 Welcome to TechSoup Talks. This is Integrating Social Media into your website. My name is Kami Griffiths and I'd like to welcome Alan Gunn, the Executive Director of Aspiration Tech. I'd also like to thank ReadyTalk for sponsoring this webinar series. So Alan, or as he likes to go by Gunner, would you like to talk a little bit about yourself and aspiration? Absolutely. Thanks so much Kami. I do run an organization called Aspiration. We exist to help nonprofits be more effective in their use of technology. We love to coach organizations in best practices when you're doing websites, social media, online campaigning, or just about anything that has to do with anything online. We operate San Francisco Nonprofit Technology Center here at 10th Admission, and it is a delight to be on this call. Thank you so much Kami. Oh, my pleasure. So it's great having you. So why don't we quickly go over the agenda? Why don't we do that? Excellent. So we want to divide this call into three phases, and I will apologize in advance that it is a lot of information. Kami and I are in discussions about how we might create additional webinars to drill deeper on some of the material. But as we've got the call structured, we really want to raise awareness about core best practices and invite questions and follow-up learning. The first part of the agenda is going to focus on what I lovingly call Housekeeping 2.0, just the basics of managing your social media real estate online, and how to actually physically add sort of a piece of web real estate by piece of web real estate level, link things together. Then I want to talk for a little bit about conceptualizing the role of different online channels when you're talking about social media in conjunction with your website. So how do you conceptualize the role of Facebook, the role of Twitter, the role of your website, your email list, and your blog? What are good conceptual models for making sure you understand how to complement those in a way that is effective across all channels? And finally, we'll talk about some best practices, and this is the area where we'll just touch on them and not go as deep as we might go in a longer format meeting, but give people an idea of some of these processes and best practices that you can follow to sort of automate some of this stuff and integrate it into your organizational process. Excellent. So let's just jump in. Where do we get started? Great, great question. So I call this the necessary disclaimer slide, but I think it's always important to explicitly state all the things we're about to cover are predicated on the assumption that an organization already has an overall communication strategy and process. In simple terms, that means that you know how you describe your organization and your work, and you've got that sort of agreed upon within your staff and your stakeholder networks. You know what you're trying to achieve in your overall communications and also online. And this is the one where I wink and act like everybody has this when very few people do. You have well-defined processes for creating and posting online content. We'll talk more about that later. In that context, you would then want to do your social media plan where you define your concrete goals for online engagement, both overall and per program or per campaign area. Moving along to the next slide. When it comes to what I lovingly call housekeeping 2.0, first and foremost, if you're thinking about moving into social media, even if you don't think you'll go there soon, it's important to go ahead and reserve the online real estate that you anticipate using so that others, especially opponents or people who you do not like, can't reserve it on your behalf and use it to other than your best ends. So if you think you might use Facebook, you think you might use Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, or MySpace, go ahead and get accounts on there so that you can request the usernames that you desire on the services that allow you to request a username. Some services like Facebook require you to get a certain minimum number of fans or followers before you can ask for a username. That's a process worth starting now. If you are just maintaining these sites, make sure to log in every 60 to 90 days just to give a pulse to that account. Maybe do a minor update just so that they know that you're not abandoned that account. And as important as anything else, don't forget to keep your domain names up to date and a particular best practice. If you have a .org domain address, it is always a best practice to purchase the variants that are .net and .com so that people you don't like, including squatters and spammers, can't grab those from you and direct traffic to look alike sites or things you don't want. A key point is to make them look like a family. So strive for naming consistency. You can pick your username on Twitter. You can pick your username on sites like YouTube. You want to make those usernames be the same. And a best practice is to have that username when possible match your domain name. So we are aspirationtech.org. We have Twitter account, twitter.com slash aspirationtech. Our Facebook account is facebook.com slash aspirationtech. The belief is that you want to make your Twitter and Facebook and other online account names guessable based on your domain name. You want to also, when you set up your Twitter or your Facebook or any of those other accounts, use consistent branding. Use the same organizational logo where taglines are an option. Use the same organizational tagline and language so that you are able site to site and channel to channel to look like one coordinated brand. Very good ideas to set us up. So what's after we set these accounts up? What happens next? Great question. One thing that we really encourage people to take the time to do and in the mad rush to be hip and cool and totally socially media tricked out, people sometimes forget to consider which online audiences they are trying to reach. So what you want to do is really do some discussion in your organization about who you are trying to reach. Is it a youth audience? Is it a business audience? Is it a political audience? Is it a senior or older audience? And then talk about which channels seem most appropriate. If you are trying to reach teenagers, it is still conventionalism that MySpace is a little bit better than Facebook, though that opinion changes day to day. But in general you want to pick one or two channels to focus on and integrate those channels into what we call your publishing workflow. The way that you publish information online. We recommend as you start using Facebook or start using Twitter, keep simple metrics. What we do at Aspiration Each Week is we take an accounting of how many Facebook followers we have, how many Twitter followers we have, as well as our website traffic. And you want to track that over time to see if it is really trending upward consistently. If you are on Twitter and you have gone from one follower a month ago to two followers today, that is useful data to tell you that Twitter is not being a particularly active channel for you. Whereas if you are on Twitter and you have gone from 10 a month ago to 100 this week and you feel like you are going to keep that rate going, that is very useful data to let