Lil' Pile O' Links - Toolbox

Here are a few links to tools I have been looking at recently, as well as some interesting posts about other stuff.

On Social Media Monitoring tools (thanks to social media explorer who explains what these do.)

FREE
101 level monitoring
Filtrbox - brand tracking
IceRocket Blog Trends (the best blog search service I've found so far)
Nielsen's Blogpulse
SM2 by Techrigy
There are tons more search and brand tracking tools, these are just a couple worth looking at.

NOT FREE
Scout Labs
Radian6
Cymfony
Scout Labs, in particular, looks really promising and Lindy and I will do a full post on these once we've had a chance to really dig into them.

Monitoring Tools on Twitter
There are more new tools every day, here's just one good post which mentions 8 Twitter analytics tools.

More Twitter stuff
Twibes - now you are a seasoned Twitterer, use this to recommend some of your fave people to follow.
Mailana - very cool visualization of your network. Click to go deeper.
FriendFiltr - a way to really get the scoop on who's following you.
Tagalus - the user-powered hashtag dictionary.
WeFollow - add yourself to this directory.

On Social Media Marketing
Great white paper - The social media marketing industry report - here's the download link.

On PR 2.0
Brian Solis' new book with Deirdre Breakenridge, Putting the Public back in Public Relations is now out. I can't wait for mine to arrive.

On Facebook for Professional Use:
Ten Facebook Tips for Power Users
How to Use the New Business Page Layout
5 Tips for Marketing on Facebook's New Pages
Facebook's redesign - good concept, but not there yet (good summary of the changes and what everyone's pissed about)
And this is not about tools, but Joshua Porter predicts Facebook will go asymmetrical - I totally agree, read the post to find out what we're on about...

On Communities
Online community examples from lots of industries; here are the examples for the nonprofit sector.

And finally, a really nice little post on Ethics by Dave Fleet.

Phew! Thinking this might keep y'all busy for a little while. :)

New blogs of note

Just wanted to let you know about four new bloggers I have had the distinct pleasure of getting to know recently.



Pat Jones is the Executive Director of the International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association. He blogs at Tolling Points.



Deirdre Reid is an association pro, and was until recently Director of Member Services at the California Building Industry Association; before that, she was at the National Association of Home Builders. She's currently making a move to Raleigh, NC and her personal blog is at Reid All About It.




Toni Rae is a performing artist and Association Director of Education - she blogs at Toni Rae's Version of Life.








Art Hsieh is CEO of the San Francisco Paramedic Association. He writes at EMTeacher.



All four, despite being relatively new at blogging as far as I know, have that special voice I love, where they write in an open, inviting way that shares part of themselves, that lets their personalities shine through, regardless of whether their posts are specifically personal or more professional in tone.

I hope you'll welcome them and I'm so glad they are part of our ever-expanding association blogosphere.

Twitter is not about what we had for lunch. Get over it.

Here's a little bit of a rant, for which I apologize in advance.

I find the theme about Twitter being all about what people eat for lunch totally irritating at this point. Yes, maybe two years ago people would write about every little thing they did, including eating lunch. But Twitter has evolved far beyond that now - and if some of us by some bizarre twist of fate are still only reading those kinds of tweets, then clearly we are not following the right people.

My response to the listserve discussion about Twitter referenced by Jamie's post above was this:

This is an interesting conversation. Part of my work as a social media strategist is to help associations figure out how to use Twitter, but I decided long ago that it was not part of that job to convince anyone to use it. So my take would simply be that with 6 million people on Twitter in the US alone (see http://www.quantcast.com/twitter.com), and with Twitter's demographics showing 79% of users are between the ages of 18 and 49 and 63% college-educated, (http://www.quantcast.com/twitter.com#demographics), the chances are at just about 100% that some of your association's members are on Twitter.

It is a communications channel which enables word of mouth about your organization, but only you can decide if you have 1) something to talk about and 2) enough of your stakeholders there to do the talking.

Here's a starter list of association professionals on Twitter - (If you use Twitter and aren't here, add yourself and your association.) You can always contact anyone on this list and see how they use it for their organization.

Here's a screenshot of my Twitter screen right at this moment. (I only have a mini-laptop, so I'll just show you the number of tweets that I'm seeing on screen right now, lest you think I am craftily hiding all the lunch posts. And yes, I follow people all over the world, so just because it's late afternoon here does not mean it's not lunchtime somewhere else right now).



So lookee here. We have:

- a message from Pepco, reminding people they don't tweet over the weekend and how to reach them. That's pretty cool I think.

- someone speaking at a conference and inviting us to have a look

- someone giving kudos to someone else who apparently helped them via Twitter (reading between the lines)

- someone giving info about weekend activities

- someone tweeting the Government 2.0 conference

- someone discussing marketing and inviting us to check it out.

Obviously this is only one snapshot - I could very easily bore you with a whole bunch more, but I'll refrain. But what do you notice? 0 for 6 on what anyone had for lunch. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm not saying people don't tweet mundane things about their lives. I personally just tweeted that I had a splitting headache - not particularly useful info for anyone. But perhaps that explains why I feel like ranting about something right about now.

Here's how I experience Twitter - Twitip summed it up perfectly as the 90-10 rule for successful Twitter networking.

