5 Essential Apps for Your Business’s Facebook Fan Page

If you’ve already searched for some Fan Page inspiration and undertaken the task of building a custom landing page for your business’s Facebook presence, you may now be in the market for some features that will further engage your fans.

A nice feature of the modern social web is that it’s modular. You can plug in and customize pre-made pieces of software (often created by other users or companies), and mix and match what works best for you without a lot of technical know-how. Facebook works the same way with apps.

Many Facebook apps are built for casual use, like the social games and quizzes you may see your friends using in their personal feeds. But there are quite a few apps that are ideal for a business Fan Page. These are useful for customizing your page with greater detail, showcasing your content from other social sites and getting more information from your customers. Here are five essential Facebook apps that your business may want to take for a spin.

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1. Static FBML for Your Page Sidebar

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We’ve already discussed how the Static FBML app can be used to make your Fan Page a unique destination. But this versatile plugin can also bring some interactivity to the column that appears on the left-hand side of your page.

Vertical, left-hand navigation is something users expect to find on most websites. They will be comfortable looking there for additional links, promotions and contact details. Moving a Static FBML box over to the left-hand column is a great way to exploit this valuable real estate. Here’s how to do it.

If you haven’t already done so, add the app to your Fan Page and make sure it’s functioning as a “Box” rather than a “Tab.” Add content to your box using standard HTML. Graphics cannot be uploaded to Facebook here, so you must reference them from a URL — likely one on your own hosted website or blog.

For a sidebar, think about adding some clean graphic buttons or icons that link out to other destinations your fans would be interested in, such as your company website, blog or Twitter () account. This sidebar will be visible no matter what Fan Page tab your visitors are on, so consider using graphic elements that coincide with your existing logo and color scheme.

Once your content is added and saved, it will appear as a box on the “Boxes” tab. Head over there to ensure that your HTML has rendered properly. If so, click the “Pencil ()” in the top-right corner of the box and select “Move To Wall Tab.” This will display your content in the left-hand navigation of your page.

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2. Promotions

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Contests and giveaways are a great way to engage people with your brand, especially on the social web. A chance at some free stuff is one of the top reasons people follow and friend brands in the first place. The Promotions app makes it easy to build and publish a contest on Facebook in a way that is inherently social and shareable.

Promotions is different from many Facebook apps in that the content you create for it lives on the developer’s website. This makes it a versatile tool, but you’ll have to sign up for a free account at wildfireapp.com.

Once you create an account and connect the registered app to Facebook, the promotions you generate on WildFire will populate the tab on your Fan Page. Promotions are easily built through a step-by-step process. Provide the dates of the contest, the types of prizes, the fields for the entry form, specific parameters about contest entry and rules, and upload any additional artwork you want to include.

A nice advantage of having contest data centralized on WildFire is that it can be sourced out to other social networks, and even to your own company website. Any changes or additions you make to your promotions will dynamically update on all of the locations where your customers and fans find you on the web.

Note, the cost to publish a basic promotional campaign through Wildfire is $5, plus $.99 for each day the campaign is active. Additional packages with more customization and publishing options are available.

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3. Social RSS

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If you already have great content from your company’s blog or another social network that you’d like to bring to the fore of your Facebook presence, Social RSS is a smart tool.

You can configure this app to automatically pull in updates from any RSS or ATOM feed and display them as posts on your Fan Page, either on a dedicated tab, a wall tab (on the left side) or as part of your core news feed. It’s a useful way to automate your content and eliminate the need to republish things manually to your Facebook Page.

Take note, however, that fans on social networks are much more responsive to curated content. Especially on Facebook, where people connect to a smaller community of personal friends and family, an unfiltered pipeline of RSS content may not be welcome in all news feeds. If your core customers are already subscribed to your blog and other social accounts, a double-dose of the same exact content may trigger some to hide your updates or “un-fan” you. Consider relegating your Social RSS feed to a tab if this is the case.

Test where and how an app like Social RSS is best implemented on Facebook, and adjust as needed depending on the size and response of your audience.

