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Welcome to TechSoup Talks. This is Integrating Social Media into Your Website.
My name is Kami Griffiths. And I would like to welcome Allen Gunn the Executive Director
of Aspiration Tech. I would also like to thank ReadyTalk for sponsoring this Webinar series.
So Allen, or as he likes to go by Gunner,
would you like to tell us a little bit about yourself and Aspiration?
Gunner: Absolutely, thanks so much Kami. I do run an organization called Aspiration.
We exist to help nonprofits be more effective in their use of technology.
We love to coach organizations in best practices when you're doing Websites,
social media, online campaigning, or just about anything that has to do with anything online.
We operate San Francisco Nonprofit Technology Center here at 10th and Mission.
And it is a delight to be on this call. Thank you so much Kami.
Kami: Oh, my pleasure. It is always great having you.
So why don't we quickly go over the agenda?
Gunner: Why don't we do that? Excellent.
So we want to divide this call into three phases. And I will apologize in advance
that it is a lot of information. Kami and I are in discussions
about how we might create additional webinars to drill deeper on some of the materials,
but as we have got the call structured, we really want to raise awareness
about core best practices, and invite questions and follow-up learning.
The first part of the agenda is going to focus on what I will lovingly call Housekeeping 2.0,
just the basics of managing your social media real estate online, and how to actually physically,
at sort of a piece of Web real estate by piece of Web real estate level, link things together.
Then I want to talk for little bit about conceptualizing the role
of different online channels when you are talking about social media in conjunction
with your Website. So how do you conceptualize the role of Facebook, the role of Twitter,
the role of your Website, your e-mail lists and your blog? What are good conceptual models
for making sure you understand how to complement those
in a way that is effective across all channels?
And finally, we will talk about some best practices.
And this is the area where we will just touch on them, and not go as deep as we might go
in a longer format meeting, but give people an idea of some of these processes
and best practices that you can follow to sort of automate some of this stuff
and integrate it into your organizational process.
Kami: Excellent. So let's just jump in. Where do we get started?
Gunner: Great, great question. So I call this the necessary disclaimer slide,
but I think it is always important to explicitly state all of the things that we are about to cover
are predicated on the assumption that an organization already has
an overall communication strategy, and process.
In simple terms, that means that you know how you describe your organization and your work,
and you have got that sort of agreed-upon within your staff and stakeholder network.
You know what you are trying to achieve in your overall communications, and also online.
And -- and this is the one where I wink and act like everybody has this one; very few people do --
you have well defined processes for creating and posting online content.
We will talk more about that later.
In that context you would then want to do your social media plan where you define
your concrete goals for online engagement, both overall, and per program or per campaign area.
Moving along to the next slide...
When it comes to what I'll lovingly call Housekeeping 2.0, first and foremost
if you are thinking about moving into social media even if you don't think you'll go there soon,
it is important to go ahead and reserve the online real estate that you anticipate using,
so that others, especially opponents or people who you do not like can't reserve it on your behalf,
and use it to other than your best end.
So if you think you might use Facebook, you think you might use Twitter, Flickr, YouTube,
or My Space, go ahead and get accounts on there, so that you can request the user names
that you desire on the services that allow you to request a user name.
Some services like Facebook require you to get a minimum number of fans or followers
before you can ask for a user name. That is a process worth starting now.
If you are just maintaining these sites, make sure to log in every 60 to 90 days
just to give a pulse to that account, maybe do a minor update just so they know
that you have not abandoned that account.
And as important as anything else, don't forget to keep your domain names up-to-date.
And a particular best practice, if you have a dot-org domain address it is always a best practice
to purchase the variants that are dot-net and dot-com, so that people you don't like,
including squatters and spammers can't grab those from you and direct traffic
to look-alike sites or things you don't want.
A key point is to make them look like a family, so strive for naming consistency.
You can pick your user name on Twitter. You can pick your name on sites like YouTube.
You want to make those user names be the same.
And a best practice is to have that user name when possible, match your domain name.
So we are AspirationTech.org. We have a Twitter account; Twitter.com/AspirationTech.
Our Facebook account is Facebook.com/AspirationTech.
The belief is that you want to make your Twitter and Facebook and other online account names
guessable based on your domain name.
You want to also, when you set up your Twitter or your Facebook, or any of those other accounts,
use consistent branding. Use the same organizational logo.
Where tag lines are an option, use the same organizational tag line and language
so that you are able site-to-site, and channel-to-channel to look like one coordinated brand.
Kami: Very good ideas to set us up.
So after we set these accounts up, what happens next?
Gunner: Great question. One thing that we really encourage people to take the time to do
in the mad rush to be hip, and cool, and totally socially media tricked out,
people sometimes forget to consider which online audiences they are trying to reach.
So what you want to do is really do some discussion in your organization
about who you are trying to reach. Is it a youth audience? Is it a business audience?
Is it a political audience? Is it a senior, or older audience?
And then talk about which channels seem most appropriate. If you are trying to reach teenagers,
it is still conventional wisdom that My Space is a little bit better than Facebook
though that opinion changes day-to-day. But in general, you want to pick one or two channels
to focus on, and integrate those channels into what we call your publishing workflow,
the way that you publish information online.
We recommend as you start using Facebook, or start using Twitter, keep simple metrics.
What we do at Aspiration each week is we take an accounting of how many Facebook followers
we have, how many Twitter followers we have, as well as our Website traffic.
And you want to track that over time to see if it's really trending upward consistently.
If you are on Twitter, and you have gone from 1 follower a month ago, to 2 followers today,
that is useful data to tell you that Twitter is not being a particularly active channel for you.
