Category — Social Sector

Last week we broke some trail on exploring the “how” of social media: what good social media looks like in Alaska, how to get started on Twitter, and why shady deals in a transparent forum shouldn’t happen. I also gave you a summary of Jim Collins’ thoughts on social sector leadership; ideas that we should keep in mind as we strive to build movements, and sustainable organizations online or off. In between “articles” or posts, I asked for your advice on decisions and projects that I’m working on.

Whew. What a week! Where do we go next?

This week I’m hoping that we can explore a topic that I briefly touched when I rebooted this blog: engagement. After I wrote that post, a friend asked me what “engagement” really was. More often than not, social sector organizations are told to engage their base/audience/constituency for greater participation. What does this look like?

Mike Pawlowski, in response to that first post, said to engage we need to:

“Step 1. Show up to things.
Step 2. Invite someone who wouldn’t normally think of going.
Step 3. Repeat.”

Is this enough?

So let’s look at Engagement + Conversation. How can we use conversation to engage our community? I’ve invited Mindy O’Neall (co-host of The Mindy O’Nils Show on KUDO 1080 AM) to share her thoughts as to how conversation can be used as a means to engage. Also, we’ll talk about getting conversations started online, when good intentions make for bad decisions, podcasts that matter, and how to use video to have a dialogue.

Stay tuned, and please let me know if you like what you see, or if there’s something we’re not discussing.

I’m not going to start this post by indicating how Twitter is the new __, or espousing its wonders. Even in Twitter’s unattractiveness, I have to acknowledge its relevance from my background in community health and social marketing: it allows you to meet your audience (or target population) where they are.

By virtue of its large audience, celebrity pull, and public “timelines”, Twitter has become an incredible asset to veteran brands and fledgling start-ups. One key feature of Twitter is its built-in compatibility with SMS text messaging. For a very low cost (free), you can issue mass texts to your constituents, members, and future members.

The steps to get there are relatively few, and quick. In short order, you’ll be on your way to becoming a Twitter pro.

Step 0 – Get Real

The most important step in getting started, is getting real and asking the tough questions:

• What does my organization gain from establishing a Twitter presence?
• Who is my existing audience? Who is the new audience that I hope to reach?
• What information do I hope to disseminate? How often will I tweet?

Step 1 – Pick a name

Twitter limits your username to 20 characters (letters and numbers). This is so that the username and tweet can fit into a single SMS message. Once you decide your “call-sign” or screenname, you’re ready to sign up.

This was a difficult step for my organization, because our full name runs long, and we weren’t quite sure how we wanted to shorten our name without misrepresenting who we are; Commonwealth North then became cwnorth.

Step 2 – Follow your organization’s contacts

Export your email addresses into a comma-delimited file, or manually copy-and-paste each one into the field. If that person’s email address is already on file, they’ll be added to who you’re following. If they’re not on Twitter, they will also receive an invitation to join.

Step 3 – Tweet

You already made a plan of what content you plan on tweeting. The beauty of Twitter is its brevity and immediacy. Limit your posts to single ideas that can be said in 140 characters or less. Initially this seems restrictive, though, eventually it will feel daunting

And now for something completely different:

More resources:

• YouTube: Celebrity Twitter overkill – Supernews!
• Marketing Vox – The Twuth About Twitter: Its Impact on Businesses and Communications
• ObjectiveMarketer – On Twitter: Experiment with a Strategy

On Wednesdays, I’ll make an attempt to review a book, blog, or article that I’ve read recently. I’m calling this series Wayward Wednesdays because, if I can say anything with any certainty, the items which I’ll review will be more recent, modern classics. These will be items that reflect a contribution to discussions on leadership, the social sector, social media, or living in the Last Frontier.

In writing his best-selling leadership treatise, Good to Great, Jim Collins noticed that he was seeing social sector organizations taking his principles to heart more than his business-oriented readers. He reviewed some of his original core principles, and identified and developed five for his monograph, Good to Great and the Social Sectors.

1. Create metrics for success that are outcome-based, and mission-centric. Use the values and mission of your organization to determine measurable outcomes. For example, the NYPD exists to fight crime, thus they focus on reducing crime rates.
2. Social sector leaders need to hone the ability to exert pressure within a diffuse power structure. Social sector organizations have numerous stakeholders all contending for decisional power. Leaders need to have the ability to articulate the organization’s vision in order give people the opportunity to follow.
3. You can’t fire a volunteer; instead get the right people on the bus, and the wrong people will leave. A professor once told me that if people are waiting in line, whatever it is must be worth the wait. This is true for organizations that are defined by the people that carry out their work. It is necessary to filter those who lack the passion to serve, thus creating a desire to participate.
4. Learn to say no to opportunities that take fuel away from your resource engine, what you care about, and what you’re best at doing. A key difference between business and social sectors in this principle is the use of economic versus resource engines. Money is the engine gives companies the ability to do the things they want to do. Non-profits must rely on their supporters’ time, money, and goodwill.
5. Develop and use your brand to build an unstoppable momentum that can sustain your organization beyond its systemic constraints. The more your organization’s values and mission has support, the more it can deliver results, further attracting more resources and commitment. If your organization means something in other’s lives, the less likely its death. This allows your organization to build an impenetrable pocket of “greatness” that can insulate it from negative systemic influences.

