 Welcome to TechSoup Talks. My name is Kami Griffiths. Today's webinar is Social Media Listening Dashboard. Our presenters are Amy Sample Ward and Alan Gunn. So I'd like to welcome the presenters and thank them for taking time to put this presentation together. Amy, can you tell us a little bit about your work? Amy Sample Ward Sure. My main job or my main hat is as the Global Community Development Manager for NetSquared, which is the project of TechSoup Global. But in addition to that, I do a lot of blogging and training and facilitating directly with either community-based groups or actual nonprofit organizations looking to build community and be more engaged with the larger global audience. Amy Sample Great, thank you. And Alan Gunn, Gunner. Alan Gunn Hello. Hey, good to be on the call. I am named Alan Gunn. Folks know me as Gunner. I am the Executive Director of Aspiration, which is a nonprofit based in San Francisco that helps nonprofits make more effective use of technology. We like to help nonprofits and nonprofit staff members figure out sustainable technology processes and coach them in their online communication strategies. And we also work with software developers to try and get more effective and open tools developed to support the nonprofit sector. We are really psyched to be doing another webinar with TechSoup. Amy Sample Ward Great, thanks. And Gunner, if you could speak up just a little bit, your audio is a little bit soft. Alan Gunn Alright, how's that? Amy Sample Ward Much better. Thank you. And I'd like to thank Becky Regan for answering chat questions. And I believe we got Matt Garcia also from Aspiration who is answering chat questions. And so I'd just like to get started and turn it over to Amy. Amy Sample Great, thank you. So our agenda looks very short and sweet, but we'll probably be hurrying to make sure that we get through it all because Gunner and I have both packed in quite a lot of different things that we want to try and cover. So we'll start with why do it, and then number 2 and 3 are going to be pretty heavy sections. How do I get started, and what do I do now? So we're hoping to save about 15 or 20 minutes at the end for questions. And we don't necessarily think that all those questions will need to wait to the end. As Kami said, feel free to ask a question when you think of it, and if Becky or Matt can answer it, then they probably will. Or they'll just save those up and cue them to ask at the end. So that's generally how it'll go, but if you also have a question about what we're saying, or you want that link, or anything like that, also feel free to ask those, not just larger questions about how to do this stuff. So why is listening important? Well, first of all, listening is the very beginning of the whole engagement process for using social media. If you don't invest in listening at the very beginning of your work, then you're not going to know where best to connect with your community. If you don't build listening into your overall social media strategy and communication strategy, you'll miss out on opportunities to grow your community, opportunities to influence the conversation about your services, and influence the larger sector that you're trying to work in. Next, why is listening important? I'm sorry, I'm getting a little bit of a lag. I don't know if anyone else is, but I might have a little bit of a pause there. So why is listening important? Well, first, it's how you learn about your community, and that's the same online and offline. You take the pulse of the larger conversation if you've heard that term before, it just lets you kind of stay tapped in. Are your services known about? Are your projects relevant? Is your information or research helpful? How can you best serve your community? These are the kinds of questions that you want to be looking for when you're listening online. Even if it's not directly about your services, I think that's one thing that I find a lot of organizations have an aha moment around is how much you can learn about your work, even if it's not a direct response or feedback to your programming. It might be to someone else's programming that does a lot of the same services in another city, or it might be someone else trying to tackle the larger issues that your work is also relevant to. Next, what does listening mean? Gunner and I are both going to cover quite a few different versions of what listening means in this webinar. And again, if you have questions, feel free to throw those in. But generally what we're talking about on this call is anything from subscribing to searching to gathering content, gathering mentions, anything that provides a map or a larger picture of what those outside your organization think about your programs, about your work, about your issues, and what doesn't listening mean? There are two things that I think are really important to say at the very beginning about the topics that we're going to talk about. And that's one, it's not passive. You have to be actually doing these things. You have to seek out the content, the conversations, willing to use the platforms or go to where the people are. And it also isn't free. In nonprofits we know this already, nothing is really free. It's either going to take someone's time or someone's energy, someone's skills, or depending on what kind of tools you want to be using, it can be taking money. So Gunner is now going to talk about why this is all good. Thank you, Sammy. And apologies for my slight cough. I just wanted to sort of build on what Amy has already said and just talk about specific situations that listening enables you to deal with. The first is when you are mentioned online, there is a relatively small window of time in which you can respond effectively. So if you get mentioned in a blog post or someone comments about you online somewhere, listening dashboards allow you to respond in a timely fashion and get back in that dialogue while it's still going on. In addition, it lets you find out people talking about you both positively and negatively. And one of the things that we at Aspiration do with our listening dashboard is we make sure to reach out to anyone that has mentioned us online. If it's a positive mention, we thank them. If it's a non-positive mention, we reach out and try to build a relationship with them and find out was the coffee too hot at our event, or was it a hassle to find the venue for an event that we hosted, those are the kinds of things that we will reach out and try to talk to people about if they say something that we feel that they should get a little bit of love and understanding for. In addition, if you are intentional about what you put out online, if you are intentional about specific types of messaging, here we refer to this issue in this language, in this other place we refer to this issue in slightly different language, then you can look and see which of your messages are actually showing up in other places. Are people quoting you? Are people retweeting specific tweets that you put out? But by looking at what is propagating using your