"90% of what you share on Twitter should be made up of personal insights and thoughts along with a heavy dose of helpful links, while 10% should be made up of messages that more directly benefit you."

This is advice, but it's not a hard and fast rule. It's also, in my opinion, a naturally developing parameter for how most of us actually do use Twitter, even if we've never heard of this rule. Of course there are days when the percentages won't be 90-10. Of course there are people who consciously don't follow this at all. But generally speaking, as professionals who use Twitter for work and play, this rule does work. And so what does that mean? It means for every "I have a headache" or "Chicken KaPow for lunch at Thai Tanic" or "Must go to bed now", there are many, many more useful tweets, with links to interesting sites, or links to blog posts, or general discussion about specific issues, or conference tweets, or news, or citizen journalism, or whatever.

Do or do not, says Yoda - just quit bitching about it.

That's all, I feel better now, thanks! Have a great weekend! :)

On aggregators and change: I haz a conundrum

In this post on the SmartBrief Blog, Merrit Colaizzi talked to Guy Kawasaki about his popular blog aggregator site, Alltop.

This question caught my eye.

With the demise of newspapers-as-we-knew-them, what role do you think news aggregators like Alltop and SmartBrief will play in the future of media (and social media)?

[Kawasaki] This is a complex question. Are we hurting these publications because people come to our sites and find the nuggets that they want without having to page through entire papers or sites? That is, are we hurting their page views?

Or are we helping them by sending them more traffic as our readers discover articles they never would have seen before? Clearly we both need these publications to survive because an aggregator needs something to aggregate.

I don't have an answer to this chicken-and-egg question, but it seemed funny that I saw this just after this blog post from Ben about unsubscribing from all his blog feeds. In the comments to Ben's post, I had a bit of a stress attack about the fact that I had culled a bunch of individual association blogs from my Reader and just subscribed to the A-List Bloggers aggregator instead. After having done this, I realized I had just lowered everyone's subscriber number by one - which doesn't seem like a big deal, but philosophically, to me, it was a big deal. It's like by subscribing to a blog I'm showing my support more than just by reading random posts. (I suppose retweeting and/or linking are levels of "sharing the love" which goes one step further too, but that's probably for another post).

It just seems like as soon as you get comfortable with something (e.g. subscribing to blogs in a Reader), the quantity of content becomes overwhelming so you try something else to control it (eg blog/news aggregators) but then soon it becomes time to move on to something else (e.g. using Twitter as a Reader and not subscribing to individual blogs any more) - which normally doesn't bother me at all, it's kind of a natural process, but it seems like every once in a while (like in this instance) I need to stop and think about it and wonder if I'm doing "the right thing". I'm not saying there is a right thing, there is certainly not just one way to do anything in social media, but it's a little conumdrum I thought might be interesting to leave hanging here on a Friday for you. :)

NTEN Water Cooler Chat 3/26

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, we discussed Smart Brief on Social Media and how you can send them a tweet (marked #sbosm) with a good blog post of yours and they may include it in their e-newsletter. We also talked about how crowdsourcing your blogroll actually renders it meaningless. We sighed about Facebook, concluded we'd wait and see (I stayed out of that one - but just FYI, Lindy likes the new FB!) and we talked a bit about Friendfeed and how we have not quite figured it out yet (but I'm working on it!)

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]

Who does socmed at your association?

Check out this great discussion on YAP.

What do you think? Are you seeing associations hiring younger people specifically to have social media as part of their roles, or do you seem them hiring with more of a management-level strategic focus?

Crowdsourcing the world: Dopplr's Social Atlas

Dopplr is basically a travel site where you can share your trips with your friends. Here's my public page.

More on Dopplr from Blonde 2.0:

"...Two trends converge around Dopplr to make it unique. The first trend is that of user presence and declarative living. Like Twitter or the status function in Facebook, Dopplr gives users the opportunity to declare where they will be traveling to in the future and share this information with their connections. This is a great way for users to find out if any of their friends will be traveling to the same places that they will be traveling to.

Another feature that makes Dopplr different from other travel services is that it takes all of your travel data, quantifies it and then sends it back to you. Marko [Marko Ahtisaari, Dopplr's CEO] tells me that they just sent out an annual report to all of their 2008 travelers with pictures of all the cities they traveled to, data about where they spent their time, who they coincided with during their travels, and for opt-in users, carbon footprint data about the environmental impact of their travels.

Marko says that its users are composed of a group of people who travel most all around the world. They create “the social atlas of the world, built by smart travelers.”

Since the social web is all about fostering relationships in real life, a site like Dopplr can help you find people to get together with when you are traveling. Social media mavens and association people are similar (when not one and the same) in that you can build fantastic relationships with them online but not get to meet or see them in person very often, as they're all spread out all over the place.

Anyway I got this email last week from Dopplr, which I thought I'd share because it's just SO COOL.

Dear Maddie,

We're launching an important new set of features on Dopplr that we're calling the Social Atlas.

The first part of it lets you build a record of places you've been in your home city and cities around the world, like quality restaurants and hotels - as well as other things you've explored.

The idea is that our collective travel knowledge will inform and improve the travel experience of all. Any places you've marked will be visible to the people that can see your travels on Dopplr.

In addition, your choices will be aggregated, anonymised and visualised into part of a unique overall picture of a city visible to all Dopplr users.

