpose of the change list with benchmarks. I think Brian is describing some sort of newsmastering of the content with some automated filtering tools. Of course, it would require some tweaking and the ability to customize to individual's preferences, levels, and interests. Also, would it require that each of these bloggers has an RSS by category? And, I think it would require some human curating.
Another colleague pinged me privately and asked where the conversation would be taking place? I think that's up to us to have the conversation.
Lucy Bernholz has a great post called "Metrics Are Good, Unless They Are Bad" which talks about the problems we encounter when we're trying to measure hard to measure stuff - like social media, social return, and social enterprise. And while Lucy firmly believes that it is possible to measure, sometimes people measure the wrong thing.
Her case in point is the recent Washington Post article suggesting that Facebook Causes had driven very little money to charity and was a failure. Several of us disagreed with the thesis money was the only one metric for success. As I blogged in response to the article, Causes is best for creating connections and awareness. If you didn't read the thread over at Allison Fine's blog, you can find it here.
Lucy also muses about what the right metrics are for social media efforts. (I've been obsessing about this topic for a while, you can read my latest musings here and here). Lucy brings up some points about metrics for Twitter. Whatever the tool we're using, the right metrics are those that can help understand engagement and relationships.
This last week I was at NTC 09 in San Francisco leading a session on Mapping Metrics To Strategy. However, while checking
my Twitter stream I realized that the Queen of Measurement, KD Paine, was at a conference a few blocks away in the lobby bar. So, headed over to say hello and to hear about her masterclass "ROI of Relationships."
Over the weekend, SobCon was taking place in Chicago and I wish I could have been there - (next year, Lis, I promise) KD Paine was there and follow her Tweets and KDPaine pointed me to her slide deck.
There's a lot of great stuff in this deck. A couple of things that I really like:
She talks about conquering our measurement fears. It's not just math phobia. It's about confronting what doesn't work and improving it. It gets at that failing formally point that Clay Shirky was talking about NTC Keynote.
She puts the what to measure question in context from hits, to views, to engagement. And, the whole point is about improving relationships.
She offers a frameworks output, outake, outcome - looks sort of like a logic model to me.
She gives a seven step framework for measuring the ROI of relationships.
She gives us some suggestions for tools
Most importantly is understanding what your engagement index is.
There is also a detailed taxonomy for types of social media conversations. I happened to see a wonderful remix of this from Buzz Canuck called "The 27 Types of Twitter Conversations."
One of my favorite metrics geeks, Jim Sterne, who has very advice on "How To Measure Engagement On Twitter." He suggests setting goals and identifying audience before selecting the metrics. His approach is not to select a metric that shows impact, but to pick the right metrics to help you improve what you're doing.
He writes about an analytics tool developed by Eric Peterson that if you apply thoughtfully can help you improve the results of your Twitter strategy. A slightly different approach than demonstrating impact, Twitalyzer calculates your influence based on your signal-to-noise
ratio, generosity, velocity and clout, and it also allows you to
calculate a score for any other Twitter user you wish to track. You're tracking relative increases and decreases to your influence over time and helps you refine Twitter
strategies.
My autographed copy of Brian Solis's (and Deirdre Breakenridge's) new book, Putting the Public Back in Public Relationships: How Social Media is Reinventing the Aging Business of PR just arrived in today's mail. I immediately opened it and started reading.
It's look at what's wrong with public relations in an age of social media, a complete social media primer from the perspective of those who work in communications, and lots of incredibly useful information about the art of listening and metrics for the web 2.0 world. Even though it is written from a business perspective, there is a ton of useful insights and pointers for anyone who does PR or communications for a nonprofit. If you are a social media strategist, it's a great book to share with your senior manager.
I have a confession, I'm one of those people who does not read a book cover-to-cover in linear way. I have a hypertext brain. I scan the table of contents and the index and jump to the parts that I'm most interested in.
