Questions you might be asking yourself about social networking -
Have you been asking yourself why you would put time, energy and potentially even funding towards social networking when you are have your hands full just keeping your core technology operational? Or, have you jumped on the band wagon, have your Facebook page up and have begun to tweet but are not seeing the results that you were expecting?
To address the first question – Why even start? – social networking is the “new” communication medium and is used extensively by people crossing many of the boundaries that exist for other media – age, gender, culture, education, etc. Social networking is simply a new tool and methodology for communication. Like any other business critical system, if there is an upgrade available that provides greater functionality, it is in the best interest of your organization to determine if the benefits of that upgrade are worth the related cost.
To engage your community in your mission, efforts have traditionally been focused on producing print, TV and radio advertising materials, providing content on your web site, and more recently many organizations have moved into email marketing/communication. Each of these methods of communication brings with it different costs and benefits, and reaches a potentially different audience. They all have two things in common – you are “pushing” information in one direction – out, and there is limited if any “ripple effect” from your messaging. The concept of social networking is simply that information is pushed out and/or conversations are started, and they are spread via your constituents’ personal and professional networks. The unique characteristic of social networking is that your potential benefit increases exponentially with a single piece of communication, and without increasing the cost of production.
Addressing the second question raised above – Why am I not getting the results I had hoped for?
There are a couple of questions below, and your answers will guide you to the correct action…
1 - Has an assessment been completed including the following items?
Assess your audience
Determine the appropriate framework for your message - Twitter allows 140 characters, Facebook has virtually unlimited capacity, and in both, you need to continue to actively message to stay “above the fold”.
Identify the appropriate tools to deliver the message – blog, Twitter, Facebook, Ning, Flickr, and so many more exist. Each has different qualities and drawbacks.
2 – Have you defined a strategy including the following items?
Training on selected tools and best practices in their use
Implementation plans
Schedule for content updates
Staffing for writing content and ongoing maintenance
Definition of evaluation methods – what are your metrics for determining if your efforts are successful?
A few closing thoughts to help you design a successful social networking strategy – Your planning for entering this new medium of communication should be as thoughtful as the planning for a new education or marketing campaign in any other medium to realize the maximum benefit. You must remember that this is a new medium, and like all new communication efforts, it takes some trial and error to find the best fit for your organization in terms of tools, frequency and substance of content. Know what you are evaluating for and do the analysis necessary to determine if your efforts are paying off. Finally, if you are not sure where to start – there are resources available, both freely accessible information on the web and consulting expertise.
Do you run an online community? The definition is pretty sketchy, ranging from a blog with active commenters to, say, America Online. If we define an online community as a place where people share knowledge, support, and/or friendship via communication forums on web sites or via email, there are plenty of web sites, NING groups, mailing lists and AOL chat rooms that meet that criteria.
The current interest is spurred by the notion that this is the required web 2.0/3.0 direction for our organizational web sites. We've made the move to social media (as this recent report suggests); now we need to be the destination for this online interaction. I don't think that's really a given, any more than it's clear that diving into Facebook and Twitter is a good use of every nonprofit's resources. It all depends on who your constituents are and how they prefer to interact with you. But, certainly, engagement of all types (charitable, political, commercial) is expanding on the web, and most of us have an audience of supporters that we can communicate with here.
Buried deep in my techie past is a three year gig as an online community manager. It was a volunteer thing. More honestly, a hobby. In 1988, I set up a FidonetBulletin Board System (BBS); linked it to a number of international discussion groups (forums); and built up a healthy base of active participants.
This was before the world wide web was a household term. I ran specific software that allowed people to dial in, via modem, to my computer, and either read and type messages on line or download them into something called a "QWK reader"; read and reply off line, and then synchronize with my system later. There were about 1000 bulletin board systems within the local calling distance in San Francisco at the time. Many of them had specific topics, such as genealogy or cooking; mine was a bit more generally focused, but I appealed to birdwatchers, because I published rare bird alerts, and to people who liked to talk politics. This was during the first gulf war, and many of my friends system's were sporting American Flags (in ASCII Art), while my much more liberal board was the place to be if you were more critical of the war effort.
At the peak of activity, I averaged 200 messages a day in our main forum, and I'm pretty sure that the things that made this work apply just as much to the more sophisticated communities in play today. Those were:
Meeting a Need: There were plenty of people who desired a place to talk politics and share with a community, and there wasn't a lot of competition. The bulk of my success was offering the right thing at the right time. It's much tougher now to hang a shingle and convince people that your community will meet their needs when they have millions to choose from. How successful -- and how useful -- your community might be depends on how much of a unique need it serves.
