 Welcome to TechSoup Talks. My name is Kami Griffiths, and today's webinar is 10 Social Media Tips and Secrets. Our presenter is Heather Mansfield. And Heather, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and your webinar program? Sure. My name is Heather Mansfield. I have a small company called DOSI Communications. And I blog at Nonprofit Tech 2.0 in various nonprofit org communities that total about 500,000 fans, followers, and friends. And today I'm going to be talking about the 10 most important tips I've learned from using these sites 40 to 50 hours a week for the last 4.5 years. Fantastic. Well, we're certainly happy to have you here and appreciate all the time that you've put into this presentation. I'd also like to thank Chris Peters and Stephanie Parker for helping out on the chat. We have a full house today, so we want to move through the webinar so we have time at the end for Q&A. So why don't we just get started, Heather? All right, great. Thank you so much. So in today's webinar, before I get into the 10 Social Media Tips and Secrets, and those are kind of more like best practices, I really want to lay a context for all the nonprofit communications folks out there of understanding social media and its role and the social web in general and kind of three evolutions of the web today, Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0. So I'm going to start with brief explanations of those and then move into really the 10 most important things I have learned over the last 4.5 years of running social networking communities, promoting nonprofits and promoting my webinars and helping nonprofits use social media. And you might be a little bit surprised by what they are. So we'll try to move through those pretty quickly and then leave about 15 minutes in the end for questions. Let's just go ahead and get started. Now this is the first time I've ever done a webinar where it's just slide, so you might have to have a little patience with me while I figure out the markup tools. So let's see, I'm showing here, Tammy. I'm on slide 7, but I don't see it in the presentation. So is there, there we go. All right, so first of all, Web 1.0, the static web. I like to define these as your website, your email newsletter, and your eadvocacy tools, and donate now button. Let me turn it a little bit here with these markup tools. So you'll notice, donate now button right there, email newsletter, the website, and then the take action tool. I am very honest with nonprofits about social media, and all these fancy new builds, and whistles, and tools that are out there. Make sure you have your website, your email newsletter, and your donate now button in place, working well before you even think about branching out into Web 2.0, which is also known as the Dynamic Web or a.k.a. the Social Web, which I'm not really sure if there's a slide delay, but I'm seeing that. Just double-click on the slide and it will move. Okay, there we go. All right, so then getting into Web 2.0, now this all started pretty much with the launch of Blogger in 2004. This is when things started getting really interesting. You didn't have control any longer. Like on your website, your email newsletter, you had complete control over that content. People aren't going to your website and posting comments and giving thumbs up and having all these discussions. So this era really changed everything. And believe it or not, it's been around since 2004. YouTube came out in 2005. MySpace and Facebook came out in 2005. So we're still fairly new, but well five or six years into this new era of the web. And for nonprofits, what this will be are your social networking tools. Over here they got to follow us on Facebook, connect with us, and then they have a blog. I almost like to call blogging Web 1.5. Now what's really important to understand is that all of these new fancy new tools, they're not meant to replace Web 1.0. Your website, your email newsletter, your email advocacy tools if you're doing any, your Donate Now button, those are still the most important tools in your online communications arsenal today. You actually use Facebook, hopefully to drive traffic to your website, Twitter to build your email newsletter list, blogging to increase online donations through your Donate Now button, and send out your e-advocacy tools through these various social networking sites, have online conversations, but then empower your friends, your followers, and fans to share them throughout the web for you. Now we're already into Web 3.0, and this actually isn't the correct technical term of Web 3.0. If you would talk to a tech person, they would say it's the semantic web. I'll tell you right now, I have no idea what that means. I cannot wrap my head around it, but it's the next big thing. But for the sake of simplicity, I like to define Web 3.0, kind of this next level of web communications as the mobile web. And this captures everything from Web 1.0, your website, except putting it in a mobile format, your email newsletter, except maybe it will be read on a mobile device or an iPad, text campaign, smartphone apps, and Facebook, Twitter, all of these tools, accessing these tools on mobile devices. Now if you look at this slide, this is actually my mobile website. It looks like it was designed in 1995. But if you go to the next slide and you shrink it, you actually see what that site would look like on a mobile device, on a mobile browser. When you click on any of those icons at the top, they don't go to the desktop version of my Twitter account. Now they go to the mobile version, m.twitter.com forward slash nonprofit org. So what's important to understand about this is that as you're building your communities on social networking sites, use them to build also your Web 1.0 campaigns, but understand that you're laying a foundation that's very important for the long-term sustainability of your organization which is embracing and becoming an early adopter of the mobile web. With that context down, let's go ahead and jump into some of my secrets. And really, secrets is kind of an elaborate term for them. They really are the things that I can sum up after 4 ½ years of doing this, where we're at today and what's most important. And I think a lot of nonprofits still tend to view kind of social media as this free tool set. We can have our intern do it, or maybe we'll hire somebody, but it'll be unpaid, this sort of thing. And we are kind of entering an era now where it's been around 5 or 6 years where we need to move it up a few notches to make it stand out for the rest. And one of the most important things that you can do right now is invest in a good avatar. And what I mean