Whereas, if you are on Twitter and you have gone from 10 a month ago to 100 this week,
and you feel like you are going to keep that rate going, that is very useful data to let you know
your time is being well spent developing that channel.
And you want to see where people respond. If you are tweeting on Twitter
which is a phrase I have never gotten used to saying,
or otherwise on Facebook publishing updates, you want to see if people are responding.
You want to see if people are re-tweeting your tweets, or responding to your Facebook updates.
In general, what you are trying to discern as you start to integrate these channels
into your online strategy is what propagates. Are different channels more active for you
and are different kinds of messages that you put out in those channels more likely to be re-tweeted
or forwarded or otherwise generate activity?
Kami: So how can we track all of these accounts?
Gunner: That's a great question.
One of the things we really, really recommend is that an organization keep an inventory
of online venues, and that includes an account and organizational owner
per online channel. So you should have a spreadsheet that lists your Twitter account
and who is in charge of that, your Facebook account and who is in charge of that.
In some orgs it is always the same person, other organizations it is never the same person.
But it is really good to keep an inventory of all of the online venues.
A best practice -- don't store the passwords in there, but do store renewal dates
where those are relevant for such things as domain names so that you are being intentional
about maintaining your online real estate through one tracking document,
or one tracking information source.
A best practice, and this is something we feel really strongly about,
a mistake organizations make is taking individual staff mailing addresses,
and making those the contact addresses for the accounts.
So if I am Gunner@AspirationTech.org, it is not a best practice
for the organizational Facebook account to have that e-mail address as the contact.
It should instead be Facebook@AspirationTech.
On our Twitter account we use Twitter@AspirationTech.
And a best practice there is those aliases go to more than one staff member.
They go to the owner of that account or the maintainer of that account,
as well as our operations manager, so if one of us is out of the office or sick,
someone else is able to get access to that account.
Kami: So folks want to hear about how to integrate social media into their Website.
So can you talk to me about that?
Gunner: Absolutely. So let's talk about what I called earlier
the Housekeeping 2.0 of linking the real estate.
Certainly on all the social media accounts that you have, you are able to specify a URL
associated with your account. You want to make sure that those all link back
to your main organizational page. So from Twitter, from Facebook you want to make sure
that those all link back to your main organizational page.
You also want to update on a Website that has what we call page templates.
If you are publishing your Website in what is called a template-based fashion,
and that may sound technical, but what I mean is if you have a content management system,
if you are running something like Plone, or Drupal, or Joomla, or WordPress,
you should be able to update the page template or templates,
to link to your social media channels.
Now it is a best practice to put it with the e-mail sign-up area, and have it above the fold
which is to say visible before people have to scroll on the page.
You also want to link to appropriate accounts from your contacts page.
Imagine that people might want to contact you via Facebook or contact you via Twitter
instead of e-mail or phone, the things they did back when I was a younger person.
And you can potentially link from staff pages to staff Twitter and Facebook accounts,
but that is a longer conversation, because organizations should really have
a very intentional conversation about whether or not you want to blow the lines
between staff channels and organizational channels.
While that is beyond the scope of this call, it is a critical topic to have on your organizational radar
as you try to figure out your overall social media strategy.
Let's take a look at some examples of the way that Aspiration does this.
And I am not saying that we are super perfect in the way that we do it,
but we are experimenting and trying to put this stuff out there in a way that really does
represent what we think are the best practices for nonprofit Webpages.
We've already got an e-mail sign up area on our Website.
What we simply did was add this "Follow Us" block above that, where we link to our Facebook,
our Twitter, our Flickr, and our YouTube accounts with the idea being;
we'll meet you wherever you want us to meet you. And people can click on those
and follow us or fan us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, and otherwise become aware
of those channels that we are publishing on, instead of just coming to our Website.
In addition, if you are sending out e-mail using a template,
so if you are using a tool like Vertical Response, or Constant Contact, or Democracy in Action,
all of those tools let you create templates for sending out e-mail.
It is critical that you integrate your social media links into your e-mail templates,
so that as you are sending out e-mail messages you are again conveying the message
that you can be reached on these other channels. So the same exact block that you saw
from our Website, but we have put here on the right side on the top of our e-mail template.
And one last visual before we get back to bullet point land --
I think it is a matter of personal preference. I don't think you want to force all staff members
to do this, but it is really nice to add the relevant links to the signature of your e-mail message
so that people can know that you are available on Twitter, and Facebook, and other channels
when they look at an e-mail message that they have gotten from you.
This particular message was a very in-depth conversation between Kami and myself
regarding the the syllabus for this particular call.
Kami: Excellent. So you have explained how to integrate, now what?
Gunner: Great. Once you have got that under control now you get to the hard part.
So yeah, you've got the housekeeping taken care of. You've created the accounts.
You've decided on which ones you want to try to animate.
How do you coordinate the different channels to get maximum effect?
You need to understand the role of each channel, really understand the different purposes
and value for each channel. And to do that we recommend
three specific best practice processes that have served us extremely well.
The first is message calendaring. And that is the shocking, shocking assertion
that you should actually plan what you're going to say online weeks, or oh my goodness,
months in advance so as to follow a structured narrative arc.
And I will talk more about that in just a second.
Secondly, we recommend a thing called a publishing matrix.
And that is a very fancy phrase for having a spreadsheet where you track
the different types of online content that you publish, a newsletter, an event announcement,
an action alert, anything that you might publish, a white paper, any document,
anything that you are already putting out over e-mail or Web, you want to enumerate
the different types of content that you publish. And then in each column of that spreadsheet
put the different channels you publish to, and what you would do in each channel
for each type of content. I'll revisit that concept in just a minute.
