social media

Ãœber-blogger Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion web feed is usually one of the first I read.

Today, Steve calls time on “a bunch of terms” he signals are now completely unnecessary. These include “social media,” “user generated content” and “consumer generated media.”

Now, clumsy they may be, but unnecessary? I don’t think so. But Steve continues…

Do any of these matter any more? I dislike all of these words and have stopped using them. Eric Hansen proposes we go with new media but that doesn’t quite work either. The reason is it’s ALL media.

The lexicon will hopefully change… We are all media, period.

Judging by the reaction of those commenting on Steve’s assertion, many also disagree (in fact, the majority… at least when I last checked in at 3:55pm). We do still need to differentiate between the “old” broadcast way of doing things and the “new”, more conversational.

The Mexico Tourism Board certainly didn’t get it (and probably still don’t). If anyone has the time or inclination, just check out my previous blogging cause, which I now frequently use as a case study.

Steve MacLaughlin has just posted some good advice on the Blackbaud blog:

Make sure that your online communication, wherever it takes place, clearly conveys who you are, what is your mission, why it matters, how people can get involved, and what is the impact of their involvement. Choice abounds on the Web and someone else’s site is just a click away. Your message needs to be compelling and coherent enough to rise above the clutter. Don’t let your message get lost in the medium.

So, just thinking out loud for a moment…

• Ignore the tools… start with strategy, outcomes and the message.
• If it fits, embrace social networks. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
• Keep this core message simple, e.g. “Make Trade Fair”.
• Simple actions repeated at scale within a social network produces serendipity.
• Post your edgiest, most viral content… be useful, and (if appropriate) be entertaining. Be prepared to respond quickly, too… and offer guidance.
• Remember, it’s about helping people to connect to each other… rather than to your database.
• Be collaborative – recognise that people may like to create something which will be seen by many.
• Let them know their efforts are crucial to advancing the cause / your mission.

But manage the risks. Social networking is both a blessing and a curse :)

• Be ready to lose some control – it comes with the territory.
• You cannot ‘vet’ who wants to become your friend.
• People may seek to build their reputation or associate you with ‘their’ cause by adding your logo to their video / blog / profile.
• be wary of anti-big-brand videos / spoof ads.
• Have a strategy in place in case things go wrong.
• Look at the probability of something occurring (e.g. legal action), and assign a value to that and calculate risks.
• The benefits outweigh the risks. In most cases people have the best intentions and will respond to a gentle nudge.
• Don’t embed yourself too deeply into social networking (and for that matter, anything else I might enthuse about) and forsake the other stuff.

Of course, all this will be easier to manage if you employ a buzz director or recruit some virtual volunteers!

I’m sticking my neck out with some of these (sort-of) predictions.

If I’m honest, I share Bertie’s view that next year, 2008, will be the real breakthrough year when charities get ‘social’. This is partly because budgets have largely been fixed for activity this year.

Never mind, there will be plenty of elbow room to experiment and innovate in 2007.

As always, comments (especially additions to this list) and challenges (be nice) are positively encouraged!

• 2007 will be the year of the widget. Charities will benefit from the downloadable fundraising widgets offered by Justgiving (launched just before Christmas) and Bmycharity (on its way).
• The desire from donors (especially major givers) for more involvement and information will intensify and the need for accountability will further erode the sacred cow of the general fund. Note: most charities will be dragged kicking and screaming down this road. Initiatives like the ImpACT Coalition seem more concerned about reputation management than championing transparency. This is disappointing.
• Social entrepreneurs and venture philanthropists will have an even higher profile this year.
• The page view is dead, long live, err… something else! Hmm… web metrics just do not cut it (and just when you’d got to grips with it!). But what should we be looking at now? In 2007, the sector needs to identify new measures of ‘engagement’ online. This work is urgent, especially as charities need to show accountability for everything they do. Engagement + accountability = effectiveness. Note: numerous conversations in recent months tell me that there’s a lot of head scratching going on around this one. Get in touch and maybe together we can figure something out.
• A blended media approach will gain ground and charities will reach and engage stakeholders where, when, and how they want to be communicated with. This means greater cross-departmental collaboration.
• More charity employees (and virtual volunteers) will identify with the roles of buzz director / community steward / social reporter. Charity managers will sit up and listen (and even start blogging). Note: I’m thinking of co-organising an open-space event for those championing social media tools (and change management) within their organisations.
• Charities will get better at reporting their achievements and aggregated update reports via RSS feeds will become standard. Podcasts will become commonplace.
• 2007 will provide some high-profile stunts and more cause-related avatars in Second Life, but remain a peripheral activity.
• Some well-equipped charities will learn to use these tools for storytelling and weave user-generated content into their own content, thus giving stakeholders more of an authentic voice.
• The distinction will become more apparent between those charities wishing to build hosted communities for supporters and activists and those who have accepted the inevitable loss of control of ‘their’ cause and become active in existing communities and social networks.
• Furthermore, by the end of 2007, many charities will register that they need to slim down their websites, and create a more personalised, targeted, atomised (but consistent) presence on the web.
• One or more of the popular social networking sites will tap into the desire for members to identify with a cause and create a “My Causes” tab.
• We’ll end 2007 with some excellent case studies (I’ve high hopes for Red Nose Day in March), some disappointments and a great deal of learning in the process.
• The novelty of ethical gifts will begin to tire by the end of the year (there are too many copycat catalogues out there).
• Not really a prediction as the One Laptop Per Child project looks set to really happen this year. Interesting to read about the look and feel of the UI.