you know your time is being well spent developing that channel. And you want to see where people respond. If you are tweeting on Twitter, which is a phrase I have never gotten used to saying, or otherwise on Facebook publishing updates, you want to see if people are responding. You want to see if people are retweeting your tweets or responding to your Facebook update. In general, what you are trying to discern as you start to integrate these channels into your online strategy is what propagates. Are different channels more active for you? And are different kinds of messages that you put out in those channels more likely to be retweeted or forwarded or otherwise generate activity? So how can we track all of these accounts? That's a great question. One of the things we really, really recommend is that an organization keep an inventory of online venues. And that includes an account, an organizational owner per online channels. And so you should have a spreadsheet that lists your Twitter account and who is in charge of that, your Facebook account, and who is in charge of that. Some words, it's always the same person. Other organizations, it's never the same person. But it's really good to keep an inventory of all the online venues. A best practice, don't store the passwords in there, but do store renewal dates where those are relevant for such things as domain names so that you're being intentional about maintaining your online real estate through one tracking document or one tracking information source. A best practice, and this is something we feel really strongly about, a mistake organizations make is taking individual staff mailing addresses and making those the contact addresses for the accounts. So if I'm Gunner at aspirationtech.org, it is not a best practice for the organizational Facebook account to have that email address as the contact. It should instead be Facebook at aspirationtech. On our Twitter account, we use Twitter at aspirationtech. And a best practice there is those aliases go to more than one staff member. They go to the owner of that account or the maintainer of that account as well as the operations manager so that if one of us is out of the office or sick, someone else is able to get access to that account. So folks want to hear about how to integrate social media into their website. So can you talk to me about that? Absolutely. So let's talk about what I called earlier, the housekeeping 2.0 of linking the real estate. Certainly on all the social media accounts you have, you are able to specify a URL associated with your account. You want to make sure that those all link back to your main organizational page. So from Twitter, from Facebook, you want to make sure that those all link back to your main organizational page. You also want to update on a website that has what we call page templates. If you are publishing your website in what is called a template-based fashion, and that may sound technical, but what I mean is if you have a content management system, if you are running something like Plone or Drupal or Joomla or WordPress, you should be able to update the page template or templates to link to your social media channels. It's a best practice to put it with the email signup area and have it above the fold, which is to say visible before people have to scroll on the page. You also want to link to appropriate accounts from your contact page. Imagine that people might want to contact you via Facebook or contact you via Twitter instead of email or phone, the things they did back when I was a younger person. And you can potentially link from staff pages to staff Twitter and Facebook accounts, but that is a longer conversation because organizations should really have a very intentional conversation about whether or not you want to blur the lines between staff channels and organizational channels. And while that's beyond the scope of this call, it's a critical topic to have on your organizational radar as you try to figure out your overall social media strategy. Let's take a look at some examples of the way that Aspiration does this. And I'm not saying that we are super perfect in the way that we do it, but we are experimenting and trying to put this stuff out there in a way that really does represent what we think are the best practices for nonprofit web pages. We've already got an email signup area on our website. What we simply did was add this Follow Us block above that where we link to our Facebook, our Twitter, our Flickr, and our YouTube accounts with the idea being, we'll meet you wherever you want us to meet you. And people can click on those and follow us or fan us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, and otherwise become aware of those channels that we're publishing on instead of just coming to our website. In addition, if you are sending out email using a template, so if you are using a tool like Vertical Response or Constant Contact or Democracy in Action, all of those tools let you create templates for sending out email. It's critical that you integrate your social media links into your email templates so that as you're sending out email messages, you're again conveying the message that you can be reached on these other channels. So same exact block that you saw from our website, but we've put it here on the right side on the top of our email template. And one last visual before we get back to bullet point land. I think it's a matter of personal preference. I don't think you want to force all staff members to do this, but it's really nice to add the relevant links to the signature of your email message so that people can know that you're available on Twitter, and Facebook, and other channels when they look at an email message that they've gotten from you. This particular message is a very in-depth conversation between Kami and myself regarding the syllabus for this particular call. Excellent. So you've explained how to integrate. Now what? Great. Once you've got that under control, now you get to the hard part. So yeah, you've got the housekeeping taken care of. You've created accounts. You've decided on which ones you want to try and animate. How do you coordinate the different channels to get maximum effect? You need to understand the role of each channel. Really understand the different purposes and values for each channel. And to do that, we recommend three specific best practice processes that have served us extremely well. The first is message calendaring, and that is the shocking, shocking assertion that you should actually plan what you're going to say online weeks or oh my goodness, months in advance so as to follow a structured narrative arc. And I'll talk more about that in just a second. Secondly, we recommend a thing called a publishing matrix. And that's a very fancy phrase for having a spreadsheet where you track the different types of online content that you publish, a newsletter, an event announcement, an action alert, anything that you might publish, a white paper, any document, anything that you're already putting out over email or web, you want to enumerate the different types of content that you publish. And then in each column of that spreadsheet put the different channels you publish to and what you would do in each channel for each type of content. I'll revisit that