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Jan 14, 04:31 pm: Four Lessons Learned: Social Media and Nonprofit Meme

The indefatigable Beth Kanter asked a group of people what lessons they’ve learned with regard to social media. Her lessons are so good, it’s made it hard for me to come up with own. And, ultimately, mine aren’t that much different.

1. Find your people. Don’t just dive into a social network because it’s taking up space in your inbox or traditional media. Dive in because that’s where your people are – the people who care about your issues (whether they agree with you or not). Use a variety of search tools (technorati, Google Blog Search, Icerocket, as well as more traditional search services like Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live, and Wikipedia) to find out where people are having real honest discussions and then make your social media investment there.
2. Think about how to make social media accounts. Let the people in your organization make social media accounts on your behalf. Give them guidelines. Make sure they know what is for sharing and what needs to stay internal. Make sure that you are following what is going on and leave comments. Engage. But let people make accounts naturally. You may want to have a organizational accounts for a variety of reasons but people don’t necessarily feel the same level of ownership over those accounts than they do over their own. Let them create their own and pull the best of what they create and share into the organizations story.
3. Give people a way to share your story. This doesn’t, necessarily, mean widgets or facebook applications or anything involving cut-and-paste or APIs. It means telling your story. Honestly, get the voices of the people you care about, the people working on the change and those impacted by it, on your site. Get photos, get voice recordings, get small film clips. Use services like flickr and YouTube to host the media and use the tools they make available to pull that back onto your site. But tag richly, write descriptions.
4. Invest in conversations. Don’t just ask for money. Don’t just ask people to spread the word. Invest in conversations. Leave thoughtful comments on photos, profile pages, blog posts. Really and genuinely engage. This investment is what will bring new people to and what, I firmly believe, will help bring people to you who do not already agree with you. And that, after all, is a big part of the point.

Shout out to Beth for starting this discussion. And I’d love to hear what these folks have to say:

• Andy Carvin
• Lucy Bernholz
• Tara Hunt
• Susan Mernit
• barb dybwad
• Christine Herron

tagged: net2, nptech, socialmedia, learnings