Community IT Innovators. Established 1993. Serving social mission organizations with integrated technology services you can trust.

There’s nothing earthshaking in the new Alertbox posting on social media and RSS. Still, it’s nice to see things we think we know reinforced by credible research. And reinforcement of the fundamentals is always helpful.

Here are a few of the things that caught my eye:

• This strikes me as particularly well put — “[B]usiness messages appear in a context that’s permeated by personal messages. This context sets the stage for use. Businesses that post too often crowd out the user’s real friends and become unpopular (and thus risk being unfollowed). Users listed too-frequent postings as their top annoyance with following companies and organizations on social networks.”
• I love that the BBC is the counter-example “Users prefer a more casual style for business messages on social networks than what’s appropriate for most corporate communications. At the same time, they expect RSS feeds to be more business-like and to cut the chit-chat. Also, for some services — such as the BBC — people preferred a highly professional tone, even on social networks.”
• Here’s the most fundamental fundamental of them all, and the reason why any social networking effort needs to be part of an overall organizational strategy, with support beyond a single enthusiast. — “In some cases, companies had established a presence that they didn’t bother to update. These graveyard sites gave users a very negative impression when they were looking into companies’ social features. Even more irksome were cases in which friend requests weren’t promptly answered. Start using a social networking service only if you have the budget to support reasonably frequent postings.”
• Neilsen also points out that users rarely seek out an organization on social networks — they react to the social networking opportunity being pushed to the from the organization or from friends. Because it can be frustrating to search out an organization’s presence on social networks, the links to those pages need to be easy to find on an organization’s own site.
• The average usefulness of corporate/organizational messages was low. “The messages that received the highest scores had three things in common: they contained something of substance, were timely, and provided the kind of information that users expected from the source company or organization.” One user commented that she valued social networking messages that made her feel like she was “the first to know.”

Read the rest of the summary, and if that’s not enough, the full report has 107 usability guidelines. The link is at the bottom; the full report costs $198.

Like a lot of organizations, CITI probably talks more about practicing what we preach than actually doing it. So it was a pleasure to take action on our online strategy.  I sat down with our Online Strategist, Glennette Clark, a few months back and was the client for a change.  I’m sure it will resonate with many of you web managers when I let you know our website isn’t as perfect as we’d want it.  When you work on websites it seems you always see the stuff you need to fix and never the stuff that works right.  And a website – even a small one – can be such a huge project there is a real tendency to want to load up the content and let it be, despite knowing an integrated website is the best way to deliver content.  That is, a website where the content is not an after-thought but fully integrated in a marketing strategy that includes social media, press, and community, where all the parts reinforce the whole.

As a consulting firm, CITI knows our clients need to know what we do and how to get in touch with us, and our website has reflected that and not much more.  But as we advocate for our clients to do better at integrating their online presence with their long term community, fundraising, and mission goals, it has become clear that CITI needs to do a better job at that, ourselves.

Glennette’s consulting sessions started out with some standard questions and a questionnaire.  She briefed us on her obsession with measurements – explaining that even if you know where you want to go, if you don’t know how you are doing along the way then you’re going to end up somewhere else.  For every goal we thought of, Glennette challenged us to come up with a metric.  For several items, she helped us see that the metric that we were looking for wasn’t a web metric at all, and that we would have to delve into our internal sales database instead.  It was one of those exercises where you feel so righteous after the workout that you wonder why you put it off for so long.

I admit, one reason I delayed starting this project was nerves about everything we weren’t doing – either because I didn’t quite know what we needed, or just hadn’t ever got around to it.  Glennette was reassuring that everyone starts somewhere – the thing is to just start.  She didn’t assume I knew anything about analytics but didn’t baby talk it either. I’d been looking at our web stats online from time to time but not in any organized way.  It was a revelation to start pulling our web statistics into a usable report format we could share internally.

One interesting fact is the number of you who come to the CITI site searching for “online strategies” – welcome!  So you know you should be more organized in this discipline too.  After our initial meeting with Glennette we went off on our own for a month and worked on next steps from the action plan we’d created – immediate, short term, and longer term tasks to help organize our efforts.  We decided to focus initially on creating the monthly metrics report, and updating our keywords and metatags in the interim.  Next steps: social media strategies and converting the knowledge from our stats into content and findability.

If you’d like to catch up with Glennette yourself, she’ll be presenting on Wednesday the 19th at a webinar from 1-2pm:  The 10 Second Rule: Optimizing Your Website for Donations

Last week, Glennette Clark presented a seminar on social media, covering key social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter and how to design and implement a social media strategy.  You can find the slides from the seminar here.