And lastly, the notion of social media dashboarding,
or setting up a listening station, there are excellent free online tools
that let you track the propagation of your Twitter messages,
let you see how well you are being mentioned online in blogs, in blog comments,
on random Webpages. So we recommend setting up a social media dash board
so that you can find out if this stuff is actually reaching people, or generating online activity.
And again, more on that in just a minute.
Moving on to the next slide...
When you are talking about the different roles for different channels,
the question is do you model those channels as a spectrum of communications options?
And that is to say that there are different messages that are appropriate
for different channels. Some channels are friendlier with frequent messaging,
other channels you want to show restraint and message less, e-mail being an example
of a channel you don't want to overuse.
You can have different tone and voice in the respective channels.
I'll say more about that in a minute. And you also will find that your time and labor investment,
versus -- oops, there is an acronym -- return on investment is a critical thing to consider,
due to social media channels can take up a lot of time without necessarily delivering
near term results. And so I'll talk about that in just a second.
Moving on down the line...
So you can start slowly and ramp up in thinking about these roles for the different channels.
One arc that we like you to consider is start by treating things like Facebook and Twitter
as simple announcement services.
If there is a new publication, if you are having an event, if you just won a major victory
as a campaigning organization, just use Facebook and Twitter
as a simple announcement service where you make the announcement
and link back to your Website to the page that gives further information on the topic.
From there, you can move to a slightly more engaged strategy,
what we call a light weight communication channel where you are sharing
more frequent updates, perhaps actually trying to engage in dialogue with your users online
to see if there's a pulse, to see if people actually want to be working in that channel
with you on your programmatic areas. If that happens,
heaven forbid that spark lights a metaphorical fire, then you can talk about whether or not
your Facebook page, or your Twitter account can become anything resembling a collaborative hub.
An example of that we use Flicker, the picture sharing site as a collaborative hub
at our events. People who take pictures at Aspiration events, can upload them to Flicker,
tag them with our Aspiration Tech tag, and then those pictures actually feed into our Website
and feed a library of event pictures that we utilize in any number of communication situations.
And finally, oh my goodness, all of the above has transpired.
You are getting traction. It feels like your time is well spent.
Then it is time to talk about whether or not you might want to move to what I phrase as
an immersive community engagement sphere. What the heck do I mean by that?
If you've really got a passionate online audience in your Facebook space, in your My Space space,
in any number of other online channels, and you have staff resources to really push energy
and time into that, you can do some very, very impressive things in those spaces.
An example of an organization that does that very impressively, Students for a Free Tibet,
a group that is working on the Tibetan freedom issue. They do a brilliant job
of keeping their Facebook account as a Central place for the student target demographic
to engage, to get updates, and to share information.
And they really get more value out of that than their primary Website,
at least in certain campaign situations.
From there let's move to some of this spectrum stuff that I alluded to earlier.
One way to think about these different channels is to arrange them as I have on this slide
as a spectrum, and consider how they differ accross different lenses.
So when it comes to target audience, one thing to think about is that your Website
has a fairly anonymous component to it. Most people find that the majority of traffic
to your Website comes from search engines such as Google.
So you have potential supporters, people learning about your work in your organization,
or people who had the poor fortune to type in words that match your pages,
but have no interest in what you are doing, landing anonymously on your Website.
So the target audience there can be thought of as really general public,
and people that we would like to get interested in what we do.
As you move from right to left on this spectrum, you change your target audience.
E-mail is a less anonymous channel, because people have given you their e-mail addresses
one way or another. So they've signal that they are willing to let you communicate with them,
and consequently, the target audience are folks who are familiar
to a greater or lesser degree with your work.
Blogging takes that a step further. With blogging people have subscribed to your blog.
They read your posts, and they may in fact comment and interact with you.
And Facebook and Twitter, that is where it is getting down right intimate,
because Facebook and Twitter users are quite comfortable with a daily update,
or multiple updates per day. And people that are on those channels
often want continuous information and details about your work.
If you are doing a direct action where you are actually on the ground somewhere
some day tweeting every 15 or 30 minutes to say, things are going great.
We've got 500 people here. That is the kind of way that you can use those channels
without fear of offending the people listening, because they know the deal.
They know those channels are higher frequency channels.
And the target audience for those channels is ready to know about what you are doing.
Let's take it to a different lens. If you buy this spectrum idea that I am lying down,
then next we can talk about tone and voice. In the same sense that your target audiences differ
from channel-to-channel, the tone and voice with which you address them also differs.
When you are writing content for your Website, and to a large degree for your e-mail messages,
you are what I call the first person plural "We" or "The Org."
And it kind of sounds like you're puffing out your chest as you talk --
"We the organization would like you the recipient to know that this is what we are doing."
And while different orgs may have different tones, you are effectively speaking
in a relatively formal construct.
Blogging is a bridge in this regard. Blogs tend to be much more personal, much more first person,
and include much more, shall we say, subjective content. Phrases like I think, we think, we believe,
we know, are much more colloquial than the kind of language you will find on the About Us page
of most nonprofit Websites.
And as you move into Facebook and Twitter channels, it is critical that you model
those channels as dialogues with other people as opposed to more anonymous conversation.
So if you want an example of a worst practice, an example of putting the wrong tone and voice
into a channel, we've seen organizations paste entire press releases
into their Facebook status updates. That is a worst practice, because instead of saying hey,
we just dropped a press release. Check it out at this link which would be the kind of tone
you might put in your Facebook channel. Pasting six or seven paragraphs of text
is basically saying I don't really care who gets this. I am just doing my job
and sticking this content on this channel.
So we strongly encourage people to think of the tone and voice in the context of the channel.
