How Social Engagement is Changing

I love a good visual...

Social Media Strategic Planning

My previous post on Social Media Strategic Planning received a few off and online requests for the use of the tactical matrix.

For your convenience, I uploaded the matrix, in this presentation form, to slideshare. You can download the presentation from there and feel free to re-use and re-purpose it. I'd love to know how you might adapt it and use it in a way that fits your purposes, so please keep me informed.

The Most Practical Social Media Presentation You'll Find For Free!

View more presentations from mikeyames.

I found inspiration in the ongoing work of Beth Kanter, the consistent use of matrix grids by Jeremiah Owyang, and a conversation with my friend, Lance Bauslaugh.

The Matrix - Social Media Planning Tool

I have been presented with a couple of opportunities to use a planning matrix or two in the last several weeks. I was glad to see the way the Jeremiah Owyang has been using them over at his blog the in last dozen posts. We have recently been challenged with our thinking at Pursuant with a fundraising matrix that has been very helpful in our strategic planning with clients. They keep popping up.

So this frame of thinking caused me to construct the following matrix specifically geared to guide the planning of a basic social media work flow. There are plenty of comments and critiques you might make to it. I'd love to hear them.



So, based on this empty shell of a matrix, I have filled it in with sample recommendations we might make to a typical small to mid-size non profit client.
You can see the fictional parameters and constraints I have inserted. You can also see that there is an assumption that this hypothetical organization would have already jumped into facebook, twitter, blogging and youtube, without taking time to think through strategy or audience or resources. (sound familiar?)

So this might be you or your organization...


This leads us to having the freedom of turning this matrix on it's side to discover a daily task list for a single person to accomplish a cross platform engagement strategy in about 30 minutes per day. Here is what that might look like...

There is plenty to comment and critique here.
Please resist a critique of the tactics that are listed in the grid. I would much rather hear your comments on the planning tool itself.

Facebook Horribly Messes with Non Profits Use of Their Site.

This is an excellent post you will find on the NonProfit Tech 2.0 Blog.

I encourage you to keep an eye on the results of this test throughout next week. This could be a real disappointment for nonprofits, even those that have employed an excellent engagement strategy might find themselves severely limited in their ability to engage or communicate.

An Experiment with Facebook Advertising for Nonprofit Organizations
2010 February 9
tags: Facebook, ROI (Return on Investment)
by nonprofitorgs

The Facebook of February 2010 is quite different from the Facebook of 2009 especially when it comes to Facebook Fan Pages. If you haven’t yet noticed, three very important changes have been made that significantly effect your organization’s Facebook community:

1) Status Updates are no longer guaranteed to get exposure in the News Feed.

There is a mysterious Facebook algorithm at play here and I just don’t know what it is, but I do know that with the launch of new Facebook design in early February 2010 the vast majority of Status Updates from Pages that I am a fan of are not showing up in the primary News Feed > Top News. More are seemingly showing up in the News Feed > Most Recent view, but definitely not all. I knew this change was coming and I had read that Status Updates that receive a lot of comments and thumbs up would at the very least show up in the News Feed > Most Recent, but that’s just not happening. I have always believed and voiced that 90% of the power of a Facebook Page is in the Status Updates, so having them not show up in News Feeds is a problem.

2) It is no longer obvious that fans have new Updates.

I can’t remember exactly when this change was made, but it was at least 6 months ago. When fans logged into Facebook in the upper right of their “Home” view they used to see alerts of “New Updates!”. Now the only way fans know if they have new Updates is if they go to their Inbox > Updates or if they click “Messages” on the left of the Home view (the later was just added February 2010). Coincidently, once this change was made, activity on the Nonprofit Organizations Facebook Page declined. I no longer saw surges in traffic (via Insights) on days that I sent Updates.

As of February 2 Updates had been relegated the realm of “Out of Sight, Out of Mind”. On that day I polled fans asking if they read Updates anymore, and the overwhelming response was no. BUT now that Facebook has added the “Messages” function in the upper left of the Home view, perhaps the usefulness of Updates with rise again? I’ll send an Update next week and let you know. :)

3) The Pages Filter on the Home view has been removed and replaced with Ads and Pages.

The new Facebook of February 2010 no longer has a “Pages” filter in the upper left of the Home view. It used to be a feed of Status Updates from Pages you were a fan of. It’s gone. Now if you click “More” just below this space a new “Ads and Pages” hub appears. You do not see Status Updates, but rather the Ads and Pages you are an admin for. Useful for Nonprofit Admins who manage many Pages and people who buy and manage Facebook ads, but there’s no way around it… less exposure of Status Updates on the Home view is just not good for most nonprofits.

Thus, a $50 experiment with Facebook Advertsing for Nonprofit Organizations.

Facebook is entering an era of profitability. They have built the largest online community the world has ever known over the last 5 years and now they are positioned to make some serious cash. You can’t blame them for it. It couldn’t be free forever. That’s business. But nonprofits have sent out millions of e-mails and Tweets over the last few years asking supporters to “Become a fan!” thus helping Facebook become the powerhouse that it is today. So, there is a reciprocal relationship here, or at least there should be (I think).

I have read rumors that purchasing advertising will help your nonprofit get more action in the News Feeds. That seems fair. I am willing to pay $50 or $100 in advertising to get increased exposure in the feeds, but not necessarily to secure more fans. If those new fans can’t see my Status Updates, well then quite honestly, what’s the point?
So, I have just purchased a Facebook Ad to promote the Nonprofit Organizations Facebook Page that is to run Monday, February 15th through Friday, February 19th. Together, we will watch to see if it increases my fan base and/or Status Update activity in the News Feeds. Below you can see the steps I took to create and pay for an ad:

1) Step 1 :: Design Your Ad

Step 2 :: Target Your Ad


My ad will target people:

* who live in the United States
* between the ages of 30 and 40 inclusive
* who graduated from college
* who are single, in a relationship, engaged or married
* who speak English (US)

Facebook let me know there are 6,892,600 people that fit that description.

Step 3 :: Campaigns and Pricing

I chose to max my ad at $10 a day. For that price I could get up 17 clicks a day, or 36,000 impressions a day. The later sounded much more impressive so I went with Pay for Impressions. The ad will run for 5 days maxing at $50 starting next Monday, February 15.

