20 objectives for organizational use of Twitter for events

In an ideal world, every organization should start their social media efforts by listening on the social web, finding out where their stakeholders are, then analyzing what value could be derived from embarking upon building an official presence in those particular social spaces so they can begin to participate strategically in those conversations. Note that WHICH social spaces (which tools) to experiment with comes AFTER the listening part!

But every once in a while, there's an opportunity to act fast, to try an experiment with a particular tool. We're working with one group who had exactly this scenario - a fairly big event coming up quickly, and members asking about their social media presence, and they figured they should just jump in and set up an official Twitter account to see what would happen. We held a brainstorming session with a large group of staff from all different departments and they came up with a nice list of objectives which I thought I'd share. In no particular order:

- to keep up with things happening around exhibits, and communicate with exhibitors
- to be the cool kid
- to experiment with a different kind of communication
- to find out who uses Twitter within their community
- to see if members are interested in using this forum
- if it works for meetings/events, could it be used for other activities?
- to hear buzz from the community
- to respond to their members (customer service)
- to reach potential donors, learn things about them that you wouldn't know from any where else
- to explore a new way of communicating (two-way)
- to communicate more concisely, faster, more easily
- to facilitate interaction with members who couldn't attend in person
- to communicate event-specific announcements very easily, as soon as they come up and repeatedly
- to find out what members are particularly interested in (via links shared)
- to drive/listen to conversation about specific topics
- to promote/reward members e.g. contest winners
- to have some fun
- to give staff a voice, allow people to get to know them
- to help exhibitors promote themselves
- to extend the life and space of the event.

Awesome, right? The event itself went great, and especially considering that the staff who were tweeting were pretty new to this, they did a fantastic job. They achieved a lot of these objectives - and those that weren't immediately apparent this time still gave them the impetus to do it bigger and better at their next (much bigger) conference in a few months.

Want to try this at home? Just make sure you go through the exercise of thinking about what you hope to achieve with your experiment. Make a list. Whether you have 3 objectives or 30, keep them in mind during the experiment. Have a debrief afterwards, check things off the list, add new things, figure out how to make it even more awesome next time. If some things don't work like you expected, understand why not. Evaluate, learn, do it all again.

Rock on.

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Only a few spots left for Buzz2009!

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Only a few spots left! And tell you what, there are a few $100 off discount codes floating around the socialsphere... search on Twitter for #Buzz2009 to find one. (It's so easy already, we need to make you do a little something, don't we!)

Here's a few items we think are particularly cool, in case you haven't seen them already. You know you can subscribe to the Buzz 2009 blog anytime to get the scoop delivered to you. If this event rocks as much as we think it will, we'll do it every year so there should be good content in the blog long after the event is over.

- Live webcast - noon-1:30 pm EST - we've already got close to 3000 people registered for this already, so if you REALLY TRULY can't come in person, sign up here. Here's the scoop on it.

- don't forget there are scholarships available!! Just go here and tell us why you should get one.

- We want to know (whether you'll be in attendance or not!) whether you have identified particular social media goals for your association or organization. Tell us here.

- Rob's really excited about his Association Social Media Spotlight panel session... Find out why. Reason 1, Reason 2, Reason 3... Subscribe to the blog to find out Reason 4.

- I know you want to come and talk to Guy Kawasaki in person about the Alltop for Association Management he set up just for you, don't you!

- In our session we'll be talking through how we've used word-of-mouth tactics specifically for Buzz 2009. We call it our living case study... and yes, we're so meta... Hehe.

- Don't just take our word for how important this event is for you, though. Check out who we got to help us make sure the content and format of our conference was really what the association community needs... and see who's talking about it. Thanks SO so much to everyone who has helped us promote the event. We really wanted to reach as many people as we could who might need this more advanced social media educational content - and using our relationships and social media to do it is a no-brainer, really! :)

- as a matter of fact, click here to see who's talking about it RIGHT NOW.

REGISTER. See you there!

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NTEN Water Cooler Social Media Chat 7/2

Your friendly neighborhood Socialfish will be "IN" the NTEN Office Hours Communications Chat Room every Thursday (that's today!!) at 3 pm EST. Got burning questions about social media strategy? Or just want to hang out and shoot the breeze and get a break from work? Now's your chance!

Thank you SO MUCH to Lynn Morton for hosting our chat for us last week. Sounds like we missed a really fab conversation on the following topics:

- What shiny new toys become overwhelming for your non-tech audience?
- The Friend v. Follower dynamic - You can be a friend of someone on one site & a follower on another, is this suggestive of the type of relationship you have with them? Symmetrical v. Asymmetrical relationships, reciprocal relationships seem more purely "social".
- How do "collectors" affect the dynamic of social media relationships? In what way can experienced Twitter users help the newbies to acclimate them to the culture?
- How Twitter has replaced RSS for some people.
- The merits of Tweetdeck & what's cool about the new Seesmic desktop application.

