the groupery blog

SVAMA's “Social Media Trends for 2010” with Jeremiah Owyang & panelists

Last night Jeremiah Owyang and panelists: Rob Fuggetta (Zuberance), Ed Terpening, (Wells Fargo), Maria Poveromo (Adobe) and Jeanette Gibson (Cisco) held a great discussion on “Social Media Trends for 2010.”  Owyang cited that one of the major challenges companies and organizations face is speed: the market is running much faster than companies can move.  So what does this mean for anyone devising social media strategy? 

Owyang and the crew focused on four themes

1. Don’t fondle the hammer – In terms of culture, process and technology, remember that technology is the easy part.  Don’t get caught up in the tools.

Forget the “facebook strategy” focus on a clear customer strategy.

A clear understanding of socialgraphics should be an ongoing effort: 

o   Where are your customers online (have a list of urls)?

o   What are their social behaviors?

o   Where do they get trusted information?

o   What is your customer social influence?  Who trusts them?

o   How do your customers use social technologies in the context of your products?

Focus on building the house not fondling the hammer!

Action: understand your customers & focus on objectives

     2.     Live the 80% rule & make sure your organization is ready for the shift.

Social media implementation is 80% process and labor, and only 20% technology.

Typical roles you’ll need in your organization to make it happen: 

Social Strategist – responsible for the overall program, including ROI

Community Manager – customer facing role; trusted by customers

Action: Prepare your organization to scale and support the 80%

 

3.     Customers don’t care about what department you’re in, they just want their problem fixed!

Every customer touch point matters – so your organization (the front line at a minimum) needs to have the information and permission to support and respond to the public.

Action:  Distribute the support network; enable people across the organization to be a part; central strategy but decentralized action is a good first step (some organizations start with a central model but move to distributed/coordinated model over time).  Empower folks on the front line.

 4.     Real time is “not” fast enough.

You will never be able to scale fast enough to keep up with your customers.  Creating and maintaining a solid customer advocacy program is crucial.  Let your customers come to bat for you because you cannot go at it alone.

Action: Identify and nurture advocates in your community.

Bottom line sentiment was that the direction of social media in 2010 is “getting back to basics”  --  it’s all about customers and relationships, technology is the enabler.

 

Extending Trusted Networks

Last night at the Ambassador in San Francisco, Citizen Effect held its Launch Event.  Previously called 1 Well, Citizen Effect goes way beyond water & sanitation in its collaborative effort to "change the world, one community at a time."  Not only does the organization ask everyday folks to "be the solution," it passes the reins.  Through its member-centric approach, anything Citizen Effect gives up in terms of control is gained times over in key areas that are lost in more traditional frameworks:  members' time, expertise, commitment and (perhaps the most valuable) extended trusted networks.

The super smart approach:
Rather than going directly to financial donors and asking for a check or credit card, the organization "empowers Citizen Philanthropists" to take on this crucial but often daunting "chunk of the business."  Who needs in-house experts when you have a community of experts to fill a phone book ready to volunteer their time?  Additionally, and this is the part I really like, these volunteer fundraising leaders approach their existing network of friends, families, colleagues to secure financial support.  This goes beyond tapping previously untapped resources to securing altogether new resources! 

The analogy that comes to mind is the wrapping paper fundraiser my daughters participated in to raise money for their school.  We live miles from the school and miles from town.  Many of our neighbors do not have school age children and are not thinking about the budget shortfalls the school faces.  So, when these generous neighbors purchase wrapping paper, it is NOT about the wrapping paper, it is NOT about the school's financial woes, it is 100% about supporting neighborhood kids who are going to the effort to raise money for something they care about.  Likewise, when I approach my network of friends and family as a Citizen Philanthropist to help with a childcare center in Dungra Village, I do not need to start from scratch:  finding contacts, developing trust, educating potential donors about the need/value of their contributions, then asking for donations.  In my trusted network (that took me years to build),  I start way ahead of the game. 

By entrusting members to take the lead, Citizen Effect lives what they believe:  the power of the individual to create change.  And, in doing so, the organization enables the passion of any one person to create significant, sustainable change in the lives of many (some of who they know well, some who they will never meet).