Step 4 :: Review and Pay for Ad

Step 5 :: Ads and Pages Admin

As mentioned above, there is a new “Ads and Pages” option on the left side of your Home view under “More.” When the ad goes live next Monday I’ll start seeing some activity and be sure to share screenshots with you the following week. But again, this experiment is not about how many new fans an ad can generate for the Nonprofit Organizations Facebook Page, but rather if it helps the Status Updates of the NPO Page get more News Feed action. I hope so!

Twitter says "Don't Tweet About It"

I think twitter is using reverse Jedi on me. I have been reading about the new "lists" feature that twitter been working on. Presumably it is the functionality that many have been already using in web applications like tweetdeck and seesmic.
So I was surprised to see this splash banner come up on an account I help facilitate.
I will run to try out the feature now. I just thought it was funny how twitter announced this private rollout.



If you can't read it in the picture, the text says, "Lists are timelines you build yourself, consisting of friends, family, co-workers, sports teams, you name it. You're part of a small group receiving this feature, so don't tweet about it yet!"

They so want me to tweet about it, right?

University President's Online Persona

I had a representative of a university president's office ask me about getting their president up on twitter. I thought I would share part of our exchange. The short research that I did might help you in a similar decision.

My initial response...

I would be remiss if I didn’t ask a couple of questions.

Is the president wanting to partially participate in a profile that is also being updated by others?
Is [president] already the kind of person who creates content on a regular basis?
Aside from simply being an active participant on twitter, does [president] have any specific objectives he’d like to see met as a result of his participation? (I can suggest a few)

Based on the answers to these questions, I would suggest a specific approach to managing his profile.

After another exchange that clarified the questions I asked, I provided the following overview of other university presidents that are using the tool and how they are using it.

http://twitter.com/asupresoffice -Arizona State is clear that this is the “Office of the President” President Michael Crow has a personal profile here http://twitter.com/michaelcrow. The office of president profile has largely turned into a newsfeed. This could be a way we would choose to approach, and then push [president] to do his own tweeting while at high profile events through the same channel. The disadvantage of this approach is that it is a bit contrived, stiff, and the opposite of what regular twitter users would expect from someone seriously interested in using the tool.
This is something we could do for you with a little training and consult. We could set it up and turn it over. Someone in the president’s office is best suited to manage the feed on an ongoing basis. It would be difficult for us to manage this type of feed for you on an ongoing basis, but it is (remotely) possible.

https://twitter.com/presidentgee - Ohio State University, obviously more personal than ASU, but guarded and not engaging. You’ll see he never @replies or Retweets or asks questions or engages in the conversation that is available. It could easily be Gordon Gee’s personal assistant transcribing an event off of his calendar. It is Less newsy, more personal, not interactive (which is the point of twitter [but not if the user isn’t willing to embrace the tool and be transparent])
Other similar examples… http://twitter.com/kstate_pres
We could assist in setup, launch, and a bit more extensive training and consult to both [president] and an assistant of his. It would be very difficult for us to manage this kind of feed on your behalf and we would not recommend ghost writing.

http://twitter.com/johnmaeda - Rhode Island School of Design, President Maeda is extremely engaging, uses the tool well. Intentionally follows others and has a huge following because of his obvious transparency and willing to use twitter as it was intended. Notice all the Retweets and questions and @replies. This user has actual clout and influence in the tool. He likely never has anyone else share his feed. He has completely embraced it as part of his daily rhythm.
Other similar examples… http://twitter.com/AJUpresident
… http://twitter.com/DavidSDockery - President of Union University in Jackson, TN
We could assist in setup and launch and provide exhaustive training and consult in explaining philosophy and practices behind becoming this kind of user. We could NOT operate this kind of feed on an ongoing basis.


Let me know what you think?
Do you know of any other school presidents who are doing a good job tweeting?

Alumni Association Twitter Use - Baseline Comparisons

What kind of influence score should the typical alumni association reach for? At this point, in this data that we have collected, we have only established a baseline of comparison that allows the different association feeds to look at each other. But as an overall average, should we compare ourselves to something else?



Here is a quick comparison of scores taken and averaged from a dozen random real people (not internet marketers or spammers or profession social media types). The commonality between this average person and the alumni associations we have looked at is that they have the same number of average followers.



You'll notice that the average user who has 560 followers has more than three times the influence and eight times the clout as the average alumni association feed. So my question to you, because I don't think this is the best comparison, is who should alumni associations compare themselves with? If we are going to establish a baseline of comparison to determine that our logistic performance in the tool is better than average or desperately in need of improvement - who should we compare ourselves to?

Brand names?
Membership associations?
Central communication feeds for the schools?
Small Companies with a similar sized customer base?

Sound off in the comments...what do you think should be the comparison that makes the best sense?

Little Funny

Found by way of my friend, Jeremy Gregg, over at FundVisor.

Alumni Associations Twitter Usage Report

Don't let the fact that I am not able to offer you a fully functioning version of this data with an attached, preloaded pivot table stop you. I would love to put a call out there for someone to do their magic with this data and give it back to us. I ventured into this project with a few basic questions I wanted to answer. I collected the data and set about to answer those questions. There is, without a doubt, a hundred other questions and answers that one could derive from this data, so have at it.

If you plan to do your own analysis and discover some answers to your own questions, you should know a few basics about the tool I used to collect this data. Twitalyzer is a website that runs the numbers you see represented in the data. Twitalyzer takes a snapshot of the past seven days of your use of twitter and runs the algorithm to arrive at a score in 5 different categories, influence, signal, generosity, velocity and clout.

A couple other things you should know...If you haven’t used twitter in the past seven days, it doesn’t matter how much influence or clout you had, Twitalyzer will give a zero return on data. This does NOT mean that your influence scores will reset, start over from zero, and need to build up again. Part of the Twitalyzer algorithm accounts for the number of followers you have, and previous profile scores that have been analyzed in the past. It is important to understand how some profiles might go from an influence score of 2.4 to zero and back to 2.2. The “no data” score is not technically a score of zero, even though it might seem that way in how you choose to present data. Twitalyzer basically answers the question, “what is your influence in twitter in the last seven days.” Where one can easily make the case that a profile that hasn’t been updated for the past week still retains some influence (based upon user accessibility to previous updates), Twitalyzer only shows trends limited to the previous tabulations that have been run on a given user name. In the basic report page, an ongoing tabulation of the scores is only presented in terms of averages… and not trends. If you would like to see the information presented in a line graph, over time, Twitalyzer will give you a look at that information in a couple of fun ways here.

