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...non-profits

Wasted.

by KSL on July 22, 2010

I am totally frustrated. A nonprofit organization that I care about just closed up shop. They claim it as a victory, as if the people they served no longer need the services but that’s a load a crap. It’s such a waste because they had lots of what they needed to sustain the programs and even grow their membership but they had no one holding the reins that understood what to do with them. Too much changed too quickly. The idea that the way they had always communicated was not how their audience wanted to communicate was simply lost on them.

It kills me that I can’t read a blog that isn’t talking about blogging, or pick up a book that isn’t talking about writing a book about social media but the “Social” folks are writing blogs and books for each other because the people “at work” still aren’t in the loop. It’s like they are thrashing around in the water and unless someone gets them to listen and appreciate the value in all this change, more will drown, not realizing they didn’t have to swim so hard they only needed to stand up.

Case in point, organization in question had some great content and they sent email newsletters with regularity but they didn’t put that content in a blog, or on Facebook or anywhere that anyone else could see it. So it got sent to the same people, over and over, most of whom were already moving on. The great content that took so much time and care to prepare never reached the people it actually deserved to serve. See the writer didn’t prefer to get content from the social web and so projected a value on email that just wasn’t reflected by the membership and prospective members. More over the single voice outbound never became a conversation. A newsletter never let all the recipients talk to each other about the topic they were reading. It never enabled them to work together and for each other. It never called back those on the way out to come back in and lend a hand to the newbs. Urgh! Wasted.

Communication is not only about what you have to say, it is about packaging and delivering that message so that the recipient will receive it with the least barrier and highest ability to arrive at the thought or emotion you wanted to bring to them. Think about the voyage of your messages not just the destination. Ok I’m done for now.

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It’s Called ‘Social’ Media

by KSL on June 16, 2010

When working with clients on social media projects, it seems we always start in “Marketing Land” and over some time I educate my clients about the importance of developing their Social Media Plans and Policies. It is paramount that they understand their own goals and define their rules of engagement before they start participating. Otherwise how will they know if it is worth their time and energy? Once we get to planning activities they begin to expand their thinking, as it’s almost always more than just Marketing that can be served by Social Media depending on the organization’s goals.

To me Social Media is more like “Operations”. It’s called Social Media because it is about the social interaction between people. It’s about who we recommend. Who inspires us. Who we inspire. What we value, crave, trust. It’s not a single task that can be executed and tied to a dollar bill, it’s really more holistic than that.

I’ve only had two engagements in the past three plus years where I feel I wasn’t … successful. Both involved organizations who felt they wanted and needed social media marketing but were not prepared to support the activities. They still had a very “traditional marketing” mindset and they were in a corporate cultures that were still very “top-down” and somewhat oppressive. AJ of MFG.com really nailed it when he talked about manufactures coming to grips to with social media, as he said “Many are trying it out with the ‘Broccoli Mentality’ – ‘I don’t really like it, but I’m eating it because I’ve heard it’s good for me.’”

They’re probably right. It is “good-for-you”, unless… its not … good for you. Then you get your nutrients from other green leafy substances, or a dietary supplement. If your environment doesn’t promote social activity then social media may not be the right choice for you. Forrester Research predicts 54 billion dollars in the US for B2B Social Media Marketing spending by 2014, but you can bet that plenty of those dollars are being spent on unsuccessful social media efforts.

If you think of your organization and the words, “people centric”, “transparent”, “inclusive”, spring to mind then you’re probably in good shape. But if words like “control”, “exclusive”, or “formal”, are what comes to your lips, then you may have some cultural challenges that social media will only exacerbate.

Things to consider: Do you promote each employee’s education and encourage their interaction with each other to educate and propel their careers? Do you showcase your Sales representatives for their thought leadership, command of the domain and contribution to the company? Do you talk about more than your product and/or service? Do you focus on something other than the bottom line? Do you practice listening to customers and employees regularly? If you answered “yes”, or “we try”, to most of these questions then social media can be a great asset to your organization. If you answered no to most of these questions then you may want to consider more traditional advertising initiatives. You may want to try advertising on social media sites.

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Customer Relationship 360 (aka Marketing Today)

by KSL on May 18, 2010

Often times when I talk about social media strategies, I explain that social media lets everyone be the center of their universe. Each and every one of us should be able to feel like the center of the universe. If your customer happens to use LinkedIn on a day to day basis, then access to everything relevant for your product, service, business, or mission should be available from within that environment. The customer or “user” shouldn’t have to change their preferred environmental preference to associate with, learn from, contribute to, or promote your business. If they live and breath on Facebook then all the same applies, and if they live in a mobile environment they should be able to access all the relevant parts of the business from within their mobile browser, mobile application or messaging program. This requires research and planning. Where do your customers live and breath online? What conversations do they want to have and where are they comfortable having them? Once you understand their environment and preferences you can begin to create your social media plans delivering information in the appropriate orbits.

Thinking about your business in 360 degrees is important for today’s customer relationships too. Your customer wants to know about all the ways you share similar interests or concerns. About all they ways your partnership can accomplish a common goal. Sharing lots of information about who you are as individuals and as an organization will turn some people away but those few were never going to be the customers who evangelized your product, service or cause. The people who will be drawn to you will stay and they will be exponentially more powerful forces on your business than those who find you’re “not a match”. My Dad always told me that in order to be successful you had to be brave enough to be loved for who you really are and for what you really value. It’s the same in business. Smart brands are living and breathing brands, sharing more than the polished messages and inspiring ideas instead of controlling conversation.