Attendees expanded the discussion, generating conversation around how to engage different demographic groups using social media, such as senior citizens, and the effectiveness of social media advertising.  With anecdotal examples, many agreed that social media was better for listening to and connecting with people on a personal level and building relationships than for targeted advertisements. All agreed that being deliberate about entering the social media realm and having clear goals for what you what to accomplish through social media was key.

Visit this NTEN website to view videos of the key speakers from the Nonprofit Technology Conference last month.  Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations talks about the impact of self-organized online communities on traditional organizing.  Eben Moglen, Professor of Law, Columbia Law School and Founding Director of the Software Freedom Law Center, gave a thought-provoking talk in favor of open source software and open knowledge sharing in the technology community.  I highly recommend taking time to view these insightful speakers if you were not able to attend NTC.

I’ve been quiet on the blog front lately. In part, I’ve been waiting for the recordings of the NTEN plenaries to go up, at which point I’ll insist you listen to them. Both Eben Moglen and Clay Shirkey gave very thought-provoking presentations. What else can I tell you? I enjoyed Dean Hollander’s session “I Hate My Website!: Overcoming the emotional and logistical challenges of Web site development and online communications planning.” It wasn’t much different in content than a lot of the high-level online strategy sessions you get at NTEN, but I liked his take and his presentation. Unfortunately, his slides don’t seem to be available online.

In “A Nonprofit’s Guide to Client Data Collection and Privacy” we had a great, focused discussion on privacy issues. Presenters Sarah Tucker and Toby Shulruff made a great number of resources available online — sample policies and release forms, in particular.

I was also jazzed by NPower’s presentation on their tool for Measuring the Impact of Technology Projects, though the actual implementation remains to be done, and it’s huge. Slides for the presentation are linked through the session title, above.

On another NTEN-related subject, yesterday Beth Kanter summarized an NTEN webinar on Facebook: So you want a Facebook Fan Page for Your Nonprofit? Here’s the Scoop!. There’s a great list of linked resources at the end of the post.

The Washington Post’s article yesterday To Nonprofits Seeking Cash, Facebook App Isn’t So Green (subhead – “Though Popular, ‘Causes’ Ineffective for Fundraising”) was sure to raise hackles in the nonprofit tech blogosphere. The bloggers who have been exploring social networking for nonprofits had had this discussion already.

Beth Kanter issued a concise rebuttal: Hello, Washington Post: Dolllars Per Facebook Donor Is Not the Right Metric for Success. Even if you’ve followed some of the discussion in the past, it’s worth reading her post, and the links therefrom, particularly the one to Allison Fine’s blog. Between the two of them, they nicely summarize what you can and can’t expect out of an investment in social networking for your organization.

Allyson Kapin’s post on Frogloop includes a link to the Frogloop Social Networking ROI calculator. The calculator is a nifty tool for looking at the costs vs. funds raised. It doesn’t pretend to calculate the indirect and non-financial benefits that Kanter and others point to, but it does provide the opportunity to decide what those other benefits are likely worth to you before diving into a social networking campaign.

All right, I’m on twitter, if only because I was intrigued by Glennette’s tale of twittering for info at the inauguration on the fly and finding out where the bottle necks were.  And if Dan Schorr is doing it at 90..  And from all the brouhaha on the Twestival, which was big enough to make its way out into the rest of the media where I picked it up. And because McKinsey – McKinsey! – is a-twittering something they call the McKQuarterly (unintentionally (?) creating images of McKQuarterpounders to me).  A perfect storm of nonprofit marketing guilt or I suppose a lingering suspicion at my own un-hipness.  And I can add movies to Netflix from my phone? Actually, that sounds incredibly useful.

Ok, and because Scott has such an awesome username.

CITI developer Greg Lavallee did this in his spare time — use Twitter to add movies to your NetFlix queue. Never again forget the name of that movie that that guy said you had to see.

Glennette Clark, our Online Strategist, held her “Six Steps for Online Success” seminar last night at CITI HQ. We had over 30 people come to hear her speak about developing long-term strategies for online technology and message delivery. A wide variety of organization were represented including the Landscape Architecture Foundation, AARP, Sojourners Magazine, and the Social Enterprise Alliance. It was fantastic to see so many of our clients and so many new faces.

Glennette gave a great presentation covering a lot of the fundamental choices that non-profits face when working online. There were some great slides from the seminar that are available here.

Some of the best moments were the discussions that came out of the topics Glennette was presenting. Some really fantastic guests, like Jeffrey Newman, Shyree Mezick, or Miroslava Lutova, had great questions and comments to share with the group –regarding crowd sourcing, micro-donations, and email donation requests. Sharing knowledge and experience is what social media is all about and we were happy to have people trading stories and ideas with us!

Thanks to everyone who came out — we love having you here.

Glennette will be giving another seminar on the same topic soon, so if you missed her this time around you can catch her the next time.