Web Works

Below is a recap of key points from Neff’s recent presentation at UT on social media for nonprofits by Amber Walkowiak.

David J. Neff gave a speech on new media in the nonprofit sphere this morning. He spent a little bit of time explaining new media and then went on to give advice on how to use it.

Old and new media
-Old media had all communication pointing outward toward the audience
-New media has communication pointing both ways and we’re expected to not only listen to comm. coming in from the audience but also to respond to it

Facebook ate many of the old media sites (Xanga, Live Journal, Friendster) and is now the giant of the industry.

Social networks are walled gardens
-You have to have an account to use it
-Further, users must give you permission to interact with them and see their profiles

The first thing you need to do in social networks as a nonprofit is LISTEN.
-Run searches on your brand
-Don’t start broadcasting until you’ve searched yourself and engaged in a few conversations with users.
-Even so, keep the broadcasting to a minimum

Find the key masters.
-These are the people who can open doors to new connections or new ideas.
-They can be anyone. Think about who you’re targeting and who might be able to help you reach them.

Video is sticky and social
-48% of people watch video online (2007 study)
-15% of people use video sharing sites (2007 study)
-Most people share links with friends or watch videos with friends because it’s a social topic

YouTube and Facebook OWN your stuff.
-They hold copyright to everything you upload to their sites.

SharingHope.tv
- Created by American Cancer Society as a multimedia sharing site to tell your cancer story
- More positive atmosphere than on YouTube (YouTube’s comments usually skew very negative)

Facebook Advertising
-Incredible because it’s so targeted

Statesman sells first twitter ad
-Robert Quigley (online editor) for Statesman sold @statesman tweets to MansionofTerror for $150 a pop
-Statesman requires ads to be actionable (coupons, etc.) - MoT was buy 1 get 1 free
-Ad was retweeted 29 times and gained national media coverage
-However, no one showed up to MoT to use the coupon

Brainstorm on why it didn’t work
-Too early in the season for people to care yet
-Maybe Twitter was the wrong medium
-Statesman reaches an older audience than was desired
-Many people forgot to or were uncomfortable mentioning the ad
-Could have had a landing page to buy tickets with a special twitter code for money off

Key Concepts
-Be honest (if you tweet an ad, admit that it’s an ad)
-Listen first and be responsive
-Spot trends and make trends
-Speak up/have a voice (don’t be a robot)

Thanks,

Amber Walkowiak
Communications Intern, McCombs School of Business
The University of Texas at Austin
(512) 232-6779
amber.walkowiak@mccombs.utexas.edu

I’m excited to begin writing about the creation of our new website, and the implementation of our content management system. I plan to use this blog to help keep everyone up to date on the status of the web team as we move forward, as well as to write some articles on our process and how each of you fit into it.

I thought I’d begin by laying out some definitions.

Content Management System (CMS)

A web-based program used to help site owners and editors to manage, edit, and publish content easily. Content can mean text, images, documents, or forms. There are lots of content management systems out there. Wordpress, which runs this blog, is an example of a simple, but robust content management system. Sharepoint is an example of an enterprise-level content management system. The difference is the goal of the system. For Wordpress, the goal is blogging. For Sharepoint, the goal can range from handling internal documents to running your entire web presence.

Sitecore

Sitecore is our chosen CMS. It was chosen for a number of reasons, but none more important than the simplicity of allowing you to edit your content. The web team has long had the goal of removing itself as the middle man between you and your content. Sitecore will allow us to do that, while simultaneously ensuring quality and consistency.

User Experience (UX)

If I’ve ever spoken to you, I’ve probably prattled on and on about user experience. Get ready, there’s more to come. Quite simply, user experience deals with the interaction between the user and your website, or “their experience.” There are a number of best practices and processes that I will detail in later posts that will help us to create a positive user experience.

That’s all for now. If you work with someone involved in our site, let them know what where trying to do here.

To insert an image, first post the image you want to insert to the server of your choice. I recommend Flickr (they do a lot of the work for you, providing resized images and embed code). Piccassa is good too. Most any online photo-sharing service is fine. All you ultimately need is the URL of your image on a server. Once you do, you can use the code below to paste into your post where you want the image to be. Note: When writing your new post you’ll have to click on the “HTML” tab instead of viewing it as you’re used to in the “Visual” tab.

Here’s the code for embedding an image: <img src=”url” alt=”descriptive text” hspace=”8″ vspace=”3″ align=”left”/> Italics indicate what you need to add: the URL of your pic on your photo site, and a descriptive text to indicate what is there if the pic cannot be seen. The hspace and vspace code will add a bit of horizontal and vertical whitespace padding around the pic so that text is not right up against the pic. The align code will make text wrap around your photo, either to the right or left. Photos should be no bigger than 500 pixels wide to fit into our template.

If you need a good image, you can always find one on Flickr that is completely legal, by searching among Creative Commons licenced photos. See Finding Pictures For Posts.

When considering your online community, it helps to think of your users in terms of types of participants.

Social networks often have social hierarchies where members play different roles:

• Some seek information
• Some prefer to pass info along
• Some are merely spectators
• Others take the lead role in determining what the group will do

Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research have created a Social Technographics Profile that further clarifies potential community members by action:

• Creators—members who will create more content than anyone else. They are highly motivated, will produce blogs, upload videos, write online articles, and more on yours and other network sites.
• Critics—members who will react to online content, post comments on blogs, ratings and reviews, edit wikis, etc. Typically, there are more critics than creators.
• Collectors—members who organize and aggregate content by saving URLs and tags on social bookmarking services, voting for news stories on sites like Digg, or gathering RSS feeds, etc. Collectors play an important role in organizing and spreading content Creators and Critics develop.
• Joiners—members who build profiles on typical social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, but limit their activity to networks.
• Spectators—members who passively take in what everyone else puts out in the form of blogs, podcasts, videos, etc. This will always be the largest group. Like Joiners, Spectators are necessary to fill out the ranks but should not be considered prime movers and shakers.
• Inactives—members who don’t do much of anything, such as Facebook members who haven’t updated their profiles in years. Insights from this kind of profile can tell you what levels of participation you should build into your network.
  - from STAMATS, “Social Networking, The Five Fundamentals”

Here are some questions you might ask yourself:

• Do you already have community members that fit any of these descriptions. What are you?
• Do you have a ‘listening strategy’ that categorizes and utilizes these people?
• How can you document and connect with these people?
• How could you incentivise, reward, and encourage involved community members?
• What can engagement tell you about community member motivation for participating in the first place?

Dorothy Brady sent me this pic. Notice the Twitter message in bold, red…I guess they don’t want anyone to know if they have a fire.