When you look at your business from the outside in, can you see who and what it is all the way around? Can you see your core values? Your sense of humor? Can you see the universe of which you are the center? If not, then you need to share the parts that are missing in consumable sharable ways. If you can then keep on keeping it real and share a story about how this level of access has impacted your organization.

KTF
-KSL

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15 Books to Put on Your Summer Reading List

by KSL on May 5, 2010

All this warm weather reminds of beach books, I’ve been thinking about my seasonal pilgrimage to my favorite book stores. While building a wish list, thoughts of you all entered my mind. Every time I speak or work with a group of people I’m asked for recommended reading suggestions. So thinking about how many people I’ve come to know over the past few months and which books I’d like you all to read to further your education in Social Media for Education, Business, and Nonprofit communications.

Here’s my linkable list for you all in no particular order
(I have either read or plan to read)

1. Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules by Mike Moran

2. Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-László Barabási

3. Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success by Dan Schawbel

4. The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman, Rod A. Beckstrom

5. What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

6. Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin

7. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Anthony D. Williams, Don Tapscott

8. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky

9. Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li

10. Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk

11. Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business by Erik Qualman

12. Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone. by Mitch Joel

13. The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business by Tara Hunt

14. The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web by Tamar Weinberg

15. Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust by Chris Brogan, Julien Smith

I’ve aksed the Aleuro followers and fans for their insight too and I will be sure to share their suggestions. I’ll republish a complete list from all y’all later this month. Please add your suggested book name (or even link would be great) here in the comments.

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Social Media Profiles

by KSL on April 28, 2010

The Question: What happens when we die?

Part of what I do for clients sometimes is act as their social media “proxy”. I share content with their community members and listen on behalf of organization, reporting common themes and distributing important questions to the right individuals within the organization for the swiftest response. Often times I play this role while the members of an organization come up to speed on platform functionality and best practices for using social media to achieve their business goals. After some time, I transition from managing their social media presence to simply being an adviser and reviewer of content and practice. Yesterday one of my clients, who has made this transition successfully, called to ask me a question I hadn’t considered when we worked through their social media policy and plan.

What happens to these profiles when someone dies?

Unfortunately they have unexpectedly lost a member of their very close company family. This individual had created accounts on several social media platforms, at the initiation of the business, and now my client needs to know how to go about removing those profiles. This is an unfortunate circumstance but it is one we must consider and prepare for when developing social media plans and policies, especially when we ask people to participate in these platforms for business purposes.

It should be clear in your policy what you will do in this event. Will you notify, delete, deactivate, or memorialize social media profiles of deceased employees? Will you leave that to their friends and families to decide? Who owns that content? If you delete it and the family of the individual wanted to keep it, can you be sued? These are questions that may not have precedent just yet. Better for you to ask and answer them as a business, and in conjunction with the individuals that make up your organization, proactively. These decisions may need to become part of your human resource information. Your HR Manager may want to go so far as to document and record the discussion and agreement of these procedures with each employee.

In the unfortunate event that you need to remove social media profiles for a deceased business or family member, here are your options and links for action on each of the most common platforms.

Facebook

Facebook handles this well by providing options to deactivate, delete, memorialize or simply report on an account.

Deactivating your Facebook account basically turns your account temporarily “off”, meaning you’ll disappear on Facebook. All of your information however is saved, so if you want to reactivate at some point everything will be just how you left it when you deactivated. If you are going to do anything about someone’s Facebook profile, this might be an appropriate response while notifying friends, family, and community members of the situation as it still leave the information intact.

Deleting a Facebook account results in all personally identifiable information associated being purged from the Facebook database. This includes information like name, email, address, and screen name(s). Copies of some material (photos, notes, etc.) may remain on Facebook servers but it will be disassociated from the user profile and completely inaccessible to all Facebook users.

Memorializing a Facebook account prevents all login access to the account. It also means that certain information on an account will be removed like status updates and contact information. The profile’s privacy settings are changed so that only friends can see the profile or find it by search. The Wall remains up and accessible so friends and family can leave posts in remembrance.

There have been debates over who has the right to take of any these actions, so again I encourage to talk about this with employees and encourage them to discuss the situation at home. It will take careful consideration to determine the most appropriate response for your organization. If you choose to report the individual as deceased (anyone can do this) you can fill out this form but keep in mind the consequence of that action (family member will no longer see their loved one’s notes in feeds or threads, all notifications (like pokes) will disappear, videos and pictures of them will be gone etc.).

Linked In

On LinkedIn you can only close an account. To remove a profile from LinkedIn you’ll need to log into the account. Select “Close Your Account” from the “Settings” window and provide a reason for closing the account. Know that once the account is closed, there will not be any way to access to the account or the contact information contained in it. The only other option on LinkedIn is to notify customer service of the deceased member and they may remove the profile.

Twitter and Skype

I actually expected Twitter to have been more prepared for this question. So I was surprised when I searched Twitter Help Resources for information on notification of deceased members and came up empty. The only thing I found were rules and policy concerning inactive user names. I tweeted to @support but so far no response. I had the same experience with Skype. No information to be found in the knowledge base or forum and I’ve sent in a support question but no word from them yet either.

Twitter is interesting because a Twitter handle is a unique identifier, a brand really. The Twitter handle of an individual may represent the role in the business or may more truly represent the individual or even their family. It might even be that I pass my handle on to my daughter when I die so she can continue to share my life’s work with my followers (#itcouldhappen).

Please Share

If you’ve had to work through this experience, I’m sorry for your loss. I hope you’ll add your advice to this post to help along those of us who may have to find our way through this in the coming months.

KTF
-KSL

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