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Engagement

Why Twitter is Bigger Than You Think

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Photo by Flickr user stevegarfield.
Edison Research posted last week about their new research on how Americans use social media. One interesting finding: a huge percentage (89%) of Americans twelve and older are familiar with Twitter while a much, much smaller percentage (10%) actually use it.

This has been a pretty consistent finding over the past several years, so while it’s interesting, an even more interesting finding is the explanation for that gap. Edison concluded that “44% of ALL 12+ Americans report seeing tweets in other media (radio, TV, newspaper or other websites) ‘Almost Every Day,’ and 80% of Americans overall claim to have ever seen tweets in other media.” This is big deal, because it means that Twitter’s impact is outsized relative to its market penetration and because it means that its impact is actually quite complicated, filtering through other media in addition to whatever direct impact it has.

Edison points to three important implications:

  • Regardless of how you use Twitter, most Americans (as in an actual majority of Americans) view Twitter as a purely broadcast network.
  • As such, Broadcasting is far from dead, and social isn’t killing it. Social is changing it, but in terms of how most Americans consume tweets, Twitter is just another cable network.
  • If you are measuring anything based upon unstructured data mined from Twitter (particularly influence), you are missing nearly 80% of the potential impact of Twitter by not taking the cross-media and offline impact of Tweets into account.

They won’t be releasing the actual study until Blogworld NY in early June, so we may have to wait until then to really dive into their findings, but it may have substantial implications for what an effective nonprofit Twitter strategy might look like.

Some of the most important nonprofit uses of Twitter are relatively confined, involving conversations amongst engaged nonprofit folks. Twitter is where a lot of those conversations happen, and a nonprofit Twitter strategy might fruitfully focus on engagement in those conversations. It’s not clear that the Edison study impacts that type of strategy very much.

But for nonprofits that want to use Twitter to engage with people outside of those conversational circles, paying attention to how tweets and Twitter memes escape the Twittersphere and penetrate other channels and other conversations is really important.

Our First Book Launch: The Nimble Nonprofit Hits the Streets (and Barnes & Noble)

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The Nimble Nonprofit is now available at Barnes & Noble ($4.99)!
Yesterday Trey and I launched our first book, The Nimble Nonprofit: An Unconventional Guide to Sustaining and Growing Your Nonprofit, with a ton of help from our Bright+3 colleague Ted Fickes.

We’re only a day into it, but it’s been great fun so far: a ton of awesome reviews on Amazon, a bunch of great Twitter traffic, and even an unsolicited and really favorable full-on book review (thanks Bonnie Cranmer!).

In addition, I now have a “Jacob Smith” author page on Amazon. I wasn’t expecting much when I logged in to set it up, but I must not have paid author pages much attention previously because it turns out they’re actually set up pretty well. In addition to what you’d expect (profile, photo, etc.), they also allow you to bring in a Twitter feed and an RSS feed, which is a nice touch.

And great news if you are a Nook fan: The Nimble Nonprofit is now available at Barnes & Noble!

The book is in review at Apple, and as soon as it launches there we’ll announce it.

We’re thrilled to sent our little book out into the world, and we welcome your comments, critiques, and thoughts … send them our way:

The First Bright+3 Book Launch: The Nimble Nonprofit

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I am thrilled to announce the launch of The Nimble Nonprofit: An Unconventional Guide to Sustaining and Growing Your Nonprofit.

The nonprofit world truly is in a state of flux. Much of what used to work doesn’t anymore. The need to invest in growing ass-kicking staff and to develop sustained organizational capacity has never been greater, yet the difficulties of doing so are growing as quickly as the need. In The Nimble Nonprofit we cover a wide range of what we believe are critical challenges facing the nonprofit sector:

  • cultivating a high-impact innovative organizational culture;
  • building and sustaining a great team;
  • staying focused and productive;
  • optimizing your board of directors;
  • creating lasting relationships with foundations, donors, and members;
  • remaining agile and open; and
  • growing and sustaining a nimble, impactful organization.