by that is your profile picture that you use on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube, ForSquare, and they should all be consistent, meaning they should all look the same for every profile. Because what you'll start to notice is that you've been on these sites for a while, but you might not see the name and recognize an organization or a brand or a resource. You'll see their logo, aka what I like to call their avatar. So it's really important at this point that you do some of the basics like have a square avatar. A lot of logos are rectangular and they don't look good on Facebook. The only place where you need a rectangular avatar these days is on LinkedIn. But if you use it on Twitter, if you use it on YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, it ends up getting cropped. So something like this, the World Society for the Protection of Animals, they literally opened their horizontal logo in Photoshop, expanded the canvas size to make it square took about 30 seconds. Now why this is important is because any time you see the World Society for the Protection of Animals in the news feed on Facebook, you don't see a logo that's cropped and messed up. You see a perfectly square logo. Now when you go out on Twitter, you'll recognize that before you even think of the name of the organization. It becomes consistent and visually appealing through all social networking sites. Another option is to take your logo and superimpose it with an image. Now this is a small nonprofit called Echo Viva. They're actually based in Oakland. They change out those photos every 3 to 4 months. So they consistently use their avatar, but they make sure that they've got a photo at the top of it so it shows up perfectly square. Now here's an example of what happens if you don't do that. I love Greenpeace. I'm a donor of Greenpeace. I've been a longtime fan. This avatar looks absolutely fabulous on the front of a Facebook page. But when you go and you see it in the news feed, which is where 90% of the power is on Facebook, most people don't go to your page and hang out on your page. They're seeing your status updates in the news feed. Well what happens is any kind of horizontal or vertical avatar gets cut off. So we're at this point now. If you've gone through any kind of logo design process that can drag out for months. You've got to have meetings about it. You go back, redesign this and redesign that. It's really time to make sure that you have an avatar that has your logo in it that's square and that's visually appealing across all social networking sites. Number two is finding your Facebook voice. 90% of the power of a Facebook page really is in the status update because they do get news feed exposure. I cannot emphasize this enough. I monitor the stats on my Facebook page which has about 10,300 likes or fans. And the vast majority of the traffic from Facebook to either my blog or my website or to a New York Times article or something that I'm posting is coming from the status updates. Not a lot of people click on tabs. They're not clicking on links over on the left side of your page. Most of that action is happening through the status update and news feed on Facebook. A really important thing that you need to understand about Web 2.0 is that it's not really about marketing. It's not old school like, well, yeah, we're going to go into Facebook and just post links to our blog and links to our donate page and links to our new press release. It really is inciting and leading conversations online. And one of the best indicators that you're doing a good job of that on Facebook is if you're getting thumbs up and comments on your status updates. I can tell you this, if you're not consistently getting at least – and it depends on your Facebook community size. Maybe you have 500 fans, maybe you have 100,000 fans. It will vary based on fan size. But you should hopefully be getting at least a couple of comments a week and some thumbs up. If you're never getting any comments or thumbs up then you still need to find your Facebook voice. The good news about Web 2.0 is it's a little bit more laid back. If you send out a misspelling or you do an email newsletter that's boring or if there's something wrong on your website, that's really bad in Web 1.0. But in Web 2.0, the online audience is a little bit more forgiving. So you can post things and maybe they don't get any comments or thumbs up. Well, you know, okay, that's not going to work. Let me try something different. So this is the National Peace Corps Association and they have a really good Facebook voice. Now on my end it's a little small. I can't actually read what I hyperlinked there. Or what I bolded there in that status update. But notice in every status update they put some kind of statement. They just don't post a link. Like here's the photos. And have a look at the photos. But they always preface it with some kind of statement. It might have an I statement. It might have a we statement. It usually will have a little bit of personality to it, which classic marketing doesn't have a lot of personality. It's just like, here, read our press release. So one thing about Facebook is you want to make sure that every status update has some kind of statement attached to a link that you're going to post. Now in this case they had an event. They posted some photos. That's really good community building. Notice they got three comments and it looks like one like I can't see for sure. And then down below they do some more photos. And let's look at another case. They've got more thumbs up, more comments. And then when somebody actually posts a comment, they'll go back and reply. What I see a lot of nonprofits do is they'll just go into Facebook, post the link, and then maybe they'll get a couple of comments but they don't actually go back and participate. And this really is what Facebook is about. You want to make sure that you're posting content that's interesting and you know it's interesting by the kind of feedback and response that you get from your fans. If you're not getting any, then most likely your ROI is pretty minimal. Now I love International Development Exchange. They're one of my favorite organizations. I used to work there. But notice the difference. They're doing marketing. They're sending out a link. It doesn't have any comments. It doesn't have any likes. And then the one status update, talking about an event where they did post a preface statement, it got a couple of likes. So it's really important to understand that most likely people are tuning out their status updates when it's just marketing. So you want to make sure on that second best practice that