And in this spectrum, as you move to the left you are thinking much more personal,
much more intimate tone like you are talking to a friend, like you're talking to someone who really,
really specifically cares about what you do.
But wait, there's more!
In addition, to the tone and the audience issues, there is the question of which channels do I use
for which kinds of messages? With your Website, you will usually your Website
and your e-mail for what we call planned messaging.
So you know you're going to do a press release next week.
You know you are going to send out an e-mail newsletter at the end of the month.
And those tend to have measured narratives. Those channels can be used for "urgent alerts"
or "intentional asks" as well, but suffice it to say those tools are best used in what we call
sort of slow motion planning mode.
But as you move to the left you may send out a latebreaking e-mail alert
if you've got latebreaking news. A blog which you can publish to daily, can be used for very,
very up to the minute types of messaging. And as you get into the Twitter and Facebook space,
you can get a little bit more diverse in what you put out there; latebreaking news,
real-time updates that I mentioned earlier.
Teasers, on our Facebook or Twitter channel it is totally cool to say something like hey,
we've got a big announcement coming out next Friday, stay tuned!
And sometimes we refer to those as "flirts," ways to get people curious or engaged
in what you are doing, and curious to find out more.
And on those channels you can also do "opportunistic asks."
Tie a tweet, or tie a Facebook update to a current event that has just happened
that helps you drive interest to your organization based on people's recognition
of your association with some current event.
For instance an example I would use there , the horrible -- if I may editorialize --
decision by the Supreme Court to allow unlimited spending by corporations
with an opportunity for a number of campaigning organizations to hop on their Facebook
and Twitter accounts and really drum up righteous indignation immediately
about the fact that the Supreme Court had given corporations all of this additional power
in the American political process.
People who hopped on Twitter, and hopped on Facebook right in that moment,
got other people re-tweeting and forwarding their Facebook updates.
And generated activity around those channels in a way that would not be nearly as effective
just updating your Website with a statement saying we are very disappointed
in the fact that this has happened.
Moving along as I look at the clock and try to make sure I don't run over,
here is where it gets interesting.
And this is honestly, the grounds for its own Webinar, because it's such a nuanced topic.
Organizations who are already online with a Website and one or more e-mail lists
are used to having almost total control of brand. What I mean by that is, the general public
cannot update your Website. You might allow comments. You are able to moderate those,
but in general, your Website is a fairly one directional communications channel.
E-mail lists, the very same thing. When you send out a monthly newsletter
rare is the organization that treats that as a discussion list, because most people
would unsubscribe quickly if that kind of noise started happening.
But as you think of that control of message, and brand in the blog channels, Facebook and Twitter,
it gets complicated, because when you are blogging, commenting is a critical component
of a successful blogging strategy. And when people comment, they don't always stay
on message, and they don't always reflect the best values of your organization.
So some things that appear in comments on your blog may threaten your sense of brand austerity,
may threaten your sense of organizational identity.
So we strongly encourage people to be intentional about having a good comment policy,
and understanding how to share that control of message with your blogging audience.
Facebook and Twitter take it a step further, because your Facebook updates,
and your tweets get mixed in on a per user basis with whatever else they are following.
So your "save the turtle" tweet might be in between a "pave the planet" tweet,
and a "I just bought a Hummer latest model" tweet
which one could say are not consistent messages around a "save the turtles" message.
So as you move into the social media space, there really is an interesting kind
of organizational analysis, hand wrenching kind of reflection on how much you are able
to let go a little bit of your message, let go a little bit of your brand, and invite others to participate
in the way that you communicate online.
A couple more, and we will be done with this spectrum exercise.
Frequency of messaging, I don't think I need to say much here.
Websites, you could update your Website every day. Unless you are a news oriented organization,
we don't think that is the best use of your time, much better to pour that energy
into e-mail messages, blog posts, and social media updates that reach audiences
in a more dynamic and immediate fashion.
And when you talk Facebook and Twitter, as I mentioned earlier, you can do those updates
almost as often as you want, as long as you are not just making worthless noise.
Time and labor investment, this is the scary one.
One of the things that is really weird about social media is that social media channels
can expand to fill available time like no other online technology.
And so with Website and e-mail, you can know what your time and labor investments are
based on past patterns. You know how much time it takes you to do a Website update.
You know how much time it takes to put together and execute an e-mail fundraising appeal.
So moving over to the Facebook and Twitter side, as I said earlier there is sort of an arc
of how you use those channels. But if you look at an organization like the Humane Society
who I find to be very impressive in that they are a quote/unquote "old school, institutional, nonprofit,"
they've got a full time social media person, and she is fantastic. She spends a lot of time,
pretty much a 24/7 kind of commitment engaging people on their Twitter and Facebook channels.
And she even checks those on the weekend. She is committed to the cause as one might say.
Now I am not saying that every organization should follow that level of investment,
but this is something organizations should be intentional about discussing
as they explore social media integration with their Website, because you really do want
to set allocations of what is appropriate Facebook and Twitter time,
what is appropriate blogging time, and balance that against appropriate e-mail,
and Website time and labor investment.
And finally, the one I mentioned earlier with an acronym fumble, return on investment.
With your Website and your e-mail again, it is knowable.
People when they send out an e-mail fundraising appeal, can say things like yeah,
last year we got $4000 in our end of year appeal. We are hoping to get $5000 this time.
But when it comes to Twitter and Facebook, the return on investment is still largely unknown,
and to that extent something that you have to research for yourself. It is uneven,
and it is subject to change. It is just important to name those things and invite organizations
to consider them as they work to integrate social media into their Web processes.