For this book, I was like a moth to flame to Chapter 18: A New Guide for Metrics. The chapter is a great overview for the C-Level suite. I pick up some tips and tricks, but I had a strong urge for "Practitioner Worksheets" which made set up this spreadsheet. Anyway, here's my takeaways:
Need to know how to convince "C-Suite" (corporate level executives) that social media is required to compete in today's economy and that it is measurable. In other words, that you can monetize the process of engagement. For nonprofits, that tracking donations from social media engagement. As KD Paine said on our SXSW ROI Poetry Slam, "You have engagement fully measured,
now calculate the resulting treasure!"
The old Web metrics don't work well for measuring social media. We know that. I love the quote from KD Paine, "HITS=How Idiots Track Success." It's about engagement, referrals, activity, sales, and market and behavioral influences.
The importance of monitoring in real time and demonstrating what's working through active listening and continually taking the temperature.
Conversation: Your placement, status, ranking, perception, and participation in the Social Media sphere. It starts with tracking conversation threads or by keyword. If you are starting, you need to begin by manually across multiple networks and then automate the search using a listening/analytics tool.
Traffic: Suggests partnering with the web team and using analytics software to track the referrals of unique visitors to site from a site. Get granular - figure how how many unique visits a particular blogger sent, a Facebook Event, or Digg.
Activity: This using specific landing pages (web pages designed to capture incoming traffic from a specific promotion or an area for sign up, special discounts, votes, or RSVP, etc) that can track visitor's presence and sub-sequent actions.
Engagement: This is defined as the amount of time a person either participates within a dedicated or hosted Web community or service related to your brand, or interacts with someone from your organization online. It also refers to the reach of your content/story - the process of spreading word-of-mouth referrals or sparking new and related conversation threads.
Relationships: Defined as the number of friends or followers or community members. Cautions against it not being a popularity contest, but the number grows because people get some value from part of an active, informative, and value-driven community.
Authority: A measure of your brand's credibility and thought leaders. Rises because of relationship building. Measured by inbound links for blogs. Important benchmark in your field. Suggests that authority can also be measured by tracking trends of RSS subscribers - not just for your blog, but all sources. Mentions an alternative tool to Feedburner - Pheedo.
The chapter identifies a new area for PR folks to measure - education, participation, and collaboration. This is not new for nonprofit folks - looks like some of the items we track in our logic models - at least short-term outcomes for efficiency and effectiveness. I wrote an entire chapter about this for the new NTEN book "Technology to Meet Your Mission."
Perception: This metric is about tracking seniment - what people are saying about you. You monitor this by searching for your brand name and the word "sucks."
Community Activity: Nice checklist of activities you can engage (and measure) your online community to do linked to different social media/networking sites. These might work well as a series of pilots/experiments to track and learn.
Measurement Tools: There's a high level overview of analytics tools - covering the topic of using free tools or not. Also talks about off-site analytics -- services like Alexa, Compete, and Quanitcast. If you're a metrics and analytics geek, you'll have to wait to for Sean Powers and Alistair Croll's forthcoming book, "Watching Web Sites"
Simplified ROI Process: It sort reads like logic model to me. 1) identify success or benefits; 2) get a baseline, identify data; 3) define goals in terms of your metrics (increase x number of visitors) 4) develop strategies/tactics to reach goals 5) Estimate cost/benefit
Don't have the time to read the entire book cover-to-cover today, but I have a long flight to California on Sunday, this book is high priority plane reading.
For the past two years, I've been doing an annual Blog benchmarking process that attempts to do a ROI analysis. Figuring out the Return on Investment for your blog can't be done with a single metric. I look at several metrics proposed by Avinash Kaushik These include author contribution, audience growth, conversation rate, and authority Then I look at the amount of time in my work flow and reflect on productivity. The last step is difficult: Translating tangible and intangible benefits into a dollar value. I do that with a grain of salt.
The most valuable part of the blog benchmarking process is the reflection process and linking insights to making improvements. This is the stuff that can't necessarily be counted, but if you ignore it completely you really miss out on the opportunity to improve the quality of your blogging, which presumably increases the blog's ROI.