concept in just a minute. And lastly, the notion of social media dashboarding or setting up a listening station there are excellent free online tools that let you track the propagation of your Twitter messages, let you see how well you're being mentioned online in blogs, in blog comments on random web pages. And so we recommend setting up a social media dashboard so that you can find out if this stuff is actually reaching people or generating online activity. And again, more on that in just a minute. Moving on to the next slide. When you're talking about the different roles for different channels, the question is do you model those channels as a spectrum of communications options? Not as to say there's different messages that are appropriate for different channels. Some channels are friendlier with frequent messaging. Other channels you want to show restraint and message less. Email being an example of a channel you don't want to overuse. You can have different tone and voice in the respective channels. I'll say more about that in a minute. And you also will find that your time and labor investment versus oops, there's an acronym, return on investment is a critical thing to consider because social media channels can take up a lot of time without necessarily delivering near-term results. And so I'll talk about that in just a second. Moving on down the line. So you can start slowly and ramp up in thinking about these roles for different channels. One arc that we like you to consider is start by treating things like Facebook and Twitter as simple announcement services. If there's a new publication, if you're having an event, if you just won a major victory as a campaigning organization, just use Facebook and Twitter as a simple announcement service where you make the announcement and link back to your website to the page that gives further information on the topic. From there you can move to a slightly more engaged strategy what we call a lightweight communications channel where you're sharing more frequent updates, perhaps actually trying to engage dialogue with your users online to see if there's a pulse, to see if people actually want to be working in that channel with you on your programmatic areas. If that happens, heaven forbid that Spark lights a metaphorical fire, then you can talk about whether or not your Facebook page or your Twitter account can become anything resembling a collaborative hub. An example of that, we use Flickr, the picture sharing site, as a collaborative hub at our events. People who take pictures at aspiration events can upload them to Flickr, tag them with our aspiration tech tag, and then those pictures actually feed into our website and feed a library of event pictures that we utilize in any number of communication situations. And finally, oh my goodness, all of the above is transpired. You're getting traction. It feels like your time is well spent. Then it's time to talk about whether or not you might want to move to what I'd phrase as an immersive community engagement sphere. What the heck do I mean by that? If you've really got a passionate online audience in your Facebook space, in your MySpace space, any number of other online channels, and you have staff resources to really push energy and time into that, you can do some very, very impressive things in those spaces. An example of an organization that does that very impressively, students for a free Tibet, a group that is working on the Tibetan freedom issue, they do a brilliant job of keeping their Facebook account as a central place for the student target demographic to engage, to get updates, and to share information, and they really get more value out of that than their primary website, at least in certain campaign situations. But from there, let's move to some of this spectrum stuff that I alluded to earlier. One way to think about these different channels is to arrange them, as I have on this slide, as a spectrum and consider how they differ across different lenses. So when it comes to target audience, one thing to think about is that your website has a fairly anonymous component to it. Most people find that the majority of traffic to your website comes from search engines such as Google. So you have potential supporters, people learning about your work and your organization, or people who have the poor fortune to type in words that match your pages, but have no interest in what you are doing, landing anonymously on your website. And so the target audience there can be thought of as really general public and people that we would like to get interested in what we do. As you move from right to left on this spectrum, you change your target audience. Email is a less anonymous channel because people have given you their email addresses one way or another, so they have signaled that they are willing to let you communicate with them. And consequently the target audience is folks who are familiar to a greater or lesser degree with your work. Blogging takes that a step further. With blogging people have subscribed to your blog, they read your posts, and they may in fact comment and interact with you. And Facebook and Twitter, well that's where it's getting downright intimate because Facebook and Twitter users are quite comfortable with a daily update or multiple updates per day. And people that are on those channels often want continuous information and details about your work. If you are doing a direct action where you are actually on the ground somewhere someday tweeting every 15 or 30 minutes to say, you know, things are going great, we've got 500 people here, that's the kind of way that you can use those channels without fear of offending the people listening because they know the deal. They know those channels are higher frequency channels, and the target audience for those channels is ready to know about what you are doing. Let's take it to a different lens. If you buy this spectrum idea that I am lying down, then next we can talk about tone and voice. In the same sense that your target audience is different from channel to channel, the tone and voice with which you address them also differs. When you are writing content for your website and to a large degree for your email messages, you'll have what I call the first-person plural we or the org. And it kind of sounds like you are puffing out your chest as you talk. We, the organization, would like you, the recipient to know that this is what we are doing. And while different orgs may have different tones, you are effectively speaking in a relatively formal construct. Blogging is a bridge in this regard. Blogs tend to be much more personal, much more first-person, and include much more, shall we say, subjective content. Phrases like, I think, we think, we believe, we know are much more colloquial than the kind of language you'll find on the About Us page of most nonprofit websites. And as you move into Facebook and Twitter channels, it is critical that you model those channels as dialogues with other people as opposed to more anonymous conversations. So if you want an example of a worst practice, an example of putting the wrong tone and voice into a channel, we've seen organizations paste entire press releases into their Facebook status update. That's a worst practice, because instead of saying, hey, we just