Whether the conversation is deep or just a nice break from the dullness of your daily routine, though, we're all about sharing. Pick our brains, we'll tell you our take on things.

Click HERE for the chat room if it's not working well embedded below.

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Web design using principles from psychology

Fantastic slidedeck from Joshua Porter. The man is a genius. Read his book. Seriously.

Designing with Psychology in Mind

View more presentations from Joshua Porter.

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Top Ten Must Read links of the week

I'm kinda losing the plot lately, with all my recent travel and getting ready for Buzz2009, but I can't not share a few really fantastic recent posts I've read / conversations I've been following. I've shared most of these via Twitter/Friendfeed but I wanted to make sure you didn't miss them. Truly MUST READs - this will keep y'all busy for a while! In no particular order:

1. Dare to be weak: When it comes to engagement, social media is the art of the possible - by Rob Cottingham on Social Signal. All about starting small. Killer quote (of many):

"Understanding what you want to achieve - even if it's just to experiment and learn more about the platform and what you can do there - doesn't just help you shape your initiative at the outset; it's the only way of gauging whether you're succeeding."

2. Tweeting With Your Twitter Community: How To Participate In A Twitter Chat - Jeff Hurt on Twitip (again!). Fantastic "how to" about chats on Twitter, including a handy list of tools and existing chats by topic.

"With some practice, hashtags and one of these third party Twitter applications listed below, even beginners can tune-in and participate in a robust Twitter discussion."

3. Reflections on Social Business - by Peter Kim. Just the start of developing the construct for "social business design". Check out the links he mentions in particular. Killer quote:

"Social business design is a mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive way of considering how a corporation, business unit, or project can create and capture value from today's emerging technologies and evolving operating environment. The social business design framework captures ecosystem (community), hivemind (culture), dynamic signal (collaboration), and metafilter (content). Putting these into play creates improved business outcomes as well as emergent outcomes. Measurement provides the backbone to the entire framework, as driving change requires proof."

4. Online Community - 25 Motivations and Incentives For Getting Involved - By Buzz Canuck. Killer quote:

"Having too few incentives for participation is a recipe for building a ghost town of community. Tapping too many motivations in one platform and you get a bouillabaisse of confusion."

5. Community Alone Isn’t Enough - by Dave Fleet. See the comments too - see what you think! Killer quote:

"For companies, however, you can’t only give back. You need to withdraw push for yourself, too. Community alone doesn’t pay the bills. Revenue and growth does."

6. What about the other Social Media ROI? - by Douglas Karr on The Marketing Technology Blog. Great list of things that can be considered ancillary ROI for social media efforts.

7. Death By Association: Do Association Leaders Consider Social Media Their Competitor, Partner Or Neither? - by Jeff Hurt on Midcourse Corrections. Great recap of a serious discussion a few days ago on Twitter about whether social media poses a threat to associations.

8. What Tyler Durden Can Teach You About Twitter And Social Media - by Shea Bennett on Twittercism. This is just truly awesome, and not just because Fight Club is one of my all-time favorite movies. :)

9. Clues to Authenticity - by Deirdre Reid on Reid All About It. Deirdre asks us, what does it mean for an organization to be authentic? Please do comment, I know you have thoughts on this. I do too of course, as do others, and I will as soon as I get the chance! Killer quote:

"We learn to listen to criticism and dissent and not overlook the uncomfortable. We face up to reality. This is not always easy, but the right thing to do usually isn’t. Does your organization go through this process? Is it listening to all its constituent voices, including those that usually go unheard?"

10. Is relevance enough? By Lisa Junker on Acronym. Whoa. Great argument raging. Is it all semantics? Killer quote by Jeff De Cagna (though I'm very much on this side of the fence):

"Great organizations don't aspire to relevance."

Enjoy!
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New Media - Old Risks

Here's the second in a series of guest posts by our risk manager bud Leslie White of Croydon Consulting, LLC. Follow her on Twitter at @ltwhite. I'll also take this opportunity to let you know that Leslie has kindly agreed to work with us at SocialFish so that we can offer her guidance if you need help with drafting your own social media policies. We're also writing a white paper with Leslie about the hot topic that is Risk Management and Social Media Policies (yeah, I know, we need a pithier title). We'll let you know more about that soon!



