 Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for attending today's TechSoup webinar around the Twitter world in 60 minutes presented by Alan Gunn. Before we begin, we have a few housekeeping items. This webinar will be recorded so that others who could not attend can watch the presentation. We will be sending all registrants a link to the recording. In order to minimize background noise, your phones will be muted in a listen-only mode during the presentation. We will be taking questions throughout the webinar via the chat function. At any time during the presentation, feel free to submit questions using the chat dialogue located in the lower left-hand corner of your screen. We will be answering questions received via chat during the question and answer period of our presentation. Also, you will see a raise hand button and you will not be using that feature today, so it is not necessary to click it when asking a question. 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This survey will help us improve our future presentations and collect feedback about your experience using ReadyTalk's preview service. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded March 16, 2010. I would now like to turn the conference over to Kami Griffiths from TechSoup. Great, thanks, Lori. Again, we're being recorded so that other folks who are unable to attend today will be able to participate in this webinar. You'll receive an email from me after this webinar with a copy of the PowerPoint, a link to the recording, as well as any other links that we discussed during the webinar. If there's additional questions that aren't addressed, please post them to our emerging tech forum, and I've included a link here as well as it will be a link in the follow-up email. And for those of you who are live tweeting this Twitter webinar, the hashtag is TechSoup, and we'll be talking about hashtag and all sorts of other things in a few minutes. So, just to get us started, this is around the world, around the Twitter world in 60 minutes, and we've got Alan Gunner on the line here to fill our brains full of a lot of information. There's a lot to go through, so we're going to move pretty quickly, but remember this is recorded, and you can go through and watch it later. So, Gunner, welcome. Thank you. So, quickly, tell us a little bit about yourself and aspiration. Absolutely. Thanks. Aspiration is a 501c3 non-profit that helps other non-profits make more effective use of technology. We really love to mentor and coach people in things like putting together social media strategies and show people how to have sustainable online communication efforts. This webinar is sort of typical of the kind of stuff that we love to share with people, and we encourage people to visit our website at aspirationtech.org and check out some of the other things that we're up to. I also want to recognize a few folks helping on the back end. We've got Kevin Moe and Elliot Harmon from TechSoup answering chat questions, as well as Matt Garcia from Aspiration doing the same. So, Gunner, who is this webinar for? Excellent question. We really wanted to target this webinar at folks that are relatively new to Twitter, so we're really focusing on the essential facts and the best practices about the Twitter platform. We really want to keep the focus on what we call organizational accounts. A lot of this is relevant if you want to tweet at home or tweet as an individual, but we're going to keep sort of the best practices focused on how non-profits can effectively integrate and use Twitter within their online communications. I described this set of slides as stuff we wish we'd known when we started out on Twitter. We designed it to be most valuable for folks that are just starting out or who have an account but haven't really started to use it aggressively yet. It's not intended for the power users, but if you're on the line and you are a Twitter power user, you can welcome your feedback and you can let us know what we left out or what cool thing we haven't heard about yet. Great, and maybe we could just jump right into that poll that we created. Excellent. If you see on your screen what I've got some questions for you related to, what is your attitude towards Twitter? So please go ahead and click one of those boxes and hit Submit. And I'll give you about 10 seconds to do that. I'm digging the real-time feedback. And so, okay, I'm going to close the poll. I'm closing the poll. And now, there we go. Get everyone's feedback, 55% curious, 22% excited, 12% confused, and 10% are just tired of hearing about it. And I like to comment about the fact that we left out the choice conflicted. So, right on, and I will just say that I share all of your feelings. In fact, I would say that while I'm not quite as curious as the group indicates, I am both deeply excited about Twitter and also very tired of hearing about it. And so, you'll get a balanced take of both those extremes as we go through the set of slides today. Well, tell us what is Twitter and how is it used? Right on, Twitter is a hosted messaging platform. That's fancy language for the fact that it's a website where you can create an account, send messages, and receive messages from other Twitter users. Some of the industry hype terminology is that it's referred to as micro-blogging. Normally, with blogging, you can actually post a paragraph or three. With Twitter, you are limited to 140-character messages. And the historical reason for that is that Twitter was initially envisioned as a mobile phone communications tool. So, in the same way that short message service, the SMS on cell phones, is limited to 160 characters, Twitter is limited to 140 characters. When you use Twitter, other users follow you and they see what you tweet right as you tweet it. So, Twitter is a real-time communications platform. So, what's really the big deal about Twitter? Well, Twitter is essentially a lighter-weight form of email that serves a different set of needs. It lets you do a much smaller-grain and more immediate set of messaging to those that want to follow what you're saying. The reason we consider it worth paying attention to, the reason that there is some there-there behind the hype, is that Twitter, unlike email, works in a social network paradigm. What that means is that when people are following you and you tweet a tweet for them to see if they think it is interesting, if they want to help support or spread your messages, they can retweet it to their networks. And those who are following them will see the tweets that are coming in to their Twitter account. So, this kind of propagation of messages is distinctly different from email where it is quite the exception in 2010 for lots of people to forward an email that you send them. Twitter message propagation is actually much better. In addition, because Twitter was originally conceived as a tool for mobile communication, it can reach different audiences and that can include people that are in what might be called