See What’s Out There

I went to several Web 2.0 sessions at NTEN, Nonprofit Technology Conference in New Orleans last week. It was amazing how many there were, sometimes even two at the same time. They were all very good, and all the same. My one criticism of all of them is addressed at the end of this post. Also at the end, I have embedded the presentations of several of those folks I mention.

The first session I attended was specifically about social networking and led by Brian Reich of Echo Ditto, author of Media Rules!

Brian’s big point was that there’s a lot of noise to cut through and to engage people you must deploy quality, focused, niche communications. Volume and frequency are not primary considerations. Most importantly, participate with authenticity. This is something anyone studying the space knows. You must be a credible member of the community sharing useful information and thoughtful comments before anyone will respond to your asks.

A good tip Brian mentioned was to deputize people to grow your network for you. This is something we have been working on at See3 – methods to build a network of influencers in the social networks who will carry your torch. Giving people certain authority to speak on your behalf, and rewarding them with praise or titles or special invitations to events, etc. In other words, to formalize that relationship is a great idea. Another point Brian made was that perhaps Facebook and Myspace are not for your organization. You may find better success participating in a niche social network like Changents or Gather. I suggest another one to explore, Rethos.

Brian provided an overview of many of the social networks out there. He talked about LinkedIn, but he did not address LinkedIn for Good. I asked him afterwards if he knew of any case studies or saw any potential for using LinkedIn for Good, which launched last year with much buzz but seems like nothing but tumbleweeds rolling by since. His thoughtful response: “I know a bunch of people have tried (and there has actually been some discussion within the NTEN blogs and community about it) to use LinkedIn as a fundraising platform. The LinkedIn platform isn’t structured exactly to support direct fundraising, and I think people don’t necessarily appreciate when you don’t respect the medium. But I have seen groups use LinkedIn to form committees that do fundraising, to have people volunteer time from an in-kind standpoint, etc. So, if you use the right tools through LinkedIn, you can get that much closer to a donation–so I’d say that is a better path. All experiments still, but there is clearly potential.”

Brian emphasized that social networking is not for every organization, and that you must consider your goals, strategies, tactics, and resources, not assuming the use of any particular tool. This notion was echoed by the other presenters on this topic that I saw, but Brian said it the best and with the most authority: “If you leave this conference, go back to your team and say, ‘We need a Facebook strategy’ then I have failed…”

Beth Kanter led a mere four sessions. I attended two of them. The first was about ROI. Coming from a background in SEM and lead generation, I was so glad to see “Web 2.0 ROI” as the title of a session. Beth pointed out a great study on blogging ROI from Forrester. She asked the audience how many people use formal ROI evaluations with regard to social media efforts. I was glad my hand was up but sad it was one of only two.

The first panelist was Eve Smith from Easter Seals. They tried the Causes challenge – seeking donors on Facebook - and her biggest takeaway was that influencers are more valuable than donors. I assume what she means is that if you find the influencers, they will bring you more donors than you could find on your own. Makes sense.

Wendy Harman from the Red Cross gave her case study on Project Listen. She does an amazing job at communicating with and monitoring the blogosphere and reporting on coverage of her organization. Her take-aways from that activity are that internally, people love the feedback from bloggers, and externally, people love to know that you care.

Danielle Brigida from NWF presented a case study on Digg and StumbleUpon. It took her 7 months to establish relationships in the Digg community sufficiently to get good results (ie, popular stories). Just like anywhere else, you have to be a credible, authentic participant and contribute valuable information in order for others to reciprocate. In StumbleUpon, she saw results from being the source of quality, relevant info. I have embedded Danielle’s PowerPoint below.

Carie Lewis, who does tremendous things on Myspace and in other social media channels, gave a case study on HSUS’s video contest after the Michael Vick dogfighting incident. HSUS only got 22 entries but from a marketing perspective it was a success in part because Hulk Hogan did the promo video for the contest. She learned from the experience to require email in the voting tool, target people likely to submit videos, and do more blogger outreach. See3 has run many successful video contests (a few examples here, here and here). Video contests can be a great way to give your community something tangible to do and create great content for your organization in the process.

Justin Perkins from Care2 presented his famous social media ROI calculator. The big take-away here is that if you assume one full-time staff member getting paid $52k/yr dedicated to social media can yield even 10,000 new email addresses for your organization in a year (which I agree would be a lot), then your CPA is $5.20/name. Justin says “there are cheaper ways to acquire email addresses.” He respectfully refrained from plugging Care2, which uses a brilliant petition process to find supporters for your cause among their network of 7 million activists at the cost of between $2-3/name.

My understanding of Care2, based on comments from Care2 clients, is that the lists perform well, however the demographic is clearly progressive, and somewhat skewed to middle-aged women. So how much any organization should rely on Care2 for list-growth really depends on your mission, objectives, and your own community. There is a lot more to this discussion, such as all of the potential benefits to social media marketing beyond strictly list-growth, such as branding, fostering community, creating discussion, distributing media materials, participating in existing communities, and many other results more difficult to fit in a spreadsheet. Again, what are your goals.

Another Web 2.0 related session I attended was See3’s Michael Hoffman about online video, which he already summarized. My take-aways from his session: “viral to what end?” Michael made the point very well that everyone wants their video to go viral, but that is not a legitimate goal in itself. Views do not necessarily lead to donations and email addresses. You need a strategy for your video and your call to action. This relates to Michael’s other session on using microsites to convert views to action. He said it’s important to start with stories and to have a strong call to action. Now here’s the part where I criticize my boss. He showed this as an example of a direct response piece, which is a great video and performed well in the email appeal for which it was created, but not nearly as well as this one, which has a much stronger call to action and is the better example.

The last session on Web 2.0 I attended was called “The Next Latest Thing: The Future of Technology in Nonprofits” led by John Kenyon with Beth. I have to say, the title of this session was misleading. Upon reflection, “the next latest thing” seems cheeky, but “the future of technology in nonprofits” seemed like a fun exploration into the unknown rather than a run-down of the most contemporary tools everyone else was talking about. Nevertheless, what I liked about this session was that John did a great job of getting comments from the crowd after each point, creating some discussion and incorporating feedback into his presentation. What I also liked about this session is that John echoed many things we advocate at See3: tell stories, get user-generated content as a great way to efficiently acquire marketing material and ignite your audience, use media to engage people.

Now here is my criticism of all Web 2.0 sessions, as promised at the beginning of this post: most, if not all, of the case studies are from large organizations with communications teams and resources that allow them to try things like video and daily engagement in social networks. But what about the small organizations that have one person responsible for marketing & communications, and that person is also the network administrator, web manager, and events coordinator? What can they do? We cannot solve their problem of limited resources, but we can find their successful case studies and present them to inspire other organizations like them, which is a majority of nonprofits. I’d be happy to moderate that panel next year in San Francisco.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 11:10 am and is filed under Nonprofits, fundraising, facebook, dogoodertv, social media, 08ntc, advocacy, web 2.0, social networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.