How can I help?

We've tried to make the process of marking places as easy as possible. Wherever you see a place you can click on the green "+" next to it to say you've been there. Click a second time to say you've been there and liked it. If you want to undo all of this, just click a third time.



Eventually the Social Atlas will be on mobile devices, part of a Dopplr mobile application which we'll be launching very soon. [...]

Check it out - here's the overview page for DC.

Here's the page for Toronto, where we'll be for ASAE's annual meeting in August.

Click on the "Eat", "Stay", "Explore", "Q&A" tabs for more specifics for each place.

So you might say, well how is this different to any ratings site for hotels, or restaurants, or travel sites in general? First of all, have you tried any of those sites lately? I've had a nightmare several times trying to find good places to eat via Google search on my phone, where all the search results I get are old or bad. This happened in Miami, until Twitter came to the rescue. Secondly, I think the fact that there's a "friend" recommendation layer beyond just the aggregated recommendations is huge. Of course, it's all only as good as the participation on there, so go check it out.

[Aside - I bet national organizations could find lots of good uses for this too as one way to get people thinking about their conferences and connecting beforehand.]

Fun times!

Related articles by Zemanta

• 10 Social Media Travel Tools (blogs.harvardbusiness.org)
• Dopplr's moment of long wow (adaptivepath.com)
• Small world, loosely joined (adactio.com)

Awesomesauce is...

NTEN Water Cooler Chat 3/19

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, Chris Bucchere and Dave Sabol very kindly hosted for us. They report back that the following supercool things were discussed:
- SxSW and my.SxSW,
- Building in-house social networks (some of the tools and platforms that are commercially available - HigherLogic, Sharepoint, Jive, Ning, etc.),
- Twitter etiquette (what does it mean when a "brand follows you" and what are good strategies for associations that want to have an Association twitter account),
- this great interview of Marc Andreessen by Charlie Rose
- and a bit about the AFP Association for Fundraising Professionals.

W00t! Thanks guys!

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]

Technology Enables Community

I really really love this beautiful post by Brian Solis, which he just wrote upon his return from SxSW this week.

The lessons learned here are prevalent to all who use the social tools to facilitate interaction with friends, associates, influencers, tastemakers, brand ambassadors, and your community.

The real story is the human network and the Social Economy that fosters the conversations that serve as its currency - on and offline.

But it’s not just about the tools...it’s about the emotional and psychological connection between people and our investment in the personal traits that others find irresistible.

Relationships….RELATIONSHIPS…count for everything here, and they’re measured by the mutually beneficial rewards that all parties experience over time. We invest in each other and harvest the fruits of our collaboration and interconnection.

I follow you on Twitter!

We’re Facebook friends!

I “like” you all the time on FriendFeed!

I subscribe to your RSS feed!

It may seem surreal, but it’s fascinatingly real and momentous.

We’re forging new and relevant links online. It’s the metamorphosis from online to offline that validates and certifies connections and symbolizes true opportunity to develop genuine relationships.

We’re putting faces to avatars while in person exchanges of emotions and sincerity replace emoticons.

Read the whole thing. I wasn't at SxSW, of course, but that's not the point. The point, which I totally "get", deep down in my bone marrow, is that all of these online social interactions are about getting to know real people, making real friendships, real connections. Face to face and in real life. Especially for those who are naturally shy, who might find it hard to just start talking to a stranger at some networking event. Which is actually most of us, I think. Social media tools and social networks and social spaces enable us to get to know each other, over time, in a very real way which is only enhanced and makes for true happiness when it culminates in meeting someone face to face for the first time.

Technology enables community. I say it a lot. A good friend told me that a hundred years ago when I first started this blog, and it's been my mantra ever since. Posts like Brian's serve as a good reminder that (even while we bitch about Facebook, and moan about the time suck, and stress about monetizing, and pull our hair out trying to figure out the ROI...) this is what it's all about. I don't want to ever forget that. Thank you, Brian.

Awesome use of Twitter: The American Evaluation Association

Check this out.

I got permission to reprint this email from an ASAE Technology listserve discussion:

Twitter does have some uses that might be seen as slightly unconventional.

We use it basically as a very easy content management system for bulletin items - but most people never realize that the content is fed through twitter.

To explain more, we have installed twitterbar [a Firefox Add-on] on key staff computers. That allows them to send twitter updates at will with almost no interruption in their workflow (it integrates with the URL window in their firefox browser). Then, staff can send an item to twitter when they come across a resource or new member content, etc. We call it Esoterica for Evaluators.

This serves two purposes - it is a useful tool for sharing information about resources and what our members are doing/producing. An unexpected - and extremely useful - side effect has been that it gives staff a concrete action, that is well perceived by members, when someone requests that we share something (including things that we didn't use to have a place to post). We get intermittent requests, from members with valid content to share, asking if we can help to spread the word (new forum on linkedin, new online evaluation guide available, extended blog content). Staff can now respond with a concrete immediate action rather than waiting for the monthly newsletter (and some items don't rise to the level of a newsletter article).

Yes, we do have a very active listserv, and many members post there, but the value of this approach is twofold: 1. The association is perceived as taking an action in support of the member, and 2. It is saved for posterity, and less buried, than listserv content.

