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Beth's Blog

A place to capture and share ideas, experiment with and exchange links and resources about the adoption challenges, strategy, and ROI of nonprofits and social media.

What are the key questions nonprofits should ask about social media training?Today

 

Photo by Topeka Library

Netsquared has another Think-Tank coming up later this month. The question is related to social media training:

What are the key questions nonprofit organizations should ask to help them determine how to prioritize social media training and experimentation as they do their technology and organization-strengthening planning?

Before we get into the nitty gritty of learning a particular social media skill, you need to make sure that you have identified a social media strategy.  And, as part of the strategy development you asked this question first:

• Our social media strategy is designed to accomplish x.   Is that a priority for staff time and training investment?  Why?
• Professional development and training budgets are not unlimited in nonprofits.   The cost of training is time - time for the initial learning and the time to put the skills into practice or what we call the "challenge of transfer."    Given all the professional needs your organization might have, what is the value of this investment compared to other training investments?

So, let's say that as part of your social

How To Be An (effective) Social ButterflyYesterday

How To Be A Social Media Butterfly

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: brigida danielle)

Danielle Brigida has posted an excellent slide show about her work flow as the social media person for the NWF.

I like her point about listening is actionable!  It isn't just about looking at the what people saying  -- it's about doing some pattern analysis and linking it back to a decision - like what should we write about on our blog.   In other words, your content reflects the community.

WeAreMedia: Help us Create the Nonprofit Social Media Tool Box and Win A T-Shirt!Yesterday

Photo by Stitch

Maybe you saw this teaser over at the NTEN blog last week about the WeAreMedia project activites for the month of October wondered what the term fondle the hammer meant.   The phrase comes from Jeremiah Owyang in a post titled 'Stop Fondling the Hammer and Focus on the House."  It is a stern warning to avoid falling into the trap of playing with the tools first without thinking of strategic outcomes.

The NTEN WeAreMedia project has been hard at work over the last few months building the house so to speak -- focusing on how nonprofits can use social media effectively.  We've addressed the strategic and tactical issues.  So, now we've given ourselves permission to get our hands on the tools.  Why? Because at some point, you need to learn how to use tools effectively and efficiently.

And, we've organized this inquiry into using the tools to match the strategic framework (see below) - so it isn't just rand

How Much Time Does It Take To Do Social Media?October 2

Time Chart - See Flickr Discussion on Version 1
Wanna Remix it?  Download it here

I'm getting ready to a workshop later this week,   I did a simple pre-workshop assessment, asking folks about their level of experience/comfort and their burning questions.   I usually do this in a room with a quick poll, but I wanted to push myself to create the content based on their questions.

Here's a question I get all the time:

How much time and resources does it take to implement social media?

In my presentations, I use a slide from Nina Simon's blog post called "How Much Time Does It Take To Do Web2.0 In A Museum?"   I've been thinking about remixing that slide so it matches the framework I set up for WeAreMedia tactical modules.

So, how can you quantify - as close as possible - the amount of time it takes to put social media in practice with good results?  It's so hard and you could cop out with "It depends ..."   It does take more time in the beginnin

Backtype: Another Listening Tool - Who's Talking About You In The Blog Comments?October 2

Dan Schwabel's  5 Free Tools For Reputation Management introduced me to a new listening tool, backtype.  It solves the problem of monitoring blog comments where people specifically mention you.   People can make comments about you on other blogs and if you only track links from blog posts, you won't see it.   BackType lets you find, follow and share comments from across the web. I gave it whirl and it turned up some interesting results. 

You can also track other bloggers and see where they commented  -- I might do this only to study how the masters do it.   An old trick is to observe people who do social media really well and learn from observation.  It's interesting to observe Chris Brogan's commenting activity.

Update:  Based on a comment to this post, I'm adding some context to comment trackers.

These services let you track conversations that are important to your organization and issue. They also allow content creators to aggregate their online activity and expertise from across the social Web into one centralized, portable profile.

Questions To Ask Before You Dive In:

• What do you need track?