 

 

Lynne has over fifteen years of product marketing and management experience, an MBA from Dartmouth (Amos Tuck School), and an AB from Stanford University. Mom of four girls, Lynne has been PTO President, producer of several school plays, is a Lacrosse and basketball mom, is active in Surfrider Foundation, SurfAid International, USA Triathlon, and the Waverly Writers.  

Give them what they want

In the back of my head is a little voice saying "this is obvious", but I'm going to tune it out and share some thoughts that have been seeded by a couple forums today.  The two forums are Beth Kanter's Can Small Nonprofits Reap Success With Social Media? blog post and NTEN's Ask the Experts webinar with Seth Godin and Beth Kanter.  The comments on Beth's page and the back-channel chat in the webinar are raising concerns of time-constraints pertaining to how (or if) NPO's should engage in social media:

• "I think non-profits are over-worked and under-staffed and that's why we're not using the tools enough or maybe properly."
• "Time is the #1 biggest problem I hear from small nonprofits about social media -- not so much fear of change, fear of much longer to-do lists when already overworked."
  
• "It really is a resource issue. They try but they only dip in their toes and get frustrated and retreat because they don't have the resources to maintain the effort and do it well."
  

So there's an obvious desire to be very focused and efficient, and despite Seth's claim that he's never known a NPO to make decisions based on ROI, I think ROI should be part of every decision on where to focus your precious time.  Regardless of which tools you use, I think the starting point for prioritizing your efforts has to start with an in-depth look at the groups of people around your organization (whether non-profit or not) and what shared affinity they have with your mission (or brand or products).  When you group people in terms of donors, volunteers, partners, recipients, and so on, you become aware that what drives them to connect with your organization's mission differs in very important ways. 

When you communicate with the different groups of supporters, are you giving them what they want?  Where does their affinity with your organization differ from one another?

Here's an example of what I mean.  In a recent discussion with James Otieno of Silicon Valley Education Foundation he identified teachers as the highest priority group in the SVEF network for them to reach effectively in order to realize SVEF's mission, although they also care a lot about donors, partners, parents, students, school district staff, etc.  James mentioned that teachers are frustrated by increasing standards requirements along with growing class sizes, but being given no tools to help them counteract these trends.  Is SVEF doing anything specific to cater to the needs of teachers in their communication framework and tools.  The answer is "not yet" - they receive the same eNewsletters, Facebook and Twitter posts, blog entries, and website updates that the rest of the SVEF community receives. 

By ignoring the specific affinity that people have with your organization's mission you are training them to tune out of your messaging.  If a donor to the Sierra Club cares specifically about the project to change logging practices to align with saving endangered owls in the Sierra Nevada, then you'll increase their loyalty and engagement to your organization by giving them access to information about that specific project and the people involved in it.

In the webinar someone asked "what's the special sauce needed to get people to interact?"  Beth responded "by asking good questions."  Have you asked what your most important supporters are looking for and focused your attention on addressing that need?  If not, then at best you're missing an important opportunity to increase their loyalty and engagement, and at worst, they may be ignoring you.

The next questions are:

• How do you add more communication channels and also simplify? 
• Which social media tools are best suited for aligning your communications with the specific affinity and interest of your most important supporters?
  

Baby steps in social media for nonprofit organizations

Last evening's Government and Non-Profits 2.0:Social Media-Best Practices event moderated by Alan Silberberg, and including Debra Bowen, Beth Kanter, and Gwyneth Galbraith covered a lot of ground in one hour.  But Lynne and I found the discussion surrounding how to get nonprofits to take baby steps toward social media to be of primary interest.  Beth listed the typical barriers (or excuses if you prefer) provided by nonprofits to avoid participating in social media.  She mentioned that nonprofits just don't have a culture for social media.  Some the top-level baby steps that were discussed included wallowing in the problem, creating a social media policy, and taking small yet comfortable steps toward embracing at least one tool, perhaps Facebook or Twitter for starters.