listening dashboard by basically having notifications of where your issues, your slogans, and your organization name have been repeated or published, you've got a sense of where you are resonating and which of your messages are most effective. And finally, as Amy said, by doing the listening, you can gain strategic advantage. This is especially true if you are doing advocacy or campaigning because you can monitor all sides of the issue. You don't just have to monitor what is being said about you and your perspective on an issue. You can find out what is being said about your opponents or your targets or other stakeholders in any situation that your nonprofit organization is working on. But with that, let me toss it back to you Amy to give some thoughts on how you can actually get started with this listening process. Cool. So as someone just asked, they want to hear about some specific information on dashboards. Well that is probably what the next half hour is going to focus on. So here we go. To get started at the very beginning, I'm just going to cover some tools that are integral to getting you in. And when I say getting you in, I mean like literally you're doing nothing. You're listening to no one. You're using no tools. And when we hang up from this call an hour after that, you will be doing these things. Or you could be, not that you, you know, I'm not going to say. I'm not going to hunt you down. But these are exactly ways that you can get started. So first is it, yep, Google Alerts. You could set up a Google Alert in 30 seconds. And it's a great way to get started. And you can also set up as many Google Alerts. I think it's unlimited. I've at least never hit a limit. They've never told me to stop setting them up. But Google Alerts are a free tool from Google. And the search terms, as you see in that box there, work just like searching on Google. So if you know how to kind of manipulate your searches and use quotations around words, or use something or something, it works just in the same way. So you can put in any kind of terms that you want. And I always suggest that people use both key words, like if you are Homelessness or New York City, but also the names of important people in your organization. So people that could be getting news coverage, or getting mentioned on someone's blog because they're the program director, they were maybe the communications person that was in an event. So include names, include the actual name of your organization, any abbreviations, and then also things around any projects that you have or partnerships or collaborations that you're doing. And type is the kind of content that you want, how often is how often you want to be getting the responses. And Deliver2 I think is the most important thing about Google Alerts to me is that if I'm setting it up with someone that's quite new to social media, I'll have it delivered to their email address because they're going to know when it comes in. They're obviously going to be able to see it, and it's a great way to get started. But what I think is most important for this call is that you can also change that selection to subscribe by an RSS feed. So next, we have RSS. These two screenshots are Technorati and Google Blog Search which are both ways to focus down your search of whatever content you're looking for to be just in the general blogosphere, which is sometimes helpful if you're looking for things that are conversations opposed to nudes or general webpages that might be about homelessness. This is a way to find the people that are leading the conversations about the issues. And again, you can subscribe to blogs by RSS. The orange icon up in the corner of your screen is what the RSS icon looks like, and you'll usually see that right in your browser's URL bar, as well as if it's a blog, there's often links in the sidebars or other places, or even text links that say subscribe to this blog. And so what happens with RSS? You might subscribe to any kind of content through RSS, whether it's a Google Alert, it's a search on Google in general. You can subscribe to that RSS of that search. If it's a blog like I just talked about, or maybe it's a YouTube channel, or it's a Twitter search, anything that you could come across for the most part online probably has an RSS connected to it. So what happens is, does everyone know? I guess it's hard to say on the call if everyone knows what RSS is. Well, RSS means really simple syndication. And what it means is that instead of going to every YouTube channel you like, and every blog that you like, and every news website that you like to see if there's anything new, instead you can subscribe to RSS. And that will search all the sites and all the YouTube channels and all of the Twitter streams that you want for you. And whenever there is something new, it just delivers that to you. You could get that as an email, or you can get it in a reader. And that's what we're going to talk about next. So NetVibes is a really easy dashboard to get started with. It's pretty intuitive. It has a big green button that says Add Content, but also its interface is drag and drop, click, and things open. So it's pretty intuitive for people that aren't really web savvy. And NetVibes is free, and it's an RSS reader. So you can use it as a personal RSS reader. Google Reader is another alternative that a lot of people use just to follow blogs that they want to follow, or follow news, anything at all. And with this, we're really thinking that you're going to be setting one up internally, but maybe not just for you. And we can talk about that later in the call, but just to keep in mind when I click through and show you the next slide. So here's an example of my public dashboard. So I've set this up. As you can see, it has quite a few tabs across the top, those blue tabs. And like anything, you can name them, change them, add them, take them away. And then those boxes that you see on the screen, those are all separate RSS feeds. So there's the one of my blog, the one of the N10 blog, that Cantor's blog, etc. And so they just show up in separate areas with all the new content is there and all those titles. And so you can, as I said before, RSS is coming on, or is connected to all these different kinds of content you might want to be following, whether it's Twitter mentions of your name or a hashtag that you want to follow like TechSoup or if it's Google Alerts that you've subscribed in RSS, you can put those in here. If it's blogs, and to do that you just click, let me grab the little arrow key. You just click right up there on Add Content and you just put in the URL and say Add. It's really that simple. I see someone just asked, what is a hashtag? At the beginning of the call, Cammy mentioned if you wanted to follow on Twitter or tweet about this session to use the hashtag TechSoup. And what that means is that maybe I don't need to explain this. I'm sorry, I don't want to take up too much time, but it's just a way of tagging content on Twitter. So it's Twitter specific and you could search on Twitter for a hashtag or for a