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4. Poll

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Sometimes you just need a little feedback. That’s what social engagement is all about, right?

On Facebook, it doesn’t get any simpler than the Poll app. There’s no account to sign up for. Once you connect it to your Page, all the setup and data lives right in your settings panel.

A poll can be a casual way to get a read from your fans about a new product, a new page design, or your business in general.

In the poll settings, simply name your burning question (What do you think of our new spicy burritos?), list your choices (Delicious (), Pretty Tasty, Needs Work, Offensive) and select your publishing options.

Polls can be published to your Page wall/feed, live on a custom tab or be popped into your left-hand navigation where visitors can click anytime they come to your Page. You can invite your friends to take a poll, and they can easily share it out as they would any other post or app. Both you and your visitors can see the poll results without leaving Facebook.

Publishing a weekly poll about new products or changes in your industry is a great way to keep fans coming back to your Page and talking about your brand.

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5. YouTube for Pages

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If creating video content is part of your business’s social media strategy (and we recommend it should be) you can squeeze more views out of your productions by dedicating a Fan Page tab to your YouTube channel.

That’s exactly what the YouTube for Pages app does. To activate the app, you’ll have to set up a free account at the developer website involver. Once it’s connected to your Fan Page, simply input the YouTube channel you’d like to pull videos from (it could be your own or anyone else’s), pick a few more settings, and you’re all set.

The app “features” your most recent upload or favorite, and displays thumbnails for previous videos on a simple, clean interface. The videos play directly on Facebook of course, so fans can watch without ever leaving your Fan Page. Just be sure to add the tab in the app’s “Application Settings.”

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Tech-savvy Generations Care About Privacy

All the dirty laundry younger people seem to air on social networks these days might lead older Americans to conclude that today’s tech-savvy generation doesn’t care about privacy.

Such an assumption fits happily with declarations that privacy is dead, as online marketers and social sites such as Facebook try to persuade people to share even more about who they are, what they are thinking and where they are at any given time.

But it’s not quite true, a new study finds. Despite mounds of anecdotes about college students sharing booze-chugging party photos, posting raunchy messages and badmouthing potential employers online, young adults generally care as much about privacy as older Americans.

The report, from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania, is among the first quantitative studies looking at young people’s attitudes toward privacy as government officials and corporate executives alike increasingly grapple with such issues.

“It is going to counter a lot of assumptions that have been made about young adults and their attitudes toward privacy,” said Mary Madden, senior researcher at the Pew Internet and American Life Project. She was not part of the study but reviewed the report for The Associated Press ahead of Thursday’s release.

Among the findings:

Eighty-eight per cent of people of all ages said they have refused to give out information to a business because they thought it was too personal or unnecessary. Among young adults, 82 per cent have refused, compared with 85 per cent of those over 65.

Most people – 86 per cent – believe that anyone who posts a photo or video of them on the Internet should get their permission first, even if that photo was taken in public. Among young adults 18 to 24, 84 per cent agreed – not far from the 90 per cent among those 45 to 54.

Forty percent of adults ages 18 to 24 believe executives should face jail time if their company uses someone’s personal information illegally – the same as the response among those 35 to 44 years old.

The survey, based on a 2009 telephone survey of 1,000 Americans 18 and older, did find some areas with generational differences in attitudes. For example, while 69 percent of all respondents said a company should be fined more than $2,500 for privacy violations, only 54 percent of those 18 to 24 years old thought the fine should be that steep.

Even so, the majority of young people generally agreed with their older counterparts in wanting more privacy, not less.

“Yes, there are some young people who are posting racy photographs and personal information. But those anecdotes might not represent what the average young person is doing online,” said Chris Hoofnagle, co-author of the study and director of information privacy programs at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.

Although they grew up in the digital age, young people know surprisingly little about their rights to online privacy, the study found. They seem more confident than older adults that the government would protect them, even though U.S. privacy laws offer few such safeguards.