dropped a press release, check it out at this link, which would be the kind of tone you might put in your Facebook channel, pasting six or seven paragraphs of text is basically saying, I don't really care who gets this, I'm just doing my job and sticking this content on this channel. So we strongly encourage people to think of the tone and voice in the context of the channel. And in this spectrum, as you move to the left, you're thinking much more personal, much more intimate tone, like you're talking to a friend, like you're talking to someone who really, really specifically cares about what you do. But wait, there's more. In addition to the tone and the audience issues, there's the question of which channels do I use for which kinds of messages. With your website, you will usually use your website and your email for what we call planned messaging. So you know you're going to do a press release next week. You know you're going to send out an email newsletter at the end of the month. And those tend to have measured narratives. Those channels can be used for urgent alerts or intentional asks as well. But suffice it to say, those tools are best used in what we call sort of slow motion planning mode. But as you move to the left, you may send out a late-breaking email alert if you've got late-breaking news. A blog which you can publish too daily can be used for very, very up-to-the-minute types of messaging. And as you get into the Twitter and Facebook space, you can get a little bit more diverse in what you put out there. Late-breaking news, the real-time updates that I mentioned earlier, teasers on our Facebook or Twitter channel, it's totally cool to say something like, hey, we've got a big announcement coming up next Friday. Stay tuned. And sometimes we refer to those as flirt, ways to get people curious, or engaged in what you're doing, and curious to find out more. And on those channels, you can also do opportunistic asks. Tie a tweet or tie a Facebook update to a current event that has just happened that helps you drive interest to your organization based on people's recognition of your association with some current event. For instance, an example I would use there, the horrible, if I may, editorialize, decision by the Supreme Court to allow unlimited spending by corporations was an opportunity for a number of campaigning organizations to hop on their Facebook and Twitter accounts and really drum up righteous indignation immediately about the fact that the Supreme Court had given corporations all of this additional power in the American political process. People who hopped on Twitter and hopped on Facebook right in that moment got other people retweeting and forwarding their Facebook updates and generated activity around those channels in a way that would not be nearly as effective just updating your website with a statement saying, we are very disappointed in the fact that this has happened. Moving along as I look at the clock and try to make sure I don't run over, here's where it gets interesting. And this is honestly the ground for its own webinar because it's such a nuanced topic. Organizations who are already online with a website and one or more email lists are used to having almost total control of brand. What I mean by that is the general public cannot update your website. You might allow comments, you are able to moderate those, but in general your website is a fairly one directional communications channel. Email lists the very same thing. When you send out a monthly newsletter, Rare is the organization that treats that as a discussion list because most people would unsubscribe quickly if that kind of noise started happening. But as you think of that control of message and brand in the blog channels, Facebook, and Twitter, it gets complicated because when you are blogging, commenting is a critical component of a successful blogging strategy. And when people comment, they don't always stay on message and they don't always reflect the best values of your organization. Some things that appear in comments on your blog may threaten your sense of brand austerity, may threaten your sense of organizational identity. And so we strongly encourage people to be intentional about having a good comment policy and understanding how to share that control of message with your blogging audience. Facebook and Twitter take it a step further because your Facebook updates and your tweets get mixed in on a per user basis with whatever else they are following. So your Save the Turtles tweet might be in between a pave the planet tweet and I just bought a Hummer latest model tweet which one could say are not consistent messages around a Save the Turtles message. So as you move into the social media space, there really is some interesting kind of organizational analysis, hand-wrenching kind of reflection on how much you are able to let go a little bit of your message, let go a little bit of your brand, and invite others to participate in the way that you communicate online. A couple more will be done with this spectrum exercise. Frequency of messaging, I don't think I need to say much here. Websites, you could update your website every day unless you are a news-oriented organization. We don't think that's the best use of your time. Much better to pour that energy into email messages, blog posts, and social media updates that reach audiences in a more dynamic and immediate fashion. And when you talk Facebook and Twitter, as I mentioned earlier, you can do those updates almost as often as you want as long as you are not just making worthless noise. Time and labor investments, oh my goodness, this is the scary one. One of the things that's really weird about social media is that social media channels can expand to available time like no other online technology. And so with website and email, you can know what your time and labor investments are based on past patterns. You know how much time it takes to do a website update. You know how much time it takes to put together and execute an email fundraising appeal. So moving over to the Facebook and Twitter side, as I said earlier, there's sort of an arc of how you use those channels. But if you look at an organization like the Humane Society, who I find to be very impressive in that they are a quote-unquote old school, institutional nonprofit, they've got a full-time social media person, and she is fantastic. She spends a lot of time, pretty much a 24-7 kind of commitment, engaging people on their Twitter and their Facebook channels, and she even checks those on the weekend. She is committed to the cause, as one might say. Now I'm not saying that every organization should follow that level of investment, but this is something organizations should be intentional about discussing as they explore social media integration with their website, because you really do want to set allocations of what is appropriate Facebook and Twitter time, what is appropriate blogging time, and balance that against appropriate email and website time and labor investments. And finally, the one I mentioned earlier with an acronym, Bumble, Return On Investment. With your website and your email, again, it's knowable. People when they send out an email fundraising appeal can say things like, yeah, last year we got $4,000 in our end of year appeal. We're