We mean for The Nimble Nonprofit to be a guide – an unconventional irreverent, and pragmatic guide – to succeeding in a nonprofit leadership role, and to tackling this incredibly challenging nonprofit environment. We aimed for a conversational, practical, candid, and quick read instead of a deep dive. If you want to immerse yourself in building a great membership program, or recruiting board members, or writing by-laws, there are plenty of books that cover the terrain (and some of them are quite good).

But if you want the no-nonsense, convention-challenging, clutter-cutting guide to the info you really, really need to know about sustaining and growing a nonprofit, well, we hope you’ll check out The Nimble Nonprofit.

This is our first book, and the publishing industry is a state of disarray, so – following the spirit in which we wrote the book – we are taking an unconventional path. We decided to publish strictly as an e-book, and we decided to self-published (with a bunch of help from Ted here at Bright+3). We are offering the book through the big three e-bookstores (Amazon, Apple, and Barnes & Noble, and we might add a few more to the mix), and we’ve priced the book at $4.99, which is much less expensive than the vast array of other nonprofit books.

As of right now, the book is available on Amazon (and it’ll hit the other two stores shortly). If you’d like to score a copy of The Nimble Nonprofit and enjoy reading it on your Kindle, iPad, or another tablet, jump on Amazon and grab it (did I mention it’s only $4.99?).

And, because our main goal is contributing to the conversations around these critical questions, we are also making a .pdf version of the book available for free.

We suspect that most readers will agree with some of what we argue and disagree with other parts, and because we challenge much of the conventional wisdom about building strong nonprofits, we’re pretty sure that some folks will disagree with a lot of what we write. And we look forward to the conversations. Please send us your thoughts, critiques, comments, and ideas

Tell us where you think we’re wrong and where we’ve hit the nail on the head, and please share with us other examples of nonprofits doing a great job of tackling these challenges and where they are just getting it wrong.

Happy reading –

Jacob

(P.S. The Nimble Nonprofit is available right now on Amazon.)

Kony Part One – Invest in Your Network

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So. The Kony campaign from Invisible Children. Check it out if you haven’t yet.

This campaign didn’t just happen one week. Years of network building went into it (among other things). Years.

Our concern (as Bright+3, an organization that helps organizations understand and succeed in the digital/networked world) is how this campaign has become as powerful and visible (and controversial) as it has.

To that end we want to share two wonderful pieces written in the past 24 48 hours. First, Jason Mogus at Communicopia writes “Why your nonprofit won’t make a Kony 2012” (And it almost certainly won’t. So sorry.)

The second piece, “[Data Viz] KONY2012: See How Invisible Networks Helped a Campaign Capture the World’s Attention,” was written by Gilad Lotan at SocialFlow.

Kony Network map
Kony Network map via SocialFlow

Jason Mogus itemizes how many (most?) large nonprofit advocacy organizations fall short in key capacities that are needed to put together and implement a campaign such as this. Those capacities (where many are falling short) might be summed up as:

  • Weak network. Organizations haven’t engaged people directly in person and are not even talking with them online. We think this is the largest of the big kahunas in this story. More below.
  • Lack of focus. Programs and communications are all over the map. Organizations working on many campaigns likely have many audiences. They don’t have the communications resources to speak clearly to everyone.
  • Policy trumps people. This is a tough one (see Ethan Zuckerman’s piece on real questions about oversimplifying complexity). How does a policy and research driven organization write clearly, passionately, and understandably for large audiences that it wants to engage in action? Most don’t try or when they do it’s muddied by the policy wonks.
  • Social web. Huh? Organizations that build lists (even networks, which are different than lists!) aren’t aligned with social network principles – the sauce that is interaction and multi-channel communications. If you’re going to build networks (or at least tap into them) your organization needs to be comfortable with social from top to bottom.

Jason speaks to the power and value of Invisible Children’s online/offline network that was critical to spreading word of this campaign. Building and caring for this sort of network takes time, focus, and a style of constituent interaction that most advocacy organizations are not built for or interested in.

It is this direct network building offline (especially) and online that, like a massive holiday lighting display, was switched on when the most recent campaign began.

Network Dissected

Gilad Lotan dives into greater detail of how the Invisible Children network functioned to effectively spread word of the campaign. Sure, there was a great video with a fabulously told story (see this piece by Anna Keenan for more on the importance of story and shared values in the Kony campaign), but it was a 30 minute video about human rights issues. Boring.

