I’ve been talking and thinking a lot about measuring social media engagement with colleagues, nonprofits, and social media activists. Two years ago, those of us participating in social media engagement and strategy were trying to come up with “the” metric to define social media tactical success. We argued and conversed, exchanged thoughts, and thought about why it’s so hard to pin this down. And then social media practice evolved, as did the thinking about measurement. In fact, it’s crystal clear to me now: Measuring Return on Engagement (ROE) is actually two measures: SMART goal Return on Engagement, and the ROE of Community Commitment Using these two metrics, an organization can get a pretty good sense of whether or not its online activities and strategies are working, and whether or … Continue Reading

Social media cannot thrive in silos. What is happening online affects the entire organization, not just the marketing department, or the development team, or the Executive Director. And while social media usage has truly penetrated the nonprofit sector, reports and activities are usually not shared throughout the organization. What results is a lack of organizational buy-in, misunderstanding of the benefit of digital engagement, missed opportunities, and role confusion. Instead of siloing information, turn it around. Knowledge sharing results in stronger organizations that have a broader knowledge base about its online stakeholders, and a wide net of useful information to meet organizational goals. There are six essential pieces of information that should be shared throughout the … Continue Reading

If you do anything professionally related to online technology, you understand the immense amount of data you need to sort through daily. There are the daily content roundups, blogs to read, Facebook posts and to check, tweets to scroll through, and news sites. That doesn’t include whatever else arrives in your inbox. I literally cannot keep up with all that I want to know about social media technology and its use for engagement, fundraising and advocacy. It’s really ... too much to know. That’s when I began trusting the curators. Trusting the curators was a strategy I employed to begin to figure out what to read, what I needed to read, and what others that I trusted thought was important to read. We cannot read it all. We cannot begin to imagine trying to read it all. We must trust to the … Continue Reading

Last Friday, I gave a presentation on how social media is impacting journalism and the newspaper industry for the New England Press and Newspaper Association‘s winter conference. I had the honor of sharing the panel with Boston Globe reporter Milton Valencia and Crowdsourcing author Jeff Howe. Milton spoke enthusiastically about why Twitter matters to journalists, and Jeff explained the virtuous cycle of reporting and online community that makes reporting better. During the presentation, I identified four areas impacted by social media: the changing definition of an authoritative news source, the concept of news participators, how news is shared, and the changing news cycle. Authority = Trust In the age of social, a newspaper and its journalists must earn authority; who is an authority is … Continue Reading

Last week I spoke at the NYC Social Media for Nonprofits conference on creating and measuring return on engagement. In fact, social media engagement should have been the untitled conference theme. Almost every speaker presented a case study or spoke about his/her use of social media for successful engagement, from how to use video to engage (Charity:Water’s September Birthday campaign) to how to create multi-channel fundraising engagement (Big Duck). And you know what? They’re right. Without engagement, social media ultimately fails. However, you can design your social media activities to create online engagement, which is the focus on my presentation. My conference presentation covered five core concepts about how to design real online engagement for the highest return on … Continue Reading