you find your Facebook voice. And that translates to Twitter. That translates to LinkedIn, or MySpace, or YouTube. Every community is unique. Every community has its own tone. Like a lot of people often sense Twitter with Facebook that is a huge mistake because Facebook is one community with its own rules for etiquette and frequency of posting. Twitter is completely another one. So on this third point is being nice and replying and retweeting on Twitter. And I have to say being friendly and being nice is important across all social networking sites. And what I mean by that is that if somebody says something nice on your wall, make sure you reply back and say thanks. If somebody does something nice for your organization, make sure you acknowledge that on social networking sites. And that requires time. And I tell you, it does require a particular personality of someone that can go in and take the time and actually want to engage people and participate and be friendly. And nowhere except on Twitter does this whole friendly thing play itself out more. And Twitter, the objective here is for those of you that aren't using it, is to build followers. You want to have people that are reading your tweets. And one of the fastest ways to get new followers is to retweet others. And I'll show you that in just a minute. And basically what that means is forwarding other people's tweets. It's an ironic thing on Twitter. The more you promote others, the more it will come back at you and you'll get retweeted yourself. One thing I see a lot of nonprofits do are less and less these days, but you want to make sure you don't go on Twitter and just start, thank you, thank you, thank you, oh this is great, blah, blah, blah. But you want to make sure that you are smart about what you are retweeting and the content that you are posting. And not being so friendly that you are posting, thanks for the retweet, thanks for the retweet 20 times a day because that's pretty boring. Now I think the National Wildlife Federation, they were an early adopter of social media. They were on MySpace, either in late 2005 or early 2006. And what's ironic is some of those early adopters, Oxfam, National Wildlife Federation, Humane Society, those that were on MySpace five years ago, they are the ones that have 250,000 fans today. They've been doing this sort of stuff for a long time now. And Danielle who works at the National Wildlife Federation, she's probably one of the best. I can count on my hands five people that I automatically just think of as friendly community builders and understand this whole concept of good karma on Twitter. You promote somebody else, they end up promoting you back. It comes right back at you. So I highlighted a tweet at the bottom where she had retweeted someone else and I actually can't see it. But the person that she retweeted is this person. And then she retweeted the National Wildlife Federation in return to her followers. So it's really important to understand on Twitter that you just don't go on there and do marketing. And this is probably why a lot of the small to medium sized nonprofits stay here like, yeah we've got to get on Twitter, let's try it. And then they get on there and all they do is market like, hey we need a donation or hey sign up for our email newsletter or hey read our blog. That gets very boring very, very quickly. And Twitter takes time to find your voice. It took me a good six months inside of that community until I really realized what it was about. And that brings us to the fourth social media secret. Mix it up. Don't only tweet your own content. Send out content that you know your followers will either retweet or find interesting. Over time, and by using a few tools I'm going to show you here in just a minute, you will get a sense of what content your particular followers find interesting. And just like on Facebook, if you're not getting any comments or if you're not getting any thumbs up, that's the number one indicator that you're not sending out the kind of content that folks want. On Twitter if you're not getting retweeted or you're not getting mentioned then most likely you haven't found your voice. And as a result your ROI, your return of investment from Twitter is going to be pretty minimal as well. So for example, let's look at my nonprofit account. Now if I went on here and all I ever did was talk about myself and talked about my company and talked about my blog, I wouldn't be getting retweeted a whole lot. I mixed up my content. So I'll promote a nonprofit through the nonprofit of the month. And then I'll promote the Facebook page and promote a nonprofit. And then I'll retweet another nonprofit. And then that nonprofit will likely retweet me in return. So by promoting others I end up getting retweeted and promoted more often. So it's really important to understand you might have another nonprofit that works on the same mission that you do, but you'll still retweet them and promote them. Or let's say you're an animal organization that works to educate people about spaying, neutering their pets. And The New York Times comes out with an article that morning that says, here are some stats on the status of unspayed and neutered pets in America. Well you might want to send that out. Most nonprofits when they first get on Twitter they do only marketing. And so it takes a while to understand on Twitter. It's not just about that. It really is about promoting others, mentioning, having conversations, retweeting. Now I train a lot of Catholic sisters. I'm a big fan of Catholic sisters. And one way that I always explain this to them is retweet to others as you would have them retweet unto you. And it really is so true. The more you retweet other people the more you get retweeted. And if you get retweeted more often then the more your name gets out there on Twitter and over time the more followers you will have. I do have to say a lot of large organizations like the Maine Society, or Amnesty International, or the National Wildlife Federation. Now in many cases they are brand concurring. They can go on Facebook or they can go on Twitter and get 40,000 followers in a year. The reality is most small to medium not sized nonprofits, they are going to have to build their communities on Facebook slowly, about 1,000 fans one year. Maybe they've got 3,000 by the end of the second year. So you can't expect miracles. But if you find your Facebook voice, if you find your Twitter voice over time your communities will grow. All the while you want to make sure for every 10 tweets you are sending out you put in one that is like, hey by the way, urgent, we really need 20 bucks. Or hey, sign up for our e-mail