digital divide domains, people that don't have quite the same kind of internet access as mainstream internet users, but also alternate demographics age-wise. The young hip kids that are more on cell phones than they are on computers. In addition, part of what has made Twitter so successful is it is an open platform that can be extended. And so there are literally hundreds of applications that have been built on top of or beside Twitter that add extra functionality, extra value, and extra information that people using Twitter can benefit from. We describe Twitter as a unique incremental step in online communications. It is not the revolution, but it is worth paying attention to because it certainly is a harbinger of what lies ahead in the way that people and organizations communicate online. Other things that I would say about Twitter is if you follow on questions. Many people are like, hey, is this flavor of the month? Is it going to be around in two years? We certainly think Twitter will be around in two years. The thing that subjects the questioning is whether or not it will still be relevant in two years. I laughingly remember a thing called Friendster that was just the real deal back in 2004. And Friendster still exists, but it's really quite a marginal social networking platform. Twitter has done a great job of creating a relevant and an interest that is unlike anything else that's happened to date. And so it will still be playing in two years, whether or not Facebook will be more of the central platform or Google Buzz. It still remains to be seen. I'm a fan of Twitter because they do a lot less invasion of people's privacy. So Twitter, unlike Facebook and unlike Google Buzz, doesn't have their business model predicated on invading individual users' personal data. And so we like Twitter better than we like Facebook in that regard. People sometimes say, hey, do we need both Facebook and Twitter? There's no quick answer, but it depends on who you target. Twitter and Facebook user communities are different and the ways in which Twitter and Facebook are used are also different. So we invite people to assess who their audiences are and where they are participating online. That should inform your decision as to whether or not to use Twitter or Facebook or both. Other folks wonder if Twitter will replace email. It certainly won't, but it is a nice compliment to email that serves a different set of functions. And we'll talk about what those are when we get a little bit more into the nuts and bolts of how Twitter works. Last but not least, people always like to ask the pragmatic question, hey, is this Twitter thing useful for our nonprofit? My come back is ask again in 55 minutes. We are not Twitter evangelists, but we certainly believe that if organizations consider their online communication strategy, they should absolutely take a look at Twitter and see if they think it fits in. And a final comment there, we absolutely believe that Twitter isn't very useful if you don't have an overall online communication strategy. So before you think about Twitter and its role in your organization, make sure that you're intentional about your overall online communications, the way that you use your website, the way that you use your mailing list or mailing list. If you have a blog, if you have other online real estate, Twitter is just another tool in your online communications toolbox. And part of what we're talking about on this call is how to integrate that tool into that larger strategy. So why don't we move and take a look at, so go ahead. I just wanted you to tell us a little bit about customizing our Twitter pages. Right on, let's start by looking at what a default Twitter homepage looks like. So Twitter works just like every other free service on the internet. You go, you sign up on the Twitter homepage. You get sent an email where you have to prove that you actually are someone who has that email address. You click on an activation link and suddenly you land on a page that looks something like what we have here on this slide. Once you're there, just to make a few obvious observations, what's happening, right in the top there, that's where you can tweet. You would type in up to 140 characters and you'll see that little counter in the upper right of that text area that tells you how many characters you have left as you are tweeting. And then in addition over on the right, you can see that there's other information. Who's following you and how many people are following you and how many people you are following, as well as how many lists you appear on. And we'll explain what that is in just a little while. And then down the right-hand side are other features that we'll touch on later. So in terms of customizing your Twitter account, it's not a lot of things that you can do to make a Twitter account more personalized, but you can certainly provide your organizational URL and what is called a biography, but obviously if you're creating a nonprofit Twitter account, you wanna have your mission statement or the one paragraph about Blurb about your organization. In addition, you can upload a profile image. If your organization has a logo or other icon that graphically represents your brand, that would be the best candidate for what to upload is your profile image for your nonprofit. You can also select a theme and or a background image if you want to more strongly brand your Twitter page. Warning, that can get kind of ugly if you're not careful. We at Aspiration have uploaded our profile image, but otherwise just use a default theme that comes with our Twitter account. You can also link the Twitter account with mobile phones so that you're able to send and receive tweets from the phone and never ever need to connect to the internet except for specific administrative tasks. You're also able in your customization to add geographic locations to your tweets. That is a longer conversation about whether or not that is useful information. I personally am a tad of a privacy advocate and so tweeting my location does not intuitively occur to me. You can finally change your privacy settings. You can do what's called protecting your tweets so that they are only visible to the people that you have allowed to follow you. But in general tweets are public data and the world at large, the Twitter world at large if anyone with a web browser can see the public tweets that you make. So can you tell us what are some of the essential vocabularies that we should know? Absolutely. So we've made a list here of Twitter Nails and then we'll get to the Twitter verbs. You have a Twitter username and that username is your Twitter identity and you will always be found at twitter.com slash your username and so we are Aspiration Tech. You can see our latest tweets at twitter.com slash aspiration tech. As I've already alluded, the act of posting a Twitter status update is a tweet and you will note the excellent Twitter trivia that tweet is both a noun and a verb. A follower is someone