Virtual Insanity

So I just had the honor of speaking at the 2009 National Catholic Development Conference and after a frantic morning of racing around trying to make sure the conference room where I would be speaking had wireless internet access (it did, thanks to the herculean efforts of one Ryan Gates Gold...who organized that conference so well, it ran like a well-oiled machine - and I know how stressful and challenging it can be to put conference events together. She deserves a standing ovation.)

Anyhoo...my session was called "An Introduction to Social Networking" and much of my prepared presentation was to show Facebook Fan Pages in detail...and wouldn'tcha know it...Facebook Fan pages (at least ours and all the ones I could think of) were down!!! By the time I took the train back to Baltimore, they were fine, but in the 60 minutes I was standing in front of a room full of people, I could not get access to our page. A frantic call to my colleague back at the office, quickly confirmed it was not just me - she couldn't access it either. Drag!

Most people would have to think fast on their feet. Me, I just sorta had an out of body experience...still not sure exactly what I said. I am usually pretty calm about public speaking, but man, I was so flustered!

Trying to talk about social networking in the abstract to a room full of people who have very limited knowledge of Facebook was, let's say, quite a challenge. Of course, being that it was NCDC members, they were all just as nice and polite as they could be, but I felt like I was explaining how to do brain surgery on the moon while speaking in another language. I wish I could have done a better job.

Anyway, lesson learned for next time...screenshot backups. Definitely.

Um, Seth? Gotta disagree, bro.

That's it. I've had it.

I'm might as well pack it all in. I'm washed up, useless, worthless, and not fit to have the word "online" in my job title.

According to this post by Seth Godin (who, btw, I've been a fan of since his "Permission Marketing" book in the go-go early dot.com days), the nonprofit I work for is a failure, because it is not in the top 100 Twitter users in terms of followers. And it is my job to develop our social networking outreach strategy. #fail!

Really, Seth? This is how you measure the effectiveness of nonprofits? Really?

I can't think of a more insipid criteria to measure whether a nonprofit is adverse to change or not, or has an effective communications strategy. Here's why:

1. Nonprofits are adverse to change? Maybe, and to varying degrees some more than others, but isn't everyone? When's the last time you brought home a different brand of toothpaste without someone in your household complaining? Big business, government, manufacturing are all resistant to change (well said, CauseWired.)
   
   
2. Nonprofits have to be good stewards. If NPO's changed their strategy every time the blogosphere got all hot and bothered about the next new thing, we'd all be holding virtual events in Second Life. We owe some caution-before-action to our donors and to those we serve by our mission. We should not be first in the pool. We should at least make sure it is full of water before diving in.
   
   
3. Free is so not free. Managing social networking sites takes staff time - a luxury most nonprofits do not have. At my org, we are fortunate to have 1.5 people managing our social networking profiles (in addition to managing a host of other things, of course), but I know how lucky we are. You have to devote time to it to do it well.
   
   
4. Top 100 on Twitter. Notice anything about what those folks have in common? Most of them don't have day jobs! Or at least not 9-5 jobs. They are celebrities. And many have a staff of people to either tweet for them or ply them with content. They are free to tweet on about the particularities of their day and it is still going to be more widely read than anything I could possibly post about the amazing work my NPO does. God that's depressing.
   
   
5. Shouldn't quality of followers matter? Here's the deal. We're selective. Here's why: We actually use our Twitter channel to listen. I scan our followers' tweets quite a bit. Not just when they mention us, but their everyday tweets. Why? Because I actually want to know, what are they interested in? What types of posts are they retweeting? Are our followers more liberal or more conservative? It's fascinating. But I don't want to wade through pages and pages of followers telling me how to "Get more followers instantly" or "Check out my barely legal photos." So we screen new followers, and if they are spammers, we block them. You can't tell me Ashton screens all 3 million + of his followers.
   

Seth, I'm sorry; I have to call you out on this one. You've got it all wrong.

It's all about the thank you

Wunderkind Chris Brogan has yet another great post up today about the importance of saying thank you. I could not agree more.

One of my work projects that I am most proud of is a team-led idea of creating a video of my organization's beneficiaries who had been helped by my organization, and we asked, on camera, what they would say to a donor if they had the opportunity. Each one chose to say "thank you" in the most heartfelt and genuine way - it was beautiful.

We launched this video, via an e-mail and a social network push right around thanksgiving and the response was overwhelming. We received more than two dozen e-mails from recipients stating they were humbled by the video and that they were honored and inspired to have an opportunity to serve the poor overseas. We intentionally had no ask in the e-mail, but our year-end campaign (which started a week later), did spectacularly, despite the tough economic climate. It was so well received that we are planning to make this an annual event around Thanksgiving.

Whether the "thank you" video increased the year-end campaign's response is indiscernible, but judging from the people that took the time to write in, taking the time to thank them - and most importantly to give them the opportunity to hear it from someone they have helped - seemed to have an incredibly powerful effect.

It is also posted to youtube here.