hoping to get $5,000 this time. But when it comes to Twitter and Facebook, the return on investment is still largely unknown, and to that extent, something that you have to research for yourself. It's uneven, and it's subject to change. It's just important to name those things and invite organizations to consider them as they work to integrate social media into their web processes. Wow, that was incredible. Thank you so much. That's my head of spinning. And to those of you who might think, wow, this is a lot of information, you'll be getting this PowerPoint later, so if you want to go through and review this later, the slides will be available. So, Donna, how can this be coordinated in an optimal fashion? Excellent. Great question. And again, I want to echo the apology that we are covering a lot of ground here. The goal of this call is to really inspire people to consider these concepts, and we apologize we don't have time to drill all the way down. But that said, the next three slides are talking about processes that we think really make your online efforts sustainable. Message calendaring is addressing the rhetorical question of how often and how far in advance do you schedule online messages? And do you message with a narrative arc? Do you design your email messages so that they tell a story over time and engage your online audience in the narrative so that they feel more a part of the work that you do? If you put together a messaging calendar, and what I mean when I say messaging calendar is that you actually using Exchange, or using a Google Calendar, or using whatever organizational electronic calendaring technology, track your messaging arcs by saying, this week we're going to do an education piece. Next week we're going to do an action alert. The week after that, we're going to announce our event. And the week after that, we're going to do an expose piece on this corrupt politician. That's a messaging arc which allows you to discuss how you advance the story in each piece of online communications. And you sustain messaging that way. You also coordinate your internal processes so that different campaigns or different program areas of an organization do not step on one another. Finally, calendars allow you to avoid what we call list fatigue when it comes to channels like email because unintentional messaging, what we call sensitive artiste spur of the moment email messaging, can lead to spamming, can lead to over sending to your messaging lists. But if you plan your message calendaring in advance, you can avoid that list fatigue and have the left organizational hand know what the right organizational hand is doing from message to message. The next process that we strongly recommend organizations consider is what we call a publishing matrix. Do you have an integrated way for deciding which messages go to which online channels? Some stuff, it's just a tweet. Other stuff only belongs on your website, probably does not warrant a tweet or a Facebook update. And to that extent the question is do you think intentionally about the different types of content that you publish? What do you do when you do a press release? What do you do with a newsletter, an event announcement, a blog post, and so forth? A publishing matrix then is the idea that when you are putting together your online planning, each willingness matrix can be a type of content, a press release, a newsletter, a blog post, and each column, as I mentioned earlier, can be an online channel. Your website, your email list, or lists, your blog or blogs, your Facebook and Twitter accounts. And for each type of content, which type of channels do you actually publish on in a coordinated example? In that teeny tiny font at the bottom of the page is the link to the aspiration publishing matrix. It's a little bit dense, and I apologize for that. We have a lot of channels and a lot of content sites, but it gives you an idea of how we have our communications process automated. On the next slide, I've got a picture of that. Well, how shall I say it? Unwieldy and not necessarily aesthetically pleasing matrix. But you see that when we announce an aspiration event, we hit every channel. When we announce a San Francisco non-profit technology center event, we only hit a couple of channels, the website, do a blog post, maybe a LinkedIn update, but we don't hit channels where we don't think it's relevant. If you look down a little further on the page, when we do a new publication, we hit everywhere. When we do a press release, we only hit certain channels. And so this is an example of our publishing matrix. And again, it's available on our website and available under Creative Commons, so you can take it and modify it and use a similar model to your own ends. Last process before we get to final things, we recommend that you consider using a social media dashboard and a big tip of the hat to Amy Sample Ward who at NetSquared has taught us a lot about how to do social media listening and social media dashboarding. There's a range of tools that lets you track how you are being mentioned online. iGoogle is sort of low into the curb. NetVibes is the tool that we use, netvibes.com and it's free. Radiant 6 for you organizations that have excessive communications budget. Radiant 6 is a pricey option but a very powerful tool for tracking. The dashboard tools let you track keywords. Where is your organization name or acronym getting mentioned? Where are your campaign and issue keywords or your staff names getting mentioned? Which blogs are you getting mentioned on? Who's commenting on stuff that you're doing? You can also track targets of your campaigns or programmatic work. Track your opponents. Track decision makers that you're trying to get engaged in your issues. The bottom line is these messaging dashboards allow you to see if your messaging is propagating and in certain situations like blog, comment, threads to find out what the reactions are. See if people are responding favorably or if they're not responding favorably, know that and give yourself an opportunity to dive into that comment, thread, and offer the organizational perspective. Next slide is just a screenshot of Aspirations social media dashboard. And again, this is available publicly at netvibes.com slash aspiration text. You can see what our public dashboard looks like and we'll put that link in the resources after this call. But it's just our simple way of knowing what people are saying about us on Facebook, on Twitter, and so forth in one place without having to go to 74 different web pages. And that, Cammy, is the set of practices that we recommend. We wish we had time to go deeper, but at least people have a rough idea of the kind of processes that can really sustain integrating social media into your website. Well, thank you, Gunner. But is there anything else that we should know about? Well, I'm glad you asked. One of the things I always feel is critical to say on a call like this, we often in the nonprofit sector as we focus on budget line items called software and hardware, forget to remember that data is our digital power. Information is what you're really, really focusing on when you do any online anything. And so we strongly encourage people to think about their online social media and website and email efforts as a curation of data