Maintaining Focus: many of the popular bulletin boards had forums, online gaming, and downloads. My board had forums. The handful of downloads were the QWK readers and supporting software that helped people use the forums. The first time you logged on, you were subjected to a rambling bit of required reading that said, basically, "if birdwatching and chatting about the issues of the day interests you, keep on reading", and I saw numerous people hang up before getting through that, which i considered a very good thing. The ones that made it through tended to be civil and engaged by what they signed on for. By focusing more on what made for a quality discussion, as opposed to trying to attract a large, diverse crowd, my base grew much bigger than I ever imagined it would.
Tolerance and Civility: We had a few conservatives among our active callers, and that kept the conversation lively. But we had excellent manners, never resorting to personal attacks and sending lots of private messages to the contrarians supporting their involvement. We really appreciated them, and they appreciated semi-celebrity status. It was all about the arguments, not about the attitude. Mind you, this was 1989/90 -- I'm not sure if it's possible to have civil public political debates today...
Active moderation: My hobby was a full time job that I did on top of my full time job. I engaged with my callers as if they were sitting in my living room, being gracious and helpful while I participated fully in the main events. There was a little moderation required to keep the tone civil, and making the board safe for all -- particularly the ones with the minority opinions -- required having their trust that I wouldn't let any attacks get through without my response.
I think that the biggest question today is whether you should be building a community on your own, or engaging your community in the ample public places (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) that they might already hang out in. In fact, I think that where you engage is a fairly moot point, what's important is that you do engage and provide a forum that helps people cope and learn about the issues that your organization is addressing. Pretty much all of the bulleted advice above will apply to your community, or out in the community.
Skeptics take note - I agree with you that Twitter, the "microblogging" service that your friends are pressuring you to join, appears to be the ultimate synthesis of vanity and wasted time. All of that potential is there, and, worse, the service seems to advertise those traits as its raison d'etre. But I'm going to ask you (and that means all of you) to bear with me as I offer some arguments for the service.
Twitter is, at its core, a messaging service that is more immediate and casual than email, but less immediate and intimate than IM (Instant Messaging). Just as email bridged the gap between the letter and the phone call, Twitter bridges these digital extremes. But, unlike email - and more like, say, Delicious or Flickr, web sites that take what were traditionally private things - bookmarks and photo albums - and make them social, Twitter makes this messaging social. You can protect your tweets so that they can only be seen by people that you approve, but the majority of tweeters don't do that.
I came to Twitter via NTEN. In 2007, as we were revving up for the annual conference in DC, a bunch of us signed up for Twitter accounts and used them -- to mixed success -- for casual announcements, off-agenda organizing and "Hey, what session are you in?" friend pinging. By the 2008 NTEN shindig in New Orleans, Twitter was an incredible asset. Even before the conference I was alerted to nationwide problems with flights, as I followed my friend @kariapeterson (and others) stories about being trapped in airports hours after their flights were due to leave.
Joining Twitter with a good chunk of my social/professional community was definitely a boon. If you sign up without a group of friends established, it can be a fair amount of work to identify and connect with people that share enough of your interests and motives for using Twitter. Because using Twitter involves more than just finding interesting people. It's also about finding people who will interact with you on Twitter in ways that fit your needs and goals.
"With the usual exceptions, people on Twitter tend to fall into two main camps. There are responders, who use Twitter as a channel to interact heavily with other users, and broadcasters, who use it primarily as a micro-blogging platform."
The nptech crowd that I hang out with is squarely in the Responder's camp. This is a social tool for us, not additional brochureware, and we use it to engage each other. For me, this has primarily meant that I have a casual channel to share and query my professional community on. I ask and answer a lot of questions. I engage in casual conversation. It's allowed me to learn more about people who I share my nonprofit and technical interests with, broadening into family, film and music conversations, but in a way that is far more natural, friendly and interactive than poring over their Facebook profiles.
But the real power comes from the crowd. For example, @johnmerritt, who works as IT Director for a SoCal YMCA, did a Twitter survey about email server message limits. He requested that survey response tweets include the tag "#inboxlimit", and then he set up a web page subscribing to an RSS feed for that tag, so that we could share a growing list of responses. This survey helped me provide context to my staff about our email policies.