who has elected to receive your tweets as you tweet them and so you may have lots of followers, you may have only a few, but followers are the people that are listening to you on Twitter. Twitter also allows you to create lists. Lists are collections of Twitter accounts, sort of a basket of Twitter accounts that can be followed as a whole and we'll talk more about those later in this hour. And finally, there's the notion of a trend. If you go to the twitter.com homepage, you'll see that different keywords are indicated for how active they've been, how many people have tweeted them over the past hour, the past day, and the past week. Moving on to the verb side of the vocab lesson, tweaking as a verb when you tweet something that is to post a status update that will be seen by all of your followers and unless you have protected your tweets, it is also visible to your non-followers. You can follow someone else by adding them as a user that you want to get updates from. You can retweet. Retweeting is the act of taking someone else's tweet and tweeting it back out to the people that are following you. And last but not least, there is the functionality called direct messaging. You can direct message someone by sending them a private tweet message that only they see and that is a specific feature of the Twitter interface that you get by clicking on the little gear pop down menu that appears in the top right when you are looking at someone's Twitter page. So can you tell us how we get followers? Absolutely. Well, our somewhat sarcastic response is tweet good stuff. The main issue in getting good followers is offering good content, putting stuff out there that people actually find interesting. Non-profit organizations should publish timely announcements, always good to post program updates, action alerts. If you're the type of organization that wants people to do things to support you or support your programs, post an action alert, and once in a while, it's really good to post what we call an existential musing. Twitter is a first person service and so imbuing your Twitter feed, which is to say the collection of things you tweet, imbuing your Twitter feed with personal observations like having a really good staff off site today or the event went really great, we're really ready for a break. These are the kinds of tweets that really convey organizational personality and get people to feel a little bit more of a relationship with you. The other best practice around getting followers is that in addition to tweeting your own messages, retweet others. Twitter is an attention economy. Some people would call it a butt kiss economy, but that is a little bit outside of the polite zone of this call. Barger is the norm. Tweeting other people's tweets, making them visible to your networks is a way of getting them to hopefully retweet some of your content further on down the line. The other part of getting followers is the act of advertising. We've got a few screenshots here of ways that you can go ahead and advertise your Twitter availability. We strongly recommend that organizations put the Twitter follow invitation on every single webpage. If you've got a website that is template based, then you're able to put a little follow us piece of real estate on the web template. So it appears not just on your homepage, but on every page of your site because remember, here's some internet trivia, when people come to you via Google, they rarely land on your homepage. They often land on secondary pages. They don't come in through the metaphorical front door. And so having a little block that invites people to follow you on Twitter or Facebook says to people, hey, if you found what you're looking at on this page interesting, you should definitely think about following us on Twitter. In addition, if your organization sends out email newsletters, it's a really, really good idea to include in your email newsletter template the same kind of follow us invitation. You'll note that in both these examples, we invite people to follow us on Facebook. That's the F, T, that's the Twitter, Flickr, that's the blue and the pink dots, and YouTube, that's the last one on the right. By having this as a part of your email newsletter template and the web page template, you're really advertising the availability of your Twitter feed and encouraging people to stay in touch with you that way in addition to through the traditional channels of web and email. And last but not least, to the extent that people are comfortable doing it, we encourage folks to go ahead and put your Twitter address in the signature of staff emails so that as you're sending messages to people online through email, you're advertising the availability of your Twitter feed in addition to the availability of your email address. So how would you get your staff to tweet? That's a really good question. The language we use in answering that question is that you need to integrate Twitter into your organizational workflow, which is a fancy way of saying, have a process when you announce an event or do a press release that includes an explicit step called tweet about it. So usually when an organization does an event announcement, they update their website, they might update an organizational calendar, they might send out an email, they might do a blog post, and so we encourage people to simply add an extra step to existing organizational communications processes so that Twitter becomes codified as an explicit part of overall communication strategy. So when you do an event announcement, when there's a new press release, when you hire a new staff or one of your staff gets some recognition, when you have a programmatic lens, which is a campaign victory or a big grant that you receive, go ahead and tweet about all of those things and that's a great way to integrate Twitter into your organizational communications workflow. In addition, when you update your website, if you make a new blog post, if you've just published a new e-newsletter, it's also best practice to drop a quick tweet that says, hey, check out our new blog post or latest newsletter is available with a link for people to click on and go check that out. The last bullet is critical. When you want to build your following and also encourage your staff to do something strategic around Twitter, what we really recommend you do is publish news updates about allies in your part of the nonprofit world. So if you're working in the climate movement, if you're working in health and human services, if you're working in library sciences, make sure you tweet about what other people are doing. Some of this might just be retweeting other people, but some of this might be, hey, we just got this email announcement that our ally had this good thing happen to them. Tweeting a link to that information is a great way to use Twitter as a network building tool and encourage other people in your network to reciprocate. So how do you get them to tweet well? Ah, an excellent question. We strongly