Based upon this information, it seems inappropriate to present these numbers in a line graph, over time.

This raw Twitalyzer data should be seen as a snapshot average, tabulated five times, between the dates of May 27th and June 22nd , 2009.

If any one data collection time returned “no data” that time was not counted as a zero in the average, instead it was not included in the average.

So, lets get into the questions and answers about Alumni Associations.

I took time to select the top 40 twitter profiles (based on number of followers) by searching for user bios or user names that contained the words "alumni association." the remaining group of alumni association feeds came from a sampling of feeds that were interesting to me for one reason or another. For instance, the two profiles at the bottom of the list were selected because they were started within a couple of days of when my data collection began.

What does the average alumni association feed look like?
After collecting data over the course of a month, what was the aggregate growth seen in each time period?
The typical twitter profile for alumni associations started off with 454 followers and following 303 twitter users. Those numbers grew. By the end of the month, the typical alumni association profile was following 356 users while being followed by 559.

Lets average all the scores together for all 49 profiles that were traced over the course of the month.

The fact that alumni associations have an average influence score 0.4 give us plenty of comparisons to make among the ones that were analyzed. Should alumni associations be happy to be above average? Do their twitter feeds rank low in comparison to other similar industries? More on that later.
For now, here is several quick looks at how individual profiles compare.




















If you have been reading these posts from the beginning, you have heard me make the case that judging a profile based on the number of followers is a horrible way to measure success. It is still a statistic that most would be interested in. Here are a couple of ways to look at that statistic. There are a couple of ways to determine how engaging an alumni association is being with this social web tool. One quick way I did this was to look back through three pages of updates for each feed and see if they had a tendency to @reply any of their followers with conversation. If there were none, it is easy to conclude that a feed was dedicated to one-way communication. Those profiles that choose to engage with @replies saw slightly higher growth in followers than those who did not. While I personally hold to the insight that it is better to have 50 responsive followers than 1000 that ignore you, this data comparison can help one make several observations.

There also seems to be a relationship between high clout/influence scores with those profiles who make a practice of following a high percentage of users that are following them. This is seen, in twitter, as a more generous and engaging way to act as a user.

The question becomes, to the alumni association, if the simple act of following back the real people who are following your feed is worth the little bit of extra time it takes to do this. The influence scores say yes.

You can see that the majority of alumni associations fail to take time to enact a follow strategy that leads out and initiates a relationship with another user by following first. Those that do, and follow at least 90% of their following, have more than three times the influence and clout of those that follow fewer than 50%.

While I have several other observations to make about this data. This might be enough to get our conversation started for now. What do you think? Feel free to pull down the spreadsheet and run your own numbers? What does it tell us? What recommendations can we make?
More to come...

Alumni Associations = Twitter FAIL -- Part 3

Yes, I am sticking with the flaming title for this series of posts. I do recognize that it is very unscientific of me to publish the hypothesis prior to the findings or even the research being collected. But this is a study that is remaining open for criticism and some midstream corrections. It also seems like it would increase the readership of the series. (My alternate title is something to do with making millions in fundraising dollars per month from the comfort of your own home!)

I am in the midst of collecting my fourth data set over the course of the last four weeks. There are some trends that are beginning to show themselves. It is interesting to watch the percentage growth of those twitter feeds that started with the most followers. It looks as if it will show that once a twitter profile reaches a certain level, it will continue to have steady growth no matter how the Alumni Association chooses to manage their outbound communication. This will be an interesting point to consider and, if true, can have several recommendations that emerge from it.

I am most interested in influence and engagement. Unless it is simply a branding exercise on the part of the alumni association, there is no reason to have a profile on twitter if you are not going to consider how much clout or influence the communication has. For example, would you rather have 2,000 follower who ignore your information or 150 followers where 50 will always reply back or retweet you?

This is the question the Katie Johnson considered as she began to manage the twitter presence of Cal State, Fresno. Katie is a numbers person, perhaps a statistician at heart. She was asking the ROI question from the very beginning of their feed. She also asked the questions early, of what kind of news and information their alumni might want to hear from them, and employed the answers she received directly to her outbound information.

SIDE NOTE --- I think it's great that she took the time to consider these important questions. I also think alumni associations everywhere should consider whether their twitter profile should be managed as a news distribution channel at all. In some cases, depending on the objectives and strategy, considering twitter use might not result in the question, "what kind of news do you want from us" but rather "how can we show our alumni our loyalty" or "what needs to our alumni have that we can meet." Those kind of questions and answers might result in the revelation that twitter is not the social web application you should be using.

Katie's orientation toward metrics caused her to use and track her tiny urls every time she sent out a news update. She has been tracking every outbound tweet, that has a link with it, for the past several months. There is quite a bit of information that can be reported on from this data. Here are a couple of basics.

Average click through rate when an update has a link - 4.2%
Highest click through rate of any update - 25%
Highest unique number of clicks on any one update - 52 (with 390 followers at the time)
Typical Time of Day for highest open rates - 2:30PM Pacific
Typical content source for highest open rates - YouTube and FresnoStateNews.com

This is one universities feed. I could only dream of being able to access analysis from all of the alumni associations I am observing. (If everyone were like Katie!) But it is an interesting analysis I recommend any mature feed employing. You can get these kind of clickthru rates using HootSuite or thru the new StumbleUpon tool that is in beta. Some of you might have additional tools that can give you similar statistics.

So leave a comment and lets talk about it. What should we compare our clickthru rates to in order to show we are doing well? Should they be better than email open rates or clickthru rates? Should this be a discussion about updates mimicking email subject lines with the tiny url mimicking the clickthru? I prefer this to be a discussion about engagement, but those numbers are not ready to be published yet.

Alumni Association Research

The followup post is coming, I promise.
I have had a few people asking.
I am still in the data collection process on what will be a fuller report on the state of typical alumni association use of twitter.

In the mean time, I have a couple of other data sets that have been sent my way that will make for a nice little post. This is not it.

I don't imagine anyone is sitting there hitting the refresh button while staring at my my blog, but you should expect to see something in the next couple of days. I apologize if I am adjusting your expectations.

Alumni Associations = Twitter FAIL -- Part2

I have received some wonderful interaction (both online and off) from part one of this series and this research. This interaction has led to some adjustments I am considering and I'd like to hear what you think about some of these ideas.

