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Network Effectiveness and Social MediaStrategy Map

Interactive Working Sessions for Packard Foundation GranteesMay 28, 2009

Small Group Simulation Game:

Objectives

–Who are we targeting?

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High school and college students—a group that’s “issue active” andactive online–What’s our high-level objective?–What do we want our target members to do?–Consider what tools are appropriate for the people we’re targeting: examinepeople’s social technographics by age; think about audience we’re targetingand the objectives and tools they’re using.

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Would we need other types of research? Other information aboutthem?–How do we differentiate between awareness, engagement, and support?

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Engagement is the higher standard–Must consider the audience’s attention span and the time-limit of thecampaign

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Can we presume people who are more active now will be more activelater?–How do we want people to become involved?–Is there listening we need to do?–What does engagement mean?

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Possibilities: Selling an earthworm kit, page views, submitting name toemail list, joining a Facebook cause, people posting videos to our siteas a way of monitoring engagement (i.e. “ a video of you doing theworm”)

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How to get people engaged: reach out to gardeners; create a wormavatar; set up worm dating service; create worm t-shirts (“I bought theworm”); encourage people to buy worm kits for kids; go to heiferorganization and start selling worm kits; sell / donate worm kits tofarmers in developing countries; target gardeners around usingworms in their gardens (target via interest/hobby focused websites)–Key advice: “Build a network before you need it”–When do we listen and when do we participate?–How do we define our strategy until we know what our objective is?

Online Tools

–Listening: Google Alerts, Bloglines/Google Reader, Technorati, Twitter–Participation: Go Comment, learning/listening journal, Twitter,–Sharing: creative commons, organizational blog (WordPress), podcasting(iTunes), widgets (lets fans share content), video sharing (blipTV, YouTube),photo sharing (flickr),–Spreading: StumbleUpon internet community, Digg, FriendFeed, Twitter,Utterli (micromedia tool for podcasting from cell phone), social networking(LinkedIn, Ning, Change.org, Facebook)

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“We want to do all of these things”

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“I could spend three hours doing a blog or three hours tweeting andretweeting. The question is, am I creating educational content that hasvalue to my audience or am I feeding the froth? Can you get anaudience without substance?”

Strategy

–Listen

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“You’re always listening”—Beth

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Google Reader is a source for listening on an ongoing basis andtracking articles

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Major flaw in social media strategy, but a common one, is to start atthe “generating buzz” piece—and skip all the first steps. You mustdevelop an audience first–Participation

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Organizational blog

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coalition blog: Ensure partner networkscontributing to the blog, so if each network blogging then we’ll start toamass more content and gain more readers

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Must have content that you’re promoting, at least at the beginning:basic facts, i.e. on gardening

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Have own blog on organizational website that links back to relevantblogs, drives people to them, generates content for own site–Blog important: tweeting and sending people back to your blog with your owncontent

Group Report Out: Strategy, Tradeoffs, Challenges

Strategy:

–Focus on outreach and retention of young members; must know thedemographic. 1) Listen: Use Technorati (track what’s happening with worms,gardening, composting). 2) Participate via Twitter. 3) Sharing story throughorganizational blog (important to create content and cross post on blogs2

about gardening, composting) 4) Join social networking site (age cohort veryfocused on social networking, so will create page on worms, ensure blogposts updated on Facebook page)–Focus on college students with a passion for gardening: listen to peopleonline in garden groups, sustainability through a few avenues: Google Alerts,RSS, Twitter (search different keywords, use tools to look at twitter profilesand search potential followers, use tools that rate listener influence—twitfluence)–Grow and engage membership: 50,000 Gen X and Y. Blended approach: 1)partner with concert to have an earthworm event. 2) Gear up for eventthrough social media: have people design t-shirts that we then sell at concert.3) Listen: use alerts, technorati, Twitter (use as key leverage point byretweeting). 3) Participation (social networking, pitching our info to otherbloggers).–We decided on an ideal number of tools, then narrowed down: 1)Google andtechnorati. 2) Start commenting on blogs and develop relationships withbloggers (they could help spread the word3) Employ Twitter and socialnetworking, as they go well together.

Tradeoffs:

–Had to carefully consider audience, and what would be appropriate for thecause–Breadth vs depth: are we trying to go too deep? Is it about growingmembership than getting information out? (We decided our goal was to getpeople together, grow membership. Chose mass marketing over a deepereducation)

Difficulties

:–Trying not to lead with the tools: Difficult figuring out communicationsmessage: Why are we putting tools ahead of the message?–Clarifying depth of involvement with each tool: were coming to theunderstanding that there are different levels of involvement for each tool: Twitter vs blog requires different efforts: how involved do you want to be?–Defining membership and engagement: what does membership mean? Howdo we gauge successful engagement?–How to measure engagement: is it subscriptions to blog, followers on Twitter,reTweets, links back to blog, or something else?

Strong Tactics: