Earlier this year I was at a journalism conference in Perugia and on one of the panels was a chap from the Huffington Post. He described how during the 2008 Presidential campaign they’d had a massive scoop when one of their contributors caught a candidate gaffe on video, it was uploaded and within hours it was leading most international news sites and the talk of the day on Twitter, Facebook and more.
Our panel discussed the implications of this on the media, and I said we’re living in a golden age of social media stupidity. Why? Because at the moment you can find copious amounts of information on people, their activities, and much more – but you can also find it very quickly.
I was reminded of this by Alison Gow’s excellent post on How to (Not) kill Journalism and how the web represents such an opportunity, particularly being able to crowdsource direct with your followers. Read the rest of this entry »
Journalists have always had contacts, those people who we can go to for comment and stories. They might be professional people, police officers, nurses or the local cleaner at the comprehensive who overhears gossip when he’s having a ciggie round the back of the head’s office.
Now, though, through social media and the web we’ve got a pool of intelligent, connected and helpful people at our finger-tips. Here’s how to leverage it: Read the rest of this entry »
I’m off to Birmingham next week, the social media centre of the UK, for an event organised by AMSU about how social media can be used to make Students’ Unions stronger. I like the title, it implies that the Union is already strong but there’s much more we can do. It’s a fitting time really as the Union’s Facebook page has just had it’s 1,000th fan join (good times!) and we need to know how we can improve what we’re doing with social media.
Ahead of the event we’ve been asked to answer the following questions:
the biggest single issue your students’ union is facing and also
one thing you think social media will be most useful for
The biggest single issue UCLan Students’ Union faces:
How to keep doing what we’re doing, but potentially with less, and proving our impact and legitimacy
It’s no secret that in the future there is going to be less money around. Less money means less resources, less people and less time. But, as a Students’ Union how do we keep giving our members best value, innovative opportunities and chances for involvement without comprimising on quality? It’s not going to be easy to keep current services operating the way they are. And at UCLan, it doesn’t seem like student numbers show any sign of slowing down and also the students that we have in our numbers are becoming increasingly diverse and spread out across different campuses. The pressure will also be on to prove what we are providing, show how we measure that and as a lot of Unions become charities – show our impact.
One thing you think social media will be most useful for:
Engaging and mobilising groups of students
Social media can be a driver for getting students involved. Not just in the Union’s business, getting them to vote etc but also by empowering them to use social media themselves to campaign, inform, mobilise other students and make friends/contacts. If we have a membership that is twittering, facebooking, blogging, creating video, posting photos that is an active and engaged membership that will help the Union achieve its goals. At the moment a lot of that activity is lacking and we need to find ways of inspiring and instigating it – but this needs to be balanced with letting students have their own opinions in an increasingly policied space (both by the Union, the University and other organisations).
I’m hoping from the social media course I am able to learn what other Unions are doing, pick up some hints and tips and put together the start of a plan of how the Union can use social media particularly in its membership functions.
I thought I’d take the question above as a starting point. A Tweetup is a new concept and it’s something that is really starting to catch-on in some places.
I organised and hosted Preston’s first Tweetup just over a week ago and it was a roaring success. We had nearly 40 people in the room, many of them with wireless enabled laptops and mobiles, all contributing to a discussion on one topic.
The idea for a Tweetup is that instead of having a networking event or discussion where the conversation is completely physical you also have a virtual conversation going on. Bear with me, it does make sense. The structure of the event is an opening preamble and then a topic is discussed by the people in the room – often splitting off into separate groups. This makes it easier to manage.
For example, at the Preston Tweetup we were discussing the Preston Guild in 2012 and how the web can be used in it.
The discussions were flowing around the tables but also on twitter, take a look at the #prestontweetup hashtag feed and you can see all the good stuff that was coming out of people chatting about the topic. Yes, some of it went off on tangents – but that happens with any discussions.
The best thing about the Tweetup was that as an organiser I was getting instant feedback. If there was a problem with something I could pick up on it straight away by watching the tweets. I could also easily collect information after the event and condense it.
This backchannel conversation was incredibly useful and exciting. It also allowed some great interaction between the groups, so that people might take a question asked by one group and explore it and the then fling some more questions back out into the twitter stream for other groups to consider. There was a fantastic collaborative environment at the event.