We have been openly wondering if a more comfortable baby step might exist - one that allows the organization to leverage existing tools and involves their existing community.  The goal would be to create a positive feedback loop, confidence, and a sliver of a social media culture before moving on to more open and uncontrollable pastures.  In other words, create a really nice entryway to your organization's landscape before tearing the fences down.

So what are the existing tools?  Our experience has been they consist of hard copy newsletters, eNewsletters, mailing lists, and maybe a blog.  Despite the fact that email is starting to feel like driving your grandfather's Buick, it's still the lowest common denominator for online communications.  So what if the existing publishing activities practiced by most nonprofits could result in push-pull engagement and participation by the community, rather than just pressing send and watching the Buick drive off into the sunset never to be seen again?  How can we better address the challenges of taking the baby steps, such as publishing in the right format, publishing to the right people, and tracking the impact?

As a concrete example, I'll turn to a recent example blog/eNewsletter created by Beth discussing network weaving.  I receive Beth's blog posts as an email compliments of Feedburner, but this could just as easily be a typical eNewsletter being sent by a nonprofit to their mailing list.  Beth wrote "My question: Is there a network of peers who do network weaving for nonprofits to support external communications?" 

Taking that question to the next level would be allowing the community to respond on the spot and share with the other members right within the context of the email or blog posting.

 
And a step further would be providing the option for people to see some comments from other readers to encourage their response.

 

Further into Beth's blog she writes "For starters, I'm going to ask Holly Ross at NTEN that we have a birds of a feather table at the NTC10 or if I get ambitious I will sign up to lead an affinity group meeting." 

This could be followed up with:

 
A yes response would place the person into a new group that could be leveraged as an immediate communications channel and collaboration point.  Beth's blog entry closes with some questions:

• Are you practicing network weaving skills in your nonprofit or network?
• What are you learning about network weaving?
• What inspires you about network weaving potential?

All of which could be replaced by a short survey in the email.

 

Now every email communication, no matter how formal or informal, could leverage best practices for encouraging participation, feedback, and more contextual dialogue.  Commenting on a blog has a few of the above capabilities, but is reliant on the reader filling in the context and doesn't provide for the option to show the results of what the rest of the community thinks in a nutshell.  For example:

 
The eNewsletter and the aggregation of results, comments, etc. at a single destination web page has an opportunity to provide evidence of a (hopefully) vibrant and caring community of supporters, donors, volunteers, and recipients.  The organization has taken a baby step using publishing-related activities with which they are comfortable and familiar. But after a few of these transactions, allowing for less controlled conversation and dialogue may start to creep into the organizational culture.  Not to mention that the dialogues are great initial content to point at when they do engage with Twitter, Facebook, and other social media channels.

If these tools existed in the way I've described then I'd be using them in this blog posting.  So I'm stuck asking for your comments here:

• Does it make sense to extend a nonprofit's existing publishing tools in this way (assuming it can be done without too much time and pain)?
• Are there any success stories out there where email is being used to bring polls, surveys, and conversation to the forefront in real time?  Maybe inserting a Google Form or other 3rd party survey into an email?
• Does this feel like a baby step that might be a good tool to add into a social media starter toolkit?

Non-Profits and Social Media - An Eruption in the Making

 

Alexandra Samuel, the CEO of Social Signal is onto something with her recent blog post.  

We too at the groupery are seeing great passion amongst volunteer leaders and non profits who today are primarily in synchronous client relationships hungry to take the social interactions into an asynchronous relationship.  They are interested in leveraging, reaching and extending their reach with social media.  They want to embrace these open technologies and often aren't sure where to start, who to have involved or scared that the task will require too much time and money.  It's unclear to many leaders what will really 'come off' the plate?  

Questions that arise are: Is it really secure?  How much time does it take to learn how to use it?  How will we ever be able to keep up with all the comments and feedback, etc.

We are talking with groups and leaders about shifting the conversation.  Spend time as teams to think through how to take an existing task off someone's plate to making space for social media.  Why not?   Consider making it as easy as this five step process:

Step One:  Talk in with volunteer teams about your where your customers live today in social media?