recommend that you have basic Twitter guidelines, and these don't need to be rocket science, but they need to be sort of what are appropriate tweets and what are not appropriate tweets. So a good example, you know, we mentioned earlier that it's a good idea to humanize your organizational tweeting. It would not be particularly clever to have a tweet on the order of, boy, somebody left some really nasty Colonel's milk in the staff refrigerator. We don't consider that to be a clever or a strategic tweet. But if you are able to tweet in a consistent first-person organizational voice, those are the kind of guidelines that an organization should consider, and it really raises the rhetorical question of how should the organization be heard online? What does the organizational voice sound like in the virtual space? That is a conversation for each organization to have. In addition, nothing better than imitation. It's a fine form of flattery in the Twitter and online realms. So study other sector-leading Twitterers. We've got a few of them listed at the end of this slide deck, but you wanna follow and study others and see what you like. It's like art. You may not know what it is, but you know what you like. And with Twitter, when you see people tweeting things that are compelling, when you see people having a tone or a content in their tweets that really strikes you as impressive or positive, don't be shy about trying to model your Twitter communications. And at the end of the day, trust your gut. Use common sense and just think about your tweets as a new way to relate, rather directly to the people that care about the work that you do. As we say here, it's a brave new world, but it's not brain surgery, it ain't rocket science, it's not even pastry-chefing. So how can you get this to scale? Great question. Well, one of the things that we encourage people to do is dip their toe in the metaphorical chat, metaphorical Twitter water. And so you start out just using Twitter as a simple announcement service, the stuff that I mentioned earlier. If you have a new key newsletter, tweet a link to it. If you have a press release, tweet a link to it. If you have a new executive director or a new director of some program, tweet about that little piece of information. Over time, as your followers grow, you'll start to have more immediate engagement. People might direct message you, people might retweet your stuff and you want to respond to those direct communications. You always want to thank people for retweeting and mentioning you as you go about your Twitter business. And as that happens and your following becomes more interactive, then you can actually start to use Twitter as an interactive tool. One of the best things you can do with Twitter is ask a question. So once you have a bunch of people following you, or even if you have three people following you, use Twitter as a knowledge network. So if you are a library that is looking for a good piece of library software, or if you are a nonprofit that is trying to figure out what you should do in a specific situation, tweeting that question to your Twitter followers is an excellent way to solicit input from your network and really start to get the bi-directional benefit out of the Twitter technology. You can also tweet action alerts, surveys, petitions, anything that invites your Twitter followers to get interactive with you. Is there anything else that we should know? Well, let's talk just a little bit about a couple of best practices. Many people ask how much tweeting is too much tweeting. And so while it is certainly possible to overtweet, it is always okay to tweet once a day, but at the same time, you don't have to tweet once a day. Quality should be your guiding light. It's really, really about tweeting things that aren't just noise. And so pay attention to your follower count. If you see it going down, that's an indicator that you're not tweeting effectively. You might be overtweeting, you might be tweeting vapidly if I could say that so delicately, but in general, frequency of tweeting is something you wanna be intentional about but not worried about. It's not until you get into the three or four or 17 tweets a day space that you can really run the risk of putting people at a discomfort level with your tweets and stopping following you. In addition, be aware about visibility of tweets. I've mentioned this before, tweets are public by default. And we recommend that people always treat all of their tweets, even the direct messages, as a permanent public record because they are stored on the Twitter server. And so you wanna be very thoughtful about the visibility of your tweets. You're able to protect your tweets. You're able to say only people who follow me can see them. But in general, as I said, treat your Twitter tweets, that's almost a tone twister, treat your Twitter tweets as public data because that puts you in the best position to not have regrets later about that which has been tweeted. And what would you recommend of who owns the account? This is a critical question. Many organizations have a take out the garbage approach to Twitter. Hey, staff member X or intern Y, we've heard about this Twitter thing. Why don't you go set up a Twitter account and see how it works? And so staff member X or intern Y sets up the account and makes the contact email either their organizational email, staff member Joe at organization.org or worst yet, personjoe at gmail.com or hotmail.com. We strongly recommend that you set up an organizational email alias, something of the form Twitter at your organization.org and have that forward to the staff member or members that will manage the Twitter account. In so doing, you make it so that if that staff member leaves or if they're sick on a certain day or for any other reason you need access to the account, contact with the account, including password recovery, goes through an email address that is not owned by an individual staff member or routed through an email address at a third party like hotmail or gmail that you don't control or have any access to. In general, what you wanna do around your Twitter account, as with all of your online accounts for your nonprofit, is to plan for different staff managing that account over time and have best practices in place to make it easy to transition ownership and responsibility as your organizational staffing profile changes. Can you tell us what a URL shortener is? Absolutely. So this is one of the sort of more technical aspects of this presentation, but a very useful one. When you tweet, you often want to share a link. In fact, that's one of the most popular uses of Twitter, is to share or publicize a link. But Twitter only takes 140 characters per tweet, so many URLs either take up that whole 140 or heaven forbid overflow, the 140 character limit. So there are these very clever URL shortening services that give you what we call tweet friendly URLs. So how does that work? Well, a URL shortener lets you submit a URL and