So, I would really suggest giving a Tweetup a try. You don’t need 40 people there, maybe just 5, but get going with it and see what happens. And if you’re in the education or conference/networking sectors, you need to be on this. Doing it. Making it happen.
After a 5.30 AM start I arrived in York a little bit fuggy but ready for an interesting and thought-provoking day. I wasn’t disappointed. In the surroundings of the National Railway Museum (ace place for a conference, big trains!) I mingled with fellow third sector professionals to discuss the impact that the web, email and social media was having on fundraising and charities in general.
Speaker 1: The story so far: Charity websites & the email – the good, the bad and just don’t go there!
The day kicked off with Howard Lake from UK Fundraising taking a look at where the third sector currently stood in relation to using the web. Howard was a great speaker, opening up the subject and explaining the basics of things such as RSS, web design, where to place your donate button.
From a Union perspective it was great that we are already doing a lot of what he talked about, but it was great to be refreshed about the basics and to remember what we should be doing on a web 1.0 level before trying to run on the web 2.0 level.
There’s a few things I’m going to put into practice on our site. The first is to instead of having a ‘donate now’ button on every page to re-focus the site to have a ‘get involved’ button on every page that allows students to quickly find out how they can get involved in the Union.
Speaker 2: Developing your online fundraising – the opportunities to be used
There was a shuffle around to the programme as Jonathan Waddingham took to the stage from Justgiving. Unfortunately Nick from Mission Fish hadn’t tuned up for this slot (or as we learned later, he wasn’t actually due until the afternoon) so Jon was bumped up the programme! He gave a great presentation that showed the huge increase in community fundraising seen on Justgiving over the past 12 months.
Jon also spoke about the success of their Facebook application that allows users to plug it into their profile and use it to help reach their total. This was a really clever idea, allowing features such as a little bar that sits on your profile and shows how much of the total has been raised so far and most important how your friends can help YOU reach the total.
From a Union perspective I think there’s a lot more that the organisation can do to support students in their personal fundraising exploits. We could point them in the direction of great tools such as the Justgiving facebook application, show them how to use the web to fundraise and explain about using secure tools such as Justgiving and Bmycharity.
Speaker 3 – Web 2.0 – where are we heading? An introduction to social media
I consider myself to know a fair bit about social media (blogs, twitter, facebook etc) but it’s always good to be reminded of their power and what they can achieve. Steve Bridger took to the stage and with a very flashy presentation (he uses a mac, so no powerpoint here!) he really opened everyone’s eyes to what social media can achieve for nonprofit organisations.
Steve opened by re-telling his days as a campaigner for Oxfam and as a student. He pulled out his ‘telephone tree’, now I’m far too young to remember one of these but apparently they were all the rage during the 80s for student activists. Remarkably though they are very similar to Facebook, you have a number of connections that you ‘touch base’ with regularly. Just with Facebook it’s easier, quicker, cheaper and the number of connections can be much larger. This demonstrated the reach that social media can give charities.
We were then shown how a blog can be a powerful, and fast-moving, vehicle for change. Steve showed us After Wilma, a blog he setup to help cover the devestating of Hurricane Wilma in Mexico. The tourism board didn’t want people to see what was happening, it was ‘business as usual’ according to the tourism board. The blog combined user generated content, images, blogs, videos and reports to showcase what was happening.
Flickr and Twitter were shown to the audience next and Flickr in particular was a very effective way of showing what the charity can do. Steve was really hammering home that charities can use social media to tell their stories. Flickr in particular is a great way to tell stories, as images are far more powerful than reams of text.
The key point that I picked out from Steve’s presentation was when he said “social media is messy, that’s just the way it is”. This is really true. You can plan and create strategy after strategy for social media but the best way is to just do it! And it will be messy, difficult, tricky but also brilliant, engaging and connecting.
Speaker 4 – The power of social networks for online fundraising
We were joined live via web link by Beth Kanter from San Francisco. The connection wasn’t brilliant so I couldn’t hear some of what Beth said but she gave an overview of how she’d used social media to raise money.
She’d used blogs and twitter mainly to raise money and awareness for various causes. I think the figure was something like $210,000 from just online fundraising. Imagine how cheap it must have been to do, not in terms of time, but in terms of overheads, no print/paper costs. I think Beth’s brief web chat showed how social media can be used to make a real tangible difference.