word even and subscribe to that search just like you could at Google search and you could follow that in your dashboard. And further, NetVibes lets you do these public or private as I said before. So I have this as a public dashboard. I wanted to have a public-facing resource for anyone interested in nonprofit technology to see what I see, to follow the blogs that I follow, and to provide a sector-wide resource. That's the same kind of thing that an organization could do. Say they want to be the go-to place for news and information about their topic. They can set up a NetVibes that's public-facing and has all kinds of sources coming in. But you can do the same internally and share it within your organization so that everyone is watching what's being said on Twitter. Everyone is seeing what's being said in the news about your new program that was launched. Everyone can follow if anyone in the organization's name is trash. And the reason that that's so important that everyone internally could be following that is that then if something about your new program that was launched is mentioned, both the comms team and the directors can see it at the same time and fundraising and the web team can see it at the same time so that if someone says, hey, we just launched this and this was mentioned, can we put the news up, they're probably going to also say, oh yeah, I just saw that. It's great that we got the news coverage. Let me put it up. So it just helps bring everyone onto the same table because you're all aware of the same news and it can be everyone inside the organization's home page even on their browser. So every time they open it up, they can see a flash of anything that's new. And next, as far as keeping everyone on the inside connected, another way to listen that I think is really important and maybe not as sexy and so it doesn't get covered all the time are analytics. And Google has free analytics that you can set up on your site and even on your Facebook page if you're using Facebook. And it also includes ways that you can start tracking or monitoring certain things that you know you want to watch for. And sharing that back with your team or with the whole organization, you can really see that new page that was launched. And you saw that there were two news articles mentioning that linking to it are getting a bunch of traffic. And you know that that was really great. And maybe that's a great opportunity to thank that news source or that blogger publicly because you know they're driving a lot of traffic to your site. So it helps you connect between what's working and in your communications if you're sending out links and you see people are actually coming in and if other people are doing that. If there was a blogger, two bloggers blogged about your public launch and one of them was the source of a lot of traffic and the other one wasn't, that doesn't mean that they both don't get thanked, but it does mean maybe next time you send the blogger that drove a lot of traffic a heads up so that they can kind of break the story. So it just kind of nurtures those relationships and gives you an opportunity to build your community out organically from what's already working opposed to just sending out mass press releases or something. And there's lots more to talk about obviously, but I want to save some time for Gunner. So here are a couple other tools as well and some are paid for and some aren't. So it's just a matter of what kind of organizational budget you have or where you're already at with your listening or your social media use. If you're really not having any presences online and you're not contributing a lot, it's probably not that great at least at first to pay for something because you could probably just dive in yourself and make a lot of inroads, but definitely all worth checking out. So to talk about the other side, the management side, and communications, I'm going to turn it over to Gunner. All right, thank you very much Amy. So what I'd like to emphasize, Amy just did a great job of over viewing a really good tool set for doing this social media listening. I'd like to talk about sort of book ending that in processes and best practices that you need to get set up to be doing effective listening, and then a couple of processes for how you manage your communications to really support and maximize what comes back to you through your listening tools. So the first thing I want to talk about is some best practices and talk about some conventions so that you are consistent in your communication. And then I'm going to explain this notion of a publishing matrix which is the idea of coordinating your online channels, your website, your email lists, any blog that you might have, your Facebook and your Twitter so that you mulch your content and get the most out of each piece of content that you post. And finally, I want to tie in the importance of storytelling to all of this stuff because if you're not telling a compelling story online, the listening won't return nearly as much interesting data. So moving to these best practices, that's always a loaded phrase. As was mentioned earlier, there is the concept in Twitter of a hashtag and that is just a unique word and it is a word, no spaces, no hyphens, a word that is preceded with a pound sign that is a unique identifier. So for our organization we are pound sign aspiration tech and as has been mentioned, tech soup is pound sign tech soup. And that is a way that within a tweet you are able to know what the tweet is referring to. It is a tweet about tech soup. It is a tweet about aspiration tech. It could be a tweet about the World Cup in 2010. There are any number of hashtags or may I say an infinite number of hashtags. It is critical to get a hashtag defined for your organization, possibly define additional hashtags if you're doing a campaign. So you might be doing a campaign Green Jobs Forever and you might come up with some hashtag like Green Jobs that would be a hashtag that you wanted to use so that if Green Jobs got mentioned you were aware of it. But let's keep things simple and just talk about the organizational hashtag. In a perfect world, your hashtag can be the same as your domain name. So if you are Green Jobs Forever.org then you could have a hashtag of Green Jobs Forever although that is a tag on the long side. We are aspirationtech.org. On Twitter we are aspiration tech as a username. On Facebook we are also aspiration tech as a username. And our hashtag is aspiration tech. And that's just we're lucky nobody else was using that identifier on any of those services. In addition if you use Flickr, if you use YouTube, if you use any of the other social media services that allow you to tag things you want to use that same tag identifier so that there's consistency both in terms of how people tag you but just as importantly consistency in how you track where you and your content are being tagged. The other little piece of trivia that's important to know in process is that social networks when you publish links out require that you give them short URLs. And