Don't just lurk, feel free to chime in on the comments, I'm happy to hear ideas from friends I haven't met yet. One of those friends is Katie, who chimed in on the comments of the previous post. I even got to spend some time on the phone with Katie today. We had a good, invigorating conversation...I love when online introductions turn into offline interaction. (go to a tweetup some time, you'll really like it)

Anyway, a few things that have hit me as we are half way through this experimental analysis...

#1 - I HAVE BEEN HARSH

I need to come out and admit this right away. The title and opening paragraphs of my initial post on this topic were intentionally over the top.
It was my intent to pull readers, especially alumni association officers, all the way into the research. It is not my intention to publish a scathing diatribe about collective ignorance. I pledge to leave this kind of tactic in post one, and intentionally become affirming and offer help in the remaining posts on this topic. If the use of this tactic lured you in to reading, I'm happy for that. However, I don't want you to hide this report or it's findings from your VP or director because it felt like I had an agenda to make you look ignorant.

That being said, I am going to allow the numbers to be what they are, even if that means they are brutal.

There are a handful of Associations in the data that are doing remarkable with their feeds. Only a portion of this partial study has been published. I chose not to make any commentary on any individual feed, but there are some conclusions you can start to draw from looking at this limited data set.

#2 - BUILD A BETTER BASELINE

Baker alludes to this in his comment on the first posting. I had an offline conversation with him that expounded this idea. I initially chose to show a glimpse of two twitter power users, Beth Kanter and Chris Brogan, in the partial findings. I wanted to give a view of how their scores are coming out, not because I intended a comparison to show that Alumni Associations were awful. Instead, I wanted to give context to the scores generated by the twitter analytic tool I used. I would love to compare the AA feeds to the average or aggregate twitter user, but I don't know where to find a tool that can give those numbers. I could find or choose several random twitter users to establish this baseline, but I believe it might be more appropriate to compare AA analysis to a brand name or business organization. I think this point should be open for discussion. I'll be happy to take suggestions of who or how to establish an appropriate comparative baseline in the comments of this post.

#3 - ESTABLISH A CONTROL GROUP

This idea came from the conversation I had with Katie. Her concern was that AA behavior and tweet habits might be affected based on the partial release of the findings. Feed managers like her will react to this release by awareness that I'm watching. This would result in skewed results for the second half of the data.

Scientifically, this is true.

Practically, I @replied to about 35 of the AA profiles that I was examining with a link to the blog post. I have heard from 6. I think a control group might naturally emerge from among those who hardly read their @replies.

Katie's suggestion also means recruiting a few feeds that were not in the study to take us up on the findings and recommendations we make once the study is over. Let's see if our recommendations are effective. That turns this into a much project for me. (A second project, in fact)

Either way, I'd love your thoughts on this point that Katie brings up.

#4 - WHY TWITTER?

Bill asked me this in an offline conversation. I think the foundation of this question is wondering if I am suggesting that twitter is the thing Alumni Associations should be involved with.

No.

I like the idea of doing a similar analysis of facebook and Linkedin. Katie pointed me to Alumni Futures. This is written by Cal Tech's, Andy Shaindlin. His colleague, Elizabeth Allen, has written in several places about Linkedin best practices. Facebook recommendations are all over the place. I guess I just needed to start some place with twitter. I do think that objectives and strategy are important. I think those should be determined before AA's dive into any one of these technologies.

#5 - YOUR METRICS ARE INTERESTING, BUT DON'T REPRESENT OUR STRATEGY

I have heard several variations of this comment, and I think it is fair to bring up. I used some language in the opening paragraphs of the first post that would lead some to believe that I think a certain way about most of the AA twitter profiles that have been opened. That they are being managed without thought or examination of objectives or strategy. Though that may be the case for many of these feeds, I don't think it's true of all of them. Some of this analysis will come out in the final report and recommendations I'll put together.

That being said, I do believe there is well-intentioned, but faulty, strategy that exists among these feeds. I would like to refrain from talking about this too much prior to the data being collected completely. I am eager to engage in this as a constructive conversation. I think I have some practical suggestions that Alumni Associations can apply that will create both efficiency in the amount of time they spend while increase the engagement level of their alum followers.

If you have any metrics that measure effectiveness of your twitter strategy that are not represented in the tools I selected, I would love to know either the metric you want counted or a tool I might use to capture those numbers.

#6 - WHAT IS THE PLAN?

My plan is to collect data three more times over the next two weeks. This will give us a look at the numbers over a month-long period of time. I plan to invite suggestions into the process along the way so the results are both beneficial and encouraging to the Alumni Association community. Feel free to leave your suggestions.

Alumni Associations = Twitter FAIL

“You are not doing it right.”
This is a bold statement that might be better suited for a manifesto. The statement is directed at alumni associations who are (for the most part) failing to use twitter the way they should.

You are showing up to a cocktail party with a megaphone.

On twitter, your alums think of you as the obnoxious guy who is unaware of himself and unable to carry on a normal, human conversation. Do you know this guy? The one who only talks about himself…incessantly, completely oblivious to the nonverbal cues he is being sent that clearly communicate he should be quiet, ask a question, or take a breath? Yeah…that guy… is you (on twitter), and I have the numbers to prove it.

Identification

Finding your twitter feeds wasn’t that difficult. Most of you have the word “alumni” in your profile name. A few of your colleges and universities may have a consolidated feed that is named for your school and not for the association. Feeds that are managed by your central communication departments have the advantage of being unified and clear in the distribution of status updates, but the gigantic disadvantages of needing to crowd out the human voice that might come through a twitter feed compounded with inability of the alumni association to have a voice.

For instance, take a look at the feed of the University of Southern California. USC’s feed, at http://twitter.com/SCTrojans follows nobody, engages none, is primarily filled with automated feeds surrounding their sports teams, and boasts one of the largest followings among universities using twitter. Their contrast is Marquette University, http://twitter.com/MarquetteU . MU maintains a very engaging feed, has an even larger following than USC, but has little room or time to focus on alumni association goals.

Translation – twitter feeds controlled by your school’s marketing have large followings and don’t have time for the alumni association.

Therefore, I have ignored the feeds that are named for your college and university, and have focused this analysis on those feeds that have been named specifically for the alumni association. You won’t be able to blame central communication for this one!