Kami: Wow, that was incredible. Thank you so much. My head is spinning.
And so those of you who might think wow, this is a lot of information, you will be getting
this Power Point later. So if you want to go through and review this later
the slides will be available.
So Gunner, how can this be coordinated in an optimal fashion?
Gunner: Excellent. Great question, and again, I want to echo the apology that we are covering
a lot of ground here. The goal of this call is to really inspire people to consider these concepts,
and we apologize we don't have time to drill all the way down.
But that said, the next three slides are talking about processes that we think
really make your online efforts sustainable.
Message calendaring, is addressing the rhetorical question of how often and how far in advance
do you schedule online messages? And, do you message with a narrative art?
Do you design your e-mail messages so that they tell a story over time
and engage your online audience in the narrative so they feel more a part of the work that you do?
If you put together a messaging calendar -- and what I mean when I say messaging calendar,
is that you actually are using Exchange or using a Google calendar,
or using whatever innovational electronic calendaring technology.
Track your messaging arcs by saying, this week we are going to do an education piece.
Next week we are going to do an action alert.
The week after that we are going to announce our event.
The week after that we are going to do an exposé piece on this corrupt politician.
That is a messaging arc which allows you to discuss how you advance the story
in each piece of online communication. You sustain messaging that way.
You also coordinate your internal processes so that different campaigns
or different program areas of an organization do not step on one another.
Finally, calendars allow you to avoid what we call list fatigue when it comes to channels like e-mail,
because unintentional messaging, what we call
sensitive artiste spur of the moment e-mail messaging can lead to spamming,
can lead to over sending to your messaging lists.
But if you plan your message calendaring in advance, you can avoid that list fatigue
and have the left organizational hand know what the right organizational hand is doing
from message to message.
The next process that we strongly recommend organizations consider
is what we call a publishing matrix. Do you have an integrated way for deciding
which messages go to which online channels?
Some stuff is just a tweet. Other stuff only belongs on your Website,
probably does not warrant a tweet or a Facebook update. And to that extent the question is,
do you think intentionally about the different types of content that you publish?
What do you do when you do a press release? What do you do with a newsletter,
an event announcement, a blog post and so forth?
A publishing matrix then, is the idea that when you are putting together your online planning,
each row in this matrix can be a type of content; a press release, a newsletter, a blog post.
And each column as I mentioned earlier, can be an online channel; your Website, your e-mail list
or lists, your blog or blogs, your Facebook and Twitter accounts.
And for each type of content, which type of channels do you actually publish on
in a coordinated example?
In that teeny tiny font at the bottom of the page is the link to the Aspiration publishing matrix.
It is a little bit dense, and I apologize for that. We have a lot of channels, and a lot of content sites.
But it gives you an idea of how we have our communications process automated.
On the next slide I've got a picture of that -- well, how shall I say it --
unwieldy and not necessarily aesthetically pleasing matrix.
But you see that when we announce an Aspiration event, we hit every channel.
When we announce a San Francisco Nonprofit Technology Center event
we only hit a couple of channels, the Website, do a blog post, maybe a LinkedIn update,
but we don't hit channels where we don't think it is relevant.
If you look down a little further on the page, when we do a new publication,
we hit everywhere. When we do a press release, we only hit certain channels.
So this is an example of our publishing matrix. And again, it is available on our Website,
and available under creative commons, so you can take it and modify it
and use a similar model to your own ends.
Last process before we get to final things, we recommend that you consider using
a social media dashboard. And a big tip of the hat to Amy Sample Ward who at NetSquared
has taught us a lot about how to do social media listening, and social media dashboarding.
There is a range of tools that let's you track how you are being mentioned online.
iGoogle is sort of a low end of the curve. Netvibes is the tool that we use, netvibes.com and it's free.
Radian6 for you organizations that have excessive communications budgets.
Radian6 is a pricy option, but a very powerful tool for tracking.
The dashboard tools let you track key words. Where is your organization's name
or acronym getting mentioned? Where are your campaign and issue key words,
or your staff's names getting mentioned? Which blogs are you getting mentioned on?
Who is commenting on stuff that you are doing?
You can also track targets of your campaigns or programmatic work. Track your opponents.
Track decision-makers that you are trying to get engaged in your issues.
The bottom line is that these messaging dashboards allow you to see if your messaging
is propagating, and in certain situations like blog comment threads
to find out what the reactions are. See if people are responding favorably,
or if they are not responding favorably, know that, and give yourself an opportunity
to dive into that comment thread and offer the organizational perspective.
The next slide is just a screenshot of Aspiration's social media dashboard.
And again, this is available publicly at Netvibes.com/AspirationTech,
you can see what our public dashboard looks like. And we will put that link in the resources
after this call. But it is just our simple way of knowing what people are saying about us
on Facebook, on Twitter, and so forth, in one place
without having to go to 74 different Webpages.
And that Kami, is the set of practices that we recommend. We wish we had time to go deeper,
but at least people have a rough idea of the kind of processes they can ultimately sustain
integrating social media into your Website.
Kami: Well, thank you Gunner. Is there anything else that we should know about?
Gunner: Well, I'm glad you asked. One of the things I always feel is critical to say
on a call like this, we often in the nonprofit sector as we focus on budget line items
called software and hardware, forget to remember that data is our digital power.
Information is what you are really, really focusing on when you do any online anything.
And so we strongly encourage people to think about their online social media, and Website,
and e-mail efforts as a curation of data model as opposed to a use of technology model.
Technology is a vessel which conveys data into the future. Technologies will come and go.
Data, properly maintained is here for the long run.