newsletter. Or hey, check out our blog. You want to do marketing of course, but you have to do it strategically. So I would say out of every five tweets on Twitter have four of them be about your programs, your missions, or content related to your work area. And then one, the blatant like hey, we need a donation. Or hey, sign up for our e-mail newsletter. Or hey, visit our new blog post. Now retweeting, it really is quite fascinating. Sociologists are having a field day with studying Twitter because it really for the first time kind of takes massive human behaviors and impulses and things that we see. It's so subtle. And then people can actually study what we are doing on Twitter scientifically. And so you will see some of the most retweetable words are please retweet. This is the please part. That's what I thought about being friendly. You would be surprised how much being friendly will carry you in social media. Top 10 reasons, how to, new blog posts, free webinars, new media release, new blog posts, check it out, please retweet us, Twitter, you, this sort of thing. The least retweetable words are kind of the cliche about Twitter, which people who don't use it, regular, you know, we see the commercials where the dad's tweeting on the back porch with the son and the son sitting right next to him and he's tweeting, yeah, I'm sitting on the porch. And it's just kind of silly. And people that use Twitter know that it's not really about that. So this whole thing of, you know, hey, I'm watching the game, ha ha ha, laugh out loud, oh I'm so tired, my back hurts, I'm bored, I'm listening to this, time to go to bed, least retweetable words. People that are on Twitter have high voracious appetites for news consumption. They tend to be college educated. They tend to be a little bit older. They tend to be professional. So it's a more advanced, you know, group of the Internet online commons. And they most often tend to be looking for news. So kind of some of the more boring, tedious stuff, it doesn't work as well. Now interestingly enough, punctuation, even plays a big deal. I use a lot of colons when I send out tweets, and I notice that does help me get retweeted. I can send out the same tweet with a semicolon, and it doesn't. And I think you'll notice the semicolons on the far right, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that if you send out a semicolon, most often people will think it was a typo, so they're like, oh, they don't really know what they're doing, they're sending out typos, right? So it's just very fascinating. Twitter takes a while. It takes a good four to six months. It's not what it appears on the surface at all. You have to be in that community a while before you really get a sense of what it's about and how to use it. Also, what URL shortners you're using make a big difference. Bitly is number one by far, so using Bitly helps you get retweeted. Number two is Owly. Now this is actually an old graph. It's about nine months old. Owly comes from Hootsuite, and I know Hootsuite is really popular now, so my guess is that's gone up a little bit, but Bitly is still by far the most retweetable URL, leading us to the fifth secret, which is using third-party Twitter apps. Now, third-party Twitter apps just aren't meant for Twitter. They can be used in your website. They can be used in your email communications. They can be used on Facebook. There are currently 2,900 third-party Twitter apps at a website called 140.com. I have read estimates that by the end of the year 2011, there will be over 50,000 third-party Twitter apps. And the backfundory of them are free. That's one thing that's really amazing about the time in which we're living and communicating in the nonprofit sector. Whereas 10 years ago, you know, a donate now button to sign up, it was $300 and then $50 a month. Websites were expensive. So many of these tools are now free and available. So here's Bitly. Bitly is of course a URL shortener, but it's much more than that. And you have to create an account. Make sure you log in when you use Bitly. And what it will do is it will basically take a really long URL, meaning a long website address, and shrink it down to about 15 characters. Now on Twitter, you're only allowed to send out tweets that are 140 characters. So shrinking URLs is really important, so it doesn't take up a lot of the space of your tweet. But more importantly, using the Bitly version where you sign in to create an account, it allows you to track how many people are clicking on what you're sending out on Twitter. And I tell you, when I started using Bitly, it was a real wake-up call for me because here I was, you know, sending out stuff. And I was like, oh yeah, my followers will find that interesting. And once I created the Bitly account and started actually monitoring to see what people were clicking on, I found out it was completely different than what I thought. So a lot of nonprofits are tweeting blindly, meaning they don't really know who's clicking on what and what the results are. One thing that's great about Bitly is for each link it will then track how many people clicked it directly from your Twitter account, how many people retweeted it, how many people shared it on Facebook, how many people commented on it on Facebook. And this whole screenshot doesn't show everything, but then it also shows all the people that retweeted it below. It will show you from what country, if it was translated into different languages. So Bitly should just become a part of your regular Twitter experience to make you a better Twitterer. You might be sending out stuff, Nick and I, this stuff is doing great. And then you might discover that no one is actually clicking on it, or you will send out something thinking, maybe this will work, and then it will end up getting retweeted like a thousand times. And you will be like, wow, I had no idea. So using Bitly helps you find your Twitter voice. Twitter is another one in general. I have found that people really like polls. It's just kind of a funny thing to answer this question. And so this is one that I sent out. All of these tools are free. You just go to twitpole.com and you actually log in with your Twitter ID. You don't have to create a new account or anything like that. So how many times a day on average does your nonprofit get retweeted? I was really shocked by the results. I can't see it. It's too small on my end in this particular view. But it was something like 70% were retweeted three times or less a week. And then another 11% didn't even know what that meant. Like they had no idea where to find out. So we are looking at 80% to 85% of nonprofits not getting retweeted at all. And