Owen Gibson writes in The Guardian that Save the Children today becomes the first UK charity to participate in Second Life, a virtual world accessible over the web via software installed on your computer.

Having ‘sold out’ of yaks for a programme designed to provide the animals for Tibetan families, Save the Children has turned to Second Life in an attempt to raise more money and awareness.

From today, participants in Second Life will be able to travel to its “Yak Shack” and pay 1,000 Linden dollars (the game currency, named after the company that conceived it) for their own pixillated yak.

The money is then transferred into a Save the Children account at the current exchange rate of US$3.50 to 1,000 Linden dollars.

If you think this reads like a shaggy-dog hairy-yak-story, then think again; a recent survey conducted by the US-based Center for the Digital Future suggested that for many people, online or virtual communities are as important as their real-world counterparts. The results of the survey were released last week and reported by the BBC.

Another study identified that the way we behave physically in real life is mirrored in a virtual environment. So, your virtual self can feel just as strongly about causes as the real you. But would you ‘connect’ with a cause, or organisation in the same way? The jury’s still out for me.

The Yak Shack concept was created by Ogilvy Advertising and works well as an extension of the charity’s “Wish List” virtual gift catalogue.

Ogilvy’s Kathryn Parsons traces her interest in Second Life back to the Picnic06 conference where she heard Philip Rosedale (the Founder of Linden Labs) make a specific reference to Second Life’s potential as a fundraising community. (A report of Philip’s talk is worth a read in itself.)

The agency was already working with SCF and Kathryn told me the connection with ‘virtual gifting’ seemed to good a creative opportunity to miss. Of course, using Second Life as a platform to fundraise will also enable SCF to connect with an audience usually considered difficult to reach.

Kathryn added that “it was important for us to create something which both respected the charity and also the ‘residents’ of Second Life”.

So, during the build, Kathryn worked closely with the Second Life community (seeking advice from Linden Labs, “in-world” avatars, and from Aimee Weber).

“We wanted to make sure we created an experience which is valued by the community and which will eventually become a fundraising success,” she said.

SCF is following the lead of US charities that have recently begun to take advantage of Second Life’s popularity and booming virtual economy. Aimee Weber also contributed to a sponsored virtual ‘walk’, which raised $40,000 for the American Cancer Society (ACS).

If your interest has been piqued, Beth Kanter writes frequently and passionately about this stuff, which has coined terms such as ‘avatar marketing’. Beth has also posted links to Second Life resources and discussions aimed at not-for-profits.

Aimee kindly offered to give me “a teleport and a tour” of the Yak Shack, but I had to decline (I don’t yet have an account!). However, I’m still keen to monitor how successful the Yak Shack proves to be for SCF.

• This is the link to the Yak Shack in Second Life

Apparently, yaks and their new owners can return to the ‘Shack’ on 16 December to show off their individually customised yaks (woolly jumpers, etc.) for the chance to win an interview in a Second Life magazine.

If you’re a Second Lifer, dig deep into your virtual pockets.

While the poppy-less Jon Snow sparked a controversy last week, the Royal British Legion produced their first ever podcast designed to encourage a new generation of supporters to “pause and remember”.

The charity seems keen to shift the public’s perception of its work and encourage understanding of its all year round relevance. The podcast is seen as a way to bridge the generation gap and appeal to those who did not have the time, or feel attracted, to attend a traditional Remembrance ceremony on either Armistice Day, or Remembrance Sunday.

The Remembrance podcast, which was recorded at last year’s Festival of Remembrance, features the Queen’s trumpeters playing the Last Post and the Reveille, with recitals of two traditional poems.

While the quality isn’t great, the short tribute intriguingly includes two full minutes of silence.

The Legion tell me that between the 9th – 12th November, their podcast was downloaded 1,500 times – mainly in the UK and US, but also in Iraq, Japan, and the United Arab Emirates.