The lack of knowledge about the law, coupled with an online environment that encourages people to share personal information, may be one reason young people can seem careless about privacy, according to the study, which was conducted in July 2009 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.

There is also some evidence that, by virtue of their age, adolescents and young adults’ brains are hard-wired toward risky behaviour, the report said, citing past psychological studies.

The researchers suggest that lawmakers and educators should not assume that young adults do not care about privacy and therefore don’t need protections.

Rather, they say, “policy discussions should acknowledge that the current business environment … sometimes encourages young adults to release personal data in order to enjoy social inclusion even while in their most rational moments they may espouse more conservative norms.”

Yet that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t believe all the stories about younger people prolifically posting photos of their beer-guzzling, scantily clad selves.

“But there is not enough research to find out (whether) older people do the same thing,” said Joseph Turow, professor at Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication. “Older adults, they may not show up naked, but they may be releasing other kinds of (personal) information.”

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The Social Media Cheat Sheet

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YouTube ‘Brings Sexy Back’ To Charity Work

The Los Angeles Regional Food Bank needed a way to tell the world about its work. Shawn Ahmed wanted to continue the video storytelling he’d begun on behalf of the poor in Bangladesh.

YouTube wanted to bring them together.

The result, YouTube’s Video Volunteers page, pairs deserving but underfunded charities with creative video producers willing to help them. The page has brought hundreds of sometimes-offbeat fundraising and promotional videos to the same site that launched such Web celebrities as singer Susan Boyle and the “Leave Britney Alone” guy.

“There are all these really big, sexy parts of YouTube, but we need people to know about this [project] because it actually matters,” said YouTube spokesman Aaron Zamost, invoking pop star Justin Timberlake.

“The nonprofits aren’t that sexy — but we’re trying to bring sexy back a little bit to the nonprofits.”

The Video Volunteers page lets nonprofits post descriptions of projects for which they need videos produced. Video artists, in turn, can scroll the offerings and pick a cause they’d like to help.

Since October, the site has featured a particular issue each month. February’s issue is health. The best videos get featured on YouTube’s main page, giving massive exposure to both the charity and the video artist.

“We would love to think users just do it out of the kindness of their own hearts,” said Ramya Raghavan, the nonprofits and activism manager at YouTube, who said she thinks that’s usually the case. “But I think the incentive piece does help a lot.”

On average, about 75 new volunteer videos appear on the page each month. During “animal welfare month” in October, 120 new videos were created, Raghavan said.

Last year, Ahmed, who had already visited Bangladesh to video blog and raise funds for poverty relief there through his personal project, Uncultured, was looking for a way to address the issue closer to home.

He found out about the Los Angeles, California, food bank through YouTube and the charity’s parent organization, Feeding America.

“It was just really serendipity,” said Ahmed, who lives in Toronto, Canada. “I wanted to do something charitable at home and YouTube had made a relationship with Feeding America. This actually made things really, really easy for me.”

The food bank is one of the nation’s largest and distributes about 1 million pounds of food a week. Its staffers were thrilled at the prospect.

Spokeswoman Julie Flynn said the staff recognized the value of an online video presence, but never had the time or money to seriously pursue it.

“We’re just trying to maintain our own Web site,” she said. “It was really nice to have someone volunteer, and a cool way for [Ahmed] to get involved. It was a perfect blend of his passion, his skills and our need.”

The resulting video shows Ahmed touring the bank’s distribution center on a forklift, interviewing clients and, ultimately, showing the 10,000 pounds of food he was able to provide with a $2,000 donation he’d raised online.

It appeared on YouTube’s main page on Thanksgiving Day, and had gotten more than 400,000 page views as of this week.

The key to success on YouTube, Ahmed said, is realizing that the site’s viewers are different than a television audience and that traditional public-service announcements aren’t going to cut it.

“When people watch videos on YouTube, they don’t approach it the same way as when they watch CNN or ‘Heroes,’ ” he said. “It’s very personal interaction for them. I just wanted to take a personal approach … I thought if I do it this way, people would get more involved.”