what that means is that they are not posting the kind of content that those followers are wanting. So when they are only growing by a couple of new followers a day or a week, it might have to do with the fact that they are tweeting blindly, that they haven't really found their Twitter voice. Another fun Twitter tool, StartPartyApp, is something called DoubleTwee. This is the Chronicle of Philanthropy. They were announcing a contest. And it will basically allow you to film using your camera on your computer a little 30 second, 45 second clip, and then you can put it on the home page of your Twitter account. You might want to use this on a special campaign day or maybe you are an organization that works with refugees and you want to do something from your executive director on World Refugee Day. But of course, use it sparingly. We all know how annoying it is now to go to a website and use it for videos, start talking at you. So it is the same thing here. You want to use this sort of thing sparingly where people go to your Twitter account and the video pops up in a little bubble. But every once in a while it is a new twist, and it is a fun way to use Twitter. And we are only covering four of the current 2900 third party Twitter apps. Another one is TuGov for any of you organizations out there that do advocacy work. This one is really interesting. You can sign up and then you send out a tweet and you use a hashtag. And when people use that hashtag or mention TuGov in their tweet, it automatically compiles everyone. And then if they have entered their location on their Twitter account and you log in and you enter your city and state, once a month this organization or this group will then send the Senators and all the Congress people and the President, everyone on Capitol Hill, how many people sent out tweets supporting such legislation or against such legislation. So if you are an advocacy organization that is very much kind of a little bit of advocacy 3.0 right there, the basis of it being born. So you definitely want to check that one out. Now a sixth tip, and I'm going to go through these last four pretty quickly to make sure we have time for questions. And this might seem a little cheesy, but it's so true, is use inspirational quotes and powerful stats everywhere on social media. It is guaranteed. I guarantee you, you will get retweeted, you will get thumbs up, you will get comments. I mean a lot of us maybe we don't want to promote or don't want to do quotes because it's like oh that seems so cheesy. I've heard that Margaret Mead quote a thousand times, but people eat it up on the online cons. They love it. Anytime I post this one by Alice Walker, Activism is my rent for living on this planet, that will get retweeted a minimum of 50 times. So that means 50 people on Twitter are sending out my Twitter ID to anywhere from 1,000 to 100,000 people. Quotes, work. Stats also work. I log into Twitter a lot. I only follow nonprofits and currently it's about 25,500 of them that I've been able to find on Twitter. I have to log in every day and try to find interesting stats that nonprofits are posting. And the vast majority of them are not at all. They are mostly doing the marketing thing. So I have actually a difficult time finding tweets from nonprofits that are using stats that I want to retweet. But nothing works more often in terms of getting retweeted or comments or thumbs up than stats related to your organization's work. So for example, 1 in 4 girls is sexually abused before the age of 18 in the United States. It's shocking to people. So that wakes them up. And then it sends a link to this organization's website who is working against childhood sexual abuse to the stat and the information where people can learn more about that. Another one, the third one, the truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off. Gloria, sign them. Don't be afraid to rock the boat a little bit. I remember I posted that when a couple of weeks ago and I had actually never said anything on Twitter like, piss me off or get mad or anything like that. I tend to be a little cautious. And I was shocked. 100 people retweeted that. So don't be afraid to rock the boat a little bit. And then another one that always gets retweeted quite a bit. Let's say you're an animal organization, or an environmental ocean organization. You've got a plethora of stats that you can find. 73 million sharks are killed annually for shark fin soup. And then it links to a video that shows shark finning with a great big donate button on it that says, you know, donate to help stop this. Definitely think about your organization, your mission, your program, and just regularly, consistently on a weekly basis. Come up with like a stat or a famous quote that you can alternate between Facebook and Twitter and MySpace or even Foursquare. If any of you are using Foursquare, stats work really well in Foursquare Shouts. So social media tip number 7, and this is one I have to say was a big eye-opener for me. I was a reluctant blogger. I only started blogging 10 months ago. I was like, oh my gosh, there's something insane, like 133 million blogs out there today. I was like, the world does not need another blogger. There is enough blogs. I was absolutely so wrong. Since launching my blog 10 months ago, my brand, my online recognition, my webinar sign-ups, just everything has exploded. So it took four years, for example, to build my email newsletter list to get 3,000. It took the last 10 months to get 5,000 email newsletter subscribers, and they are coming from my blog. And the two most important reasons that you want to think about blogging today and how it is so different from say blogging in 2006 and 2007, when maybe your executive director was going to launch a blog, like to put a human face to your organization. Today it's about, well, if you are going to go out on Facebook, if you are going to go out on Twitter and regularly have fresh content on Twitter, you can be posting 3 to 4 to 5 tweets a day. Well, what are you going to be posting? Are you always going to be sending out the New York Times? Are you always going to be sending out that About Us page from your website? Well, that's going to get boring pretty quickly. What blogging allows you to do, and there are plenty of things that you can blog about. I have a blog where I actually have 15 different ideas for nonprofits to blog about for 15 different things. This will allow you to have a consistent stream of fresh content that you can log and send out on Twitter and Facebook every day. Twitter and Facebook and all of these new social media tools are content driven. So if you are an organization that maybe only