so this is just a quick plug for a free service that we like a lot. Bitly, B-I-T dot L-Y converts really, really long URLs, Google map URLs is the best example to very short URLs. And in case anybody tries to click on that Bitly link, I just made it up so it will be a random thing if anything that comes up. But what Bitly does that's wonderful and that's part of your listening strategy is that if you tweet out a Bitly link and that sounds like foreign language if you actually say it fast but if you tweet out a Bitly link it will then report to you in your Bitly account who clicked on it, how many people clicked on it, and give you the same kinds of analytics that Google Analytics can give you. So tying that all together if you want to properly use hashtags in Bitly you might do a tweet as the one I have down at the bottom. Doing webinar with pound sign TechSoup to emphasize that that's the topic of the tweet. It's a TechSoup tweet. And then I put in a Bitly link which in this case is not actually but ostensibly would be to the webinar page. Alright, couple of things about process. We really encourage you as you're setting up your listening dashboard to take a step back and ask if you really are intentional about the different types of content you publish. Do you have a process for all of your online channels when you publish a press release, when you drop an e-newsletter, when you announce an event? And so we recommend this very simple publishing matrix model so that you have an integrated way for deciding which messages go to which online channels. Now to build a publishing matrix and we'll show you aspirations in just a second. It's a little bit more involved than it needs to be in the average nonprofit. But with a publishing matrix you simply in each row of a spreadsheet enumerate a type of content that your organization publishes. You publish press releases, you might publish newsletters, you might announce events, you might have blog posts. And then each column in this matrix is an online channel, your website, your mailing list, a blog, your Facebook, your Twitter. And then you simply mark out for each type of content which channels you actually publish something on. So there's a link in 0-point font at the bottom of this slide to our publishing matrix which is available as a Creative Commons document for your benefit. I will click forward and apologize. Aspirations publishing matrix is a little complicated because we have a number of online channels. We have three Twitter accounts for the main organization, our social source comments program, and our answer program. So that's why there's three brown columns there. We have a number of blogs and so again, there's a number of different columns where in many organizations there would just be one Twitter column or one blog column. But you'll see that the kind of rows, we announce aspiration events. We announce events at the San Francisco Nonprofit Technology Center. We might announce major website updates. We might announce updates on other sites such as Answer. And the idea here is that these X's in this grid remind us where to publish so that when there is new content available we put it out on as many channels as possible. And the question you may be asking is how does this relate to social media listening? By following a process like this, by maximizing the number of places where you publicize new online content and convey to different audiences the available of new information from your organization, the more that's going to show up in your listening dashboard as people retweet that, update their Facebook to reflect anything you put on Facebook, comment on your blog, or mention your blog posts elsewhere, that's going to drive data to your listening station so that you get a sense of who's listening and what they're saying. In parallel with that, that's the nuts and bolts. Now let's talk about the planning piece. If you're going to follow a process around publishing matrix, you want to couple that with a messaging calendar because too many organizations in the nonprofit sector, and I say this to be kind but tough loving, have anemic planning horizons for their messaging. We work with a number of organizations that only plan out two to four weeks in advance what they're saying. Our advice to organizations is actually plan your next six weeks or your next 90 days or your next, oh my goodness, six months so that you have a sense of what you're saying this month, what you're saying next month, what you're saying the month after. This month we're educating. Next month we're trying to get people to take action. The month after that we're going to try and get them to give us money. Here's the story we're going to tell to get to that point. Here are the actions that we are going to ask people to do. And so by doing that, the way that we summarize this process, tell your folks that you're going to tell them. Give a narrative at the start of a messaging cycle that says, in the coming months we will be telling you these things. We'll be asking you to help us in these ways. Work them through the message calendar and at the end make sure to summarize and say over the last several months we've been talking to you about this and summarize what got done and acknowledge participation and then do it all over again. A simple methodology, pick a primary channel like your email list which is a common one that many nonprofits work on. Plan out the goal of each message. Do you want to send an email that starts out by educating people? Do you want to ask for feedback from your mailing list? Do you want to ask your mailing list to take action to come to an event or call a politician or do some other action? Or do you want to ask them for support, financial or otherwise? Then actually design each message. What do you think the subject line will be? What do you think the ask will be? Click on this link, tell a friend. What are you going to ask the recipient to do? And the narrative outline. What is actually going to be in that message? Sketch all of this out in advance and then as you publish each message use your publishing matrix to support that core messaging strategy by making appropriate tweets and Facebook updates and potentially website or blog updates to support the messaging that you're doing in that primary email channel. By following processes like this, again, you increase activity online and by increasing activity online you get more information coming back to your listening dashboard. So just a couple of simple steps to summarize what Amy and I have said. To get going, set up your simple dashboard. Just go to netvibes.com, create a free account. Start by just tracking basic things. Learn how to do a Google Alert, create a Google Alert for your organization name, create a Google Alert for instance for your executive director name or your own name if you are not the executive director, and perhaps put together a Twitter search for your organizational hashtag and put those into NetVibes. And we apologize that the scope of this webinar is not a how to do NetVibes although