Step Two:  Discuss areas that are time intensive and involve communication, public relations, marketing and business development.

Step Three:  Converse around possible areas you would like to save time or resources from existing tasks or programs?

Step Four:  Consider taking small steps as group to practice internally "walk the talk" in a safe environment that builds everyone's confidence and experience. 

Step Five:  Launch one small social media program that allows you to be responsive to your customers, invite them into conversations and see the benefits of how adapting into this new environment can be fun, social and rewarding.

Hopefully in taking on these five easy steps, groups can see that social media does have its advantages and you can find the resources and time to commit.   We're particularly interested in the answers that NPO's and volunteer leaders arrive at for step one.  Do you believe you can reach and continue to engage your customers via Twitter and Facebook?  Or do your customers really live in eNewsletter land?  Do you have to pull them into conversations from their Inbox?  What's working for you?

Beth's Blog is another great resource for organizations at all stages of adopting social media.

Would you like to win a $25 Amazon gift card?

Say it in your own words and you could win a $25 Amazon gift card from the groupery!http://bit.ly/eZPU

Sound easy? That's because it is...
Simply add your ideas here on how a group could benefit by using the groupery and you'll be entered to win. Don't be shy, no answer is too short or too long -- the winner is randomly selected!

The winner will be randomly selected and sent the gift card by October 15th, 2009.

* Yes, every contest has fine print.
Must be a member of the groupery's leaders community (please go to www.thegroupery.com/leaders/@@newuser to join)
Must be over 18 years of age
Limit one entry per member
All replies may be shared by the groupery online or in print at any time

A great way to raise money for items not in your budget

Double Diamond Parent Leader, Lauren Klein is using the groupery’s product called GoLocal in an effort to get projects that weren’t in their Strategic PTO Budget now covered under a very easy to use online advertising tool with the groupery. 

Lauren found the groupery is easy to use to foster open communication and collaboration amongst school leaders, teachers and parents around community sponsors, events and fundraising.  She is using this tool for online advertising for her community members as fundraising tool and also a way that connects local business leaders with the Double Diamond Parents.  

The first sponsorship will pay for a new park bench for Double Diamond Elementary School as we recently got a new baseball diamond on campus.   Which is why I’m sharing my thoughts on the groupery blog – because I think this is a great way for sponsors to get daily payback and be a visible support of something ‘concrete’ on campus, like a bench.  In fact, we recently, had a parent request grass for our playground, which is currently all dirt that the children play on – so this new tool for our PTO will allow us to look at other campaigns, like for landscaping or other projects that weren’t in our formal budget.  I believe it can be a really positive relationship between our local business community and our school that leads to an interactive collaboration and longer standing relationship together.

The sponsorship for a community group is less than $2 per day, $50/month and offers varying contract lengths - from 6 or 12 month sponsorship.  It allows local businesses to receive valuable visibility 100’s times each day and raise awareness via profile page and promotions & coupons.

It was flexible and really easy to use!  I’m excited about the new potential for us in Nevada as we aren’t eligible for stimulus monies, so we need to work really hard in this economy to support our children.

The groupery has more information about GoLocal sponsorships here: http://www.thegroupery.com/golocal/golocal_for_sponsors.pdf

 

Flyer Webinar fostered dialogue around communication

Today's webinar discussion around flyers allowed playgroups, mothers club and schools to discuss how they can communicate using technology.  One attendee shared that they are currently using Yahoo groups and are evaluating new web platforms that have more robust features, like flyer creation, archiving and storage. 

Another attendee was inspired to use the flyers to invite their local merchants to attend their upcoming carnival and use the platform to recognize their donors as well.

 

Upcoming webinar on July 29th if you missed today's:  Jump Start Session: Creating Flyers with sign-ups at noon PDT.  Click here to register for the webinar.

Social Media Mix

There are sites on which your group can communicate and gather to do its work, like the groupery. But there are other needs for social media.

How do Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr and other sites contribute to building your community?

Beth Kanter eloquently describes a frame for understanding how social media fit into the non-profit sector and talks about how she helps non-profit groups get acclimated. Here, I'm going to get more detailed, and I admit I wrote this post in part to help people follow world events.