So five themes we like to hit on, as an organization make sure that you have actually
enumerated all of the places you have got data, all of the online accounts, all of the databases,
all of the places you have information, and treat that as a universe.
Treat that as a collective whole as you do your communications planning
and your organizational IT planning.
I sound like a parrot here, but if you could see me I would be wagging my pointer finger.
Have a complete and sustainable back up process,
and that includes getting your backups off-site, so that if your building burns down,
or you get hit by aliens shooting laser beams at your building, you don't lose all your data.
That by extension leads into the idea of keeping control of your data.
Where you have remotely hosted data on a salesforce.com platform, Democracy in Action,
any hosted data, make sure that you are making local backups on a regular basis.
This can be automated, and does not have to require a lot of staff time.
Also confirm with your data that you can migrate it if you decide the tool is no longer relevant.
Services like Facebook and Twitter -- to use the technical term -- kind of suck,
because they deliberately make it difficult to migrate that contact information.
But a good e-mail newsletter tool like Vertical Response, or Constant Contact,
Democracy in Action, has export options. And you should verify in advance,
whenever you take on a new communications channel that you hopefully have export
and migration options if you decide that that tool is no longer the right tool for your organization.
And finally, when you think about data, and you think about online communications
in all of these channels, remember you need a good privacy policy
where you honor the privacy of your users, and assert your own expectations of privacy
as an organization working for social change.
In addition, really, really encourage people to be intentional about unifying your online identity.
Some people will create their organizational blog at my-org-dot-WordPress-dot-com.
That's a really bad model, because then you are married to WordPress. You want to route
as much engagement online as possible through domain names that you control.
So much better to have blog-dot-my-org-dot-org, than blog-dot-WordPress-dot-com,
so that when you decide to change blog technologies,
you don't need to change blog addresses.
Also presume that Facebook and Twitter are, shall we say, metaphorical flashes in the pan,
and one need look no further back in the dust bin of online history than Friendster
to see what it looks like to see an online community fade away into irrelevance.
So we strongly encourage you to really be intentional about maintaining an online identity
behind addresses that you control, not addresses that somebody else controls.
Kami: Alright. Before we jump into Q&A, which we have a bunch of questions,
let's do a quick summary.
Gunner: Well, first and foremost the thing that I started out with lovingly called Housekeeping 2.0,
get the real estate reserved in advance. Configure your online channels to advertise
and link to one another. And be intentional about treating them as a collective whole.
You want, in doing that, to understand the purpose and the norms of each channel,
and it is very helpful to refer to some of those spectrum diagrams that we went over,
so that as you decide how you will use Facebook, and you decide how you will use your blog,
or your Twitter account, that you have a sense of the purpose and the voice
and the tone that you use in those channels.
We strongly recommend that you follow the best practices that we've mentioned.
I will apologize for the 15th time that we only touched on those briefly.
And at the end of the day, think about it as a data exercise, and think about how are we amassing,
how is our organization amassing a digital data set that we can leverage to have impact
and organizational success moving forward independent of any specific technology.
Kami: Alright, questions. There are about 50 of them here waiting.
I am going to start with a question from Pat.
Do you think it is necessary to also keep domains dot-info, dot-US?
Do you see these domains growing into common use in the future.
Gunner: Super great question, my general answer is; no, not at all.
I think it is per organization. So if you are working on US policy,
then it is probably worth having a dot-US address. But just to give you the Aspiration policy
and we -- I am embarrassed how many domains we have. We maintain about 25 different domains
for different purposes, but we just maintain dot-com, dot-net, and dot-org,
except in very specific exception cases.
Kami: And Kathy has a question. Can you talk about privacy policies and statements,
if and when they are needed? You had mentioned them when uploading pictures to Flickr.
Are there privacy concerns?
Gunner: Great question. The first answer is, privacy policies are always needed.
Let's start with your Website. It is do it rigor that you have a privacy policy on your Website,
and that you follow it. So we strongly encourage every organization to have a privacy policy.
Feel free to take a look at the AspirationTech.org privacy policy. We share everything we do,
so if you want to jack our privacy policy and adapt it to your needs, that's a good move
though we always recommend that you consult a lawyer.
For sites like Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook, it gets more complicated,
because there the privacy policy of the service provider is the preeminent privacy policy.
And to put a cynical spin on this, Twitter and Facebook are in the privacy invasion business.
Their whole goal in being viable businesses is to blur the distinctions between the individual
and the community. And so what we encourage organizations to do there is to consider ways
in which they might be at risk of violating the privacy of people that are collaborating
with them in those channels, and avoid doing that.
So in particular, when you are using Twitter, or when you are doing other online communications,
Twitter allows you to do direct messaging. You need to remember that depending
on how things are set up, other people can see your direct messages on Twitter.
Don't put anything sensitive or private in a Twitter direct message,
because it is one way or another likely to be seen by eyes that you did not intend.
So it is a phenomenal question. We don't have great answers for channels
in the social media realm, but it is critical that for your Website and your blog,
you have privacy policies. And in addition when you send out e-mails there is a privacy policy link,
and that you never ever, ever, ever, give your e-mail addresses to anybody else ever.
That may sound extreme, but it is just never okay for an organization
to ship a bunch of e-mail addresses to another organization under any circumstances.
And I know that there are people out on this call that might argue with that extreme statement.
That's our policy on good e-mail privacy practice.
Kami: And Faith has a question and a comment. I am very blunt, but entertaining
on my Twitter account, especially about politics. Should I have a live Twitter feed on my Website?
I don't want to sensor myself on Twitter.
Gunner: That's a great question, and it gets back to the audience analysis.
If you feel that your Twitter account is edgy, and you feel that you don't want to take the risk
of looking edgy on your Website, then no. Keep them separate.