maybe that's a good other webinar to offer. Once you've put together these basic alerts inside of NetVibes then you can watch what comes back. You can see yourself getting notified if your organization is mentioned. You can see yourself getting notified if any other searches that you've put into your NetVibes dashboard return results. Then you can add more listening widgets, more of those little rectangles that you saw on the screen that Amy showed. And you can focus your energy online in your communications where you see action, where you see people responding or retweeting or otherwise communicating what you've already put out there. And finally, once your listening dashboard is in place, once you've got that basic thing to watch with, plan out your messaging and use the publishing matrix to weave in more detail and more nuance to the different channels that you're publishing all of your good content to. Amy, back to you. Amy Cool. So this is really just kind of a recap slide to say that both what Gunner just now talked about and what I talked about before with the actual NetVibes dashboard or any other tools. The way that this is really going to improve internally is that you have everyone responding to the same information. So it's not different stories about which news covered the launch or anything else. You have the same access. And that can mean that people have a much easier way like with Gunner's method of the messaging to know who responds when. It's not someone in your organization thought they were the only one that saw blog coverage and thought it would be really important to respond right away because they had the information wrong. But instead everyone can see that that blogger covered it, had the wrong information, and the right person can respond in a timely manner. So it just kind of puts things back into a succinct, less crazy or manic kind of state which I know from organizations I've worked in that sometimes it's like, oh my God, this person, they just wrote about us, quick respond, and then you realize half an hour later that someone else was drafting a really nice response or there was some way in which the wires were crossed to use the slide example. So internally it can really smooth things out and bring everybody up and it can really make people feel empowered to participate and say, oh I'm the one that launched that program so I'm going to step in or I want to participate in this chat on Twitter because they're inviting us in, whatever it is. Gunnar? Right on. Thanks so much. I just want to summarize sort of what we've talked about in the context that if you can imagine yourself setting up the dashboard and imagining yourself getting into a publishing process, then just to build on what Amy was saying, what can you use your listening dashboard to build? You can use it to build relationships. The bad news about listening dashboards is that they don't automate some massive bulk communication solution where you can speak to the whole world or track everything that's going on without ever lifting a finger. What they do is they identify who online actually cares about what you're saying. They may care favorably and be repeating your tweets or otherwise propagating your messages. As Amy said, they may be saying something not so great about you. In either case you can use your listening dashboard to build relationships with those people, thank the people that are propagated and retweeted your content, and convert them into more passionate supporters of your organization. So in that sense the listening dashboard is a discovery tool for potential allies and stronger supporters than you would have in a traditional passive email campaigning moment. In addition, if you look at your listening dashboard across different channels, looking at it for web searches, looking at it for Twitter searches, looking at it for blog searches, then it is also a place where you could potentially figure out where your message is resonating best with different audiences. Because we are always first to tell you before any technology discussion kicks in that if you're going to be successful in online communications, your first task is to be explicit and intentional about who the audiences are that you're targeting. The unfortunate truth is the audiences that you target and the audiences that respond are not often the exact same. And so when you're listening with a listening dashboard you get a sense of who your audience is. You get a sense of what issues trigger responses. You get a sense of which of your issues get retweeted or otherwise show up in other places. And by better understanding your online audiences you're able to craft your message and really be more effective in your online communications. The other thing you can do with listening dashboards is build appreciation first by mentioning others with an awareness that they hopefully also are listening and that things that you say about others can get tracked and can also propagate. So don't just expect others to retweet your stuff. Retweet things that come in from your allies when somebody does a really good blog post from one of your organizational allies, tweet about it, or blog about it, or Facebook about it, so that you're actually telling your network about great work being done by organizations. And a variation on that theme, if you are using a listening dashboard to track issue areas you may see an ally get mentioned and that may be someone who's not using a listening dashboard, not tracking what's going on online. So it's always nice if you could give someone a heads up and say, hey, I don't know if you know this, but somebody just said something about you on this blog, you might want to respond. People are always grateful and really appreciate that kind of heads up when people give it to them in a moment when they were not otherwise aware. And finally, the bottom line of why a listening dashboard is a good thing. And it ties back to some of the great points Amy made right at the start of this webinar. Listening dashboards help you to grow your organizational intuition and make you smarter as an organization in the way that you work online and to some degree how you work offline as well by seeing what's going on online, by having this dashboard where you see what issues are getting discussed, who is saying what, who is active, who's hot, who's not. You really develop a dimensionality of understanding and perspective that hasn't been possible before the Internet were wired together with duct tape and glue. So those are our thoughts on listening dashboards. And again, to echo something else Amy said, we wish we could go infinitely further into detail with any number of these slides, but we wanted to leave these 20 minutes for questions and to really respond to the specific curiosities that all of you have on this topic. So back to you, Kami. Great. Thank you both. That's amazing, amazing information. And there's a lot of questions that have piled up, so I'm just going to get started. And why don't I ask Amy, how do I have enough time, and this is from