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Helping you win loyal friends through your communications

Are You Communicating Better This Year?

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It’s a new year.  Here are ten resolutions that every organization should make to improve their communications in 2014.
  1. Google yourself. What are the first things people see about you? Would you support the group you see on screen?
  2. Take charge of your brand. Create your own reputation through the news you make and the stories you post.
  3. Cultivate local reporters.  They work too hard: if you feed them human interest stories and photos, they’ll be grateful.
  4. Everyone in your organization speaks for you.  What are they saying to their friends? Do they have stories to tell your supporters?
  5. Your website: keystone of all your communications.  Ask an outsider to click through it. Is it easy to navigate? Informative? Fun?
  6. Facebook is a party, not a meeting.  Find ways to get your fans talking with each other.  They’ll come back more often and like you better.
  7. Which social media should your group use?  Depends.  Who do you want to reach?  Where do they go when they’re online?
  8. Horror movie: “I mail to dead people.” In January, take people off your postal and email lists if you haven’t heard from them since 2011.
  9. Photos: not just for breakfast any more. Your readers want to consume photos at every meal, including online posts.
  10. Your good name is your most valuable asset.  What’s it worth to you?  THAT’S the return on investment for your communications.

 

What I Learned at Social Media Manager School

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Have you heard the saying, “There’s no such thing as a social media expert”?  It’s true.  Social media are changing too fast for anyone to know it all.  But Andrea Vahl and Phyllis Khare come close.

Along with a few hundred students from around the world, I enrolled in Andrea and Phyllis’ Social Media Managers School this fall.  They have a wealth of practical experience and they shared as much of it with us as they possibly could.

I learned a lot more than I already knew about:

  • Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest
  • Top tools for managing multiple clients’ posts on multiple social media
  • Analytics you can use to measure what matters
  • Producing webinars and Ebooks
  • Finding clients, online and in person
  • Setting expectations and actually doing the work

I came to the course with a well-developed sense of strategy, the writing skills I needed for content marketing, and long familiarity with social media.  What I knew less about was a) advanced social media tactics and b) running a business.

Phyllis and Andrea took the mystery out of it.  With patience and good humor, they led a varied group of wanna-bes and already-ares through the course.  The Facebook group for participants was a great bonus: there were some days when I learned as much from the other students as I did from the teachers.  That’s a sign of a great course.

If you are interested in managing clients’ social media for a living–or if (like me) you want to add social media management to what you can offer your clients–then you cannot do better than to sign up for the 2014 Social Media Managers School.

Just don’t call yourself an expert.  Let your expertise speak for itself.

What Nonprofits Need More Than a Facebook Donate Button

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English: Mark Zuckerberg, Founder & CEO of Fac...

Mark Zuckerberg, Founder & CEO of Facebook (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dear Mark Zuckerberg,

Thanks for putting a Donate Now button on Facebook.  Now, our nonprofit’s Facebook Friends can give without ever leaving the page.

But will they see our page in the first place?

Already, fewer than 15 % of Friends see any particular post.  And as you recently told us, that percentage is going to drop.  Ad Age published your Generating business results on Facebook, where your company states:

We expect organic distribution of an individual page’s posts to gradually decline over time as we continually work to make sure people have a meaningful experience on the site.

In other words, fewer eyes on our pages.

The solution, according to your spokesman? “The best way to get your stuff seen if you’re a business is to pay for it.”

But what if you’re not a business?

Many nonprofits are local.  Some are tiny.  Few have a budget for marketing.  They are constantly trying to put more money into programs instead.

So, nonprofits’ reach on Facebook is almost all “organic,” meaning that our Friends like and share our posts with their Friends.  And that’s what you say is going to decline.

I understand that you want to do a good thing for nonprofits by providing a Donate Now button.  But it will be a meaningless gesture if fewer and fewer people ever see it.

Ask Sheryl Sandberg how to make ad grants to nonprofits.

Over at Google, where your COO used to work, they’ve been giving nonprofits $10,000 every month to advertise on Google.com.  For years.  And it works!

Ask Sheryl Sandberg about the business results and the public relations Facebook can get by instituting an ad grant program.  Then, please put that program into place.  It will multiply the value of the Donate Now button–for Facebook and for nonprofits.  And isn’t that what you wanted to do in the first place?

Happy 2014,

Dennis Fischman, Communicate! Consulting

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