Among other UK charities experimenting with podcasts are Cancer Research UK and Help the Aged, who used their podcast to invite listeners to send in their stories which the charity can use for campaigning purposes.

Photo: Hobvias Sudoneighm on Flickr

It’s a particular crusade of mine to encourage not-for-profits to identify an internal champion (or recruit a virtual volunteer) to take on this role. Call it what you will, and David Wilcox and Beth Kanter, have both had a go at (re)inventing job labels. I like Beth Kanter’s “Social Media Coach”. But how about “Cause Evangelist”? Anyway, you get the idea.

Interest in social media among not-for-profits right now is high. A good many are researching good practice and developing their strategies for participating in and monitoring social networks and the blogosphere.

With this in mind, I thought I’d have a stab at unpicking the role of “buzz director” (or whatever). What follows reflects my belief that social media is more of a creative discipline than a technical one:

• Before you get your feet to comfortable beneath your desk, remember that you should maintain a 360-degree joined-up view of your organisation at all times. Work across teams and departments.
• Research the key blogs that cover the issue areas in which your organisation works, the related policy arena and other relevant topics. Find out what others are writing about your organisation.
• Talk to everybody. Listen. Make it easy for colleagues to find you, or manufacture the conditions by which serendipity is more likely to occur.
• If you see the never-ending strategic review dragging your new colleagues down, remind them of the reasons they joined your organisation in the first place. Get them passionate (and close) to your cause once again. Share their passion. Be energetic. Be useful.
• Your role is to create a buzz around your cause (and secondarily, your not-for-profit ‘brand’). But resist any desire (or pressure) to “own” the cause. Far better to identify the communities where your supporters and activists are already and join in the conversation. After all, whose cause it anyway? Again, David Wilcox hits the button:
  

  Many of the first round of tools – Web 1.0 – were linked to existing social structures and ways of doing things. Web sites would be like magazines online. Forums online would be places you went to, just like physical events. It was quite costly and difficult to create online places, so they tended to be collective rather than personal. You now need to be in all places at once.

• Get into web widgets. While you’re not in the world domination business, your own website can still be a magnet. Create something useful (e.g. your events calendar, appeal running totals) that your dispersed supporters can add to their own blogs. Beth Kanter can tell you more about widgets…
• Work with legal to write your blogging guidelines. Anticipate more scrutiny into your organisation and its work (which you should welcome) and identify the possible pitfalls. Balance risks vs the opportunities. Get ready for some tough love.
• Coach your colleagues on blogging. Help them through the inevitable rough patches. Continually give feedback on how to write, and how to be generous.
• Talk to the press office/pr/media dept and work with them to identify key bloggers and build relationships with them to get your news and stories out. Explore the options for podcasting and video from emergency locations to get across your side of the story. Blogs can be a good way to break news that the mainstream media can pick up on and amplify. Try letting people post comments to the press releases your organisation publishes online and introduce colleagues to the concept of the social media press release.
• Set up a group photo pool in Flickr to upload, tag, and share photo stories online with your activists and fundraisers. Create a unique tag and invite your fundraisers to post photos on Flickr using this same tag. Build a visual archive your organisation’s work. This will all have a cumulative effect over time.
• Take baby steps and start small by blogging around an event. Josh Hallett tells you all you need to know.
• Include blogs and social media in your next supporter survey.
• Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Don’t neglect those traditional methods that have served your organisation so well. Appearances can be misleading: the average age on MySpace is 35.
• Develop social media optimisation across all your online communications. This means working tirelessly with communications, fundraising, campaigns…
• Your role is to help colleagues to plan, deploy, monitor and refine your blogs and social media activities just as you would for any other communications and engagement tactic.
• Share what you learn with colleagues and network with people in other organisations who sit in seats like yours to identify new ways to calculate the benefits, costs and risks of blogging. Work with them to create a framework for measuring the ROI of your blogging efforts. Join the search for a new metric for engagement.
• Explore ways to keep in touch and to share ideas and insights and share links to new developments. Embrace opportunities for collaboration.
• Don’t stall on starting to use this stuff until you “know the ROI of blogs”, but continually refer to your organisation’s mission and ensure that this activity aligns with your strategic goals. Plan for 6-12 months time, but start experimenting sooner. Set realistic expectations.
• Don’t get too big for your boots and call all this a ‘project’ because it will run into the rails. Don’t call it a pilot as no one will take it seriously enough.
• Do prepare a monthly report of activity and ensure it is distributed widely within the organisation.
• Not-for-profits unwilling to consider some or all of the above, risk becoming irrelevant. How will your organisation be different in three years time?

Of course, this is only a start. Comments most welcome.