once you've submitted it, you go ahead and get back a shorter version of the URL. So the example that we've got here on this slide is that I have submitted a link to an aspiration webpage and I get back a shorter version of that link. We use a shortening service called Bitly. The reason we like Bitly is because it produces nice short-urls and good usage statistics. What you're able to do with that is then link, excuse me, paste that link into your tweet and when people receive your tweet, they are able to click on that link and it magically redirects to the URL that you originally intended them to use. So examples of those services, Bitly is one that we like and recommend. Tiny URL is the original, the first URL shortener. Some would argue that there were others, but Tiny URL was the first one we got popularized. There are 10 gazillion to use the technical explicit count. There are 10 gazillion, oops, excuse me, now there are 10 gazillion and one URL shortening tools that each have unique features. When in doubt, we recommend you use Bitly at the standard. Matt, our social media staff person just pointed out to me that in an effort to increase security for the Twitter community, Twitter themselves are going to be publishing a URL shortening service to improve security and I'll talk more about that in just a couple of seconds. So can you explain what a hashtag is? Absolutely. So hashtags especially mark keywords that people place inside of their tweets to signals to other people that they are talking about a particular topic or subject. So metaphorically, you can think of a hashtag inside of a tweet as tantamount to the subject line of an email. The way that you indicate that you are putting a hashtag in a tweet is to simply precede that word and it can't have any spaces in it. You can precede that term with pound sign and so you'll note that I used three examples. NPTEC is the hashtag that all nonprofit technologists use to flag it when they are tweeting about something that other nonprofit technologists might be interested in. My wonderful wife is from Costa Rica so she'll often look for tweets that contain Costa Rica and if you're a Politico or worried about what's going on on the hill right now, you might be looking for the hashtag healthcare to see what's going on with the public option, Harry Reid's hairdo or the latest Republican conundrum. In addition, when people do tweets, take a look at this example down below, you might mention other people that you're working with. So Invinio is a great friend of ours that worked down the street here in San Francisco. They put pound sign Haiti to indicate that they are tweeting about the work that they are doing on disaster relief in Haiti. They say that their first long-distance Wi-Fi internet link is up and then they put at Save the Children, they are mentioning the Save the Children organization and that nomenclature with the app sign references the fact that that's another Twitter username and last but not least, they link to the new Wi-Fi internet link, a picture I'm guessing and they use the URL shortener Auli which is one character less than Bitly and so you're able to click on that HTTP Auli slash blah blah blah shortened link and get a look at what it is that Invinio has been up to. There you see people using both a hashtag and a shortener in concert together. In addition, as you're using hashtags, you're able to use Twitter search feature to track them and so what I've got here on this next slide is a picture of the search results for the hashtag in P-Tech and so this was something I just did yesterday and you're seeing the last three tweets that contain the hashtag in P-Tech. I was going to ask about the Twitter list. Can you tell us, we mentioned it earlier, but can you tell us more about Twitter lists? Absolutely. Twitter lists are a relatively new feature. They've only been out for a few months but it is the idea that if you are tracking people who tweet, you may want to group them topically or in some other way. So if you are following the healthcare issue, you might have a list of Twitterers that have healthcare interests or frequently tweet about healthcare issues. If you are tracking a specific aspect of the library field, you might have a list of really cool library technology tweeters. The functionality that you get is that by adding people to a Twitter list, you create a single unified new feed of all of the tweets that come from all of the Twitter users that are in that list. So it's a nice way to create something analogous to a Twitter mailing list in that you are forwarding all of the tweets that come from a collection of users. In addition, you are very honored if other people put you on their Twitter lists. So we are a nonprofit technology organization. Many people make lists of nonprofit technology tweeters. And so we show up on a lot of nonprofit technology Twitter lists and that allows people to discover us and find out what we're all about. So one thing to think about here is that if you're new to Twitter and looking both to do some discovery and also to build your Twitter brand, think about creating useful lists. If you have a domain expertise, if you are the expert on sustainability of bluebirds in climate change regions, you might want to put together a Twitter list of people who are tweeting about bluebirds sustainability in climate change regions. And then all the other people who care about that issue or that domain of knowledge will actually follow you and you can build thought leadership around that and add your own commentary through tweets into that list feed. There are many symbols within the tweets. Can you explain how those work? Absolutely, let's talk about a couple of the basic ones. As I already alluded, when you mentioned another Twitter user, it's considered the best practice to put an at sign in front of their user name as a way of signaling to people to get your tweet that you're talking about another Twitter user that they might want to check out or follow. So I've got this example here of a tweet that reads, hey, listening to at sign aspiration tech give a San Francisco groovy webinar. And so if someone tweeted that, the person receiving that tweet could then realize and go look at the aspiration tech Twitter account. In addition, and I just give one example here, but there is a common pattern of what I might call canonical hashtags. So you might have a hashtag like NPTEC or healthcare, but you can also have hashtags like the fail hashtag as a universal way of complaining about things that don't work. And people who follow the fail tag often get amusement at what other people are complaining about having failed. So the example I use, if you're from San Francisco, you know that our public transit is not our proudest moment. And so the SFMUNI buses often run several months behind schedule. So my example here is the SFMUNI, and I use the SFMUNI tag, SFMUNI 24 bus, 45 minutes late, pound sign fail. That would show up for anyone tracking the fail