The network had been primed to act. The people that Invisible Children had met, invited to participate, and continually engaged over the years understood the issues and have been trained to act and share. The pre-existing networks created by Invisible Children over time were, through social media connections, able (and willing) to rapidly (and strongly) share the video and its message.

Lotan also points out that the campaign designed and positioned itself well to tap into the online networks of celebrities that appealed to its core audience. Invisible Children made it easy for supporters to tweet Taylor Swift, Oprah, and others with their own large Twitter followings. This demonstrates comfort with and understanding of networks.

Some, including Lotan, point out that this network is decidedly young (which tracks with social media engagement in general) and skews towards evangelical Christians. The latter is a well-organized network in its own right, one built on personal relationships (see Movement Building and Deep Change: A Call to Mobilize Strong and Weak Ties from the Engage Network for more on this).

What of It?

Jason Mogus makes the point that most organizations do not run their communications, digital, and programs in a way that makes a Kony-esque campaign possible. They are neither network focused nor social. And, for many organizations, this is okay. Policy and political expertise, lobbying and legal capacity, and research expertise are all desperately needed in the advocacy community.

The conflict in organizations comes from the fact that policy and lobbying organizations relentlessly invest in building online and offline lists in email, social media and direct mail. The “list” is the mythical source of unrestricted funding. Much of this list building comes through advocacy actions: “sign this petition” and “write to your Senator” (what some label as slacktivism).

These lists are called upon to respond to get behind big events, actions, fundraising campaigns and videos that should “go viral.” Online teams in these organizations struggle to light a fire under their lists, go big, and make an impact that the size of the list would imply is possible.

A friend wrote in an email that network communications like that shown in the Kony campaign isn’t in the DNA of policy-oriented organizations. We agree but that’s too bad. Network building, engagement, and policy advocacy shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.

 

Storytelling + Video = Power to change behavior

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A common refrain: Our video has a great story, great message, and clear call to action. But only 350 people watched it. WTF?

Story of Sushi
The "Story of Sushi" by Portland's Bamboo Sushi tells the story of how industrial fishing is destroying ocean life and presents alternatives. Something to think about with your next sashimi.

There are no simple reasons to explain why some videos take off and others languish in the dustbin of irrelevancy.

How did you distribute it? What was the keyword strategy? What sharing tools were used? Did you use AdWords, Facebook ads, or other paid marketing? How big is your social media audience? How engaged are they? Was Will Ferrell in your video? Useful questions though maybe the answer is simpler: people just didn’t connect with the story.

Perhaps you’ve seen the story of sushi video created by Portland’s Bamboo Sushi. We’ve embedded it below. The video is both clever and lovely in its simplicity and clarity of message. There is a story here: bad guys that overfish the seas, good guys that do it right, and the hero is the viewer – the person that has the opportunity to ask questions, know what’s going on and force change to happen.

What’s missing? The 2 x 4 over the head that has “take action now by calling your Senator.” The action is the story itself and its ability to make the viewer think about their behavior.

We will be the first to tell you that if you’re in the advocacy business you need to know your call to action in every message be it email, video, blog post or presentation.

But there is often greater power in using story to lead people to act on their own. A good story guides the participant to their own conclusions and you need not hit people over the head with your advocacy. Sometimes a big stick just scares people away while a good story makes them think. Thinking is good.

Designing for Careless Mistakes

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Photo by Flickr user griffithchris.Ted’s Valentine’s Day tweet: “Nothing says ‘we value your involvement’ like an email that starts with ‘Dear Name,’ – personalization fail.”

His point: this is not a particularly good way to sustain the support and enthusiasm of your donors.

I think he’s right, but I think there’s also another story worth telling: Setting up a merge with the recipient name but then not actually bringing those names in is such an obvious, careless, predictable mistake. Why would the CRM software allow a user to make this mistake in the first place?