Gabby, how do I have enough time to manage the social media when I have some of the other important tasks? Well, I found that when I created a dashboard, I had a lot more time because before I was going out and looking for the content. So I was doing the same search a couple of times or even refreshing searches and trying to find new bloggers. And that takes time. But when I set up the tool in a way that it was searching things for me, and it was highlighting new conversations for me, I could check in with the dashboard when I had, okay, I'm going to spend 15 minutes before lunch looking this over. You can be way more targeted in your time. And I think that someone tweeted, and I don't want to try and put too many eggs in the basket, but someone had asked how you organize your feeds in a dashboard like that. And I find it helps your time issue by prioritizing those in tabs by how time sensitive they are. So you might have a tab for Twitter because you know that those are conversations that are really timely. And then after a while, it just looks bad that you were never there, and it kind of gets buried in the timeline. So have a separate tab for any searches that are on Twitter or for any Google alerts that come from Twitter so that you know, okay, if there's something that shows up there that's new, I'm going to respond to that prior to a news page or whatever your priority list is. So I prioritize my tab based on time-sensitiveness. Great. And some questions, I'll throw this over to Gunner. What are some other tools, other than NetVibes, that you would recommend people using? Sure. So for the task of listening, there's sort of a food chain that starts at free and moves to arbitrarily expensive. On the free end, the iGoogle setup. So if you create a Google account, you can use iGoogle to set something up very similar to NetVibes. We prefer NetVibes just because we think it's more user-friendly and at the same price, zero. There's not much cost competition either of those two services. If you're willing to pay, there's a number of services that offer stronger analytics, although we continue to ask people what they think of the paid services and people that we respect don't have high opinions of them. But examples of those services include FilterBox without an E, so F-I-L-T-R, BoxFilterBox.com, Radiant6, R-A-D-I-U, Radiant, R-A-D-I-A-N-6, the number 6.com, Radiant6.com, and also Biz360, the one that Amy mentioned on one of her slides. These are higher priced. Radiant6 I think has a nonprofit rate of $250 a month, which is quite spendy. And what they do that's slightly more useful, they'll actually give you numbers. One thing you don't get out of NetVibes is it won't give you, for instance, the number of times that your hashtag has been mentioned in a given time window. You can't do graphs of how many times you've been mentioned, although that service is now available on places like the Google updates search. So long story short, we think NetVibes is still a great deal for the money, but you can get a demo, and you can also get sort of a test drive account from FilterBox or Radiant6 if you want to see the fancier analytics and the kind of reports that you don't get from a NetVibes where it's sort of self-service. You've just got to look at the data on the NetVibes screen and read those tea leaves to your own ins. Excellent. And Amy, what is the value of paying for ads on social media? What is the value of paying for ads on social media? I don't know. I don't pay for ads. So you wouldn't recommend that people pay for ads? I mean, I don't really feel in a position to say either way. It's never been something that I've felt was a valuable outlet for my work, at least at NetSquared. We're completely community driven, and do as much as we can to be driven as an organization through our programming or whatever by what the community wants and needs, and it grows as it grows. And we're very dedicated to keeping it organic. And so in that way, we haven't ever bought ads. And that addresses like the earlier question they had which is how do I attract others to our site? And I didn't ask it because it's such a big question, but by saying you're having the community drive traffic to your site. So can you maybe talk a little bit about utilizing your community to bring people together? Sure. Another kind of dashboard that I often recommend is a community dashboard on your website so that that's where anyone that wants to support you in any way can go. That's where they could get your logo so that they're using the correct logo and not doing anything to yours. That's where they could get press releases or little tweetable little blurbs about your organization that are already 140 characters or less and maybe already include the hashtag you want them to include. Have recent pictures from events so that if they were at the event and they want to blog about the great time they had, they have a really good picture of the keynote speaker to use. Whatever would make someone promoting you or talking about you or supporting you super easy to do, put all of that into a page in a nice way so that when people think, okay, I'm maybe going to blog about TechSoup today, let's see what they have, they can see, oh, here's this little community toolkit area and I can get the correct TechSoup logo and I can use the right link to the forum or whatever it is. So I recommend that as a way to help your community drive traffic for you and then the other side obviously is to create valuable content. The more value you put out, the more people are going to want to share it and link back to it or talk about it or add to it. So really concentrate on value and not necessarily how often you're tweeting, but is every tweet a good tweet that kind of issue. And again, that's all relative. Great, thanks for answering that. The next question, Gunnar, if you could pick one tool for communication, would it be Facebook, Twitter, or a blog? I'm going to challenge that question. There is no such thing as a right tool. There are two specific sets of considerations. The most important consideration is what audience or audiences are you trying to reach and what tools do they prefer? So if you are trying to reach a predominantly youth audience, it is still the case, even though MySpace is no longer cool, it is still the case that your best bet to reach a target teen audience is MySpace. Facebook is also pretty good, but demographically, MySpace is still a more youth-friendly social network. If you are trying to reach a pundit audience, if you are trying to reach thought leaders, if you are trying to reach people who are writing about things, blogging is often an excellent channel to be communicating in. But part of why we are so bullish on this dashboard concept is it lets you engage in a two-directional study and engagement with your audiences. You can see where people are retweeting. You can see where people are talking about you or commenting about you in places that you don't control. If you have a blog, you know who comments on your blog. But if you are mentioned