The Obvious Numbers

What you will see here is sampling of 50 alumni associations and the brief analysis I found using free tools, easily available, on the web. The top 40 were intentionally chosen for analysis based on the size of their followings. Ashton Kutcher has taught us all (unfortunately) that the size of your following is what is most important. [You’ll see that the analysis of this report runs counter to that notion, but I went ahead and selected and organized these twitter feeds based upon this misunderstood metric] The last several entries were chosen as a cohort that was intentionally chosen for being low in followers and brand new to twitter. It sounded interesting to have input from this representation.

I'll arrange the first look at these based on the way that a casual twitter user might measure influence and clout - based on followers alone. These numbers were recorded as of May 27, 2009.

Don't let the follower metric fool you. What does it mean to have 1873 followers?
Is that follower number a metric that really matters?
What was the reason you opened up your alumni association twitter feed to begin with?
Was this a series of questions you even asked yourself prior to jumping into twitter?

The Not-So-Obvious Numbers

If we take a quick look at the way that these alumni associations engage their followers, we can come a little closer to the value of having over 1,000 followers. By looking at the feeds themselves, we can get a sense of what strategy is being used to increase followers as well as the approach that is being utilized in the day-to-day use of twitter.

* A twitter feed can be used as purely one-way communication and can also be used to speak with and republish others content.
* A twitter user that engages in conversation can be easily spotted by the number of @ replies found in their feed.
* A twitter user that intentionally republished others content can be easily spotted by the "RTs" that lead their updates.
* A twitter profile that asks questions is intentionally engaging followers and eliciting @replies.

An organizations tendency to follow or refollw people also says a lot about the way they have chosen to use twitter. Most of the time, those that just deliver content (and don't engage their followers by asking questions, engaging in conversation or refollowing them) expose themselves as users who are only using this social web platform as a distribution channel (while ignoring the social components).

Here is the same sampling and a look at how these organizations strategically use their feed.

The Numbers You Should Be Looking At...

Which would you rather have... 1000 followers who don't pay attention to you or 40 followers who are actively listening and participating with you?
What is 10,000 followers worth if you are causing your feed to be lost in the twitter noise?
To take a quick look at how engaged these feed's followings are, I took a quick look at their last several days of tweets. By doing a simple search of the twitter profile name you can count how often the feed name is mentioned by other twitter users in the past few days. This is a broad representation to how often people are retweeting, replying, or answering questions the alumni association is asking. This chart also gives you a general idea of the frequency of the outgoing updates by each of these feeds.

Do you see what these numbers are saying? Chris Brogan's twitter name is mentioned 100 times in the past 3 hours and 92 of those mentions are other people talking about, replying to, or retweeting what he has said. That is influence!

Speaking of Influence...

Influence is the real value of any social network. Your follower number is a deceiving metric, especially if you have inadvertently trained your followship to turn a blind eye to your updates. I suppose you could be satisfied with the idea that your alumni network is among the early adopters of this growing social network. As a branding exercise, this may cause you to not care about your influence in the conversation. As long as your profile isn't embarrassing you, maybe you couldn't care whether yor alums are actually listening. But if you do care, this last set of numbers will have some significance and education in themselves for you. This is a snapshot of the recent activity your profile was engaged with in the end of May. based upon the tweets of the previous seven days in combination with a whole host of metrics, these are the scores given to your twitter profiles by a great little tool found at www.twitalyzer.com.

I don't see any reports that show what the average Clout or Influence score is across all twitter users, but from a brief twitalyzer search of a handful of my active twitter friends and a few brands, it seems that a clout score of over 2% is above average and an influence score over 1% is perhaps a bit above average. Either way, you can compare yourself among others in your field to see where you fit in while comparing yourself to other alumni associations that are using twitter. I am not suggesting you should tweet like Chris Brogan does, but I do think there is a lot more value in these number than simply measuring success by your growing followers.
Here is a quick word about the scores you see and how the are mined. These are lifted directly from Twitalyzer's explanation.

Clout -
Clout is often thought of as "special advantage, pull, or influence" in the real world, as in "the senator's nephew has a lot of clout with his uncle." In our usage, clout is the likelihood that other people will reference you in Twitter, as in "gee that @Mashable sure does drive a lot of traffic!" The more people who reference you, the higher your clout.
Our definition of clout is simply the number of references to you divided by the total number of possible references (as governed by the Twitter Search APIs).

Velocity -
Your velocity is simply the rate at which you contribute to Twitter. Since the Twitter Search APIs limit us to 1,500 records, at least for the time being, you are judged against a theoretical maximum of 1,500 updates per week.
This is not to say that you should attempt to write 1,500 updates every week, especially if you don't have very much to say and would end up telling your followers about your cats, lint, or your feelings about your mother. But the reality of the situation is that the most influential people in Twitter are, by and large, writing a lot which helps increase the awareness of their personal brand, the likelihood that they will be referenced, and the likelihood that they will be retweeted by others.
Conversely, Twittering a lot about nothing will increase your velocity but decrease your signal-to-noise ratio. And while the latter is not directly factored into the influence calculation at Twitalyzer, in our experience if you start to ramble about nothing you will lose followers very, very quickly.


Generosity -
We believe that Twitter is a lot like life, only in fewer characters, and that being generous with others is extremely admirable. In Twitter, we think of generosity as one's willingness to pass along ideas and call attention to those ideas we think are great. Our measure of generosity is one's propensity to "retweet" someone else, thusly creating awareness of their work and ideas among your own followers. Specifically, our measure of generosity is based on the ratio of retweets you pass along to all updates you publish. Simple, huh?
This leads to the obvious (yet cynical) conclusion that "if you want to game the Twitalyzer's influence calculation, all you have to do is retweet other people a lot." Yes, yes that will work. And if we are able to get more people to share information in Twitter just to eke a few more points out of their influence score, well, then we believe we have done good work.
Incidentally, if you retweet more frequently, you'll also increase your signal-to-noise ratio as well. Sweet, huh?


Signal to Noise Percentage -
One of the great things about Twitter is that you can say anything you want (in 140 characters or less.) Some people choose to pass along information, others choose to share anecdotes, and still others talk about their cats. The Twitalyzer has observed that people tend to gravitate towards strangers who are passing along information. Our signal-to-noise ratio is a measure of the tendency for people to pass information, as opposed to anecdote.

By our definition, "signal" will be counted for any update that includes at least one of the following elements:

* References to other people (defined by the use of "@" followed by text)
* Links to URLs you can visit (defined by the use of "http://" followed by text)
* Hashtags you can explore and participate with (defined by the use of "#" followed by text)
* Retweets of other people, passing along information (defined by the use of "rt", "r/t/", "retweet" or "via")

If you take the sum of these four elements and divide that by the number of updates published, you get the "signal to noise" ratio. For example, if you published four updates and two of them contained links, your signal-to-noise ratio would be 50% (2 updates with signal / 4 total updates).


Influence -
As Twitter becomes increasingly important to online communication, the creators of the Twitalyzer believe that the need to measure the impact of our efforts in Twitter will increase a commensurate amount. While some believe that "popularity" is an appropriate measure of success, we disagree, eschewing this easily gamed metric in favor of something more robust, more fair, and more difficult to cheat.
The Twitalyzer solution is our measure of "influence in Twitter" calculated based on:

* Your relative reach in Twitter, measured by the number of followers you have
* Your relative authority, measured by the number of times you are "retweeted"
* Your relative generosity, measured by the number of times you "retweet" others
* Your relative clout, measured by the number of times you are referenced by others
* Your relative velocity, measured by the number of updates you publish over a seven day period.
Each of these measures are weighted but otherwise the calculation is incredibly simple. We believe that what you get is a measure of success in Twitter that can be applied in a variety of ways. We know this measure is not perfect but, well, we're not perfect and we don't believe in holding software to a higher standard that we ourselves live up to.

What do the Real Numbers teach us?

They teach us what we suspected from the beginning. Don't make too much of the following. Your influence is a much better indicator of effectiveness and usefulness. Your questions of whether you whould change your approach or turn this into a place for fundraising appeals is a question for your original objectives in particpating. Perhaps you are satisfied with the knowledge that your update habits are teaching your alums to ignore your messaging, as long as you have an active feed.

I am going to monitor these feeds (a total of 50) over the next several weeks and report on progressing numbers. I'm interested to compare tactics with growth rates and report on other observations that will come with time based analysis. Stay tuned!
When I have done a snapshot of the data over several weeks, I'll give you a look at all the numbers and all the feeds.

Fail Whale image via http://www.dache.ch

Selling Twitter to my Mom

Mom,

I jumped on twitter a few months ago. I told you about it at the time, but you noticed it before I even brought it up. You saw it because of the increased number of status updates and weird characters that were showing up in the "Michael is..." box at the top of my facebook profile. I thought I'd write a few thoughts out to help you for if and/or when you decide to try twitter out.

Selling the benefits...
Staying connected with the grand kids was the top benefit we talked about. You liked the idea of having your 4 kids and 8 grand kids sending out status updates from their cellphones so you could have a feed of what was going on while you were in San Francisco and the rest of us were spread out across the country.

I should correct a couple of things about this "benefit." When your grand kids get old enough to use their phones and tweet their status out, twitter could be long gone. That seems incredible, seeing that your grand kids are just a few of years away from all having their own phone. Things change so fast in digital media these days, you might prefer to wait to see how they are communicating and adopt that tool, instead of adopting a platform that they may not be interested in.

That being said, you should jump into twitter just to explore and keep your digital communication muscles nimble. If there is one thing that distances you from most in your generation, it is that you are willing to try and learn new things all the time. Your abandoned myspace page is proof that you are exercised in trying these experiments. Keeping up with you grandkids and great-grandkids will be easy for you.


Introducing the tool
Twitter is not a logical progression from facebook. When you set up your profile it will be an easy process. Using the tool for the first time will be a little awkward. I went back into my settings and preferences a dozen times in the first couple of weeks of using twitter until I got the service working for me just the way I wanted. You will find yourself using it differently than I use it, and it takes active use to really figure out those preferences.

Following on twitter is not like friending on Facebook.
Some people will follow you because they want you to follow them back. You don't have to, and it's not expected. You should think of twitter as two two services. Ask yourself two different questions, and feel free to leave them independent of each other.
1. Twitter lets others follow you. If it freaks you out that strangers will be following your status updates that are meant for only family, you have the freedom to block others from seeing your updates. It's not rude. There might be a pressure in facebook to accept everybody's friend requests, it is not necessarily that way for twitter.
2. Twitter lets you follow others. Follow those you are interested in. Don't feel the pressure to follow people just because they are following you. This is not like facebook where a friendship is accepted and then both of you can see each others full profile. If you don't want you cell phone cluttered with text messages from people you don't care to follow, you don't have to. You might want to follow a celebrity or two, but once you are following more than about 20 people or so it gets you into a different frame of reference to interact with all those messages.

Status Updates are not your email inbox.
You don't have to read them all. Nobody does. Feel free to skim or even ignore the ones that come across your feed. If, after a few weeks, you seem to be not as interested in following a particular tweeter, unfollowing is something you can do. Twitter etiquette allows you to be in charge of both your followers and your following.

Twitter from your phone.
Text messaging is not difficult to pick up. Most kids learn to type blind on a phone keypad within a couple of months. It is odd, that the most advanced communication device is something we have chosen to type on, but it is actually much more convenient than I expected.

Twitter from your laptop.
There are lots of free apps you can download so you can manage twitter from your computer desktop. Most avid users of twitter have three or four ways that they access the twitter network. You will choose your favorites over time. I would recommend you look into TweetDeck for you desktop, tweetie for a smart phone, and you will do straight text messages to the phone number 40404 when using your traditional cell phone.

While I have written this in a personal and affirming way. If you are just wanting a straight up tutorial on what twitter is and how to use it. You can check a couple videos out here and here.

Hope this helps you as you consider diving in. Thanks for letting me use you as an object of this write up. I hope it will be a help for others as well as you. Don't feel any extra pressure to open a twitter profile just because you are the object of a blog post.

Love you,
mikey

I'm a Jerk, No It's My Personality, My Personality is a Jerk?

From the time I first started sharing my reflections here, on the use of emerging technology, I have been aware of my potential in becoming what I despise. As I start recognizing behavior in myself that I have already characterized as "bad," I can either stop that behavior or I can analyze it to the point of justifying it.

I don't want to do either. It's possible for me to treat myself in an experimental way that I can make impartial judgments and observations about how I'm handling it. Morgan Spurlock did it effectively in Supersize Me. A.J. Jacobs has done it several times, most notably in The Year of Living Biblically.