hashtag and anyone from San Francisco would be what else is new. So can you tell us a little bit about fishing on Twitter? Absolutely. As Twitter becomes more popular, the bad guys get more and more interested. Fishing is a general term for online malevolent behavior that tries to trick users into divulging their passwords and other personal data so that that information can be used and abused. So what happens is in the Twitter world, one of your followers or one of your friend's Twitter accounts gets compromised through a trick and someone bad gets access to their Twitter account and then sends you a tweet saying, hey, check this super cool link out, hoping that you will click on it. And that link, especially if you are using an insecure browser, that link may take you to a page that tries to install a virus on your computer or tries to trick you into logging in to a service that you normally log into. So many fishing scams take you to a page that looks like a Twitter login page or it looks like a Facebook login page trying to trick you into supplying your password and username so that they can use it and then trick your friends too. So what we really encourage people to do, anytime somebody sends you a tweet that includes a link, think thrice before you click. And another great thing to know about there is a website called longurl.com, L-O-N-G, longurl.com, that will expand short URLs to let you know and look and see if you trust that short URL. So be very suspicious of expanded URLs that come from faraway places like .cn and .ru domains that are likely some sort of an online hustle and that is not to say that there are many valid URLs from those countries, but there are many .cn, which is China and .ru URLs that are used in fishing scams. So be mindful as you click on links that people send you especially if you weren't expecting a link from that person. And anytime you get asked for login information when you weren't expecting it, make sure that you look twice at the URL, the web address that appears at the top of your browser and then it looks like an address that you are used to seeing when you log in to that service. How can we tell if it's working? Well, a good question. Many people ask, hey, how do I measure my Twitter ROI for return on investment? And our answer is, gee, you know, that's not well-defined, but that said, there are phenomenal set of what are called listening tools and our advice to people who wanna know whether or not Twitter is working, whether or not it's offering benefits to your organization is to set up a listening tool and see where your tweets are propagating, see who is retweeting you and see who is mentioning both you and the issues that you care about. So examples of listening tools include netvibes.com, which is a nice listening tool that supports lots of different technologies, including Twitter. It also lets you listen on Facebook. It lets you listen for general Google searches. Netvibes has a lot of great features and it's priced correctly for nonprofits. It's F-R-E-E-free. Another very focused listening tool is hashtag.org. On hashtag.org, as you might guess, you can see how each hashtag is trending. So you can look for the hashtag Lady Gaga to see silly trending or you can look for a more substantive hashtag like healthcare to see how the healthcare tag is trending and what people are saying. If you have crazy nonprofit money and can spend hundreds of dollars a month on tracking your social media, Radiant Six is a pretty impressive but very expensive service for also doing this kind of online listening. And on this next slide, I've got a screenshot of our Netvibes listening station. And for those of you that have Bionic Vision, you can see we are looking at our Twitter feed. We are also looking at back tweets, which is people that have shortened some of our URLs on the aspiration website and added them to their tweets. But this is the Netvibes listening tool at netvibes.com allowing us to see where we get mentioned in Twitter and where we get mentioned elsewhere, including Facebook. And we will be lucky enough to have Gunnar on a future webinar talking about this topic. So April 22nd, we'll be having he and Amy Sapaward talking about this topic. Very excited about that one. So let's talk about some tools. Can you share some information? Absolutely, and just by way of talking about what's ahead in the slides, you know, we're a little bit behind on time, so I'm just gonna give a quick overview and invite folks to sort of leave it as an exercise to the reader to check out some of the slides that come after. As I mentioned, with Twitter, you have the ability to extend the Core Twitter platform and many, many people have done many great extensions of the Twitter platform. Because Twitter is an open platform, some people have written quiet applications that let you manage your Twitter relationships. You can group the people that you follow into separate groups. You can tweet from your desktop as opposed to having to go to twitter.com to actually post a tweet. And in general, you can better manage your Twitter account using these Twitter clients. There are also some excellent Twitter search tools that let you explore Twitter content in addition to seeing who's tweeting about you and your issues. You can track geographic patterns and you can also track temporal patterns. What time of day do people tweet about healthcare the most? I don't care about that, but I'm sure someone does. In addition, and this is to me one of the most compelling sort of tools, there are things called tweet schedulers. Many people are like, wow, I just don't think I'm gonna remember to tweet every day. There are services that let you queue up a bunch of tweets and then tweet them out at regular points in the future. So organizations like QuikWatch, who we have big fans of the way that they use social media, QuikWatch queues up a fact of the day about malevolent corporations. And as the Twitter gains roll by, the twerper service that they use or other tweet schedulers posts a tweet that is just a new piece of information about a corporation that QuikWatch is tracking. There are also Twitter petitions that let you ask other people in the Twitter network to build support around an issue or a cause that you care about. There are now actual Twitter fundraising tools that let you take online donations through Twitter using services like PayPal and Network for Good. And last but not least, there are analytical tools in addition to some of the listening tools that I just mentioned that let you track how you're doing in Twitter, how your retweets are trending, how's that for a malevolent? But you're able to use these analytical tools to see how you're doing. And as I mentioned, I've given examples of all these tools on the subsequent pages, but I think what I'd like to do just so we can get to questions, I'm gonna jump ahead to slide 39 and tell you about a few nonprofits that we really, really like a lot. These are nonprofits that we