on another blog or someone does a blog post about you, it's with a listening dashboard and these other related tools that you get notified about that and can then do the analysis to really try and decide where it makes sense to invest your energy. That said, the other way that we answer the question is that the incremental cost of maintaining a simple Facebook presence and a simple Twitter presence are quite small. And especially if you will buy into this publishing matrix approach, the incremental cost of tweeting a link to a blog post or posting on Facebook an update that links to a blog post, what you are doing there is you are by definition reaching different audiences. Your blog audience is demographically guaranteed to be different than your Facebook following is guaranteed to be different than your Twitter following. And so by using a publishing matrix approach and knowing where your primary channels are, and that's usually web, email, and blog, but for some organizations, Facebook and Twitter are your primaries. But by knowing where your primaries are and supporting those channels with intentional messaging in the other channels, tweeting about blog posts, Facebook updates about new website content, that's the way that you drive maximum traffic while also reaching the broadest number of audiences and using the listening dashboard, you get a sense of where to invest future energy based on what comes back to you. Great, thanks, Benner. And Karen's question, can we follow what's said about our organization on Facebook and Twitter even if we don't have a presence there? You definitely can on Twitter. If you just go to search.twitter.com, you can search for whatever you want. And it's also helpful if you want to search for something that might not be super recent in a normal Google search if you include twitter.com and then other search names or words that you want to look up, that'll pull from the Twitter stream as well. Facebook, you're going to need to have a login. Even if you don't have an organization fan page or a group or anything like that, in order to get into Facebook, you're going to have to have at least a personal login. But otherwise, once you're in, so to speak, same as Twitter, you can search for whatever you would like. And if you're an organization, a nonprofit, it would be great if you did searches in the causes application and other fundraising applications so that you could see if people were fundraising for you. And causes will let you create an organizational presence so that you can communicate with those cause administrators. And just like having a community toolkit on your website, you can feed them information or content or action so that they can join with you in fundraising or join with you in a call to action to sign a petition or whatever it is. So I would definitely log into Facebook and search and see if people are already trying to focus on something that you're working on as well. And this is Gunnar. I'd just love to hop in with a quick public service announcement. We really encourage organizations to consider a Twitter account and a Facebook account to be like domain names and go ahead and reserve them even if you're not sure how much you'll use them. You want to go ahead and get the Twitter identity that matches your organizational name if possible. You want to go ahead and get a Facebook account. And once I think you've got 25 fans or friends or whatever F word it is, once you've got 25, you can also ask for a name. We strongly encourage organizations to go ahead and get those while they're available because they disappear quickly and especially if you're a campaigning or issue-oriented organization where you have opponents and you have targets, they're going to go ahead and get that real estate if you don't. So we really do encourage you, even if you're ambivalent about the degree to which you'll use Facebook or Twitter or MySpace, go ahead and get those accounts and log in every 60 to 90 days to keep them alive because that's online real estate you want to have and protect with the option to use it later even if you don't know now whether or not you will. Cool. Thank you. So Gunnar, I'll just send this to you. Why is the hashtag important when other Twitter users can just use the app sign your name when they're doing a search? Great question. And it gets into some Twitter nuance that I will try not to go too far down the Twitter rabbit hole. The app sign is associated with an actual Twitter username. Many hashtags do not correspond to user names. And so great example of that. Aspiration runs a lot of events. And so our annual nonprofit software development summit that we hold every fall in Oakland, California, the hashtag for that is Dev Summit. We tweet from the Aspiration Tech account. We invite our participants to tweet from their accounts. But by using the hashtag Dev Summit, we're able to aggregate all the tweets about our Dev Summit by that hashtag which is not associated with a username. When you see the app sign, that's talking about a user, a username on Twitter. And Amy, any advice you can offer for nonprofits which are nervous to use social media because of possible negative comments being posted? Well, if you start listening, you'll be able to start hearing all the negative comments which A, first of all, a negative comment is an opportunity to do better. Either you're not delivering the service in the way that you really could, you're not reaching people, or they just don't know that you are doing it in the way that they want, and there's better communication that can be done. But second of all, once you hear that, you can start letting people know, oh, that's great feedback. We'll improve that programming. Or actually, that information is located right here. Let us know if you have other questions. So I would love to hear, well, no, I guess that's kind of a bad statement, but I am not upset when I hear bad feedback because that means, like I said, either that's someone that's taking the time to help me improve, or it means that they just didn't know where it was or what the information was, and it's an opportunity for me to connect with them, show that I'm listening, show that I care, and I'm engaged, and get it straightened out. So starting to use social media is different than starting to listen, and starting to listen, you'll get to hear any bad comments. You'll get to hear really good comments. You'll get to figure out where people are and where it's easiest for you to start engaging, whether that's commenting on people's blogs, or setting up a Twitter account, or whatever it is, and that kind of opens the door for you and helps guide you. Like I said before, the community will then guide you where you should start using social media, because there are thousands of different social media tools, and widgets, and all kinds of things. So to think that you could just pick a few out of the sky is unreasonable and really overwhelming, and puts the pressure on you to make those successful. They're maybe not the right tool. So starting to listen, yes, you