Email clients are often designed to warn you – before they actually send the email – that you used the word “attachment” but didn’t actually attach anything, just in case you meant to. It’s an obvious, predictable error, and the software is designed to pay attention and warn you before you actually make this mistake. Hootsuite (my favorite third party solution for managing twitter feeds) won’t post your tweet until you actually tell it which account you want it posted to. Inadvertently tweeting to the wrong account is an obvious, easy-to-make, and predictable mistake, and HootSuite – by design – helps prevent you from making it.

Sure, there was a user error on that Valentine’s Day email. Somebody screwed up the merge on the ‘name’ field. But some user errors are common and predictable enough that the software ought to help you avoid making them.

A hint to CRM publishers: help me – as a typical user of your product I am tight on a deadline and prone to making careless errors – avoid making really stupid, careless mistakes. If I try to send an email that’s going to end up in everyone’s inbox with a “Dear Name” salutation, please make sure I actually want to do that before you send them.

Don’t phone in your social + weekly wrap

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Busy week so we’re going to wrap it by kinda sorta phoning it in. And there’s the theme for the main story here.

Puppy on the phone. Don't they have earbuds or something for dogs?Earlier this week I received an email of the “take action/write congress now” nature about an issue that to me seemed pretty intense, important and, well, worthy of stepping up and clicking that button to write my Congresswoman. All in all it was pretty well written and compelling.

A couple things struck me as odd.

The PS was a call to join the organization on Facebook and Twitter. The links went to the general Facebook wall and Twitter page. If taking a shot at clouding an advocacy action with a social media call to action then make the landing page relevant to the action at hand.

There should be one clear call to action and one clear goal in your message. If one clicks the Facebook link she’s not coming back to the email, especially if the content on Facebook at that moment has nothing to do with the issue.

At this point, folks, people know about Facebook, know your organization has a Facebook page, and they know how to find it and follow your organization. Why distract from your message with a confusing call to the obvious?

Focus. Drive towards a goal-oriented conversion or don’t bother. Don’t phone it in.

Second, the message was “signed” by the organization and not a person. Perhaps this has little or no impact on the number of respondents but it sends a message that there aren’t actual people there writing these messages, staying on top of the issue…someone that could tell me personally what the hell is happening. People connect with people. Not organizations.

Wrapping up the week

Some smart thinking on the Intertubes this week:

Punk views on social media writes about the brand army. A lot of smart organizations look to identify some of their most active social media followers and give them tools to spread the word. Many others just sorta hope that will happen. Instead, look at social media following as the start of the engagement process. Empower and enable everyone there to get involved, spread the word and speak on your behalf. Create an army.

Get a digital product manager for your nonprofit. WHAT? Daniel Atwood ran digital at the impressive Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans Association for several years. He notes that digital has changed the nature of how many people view the role of nonprofit organizations. Increasingly,  folks want tools to make change directly. Heard of Change.org? Nonprofits know what’s going on in their field and are often creating tools for change. Why not think of these as products for people, not just staff?

Digital teams need to get a handle on how they position themselves in the organization if they want to stop underperforming. That’s part of the message from Jason Mogus over at Communicopia, a firm that’s been putting forth a ton of smart thinking lately about digital teams. Fact is most digital staff really need to build their leadership skills and take charge of their team’s destiny. It won’t be easy but is imperative for the team success (and the organization’s).

Lessons From the SOPA/PIPA Fight

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Wikipedia screenshot by Flickr user LoveNMoreLove.The Congressional fight over the SOPA and PIPA bills wasn’t a fight about whether intellectual property should be protected – virtually everyone agrees on this – but about how best to accomplish it. In fact, the most visible voices in the fight over SOPA/PIPA, on both sides, were people and industries with livelihoods based on creating or protecting intellectual property. But the substantive positions between proponents and opponents, and the implications of the legislation, were considerable nonetheless.

For nonprofits, the implications were substantial even if they weren’t generally highlighted. Making service providers fully liable for copyright violations occurring anywhere on their networks would almost certainly lead them – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social engagement platforms among them – to aggressively censor information before it is ever posted, erring on the side of expansive and overreaching prohibitions rather than risk liability. And it gives repressive governments, well-heeled corporations, and others a substantially enhanced ability quickly to shut down web sites and entire domains, a power easily applied to silence online speech they dislike for whatever reason. For nonprofits involved in supporting democracy or human rights movements around the world, these provisions were especially troubling. Ethan Zuckerman and Joi Ito of the MIT Media Lab have a good blog post (“MIT Media Lab Opposes SOPA, PIPA“) explaining some of this.

