Keep Your Ear to the Ground

Safeguarding your reputation means listening not only to the “word on the street,” but to what’s being said online. Have you googled yourself lately?

A few tips for listening:

Set up Google alerts for, minimally, your name and your organization’s name. You can also add names of other prominent people in your organization (CEO, Executive Director, members of your Board of Directors).

Advanced Google alerts might include topics or issues that your organization is connected to. For example, a nonprofit organization that provides health care for low-income residents or those without insurance might include search terms like “universal health care” or “health insurance coverage.” This will allow you to track news, blogs and even video on these issues and keep up with the media.

Learn more about Google alerts here.

Other free options for monitoring include Technorati, Blogpulse and the download BuzzMonitor (which is from the World Bank, oddly enough).

There are also paid options, of course. And plenty of experts to help you navigate the options.

Photo: Corbis

The New Face of Politics

A large part of Public Relations 2.0 is the ability to surrender control.

Once information is released into social media outlets, it is out of our hands and we can’t control what may happen next. This is difficult to get used to for many public relations folks and organizations of all sizes.

Recently, the political realm joined public relations practitioners in letting go during the CNN/YouTube debate.

Democratic candidates for the presidency participated in a debate with questions provided by Average Joes (and Joannas) via YouTube. This new format stripped the formality from presidential debates and allowed the questioners to ask sharp questions and confront the candidates if they felt their questions were not answered.

The new format allowed greater participation and greater perceived access to presidential candidates (the questions were pre-chosen by CNN and the winning YouTube users flown to South Carolina for the debate).

Some candidates have already jumped on the social media bandwagon. For example, Barack Obama uses Twitter; John Edward has an avatar and election headquarters in Second Life; and many candidates have profiles on YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook.

This will be the first presidential election in which social media plays a large part. In the next year, social media will involve itself in different aspects of the election process and Verve can’t wait to see how it turns out! And what lessons we can learn for those clients who aren’t in the political realm.

Making Decisions About Web 2.0 Tools

Solidariti, a blog by Priscilla Brice-Weller and based in Australia, has a terrific post called “Does Effort = Effect.” Priscilla has developed a very simple (even I’m not afraid of it) formula for determining which social media applications make the most sense for an organization to participate in.

The “effort” score is made up of the amount of time required to develop the took, the amount of money needed to get going and to maintain and the amount of “in-house geekiness” (technical know-how) required. Rate each on a scale of 1 to 5, resulting in a total max score of 15.

Effect score is much more subjective. Think about the potential effect of each tool for your organization and rank it on a 1 to 5 scale.

The result, a graph that gives you four quadrants:
Yellow: Must Haves (low effort, big effect)
Green: Should Haves (greater effort, big effect – probably worth the time/money investment)
White: Can Have (if you don’t spend much time, the effect could be worth it)
Blue: Stay Away! (too much effort, too little effect)

This graph was created for ANTaR, but you can easily do the same for your organization.

A couple of definitions:
Demographic refers to Web sites that appeal to a core demographic and allow nonprofits to participate by having their own page and connecting with potential volunteers, donors, etc.

I have no idea what Bespoke it (up in the corner) and I’m not sure what Priscilla means by maps. Maybe she’ll come by and leave a comment…

Great tool! I plan to use it in the near future. I’ll try to post the results.

Toe-In-The-Water Strategy for Social Media

Social media means marketing departments, public relations people and CEOs have to let go. They have to let go of control. They have to let the conversation develop and dialogue take place.

And that. is. hard.

If your organization is not ready to open itself up to the world, but wants to dip its toe in the social media water, a couple of things will get your started.

Start monitoring conversation about your organization, key people, trends and issues. The two primary places for monitoring are Technorati and Google Blog Search.

Both services allow you to subscribe via RSS to a feed. I highly recommend Bloglines to manage your feeds. Lots of people would be just as adamant about Google Reader. The benefit to a feed reader is that you can view all your searches and commonly read blogs in one place, keeping your “favorites” folder more manageable.

Start an internal blog. You can define what “internal” means. In a pure sense it would mean internal to your organization. But you can also have an “internal” blog for members only or for your staff and board of directors.

Most blogging platforms allow you to let in or keep out who you want. WordPress is quickly becoming the Internet standard and has lots of great options for privacy. The Intranet Journal offers this how-to on creating an Intranet via WordPress.

The clear benefit to an internal blog is that there’s still a great deal of control, but you can test systems for posting, monitoring and responding with relative security. You can also foster a blog-friendly culture that will be more open to creating an external blog when the time is right.

CIO Magazine has seven reasons to create an internal blog here.

Understanding blogging culture and social media is an important part of getting started. You’ll find some great tips here at Marketing Profs (one of my favorite resources!). And Kami Huyse at Communication Overtones has two excellent posts to which I refer frequently on corporate blogging – here and here.

Need more toe-in-the-water strategies? Media Orchard offers a few additional tips here.

Take your time and be deliberate. It may be an instant medium, but when you’re participating on behalf of your organization, it’s important to have all your systems, policies and strategies in place before you dive in.

- Kelli

“Toes” via Flickr by Crawford 721.