You can actually access the twitter-fed content in four ways:

1. On our webpage at http://eval.org/aeaweb.asp: If you looked on this webpage the user would never know that the content was driven by twitter - other than that we do include "Follow Updates on Twitter" at the bottom for those who wish to do so (this could be removed).

2. One can subscribe to the RSS feed (see the link at the top of the page).

3. One can actually see it on the twitter page for that content http://twitter.com/aeaweb

4. One can follow it on Twitter.

I also want to thank colleagues at ASHA for their assistance as we were conceiving this project.

Susan

Susan Kistler
Executive Director, American Evaluation Association

In short, they have a few staffers using the Twitterbar for content in, and they just use the Twitter RSS feed for content out. They will archive for their own purposes.

Additional awesomeness - check out their page explaining what RSS is and why you might want to subscribe to their feeds.

Nicely done!

4 Steps for Setting Up an Organizational Twitter Account

We're often asked about how to set up a Twitter account for an organization, when it's likely that more than one staffer will be tweeting.

Here's a quick four-step rundown of what we would do. This isn't the only way, of course. But if you are starting from scratch, this is what we would suggest. We'll use YAP as an example.

1. Set up a main "umbrella" account - e.g. YAPtweets.

Why? So people can find you easily. In the description, put in a nutshell what the organization does. A mission statement in under 140 characters, for example. (Be pithy - people like that. There's lots of other places you can be boring). For the website link field of the profile, create a Twitter landing page which says, "Welcome to the Twitter page for YAP! We're glad you're here. Here's what we're all about. Here's what we tweet about. And here are our team members, should you be interested in following them too." Then list the team as per #2.

2. Give your staff their own individual accounts - e.g. YAP_Bob, Maggie@YAP, etc.

Why? because people want to see individual people representing their organizations. There can be backlash when that doesn't happen. Presumably each staffer will have their own personality, their own things they like to tweet about personally and professionally, and they will also have their own content that they are responsible for - namely marketing, or advocacy, or publications, or events. Each person will grow their own followers independently - and can share them under the umbrella account as they go along (see #4.)

3. Use a multiple account Twitter client to manage your accounts.

Why? Because it's MUCH easier than signing in and out of accounts all day. SplitTweet works great, and we're checking out CoTweet (currently in private beta). SplitTweet has a cool "track your brand mentions" feature; CoTweet allows you to tag your replies as being from a particular person, and allows you to assign responses to team members. Both services allow you to monitor multiple accounts at the same time - so you can choose to tweet something to your individual account and the umbrella account, or just to one at a time. [Update - HootSuite is another good one.]

4. Under the umbrella account, periodically retweet items from team members as well as from their followers/friends.

Why? To show a coherent stream of content where visitors can immediately see what you're about and that different people speak for you in different ways. If managed well, you can follow relevant public conversations between team members under the umbrella too - conversations that might draw people in to whatever topic you are discussing.

That's it! Start tweeting!

Oh - hold up.

You might be wondering, but what about tweeting around a conference? Should we set up a specific conference-related Twitter account?

I say no. If you set up a new account for each conference, you are basically starting from zero friends and followers each time - and it takes time to build that community. However, make sure your team all use a specific designated hashtag for a particular conference. That means people finding you on Twitter via the conference promotion will be able to find all the tweets from you and your attendees about the conference, but also it allows you to differentiate between annual conferences from year to year - eg #Tech09 versus #Tech10 - but the staff members who have built a following on Twitter will stay visible and won't be hidden under some conference account. They will each also be enabled to add their own personal takes on the conference, by talking about the particular sessions they are attending and the things they care about from their individual (professional) viewpoints.

Want more? Here are some good introductory tips from TwitTip, a fantastic 101 blog from Problogger Darren Rowse all about Twitter:

- Building an Effective Business Profile on Twitter

- Tips for Brands and Nonprofits

- How to Handle Multiple Users Within Your Company

Let me know how you get on with this, or if you tried it a different way with success.

Love this! NonProfit ROI Poetry Slam

I am keeping a close eye on all the awesome stuff coming out of SxSW and what might be relevant for us association/nonprofit peeps. Here's a taste:

SXSW Poetry Slam Slides

View more presentations from kanter.

Full text of poems are on Beth's blog here. Rockin'.

[Update - here's the video of the poets in action!]

On Citizen Members

So I had a bit of a disaster with my comments form on this blog as I was trying to uninstall a certain comments application that was not working well and it proceeded to wipe all of my previous comments (or so I thought, until Dave Sabol swooped in like a handsome caped crusader and saved the day!) Yay! And, before everything was lost, I managed to cut and paste the comments from my Pondering Great Ideas post, and I thought, what a great opportunity to repost them here and see if anyone else had further thoughts on the theme of the member as citizen.

Just to recap:

Here's the thought. What if we could shift the theoretical focus from the membership model to the citizenship model - in other words, I am a member of Costco, but that's not being a "citizen" of Costco, is it! I can see being a citizen of an association. I understand that being a citizen has all the implications of wanting to volunteer, to participate, to give money and time, to be a content creator or a "sharer" or a commenter; and it has all the implied interactions inherent in being part of a group - the networking, the social, the face-to-face events, the learning, the professional development, the leadership, the belonging, the responsibility etc. And the value proposition becomes not just the individual bits of content that people pay for but the community that provides a safe space for all of these interactions to happen.