That is part of the beauty of having different channels is that you really can convey
different personalities and different tones in those different channels.
So yes, technologically it is quite straightforward to pull in a feed of your latest tweets
into your Website, but if you are concerned that that tone might not align properly
with your Website's editorial tone, then it is just fine and dandy to keep those completely separate
or to do the lighter weight thing of linking to your Twitter feed from your Website,
but not in the Website content intimating the nature of the content on that channel.
Because in the Twitter context people are very tolerant and in fact, deeply appreciate edgy, blunt,
and otherwise "bringing it" tone and attitude in a way that Websites can't necessarily do,
because again, most of your Website traffic is an anonymous audience
that is not familiar with the work that you do.
Kami: And a couple of people have asked about LinkedIn and where does it fit
in a nonprofit social media strategy?
Gunner: That is a superb question, and one that we sort of subtly invited by showing
our publishing matrix, and the fact that LinkedIn is one of the channels that we think about.
LinkedIn is complicated in the following way. LinkedIn does not have the concept
of an organizational account. It is strictly for individuals who want to shmooze, network,
and have a place to send their resume out gratuitously when they are looking for work.
What we believe is that you can use LinkedIn in an opportunistic limited way
when you need to get the word out to that network.
But since it has to go through a person account, you need to have a conversation with your staff
to see how they feel about using their LinkedIn accounts for that purpose.
In my case, I have a LinkedIn account. I've had the same job for six years,
and I don't plan on changing. So I am able to use LinkedIn as a de facto organizational channel.
And all I use it for is their question feature is something that I jack to announce events.
So the question I will pose to my 500, or however many hundred LinkedIn connections I have is,
can you help us spread the word about Aspiration's Nonprofit Software Development Summit?
And I have had great results with people actually responding to that, and spreading the word
through their Facebook, through their LinkedIn, through their Twitter in ways that really were a
nice augmentations of our own Facebook and Twitter efforts.
So long story short, LinkedIn can have a role, but it is problematic
because of the fact that you need to go through individual accounts.
And you need to make sure that you have a clear delineation
of how the organization and the individual account relate.
Kami: And Lynette's question is how do you feel about inundating people
who might be subscribed to multiple channels, with the same info?
Gunner: Super great question. My general philosophy is, people are intelligent
and they know when they are getting more information from you than they want,
so you basically want to take it on a per channel basis.
When you send out e-mail it is a best practice, 12 to 24 hours after sending a message,
presuming that you have a tool that gives reporting and statistics,
you should study the unsubscribe rate. And if you see a higher unsubscribed rate
with frequent messaging, that is a clue that you probably are sending too many e-mails
to your e-mail list or sub lists.
That said, with things like a blog it is virtually impossible
as long as you are publishing meaningful content, it's virtually impossible to over publish on a blog.
I've seen it done, but not in the nonprofit sector. And in Facebook and Twitter land again,
frequent updates are the norm.
And so to the question, if someone is on more than one of those channels
it is important for you to have distinct voice in each channel
so it doesn't sound like you are droning channel to channel.
But if you use a blog post to talk about an upcoming event,
but also tweet and Facebook it, that is a best practice.
And the key is to make sure that you use the appropriate format.
In Twitter and Facebook it should be a one liner with a link to more event info.
Whereas in a blog post you can go deep and talk about the goals and the vision of the event,
or the speakers, or the participants, and really do a more engaging job of describing
what that event is about. That is the kind of differentiation that we encourage
with the idea being that if somebody is getting everything that they need
on Twitter and Facebook, they know how to unsubscribe from your blog,
they know how to unsubscribe from the channels that are more than they want.
A final note on that, we do encourage people to be very intentional about trying
to get as many e-mail addresses as you can, because e-mail addresses
are the most persistent contact information that you have online. Organizations that depend
primarily on Facebook or Twitter are setting themselves up for a world of hurt
if those services ever get acquired and change their terms, go out of business.
Twitter has yet to make a lot of money, so while everyone is confident that it will get acquired
some day, it is also entirely possible that Twitter will just run out of gas two or four years from now.
And so those kinds of channels, those connections should be treated as more transient,
and efforts should be made to get people in those channels on your mailing lists
through any number of cynical mechanisms, including petitions and other ways
of having people say yes I agree, and here is my e-mail address.
Because as you are trying to balance your messaging in the different channels,
the e-mail one is the one that most likely will be your long-term most valuable channel
in a general sense. It's certainly entertainment depending on people doing work in for instance
youth contexts. You can make a strong counter argument that the social networks
are at least as valuable.
Kami: And Linda had a question about government agencies.
She would like to know how government agencies are using social media,
and any references would be helpful. So do you have any suggestions or examples
of how government agencies are using social media?
Gunner: That's a great question. I don't off the top of my head.
Kami, when you and I put together the resources page afterwards,
I will see if I can Google up anything, because I have certainly heard it discussed before.
It's super complicated because -- and again, I don't know which government department
or type of work you are talking about, whether you are actually talking about US government
or a quasigovernmental organization. But the issues there to my understanding
are much more institutional and outside the scope of this set of process points,
because so often what you are most constrained by in social media,
and we have seen this working with certain institutional clients in our work,
is imagine an organization where you have a three week approval chain for a tweet.
That's pretty mind blowing, but that's actually standard operating procedure
in risk averse organizations that do not want unauthorized communications going out.
So it is a superb question; I wish I had a better answer.
Kami: Okay, and Kate wants to know where you got your Facebook icon for your Website.
Gunner: Okay, I'm going to say this on record. We jack them just like everybody else does.
