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:
I am doing a little inbox housecleaning before I take the week off next week and thought I’d share a couple of really great resources with you. Two articles focus on using email in your campaigns and the other is a great wrap-up on keeping your head up during tough economic times.
Network for Good has a great free download for NPOs who want to improve their email fundraising.
Change.org has also recently released a comprehensive post entitled 15 Steps to Launching a Successful E-mail Petition Campaign on Change.org. This is an area that I struggle with and this post really does a wonderful job of spelling out the details.
Network for Good also ran a great telesmeinar last month on maintaining sustainability during tough economic times. All of the materials are here.
I’ll be at Blog Potomac all day tomorrow. If you are going to be there give me a shout so I can say hello!
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!
I’m speaking at DC Web Women’s “Social Media Extravaganza” tonight and have chosen the topic of listening. Listening is a vital part of effective social media marketing and sometimes I don’t do enough of it. When I talk to clients, they are typically overly excited about jumping into the conversation and I often find myself encouraging them to take a step back. Before you talk, it’s important to listen. And part of being an effective communicator is being a good listener. So, today, let’s take a step back and listen.
We all have the friend that likes to talk. Yack, yack, yack. We try to break into the conversations to either be cut-off or rolled over completely. Don’t be that person.
In my life (not just in social media, but overall) I’ve found that it’s important to be a good listener. Whether you are lending an ear to someone’s problems, learning from a compelling seminar or watching your favorite movie, listening is how we learn, process and connect.
In social media, it’s important to “listen” to what others are saying not only about your business and brand, but about your industry as a whole. Fortunately, the magic of the Web has made it easy to listen to the chatter and pick out the most important pieces of information for you. Here are a few tools to make it easier:
Google Alerts – Google Alerts enables you to receive email alerts when there is a new post about your brand or industry on Google based upon keywords.
Twitter Search – Millions of conversations happen on Twitter every day. Twitter search will enable you to monitor any mention of your brand in a conversation based upon keywords.
Google Blog Search – Unlike the general Google search tool, the Blog Search enables you to monitor blog posts that are indexed through Google.
Keotag.com – Keotag.com is an aggregator that enables you to check a variety of directories (like Google, Technorati, Live, Yahoo, etc.) based upon keywords.
BackType – BackType enables you to search blog comments based on keywords. Often blog comments don’t make it into the mainstream search engine results.
BoardTracker - BoardTracker searches popular bulletin boards for posts based upon keywords.
Start by searching for your brand or your name to see if anyone is talking about you specifically. Then try searching on terms that are pertinent to your industry. This will help you assess what people are talking about industry wide.
Once you have a handle on the topics that are important to your customers, jump into the conversation offering your opinion, help and expertise. You’ll be more informed and your listeners will get more from the interaction.
Since the first post on industry-specific Twitter resources was so wildly popular, and a lot of folks are actually changing their jobs these days – here is part 2 of our Twitter resource series.
Twitter for:
If you have an industry that we haven’t covered, please leave a comment and I’ll include it in part 3 of the series!
I think that one of the best, easiest ways to promote your blog is through feeds into social media properites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. While there might be a magical tool that links all of these mediums together, I’ve yet to find it. So here is my step-by-step process for posting your blog posts to almost all of your profiles. I will preface this by letting you know that I use WordPress so all of my techniques are based on WordPress.org.
Feed into Twitter - Use the WordPress Twitter Tools plugin to auto-post your blog post to your Twitter profile upon publication.
Feed into Facebook – There are two ways that I like to auto-post to Facebook.
1) By using the Twitter app in Facebook to feed your Twitter posts into your Facebook status bar, your blog posts will be posted to your Facebook profile automatically.
2) You can also use NetworkedBlogs to set-up a profile for your blog on Facebook. This gives you addtional exposure in general and feeds your blog posts into your activity timeline.
Feed into LinkedIn – LinkedIn recently launched a series of web apps that enable additional functionality for your LinkedIn profile. I use the WordPress app to feed my blog posts into my LinkedIn profile automatically. There is also an app called BlogLink that enables feeds for other blogs.
Feed into your Website - By using Feedburner, it’s easy to feed your blog posts into any HTML page. Simply sign-up for an account, enter your blog URL, configure your settings and copy/paste the generated code into your web page.
While there are literally thousands of social media tools, the feeds above should give you an starting point for effortlessly promoting your blog to your readers.
- FOCUS, FOCUS, FOCUS. In times like these, it’s tempting to find revenue wherever you can. DON’T DO IT! It will dilute your brand, and leave you with zero competitive advantage. If anything, do the opposite. Jettison the products or services that are under-performing and focus on the few things you do really well.
- Take some “ME” time. I was so down in the dumps over the state of the economy, feeling bad for my laid off friends, and generally feeling down, that I was being totally unproductive while working on my business. I cut my work week down to four days, and spend my fifth day doing something like hiking. My first day out of the office, I had my greatest business-related epiphany in a decade (not kidding), and I’m getting more done than I was working 5+ days a week.
- Get out and talk to your loyal customers to better understand why you matter. Take them to lunch. Benefit to you: Better understand why they’re loyal and uncover insights that can translate to other customers. Benefit to them: They feel appreciated!
- Plan for the future. As bad as it is right now, it will get better. But the reality is that it’s gonna be tougher for brands to compete. Maybe it’s less access to capital. Maybe it’s new competitors that see this downturn as a chance to move into your market. Whatever. The brands of the future will be required to compete on four levels: Innovation, Creativity, Culture, and Connection. Plan accordingly.
- Quit ignoring twitter, facebook, and the others. Social media is here to stay. Not because twitter is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but because consumer expectations for access, transparency, and authentic brand experiences have been growing for years, and these tools are finally catching up to their expectations.
Scott Davis is the founder of From The Rooftops, a Portland-based brand strategy consultancy. Scott has spent the last decade mastering the tools and techniques of effective cultural study and brand strategy, and living at the point where they intersect. In this time, he has also won multiple Fantasy Baseball Championships, summited Mt. Hood, published branding articles for pubs like Sustainable Industries Journal and Media Inc, and consumed countless pints of Copacetic IPA. Scott’s true passion lies in creating positive change for organizations by helping them to find their identity, stimulate their culture, and build rich and enduring relationships with their constituents. Follow Scott on Twitter. | Email Scott.
Subscribe
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?