Many of the clips are quirky, unconventional and self-referencing — taking their cues from some of the most viral videos on the site.

One video titled “The World Sucks: Make It Suck Less” promotes the launch of Video Volunteers while name-dropping some of the most viral Web videos ever.

“How about we put a squirrel on water skis and we tie a banner to its neck with all the stuff that you want to say about charity?” says a guy having a video chat about the page. “Or, we take a 7-year-old kid to the dentist, we get him all hopped up on pain medications and then we have him talk about charity.”

In the end, Raghavan said, the project is about giving charities — which often struggle to make ends meet in tough economic times — a chance to make their case to the masses.

“If you’re a pet shelter in Kansas, you don’t have the money, you don’t have the staff and, frankly, you don’t have Bono,” she said, referring to the U2 singer’s worldwide One campaign. “It’s very hard to get your message out.”

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10 Social Media Metrics Your Company Should Measure

While companies are starting to adopt Social Media for online marketing campaigns, and even letting employees participate, the question of ROI (Return on Investment) arises, along with doubts about what metrics to measure. How do you know how effective your social media campaigns are if you’re not measuring any metrics, let alone an overall ROI? Below, we discuss ten important Social Metrics for companies.

According to 2009 Mzinga & Babson Executive Education study, over 80% of professionals do not measure ROI for their company’s social media programs. Granted, Social Metrics and their measurement techniques are relatively new, and this might account for the lag in tracking. However, there are some organizations measuring social metrics, which enables them to eventually measure ROI. Marketing Sherpa’s survey of 2,000+ marketers shows the following three social metrics at the top of what’s being measured:

1. Visitors and sources of traffic
2. Network size (followers, fans, members)
3. Quantity of commentary about brand or product

These are easily understandable common social metrics. However, with some C-level executives saying that they want to measure ROI from social media but don’t yet know the value of certain types of social media, there has to be more measurement and analysis. Monitoring data is only valuable if metrics relevant to a company are being tracked, analyzed, then applied to improving a Social Media Marketing (SMM) strategy. Each company may have some specific requirements, but here are ten important social media metrics to measure:

1. Social media leads. Track web traffic breakdowns from all social media sources, and chart the top few sources over time. If members of your social media networks are sending referrals, consider measuring this data as well.
2. Engagement duration. For some companies, engagement duration is more important than page views. For example, if you have a Facebook application, how much time are social network members spending using it? Is per-member usage increasing over time? Alternately, if people visit your your company websites from SM (Social Media) sites, how long are they spending? (Also consider tracking which pages they visit.)
3. Bounce rate. Are visitors coming to your site from SM sites but quickly leaving? Maybe your landing page needs better, more relevant copy. Maybe the information they’re seeking isn’t easily found.
4. Membership increase and active network size. This is the portion of your company’s social networks (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) that actively engages with your social media content (e.g., Twitter, Facebook Pages, etc.) Is your collective members, followers, fans network growing, and is there interaction with your content?
5. Activity ratio. How active is your company’s collective social network? Compare the ratio of active members vs total members, and chart this over time. There’ll always be some social network members who are inactive, but if you initiate a campaign to increase interaction, you should also measure the resulting data. Activity can be measured in a variety of ways, including usage of social applications.
6. Conversions. You want social network members to convert: into subscriptions, sales (direct or through affiliates), Facebook application use, or whatever other offerings you have in your overall sales funnel and that can somehow be directly or indirectly monetized. (E.g., subscription to a weekly e-newsletter can be monetized by giving other companies access to your list in the form of advertising.) Measure all types of conversions and chart them over time.
7. Brand mentions in social media. So, you have a highly active social network and members are talking about your company or the company’s brands. Measure and track both positive and negative mentions, and their quantities.
8. Loyalty. Are social members interacting in the network repeatedly, sharing content and links, mentioning your brands, evangelizing? How many members reshare? How often do they reshare?
9. Virality. Social members might be sharing Twitter tweets and Facebook updates relevant to your company, but is this info being reshared by their networks? How soon afterwards are they resharing? How many FoaFs (Friends of Friends) are resharing your links and content?
10. Blog interaction. This is actually more than one metric lumped together. Blogs ARE part of an SMM (Social Media Marketing) toolkit, but only if you allow comments and interact with readers by responding. If you’re doing this, encourage responses either directly in the comments section of blog posts, or via Twitter. (Use a blog widget that allows this.) If your blog’s content is suitable for social voting (Digg, Propeller, Mixx, etc.) or social bookmarking (Delicious, Stumbleupon) sites, install a blog plugin that displays the necessary sharing “buttons”, then track referrals back from those sites.

You can see from the above list that there are both key metrics and variations that you’ll probably want to monitor and analyze, depending on your business objectives. Not all of them are simple metrics to track, and as such do require either or both custom tools and custom reports. Supplement your metrics reports by noting any milestones in your SMM plan. Also, if you run any sort of social campaigns, measure the ROI on specific goals. Social campaigns could use applications (E.g., Facebook applications like Mob the Rainbow) to encourage social participation. Measure application usage and resulting conversions. Finally, the use of complex measurements such as Multiple Moving Averages (MMAs) can show both short- and long-term trends, thus providing you with an overall view of the health of your sites and social networks.

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Twitter Creator Reveals Square Mobile-Pay Device

Paris, France (CNN) — Twitter creator Jack Dorsey Wednesday gave the first public demonstration of his hotly-anticipated latest venture — a device to allow credit card payments by cell phone — and revealed it would be given away for free.

Details of “Square” — a card reader which plugs into the headphone socket of most mobile devices — have been circulating on the Internet since it was announced earlier this month, but little has been known about how it works or who it was aimed at.

However, Dorsey — whose microblogging Web site has proved hugely popular but not hugely profitable since launching in March 2006 — gave no explanation on how he would make money from his new creation, beyond revealing there would be a per-transaction charity donation.

Square, a tiny cube about an inch in length, contains a magnetic strip reader that allows users to swipe and read credit cards, then deduct payment on or offline through a downloaded application that communicates with card issuers in the same way as retailer devices.

Customers then use their finger on the phone’s touch-recognition screen to sign their name to the transaction.

Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and chairman, says the device, scheduled for launch on iPhones and iPods in March 2010, was inspired partly by the “immediacy, approachability and transparency” of Twitter and by the global economic crisis which has exposed a need for a radical rethink of the financial sector.

“The financial world is amazing right now because there’s a clean slate. A lot of these industries are looking for something very small and innovative,” he said during the gremlin-hit demonstration of his device at LeWeb, a major Internet forum in Paris.

“My co-founder is a glass artist. He sells things that people don’t need — $2,000 glass faucets. They’re beautiful. If he could not take credit cards, he wouldn’t make the sale because no one carries around $2,000 in the cash.

“So we looked at it. Ninety percent of the U.S. has moved to credit cards, but it’s still very difficult to accept them.”

Dorsey said he considered a number of options in developing Square, including using cell phone cameras and character recognition software to read images of the credit card.

“The other thing we looked at is the audio jack — and it’s on Macbooks, desktop PCs, BlackBerries and Androids. We built this hardware. It’s a self-powered swiper. Powered by the magnetic power of the swipe itself, converts it to an audio signal, which the software interprets.”

Dorsey, who joked he had pocketed $650 by allowing potential business partners to road test the device with their own credit cards, said Square was currently being beta tested in a handful of major U.S. cities by a cross-section of small business users.

“We’re trying with a bunch of different profiles of folks in New York, San Francisco, LA and St. Louis, Missouri. There are piano teachers, flight instructors, and coffee shops. It can be used in a retail store like Apple, all the way down to Craigslist or paying me back for that dinner you owe me.”

Dorsey said his developers were still working to ensure the device was fraud proof.

