Social Media for Community Centres - Part 3

Begin, Observe, Learn, Start Over

You are now convinced of the importance of converting to social media for the good of your organization and have carefully examined your online presence and your team's IT qualifications. You've even started to plot your strategy by mapping out a few main objectives you could attain. Excellent! You are now ready to open profiles on various social media platforms.

1. Start off small.

The social media learning process is one that incessantly repeats itself. For one, there are so many potential applications that there will always be one of its uses that will go unnoticed. Thus, there is always something to learn. Furthermore, the social media universe is in constant motion. Certain sites, such as Facebook, are constantly overhauling their service, which forces users to readjust their practices according to each major change. Not to mention how quickly a new social network can become unavoidable in less than a year. The secret to success in this case is to start off small. Pick two or three tools, tops, as your starting point.

Pick your tools.
Avoid tools that fulfill similar roles. For instance, if you're creating video content, you are not obligated to simultaneously upload on YouTube and Vimeo. While YouTube has more users, which gives you a greater visibility, Vimeo is better equipped to protect intellectual property rights (if these matters are important to you). YouTube will, however, allow you to showcase other users' videos on your own channel, which can allow you to present useful information to brief your target audience.




This same principle applies to photo-hosting sites. Photobucket, Flickr and Picasa are three tools that allow you to upload photos, create online albums and display those images on your social media profiles, blog or website. We recommend Flickr, notably because they allow you to control the degree of user rights for your photos, ranging from most strict (copyright/all rights reserved) to most 'lax (Creative Commons, reproduction rights).

When it comes to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, each network is significantly different and you could justifiably sign-up for all three. However, your best bet is to begin by using the tools best suited to your objectives. Promoting your organization on LinkedIn may be a good way to recruit mentors or contact employers offering internships for your participants. Twitter could be used to interact with media outlets, Facebook is an adequate space to promote photo and video content, etc.

If ever you are still hesitant on which network is right for you or your organization, contact us.

Profile Names.
When creating organizational profiles for your center, make sure you name the profile properly. Try using the official name of your organization, its typical name, perhaps the group's acronym or sigil. Avoid putting all of them at once. On Twitter, try using a shortened user name, such as an acronym or sigil and use the other fields to specify the nature and identity of the organization. On LinkedIn, if you create a business page, go with the organization's official name. On Facebook, you'll have to choose two names (sort of): one for the group page, and another for the custom/vanity URL that you can opt for once you will have reached 25 'likes'. Both are important for SEO (search engine optimization) but the preferred method is to use the sigil or acronym for the URL and the name in full for the profile name.

First Steps. 
To begin, it is important to have a presence on the media you intend on using and not leave them idle. Keep in constant touch with your community. Announce when you've created a new profile on your current network(s), what you intend on using the profile for, whether info transmission,  community feedback, service promotion, etc. Appreciate these new communication tools and learn to enjoy the user experience.

2. Observe, promote, share, assist.

Your social media profile will not become the talk of the town from one day to the next. You will have to go through multiple steps in front of your audience. You will start off as an anonymous presence that people will be wary of at first. However, as you develop a reputation as a reliable source of information, users will begin to trust you and the seeds of a community will have been sown, one based on a multi-directional exchange of information. (source: Cédric Deniaud).

Community interaction is relatively similar across different websites. A small group of users are creators themselves (1%) who will provide original content. Another group (approximately 10-15%) are contributors that will comment, index, archive, rebroadcast, reproduce and/or recommend quality content. The vast majority will be relatively passive consumers that only seldom participate in those sort of exchanges.

You cannot force the implication of passive users. They will only engage with your product or community once you have achieved critical mass and the other users are actively recommending or interacting with the site. You will need ''star'' users. You must identify, encourage and ultimately be of interest to them. In the meantime, you'd be best served by promoting your own content, but especially promoting the content of similar websites or strategic partnerships with organizations in the same neighborhood or working towards the same goals as you. Promoting others, in essence, is a covert form of self-promotion. 