model as opposed to a use of technology model. Technology is a vessel which conveys data into the future. Technologies will come and go. Data properly maintained is here for the long run. So five themes we like to hit on. As an organization make sure that you've actually enumerated all of the places you've got data, all of the online accounts, all of the databases, all of the places you have information, and treat that as a universe. Treat that as a collective whole as you do your communications planning and your organizational IT planning. I sound like a parent here, but if you could see me, I'd be wagging my pointer finger, have a complete and sustainable backup process, and that includes getting your backups off-site so that if your building burns down or you get hit by aliens shooting laser beams that you're building, you don't lose all your data. That by extension leads into the idea of keeping control of your data where you have remotely hosted data on a Salesforce.com platform, democracy and action, any hosted data, make sure you're making local backups on a regular basis. This can be automated and does not have to require a lot of staff time. Also confirm with your data that you can migrate it if you decide the tool is no longer relevant. Services like Facebook and Twitter, to use the technical term, kind of suck because they deliberately make it difficult to migrate that contact information. But a good email newsletter tool, like Vertical Response or Constant Contact, Democracy and Action, has export options and you should verify in advance whenever you take on a new communications channel that you hopefully have export and migration options if you decide that tool is no longer the right tool for your organization. And finally, when you think about data and you think about online communications in all of these channels, remember you need a good privacy policy where you honor the privacy of your users and assert your own expectations of privacy as an organization working for social change. In addition, really, really encourage people to be intentional about unifying your online identity. Some people will create their organizational blog at myorg.wordpress.com. That's a really bad model because then you are married to WordPress. You want to route as much engagement online as possible through domain names that you control. So much better to have blog.myorg.org than blog.wordpress.com so that when you decide to change blog technologies, you don't need to change blog addresses. Also, presume that Facebook and Twitter are, shall we say, metaphorical flashes in the pan and one need look no further back in the dustbin of online history than Friendster to see what it looks like to see an online community fade away into irrelevance. And so we strongly encourage you to really be intentional about maintaining an online identity behind addresses that you control, not addresses that somebody else controls. All right. Well, before we jump into Q&A, which we have a bunch of questions, let's do a quick summary. Well, first and foremost, the thing that I started out with, lovingly called Housekeeping 2.0, get the real estate reserved in advance, configure your online channels to advertise and link to one another and be intentional about treating them as a collective whole. You want in doing that to understand the purpose and the norms of each channel, and it's very helpful to refer to some of those spectrum diagrams that we went over so that as you decide how you'll use Facebook and you decide how you use your blog or your Twitter account, that you have a sense of the purpose and the voice and the tone that you use in those channels. We strongly recommend that you follow the best practices that we've mentioned. I'll apologize for the 15th time that we only touched on those briefly. And at the end of the day, think about it as a data exercise, and think about how are we amassing? How is our organization amassing a digital data set that we can leverage to have impact and organizational success moving forward independent of any specific technology? All right. Well, questions. There's about 50 of them here waiting. I'm going to start by a question from Pat. Do you think it's necessary to also keep domains .info.us? Do you see these domains growing into common use in the future? Super great question. My general answer is no, not at all. I think it's per organization. So if you are working on US policy, then it's probably worth having a .us address. But just to give you the aspiration policy, and I'm embarrassed how many domains we have. We maintain about 25 different domains for different purposes, but we just maintain .com, .net, and .org except in very specific exception cases. And Kathy has a question. Can you talk about privacy policies and statements if and when they are needed? You had mentioned them when uploading pictures to Flickr. Are there privacy concerns? Great question. The first answer is privacy policies are always needed. Let's start with your website. It is durr-rgurr that you have a privacy policy on your website and that you follow it. So we strongly encourage every organization to have a privacy policy. Feel free to take a look at the aspiration tech.org privacy policy. We share everything we do. So if you want to jack our privacy policy and adapt it to your needs, that's a good move, though we always recommend that you consult a lawyer. For sites like Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook, it gets more complicated because there the privacy policy of the service provider is the preeminent privacy policy. And to put a cynical spin on this, Twitter and Facebook are in the privacy invasion business. Their whole goal in being viable businesses is to blur the distinctions between the individual and the community. And so what we encourage organizations to do there is to consider ways in which they might be at risk of violating the privacy of people that are collaborating with them in those channels and avoid doing that. So in particular when you're using Twitter and when you're doing other online communications, Twitter allows you to do direct messaging. You need to remember that depending on how things are set up, other people can see your direct messages on Twitter. Don't put anything sensitive or private in a Twitter direct message because it is one way or another likely to be seen by eyes that you did not intend. So it's a phenomenal question. We don't have great answers for channels in the social media realm, but it is critical that for your website and your blog you have privacy policies and that in addition when you send out emails there's a privacy policy link and that you never ever, ever, ever give your email addresses to anybody else ever. That may sound extreme, but it is just never okay for an organization to ship a bunch of email addresses to another organization under any circumstances. And I know there are people out on this call that might argue with that extreme statement. That's our policy on good email privacy practice. And Faith has a question and a comment. I am very blunt, but entertaining on my Twitter account especially about politics. Should I have a live Twitter feed on my website? I don't want to censor myself on Twitter. That's a great question and it gets back to the audience analysis. If you