This post is a follow-up to my first guest post (thanks Maddie), The Hidden Risks of Social Media – It’s Not What You Think, which discussed the business risks of social media. Business opportunities are lost while not participating in social media, and harm can arise from participating badly (not engaging the right communities and participants). However, I didn’t discuss the legal liability issues - which are what scares people the most.

Every social media presentation raises the risk question. The responses range from “don’t worry, be happy” to "it's the end of the world as we know it (Danger! Danger! Will Robinson!)". At the recent Blog Potomac, the speakers’ answers were on the lower end of the risk continuum - not surprising from people whose careers are built on social media. While social media risks are not cataclysmic, they exist and can have adverse reputational and financial consequences IF the exposures are not acknowledged and managed well.

According to Elizabeth Engel’s post, Shel Holtz said at Blog Potomac while discussing the barriers to social media, “2-3 years later none of what the lawyers warned us about has happened.” True, we have avoided the apocalypse so far, but we do not yet know all of the legal risks since it takes years for litigation to work its way through the United States court system. For example, Congress passed the Communications Decency Act in 1996 where Section 230 (47 U.S.C.§230) essentially bars claims to hold the service provider of an interactive computer service (your association) liable for tortuous or unlawful information that someone else disseminates through that service. The act seems fairly simple, but thirteen years later it is still being litigated.

Last month, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals partially overturned the 2005 dismissal of a case against Yahoo! The appeals court in Cecilia L. Barnes vs. Yahoo! Inc. (May 7, 2009) ruled that the plaintiff’s allegations of a breach of contract by Yahoo! for failing to remove offensive material is not precluded by Section 230. This means the original case goes back to the U.S. District Court for litigation – costly for both parties. Is this court decision disastrous? No – but your association had better review its complaint procedures and train the appropriate personnel to respond appropriately. [More on the case here].

Social media is media, so that is where the risks are – defamation (libel or slander), disparagement, invasion of privacy, copyright or trademark infringement, and plagiarism - to name a few. Associations also have to worry about antitrust allegations and professional liability exposures from any standard setting, certification or accreditation activities. Media exposures have existed since the first spoken or printed word. However, the nature and complexity of these risks have changed with the adoption of social media.

First, associations have lost the illusion of control of what people are saying about your organization. Associations still have the same level of control over “official” information distributed or published through its Web sites, magazines, newsletters, training materials, and body of knowledge materials. But now staff and members are writing blogs, commenting on blogs, making videos and publishing material about your association and industry. People were doing these things before; you just did not know about it. One advantage of social media that is often overlooked is that now you can listen and find these conversations with just a little effort.

A more significant change is the speed with which this information travels through the universe. In the electronic world, information becomes “viral” because it can spread so quickly. Before, conversations involved a few disgruntled members or employees, now via the Internet and telecommunications the word spreads rapidly throughout the universe. Conversations take on a life of their own and your association cannot control them. But you can decide how to respond to the negatives and extol the positives. A strong social media strategy will help you manage these risks.

Social media is too important for associations to avoid or abandon due to fear of litigation, but a healthy respect for the risks is a good thing. I do believe the risks can be catastrophic IF you do not manage the risks proactively. Most exposures can be handled by policies (social media, code of conduct, crisis communication, and others) but all policies need to be supplemented with training. Most people mess up accidently because they did not know any better. Help your staff and members become smart social media participants. A little planning and training goes a long way. Good luck.

[photo credit]
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NTEN Water Cooler Social Media Chat 6/25

Your friendly neighborhood Socialfish will be "IN" the NTEN Office Hours Communications Chat Room every Thursday (that's today!!) at 3 pm EST. Got burning questions about social media strategy? Or just want to hang out and shoot the breeze and get a break from work? Now's your chance!

Last week I took some time off, but Lindy reports that the discussion mainly centered around wikis and how difficult they can be to get off the ground. An Ideastorm-like model may be of more appeal to get people participating. Today we're on our way to Charlottesville but we hope our regular crowd will hang out round the water cooler as per usual.

Whether the conversation is deep or just a nice break from the dullness of your daily routine, though, we're all about sharing. Pick our brains, we'll tell you our take on things.

Click HERE for the chat room if it's not working well embedded below.

[chat room removed after chat]

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How to Think Like A Social Media Marketing Genius

Busy bee this week - Boston today, Philly tomorrow, Charlottesville Friday... but here's something to keep you busy in case I don't get a chance to add my usual volume of stuff to your Google Reader. (Sorry about that by the way, I have tried to do less blogging but it's just my natural rhythm, can't help it! Just so much good stuff out there and things to think about!)

Anyway this one is a really great slidedeck by the prolific Beth Kanter. Enjoy - and share!

Craig's List Nonprofit Bootcamp

View more OpenOffice presentations from kanter.

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