has a 30 page website, then you've got to start getting creative about what you are going to send out on Twitter. The great thing about blogging is you can send something out, but let's say for example, going back to that analogy or that idea of the New York Times, writing the story about Spain neutering your pet. Well, let's say you were an animal shelter and you had your own blog. Instead of sending out the New York Times article, how about linking, logging into your blog that morning and linking to the New York Times article and then putting a one paragraph statement about what you think about the article. But instead of sending out the New York Times link, you send out a link to your blog. Now why that's beneficial is because it's still the New York Times article, but it doesn't have the New York Times branding. Your branding gets out there. Your hey connects with us on Twitter. Hey, connect with us on Facebook. Okay, sign up for our email newsletter. It's featured there, not the New York Times. Another reason why blogging is really important, which I can't get into much detail right now is that search engine optimization has changed dramatically. Blogging can help increase your organization showing up in Google results significantly. I mean, it's a miracle. I just launched a new blog a week ago. And already I went and searched for a keyword that I was using and I now pop up number one in Google. It took a grand total of a week and I did that by blogging. So if you've thought about blogging, you know, hey, we're just going to get in here and kind of write about us and write about what we're doing. Think about blogging in a new way. Maybe read some of my blogging best practices after the webinar to get a sense of what you can really do with them these days. What I find interesting is the Nature Conservancy, they had a blog that looked a certain way for a very long time. And then just within the last month they've redone everything. Now I want you to notice on their blog, so instead of sending out articles about the Gulf Oil Spill from news outlets, they're making their own news. And they're sending out that Gulf Oil Spill building the Ark of Recovery post everywhere on Twitter and on Facebook. And then it has the share-ups. And then you'll notice in the upper right, hey, become our fan on Facebook. Connect with us on Twitter. Subscribe to our email newsletter list. So they have, I think, understood just like I did where the lightning bolt went off about six months ago, which blogging tends to be the missing piece in a social media strategy. It really, really does. And they have designed their blog to exactly, their new blog, to exactly fill that void. The eighth tip is utilizing LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a sleeper in return on investment. And I think the reason why a lot of nonprofits don't use it is because maybe they've tried, they didn't have a whole lot of success, and they gave us on it. But the reality is when it comes to LinkedIn, there's all kinds of things you can do on LinkedIn, but I'm just going to talk about groups. Most nonprofits did groups wrong. They created a group named the same name as their organization. For example, creating a group called Greenpeace doesn't really work because what that does is people are like, well, I don't really want to join a group to just talk about Greenpeace, but joining a group that says, you know, stock global warming or safety environment, that's a group that could grow very, very quickly on LinkedIn. And I learned this because I launched a group called Deosa Communications. I did it about two years ago maybe, and a grand total of three people joined it. Because nobody wanted to join a group that was my company name to get on there and talk about my company, how boring is that? So instead, I created a group called Social Media for Nonprofit Organizations. It's much more broad. It's about social media. It's for nonprofits. And this group now has about 7,400 members. When you can create a group, and it took about a year and a half to get there to get these 7,400, and what I have noticed in social media in general is 5,000 is the magic number. When you hit 5,000 friends or 5,000 fans or 5,000 followers or 5,000 members, that's when it starts to grow quicker and quicker every day. So I think they have to promote this any more at all. I had to promote it to jumpstart it, but now I log in on any given morning and there's 75 to 100 new people that want to join. So if you can create a group's name that people are interested in joining that's more general, like Spay or New to Your Pet or Save the Environment or Stop Global Warming or Feed the Hungry Children, whatever the case is, you'll have a much more broad appeal. And if you can get that group to take off and actually spend some time building it, promoting it, there are all kinds of perks that come with being able to manage a group. One of them is the ability to send announcements. So this group has 7,400 people. I then have the ability to email the 7,400 people. You also can create templates for when people join or when people leave. LinkedIn, I will tell you when I look at my referral traffic of where most of my traffic is coming from, Twitter is always number one because I just got lucky and I have an insane amount of followers on Twitter. LinkedIn is always number two. It blows away Facebook. It blows away MySpace. It blows away YouTube. LinkedIn is a sleeper in ROI. But what most nonprofits have done is this sort of thing, creating groups of the organization's name. It doesn't work. I can't see how small that group is. My guess is it's somewhere around 1,200 or 1,000. I highlighted it. I can't see it, but probably all the other Sierra clubs are smaller because people don't want to join groups where they are limited to just talking about the Sierra Club. But if the Sierra Club or another organization, Monster Group, something like Protect Wildernesses or Save National Park, and then you could actually get that to go viral, you would have a group that would have a lot of power within a year to two years. And I will tell you, LinkedIn is growing. I watch on a weekly basis. It's Twitter. Where's Twitter at this week? Where's MySpace at this week? Where's LinkedIn at this week? And LinkedIn consistently over the last two years is jumping up one spot, one spot, towards now the 17th most visited website in the United States. Twitter's number 9, MySpace is number 13. So for example, the Sierra Club would have created a group called Green, or Green Living. I'm not sure how many members are there, but my guess is it's somewhere around 80,000. If I can remember, that is a very, very