Many thanks to Volunteer Fairfax and Exxon Mobile for inviting me to speak with the participants in this year’s Community Summer Jobs Program. I’m looking forward to meeting everyone and enjoying a great discussion!
Building an online community is a fun and dynamic way to connect with your audience. While community building seems like an easy thing to do, a solid plan will ensure that you (and your internal stakeholders) understand who you are trying to reach and why. When we launched our social media plan for GoodDogz.org, we had many audiences to address – animal rescue volunteers, dog owners, dog adopters, pet professionals, donors – how would we engage them all? With some research and a lot of “listening“, we realized that each group was communicating in a different part of the social media space and we engaged them on their turf.
We set-up a growing animal welfare professional networking community within a LinkedIn group. Yahoo Groups provided a perfect forum for rescue volunteers to tell other organizations about dogs in need. Our NING community provided a full community where dog owners and potential adopters can connect with each other and we can connect with them. Through VolunteerMatch, we’ve successfully recruited a myriad of volunteers. We use tools like Facebook and Twitter to help promote events and initiatives. And while our community is growing, we have been less successful had we not taken the time to understand what we were trying to accomplish.
The formula for creating a plan is pretty simple and is reminiscent reporting for my school newspaper.
Who? Who is your audience? Donors? Board members? Volunteers? Employees?
What? What are they talking about? Are they trying to raise awareness? Are they concerned about a news item or political initiative?
When? Are they engaging during the workday? On the weekends?
Where? Where are they carrying on their conversations? Facebook? Twitter? Blogs?
Why? (Goals) Why do you want to get engage your audience? For donations? To raise awareness about a particular issue? To recruit volunteers?
How? (Tactics) How are you going to be part of the conversation? How will you gauge success?
Once you’ve established answers to the questions above and feel good about your plan, you can start setting up your community and promoting it. As long as you engage your members and nurture the community, it will give back to you ten-fold.
Here are a few additional resources to help you get your head around community building:
On Saturday, I had the pleasure of speaking on an online writing panel with Mayra Ruiz-McPherson, Thursday Bram and Deborah Ager facilitated by Kristen King. All are fantastic ladies and leaders in their fields. The panel was part of the 30th annual American Independent Writers conference.
While a lot of the discussion revolved around transitioning from print to electronic writing, there was also much talk about the legitimacy of blogging and citizen journalism. Attendees asked about how to generate revenue from blogging and how low blogging pay rates compare with larger print pay rates. Here are a few takeaways:
- Writers blog for many different reasons like marketing another business, to raise their rep as an expert in their field or to drive traffic to third party revenue services (like AdSense).
- While pay rate per post may be low, if you can turn over many posts in an hour, the per hour pay rate actually increases.
- Pay rates for print jobs are dropping. In the future, blogging and print pay rates may be equal.
Here are other great wrap-ups of the event. Many thanks to Kristen King for having me!
Whitney and I attended the second annual BlogPotomac bloggers conference on Friday at the State Theater. Hosted by Geoff Livingston and a variety of wonderful sponsors and volunteers, I thought that the presenters, topics and overall format were relevant and timely – they really got to the heart of social media challenges and benefits. I had initially bought my ticket so I could see Ford’s sole social media powerhouse, Scott Monty speak about how he put a new coat of paint on Ford’s brand by actually listening to its customers. (I also got to hang with Scott and Pam & Frank Martin – Pam is in the photo with me – during the lunch break!) But I was pleasantly surprised by the thoughtfulness and quality of the other speakers as well. Topics ranged from utilizing blogging for political activism to the pros/cons of personal branding. Any proceed from the event were donated to DC Central Kitchen, a nonprofit who helps train homeless people in the culinary arts. To date, they have trained over 700 folks with culinary skills.
Kudos to Geoff and team for pulling off such an outstanding event. Can’t wait for October!
Here are a few takeaways from the event:
- Who should own social media? Orgs own their own efforts.
- Engage employees who “get” the mechanics of social media; but these people aren’t your strategists, but they will get things done.
- Understand the resources that you will need to be successful in social media (ex. Southwest Airlines had to hire 2 new full-time people just to moderate comments.)
- Hashtags (ex. #blogpotomac) are incredibly important for following important conversations.