Here are the comments. There was more discussion on Twitter too. I'd love to hear your take, now that a couple of weeks have passed since the conference.

Adrian
I was wondering - when the concept of citizenship comes up, to me it's not just a matter of membership or participation. It's all these things, but also responsibility. What concepts of responsibility were brought up in the discussions about citizenship?

Good question - I think the citizen concept is all about responsibility, actually, and giving back, and being part of something where individual AND collective action benefits the whole. This also brings up the idea that the ASAE study Decision to Join talked about, where joining for the "good of the order" is as important to members as joining for their own personal benefit.

Peggy_Hoffman
Maddie - great recap and love the points re Twitter and crowdsourcing. On the first, I'd like to add that as a live twitterer at Great Ideas I met some new people (some who were following and some who were curious) ... so Twitter was also a community builder on 1:1. Secondly, I felt in twittering that I was also able to add to the content being delivered in that I and my fellow twitterers were in fact adding layers.

On crowdsourcing, my aha was let's crowdsource the next great ideas ... let's have all submissions be in the form a short video clip that we get to vote on.

Lastly the issue of citizenship is one that my AMC/Company has been talking about for awhile - great question from Adrian about concept of resp. In our viewpoint, when members make that transition to citizen they become active participants in the forces of the association and accept responsibility to care for it, nuture it, build it, protect it. And dues, like taxes, are just a part of the supporting and showing part ownership, not a subscription decision.

I've got some many great ideas to ponder - thanks Maddie for getting a few down on the "paper"!

Dave S.
Mads it sounds like the fundamental unraveling of the traditional association model as we have known it. It takes the old idea of the association as the message and the medium and relegates it to the facilitator of the conversation. Perhaps what you are seeing is the latent potential of members empowered through SMT and up until now being held somewhat captive by what associations provide them. I don't think it diminishes the role or importance of associations as the hub of activity and provider of vision and guidance but I do think it places the responsibility on them to get out of the way - in a matter of speaking - and let the creative ideas and endeavors of the members take central stage. There is more than one gem of wisdom here but this is the one that gets me the most excited.

Jeffrey Cufaude
I would counter Dave's observation a bit and suggest it is a return to how many associations got started as opposed to an unraveling of the model. When associations did not have staff and all the work was being done by volunteers, I think they had much of the citizenship model being proposed. I'm not in anyway suggesting that staffing is bad or wrong, but it does enable members to assume "someone else will take care of this."

Over time staff and the governance structure shift the emphasis to providing products and services rather than facilitating the community in the acts of creation and collaboration. Peter Block talks about this type of shift quite elegantly in his new book, Community: The Structure of Belonging. Though most of his focus is on local governments and community involvement, I find it almost completely transferable to associations.

I'm on board with the citizen metaphor, but am a bit concerned more member wordsmithing is likely to inhibit a real transformation, but perhaps not. Maybe we could just start treating members like citizens and organizing our efforts accordingly to see what emerges.

I think in a sense we've forgotten what it really means to be a member - so it might be wordsmithing, but changing the word we use to "citizen" could not only revive the original sense of what it was to be a member, but at the same time look to the future (or the present, really) where the member citizen is much more invested through the new community building imperative.

Matt Spencer
I love the citizenship concept and all of the comments as well, especially the concept of returning to the original structure of associations. The idea I'd like to echo is that in the US, all of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship flow directly from the "voice" of the citizen in elections. If membership organizations are to use a citizenship model, the must give their citizens a clear right to a voice in the operations and direction of the association.

Right! Anyone else have any thoughts on this?

Hashtag it, baby

It's all the rage - the new hashtag sign not-so-secret hand signal. Who says social media only happens online?



pic via #sxswbingo.

Nice Slide Deck About Building Community

Online Communities: what works, and what doesn't.

View more presentations from Bart De waele. (tags: online communities)

NTEN Water Cooler Chat 3/12

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, we drew an outrageously huge crowd for some reason, and spent pretty much the whole time discussing this unusually misleading (for what is normally a great blog) Buzz Bin blog post (see comments - if you agree with me or not, please add your thoughts!), and also breaking down the Skittles experiment [my link is to a good summary after the fact, but this story has legs so if you have better links now let me know. Here's another good one.]

This week Lindy is in Colorado and I have a conflict, so our good buddy Chris Bucchere (@bucchere) has kindly agreed to host our chat. Come and hang out as per usual! He might even give you some scoop on SxSW, for which he is running their social network, my.SxSW. All very exciting!

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]

Social Media Employee Guidelines

People keep asking me for the link to my post about Intel's social media employee guidelines (and other examples) so here it is again. Intel's link was actually not working a couple of days ago, so I got in touch with them and they totally fixed it. Awesomesauce!

Their policy guidelines are so good that I have actually cut and pasted them into a Word doc in case the link goes dead again. If you haven't looked at them, check them out. Seriously. Adapt them for your own organization. They very clearly understand the relationship between being authentic, being an actual person, and having professionalism in your communications when you are participating as a staff member.

SxSW and Guest Blogging for the Forum Effect

It's SxSW week! We can't be there, but we can write about it! So this is just a little head's up that Lindy and I are guest blogging this month for the Forum Effect, in conjunction with our article in the Association Forum of Chicagoland's Forum Magazine on "Unleashing the Ultimate Cool Factor: Social Media Ideas from SxSW". The article is an interview of Chris Bucchere of the Social Collective, whose my.sxsw is the social network built around the famous Austin music and tech conference.