However, watching and reading these works will give you a glimpse into the personal lives of these folks and make you realize that these guys drove their wives crazy. They can't help but drag their friends and family with them into the experiments. They must.
They are incorporating these experiments into their entire life.

So...I think I am starting to frustrate my wife, and I think it's because I am doing a poor job of showing her what's really going on with what has been defined (by this blog) as "experiments and observations." I will try to explain the difference between my personality and what seems like jerky behavior. Maybe we can lure Jennifer out of the lurk to leave a comment. Maybe it will be a comment that doesn't feel like a punch in the throat.

Ladies and Gentlemen, presenting the Social Technographics Ladder. Don't check out because of the name! You can find yourself

This handy reference was put together by the smart people over at Forrester Research. It was heavily referenced in Josh Bernoff's and Charlene Li's Groundswell. I highly recommend reading both the book and the blog if you are excited about this kind of thing.

Take a look at this ladder. This is an interesting analysis of the kinds of people who are online. It seems these classifications are largely tied to how a person's personality and temperament is wired and the resulting behavior that emerges when you put that individual on the interwebs. Perhaps a case can be made for someone moving up the ladder based on their experience with the web, but I believe a person remains stuck on a rung that is informed by who they are in "the real world."

I have realized myself as a Creator. It is largely tied to the kind of behavior I exhibit in offline arenas. My online behavior has been a progress up the ladder. I moved from being and Inactive to being a Spectator and then a Joiner. I have never been an online Collector or Critic and have landed myself squarely as a Creator. You can take this quiz as a help to identify your own spot on the ladder.

I have embraced this label. My personality typically doesn't embrace labels, but my online behavior has born out that I am securely on this rung of ladder.

Move this conversation into the realm of social web and the emerging technology I am experimenting with...
I send a twitter update while I am out with my wife.
A friend chimes in to scold me.
My wife is sly in her agreement with scolding friend.
I feel like I deserve a punch in the throat.

But hold on a second.

Am I rudely texting while while ignoring an active conversation in front of me? No. Jennifer is elbowing me in the ribs for creating and sharing while we were at This American Life.
Am I answering email because I can't stop working? No.
Or am I simply continuing to be a Creator as applied to the social media space?
Am I justifying bad behavior? Or am I embracing who I am in this larger, digital conversation?

If Jennifer remains who she is, she will be a Spectator and not post a comment.
Perhaps will can draw a few Spectators and Joiners out to comment on these thoughts. Perhaps some of them will be thankful to finally identify themselves as something and realize they don't need to feel like they need to be a Critic or a Creator to be an appropriate online participant.

I think this is why so many blogs fail. Too many Critics trying to exhibit Creator behavior?
This is why twitter has exploded. It is an easy tool for Joiners to act like they are Creators.

So who are you on the ladder?
Do you buy into this?
Am I just making excuses for being a jerk?

Facebook Fundraising Tips...the visual version

A couple of posts back I posted some tips and best practices for facebook fundraising. I figure that part of the population would prefer a visual presentation of that information. This slideshare is the result. Feel free to download, remix and use in whatever way it might benefit you.

How facebook is both horrible and ninja for fundraising

View more presentations from mikeyames.

Does anyone know the standards that facebook operates by to suspend or expel a user's profile?

One Man (Ashton Kutcher) takes on The Man (CNN) and is winning!

If you are not familiar with the twitter race to one million followers between Ashton Kutcher and CNN, you can get caught up by watching this, this and this.

I don't know why I am in to watching this unfold, but I am. It's emerging technology showing itself (in an odd analogy) of like the anti-John Henry story. One man is beating the steam drill juggernaut that is CNN. The representation of Ashton Kutcher (John Henry) taking on the new (old)establishment (broadcast media). About there the analogy breaks down, but it can be fleshed out better than that if I spent time with it.

For now I just want to show you something.
I'm sitting here hitting refresh on my browser on both the CNN Breaking News twitter profile and the Ashton Kutcher profile.

I started this little experiment and CNN had 953,969 followers while Kutcher had 931,056.
I hit refresh periodically over the next several minutes. Sometimes it was 30 seconds later, sometimes it was a couple of minutes later. The refresh rates were being tracked in a parallel way.

Ashton - moves from 931,056 followers to 931,079 thats +23 followers
in that same time
CNN - moves from 953,969 followers to 953,982 thats +13 followers

periodically over the next several minutes
Ashton - 931,079 - 931,130 +51 followers from previous benchmark (ffpb)
CNN - 953,982 - 954,006 +24 followers from previous benchmark (ffpb)

Ashton - 931,130 - 931,199 that is +69 ffpb
CNN - 954,006 - 954,029 that is +23 ffpb

Ashton - 931,199 - 931,399 that is +200 ffpb
CNN - 954,029 - 954,124 that is +95 ffpb

Ashton - 931,399 - 931,589 that is +190 ffpb
CNN - 954,124 - 954,206 that is +82 ffpb

Ashton - 931,589 - 931,860 that is +271 ffpb
CNN - 954,206 - 954,276 that is +70 ffpb

Ashton - 931,860 - 932,060 that is +200 ffpb
CNN - 954,276 - 954,375 that is +99 ffpb

Do you see the trend? Ashton is adopting followers at a rate more than twice that of CNN. With the gap between where they are and 1,000,000, Ashton will surpass and win this little race.

The overall lesson...
In the social media arena, authenticity will beat out press releases every time. If Ashton starts to use his twitter feed as a press release, he will get dropped by many of those followers. Keep it real, Ashton, and people will continue to follow. CNN can't keep it real.

Hey, Non Profit Organizations, keep it real in the way you use your feed. Cultivate your following audience. Don't press release or solicit them. Until you recognize that "donor loyalty" is about you being loyal to the donor, you won't use social media in it's most effective way.

UPDATE:
Interesting news, CNN recently acquired the news feed hosted at twitter.com/cnnbrk from James Cox. James is a random dude from San Francisco who has nurtured the account on his own for the past couple of years. Read the Silicon Alley Insider news story here. Turns out, the race is exposed as John Henry vs. Jon Henri.
It will be an interesting footnote in the overall story.
Now that CNN is operating the account, it is now officially your old steam drill.