feel that your Twitter account is edgy and you feel that you don't want to take the risk of looking edgy on your website then no, keep them separate. That's part of the beauty of having different channels is that you really can convey different personalities and different tones in those different channels. So yes, technologically it is quite straightforward to pull in a feed of your latest tweets into your website, but if you're concerned that that tone might not align properly with your website editorial tone then it's just fine and dandy to keep those completely separate or to do the lighter weight thing of linking to your Twitter feed from your website, but not in the website context intimating the nature of the content on that channel. Because in the Twitter context people are very tolerant and in fact deeply appreciate edgy, blunt, and otherwise bring in it, quote unquote, tone and attitude in a way that websites can't necessarily do because again most of your website traffic is an anonymous audience that is not familiar with the work that you do. And a couple of people have asked about LinkedIn and where does it fit in a nonprofit social media strategy? That is a superb question and one that we sort of subtly invited by showing our publishing matrix in the fact that LinkedIn is some of the channels we think about. LinkedIn is complicated in the following way. LinkedIn does not have the concept of an organizational account. It is strictly for individuals who want to schmooze network and have a place to send a resume out gratuitously when they're looking for work. What we believe is that you can use LinkedIn in an opportunistic limited way when you need to get the word out to that network. But since it has to go through a person account you need to have a conversation with your staff to see how they feel about using their LinkedIn accounts for that purpose. In my case, I have a LinkedIn account. I've had the same job for six years and I don't plan on changing so I'm able to use LinkedIn as a de facto organizational channel and all I use it for is their question feature is something that I jack to announce events. So the question I'll pose to my 500 or however many hundred LinkedIn connections I have is can you help us spread the word about Aspirations Nonprofit Software Development Summit? And I've had great results with people actually responding to that and spreading the word through their Facebook, through their LinkedIn, through their Twitter in ways that really were nice augmentations of our own Facebook and Twitter efforts. So long story short, LinkedIn can have a role that's problematic because of the fact that you need to go through individual accounts and you need to make sure that you have a clear delineation of how the organization and the individual account relate. And Lynette's question is how do you feel about inundating people who might be subscribed to multiple channels with the same info? Super great question. My general philosophy is people are intelligent and they know when they are getting more information from you than they want. So you basically want to take it on a per channel basis. When you send out email, it is a best practice 12 to 24 hours after sending a message. Presuming that you have a tool that gives reporting and statistics, you should study the unsubscribed rate. And if you see a higher unsubscribed rate with frequent messaging, that's a clue that you probably are sending too many emails to your email list or sub lists. That said, with things like a blog, it's virtually impossible. As long as you are publishing meaningful content, it's virtually impossible to over publish on a blog. I've seen it done, but not in nonprofit sector. And in Facebook and Twitterland, again, frequent updates are the norm. And so to the question, if someone is on more than one of those channels, it is important for you to have distinct voice in each channel so it doesn't sound like you're droning channel to channel. But if you use a blog post to talk about an upcoming event, but also tweet and Facebook it, that's the best practice. And the key is to make sure that you use the appropriate format. In Twitter and Facebook, it should be a one-liner with a link to more event info, whereas in a blog post, you can go deep and talk about the goals and the vision of the event or the speakers or the participants and really do a more engaging job of describing what that event is about. That's the kind of differentiation that we encourage with the idea being that if somebody is getting everything they need on Twitter and Facebook, they know how to unsubscribe from your blog. They know how to unsubscribe from the channels that are more than they want. A final note on that, we do encourage people to be very intentional about trying to get as many email addresses as you can because email addresses are the most persistent contact information that you have online. Organizations that depend primarily on Facebook or Twitter are setting themselves up for a world of hurt. If those services ever get acquired and change their terms, go out of business. Twitter has yet to make a lot of money, so while everyone is confident it will get acquired someday, it's also entirely possible that Twitter will just run out of gas two or four years from now. And so those kinds of channels, those connections should be treated as more transient and efforts should be made to get people in those channels on your mailing lists through any number of cynical mechanisms, including petitions and other ways of having people say, yes, I agree and here's my email address because as you're trying to balance your messaging into different channels, the email one is the one that most likely will be your long-term, most valuable channel in a general sense. I'll certainly entertain that depending on people doing work, and for instance, use context, you can make a strong counter argument that the social networks are at least as valuable. And Linda had a question about government agencies. She would like to know how government agencies using social media and any references would be helpful. So do you have any suggestions or examples of how government agencies are using social media? That's a great question. I don't, off the top of my head, can you and I put together a resources page afterwards? I'll see if I can Google up anything that I've certainly heard it discussed before. It's super complicated because, and again, I don't know which government department or type of work you're talking about, whether you're actually talking about U.S. government or a quasi-governmental organization. But the issues there to my understanding are much more institutional and outside the scope of this set of process points because so often what you're most constrained by in social media, and we have seen this working with certain institutional clients in our work is imagine an organization where you have a three-week approval change for a tweet. That's pretty mind-blowing, but that's actually standard operating procedure in risk-averse organizations that do not want unauthorized communications going out. So it's a superb question. I wish I had a better answer. Okay, and someone wants, Kate wants to know where you got your Facebook icons for your website. Okay, I'm going to say this on record. We jacked them