I've just posted my first Forum Effect post - How to Build It So They Will Come. It's about some important concepts to consider when you're building a social network or online community for your members. Enjoy!

It's OK to hate Facebook

Here's a little secret for you. I hate Facebook and I always have. I mean really, really hate it. I feed all my stuff to it, but I can't stand it and try not to go in there unless absolutely necessary - then feel guilty that I've missed a bunch of comments and invitations and whatever.

I don't hate that it has connected me to lots of people from my past and my present, nor do I hate being able to catch a glimpse of peoples' lives and find things in common. I don't hate some of those original motivation factors for its existence - I hate that it seems to have forgotten about those motivators while it's trying to keep up with the Joneses.

I do hate that it keeps all your data and you can't have it back. I hate that it has the worst usability of any site ever. (And I wonder about how the power of personal connections and tagged photos can keep people using it in spite of that). For example - I hate that many people message me through it then I have to actually go in there into the swamp to get my messages and reply rather than be able to from my email. I hate that when I have one task to do, usually involving a group, I can never remember how to get to where I need to be to do that task. I hate the fact that I am supposed to stay ahead of the curve on it yet I get stressed out the minute I have to go in there to check out their umpteenth new upgrade which seems to make it worse each time they do one. As a massively popular social network, or as something I have to keep on top of from a professional/association/nonprofit standpoint? Hate it.

The overarching, all-encompassing reason I hate it so much? Facebook suffers from the worst case of feature creep that I have ever seen. Joshua Porter defines feature creep as "the process of slowly adding features to a product or interface over time. The result is a design that is less than the sum of its parts. The features may have added functionality, but the overall effect is negative. The complexity brought on by the features has, instead of adding value, made the design undesirable and a pain to use". All those "improvements" they supposedly made? I still haven't figured out how to navigate the "new" profile pages - which are now not new, since they're changing them - AGAIN. Talk about trying to be all things to all people, trying to compete with Twitter, trying whatever it is they are trying - which is totally unclear to me and totally irrelevant. How about making it user-friendly? How about making the features invisible? How about not making me click seventeen times because they keep moving the link to my groups?

So sue me. Anyway - I didn't mean to rant. I just wanted to tell you that it's ok to hate Facebook. I'm right there with you. What we can't do, neither you nor me, is ignore the fact that many of our stakeholders love Facebook and are hanging out there. So we just need to plug along and figure out whether it's a strategically good idea to build a presence there in order to connect with our members.

To that end, here's a bunch of Facebook resources for you.

Facebook for Associations (my article for ASAE's Communications News)
Facebook demographics (Quantcast)
Facebook - What you Need to Know (SocialFish resource)
Facebook Lessons From Kindergarten - SocialFish Food e-newsletter
Facebook Case Study: Chapters - Peggy Hoffman
What, Why and How of Facebook Pages - Beth Kanter
Facebook Pages vs Groups

And on the new changes:
Facebook announces new home pages - it's all about the stream
Facebook announces a myriad of changes

I will tell you I have not yet investigated the latest changes. I'm hoping Lindy will go in and just tell me what I need to know. :)

But I just wanted you to know that I feel your pain. You are not alone! We'll figure it out together.

Twitter finally adds decent search box

Twitter has finally figured out that the search function deserves more than a tiny link at the very bottom of the screen - there's now a nice search box at the top right above your profile pic, as well as a "trends" drop down to the left of it which will show the top trending keywords at that moment. (If this hasn't appeared on your twitter page yet, just wait a day or two.)

If you're looking for a hashtag for a conference going on right now, it will likely appear here, assuming there are enough Tweeps in attendance. Kool and the Gang!

So true... :)

NTEN Water Cooler Chat 3/5

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, we welcomed more new people, checked out Twitterpacks' autofollow feature, noted that the word "McLovin" actually makes an appearance in the Great Ideas Wordle, marveled over the National Apartment Association's awesomesauce new blog, and continued the conversation about the concept of the member as citizen.

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]

ASM Wiki March Case Study of the Month: NAA

Whoo hoo! The National Apartment Association has the stupendous honor of being our Association Social Media Wiki Case Study of the Month!

Thanks so much to Rene Shonerd for allowing us to dig a bit deeper into all the cool stuff they are up to!

Read it and weep...

Who will be next? Step it up, people! :)

Spoken like a true enthusiast.

This is my Tweetcloud Wordle. Not much of a critic, am I! Not so much about negativity... :)

Different Strokes for Different Folks: usability from a member perspective

So excited; I just ordered my fave usability expert Joshua Porter's book, Designing for the Social Web. [Don't get it at this Peachpit link though, it's way cheaper on Amazon.]

Here's just a little snippet.

Different Strokes for Different Folks

Each person who visits your web application has their own agenda: they're trying to do something specific. While we don't always know what that something is, we can identify recurring roles that seem to crop up again and again. Here are some roles to watch out for:

* Ready to Go. This is the role most people design for. This is the role we hope for. These people are ready to start using your application. The key to designing for them is to get out of their way. They're already convinced your software is worth trying, so make it as easy as possible to sign up by eliminating usability problems and unnecessary friction in the interface.

