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Set objectives based on a clear understanding of how social media changes the feedback loop between your organization and stakeholders. The key thing that is different with setting a social media objective is that it is not about reaching a mass audience and blasting your message out. Social media is about reaching the influencers, developing relationships, having a conversation, and getting insights. Make your objectives "SMART" (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-Bound)
As you define your strategic objectives, try setting them in one or more of these different categories, starting with listening and learning and working your way through the list. When you're first starting out, start with only one or two of these categories until you get your feet wet.
As with any marketing effort, the first step to success is identifying who your organization wants to reach and finding out how they are using social media. There is more and more audience research for users of particular social media tools and a lot of it is free. It pays to spend a few hours reviewing the demographic or "technographic" details (what people are doing online).
While secondary research may help inform what general direction you may want to go in, there is no substitute for primary research. And while surveys, focus groups and other services can give you an analysis of what your current audience is doing online, direct observation works best. For instance, if you are considering a Facebook profile, before you set up an organizational presence - spend some time searching to see if anyone has set up a Fan Page or Group to talk about your organization or issue area. Or, if you are considering a blog, find out who the key bloggers are in your topic area. This will allow you to observe what your audience is saying in their natural environment. Some social media strategists call this step "listening" and it is an essential first step in developing your social media strategy.
Your social media should be in perfect harmony with your overall Internet strategy. It should support the objectives established for your web site and outbound communications.
An Example of an Integrated Strategy SaveDarfur Campaign is an example of a campaign that has an integrated social media strategy. (Read here about SaveDarfur's integrated social media campaign). In December, it launched an aggressive "Be A Voice For Darfur campaign" that included using social media to encourage President-elect Obama to action and end the Darfur genocide.
The Save Darfur Coalition’s Be A Voice For Darfur postcard campaign goal is to ensure that Darfur is a priority for the Obama Administration. Obama has already promised "unstinting resolve" to end the Darfur Genocide. The effort, aims for no less than 1 million postcards to be emailed, blogged and snail-mailed to President-elect Obama within his first 100 days in office.
The social media component is targeted to younger activists, and uses a new petition application developed in conjunction with Facebook Causes to promote SaveDarfur. Other social media components include an influencer relations campaign, and a Darfur Blogger Toolkit with videos, photos, and other resources at http://www.addyourvoice.org/pages/blogger_toolkit. There's also a Twitter hashtag: #voice4darfur .
Remember, social media can also be used to connect people to offline actions and events, too.
As with the introduction of any new technology or anything new for that matter, there are bound to be fears and concerns expressed by others in your organization. Common concerns about social media from nonprofits may include:
To be successful, social media requires a mix of authenticity, openness, transparency and to a certain extent giving up control. This is a different way of working. Change does not happen in organizations unless there is education through discussion. One of the best ways to educate people about social media is find examples of similar organizations and present information on how they’ve used social media. Throughout this wiki we've tried to share examples that you might want to use with staff. Some boards and senior managers may only understand numbers. They want to know what the results are, so be sure to talk to other nonprofits who are using social media effectively to find out how it worked for them. Then you can show examples, facts with numbers attached, and insights, it can spark a productive conversation.
Many organizations start using social media internally, rather than going immediately to working with external stakeholders. This allows people to understand and get comfortable with the technologies in a more "safe" environment and gives everyone a chance to work out the kinks. There's nothing like hands-on experience for helping staff understand how social media works. Some potential ways to practice internally include:
Sometimes being a social media evangelist and only touting the benefits can backfire. It is important to explore both positive and negative perceptions and alternatives. The fear of wasted time and resources also needs to be addressed. In the early stages of social media strategy development and implementation, there will be mistakes because you need to find out what works and what doesn't for your organization. Learning is part of the process. Some key organizational decision-makers may still think of social media as something for teenagers, not understand it, or point to other organizational priorities. To pave the way to successful adoption, you need to have the conversation in your organization about these issues. Be sure to step back and explain social media in a way that others in your organization can understand if they are new to social media.
It also important to have an upfront understanding of what the organization's staff will and will not do on the social web before implementation begins. If your organization sets up a blog, you need to establish a blogging policy first. The process of creating a policy can also lead to a deeper understanding of the benefits and value of social media.
If, for example, your organization will be using social networking sites, staff members need to figure out how they will professionally represent themselves with their individual profiles. You also need to determine how your organization might respond to negative comments on the blog or on an online forum or social networking site. What will you do if a fan sets up a page on Facebook that doesn't use your "approved" messaging or branding as in this example from the Chicago Symphony
Depending on your strategy, implementation can take anywhere from a minimum of 5 hours per week to over 20 hours per week. Keep in mind these are rough estimates. As with any new skill, you need to factor in learning curve time. As soon as you have the workflow in memory and have it down to an efficient routine, it will take less time. Most importantly, it is how you manage your online time. Are you staying on task and getting the workflow done for each specific strategy? It is also important to keep in mind that it often takes a few months before you see begin to see results from your social media effort.