powerful group. Now not only that, you can go into groups like Green. Let's say you're an environmental organization. You have a blog. Well, you can go join groups like Green or Save the Environment. By the way, there is no Save the Environment group on LinkedIn. There is no Spain New to Your Pet group on LinkedIn. There's no Stop Global Warming. So it's carte blanche there of whoever wants to do it first. But if you are an environmental organization, for example, you can join a group like Green and then go post links to your blog and participate in that community to promote your blog and your organization. Social media tip number 9 is you've got to know HTML. You have to know basic HTML. From what I can tell, about 10% of nonprofits know HTML enough to be able to add donate now buttons and email newsletter boxes to their Facebook page or their blog. It will make or break your social media ROI. So what I mean by that is if you look at my Facebook page and you see all those icons over on the left, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, WordPress, YouTube, Flickr, that's the static FBML app on Facebook and that's HTML. It looks more difficult than it actually is. There are online tutorials. I teach it in my webinars. You can take a class, but you have to learn HTML to take your social media campaigns to the next level. I have to say we are there. It is time to take social media campaigns to the next level meaning we've got to think about maybe hiring somebody five hours a week or we've got to hire somebody to design our avatar. We've got to make sure our social media person knows HTML and is properly trained. You don't want to wing it at this point. And that brings up an important point about blogging. You want to make sure that you have a banner and that it's designed. First impressions are everything in blogging. Whether or not they will come back and take your blog seriously has a lot to do with what they think about it in the first three seconds. So that might mean hiring a designer to do a banner for you on your blog. Now you'll notice I have highlighted there, subscribe. Oh I keep forgetting I have this fancy thing here. Subscribe to Nonprofit Tech 2.0. Well that's HTML. So you have to learn how to use it. Now the last one I'm going to go through pretty quickly because I don't want to overwhelm you with the Mola web. It's not the next big thing. It's already here. And I have to say from watching nonprofits be the best at social media. I really do think nonprofits are the best at social media. I think they are better than the big corporate brands. I think they are better than colleges and universities because they were the first. They were the pioneers. They were the early adopters. They were there in 2005 on MySpace. They have been learning and confronting their fears about social media for five years now. They have been very, very slow to adopt the Mola web. And I think it's because they think it's expensive. Tech to give and iPhone apps and all of that stuff, I'll be honest. I don't think that's the best way to enter the Mola web. And those tools are expensive, but that's a whole other webinar. But I would say think about launching a Mola web site. Now my Mola web site cost $8 a month. There's a blog post on my blog about how I did that. So these tools are not expensive. They don't need to be fancy. Somebody emailed me the other day and said, hey we got a quote for a Mola web site for $12,000. What do you think? I said absolutely that's crazy. Don't even talk to those people again. They're trying to pull wool over your eyes. Designing a web site, you can use a WordPress blog. Super simple. Again, when the Nature Conservancy launched their new blog, at the same time they launched their mobile web site. Now it doesn't look great on a desktop site, but what you need to imagine is what that's going to look like about two inches wide. And the reason I think they did it is because they understand that by 2015, the Internet as we know, it's going to be completely different. So those larger organizations who actually have the staff and the ability to keep up and read the data and are reading Mashable and TechCrunch and all this stuff and know what's going on and know what's coming next, and are vested in being early adopters because they know what the benefits of early adoption are. Those who do it first, those always get the most buzz. So by 2015 the mobile web, mobile web site, apps, iPads, all this kind of stuff. But one of the reasons why a mobile web site is so good is that it's accessible to anyone on any mobile phone, right? African Americans, Latinos, they're the quickest-growering users, not of iPhones or Blackberries of all of this stuff, but of regular cell phones that have mobile browsers. So when you get into issues of apps and all of these fancy tools, you might be getting into an issue where not everyone can access it because perhaps of background, societal background, or income level, that sort of thing. Texting, you can use TextMark to launch a campaign for free. I just wrote about that two days ago. It's on my blog. Social networking on the go. This is the Humane Society. Last year they sent tweets live from the Seal Hunt. Now that was a game changer. They had been reporting about the Seal Hunt for years, but after the fact, after coming back and taking the awful pictures and posting them in an e-mail newsletter, this time they did it live while it was happening, video and photos. It was a game changer. It made me give to Save the Seals. An early adopter, Four Square, you're going to check that one out, and there's a good chance your organization might already have a profile in Four Square. Again, just in the interest of time, I see we only have 9 minutes back. I don't want to get into details. But on that 10th point, just make sure that you're syncing. Even if you're not ready for it, you don't need to make a move right away. But Facebook Mobile is now growing faster than Facebook Desktop. YouTube just launched their new mobile site yesterday, and the tools are affordable. The web is fundamentally changing once again right now from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0. So how about some questions? Someone is asking, I see best sites to use to watch a blog. I love WordPress. Love, love, love WordPress. Cannot recommend it more than anything. I also use it as the content management system for my mobile website. So I pay $8 a month to design the site and add images and all that, but I actually go into my blog to update it. $8 a month for the mobile website. Texting using text marks is free. So for a grand total of about $100 a year, you can launch a mobile website