- Folks who blog for orgs or corps – learn to speak with your own voice, not your directors (sometimes this is difficult to overcome). Ask if the single “voice” is speaking to everyone – investors, staff, customers, constituents, etc.
- Personal brands are not created. They are earned.
- Scott Monty stated that he was “not online to sell cars. He is online to build reputation.”
- Crisis is the opportunity to turn a negative into a positive.
- Brands aren’t only built around just a name but larger, the reputation.
- The name is just a label. Never let your personal brand eclipse the greater goal of your company.
- Despite shiny tools, strategy is still key!
There are also a ton of great wrap-ups out there. Check it out.:
I have the distinct pleasure of speaking at the American Independent Writers conference today and I’m super psyched. AIW is truly one of my favorite groups to present to. I spoke on a panel last year to this great group of writers on the topic of writing for online audiences and will be speaking on the topic of finding your voice today.
When you start to write, particularly when blogging, its important to think about the tone of your writing. When I started blogging, I considered my audience which was (and still is) professionals who want to learn more about using social media within their business or organization. Prior to blogging, my writing background consisted primarily of technical writing and documentation. So my writing started out very formal and corporate, sadly, almost “white paper-ish” and eventually I was bored with my own writing.
Blogging should be personal and genuine. And even if you are blogging about business tips or company news, it should come from the heart.
Sick of my own corporate blather, I changed my tone. I started to write more like myself. Interestingly, I started writing exactly the way that I speak and it worked for me…and more importantly for my readers. I found that the more that I injected my own opinions, talked about my own experiences and connected with my audience, the more readers I attracted and the quality of the conversation improved.
Some of us have, what I will call “BIG” personalities. And the challenge for me became balancing and sometimes filtering my own personality a bit. While my sarcastic wit and strong opinions work sometimes, they don’t work all of the time. So, to date, I do temper my writing just a bit. But I recently had a great conversation with a branding colleague who encouraged me to put more of my personality out there, so you may start to see more of “me” shortly.
One note on “putting yourself out there”. If you are very opinionated, its likely that there are folks out there who don’t share your opinion and want to tell you about it. I wrote a helpful post a few weeks ago about dealing with negative comments that might be helpful.
If you write for a corporate entity or organization and are more constrained to towing the “company line”, I would still suggest trying to find your own voice. And more importantly, avoid using the sole voice of the director. For some of you this will be a challenge to overcome, but with some frank discussions with upper management and marketing, you may be able to make your case. Ask if this single “voice” of the company is speaking to everyone – investors, staff, customers, constituents. Your colleagues may find that the tone is too corporate and is not truly connecting with your audience. Consider encouraging multiple staffers to blog. Everyone’s voice is different and while you may not connect with a customer, someone else might.
Most importantly, experiment and see what works for you. Don’t rush it – take baby steps. Eventually you will find your true online voice.
Ummm…WordPress hosed me on publishing this post on Monday. I’m looking at the scheduler now and it says June 8, but alas, it wasn’t published. So here are the webinars for the remainder of the week. Sorry for the glitch!
Wow! There are so many great webinars scheduled for this week! I hope that you find one that’s right for you! Also, if you would like to see your nonprofit webinars included on this list, please let me know and I will be in touch!
Here’s a little something something for a rainy Friday. I say, TGIF anyway!
Enjoy this GREAT round-up of presentations on social media for nonprofits from Rebecca Leaman, Wild Apricot! Rebecca’s blog is a must for anyone interested in social media marketing for nonprofits. Subscribe. Bookmark. Delicious. (Here is the excerpt at Mr. Tweet as a bonus)
Happy Friday!
Hey gang – it’s been a hell of a week with lots of fun projects and proposals for more exciting programs. But all this work has caused me to neglect my readers! So sorry! So, while I try to get through the rest of the week, I’m giving you a few tidbits that I’ve read this week that I think are worth a mention. I particularly like the post from Geoff Livingston on how the basics of making friends have stuck for 80 years and are now so well reflected in social media. Enjoy and I promise that I’ll be better in June!
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I work with businesses on marketing strategy, tactics and social media tool selection. I help create effective ways to leverage social media to meet business and marketing goals while cultivating customer engagement. How can I help you?