* Interested but Unsure. These people are interested in your software but are unsure if it is for them. There are a lot of these people. They need to be reassured they're making the right decision in trying your software. They have specific questions about what your software can do. The key to designing for them is to provide multiple levels of detail so that they can find appropriate answers to their questions.

* Fact-finders. These folks are doing reconnaissance and don't plan on using your software just yet. They want enough detail so they can report back to others (perhaps their colleagues, or perhaps their readership). Design for them by providing a solid summary and how-it-works information.

* Skeptical. These folks basically want to prove to themselves that your software isn't what they want. They want to find out that the software they're currently using is a better solution, so they don't have to go through the pain of switching. These folks present an interesting opportunity. Design for them by providing lots of evidence that other people are happy using your software.

He's talking about software design and web applications, but I thought it would be interesting to think about these roles from a member perspective, with a slightly different spin.

Because these "roles" can be very relevant to how you design for your members, those people you're asking to join your white label social network, for example. I've found that it can be really difficult for staff to put themselves in a member's shoes when thinking about how they (as Joe Member) would use their new online space. This might be one useful exercise when trying to do that.

I think from a usability perspective these roles are really important, and live alongside your usual "newbie >> connector >> champion" roles defined based on how comfortable people are with the online community space. Each of Porter's roles can go through the newbie-to-champion pathway.

Here's an example of how these roles appear within your membership (and of course their descriptions can be adjusted depending on who your members are).

The "Ready to Go" people are those members self-selecting (before or after your "ask") as being interested in beta testing your community. They are enthusiastic, ready and willing to give feedback, and eager to jump in, but they can turn on you pretty damn fast if your platform is quirky or hard to use. They will abandon you faster than rats on a sinking ship if you don't show immediate responsiveness to their concerns. They know what they are talking about and they won't stick around too long to wait for you to catch up. If you are really unlucky, they will go and tell all their friends how much your socnet sucks.

The "Interested but Unsure" people are those members who are willing to try it, but it needs to work based on their specific needs, whether it's setting up a committee workspace or whatever. They need to see pretty quickly the value in the feature sets, while being able to navigate with ease through the site to find what they need.

The "Fact-finders" are those members that have a specific single task they want to accomplish and they need to be able to do it easily, whether it's finding people to connect to around specific parameters, or locating a particular resource. They need simple "how-to" steps. They will get irritated if it takes too many clicks to accomplish that task, and they won't come back, instead asking staff to do it for them next time. (Tell me you don't recognize THAT member.)

The "Skeptical" are those members who don't see the point in setting this up in the first place, who are perfectly happy with their clunky listserves [for example]. They need to be persuaded, not by you but by other members, whose favorable experiences will show them the way. Designing with these people in mind can tease out many the flaws before you launch.

[Side note - Whatever you do, no matter what, the login process has to be simple and immediate or you will lose ALL of these people. Any sign-on frustration will set you back a long time!]

So how do you design for each of these roles? That's the easy part. You already, presumably, know what is "nice to have" and what is "need to have" in your online community's features. You probably already have a general framework to mess around with. All you need to do is take each of these roles and pretend to be that person. Think about some specific tasks (or social objects) each type of person would be in there wanting to do. Walk through the steps it take to do that task.

For example:
- Ready - connect with people, make friends, search for a keyword.
- Interested - Set up a group, upload a document.
- Fact-finder - find and download and article.
- Skeptical - one-step connect with friends. View a discussion.


So do these roles make sense when applied to your association's members? Any further thoughts?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Deep Thoughts on Usability (socialfish.org)
• What Usability Is and How to Recognize It (histalk2.com)

The Future of Marketing... and community building

I found another really awesome blog - Chief Marketing Technologist, written by Scott Brinker (@chiefmartec). He writes from the intersection of marketing and IT - and as you must know by now, anything that blends boundaries is interesting to me!

I wanted to specifically comment on this amazing post, where Scott talks about "five new skills for the future of marketing". I thought his five skills were equally significant viewed through the lens of the future "community manager".

I should say as a preface that I think the term "community manager" completely sucks - but, as of right now, it's the one that seems to be sticking in describing the role of someone in charge of listening on behalf of an organization to the social web, analyzing what they hear, and providing strategic direction based on that information. There's still a lot of debate as to how this role is defined in terms of where it might live (comms? marketing? membership? PR? etc), who does it, is it a full time role for one person or part of every member-facing or stakeholder-facing staff person's job, but in my ideal world it would be all of those things - namely, every staff member who is public-facing would have community management as part of their job description no matter what department they are in, and there would also be a full time person who could provide organizational, strategic oversight to the whole shebang.

Anyway. Scott identifies five new skills at the intersection of marketing and technology which he thinks will be crucial to develop. I agree wholeheartedly with these and think they relate quite naturally to community management and community building (which is really the goal of engaging stakeholders). They are:

1. Analytical pattern recognition - "the ability to look beyond the numbers to see the underlying patterns and trends".

Many people can be good listeners and active participants (on behalf of their organization as well as personally) in the social web - but not many, I think, will necessarily be able to see and extract the bigger picture for pushing strategic imagination.