think do a great job of both tweeting and retweeting others. So three that we would recommend that you check out and get to know better, Kibisa is an organization that does technology capacity building work in Africa. They are very active Twittererers, how's that for a malevolent? And we really are good friends with Kibisa. Wiser Earth, based right here in the San Francisco Bay Area, they do all kinds of capacity building across the NGO sector globally. Their Twitter account is very lively and very fun. And Invinio, who we used in an example earlier, they do sustainable hardware in the developing world. So solar-powered wireless networks and low-powered computers, we really love to see the tweets that Invinio tweets because they are really interesting technologically. In addition, no Twitter overview would be complete without mentioning few rock stars in the Twitter arena. Beth Cantor, the elder state's person of nonprofit social media, always fun to follow her, though that bet she is prolific. Ash Shepherd, who tweets as tax in power, he just put out incredibly useful summaries of knowledge about social media and Twitter. And Britt Bravo, a good and longtime friend of aspiration at TechSoup, Britt has lots of great things to say. And if we'd had room for one more line or two more lines on this, a couple of other Twitter accounts that we really, really think are worth following. N10 and Holly at N10 have really great things to say on Twitter and idealware.org. Twitter.com slash idealware are also great Twitter accounts. We'll make sure we get all of those onto the resources page that we post after this webinar. Why do we think these folks are good Twitterers? They tweet useful materials and that's a critical criteria. You want your Twitters to be usable and useful. But they also retweet frequently so letting their followers know about cool things that are going on with other Twitter accounts. And these people also reply to direct messages. It is critical if you're gonna play in Twitter that you actually reply when people get in touch with you. And finally, our good non-profit Twitter examples also make good use of lists. We recommend that you check out who these folks follow and who they retweet. This is good study material to get a sense of exactly where you can be most effectively tweeting and how. Great, we're gonna jump to questions right now. We have quite a few that have been stacked up since we started the presentation. So if you have a question now please submit it via the chat. But a couple themes are what Twitter clients should we use and how do they allow multiple users to post to one account? Great questions. So I will confess that I'm a web-based Twitter user so I don't personally run a Twitter client. That said, most people that I know and love use Twitter clients like TweetDeck. But the cool thing about Twitter clients is that they are free. And so what we strongly encourage people to do is take 10 or 15 minutes and go ahead and download a few of them and see what you think. If you just Google for best Twitter clients, you'll get a really, really good list of Twitter tools. And in addition, one of the links on that resources slide that we just jumped over, Aspiration maintains a website called Social Source Commons. That's an inventory of all nonprofit software and on that link at Social Source Commons is another list of really good Twitter clients. As far as sharing a Twitter account, a service that we should have mentioned in this presentation that I'm very impressed by Co-Tweet. So if you go and I believe it's Co-Tweet.com, Co-Tweet allows people to effectively share a Twitter account. Great questions. Social Source Commons, the longest, ugliest, nonprofit tech domain name. And that's the dot org. And just to let folks now be reviewing the resource page before we end and all of these links that we're talking about will be in the follow-up message. So another question had to do, how do we find out about the demographics of our Twitter users? That's a great question. Some of the analytic tools can give you information about geographic location. But one of the things I like about Twitter is it's a relatively anonymous service. Twitter does not collect a lot of data on you. And in fact, the only things that you can give Twitter vis-a-vis personalizing are a URL, a little profile blurb and an icon. So some of the analytic tools use sort of technical trickery to figure out other information and you can tell Twitter that you wanna add geographic location to your tweets so that others can know geographically where you are tweeting from. But in general, demographic research on Twitter is a non-rich discipline, though some of the analytic tools surprise me with some of the information that they'll give you. Okay, and some people have some questions about, we talked about this a little bit about rebranding your Twitter page. You talked about branding it, but what about rebranding it? Well, Twitter is one of those services where you have to use their web address. So you can't, you know, Twitter will not let you do what we call a white label kind of rebranding. You cannot create twitter.techsuit.org or twitter.aspirationtech.org, but you can create twitter.org slash username. The best practice there, if it's still available, you want your Twitter username to match your domain name of your nonprofit. So if you are aspiration tech.org, it is a good idea to have your username be aspiration tech. That said, we recommend that you get a graphically pretty version of your organizational logo or graphic to use as your Twitter profile icon. And then from there, you can think about uploading a background image, but as I mentioned earlier, do that with caution because it is the exception in my experience that background images add to a Twitter page. And we are big believers that just a really well-conceived Twitter icon, a Twitter profile picture is a really strong way to brand without making your page, shall we say visually off-putting. From there, the kind of things that we really do recommend, make sure that you have defined your organizational hashtags, both for the organization, and that's usually just your username, but also for your issues. So if you're working on healthcare, if you're working on a specific aspect of social justice, if you're working in a specific subdomain of library sciences, you want to make sure that you have hashtags that you consistently use. And when people tweet about you and about your work, that you tell them what hashtags to use so that they are also indicating consistently what information is being published relevant to what you are doing online. Those, I think, are the main practices around branding and Twitter. And in addition, just be really intentional when you tweet about having consistent organizational messaging. As I said earlier, Twitter is just a channel of your larger online communication strategy. And to the extent that you have talking points and consistent branding language that you use, make