At the end of 2008, I did a "Best of Beth's Blog" analysis using PostRank. It takes your RSS feed and applies engagement metrics, analyzing the types and frequency of an audience's interaction
with your content. Each blog post is given a score from 1 to 10, representing how
interesting and relevant people have found your content. The more
interesting or relevant an item is, the more work they will do to share
or respond to that item so interactions that require more effort are
weighted higher. PostRank scoring is based on
analysis of the "5 Cs"
of engagement: creating, critiquing, chatting,
collecting, and clicking.
Of course, you can't really translate a high engagement score into a dollar amount or look at it in isolation without relating to your blogging goals. Measuring engagement in social media as part of an ROI process is tricky, if not a bit controversial. Read "What Is The ROI for Social Media" by Jason Falls which includes an interview the queen of measurement, KD Paine. Here's the ah ha insightful quote:
To illustrate that point for all our
measurement and metric geeks out there, what you are trying to do is
assign multiple choice scoring to an essay question. It’s not possible.
Katie hit the nail on the head near the end of her round table
discussion when she said, “Ultimately, the key question to ask when
measuring engagement is, ‘Are we getting what we want out of the
conversation?’” And, as stubborn as it sounds Mr. CEO, you don’t get
money out of a conversation.
I'm also having some problems with lumping all the engagement measures together, although it's good for a quick and dirty analysis. Is the number of comments the sole measure for success of a blog? Some education technology bloggers, like Tony Karrer
suggest looking at the number of views and delicious saves as does Sue Waters in her post, Life is One Big Top Ten. Chris Brogan recently provided some insights about bookmarked blog posts and how they can help increase traffic. And notice that he doesn't just take a list of most bookmarked content, that's only the first step. He's done the reflection process about why a blog post get bookmarked (what's the format or criteria) and what happens when a lot of people bookmark a blog post.
Nina Simon discussed why commenting metrics shouldn't be the only metric to use to help you reflect on your blog and make improvements.
Conclusion and Questions
Here is what I'm leaning towards for a benchmarking process:
Raw Author Contribution: Frequency of publication and number of words. Setting a goal for publication schedule and consistency and looking back to see if you've stuck to it. Analysis of words in posts. If you use wordpress, Joost Blog Metrics can give you these numbers easily. What is the optimal publication rate for your blog that builds readership?
Reader Growth: This is content consumption and there are two different types of consumers and you're looking a monthly trends over time. You can look at Unique Visitors Trends from Google Analytics (grain of salt about looking at numbers only) and the Feed Subscribers Trends from Feedburner. What you want to know - is the number of visitors and subscribers going up and to the right. If not, why? If yes, why? One thing I'd like to separate but can't is subscription delivery - via email versus RSS. I get great information by asking those who unsubscribe via email why.
Reader Sharing: This is bookmarked content for later retrieval and some way to look at Twitter mentions (not sure if that is even valuable). You can find out about bookmark saves from PostRank numbers, although the program doesn't make it easy to calculate. Also, you need to reflect on the type of post and your goal.
Conversation Rate: This is the commenting and conversation. You can get the most commented posts from PostRank. If you use wordpress, Joost Blog Metrics you can get a comment to post ratio. But you have to ask yourself, what did you learn from the conversation? What's the value of that? If I just took raw numbers, this blog would be all about giving about books and software because those tend to be my most commented posts. The value of comments to me - ideas for future posts and deepening my own learning. Ha, try to measure that or translate into a dollar amount.
Authority. This your influence or authority rank and it is problematical. I've used my Technorati rank [it has issues] and just compared against myself for year before. But for some reason, my Technorati rank hasn't updated in six months. What's up with that? Another way to do this might be number of links to a post using Yahoo Site Explorer. Best use of this is to analyze the types of posts (content and format) that get linked and the impact of that linking (through referrals in Google Analytics)
Cost (what!). For me, this is all about my time since my hosting costs are minimal. So, this is an opportunity to do a work flow analysis of your blogging and think about how to make it more productive.