2. Agile project management - "Now, you've got hundreds — often thousands — of micro-opportunities, swirling around the extended enterprise every week, the best of which must be quickly snatched and efficiently executed. Priorities can change overnight, and near instantaneous social media feedback demands a near instantaneous response."

Knowing how to act and react in public is definitely part of having an agile management style; knowing how to involve your people (staff and members) in the continuously evolving, iterative feedback process of building community by consciously giving them ownership is another.

3. Experimental curiosity and rigor - "The far majority of marketing activities at this point should be run as tests, continually trying new alternatives, pushing on the edges, constantly on the lookout for shifts in response that portend new threats or opportunities. Thriving in this marketing laboratory requires the imagination to come up with new ideas, the cleverness to figure out how to test them with minimal risk and resources, the courage to overcome status-quo-ism and actually carry out the experiments (remember, even if they don't work, the organization can still learn something from them), and the discipline to run the tests with enough rigor to draw meaningful conclusions."

This one speaks for itself, I think! A strategic community manager will be continuously beta testing new ideas and designing in public.

4. Systems thinking - "Marketing can no longer be managed in silos. Tactics in one area (e.g., a particular trade show presentation) impact the effectiveness of others (e.g., your search marketing ads) almost immediately. Social media has not only accelerated cross-channel effects, it's blended and mashed-up channels and partners with independent communities into a completely new, living ecosystem. If engaged properly, that can be a powerful force multiplier; if mismanaged, it can be a train wreck.
The key is to grasp the emergent relationships between the different moving parts, their positive and negative interaction effects, and optimize for the evolutionary dynamics of the whole."

I think social media has the very obvious and direct effect of breaking down silos, which is a great thing as long as someone has the bigger strategic "systems" picture in mind.

5. Mashable software fluency - "Not all marketers have to become programmers, but those who understand how software is built and deployed in the new "mashable web" — a world of mashups, widgets, and APIs — will have a competitive advantage. (And if you can whip up a quick script yourself, more power to you.)"

This is absolutely true of the community manager. You have to be in it to win it. You have to understand at a semi-decent level how all these new technologies work and how they fit together, if only because that understanding tells you a lot about how people use them and why. If you know your members you'll know why one thing works and another doesn't, and you'll know how to show them how to use certain tools when it comes time to help the digital immigrants catch up to the digital natives in your membership.

What do you think? Make sure you read his whole post - it's really good and has lots more thoughts and good links too, particularly those linking to some of his other posts. Think any of these are off base (or just too optimistic)? Anything missing? I'd also love to hear if anyone has started hiring for a community management position and how they developed the job description...

[Interesting related side note via Ben Martin - read this great post from Realtor blogger Rob Hahn to the newly hired social media manager for the National Association of Realtors. I think it touches on some of these same points but from a totally different perspective.]

[Intersting related side note 2 - this discussion on YAP asking "who does SM at your association?]

Looking for a new AMS?

You can't go wrong with starting here. Wes Trochlil at EDM Blogsite has some nice podcast interviews with seven AMS company CEO's.

What's a hashtag when it's at home?

Got this awesome email from a friend:

"Maddie,

Has the term "twit" been coined for a person who cannot understand parts of twitter yet?? If not.... :)

Okay, please HELP ME! I am completely baffled by the # in twitter. Example "#followfriday". What the heck does # mean?? Is it a group? Is it majic??"

As it happens, there are a couple of good posts I just read that explain what a hashtag is and why you should use it.

Chris Carfi says, "Hashtags" are a simple way to make things you are writing (or photographing, or video-ing) more findable on the web."

He points to a good primer post by Amy Gahran, who says, "More and more people are covering live events and breaking news via Twitter — and usually there are several Twitter users covering the same event. Hashtags are a handy tool for pulling together such disparate coverage."

I remember when you first had to follow @hashtag on Twitter in order for your tagged keyword to be indexed. Then people started getting annoyed that other people were dropping hashtags all over the place like jimmies on ice cream... And it was definitely annoying. But the hashtag frenzy soon calmed down, and now of course they are pretty much required for any news item, event, or any other trending keyword that you might be using. Why? Here's my short and sweet definition:

A hashtag (the pound sign # placed in front of a keyword) enables all tweets about that keyword to be found in Twitter search and creates a hyperlink within a single tweet to that search.

Why is that "required"? So you can find all the stuff people are talking about around that subject, regardless of whether you follow those people talking about it or not. For any time-specific event, a hashtag for that event allows you to round up all the tweets around it - which leads to lots of other cool things like being able to find all the other Twitter users who were part of that event (or just interested in it) and, then you can follow them. Newbie twitterers who try it out during a conference can immediately find a bunch of people to connect to. Advanced Tweeps can expand their network. Organizations can find out all the people who were participating in their conferences.

You might ask, well how do people know what the hashtag is for a particular conference? What if people use several? I would say it's in the organizers' interest to publicize early and often what the hashtag will be. Just pick one, make it as short as possible (easier for people to use and won't cut too much into the 140 character limit), make it unique so there's less chance of it being used with something unrelated, and tell people about it.

Now you might argue that Twitter search can also search for any old keyword, whether hashtagged or not - that is true, but the clincher is that a hashtag within a tweet creates a link. No hashtag, no link. No link, no instant connection to all the other people talking about the same subject. Automagical!

So back to my friend - "twit" or not, hope that helps! :)