In order to do so, it is of the utmost importance that you pay attention, through your active social media outlets, to the discussions that center on your organization and the stakes related to it. Attempt to open dialogue: keep an eye out for opportunities to interject. Questions, requests or grievances are all opportunities for you to transmit information or support. You may ask some questions of your own in order to elicit a response: ''How may we help your cause?'' or ''Which services would you like to see us render in the future?'' Also, keep up to date with compliments and messages of encouragement, and thank those who give them to you.

You can expect certain recurring questions. A person who has recently discovered your page might ask about your services or mission statement. Your regular clientèle may have questions pertaining to services currently being rendered. Perhaps someone may request for an opinion on a service similar to yours, offer negative feedback, etc. Be mentally prepared to deal with these and other potential scenarios and have template answers you can refer to if the need to do so ever arises. 

3. Survey and evaluate.

As you familiarize yourself with your new communication tools you will be in a position to evaluate the effectiveness of your digital activity. In order to do so, you will have to diligently observe your online presence and make note of available stats, as well as figure out how to use those numbers to improve the quality and efficiency of your interactions. You can have access to numerous statistics and there are many available tools to assist you. Rely on the networks you have chosen to be active on as well as the main objectives you have set for your organization's expansion into social media. 

Statistics to consider:
Amount of fans (Facebook), followers (Twitter), etc.
Amount of publicly transmitted messages
Amount of messages addressed to you by the online community
Amount of private messages that you have answered
Fan demographics (Facebook)
Amount of messages that were rebroadcasted by the online community (FB, Twitter)
Amount of links that lead to your profiles
Amount of averted problems that were resolved by social media
Amount of visitors (website, YouTube videos, etc)
Amount of user activity (comments, likes, retweets, etc)
Amount of time spent on social media
Cost of social media training
etc...

There is no obligation to commit to the stats mentioned earlier. Start by keeping tabs on certain elements that appear connected to your objectives. You can easily compile your data in an Excel spreadsheet, using the rows for stats and columns for dates. Tabulate your findings as often as you deem fit: monthly, weekly or daily. Pay special notice to results that seem out of the ordinary. If a given period showed a marked increase or decrease in interaction, try to find out why. 

Working tools for social media:
There many working tools available if you wish to optimize your efficiency on social media. An oganizational profile must meet certain criteria that individual profiles do not have to abide by. These profiles are meant for work, not play (though you will at some point draw a certain pleasure out of using them). Again, you are under no obligation to learn all of the following tools. Once per category ought to suffice, and you can begin integrating them into your networks one at a time. 

1. Dashboards & automation

A dashboard is a tool that allows you to manage numerous social media accounts from a single interface, allowing you to save time in the coordination of your web activity. Automation is a process by which an application (software) is programmed to carry out repetitive tasks rather than having to do so manually yourself. 

Netvibes (www.netvibes.com) 
With Netvibes, you can have a single dashboard that will: watch for mentions of your organization online; read blogs or web pages that are essential for the stakes of your organization; observe and/or publish content on your social media profiles. The modular interface is totally customizable and their free version is more than sufficient. You can also tack on RSS feeds and many other widgets to your dashboard.

iGoogle (www.google.com/ig)
Similar to Netvibes, the iGoogle dashbaord has a more user-friendly interface which is integrated with your other Google products (Gmail, YouTube, Google+, etc). However, you will find an enormous variety of supported widgets, which makes finding the right Twitter app a challenge in and of itself. This is a free service.

Ping (www.ping.fm) et Seesmic Ping (www.seesmic.com)
Ping  is a site that allows you to synchronize the messages you wish to publish across your many social media platforms. If you want to broadcast the same message on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, for instance, you can do so on Ping and it will be published on those platforms simultaneously. Seesmic is a new Ping service currently in its beta phase (i.e. still in development) which has a similar application but also gives you the option of controlling your dashboard from either your desktop, their website or your smartphone. This is also a free service.