just like everybody else does. I am proud to be a board member of the Ruckus Society, which is an organization that trains activists in nonviolent social disobedience. They had an artist do a nice treatment of Facebook and Twitter icons, and we just rolled on over there and with their kind permission, copy-pasted those into our own graphical format. In general, and I'm saying this with my lawyer hat off, reuse of Facebook and Twitter icons online is a de facto standard. I'm not saying it's right, but it's certainly the norm. And so if you find ones that you like on a website, you can do two things. You can copy-paste them and probably not get in trouble, but I know that all the lawyers on this call are squirming uneasily in their seats as I say that, or the better practice, contact the organization whose site it is and say, hey, would it be okay if we reused your Twitter and Facebook icons? Most of those services, to my knowledge, don't have a page where you can download blessed icons from them, though some organizations do. And actually, that's a homework assignment for me because I'm going to go verify and see if any of those organizations, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., have in fact got pages where there are appropriate use icons available, but to my knowledge, I have not seen those on those main sites. Okay, and James wants to know if it's okay to use your slides and audio for presentations inside their organizations. It's okay for my point of view from TechSoup to use this entire presentation. So Gunner, do they have your blessing to use your slides? I am jumping up and down with glee in a metaphorical sense. Everything that Aspiration publishes is published under Creative Commons license. We strongly encourage reuse, adaptation. You can mash it up. You can rearrange the slides. You can add stuff. And all we ask is that you acknowledge where it came from, and we're deeply grateful for that acknowledgement. Excellent. And Brian wants to know how do you monitor how many people have looked at your Facebook group page other than the number of group friends you have? That's a good question. At the top of my head, I don't remember if they're currently giving those statistics out. One of the frustrating things in Facebook is that the functionality of group pages is a subset of the functionality of person pages. And so I'll have to check with our social media person, Matt Garcia, to find out. And again, I think if there's an answer to that, we can put it on the research page. But it's not something we're currently tracking because I don't think that information is readily available from Facebook. And Morris would like to know about putting social media information on one's business card. Do you recommend that? Great question. I think I will answer conditionally of who you give your business card to. So yes, if you are tweeting aggressively and that's a channel that is really valuable for you, or your Facebook channel has really reached a critical mass where you know it's going to be something you maintain for the length of the life of your box of business cards, heck yeah. If there's room and it doesn't look too squunched, I think that's the best practice. The counter argument is that by putting your website address, people should be able, if you follow the best practice that puts your Twitter, Facebook, and other social media links above the fold on all pages, people should be able to come to your website and self-select in to those channels. So if I were a conservative organization where staff members only get business cards once every five years, I'd think twice or three times about putting those links on there. But if you're an organization where you push a box of business cards every month and social media is really an integrated part of their online communication strategy, heck yeah, go for it. And even maybe put teeny tiny versions of the F and the T icons so that people actually visually get the clue that that's what they're looking at on the business card. Another question, how can I share info on Facebook via my own page, my organization stand page, and our cause page without being redundant? That's a great question. My answer is perhaps not exactly a simple one, but it gets back to treating each one of those as a separate channel considering to what degree the audience is overlap or are distinct and separate and then making appropriate decisions. So if you have three different online channels, a personal Facebook page, an online Facebook page, and a causes page, it gets back to that publishing matrix that we talked about earlier. For different types of content, think about which channels are appropriate. If it's a super important announcement that everybody needs to see, put that in one place. But if it's a minor update on your cause, just put it on your cause page. If it's a minor update or an update that's strictly about the organization, you know, Organization X hires new executive director. This is a wonderful hire. We are super proud. I would just put that on the org page, not on the causes page. But the key thing is to come at it in a publishing matrix process where you abstract the types of content you're publishing and then think intentionally about which types of content belong on which channels. Well, that is all the time we have for questions. Thank you, Gunnar. I'm just going to throw up this resources page quickly. And remember if we're sending this PowerPoint out to you so you can access all these links. And if your question wasn't answered, I apologize. But we do have a follow-up forum that you can post your question in that Gunnar will be checking out. Here's a link that will make its way to you in the follow-up message as well. For those of you who are new to TechSoup and only know us by our webinars, we also have articles and community forums and we post upcoming events. And we have donated software from companies like Microsoft Adobe Semantic and 36 other vendors. So we have a ton of webinars coming up. I'm really excited to be offering these webinars. So check out our website for a listing of these and how you can register. The next week, we'll learn how TechSoup can help your organizations. We've offered this one twice before, but we always find more people are interested in participating. Talking about VoiceOver IP, I'll learn some new things on that one. And then talking about after-the-crash tips on data recovery that will be at the end of February. And then creating a successful computer refurbishment program at the beginning of March. So again, I'd like to thank ReadyTalk for making these webinars free and available to nonprofits and libraries. ReadyTalk helps nonprofits and libraries in the U.S. and Canada reach geographically dispersed areas and increase collaboration through their audio conferencing and web conferencing services. Again, I'd like to thank Gunnar for his fantastic presentation. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Gunnar. Thank you, Kenny. And if anybody has questions, feel free to call us. Fantastic. And be sure to complete the post-event survey. I'd like to thank Becky for helping out on the chat. And have a great day and join us on another TechSoup talk. Have a great day. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thank you. Please stand by.