Return on Investment; This is where we do the math and attempt to make a business cause. You know, compute the cost of your time and subtract it form your income. To me, that's not useful. You need to look at both tangible and intangible benefits and translate them into some value.
Questions
Is there any value or meaning to looking at traffic trends via page views?
How do you understand the impact of using Twitter to share your blog post links or if other people Re Tweet or share them?
Is there a formula or set of sharper reflection questions?
I'm doing this an individual, how would you use an analysis like this to help with planning or making the case for social media (blogs) to your executive director?
What are tools or techniques are there to collect data, summarize it, or reflect that are efficient?
How do you use qualitative information and perhaps survey data from readers effectively? Do you need it?
In a recent post, I mentioned that Jeremiah Owyang pointed out that "Retweet" (sharing a link or
tweet from one of your followers with your followers) is a social
gesture indicating endorsement of an idea and predicts that there will be an analytics tools to measure this.
I went looking for stop gaps from Brian Solis's awesome list
Plodt
plots your professional or personal life, interests, activities, and
moods on Twitter. Basically you can categorize your Tweets so that you
can analyze them as an individual as well as compared to the community
at large.
Twitt(url)y
is a service for tracking popular URLs people are sharing on Twitter as
a way to identify trends, topics, and new and interesting tools and
services. It's basically Techmeme or Google News for Twitter, but for all popular links shared in a given day.
Favrd
(pronounced Favored) is a service that channels the most "favorited"
tweets on Twitter. You can search by keyword and also see who else has
favorited a particular tweet in order to identify like-minded contacts.
TwitLinks aggregates the latest links from the worlds top tech twitter users.
Twist analyzes and presents trend comparisons and volume between keywords and tags.
Plodt
plots your professional or personal life, interests, activities, and
moods on Twitter. Basically you can categorize your Tweets so that you
can analyze them as an individual as well as compared to the community
at large.
It looks like a mapping tool in the works that will let you visualize your Twitter network by retweets from Dan Zarrella. (hatip stacymonk) He collected over
84,000 retweets. to help build this system and has shared some analysis of these retweets.
I'd use something like this to identify influencers in my network whose retweets had reach or velocity. I'd also do an analysis of the content and construction of the retweets to see which ones worked best for me - sort like the ongoing refine you do with google ad words or SEO. I wonder how Laura Lee Dooley would use this tool?
If you had an analytics tool to track your organization's use of Twitter, what metrics would you track and how would you define success?
HowSociable provides a simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web. It measures mentions on these twenty sites. I scored 359 on September 1st. It isn't clear exactly how it indexes and computers your score. For comparison, I benchmarked myself against Chris Pirillo. Something isn't quite right here if my score is higher than Chris!
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?
When this is published, I'm be flying down to Austin, Texas for the Legal Services TIG conference to do a session on ROI and Nonprofit Technology and a workshop on Social Media. The ROI presentation is not focused on Social Media but will most definitely inform the panel at NTC. Notes for the ROI session are here.
We're in the final stretch of the America's Giving Challenge for the Sharing Foundation. It's over tomorrow at 3:00 PM EST. Right now we're number 5 on the leader, only 30 donors away from winning the $50,000.
If you're not sold on my charity - read this post. Essentially, I am asking YOU (and I mean you) for $10 (USD) to help these children in Cambodia. If you’re sold already, donate here.
The competition ends Jan. 31 3:00 PM EST. Please Donate here.
Tim Davies in the UK writes Tim's Blog and we share lots of cross overs in our topic interests. (One series of posts that he did that I love are his one-page guides like this one about wikis.) He tweeted this morning about some quick reflections on social media ROI: To know ROI of social media compare to paper base outreach.
Printing 1000 leaflets doesn't mean 1000 leaflets get read.
But leaflets don't report back how many people have read it.