I am proud to be a board member of the Ruckus Society which is an organization
that trains activists in nonviolent social disobedience.
They had an artist do a nice treatment of Facebook and Twitter icons.
And we just rolled on over there and with their kind permission copy and pasted those
into our own graphical formats. In general, and I am saying this with my lawyer hat off,
reuse of Facebook and Twitter icons online is a de facto standard.
I'm not saying it is right, but it is certainly the norm. So if you find ones that you like
on a Website, you can do two things. You can copy paste them and probably not get in trouble,
but I know that all the lawyers on this call are squirming on easily in their seats as I say that.
Or the better practice, contact the organizations whose site it is and say hey, would it be okay
if we reuse your Twitter and Facebook icons. Most of those services to my knowledge
don't have a page where you can download blessed icons from them,
though some organizations do. And actually, that is a homework assignment for me,
because I am going to go verify and see if any of those organizations, Facebook, Twitter,
YouTube, etc. have in fact got pages where there are appropriate use icons available.
But to my knowledge, I have not seen those on those main sites.
Kami: Okay, and James wants to know if it is okay to use your slides and audio
for presentations inside their organization. It is okay from my point of view from TechSoup
to use this entire presentation. So Gunner, do they have your blessing to use your slides?
Gunner: I am jumping up and down with glee in a metaphorical sense.
Everything that Aspiration publishes is published under creative commons license.
We strongly encourage reuse, adaptation, you can mash it up. You can rearrange the slides.
You can add stuff. And all we ask is that you acknowledge where it came from
and we are deeply grateful for that acknowledgment.
Kami: Excellent. And Bryan wants to know how do you monitor how many people have looked
at your Facebook group page other than the number of group friends you have?
Gunner: You know, that's a good question. Off the top of my head I don't remember
if they are currently giving those statistics out. One of the frustrating things in Facebook
is that the functionality of group pages is a subset of the functionality of person pages.
So I will have to check with our social media person Matt Garcia to find out.
And again, I think if there is an answer to that we can put it on the research page,
but it is not something that we are currently tracking, so I don't think that information
is readily available from Facebook.
Kami: And Morris would like to know about putting social media information on one's business card.
Do you recommend that?
Gunner: Great question. I think I will answer conditionally,
on the condition of who you give your business card to. So yes, if you are tweeting aggressively
and that is a channel that is really valuable for you, or for your Facebook channel
has really reached a critical mass where you know it's going to be something you maintain
for the length of the life of your box of business cards, heck yeah.
If there is room and it doesn't look to scwunched, I think that's a best practice.
The counter argument is that by putting your Website address people should be able
if you have followed the best practice that puts your Twitter, Facebook,
and other social media links above the fold on all pages, people should be able to come
to your Website and self-select in to those channels.
So if I were a conservative organization where staff members only get business cards
once every five years, I would think twice or three times about putting those links on there.
But if you are an organization where you push a box of business cards every month,
and social media is really an integrated part of your online communications strategy,
heck yeah, go for it! And maybe even put teeny tiny versions of the "F" and the "T" icons
so people actually visually get the clue that that is what they're looking at on the business card.
Kami: And another question, how can I share info on Facebook via my own page,
my organization's home page and our cause page without being redundant?
Gunner: That's a great question. My answer is perhaps not exactly a simple one.
But it gets back to treating each one of those as a separate channel,
considering to what degree the audiences overlap or are distinct and separate,
and then making appropriate decisions. So if you have three different online channels,
a personal Facebook page, an online Facebook page, and a causes page,
it gets back to that publishing matrix that we talked about earlier.
For different types of content think about which channels are appropriate.
If it is a super important announcement that everybody needs to see put that in one place,
but if it is a minor update on your cause, just put it on your cause page.
If it is a minor update or an update that is strictly about the organization -- you know
organization "X" hires new executive director. This is a wonderful hire. We are super proud.
I would just put that on the org page, not on the causes page. But the key thing is to come at it
in a publishing matrix process where you abstract the types of content that you are publishing,
and then think intentionally about which types of content belong on which channels.
Kami: Well, that is all the time we have for questions. Thank you Gunner.
I am just going to throw up this resources page quickly. And remember we are sending
this Power Point out to you so you can access all these links.
And if your question wasn't answered, I apologize, but we do have a follow-up forums
that you can post your question in that Gunner will be checking out.
Here is a link that will make its way to you in the follow-up message as well.
For those of you who are new to TechSoup and only know us by our webinars,
we also have articles, and community forums, and we post upcoming events, and we have
donated software from companies like Microsoft, Adobe, Symantec, and 36 other vendors.
So we have a ton of webinars coming up, really excited to be offering these webinars.
So checkout our Website for a listing of these and how you can register.
Then next week learn how TechSoup can help your organization. We have offered this one
twice before, but we always find more people are interested in participating.
Talking about VoIP I'll learn some new things on that one.
And then talking about After the Crash: Tips on Data Recovery. That will be the end of February.
And then Creating a Successful Computer Refurbishing program the beginning of March.
So again, I would like to thank ReadyTalk for making these webinars free and available
to nonprofits and libraries. And ReadyTalk helps nonprofits and libraries in the US and Canada
reach geographically dispersed areas and increase collaboration through their
audio conferencing and Web conferencing services.
Again I would like to thank Gunner for his fantastic presentation.
Thank you, thank you, thank you Gunner.
Gunner: Thank you Kami. And if anybody has questions feel free to call us.
Kami: Fantastic, and be sure to complete the postevent survey.
I'd like to thank Becky for helping out on the chat.
And have a great day, and join us on another TechSoup Talks. Have a great day. Bye-bye.
Gunner: Bye-bye.