By Barry Neild, CNN
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Crossover Learnings Between Email And Social Media

by Chad White

What Email Can Learn from Social Networks

Expressing personality. Most brands can no longer afford to be faceless entities. The interactivity and transparency of the Internet has elevated the need for personality. Luckily, there are several ways to do this: You can use an executive as TigerDirect does, staff members like Crutchfield, or your customers like REI. The most poignant expression of personality I’ve seen recently is Backcountry’s memorial message for skier Shane McConkey.

Expressing a sense of community. People want discounts and helpful information, but many also want to be part of a community. Including product testimonials from product reviews on your site is one way to do this. Backcountry goes a step further and highlights its top contributors in its monthly newsletter.

Mark Brownlow of Email Marketing Reports recently suggested another way to build a community feel: adding social proof to your email sign-up process, such as a running count of how many subscribers you have. Thanks to blogs, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, subscriber counts are a well-established and highly promoted measurement of legitimacy and influence. I haven’t seen anyone try this yet, but the idea is intriguing.

What Social Networks Can Learn from Email

Providing exclusivity. Email subscribers appreciate it when they get exclusive deals and information not available to your Web site visitors. It helps justify them sharing their email address with you. With social networks, there’s a similar dynamic. Some people will ask themselves, “Why should I bother to be a fan if the announcements and other content are available on your Web site or to email subscribers?”

There’s value to making information available via different channels — being channel-agnostic is great m– but if you want to get people to engage with you via multiple channels, then the experience has to be different. Indeed, people expect to have a different experience with your brand via Facebook vs. Twitter vs. email, for instance.

Explaining the benefits of joining. Just as email sign-ups suffer when you don’t explain the benefits of receiving your emails, your “Find us on Facebook” or “Follow us on Twitter” call-to-action put the burden on your customers to explore the benefits themselves. Quickly listing the key benefits can be effective in getting people motivated to take action. In a recent email, Fingerhut did a good job of selling the benefits for engaging with the company on Facebook and Twitter.

Driving subscribers to other channels. Providing customers with many avenues to take advantage of offers and exposing them to different channels has well-established benefits. Just as email programs aren’t maximizing their opportunity when they drive traffic solely to the Web, self-contained social networks are destined to underperform. Look for occasions to expose customers to multiple channels. Sephora did that recently by asking email subscribers to share a digital gift (a tote bag) with their Facebook friends; if they did that, they could get a real Sephora tote from their local store. But the most impressive utilization of a brand’s channels that I’ve seen recently was Buy.com and its Tweet n Seek contest, which had participants following them on Twitter, searching Buy.com, visiting their Facebook page, and reading products pages.

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Fundraiser’s Atwitter Over New Cash Stream

The money to be raised through social networking has some nonprofits seeing green. 

 By Clare Trapasso

“At least three-quarters of what people donated to my fundraising fund came from Facebook, easily,” said Fogarty, whose 57-year-old father is battling colon cancer. “The Facebook application made it a lot easier to get the word out, because people could see it centrally located on my Facebook [page.]”

In this rough economy, every dollar counts. Nonprofits of all sizes are learning that social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are inexpensive ways to tap into new audiences – and new revenue streams. And although efforts to raise money through these types of sites are still in the early stages, some in the nonprofit world believe that social networks will eventually become key sources of charitable donations.

“It’s a growing trend, but it’s still in its infancy,” said Craig Weinrich, outreach coordinator for the Nonprofit Coordinating Committee of New York, about the social media fundraising phenomenon. “This is very similar to when the Internet first came on and e-mail really boomed.”

The majority of the almost 1,800 nonprofit organizations that the committee represents in New York City, Long Island and Westchester are beginning to use sites like Facebook and Twitter, Weinrich said. He believes they are good ways for organizations to reach new people and develop relationships with them. This can eventually lead to donations in the future.

“It will not replace fundraising letters and person-to-person solicitations,” Weinrich said of raising money through social media. But “in the next couple years, nonprofits will figure out ways to make social media a viable fundraising tool for their organizations.”