and a text messaging campaign. I come from a background of pulling off miracles on about $0.20. I've worked with small nonprofits, so I'm just not one that looks at the tools that are $1,000 a month or that sort of thing. I really put a focus on how can I pull this off with the least amount of cash possible. Let's see, boy, lots of questions. Here's a good one. How many times per day a week should we update Facebook? I tell you what I've learned about Facebook, and it took me a while. It actually took me longer to find my Facebook voice than my Twitter voice, and sometimes I still think I don't have it. That is a hard community. What I have found on Facebook is less is more. You can get away with two status updates a day, but if I were you, I would do one in the morning and one in the afternoon. What I have found works best for me is actually three to four a week. So on Monday afternoon I might do one, and then on Wednesday morning I might do another one, and then maybe Thursday afternoon. And then on Saturday morning, when people are a little bit more relaxed and they're not rushed and they're waking up and they're having a cup of coffee, a Saturday morning is actually a really good time to send out a status update on Facebook. I think if you send out too many, particularly if they're not good, I mean your status updates have to be good on Facebook. Whereas on Twitter you can send out six or seven a day as long as you spread them out throughout the day, and maybe three of them are really boring. People will forgive you of that, or they won't see it. But on Facebook you've got to make sure you've got top notch status updates. So if you're going to be posting more than one or two a day, make sure that it's good content. And again, I think the big brands, the nationally and internationally well-known nonprofits have a completely different experience in social media than the smaller to medium-sized. Humane Society, everybody loves the Humane Society, or at least most people do. They want to hear about happy stories of kittens and puppies. So I can see the Humane Society in my news feed four times a day, and not really get too annoyed, even though sometimes it is too much clutter, but I won't unfriend them, or I won't unfan them, or I won't hide them. But if it's a smaller nonprofit, and it's just kind of marketing stuff, and it's us, us, us, read us, we're so great, blah, blah, blah, I will definitely, you know, unlike pretty quickly. So when it comes to Facebook, I go on the side of caution, three to five a week spread out. Community, oh that's a tough one. Someone is saying our nonprofit name doesn't define itself, we're a conflict resolution organization, but our name is Community Conferencing Center. That's a whole bigger question, because absolutely you're right, your name does not represent what you do. So maybe you want to start something with terms, maybe you want to start a campaign with conflict resolution in it, and then as a by-product, a project of the Community Conferencing Center. And then another question, another question was, well we have a news section on our website, and do we still need to launch a blog? Well the first question that comes up is, I hope that on your news pages you can still use news as long as two things are there. One, connect with us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, you've got icons to all your social networking profiles, because I tell you I have them on my website, nobody clicks there. People when they go to my blog and they see the I statement, and this is Heather, and this is what she's thinking, they either agree with me or they don't, but none of the less they want to fan me on Facebook to see what I'm going to say next. And that's that kind of casual person voice that blogging allows you. I don't know if on your website you particularly are comfortable with using IWI statements, either way just make sure if you're going to use news that you've got that connect with us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, check out our YouTube channel, and most importantly subscribe to our email newsletter list. Even though email subscription rates are going down about a percent a year, the vast majority of online donors still come from a link that's clicked inside of an email newsletter. So it's really important. Another thing that's important is on that blogging component on the news section is can people comment on it? So if they can't comment on it then that's not a blog, it doesn't work the same way you would need a blog. Well that is about as much time as we had. Maybe there's just one more question. Sorry, I had my line get muted. I meant to ask you some questions but you had answered a lot that had lined up. But we do have many, many more questions that aren't being that we won't have time to answer today. Heather, thank you so much for this great presentation. And again folks, we have a forum topic started in our community forums and we'll be posting some of your questions here that we've collected there and have them answered. So check back. I'll send you the link shortly. So here's the Bitly URL which we talked about bitly earlier. This will bring you straight to that forum topic that you can post your question to. If you're new to TechSoup we've got much more than just webinars. We've got donated software from organizations, companies like Microsoft, Adobe, and Symantec. We've got articles and a blog ourselves as well as our community forums and we post upcoming events. So I'd like to tell you about a couple of upcoming webinars. We do our planning one on WordPress and talking about some different CMS tools. But here are two that are planned for the week after next, tips and tools for technology planning as well as business planning for nonprofits and libraries. So hopefully you guys can join us for one of those webinars. And we would like to thank ReadyTalk for their sponsorship of this webinar series. This webinar is made possible by ReadyTalk which has donated the use of their system to help TechSoup expand awareness of technology throughout the nonprofit sector. ReadyTalk helped nonprofits and libraries in the US and Canada reach geographically dispersed areas and increased collaboration through their audio conferencing and web conferencing services. Again, I'd like to thank everyone and especially Heather. This was really amazing. You've done such a great job of showing us what the big things are to think about and I think there's a lot of food for thought here and hopefully we'll get you on in the future to do another webinar. So thank you so much. Thank you and have a great day everyone. Bye-bye. Thank you. Please stand by.