It is important to consider who is going to implement your organization's social media strategy. Whether you hire someone new or entrust an existing employee with the role, the person in charge should be comfortable using the tools, passionate about your organization's programs, and should enjoy interacting with other people. It is after all, called "social media." That said, social media should not exist in a silo and be implemented as a supplemental channel by "a young intern alone in the corner." It needs to be owned by the entire organization.
Some organizations take shared staff responsibility for the implementation. For example, some organizations implement multi-author blogs so one staff person does not have to do all the writing and can it can be shared across departments.
You may also want to use volunteers or interns, although there are definitely pros and cons to this. On the one hand, it is a great to begin testing social media without the investment of staff time, particularly when budgets are lean. On the other hand, it may not be effective in the long run. What happens when your intern moves on? Does anyone on staff know how to manage the Facebook Fan Page left behind?
Consider whether your staff may need additional training or could benefit from outside expertise as part of the implementation. Sometimes it may be a matter of allocating work time to the efforts.
There are literally thousands of potential social media software tools available that you could use as part of your social media strategy. Tools should be selected in the context of six broad approaches
Listening: If you are new to social media, this should be the objective for your first experiment with social media and where you should focus your time. You can listen with Google alerts, technorati, Twitter search, and RSS readers. The key skill is pattern analysis and of course, using what you find to inform decisions or actions.
Participating: Once you know what the audience is saying, the next step is to engage in a conversation with them. There are many different tools to support this - from leaving comments on blogs to using twitter.
Share Your Story: You share the impact of your organization's programs through blogging, podcasting, sharing photos on Flickr, or YouTube or other video sharing site. The next step is to get your constituents to share their stories about your organization with others (which takes more time)
Generating Buzz: When you share your message with enthusiastic supporters, they in turn may choose to pass it to others with a similar interest in your organization or campaign. The key benefit is that drives traffic. But first, you have to build trust, credibility and - most importantly - a relationship with those who might interact with your posted content, particularly influencers. Buzz tools include FriendFeed, Twitter, StumbleUpon, and Digg - and of course there are many others.
Community Building and Social Networking: If you want to build an online community for knowledge or skill sharing, using social network tools like Ning will help you get there. If you're looking to engage and inspire new supporters, setting up an organizational presence on one of the larger social networks like Facebook or MySpace is an option.
Fundraising: If you plan to use social media for fundraising, remember that you need to first use it to accomplish all of the objectives above. A call to action that asks people to give you money - especially online - is generally a result of having developed the relationships and credibility that make people want to give.
You need to pick the right hard data points or metrics that will help you track your objectives. It is important to look at trend movements and changes over time, not just numbers. But hard data points alone won't give you much value unless you harvest insights to improve your social media strategy. For social media, it is also important not to look at a single metric, you will have to evaluate your strategy performance from multiple dimensions.
As many nonprofit early adopters have learned, the secret to social media strategy success is careful, low-risk experimentation. Put another way, "You need to have failures before you can have success." Your initial experiments will be designed around trying out the tools and techniques. What's important is to set up some discovery questions on the front end and keep a constant eye on what works and what doesn't. Understand that you will most likely fail in these early efforts, so don't be risk adverse. Learn from the mistakes and reiterate over time.
The most important point is that you set up a system for learning how to improve your social media efforts over time.
In 2007, the Humane Society implemented its first photo petition campaign to protest Wendy's treatment of animals. They tracked the number of photo submissions they got, but they also listened carefully to the responses they got from participants. As Carrie Lewis mentions in the comments in the blog post on the Humane Society's campaign, "Since this was our first run at a photo petition, it was difficult to get across exactly what we wanted people to do without writing a book. So every person that wrote in and needed help was answered personally. This gave us a good idea of how to more clearly explain ourselves next time." This particular photo campaign had many technical glitches and ultimately the number of submissions was less than impressive. Did HSUS proclaim that photo competitions were a waste of time?
No. The next iteration of a photo contest called LOL Seals made it as easy as possible for people to participate. That's what they had learned from the first campaign. The first contest, they asked people to upload their photos and tag it themselves, which meant they had to create a Flickr account and know what "tagging" was. The second contest, they used the Flickr API which made everything automatic - from tagging and uploading without the user having to even touch Flickr. They had about 3,000 submissions and captured about 2,000 new email addresses.