The American Cancer Society has already begun to explore this idea. It began using the Boundless Fundraising application that Fogarty had put on her Facebook page about a year ago, said Melissa Lee, the society’s Eastern Division Director of eRevenue. The application was successful, because it capitalized on people’s existing social networks, she said. This exposed her group to new audiences.

Most of the donations the society received through Facebook were from first-time givers, Lee said. But the average gift was less than $5.

“It can’t make up the difference in the dollar gap [due to the economy],” Lee said. “But what it can do is help us stay in people’s minds. … The more people who see us, the more impact we’re going to have, and that will eventually translate into dollars down the line.”

That’s what Daniel Buckley, the online communications manager at the Food Bank for New York City, has come to believe.

His organization set up a Causes page on Facebook where people can make charitable donations to his group online. Overall, Causes has raised about $18 million since it was launched in May 2007, Causes’ director of nonprofit relations Matthew Mahan wrote in an e-mail. About 65,000 nonprofits currently use it to fundraise, Mahan said.

In the two years the Food Bank has used it, the group has raised almost $2,600 through the application – without having to do a thing, Buckley said. But that’s not very much cash. “I absolutely believe social networks will become a significant source of charitable donations over time, but they’re not there yet,” he said. “In fact, they’re not even close.”

He’s more excited about how sites like Twitter, and YouTube videos, have increased traffic to the Food Bank’s website. “We almost exclusively use social media as an awareness-building tool and a community-building tool,” Buckley said. “It’s a great place to develop relationships with individuals that hopefully will translate into donor or volunteer relationships down the line.”

Deanna Lee, vice president for communications and marketing at the New York Public Library, would agree that social media is a good way to get people involved in an organization.

Last summer, the library launched an online advertising campaign to combat a looming $28 million city budget cut. The library put a giant red pop-up box on its web page asking people to take action by contacting their local officials and donating to the library, Lee said. At the same time, the nonprofit started a YouTube campaign featuring celebrities speaking about what libraries meant to them.

Almost 10,000 e-mails were sent to city officials during the campaign and about $23 million of city funding was restored. The library also received more than $50,000 in gifts from more than 1,100 donors. About 80 percent of those donors were first-time library donors, Lee said.

“The whole point in using different social media platforms is to tie them together to push them back to the point of action,” Lee said. “Young people don’t want you to just throw information at them. … They want a call to action.”

But not every organization is looking at social media as a way to raise money. A group called Takes All Types is trying to help organizations and institutions like the Coney Island Hospital collect blood donations.

The Brooklyn-based nonprofit builds technology that organizations can use to recruit new blood donors in an area. When that region runs low on a certain blood type, prospective donors receive messages on where to donate on whichever technology they signed up for, said organization executive director Ben Bergman. That technology can include Facebook and MySpace applications or even Twitter and text messages.

“This is the most important new medium on the Internet for nonprofits,” said Sree Sreenivasan, the dean of student affairs at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, who speaks to nonprofits several times a month about how to utilize social media. “I can guarantee you it’s going to continue to grow as an important way in which nonprofits connect with the world around them.”

But he cautioned groups against only using social media to fundraise. “It’s not a broadcast channel, it’s an engagement channel,” Sreenivasan said. “It’s for connecting with your audience, seeing what they’re interested in and answering when they ask a question.”

- Clare Trapasso

 

Socialnomics ROI Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypmfs3z8esI

How Not For Profits Can Succeed Online – Social Networking

Social Networking has become extremely popular for one primary reason… People want to connect. Social networking sites have given people the ability to exchange ideas and information with other like minded individuals. They can gather in large or small groups and virtually brainstorm, network, share and gain insights. The question becomes, how do you harness this activity to benefit your organization?

Jump in with both feet:

When you join a social network, create a profile – but don’t just stop there. Start a group or join other existing groups. Sites like Facebook have groups – these groups give people who have a common interest a place to enter into discussions, share links, videos and photos and even promote new ideas. Finding a group of people who would be interested in your cause is a simple matter of searching. Let’s say you are looking for a group of people who are interested in helping victims of domestic violence, do a search on domestic violence and check out the groups that come up. Try these searches: Museums, Animal Safety, Diabetes. If a group doesn’t exist that suits your needs… start one!