Excellent post from Jeremiah Owyang called "Why Your Social Media Plan Should Include Success Metrics" that shares some examples of success metrics for social media. These look like what we in the nonprofit sector might call "short term outcomes." I've translated his list for nonprofits:
We were able to learn something about stakeholders we’ve never know before
We were able to tell our story to donors or audiences and they shared it with others
A blogging program where there are more clients or stakeholders talking back in comments than posts
An online community where clients served are self-supporting each other and costs are reduced
We learn a lot from this experimental program, and pave the way for future projects, that could still be a success metric
We gain experience with a new way of two-way communication
We connect with a handful of advocates or donors like never before as they talk back and we listen
This is the way I'm viewed my current and past forays into social fundraising - yet the dollars raised is THE success metric, but there are also some important learnings:
What is the flow of a networked fundraising drive?
What is the degree of influence or motivation of donors once you start getting past one degree of separation between donor and cause?
Is there any best practice that works best for connecting with "wired activists"?
When does donor fatigue happen in socially networked fundraising campaign? Does it happen faster or slower?
How does the ladder of engagement work (or not) as a networked fundraising campaign unfolds?
What are some of the best ways to convince the .org's stakeholder group that may not be familiar with social media/networking that the learning is as valuable as the dollars raised?
What triggers the networked effect and inspires others to carry your message to their networks?
What's more important to the success of the campaign - an highly networked person who isn't as engaged in your cause to message out to their network or a highly passionate person about your cause with a smaller network? Which one will encourage more spreading?
How does strategy differ between a sprint type campaign versus a marathon? Are marathons not best the fit for socially networked fundraising? How long does it take to build and leverage momentum?
Ed Mitchell posted a summary from the online community ROI report that looks at effective communication related to online community projects. (The full report is here) I wonder if all or some of these are relevant for nonprofit technology?
Report Direct Revenue: Report on direct revenue from Community Members.
Establish Comparative Costs: Compare cost of the same result or activity in other media, like blog post comments vs. the cost of hosting a focus group.
Communicate Cost Savings: Cost savings by hosting community, including support call deflection. Word of mouth vs. traditional marketing vehicles.
Compare value of Member vs. Non-Member: Track and compare activity of subset of community member vs. non-member activity, including activity outside of community.
Highlight the Direct Connection: Communicate the disintermediation opportunity for businesses, especially if your business is not directly selling to customers. Their online community creates a connection with the customer during and after the sale being handled by channel.
The 24/7 Focus Group: A subset of your community will be giving real-time feedback on initiatives, products and company activities. “Human voice compliments the numbers.”
Evangelist Creation and Mentoring: Communities attract your biggest fans and give them a place to connect with others, in the process creating new evangelists.
Communicate the Cost of Not Being Engaged: Including increased marketing spend, and the threat of competitors engaging prospects and taking existing customers.
“Value for all Departments” Communicate the broad value back to the management
What are your techniques? Do you have an example of a good ROI story telling?
I'm working up a presentation and workshop on ROI and NpTech for Legal Services Corporation TIG Conference in a couple of weeks. So, the most simplistic definition of Return on Investment (ROI) is the difference between cost and income (or quantified benefits) and expressed in dollar amounts or percentages.
POP QUIZ: True or False The ROI Methodology collects just one data item, a financial ratio, expressed as a percentage.
It would be unfair and misguided to evaluate the success or failure of a technology project based on this one financial measure. As Alison Fine suggested in an email to me, it leads people to thinking that there is one way to measure and one measurement. ROI should collect measures related to efficiency, effectiveness, mission impact, ROI calculation above, and intangible benefits.
Ah, those intangible benefits that many of us identify related to some technologies, say Social Networking sites, that are difficult, if not impossible to quantify, and often lead us to wonder whether it is all waste of time because there is now ROI.
"Anything can be measured in a way that is superior to not measuring it at all" - Gilbs Law
That lead me to Tom Gilb, an engineer and measurement guru. Should do we just ignore intangibles in all of this thinking? Do we attempt quantify them? Or we just describe them and don't bother to quantify?