IFTTT (www.ifttt.com)
IFTTT (If This Then That) is a fascinating automation site that allows you to coordinate your online publishings. You do so by defining a set of conditions (If this...) and their consequences (Then that...). You can, for instance, ask the site to promote every blog post you have on Twitter and Facebook, or to send you an email whenever a website refers to your content, allowing you to thank the author to do some damage control, depending on whether the outcome was positive or negative. We have already spoken about this site for job search optimization, but it can be used for multiple purposes.

Paper.li (www.paper.li) and Scoop it (www.scoop.it)

Paper.li and Scoop it are websites that allow you to easily create an online newspaper or magazine. This publication will have content that you find online, whether on Twitter or other social networks, keyword searches, your own blog, RSS feeds, etc. The layout is modular and similar to Netvibes and iGoogle, but has a much nicer aesthetic and is meant to be publicly shared. Thus, you can gather content relevant to your neighborhood or related issues and republish them in a journal according to the needs of the greater community. Scoop it allows you additionally to easily publish and edit content, as well as draw it from other sources. For a working example of what can be done on Paper.li, please consult «Une Job SVP!», curated by the Carrefour Jeunesse-Emploi du Plateau.

2. Online Alerts

Online alerts are an efficient way to consult media content in order to spot trends or elements of interest. This applies to social media as well as traditional media, but is most effective when used online in both circumstances. Many tools exist to assist you in this task. As always, there are more tools than necessary to get the job done.

Google Alerts (http://alerts.google.com)
Perhaps the best tool to begin your survey of the online landscape is Google Alerts. You can make it so they send you an email message whenever your organization is mentioned on the Internet or any issues related to your mandate.  

Google Trends (http://trends.google.com)
This tool will show you which sites and keywords are most sought out on the web at the moment. If you want to stay up to date with what is currently of interest to online surfers it is worth taking a look at. This also allows you what's trending within a specific web site. However, this version is only available for sites with high traffic volume.

Google Insights (http://www.google.com/insights/search)
Google Insights can be used to gauge the level of interest for a particular subject online over an amount of time by looking at which keywords are being searched. For instance, if one were to search for keywords social media job search, one would find a graph indicating a peak in searches for those keywords in 2011, with a projected increase for 2012.

Other online reputation gauges
The following tools are less known but have been recommended to us:

• How Sociable (http://www.howsociable.com)                                                                                   This site measures online visibility for brands or organizations.

• Social Mention (http://www.socialmention.com )                                                                              This site searches for brand or organization mentions in social media and allows for data analysis.

3. Promotion

Whether you're publishing your content on your own blog, Flickr, YouTube or updating your layout, you should systematically promote this work across the many social platforms you are active on. Occasionally, one may create content that you wish to disseminate over a wider audience: a manifesto, a well-conceived document, a practical work tool, etc. In Networking 2.0's case, for instance, we could think of our instructional material as something we would want broadcast on a wider scale. In order to actively promote specific content, there are numerous tools you that allow you to do so.

Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org)

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia available in multiple languages with a team of editors who ensure their editorial policy is enforced among the contributors who submit articles. The authors are mostly regular online users who write on a voluntary basis. If your organization does not have an article on Wikipedia yet, you may want to draft it yourself. Make sure to respect the site's guidelines and to provide references. Examples of good sources are: officially published documents issued by your organization (such as annual reports), your website,  partner sites, any news article or publication that mentions you or your projects. You can also upload images of your office space, your programs in action or any company logos.


StumbleUpon (www.stumbleupon.com)

StumbleUpon is a website, social network and search engine that blends targeted suggestions and  haphazard results in order to allow users to better discover the web. It is very easy to become a victim of what is known as the echo chamber: you are exposed to a limited amount of content, usually what's popular or in the news, reverberated by your surrounding's consumption and recommendations, which usually amounts to a tiny fraction of what is available online. Therefore, it becomes rather difficult to expose people to new content unless it's already in circulation in their extended circles. StumbleUpon provides a forum where you can avoid the echo chamber and offers users a simple interface where they can go over all sorts of user-submitted content in random order. Submitting your content to StumbleUpon can allow users to discover your organization who may have never heard of you otherwise.