On Monday, @webb, co-Exec at an awesome San Francisco nonprofit, asked us all what non-financial giving we have planned for the coming months, with the request that we tag our answers with "#givelist". If you want to be inspired, and learn a lot of ways that you can be philanthropically productive without increasing your budget for donations, then the responses are a worthwhile read. You can learn even more at this website.
The typical assumption about any social networking site is that it will allow you to market your mission and, possibly, increase donations. Twitter, of course, can do those things, as Facebook or MySpace can, under the right conditions. But it's a far more natural tool for generating ideas and camaraderie than cash. If you're writing it off as just another place to promote yourself or your cause, I'd say that it deserves a deeper look.
These days, having an “Intranet” comes up a lot as a requirement for website projects. I’m using the term advisedly to refer to a range of needs for private space for organizing campaigns and collaboratively developing ideas.
This is different from project specifications that call for members-only sections. Those kind of requirements typically focus on log-in based spaces for designated folks to download private materials, sign up for events not open to the public, maintain their profile and so on. The “members-only” pages communication model typically still has your organization and your site at the center. It places constituents in individual relationships with you.
Here we are talking about requirements that point toward building a communication and collaboration network. Contact, discussion and organizing takes place among the participants as well as with the site owner. Historically, Intranet referred to private spaces for organizational staff, while Extranets extended to clients, volunteers, board, and more. With more organizational work flowing through collaborative networks, the distinction doesn’t seem as important. Typical requirements that organizations bring us today include:
a shared space to brainstorm, draft, edit public policy documents or strategy and tactics for advocacy campaigns
space for community organizations doing the same kind of work, such as immigrant rights or youth services, to collaborate on development best practices documents
spaces for researchers in different places or in different organizations to collaborate on community development or employer research agendas
private spaces to post and discuss assignments for classes in a school or workshop trainings
shared private calendar of events of interest for organizations working together
Many tools out there can be adapted to meet needs like this—whether this was their intended purpose or not. We find ourselves recommending several kinds of possibilities, ranging from the simple and out-of-the-box to the more complex. Planning and customizing may make a lot of sense when you need to develop a more strategic collaborative model with specific community networks, particularly less technical and more program-driven and community-based teams. Where time, cost, staff attention span pose limits, simpler solutions may do. And they could serve as proofs of concept for a second generation strategic initiative.
Creating a wiki. You can do this using an inexpensive hosted service, such as wikispaces or zoho’s wiki, or you can install on your own server the original mediawiki or newer full systems such as tikiwiki. Wikis have the advantage of totally flexible, malleable structure for sharing knowledge. They intentionally have limited features and the formatting or mark-up syntax may frustrate less technical folks.
Creating a simple web site that is mainly kept private. Google sites or Wordpress come up as solutions of this sort. In just a few hours, a site can begin to emerge that can have private discussion spaces, with blog-like commenting, places to store documents and keep track of revisions, make lists and calendars to organize a work plan and collaborative needs. Google sites have the advantage that they build on what for many is first-order collaboration—sharing an individual Google document, spreadsheet, or calendar. Wordpress has more polish and can be installed locally.
Adapting project management tools for a knowledge network. We have used and recommended Basecamp for this, and Central Desktop offers similar solutions. These are hosted services, with fees per month that grow the more private spaces you create. Again, you can also have blog-like discussion and commenting, collaborate and monitor versions of documents, have an organizing calendar and so on.
Sharepoint from Microsoft offers similar features to the last category. Though an extension of an internal network, it can be opened up to outside team members as well. Larger organizations put a lot of time into customizing it or using its integration with Exchange and other Microsoft stuff, if that is your path in life.
All these choices come up as alternatives to building the Intranet or collaborative space as a section of a public website. All the major content management systems, both proprietary and Open Source, have this ability to one degree or another. When the needs go beyond the simple, the power of a full CMS can and should be harnessed to meet goal driven needs. At one time, we thought that all our Drupal websites could just have the same Intranet/collaborative space option. The advantage over just using one of the other types of tools here comes from the ability to refine different types of users, categories, workflows and so on. And this is true with the other CMS systems.
There is planning to be done for any of these options. For example, choosing whether it’s OK to have your private discussion and materials hosted outside (even if based on logins) versus the security of installing it locally can be an important consideration. The communication model for new users, including around email integration, needs careful consideration. You will need to determine what will bring your intended participants into a lively collaborative network, how much structure you need to provide, who will monitor it and other such questions. It is great to know that once you work through these questions, the technical choices get better all the time.
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