Two weeks ago, I helped coordinate the Alaska eHealth Workshop: a discussion on the need for, and concerns regarding Alaska’s implementation of an eHealth system. Some of the other facilitators thought it would be an interesting exercise to find out what social media each of the 13 participants were using.

In this post, I look at what and how well social media is being used in Alaska, and how it could be improved. For your consideration, and improvement, I present the top six Alaskan uses of social media. For each technology, I’ve described an anonymous, composite “worst” scenario, and showcased one or two best cases that you can check out today.

1. Email
   • Worst case: You’re at a networking event and you gave someone your business card, they added you to their email blast list. Your requests to opt-out haven’t been taken into consideration. You get blasted more than once a day, with badly formatted emails that make it difficult to find relevant content, or act on the content. Think fax spam.
     • Are you acting like the networking leech?
     • Have you been subject to email blasts like this?
     • What could you do to improve your email newsletters?
   • Best of:
   • Spenard Roadhouse (via Snow City Cafe): I get their emails about once a month, or every time they start running a new special. Albeit, since the Roadhouse is a new joint-venture from Snow City and Sack’s, the first email I got from the roadhouse was through Snow City, and it felt like they had poached my email. But I had an opt-out option, their emails weren’t too long, and they didn’t clog my inbox.
2. Facebook
   • Worst case scenario: It can go one of two ways. You become an organization’s fan: they smother you with attention, or don’t post anything, ever. When you’re smothered, you get 2-5 updates a day from the group, in addition to status updates, and invitations to events in Anchorage when you live in Fairbanks. When you’re ignored, no pictures are posted, a smattering of events go up, and all the links shared are strictly self-promotional. Dull.
     • How can your organization find the happy medium?
     • What would it take to build the momentum that your “fan base” wants?
   • Best case:
     • Anchorage Won’t Discriminate. Any local organization should be so lucky as to grow and earn over 2,000 fans in the first two months of creating a new profile. AWD has also maintained their growth momentum the right way. They respect the spirit and transparency of the web, and only use the profile to communicate items of value to their constituency. Frequent (but not overly so) updates that include events, pictures, videos, links, and clippings from local media on their campaign give supporters what they want and need to stay connected to this cause.
3. Twitter
   • Worst case scenario (in 140 characters or less): Posting too frequently or too much. Followers have 120 other tweets competing for their attention. Respect the noise.
   • Best case:
     • Anchorage Daily News. The ADN knows how to make their content viral, and give readers multiple avenues to get the content that they want. If you like a specific columnist, perhaps Julia O’Malley, you have the option to follow her feeds, get advance notification of her new content. You can get breaking local news updates, especially important when a student pilot is having issues with landing gear. Furthermore, the ADN tweeple understand that social media are value-added conversations, engaging readers in polls, and re-tweeting highlights from their readers (Twitter’s ultimate form of flattery).

       Check them out:

     • @adndotcom – ADN Breaking News
     • @adn_jomalley – Julia O’Malley
     • @ADNVillage – Kyle Hopkins
     • @playadn – Play Magazine
4. Blogs
   • Worst case scenario: Someone on your board said that you needed to have a blog. Everyone else who is important seems to have one: CEOs, the White House, and your grandmother. The problem is, you haven’t identified a strategy or set of topics that you want to address, let alone set aside the time each day to write a post. Blogging takes time, energy, and planning. Yes, anyone can do it, but do you really want to?
     • How is your organization leveraging this technology?
     • What kind of topics would you address?
     • Can you spend an hour a day to spend writing posts, managing comments, and planning the next day’s?
     • What resources do you have available? Would a volunteer blog be appropriate for your organization?
   • Best cases:
     • I had a hard time narrowing this down to one. I’ve been really impressed with how quickly the following blogs have built an online community in Alaska.
       • Social media expert Aliza Sherman’s Living in Tok, is a virtual hybrid of a small town newsletter, coffee shop bulletin board, and local newspaper. All published from Tok, the last bit of Alaskan civilization before the Yukon Territory.
       • While in Alaska is the online journal of two college students who decided to try an Alaskan adventure on for size. (Kind of like Christopher McCandless, except with wireless internet, and not on an abandoned bus).
       • The Mudflats has become the defacto online political gossip “watering hole” for Alaska. They dish dirt on elected officials, providing (partial) transcripts for (some) public events, and catalyzing local conversations. Each post nets over 100 comments. Wow!
5. MySpace
   • Worst case scenario: Your organization has done the bare minimum, and posted a link to its profile. Good first step, but you rarely post any events, you don’t really have a need to share music with your audience, an audience that doesn’t even use MySpace. Your profile looks empty, and you provide no value: it’s no wonder that Tom is your only friend.
   • Best case:
   • Chilkoot Charlies. When I use MySpace, it’s to check out an emerging artist’s songs, and upcoming events. Beyond that function, I don’t like using MySpace, thanks to the seizure-inducing, aesthetically disjointed tweenaged profiles that seem to be in excess.