It's about time: Twitter

One thing to think about is that we're each members of many communities, and sometimes the membership lasts a long time, but for some communities membership is very brief, for example when people come together because of an event.

One reason a community might form and disband in this way has to do with breaking news.  Whether it's the a sports playoff, elections, or a tragic global event, people who have that interest come together, meet each other at least to some degree, and may choose to stay in touch or not. 

An physically-established community -- like a school, religious, or community group -- has its own time scale which is fairly long. But some event might come up, and you might join an ad hoc community that only lasts the length of the event! 

An example: I'm sure you have heard about the tragic and historic riots surrounding the Iran Election.  Mashable has written a helpful article: HOW TO: Track Iran Election with Twitter and Social Media.  It explains how Twitter and YouTube have the fastest-breaking news, but it's hard to find and filter for the best examples. Blogs tend to get that information together more quickly than traditional news services (again with a higher degree of questionability in some cases). And if you think about it, for every person with a video camera, there are hundreds with a camera phone: Flickr has a tremendous volume of relevant pictures - again, when they can be sorted through.

Past global events covered this way have included the terrorist attack on Mumbai, and the May 2008 earthquake in China.

Particularly in a diverse school population, some people may be more distressed than others about a global news event.  Enabling a mechanism for people to have fluid interactions and share the experience builds relationship strength and fosters community resilience.  Yes, it's true that a large percentage of your main group might not want to follow playoffs or a specific world news event very closely.  However, by allowing those that want to, to do so, you're building the overall resilience of the group. (Community Resilience handbook by National Children's Traumatic Stress Network - 83 pages.)

So one way to think about how to use social media is to think about the time scales:

• Twitter and other media that can be captured quickly: ad hoc communities meant to be fast, to err on the side of too much information and information that's not quite accurate... rather than not enough.

• Blogs and other media that you want to persist: information that's been thought about and subject to public censure if it's inaccurate, and published as you would any newsletter, whether daily (or more frequently) or quarterly.

• Community information and tools that support the critical work that a community does. Yes, like the groupery.

And what about Facebook?

Facebook, MySpace, and to some extent LinkedIn are meant as a generic area that can be used to fulfill any purpose, depending on the creativity of the user.  Consequently they function well as gathering spots. News and "found items" are shared, games are played, photos are swapped.  I have heard it said that the absolutely best thing about Facebook is its ability to keep track of everyone's birthdays. 

Once you have added a friend who uses Facebook, it's relatively easy to go to their page and see what's going on in their lives (to the extent they want to share). MySpace is similar, and while LinkedIn is focused on professional aspects of peoples' lives, it works the same way: put up a profile, add relevant content, and keep in touch.  (I know one family that spans three generations on Facebook, ages 84-19.)

Public social network applications are great places to look for the people you need, and invite them to ad hoc conversations and group interactions elsewhere.

By understanding how social media work together, you can communicate online in a way that's comfortable to all your groups, teams, and family members.

#octribe

Teens Develop Skills When Online

A extensive Digital Youth Research 3-year study funded by The MacArthur Foundation explains that teens learn important new social and technical skills that are relevant type of literacy today.  It also recommends that adults and educational institutions take an active role in participating with teens online.

According to researchers, young people are motivated to learn from their peers, as well as adults, online. The Internet provides new kinds of public spaces for youth to interact and receive feedback from one another. This may be different from how students are often asked to learn in schools.

In a cautionary note to parents, the study indicates that most youth are not taking full advantage of the learning opportunities of the Internet. While most youth use the Internet socially, they may overlook learning opportunities. Serious learning opportunities are abundant online in such subjects as astronomy, history, creative writing, and foreign languages. Youth can connect with people in different locations and of different ages who share their interests, making it possible follow pursuits that might not be popular or valued with their local peer groups.

Teens need guidance in where they can be private and where they are public online. Profiles are public; conversations are often private (unless they're conducted publicly, or there's some reason to search them).

Help your children achieve literacy in this new medium!  If you have specific questions, post them here; or begin a new topic on the groupery's facebook page.