UPDATE:
LA Times broke this story this morning. Turns out that although CNN didn't "own" the feed. They had contracted with James Cox to maintain it for them since mid 2007. In that sense, one man vs. THE MAN is back on!

Comprehensive Facebook Fundraising Tips Almost Anyone Can Do

I conducted a little experiment last October that was combined with a passion and fund raising cause that I was challenged with. I obviously set the goals on my experiment too low, as you will read.

Community Hunger Day is a yearly event, started by Central Dallas Ministries to raise awareness about the hunger problem in Dallas and raise funds for their food pantry. On a day in October, each year, CDM challenges people to go without food for a day and donate the money they would have spent on food to their food pantry. CDM, in coordination with several partnering food programs, can feed a family of four, for an entire week, for $28.

CDM, three weeks prior to Community Hunger Day, sent me an invitation to become a fundraiser for this day. I said, "yes," and pledged a goal of $1000 dollars. The experiment part came in when I decided I was going to focus my efforts using only the profile page that I set up on the Community Hunger Day website and facebook. No email channel, no face to face asks, no telephone calls...just facebook and a link to a secure, online donation page. I wish I could should you the microsite and profile page I set up for myself on the site, but the site is under construction and redesign in anticipation for the 2009 day in October

Here is the appeal I crafted.


If you are a professional fundraiser, try these numbers on for size.

List size - 334
Historic Open rate - unknown
Average Donor Profile - Nondonor
Gift rate - 19.5%
Total Gifts - 65
Total Donations - $1850
Average Gift - $28.46 (right at the requested appeal)

Here's the thing, Non Profit officer, what if you could get 100 of me to do the following simple things. That's nothing to sneeze at. That best way for you to leverage facebook could be to AVOID THE CAUSE APP! If you are active on facebook, you know how many causes and invitations you ignore on a weekly basis. It has become spammy. By the way, you, non profit, cannot leverage facebook. You may only leverage the relationships you have, that is (almost) all that matters in the world of social media.

The following things I did while avoiding the spam channels that most facebook users ignore.

1. Create a video appeal that addresses your facebook network specifically. Use the voice that your facebook friends know. Don't "put on" a fundraiser voice. Be yourself, that's who people will give to.

2. Group your list of friends into groups that facebook calls "friend lists." This might take you a little while, but it will help you manage your follow up much better. So do it prior to uploading your video message. If you have over 300 friends, it might feel difficult to sort through the list.
- Export your friend list with this handy app so you can use excel easily group them into commonalities
- group them into friend lists where those friends know each other. When comments start to spread about your asset, it is easier for community to be built in that comment thread when the commenters already know each other.
- friend lists can only contain 20 people, so you might be titling these lists things like "workfriends1", "workfriends2", "collegebuds1", "randomfacebookies1", "highschool1", etc.
- it is OK to leave some space to grow in each friend group, but keep track in your CSV export who is in what group. Facebook doesn't help you manage your group size at all.

3. Upload your video multiple times. You are able to tag as many as 50 of your friends in each video. You can't tag a video asset with a friend list (that would be great!) but you do want to follow the pattern that you set when you established your friend lists and group the 50 that you tag in any video with the same groups of people who know each other. Tagging your friends in the video not only causes the video to appear in their own notifications, but also sends it to the feeds of all their friends.

4. Place a link to your giving page in both the description of the video and in the first comment under the video. The URL in the comment will be hyperlinked text. The URL in the description will not be hyperlinked text, unfortunately. This is an important part of the donor funnel. If your non profit you are raising money for doesn't have a precise giving form or donor destination, consider opening yourself up a chipin widget or something like it. Community Hunger Day had a very slick, custom sponsorship microsite that was built for them by Pursuant.

5. Cultivate others comments by replying to and engaging with each comment.

6. Do a daily, stewardship, thank you and update. Here is what ours looked like.

These thank you videos should be tagged with the donors names. I had one friend who told me that he gave just so he could hear my kids say his name.

7. Half way through your campaign, and just before the end of your campaign, craft messages (video or note) that gives an update of progress. These updates should be created, uploaded and then "shared" with your friends. You don't need to upload multiple updates as you did with your initial video. Instead, you can send the one asset out using this share button several times. You friends lists show up as you begin typing them into the sent line of the share function. Facebook currently has a limit of sharing an asset with 25 friends at a time. This asset will show up in your friends inboxes instead of their notifications.

8. If you are an active facebook user, I am confident that these tips will help you reach your fundraising goals. If you are a passive facebook user I would recommend you spend three months commenting on friends photos, commenting on friends videos, uploading your own quality photos and videos, involving yourself in conversation around your friends notes and status updates. Without effectively developed relationships on the site, it will not be a quality channel for you to make a solicitation. If you are a non user of facebook...that is a discussion for another post.

Disclaimer -- Having used this precise method several times, I have never run into facebook suspending my account. I know of others who have deviated from this distribution plan and have been temporarily suspended. I don't know what triggers a suspension. Anyone who does know the current, specific triggers for suspension, I'd love to know.

Simple Social Media Tactic

As I tap into why I find social media so addictive to my own personality, I find that I'm distracting myself with "why" I am so drawn to spaces instead of "how" to best use them. So I should just be honest about the "why" - get it out of the way, and then focus more on the how. So here's why...I desperately want people to like me. I am one of those people who will work tirelessly for the promise of a compliment.

Now that that's over, here is a tactical "how" that you can use, created because of my desperate desire for thank yous and kind words.

I created content a little while ago. It was a helpful schematic for me as I was exploring a new tool, Ping.fm. The tool is relatively new to the technology/social media scene, so there are several who are being newly introduced to Ping.fm every day. After I created it, I wanted to share it with others, get their feedback, and bask in some thank yous.

Every few days I'll hang out on a twitter search feed for ping.fm and anytime any random person asks a question that seems like my schematic can help with, I send them a link to it. It is so addictive. You should try it. It is a great way to move your business or non profit organization from listening to the online conversation to participating in it.

By the way, this post is going out to yammer (through ping) for the first time. The schematic will need an update. By the way, do you use ping? What's your use of it look like?

Company Man

Here is part of what has been keeping me very occupied over the last several months.


Matt Frazier, CEO Pursuant, Introduces Mikey Ames and Social Media Basic Services from Mikey Ames on Vimeo.

This Vimeo Channel has videos that answer several questions I have been getting recently from clients.