     Koot’s takes advantage of MySpace at its best, providing a full event listing; just this week it has 11 events listed, not including next month’s. They have consistent branding and links between their multiple online profiles (web, MySpace, Twitter, etc.). Their blogs are kept active, and right above the blog is a link to buy presale tickets. No beating around the bush with what they want you to do. Directly under the blog is a VIP email list registration, giving you the opportunity to serve as an evangelist for their brand.

     While I don’t visit Koot’s, I can say from years of trudging through poorly implemented MySpace profiles, that this a venue that gets it.

6. LinkedIn
   • LinkedIn seems to me like Facebook meets Monster.com: you can upload and customize your résumé, while also networking. I’ll be honest. I haven’t used LinkedIn much beyond establishing my own profile. The group functions seem a bit restrictive at first, requiring me to wait for “manager” approval before I can see anything. It has some nifty app functionality, yet again, I haven’t used it much.
   • Do you use LinkedIn regularly?
   • What kind of apps do you use?
   • How have you made this useful in your workplace or for your organization?

What technologies do you use that aren’t listed? What are other good examples of Alaska putting the web to work? How can we use these to develop a fourth leg for the Alaskan economy: human capital?

While I am a summer intern at Commonwealth North and may be reflecting on my work there, the views and opinions expressed are mine alone and do not represent the official views of Commonwealth North.

It’s been awhile since I’ve updated this blog. Every other year or so, I get recommitted to doing it, but I haven’t found a way to structure it into my existing daily tasks. Fortunately, I’ve become the self-proclaimed, in-house social media dude for Commonwealth North. Being volunteer labor has its advantages.

One of my recent deliverable commitments is leaving behind a how-to on how to maintain the social media accounts I’ve established for the organization. I want to use this blog to assemble the chapters live, and gain guidance from the existing group of social media mentors online.

As I work on each section, I’ll post bits of it, with questions, in the hopes to solicit advice and drive conversation on the relevance of social media beyond the “everyone’s on it” argument.

This isn’t so much daunting as it is provocative. Now, I have to not only explain how to use social media technology, but also provide guidelines and principles by which one uses the technology. There is a lot of excitement over the possibilities of reaching our members, and enriching the work we do together with things like Ustream.tv, blip.tv, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. But what else are we missing? How can we make these work together?

I recently picked up Seth Godin’s Small Is the New Big from the public library. I’ll be honest, had I not been stalling in the stacks that day, I probably would not have given this book a chance. Too often, deep, thoughtful, rich conversations about leadership, management, and strategy are lost in the wilderness of buzzwords. Don’t get me wrong, words are useful shorthand for complex systems of thought. The branding junkie in me, loves the power of words.

Turns out Seth Godin is more than just a purple cow. He actually gives nuanced issues the reflection they deserve. From accountability to change (that’s as far as I’ve gotten), and a few of his eBooks, Seth covers the gamut of issues affecting organizations in today’s changing digital landscape.

But what reeled me in? Two things:

• “Multiple channels of information mean that
  it’s almost impossible to live a lie.
  Authentic stories spread and last.” (pg ix)

• “Blogs work when they are based on:
  Candor
  Urgency
  Timeliness
  Pithiness
  Controversy
  (Utility, maybe, if you want six)
  [...]
  Save the fluff for the annual report.” (pg 23)

Gave me some hope and direction for my own blog. (And what to shoot for). As well as some legitimacy to my mentors’ and peers’ urges to “live your truth” or “don’t worry about what other people think, just do what’s true to you, and what you feel is right“.

This Sunday, Bishop Michael Keys, addressed stewardship to the church my family attends, and observed that people in my generation are quite possibly the best people to have on board. With one caveat: “if they’re engaged, they’re committed; but as soon as they become disengaged, they’re out the door.” This is nothing but a concrete statement in Eagle River, where at least a third of the families are stationed at a military base as part of their three-year rotation. If these families aren’t engaged from day one, they’ll move on to a different faith community; military families need to be able to establish roots in their home community, ASAP.

Religious implications aside, these realities and observations have merits for any community-based organization expecting to reach Gen Y/Me/Now/Whatever.

Given this, here are five questions that I think are useful in framing the discussion of emerging leadership in a webbed world. Especially if you plan on leading a community.

1. When do traits or events that have been traditionally viewed as problems or challenges, become assets and opportunities?
2. Who are you losing because you fail to engage?
3. How do you make nuanced relationships count in a polarized idea marketplace?
4. What can you do to enrich those relationships through participation in your organization?
5. Most importantly, given our geographical disparity, how can we make social media work to Alaska’s advantage?

What are your thoughts?