Communicate!

Helping you win loyal friends through your communications

Social Media Beneath the Surface

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So many readers enjoyed my post “Are You Listening, Nonprofits?“, I thought you might like a little more advice about social listening.

Submarine using sonar

Most social media is below the surface

Craig Jamieson is a submarine fan, and he tells us that social listening is like sonar.  Use it to find:

  • Conversations that reveal something about the people who support you or the people you serve.
  • Mentions of your organization. Ever wonder whether people out there really know about your organization?  The one who mentioned you does! Write them back.
  • Praises and problems. Visibly thank people for saying good things about you.  Visibly respond to requests for help or criticism of your organization.
  • What your audience wants to hear.  If people “like” something on social media and it relates to your mission or your community, why not post something about that too?
  • Opportunities. Your elected officials are probably online.  So are your funders, your donors, your collaborators, and your competitors.  Listen to what they’re saying to get a better sense of what your organization could be doing.

You can do all this with tools that you have at your fingertips, like Google Alerts, Facebook and Twitter lists, and keyword searches.  If you want to make your sonar run by itself, you can invest in tools specifically designed for social media monitoring.

Either way, a human being still has to listen.  So, turn on your sonar and run silent, run deep until you find the right conversation to enter!

You Just Graduated. You Must Be a Social Media Expert, Right?

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college graduateCongratulations, class of 2017. You’re a college graduate. You even landed a job.

Now, watch out.

Your employer thinks you’re a social media expert.

Just because you’re a “digital native” who played with an iPhone before you could ride a bike, your new employer thinks you can be the company’s social media manager.  Without training.  In addition to all your regular duties.

What are you supposed to do with that?

It all depends.  Do you want to be a social media expert?  Then, here are three things you need to do right away.

One: Explain to your boss what you have to learn.

  1. How to create a strategy for your organization, so that you reach the people you want to reach, where they hang out, with a purpose in mind.
  2. Who in your organization has great stories to tell.
  3. Who in your organization can take great photos.
  4. Who in your organization can produce great graphics.
  5. How to motivate the people in 2, 3, and 4 to send that content to you to use.
  6. What a publication calendar is, and how to stay on schedule.
  7. How to write killer subject lines for email, headlines for blogs, and text for tweets.
  8. How to write content that will make people look past the headline.
  9. The best ways to make sure your Facebook posts get seen.
  10. The best times of day and days of the week to post on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn….
  11. How to integrate your print communications, website, blog, email, and social media.
  12. What will make your followers like, share, and comment on your posts.
  13. How you can find and curate content your followers will be glad to read.
  14. How to tell whether any of it is making a difference.

Two: Tell your boss you’ll need a budget for training.  (Call it “professional development”: it sounds classier.)

  • There are great online courses.  John Haydon’s Facebook Bootcamp and the Social Media Managers School founded by Andrea Vahl and Phyllis Khare are two of them.
  • You can also take webinars on the subject of your choice.  I will humbly mention my Blogging on a Mission webinar…and check out the entire series offered by NPO Connect.
  • In-person classes and conferences will bring your skills up to date and keep you there.

Three,  politely explain that being a social media manager could be a full-time job.  Heather Mansfield, author of Social Media for Social Good, estimates that doing a good job with just Facebook could take you seven hours a week.  Get a very clear set of instructions about your boss’s priorities: in writing, if possible!

But perhaps you’d rather eat live snakes than manage your organization’s social media.  Then show your boss this blog entry to make the case that it’s just too big a responsibility to do on the fly.  Suggest that he or she hire a communications consultant to do it right. (I might just be available.)

You just helped make your organization better.  Congratulations, graduate!

Marathon: What Boston 2013 Taught Me about Communication

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Boston Marathon“Oh my God,” I said, “I have friends in that race!”

I can’t remember exactly how I first heard about the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, but I know that was the first thing I said.

And I know the first things I did: turn on the radio, and get onto social media.

4 Lessons from the Boston Marathon

I spent a lot of that Monday listening for news, then sharing it with the immediate world via Twitter and Facebook.  That Patriots’ Day and the week that followed taught me four lessons I will never forget.

  1.  Write only what people care about.  On Monday, I cancelled any tweets I had pre-scheduled. I ignored any other topic.  I wrote only for people like me who said “I have friends in that race. Are they all right? What’s really going on?”
  2. Write what I know better than other people.  I live in greater Boston, and the local NPR affiliate, WBUR, is my soundtrack every day.  Simply by listening to the radio and following other Boston-area friends on social media, I knew more than 95% of the people in the country.  What I knew, I shared.
  3. Be a source of reliable information.  There were a lot of rumors flying around, and the media were more often fanning the flames than keeping their cool.  We were better off reading the Onion or the Borowitz Report than the New York Post (or watching CNN).  I made sure to pass along only what seemed certain–and even then, I gave my sources.
  4. Listen, and engage in conversation.  When I heard about friends who reported they were safe, I spread the word.  When people asked questions on Twitter, I used @ messages to write them back.  I followed the #boston hashtag to keep track of the conversation in real time.

Communications: Not Just for Crises!

Looking back at it, it occurs to me: these four lessons are not just for crises.

If you want people to pay attention to what you write, you should write what people care about and what you know best, giving reliable information and engaging in conversation, every time you post, tweet, or talk or email.

Only, don’t write as often every day as I did on Patriots’ Day 2013.  Because communicating with your readers is not a sprint.  It’s a marathon.

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