Speaker 5 – A case study – Dogs Trust
The next session was a real eye-opener. Dogs Trust took to the stage and after all the theory we’d heard and examples, they showed us how they had used social media to create a community and also achieve their goal – to re-home dogs.
They’d used Facebook to create a network where they had 35,000 fans (that’s the equivalent of the Union’s membership) and this gives them a base to push out messages to those fans and get them involved. Not content with being on Facebook the Dogs Trust showed off DoggySnaps – summed up as Facebook for dogs. This is a brilliant idea and they’ve created a network for dog owners to show off their pets, connect with each other and the Dogs Trust sell advertising off the back of it to fund it.
Their use of twitter was also eye-opening. They had a full-time staff presence who looked after their social media presences and being on twitter was an important part of it. They gave an example of how they’d managed to re-home a dog through twitter, and just being there to respond to people was important.
This got me thinking about how the Union can use twitter. We have an account but don’t actively use it to engage with our membership (don’t know how many of our membership are active on it, but students tend to be early-adopters!). The key for using twitter seems to be to engage people by asking questions and be a ‘real person’ where possible on twitter – not just an automated post/response drone.
Speaker 6 – eBay for charity: buzz-building, special auctions and social networks
Nick Aldridge from MissionFish had arrived after the programme cock-up took to the stage to explain how eBay and MissionFish could be an excellent way for charities to raise money.
He also appeared to sound a note of caution about social media and the web, and rightly so. While the numbers with social media appear big and impressive, they are still a small % of a charities audience and potential donors. It’s easy to get carried away with new media and forget that 3 million odd people still read The Sun every day! However, something that starts online/social media can often help lead to ‘old media’ coverage because the old guard like anything that is new – hence why Twestival got very good coverage.
Nick also went through five key trends about online fundraising that he’d picked out during a joint research exercise with the Institute of Fundraising:
Stories, not annual reports
Engage and explain, then fundraise
From walled garden to public park, beyond your own website
Integrate the online work to fit your overall message
Use partners to reach new audiences
Speaker 7 – To blog or not to blog? That is the question
Chris Garrett rounded off the day with a top session about blogging. He got a little sidetracked when speaking about twitter, but it was great that he put his twitter screen up and talked everyone through what it actually was and what it could do.
He had a great little summary of why charities should blog:
That hit the nail on the head. Great stuff. He also spoke a little about SEO and explained how using a content management system such as wordpress, or anything with tags, makes your web presences infinitely more findable by Google and other search engines.
Summing up
Overall it was a great day and while some of it was stuff I already knew, there were some fantastic examples of how social media and the web can be used. The main idea I came away with was that the Union can use the web to engage students a lot more and connect them with opportunities and ideas that they want to be involved with.
Credit has to go to Graham Richards from the Institute of Fundraising North for his excellent organisation of the event and for being adventurous with twitter to find speakers!
I’m getting up at the arse crack of dawn tomorrow to travel on the 6:54 from Preston to York. Why? Because I’m going to meet fellow marketers/communicators working in the third sector who want to know more about using the internet, email and social media.
It’s hosted by the Institute of Fundraising North and there’s a great line-up of speakers. The agenda seems very web 2.0 heavy and social media heavy and I’m looking forward to seeing what some respected experts have to say. We’ve even got someone joining us live via web link from San Francisco to speak about the power of social networks in online fundraising!
Why am I going? I want to answer these questions:
How can I put together a social media strategy for the organisation I work for
What should be involved in this social media strategy, what tools should be used
Who in the organisation should be using what tools and just as importantly who shouldn’t!
I’m hoping to find out what other charities and third sector organisations have been doing with social media. Are we ahead of the curve at UCLan or are we lagging behind?
We’re currently working on our communications strategy, this involves implementing CRM and lots of email marketing. I’ll be playing close attention during Howard Lake‘s session on ‘The story so far: Charity websites & email – the good, the bad and just don’t go there!’. Hopefully this will give me an idea of what will work and what doesn’t.
While the conference is ultimately about fundraising, coming from a membership I’m going to substitute where possible the ‘fundraising’ aspect for ‘engagement’. A lot of the tools used online involve calls to action, and instead of donating via credit card it might be that signing a petition could be inserted instead.