sure that you use that in your tweets and are very intentional about using that language consistently. There are a lot of questions about hashtags. People are wondering, do they need to register them or how do they create a hashtag? That is a superb question. The good news is no. Many conventions in Twitter, including hashtags, were invented by the users of Twitter. So hashtagging just happened when a bunch of Twitter people started to want to indicate that they were talking about specific hashtag topics. And so examples of sort of canonical hashtags that I already mentioned, pound sign, fail, there's a concept that Twitter publicizes called Follow Friday. And so you put pound sign and then the two words follow Friday all run together. And you mention another Twitter user that you think other people should know about. So you can say, my pound sign, follow Friday is TechSoup. And it would be AppSign TechSoup to indicate that that's their Twitter username. Hashtags are basically a freestyle art. And so you can put a hashtag in front of anything. And it is often a source of Twitter's humor to put a hashtag in front of some silly language or another. And a question from Jennifer, where can we find the follow-up icon to add to our website on newsletter? This is a question we've gotten asked on a couple of our social media webinars. I will literally say, steal them. We strongly encourage people to go to aspirationTech.org and borrow ours. Just right-click and save image as. We will humbly confess that's how we got them ourselves. We borrowed ours from a couple of other organizations, including ruckus.org. But we basically honor the time on our tradition of reusing branded internet graphics. And the organizations, to my knowledge, none of those organizations have really easy-to-use pages where you can get those icons. Though I need to check on that and see if that is still a true statement. But we basically just say, go find them on a page that has them already and just right-click and save as. Because you're just reusing a branded graphic the organization that owns rights to that graphic wants you to reuse. The only thing to be careful about is make sure that you're using something that looks good as an isn't sort of jaggy or looks like a really low-quality graphic. That's the only time you'll ever annoy anyone who's Twitter or Facebook or YouTube or Flickr iconography you are making use of. And to lawyers in the audience, I apologize for this, shall we say, low-bag approach to graphic utilization. One question from Virginia, does look bad if nonprofits start tweeting, do a few tweets, but then abandon it? So actually, I broke up, can you say it again? Oh, sure, you know, when nonprofits will start tweeting and maybe tweet a few times, but then abandon it because they don't have the time, does that look bad? I don't think it looks good. You know, the way that we encourage people to dip that toe in the water is, get a Twitter account and start following some of those workflow processes that we recommended earlier. When you publish your newsletter, when you update your website, when you announce an event, whatever our sort of public communications events, simply make it a canonical part of your organizational process to tweet that information. And then over time, see if you are able to sustain that task as a part of your communications workflow. As you find that to be sustainable, that's when you start adding the Twitter icons to all the pages on your website or adding the Twitter icon to your email newsletter once you've sort of filled up that channel with some content and convinced yourself it's sustainable. But my personal belief is that the incremental cost of tweeting is so low that nonprofits should really force themselves to do it. And that is to say, if you're already updating your website, if you're already publishing an e-newsletter, it is literally a matter of one or two minutes to post an additional tweet that lets a different audience and a bunch of people that may be following you in a different way on mobile phones or sort of as a different audience to know about new content that's available on your website. So we really do believe you should view Twitter at the very least as a very useful announcement service whose utility is going to continue to grow. Twitter is already sort of peaking in terms of user growth. They were hoping to become the first one billion user site. But that said, there are hundreds of millions of people on Twitter. And so putting out announcements about what you do on a Twitter account is a great way to cast a message out into a very large void where it is guaranteed the land in front of some number of eyeballs. So we strongly encourage organizations to try to integrate that extra several minutes into their communications publishing tasks. Well, that's all the time that we have for questions. Thank you so much, Gunnar. We wanted to bring up the slide of resources and we've got dozens more that we'll include in the follow-up message that you will receive in about two hours. I wanted to let you guys know about something exciting that's happening here and that we've been nominated for an award through the Financial Times. There's a URL here that we'll send out in the follow-up message. If you wouldn't mind spending a second to vote for us, it would be great to increase our visibility. But I also want to let you know if your question was not answered today at this webinar, we have a topic started in our community forum. And here goes a shortened URL that you'll get in the follow-up message. And please post your questions there. We'll have our local experts answering those questions. If you're new to TechSoup, we've got more than just webinars and donated software. We've got articles and a blog and community forums. We post upcoming events. And in general, we just want to help out the nonprofits as much as possible. And our upcoming webinars, we're talking to Salesforce next week and helping you understand if Salesforce is the right CRM for you. And then the following, I guess it's two weeks after that, we'll be talking about donor databases. And we'd like to thank ReadyTalk. And I'm so happy that this has all worked out without any major glitches. So ReadyTalk, this was made possible by ReadyTalk, which has donated the use of their system to help TechSoup expand awareness of technology throughout the nonprofit sector. ReadyTalk helps nonprofits and libraries in the US and Canada reach geographically dispersed areas and increase collaboration through their audio conferencing and web conferencing services. So again, I'd like to thank Gunner for his wonderful presentation and Matt and Elliot and Kevin for answering questions and the ReadyTalk team for making sure this all worked perfectly. Thanks for attending today. And I hope you learned a lot. Please fill out our post-event survey that will pop up right after this window closes. Thanks, Gunner. Thank you, Kevin. We'll talk to you later. Bye-bye. Bye, everyone.