might hear the bad comments, but that's great, and it'll help you figure out which social media avenues to actually start walking down. Excellent. Thank you. And Kim, if I could just, I'd like to piggyback on that and say a couple of things. And the first is a supportive, tough love statement, which is some variation on get over it. And that is to say, many organizations have that fear, and we really encourage you to go ahead and dip your toe in the proverbial water, because unless you're working on a really hot button issue, if you are working on reproductive rights, if you are working on the death penalty, if you are working on Middle Eastern or Palestinian issues, then yes, it is likely that your online real estate could become battleground-like, and you do want to be careful. But 90% of nonprofits working even on campaign and issue-oriented areas are missing an opportunity to engage a very influential set of audiences by opting not to go there because of risk aversion. And the simple truth is the new Internet, the Internet that has evolved over the last 10 years, sort of the post.com Internet, is an Internet that says that organizations need to use online channels to give their online audiences a role in their work, an interactive opportunity to be engaged if they really want to be effective. And while that's absolutely a debatable point in a matter of perspective, we really do encourage organizations not to let fear of a negative comment or fear of anything other than just not getting value be a reason that they don't go into these online opportunities. So Gunnar, how do we integrate social media into our project management process? So how much time should this take? Well, I think let's take a step back because to us, social media is simply a special case of online communications. It has a slightly higher interactive responsibility but it is not overwhelming. Many organizations think that the minute they have a Facebook page or a Twitter page, they're just going to be overwhelmed with people interacting with them. And again, unless you're working on something really hot or you're working with a very Facebook or Twitter-enabled set of audiences, you're not going to get overwhelmed. I mean, aspiration tech, we are privileged to have several hundred thousand Twitter followers because we were featured on Twitter. We don't get overwhelmed by tweets. We don't get overwhelmed by direct messages. And we have a decent Facebook following somewhere south of a thousand folks that follow us on Facebook. And Matt, our social media person does a phenomenal job of drinking a cup of coffee every morning, checking our social media dashboard and our accounts and responding to them. So to the question, what we recommend is that you have an overall communications process. You know, when you communicate, when you update your website, when you send emails, and you've planned out your messaging, you've planned out when and how you actually send messages out. And you simply integrate social media into that workflow and not treat it as a bolt-on or a standalone component. The interactive part of the social media, the fact that yes, you might actually engage in sort of a one-on-one community level, that's a sign of success. That's something that we encourage organizations to effectively earn in that you can do a good job of being online and then you do, in fact, get that audience engagement. That's when you need to have the resource conversation about what resources are realistic to allocate to that. But we encourage people to try and get to that problem because it means that you're having resonance. It means that you've got a motivated, passionate set of audience members that want to be engaged with you and potentially want to support your work. And to some degree, you can have conversations that include delegating volunteer members of your community to help with managing some of your online real estate if that's appropriate for the kind of work you do. But the bottom line answer to the question that was asked, integrate social media into your overall organizational workflow just as you integrate overall organizational communications into your organizational workflow. Great. Thanks. And I believe this will be the last question. How do you determine what type of content, and this is for Amy, is best suited to a particular channel? So if you post onto your website or Facebook, Twitter, and a blog. Sure. So the easy answer is test it out, try it, see how people respond. The second more in-depth answer is to go along with all of the other charts and maps and planning that we've talked about in this call is a really simple chart that I do just for not every single message, but for more content level type messages is I just chart it as who are the different audiences? Because you don't have just one audience if you think your community is made of one group of people, then probably not very many of them are listening. So separate it out by who the different groups are in your community. And then next to that say what they want to be talking about with you, what issues are there? Maybe they only want to talk about your services, someone else wants to talk about your program, someone wants to talk about how to volunteer for you, whatever those different types of topics are. And then next to that, so you now have a line going from who it is, what kind of things they want to talk to you about, and then where they want to have those conversations. So once you've done, mapped it in that way, you can then see, okay I have three different areas that it looks like I know groups engage on Twitter, and there's really just two topics that show up. Okay, so that's maybe what I'm going to concentrate on on Twitter, or does that make sense? At least to Cammy and Gunnar since your voices are there. That's how I like to do it is who the groups are, what they're interested in, and where they talk. And it just makes it really easy to see who's talking about what where, or who wants to engage with me about what topics where. Great. Thank you so much, and I want to let everyone know that we're out of time, but Gunnar and I conducted a webinar a few months ago on this topic, so I will send out a link to that fantastic information, but definitely worth a whole hour. So thanks everyone for participating today. If you have additional questions, I apologize if your question didn't get asked, but do post them to our community forums. Becky will send out the short URL for that. And if you're new to TechSoup, we've got a whole lot of stuff other than webinars. We've got donated software, articles, blog posts, promote events. So check out more that we have to offer. And our next webinar is happening on Thursday, and it's winning campaigns with powerful collateral. So I hope you can join us for that. And we want to thank ReadyTalk. This webinar is made possible by ReadyTalk which has donated the use of their system to help TechSoup expand awareness of technology through the nonprofit sector. 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. So thanks again, everyone.