You should learn the art of developing your own tailored scales of measure for the performance and resource attributes, which are important to your organization or system. You cannot rely on being ‘given the answer’ about how to quantify. You would soon lose control over your current vital concerns if you waited for that!.
His point that some intangible may be quantified, but it takes some discussion around the attributes. He gives an example of quantifying love (tongue and check)
So, if one look at the technology investments, identified the benefits, and through discussion identified the attributes, this might lead to some quantification of the value. Would love some examples or perhaps this is the exercise I give to participants.
Determining a technology investment's value means quantifying costs and benefits
Some benefits are intangible and may or may not be quantified. When attempting to quantify intangibles, important to obtain consensus among decision-makers about what constitutes a meaningful measurement.
Sometimes hard to claim that investments in IT alone resulted in the improved client service or whatever. One solution is to identify the cause and effect chain between the capabilities identified by the technology. This requires conversation with others or staff - not only to gather the data necessary to establish the chain, but obtain their agreement on the technology's contribution to the mission or program improvement.
To quantify intangibles look and listen. See if there are published tangible payoffs from others and collect these "data nuggets" because they add credibility to your analysis.
Consider setting up a "benefits discovery" brainstorming session of 10-15 people who are knowledgeable about the areas that will experience the largest impacts.
Does anyone have an example, using a technology investment, that quantifies the intangible in a credible way? Do you agree that ROI isn't just about the numbers?
I wanted to put together some quick links for the panelist (who I hope don't kill me) of some examples and tips. Here's an excellent example of a Pecha-Kucha on signage by Daniel Pink, a writer at Wired. Here's what Garr Reynolds had to say about his presentation.
The case study presenters will include
representatives from nonprofits using social networks or other web2.0
tools -- Eve Smith, Danielle Brigida, Carie Lewis, and Wendy Harmon. Each case study will focus on a different aspects.
Have you ever presented Pecha-Kucha style? Have any advice?
I've been thinking a lot about ROI because at the end of the month, I'll be doing a session at the Legal Services Corporation's TIG Conference on ROI in the Nonprofit World. On Monday, my article, The ROI of Social Media, was published in the NTEN Newsletter and in March I'll lead a panel at the NTC on that topic. ROI is a ROI is a ROI.
Shortly after the NTEN article was published, Alison Fine emailed me with some of her thoughts and gave me permission to blog them. I agree 100% with a lot of what Alison is saying.
One point that Alison mentioned made me think of this photo by Evan Hamilton.
I get very nervous with terms like metrics and ROI because they often lead to people thinking that there is one right measure, that is too often financial, that will be the silver bullet of success. Alas, measurement is a slow, learning process that takes time and energy. We need to find ways to learn on a continuous basis about what's working and how to improve for ourselves and our efforts first and foremost.
Alison goes on to talk about how easy is it to get quantitative information online, but the qualitative is more difficult.
In particular, we know that social networks are critical to the success of efforts to raise awareness and advocate for an issue, but what is it about these networks that makes them successful - the size, the strength of the relationships (even though we know that successful social networks are made up of tight AND loose ties), the activities within the network, the activities that are created that happen outside of the network - or maybe all of the above!
Alison's last point is a call to action that I want to incorporate into the case study slam part of the NTC Panel:
I think the time is right to get activists and activist organizations to begin to think through their own success for their social media efforts. To date the technology itself was so nascent that we were all pretty happy when it worked and people responded and participated. The right is absolutely right to ask the "so what" questions, but it would be nice to do it in a way that avoids the perils and missteps that assessments have taken on and that have locked it, too often, into such a burdensome, financial model.
I think what Alison is saying is that ROI may be calculated based on numbers, but numbers alone - no matter how compelling or disappointing won't speak for themselves. And, that there are different measures of success for different organizations. It's now up to us to explain what they mean and how they support the organization's visions and goals as well as what we may learn about the network's social interactions.