But the SOPA/PIPA fight was important for nonprofits in another way, as well: a technical, largely unreported, non-issue exploded into the popular consciousness in a matter of months, fundamentally changing the debate in Washington, D.C. In an incredibly short period of time, SOPA/PIPA opponents repeatedly made national and local press (local television stations were covering this!), compiled petitions signed by millions nationwide (Google says seven million signed its petition, and Fight for the Future reports ten million on another one), and produced a day-long Wikipedia blackout. I suspect there are a lot of lessons non-profit folks can learn from the SOPA/PIPA fight. Here are five:

1. Clear and Compelling Message
Opponents were able to take two very complex pieces of legislation and explain them in clear terms that spoke directly to the values and interests of their intended audiences. Tech people understood the implications of the DNS-blocking provisions, people whose livelihood depends on the ability to share information understood the implications of making social networking sites liable for copyright violations by people using the sites, and free-speech advocates understood the censorship implications.

2. Critical Mass
Opponents hit a critical mass, and their stories went viral, in part because everyone across key communities started talking about it about at the same time. Some of that was probably blind luck, but it was also because key opponents found ways to reach out aggressively across their networks more or less in unison. If you weren’t aware or engaged yet, but you were part of those networks, you heard about the issue a bunch of times within a short period, and then often you’d turn around and share the information with your networks, amplifying the viral effect. This was a real-time example of the “people have to hear something a dozen times before they notice it” marketing adage.

3. Calls to Action
Opponents, when reaching out to the not-yet-engaged, were able to offer a range of easy ways to express support. Calls to action included options like replacing your social networking profile photo with a “Stop SOPA” image, signing the national petition, adding your name to sign-on letters, and spreading the word about the blackouts by Wikipedia, Reddit, and others. Tons of individuals and individual companies created their own badges, images, and other easy-to-use tools. And many of these calls to action were themselves viral (or at least amplified the overall virality of the message). This was often organic … although there were people coordinating and collaborating (and some in prominent positions), there wasn’t, to my knowledge, a conventional campaign leadership team calling the shots, issuing assignments, and allocating resources. People across the networks felt empowered to contribute, and contribute they did.

4. Volume
We often argue that narrowly focused outreach strategies can have more impact than untargeted outreach strategies. Efforts that depend on numbers alone typically don’t cut through the noise or they fail to offset more targeted strategies by the other side (“another day, another 5,000 emails from some nonprofit advocating for something”). The SOPA/PIPA fight illustrates an exception, however: if you can push the volume level high enough, even a strategy largely dependent on numbers can have a real impact. The number of news stories, the number of emails and phone calls received by legislators, the number of people signed on to the petition, the significance of Wikipedia blacking out … all of this resulted in a volume level that was impossible for legislators to ignore, and many flipped from supporting SOPA/PIPA to advocating for a slowdown or even opposing it altogether.

5. Telling Concrete Stories
And, lest this get lost in the excitement of a quickly organized large-scale national campaign, it looks like concrete stories from real individuals who would be directly impacted by SOPA/PIPA were also really important to persuading legislators to shift their positions. The high volume efforts got their attention, but the legislators and staff I spoke with wanted to know – in very tangible terms – what the legislation would actually mean in specific instances for real people and real businesses. The large-scale outreach work created space, but from here it looks like the concrete stories were essential for closing the deal.

Although I don’t think the SOPA/PIPA fight is necessarily a good model for every advocacy campaign, it’s not difficult to predict that the so-called “internet community” will become increasingly political and increasingly sophisticated. There are plenty of lessons from this fight for other advocacy efforts, and lots of opportunity to collaborate with other constituencies as well as watch and learn as online advocacy strategies mature.

MacWorld just posted a interesting analysis, and we’d love to hear about the best analyses you’ve come across. We’d also love to hear your thoughts on the lessons to learn from the SOPA/PIPA fight.