Other social recommendation sites

Besides StumbleUpon, there are a few other sites where you can submit your content and it will be promoted to users that may find it of interest.

• Digg (www.digg.com)
  Digg is a site where content is promoted (digg) or shunned (bury), allowing quality content to rise to the top of the heap through up-voting. You can, of course, submit your own content on Digg. 

• Reddit (www.reddit.com)
  Reddit is like Digg in that it's also a peer-recommendation site, but its interface is slightly different. It gets a bit less traffic and a user base that is a bit less active, but may be of interest if your prefer their interface.

• Delicious (www.delicious.com)
  Delicious style themselves as a social bookmark service. One of the advantages for users is the ability to synchronize their bookmarks between multiple browsers on their different computers, and to access them online from any computer. Another use for Delicious is to publicly share some of our bookmarks. You can divide them up into specific categories, such as which sites are best for job-hunting, or even a folder of bookmarks centered around your site's finest content.

4. Statistics

You probably want to have access to certain key statistics, if anything to gauge your progress as you engage with social media, or to have substantial numbers to present to your accountant or financial sponsors. Some of the tools mentioned earlier will provide you with stats. Certain numbers are easier to get than others. Your follower count, for example.

Klout (www.klout.com)
Klout is a controversial service that calculates your influence across social media and gives a rating between one and 100. The average Klout score is about 20. If you wish to measure your success rate on social media without too much hassle, try Klout.

Facebook Insights
When you create a Facebook page, you have access to interesting stats pertaining to how many hits your page is getting, or your audience's demographic figures. The service is called Facebook Insights, and a tutorial on how to activate Insights is available on the site.

Archivist (http://archivist.visitmix.com/)
Archivist est un service qui enregistre des conversations ou des recherches Twitter pour que vous les consultiez plus tard, ou pour que vous puissiez les analyser afin d'en ressortir des statistiques. Si vous voulez montrer comment vous avez procédé pour sensibiliser le public sur un enjeu, documenter les opinions circulant sur Twitter sur un sujet, ou prouver qu'une campagne de désinformation ou de salissage a lieu, vous pouvez archiver les contenus appropriés pour y avoir accès plus tard.

5. Other tools

There is certainly no lack of work tools to assist you in navigating social media. One of the more useful services is flick.com/creativecommons , which will allow you to access a bank of available photos you can use freely to illustrate your blog posts, website, flyers, ads, etc. Also take a moment to look into gopetition.com or act.ly, sites  that allow you to collect signatures for your only petitions. Also, consider TweetDeck.com (a Twitter dashboard service), bit.ly and tinyurl.com (both URL-shortening services) which all make for a more efficient Twitter experience.

4. Adjust and optimize

As you master these tools, you will see where you are reaching the objectives you've set for your social media accounts. You will also see where your social media strategy is faltering. Do not abandon a tool if it is not optimal: there is no harm in having a Facebook or Twitter account that is open but not active. Rather, adjust your strategy and optimize your process.

In order to properly use social media, you must connect, collaborate and innovate. You must keep an open mind. Generational conflicts may arise or troubles in adapting to the changes this different reality brings. Consider task delegation. The creation of content should not necessarily be handled by the same person that does community management or promotion. Assist generational conflict, organizational changes,  communication or social media training programs

If all is well, you may adopt a new social network. Are you already actively promoting your blog on Twitter? Try reaching users on Facebook as well. If you social media activity is taking up too much of your time, perhaps try alternating networks. One may be more effective than the other, and vice-versa.

Maybe better use of your social networks is not contingent on which tools you use to manage them. Perhaps you are not giving yourself the chance to successfully transition to social media, either by lack of commitment or a need for a clearer policy pertaining to the use of social media in your organization.

Coming soon:
Social Media for Community Centers Part Four: Human Resources and Social Media Policy