Hopefully I’ll be able to answer some of the questions I have tomorrow, meet some people who are already doing some of it, or even tell people about what we’re doing!
You can follow the events via twitter by using search.twitter to follow #iofnorth – I for one will be tweeting from ed_walker86 so feel free to follow me as I’ll be tweeting as long as my laptop battery lasts (or I can get a charge).
This month’s topic over on Tomorrow’s News, Tomorrow’s Journalists is an interesting one and one that I voted for in our very democratic way of deciding December’s topic. What have you done to build your brand online?
See where you are online
The first thing I did was go and see what is out there about me on the internet. A quick Google of my name ‘ed walker’ made me realise first of all: a) I have a really common name b) There’s a ‘Sir Edward Walker’ – not me. Having a common name is the first hurdle in building a brand online, because if you’re called Japhael Jiminez – chances are you’re pretty unique.
Start a blog
Starting a blog is a must. This should be the core of your brand online. This is where you live and breath online. If possible try and buy your own domain and a bit of hosting, as having your name as a yourname.com/.co.uk/.net will help massively when it comes to boosting yourself up those all important Google rankings. After starting your blog and making it look pretty, get posting. Post about stuff that matters to you, it’ll probably matter to other people. Your blog should be your living CV, blog about stuff you’re working on, your success’ and even some of your failures. Make sure you’ve got an ace ‘About’ page, so that if people want to know more about you they can find out.
Link to people
You’re not going to build this brand alone. When posting on your blog, link out and link far and wide. If you link to people, they will probably come and look at your blog and see who you are. They might even link back if they like your stuff!
Have a good presence on LinkedIn
Forget Facebook, Bebo, MySpace etc, LinkedIn is the professional networking site and it can be used by potential employers to find you and see who you are and what you do. Ensure your profile is fully filled out, keep it updated reguarly and you’ll be surprised how much traffic it can bring to your blog and also how highly LinkedIn profiles rank in Google and other search engines.
Claim your blog on Technorati
Technorati is the bloggers website. It’s important to claim your blog as this will tell you who is linking to you and give you an authority ranking. As more people link to you, your authority grows.
Listen to those who know
I suggest people like Chris Brogan and Adam Singer, who aren’t journalists, but have built up highly successful blogs and follows online. They have built a brand around themselves online, and as a result have benefitted financially but also in building up a big and useful network of contacts.
Network offline and transfer online
Face to face is still and always will be the most powerful communication tool in the world. Make use of it, at a networking event? At a party? Social media is reasonably in right now and while it may not be the best conversation starter it’s a great conversation finisher. Make sure you leave people you’ve been speaking to with your blog address, or if you’re a guest speaker make sure it’s on your slides.
Twitter and other social media
Make sure you’re using social media such as Twitter to join in the conversation, find and follow relevant people. Give people a reason to follow you by posting regularly and by posting interesting links to Twitter. Don’t tell us what you had for breakfast, that’s what Facebook status updates are for. Make sure all your social media presences link to your blog and that your blog links to all your social media presences. Think of your blog as the continent with lots of little islands around it.
Join relevant networks (like TNTJ!) and get networked
If there’s a network for your industry, join it and meet people. You’ll be surprised how interested they’ll be in what you do and what you may be blogging about.
Image in this post is used under creative commons from flickr user See-Ming Lee
Seemed to be a trend over the last few days as some great posts popped up about what the US election and in particular the Obama campaign means for marketing professionals, charities and nonprofit organisations. Here’s the best:
The Charity Place has a piece about what nonprofits can learn from the Obama campaign, and it’s more of the same. Engagement, make friends first and then ask for money – not the other way round. I think that’s an important one, build a connection and then ask for the money.
Been watching the twitter voter report tick over, it’s incredible. So much data. Will we see anything like this in the UK when the next general election rolls around? You can’t beat it for that ‘being there at the polls’ feeling.
Short piece about how if Obama does win next week, it could cause a lot of people to start re-write the politics marketing books. He’s shown how online can connect with the grassroots but that you can’t just be online, you have to be everywhere.
Nigel Barlow points me in the direction of Andrew Grant-Adamson who makes some interesting points about whether online could be the future of hyperlocal. With local newspapers across the country in huge decline, could online present a return to the local, local, news agenda? I think it’s all a question of resources.
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