Do not discount MySpace. Check out the the MySpace Impact Awards (http://www.myspace.com/impactawards). The Impact Rewards honor organizations who work to create a positive difference in the world. It may not win you donation dollars, but it will go a long way to creating trust and recognition in the online community. The only thing you are required to do is set up a MySpace page for your organization and share your message.

Interact with the people you connect with on a regular basis. Set aside a fixed amount on time on a daily or weekly basis to log in, check out your profile and share with others. This is about building relationships. I doubt that you would walk up to a stranger on the street and ask for support or money. The same holds true for your online connections. Let people get to know you and your organization and the trust will come.

Set your organization up to receive donations:

This may seem obvious, but in fact many Not for Profits don’t do this. Both Facebook and MySpace have charity contribution widgets. Facebook has Causes and MySpace has teamed up with PayPal to create donation widgets (PayPal account is required). However, I should note that statistically, the donation amount is smaller ($10 or so) but it is from more people. This is known as the Long Tail of Fundraising. You get your message out – it reaches more people who give less but it spreads out (like a tail) over a longer period of time. In addition ebay has Ebay Giving Works which allows people who are already auctioning items to donate a % to your organization. Smaller sites like Network for Goodfocus on gathering people who are looking to incorporate philanthropy into their lives.

Post Your Events and Invite Connections:

Facebook and MySpace both have public calendars for you to advertise your events on. Google has one as well. The advantage is the calendars get indexed in the search engines – just one more way for people to find your web site.

Share… Share… Share and don’t forget your web site:

All roads lead to Rome. In everything you do your main goal is to get people back to your web site.

Set up a blog on your web site and link it to your Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Google accounts. This allows you to work once and spread the word in multiple places. There are automated software programs such as twitterfeed (www.twitterfeed.com) that send your post to twitter. You can set up your Facebook account to have the status automatically update with your Twitter account. In addition you can use the Blog Networks or Blog RSS Feeder Applications to automatically import blog posts into your Facebook profile. I also use Ping.fm to blast out announcements to my Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn status lines.

Let’s assume you have 100 friends on LinkedIn or Facebook. You send your message out to those 100 people. Those 100 people then send it to their friends, say another 1000 people. Those are 1000 people that you would have not been able to otherwise reach. That is what Social Networking is about. It will take an investment of time and energy to have it pay off, but it will pay off.

Keep Your Eye on the Conversation:

With the rewards comes some risk:

Reputation Management: Once you unleash the social networking beast, it can be hard to rein in. You have to keep on top of what is being said about your organization. Setting up news and blog alerts in Google and Yahoo is a very smart idea (http://www.google.com/alerts http://alerts.yahoo.com/). You can track what is being said on twitter through twitter monitoring tools such as twitter scoop ( http://www.twitscoop.com/) and other software available online

Not all bad press is bad. If something is constructively critical of your organization, you have an opportunity to correct it. You can rebut or make right the complaint without hiding it and actually win the trust of those “watching”.

Message Dilution: An organization’s message and purpose can get diluted in the Social Networking arena. I akin this phenomenon to playing telephone – when the message passes through many mouths and ears, it can be altered. The reality is, on the web, people are having conversations without the organization or corporation being involved. This means that you will not always have control over what is being said – and you know what, that’s ok. Releasing some of the control is not necessarily a bad thing.

More ways to Share Your Stories:

Itunes can be used the same way as blogs for Podcasts and YouTube and Google Video for Video Feeds (all free).

Some examples of good Social Networking use for Not For Profits:

Shelterbox Fan Page on Facebook: http://www.new.facebook.com/pages/ShelterBox/25010947137

Youth Against Poverty Page on MySpace: http://profile.myspace.com/youthagainstpoverty

Check out this well done video by the NY American Red Cross

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