AAUW NC has had

• a mailing list open to all members since 1997 or so with more specialized lists (for branch presidents, state leaders) for several years. These are set up as “discussion lists” but only a few people ever post.
• an RSS feed since about 2005  aauwnc.org/feed, which (theoretically) offers a way to subscribe to the news
• a twitter account since 2007 or so (originally set up as a to retweet web site posts marked as “announcements” and encouraging folks to “subscribe via your phone”), twitter.com/aauwnc
• and a Facebook page since ?? (maybe late 2008 or sometime in 2009). facebook.com/aauwnc

These are integrated in the following ways

Tools:

• twitterfeed.com used to read the RSS feed from the web site and repost to twitter
• ping.fm used to post items to Facebook and Twitter at the same time
• tweetree used to read/post as @nes49  – a browser based client that doesn’t have the advanced “listening” features of something like tweetdeck or hootsuite but does have “real names” and threaded discussions which really help me understand the messages.
• twirl used to manage “organization” twitter accounts, making it easy to be both @aauwnc and @ncwu
• The website posts are imported to Facebook using the notes application — doesn’t always work correctly (and seems to be particularly problematic today, sigh).

An  earlier part of the conversation mentioned using Facebook to reach college/university populations. AAUW NC uses it to reach Facebook members in general, and doesn’t gear it for C/U communication in particular. There are many nonmember fans of the page, but few of those are on campuses. They are mostly friends of fans or come from connections through our allied organizations.

None of these communication avenues have a broad reach, and I don’t spend much time on analytics. From anecdotal evidence, I have to believe that the Facebook page is doing a better job of reaching our members. On the other hand, since we’ve set up the page we’ve cut back on our “e-newsletter” publications, and I’m sure we’re missing some people who haven’t “liked” the page, don’t use Facebook at all, and never check the News page on the web site. So we’re going back to basics and looking at better use of a mailing list, which is still the way many people prefer to get their news.  As for nonmembers — twitter and Facebook both reach folks who might not have heard about us otherwise — but we’ve not been  as intentional about the outreach as we might have been.

For more on the general topic of setting up a marketing plan and using new (and old) media, I’d recommend Kivi Leroux Miller’s new book “The Nonprofit Marketing Guide”  (amazon link). It has a number of practical tips, some of which are aimed at larger organizations. But I found it useful to read in the context of a branch/state marketing plan, most of which fall into her “marketing department of one” target audience. See www.nonprofitmarketingguide.com for more. [I'm rereading it now -- let me know if you're interested in a virtual book discussion.]

See also www.aauwnc.org/subscribe.

In 2007, in response to the culture change to have more information immediately available, we also tried using twitter to get information out from the floor of the convention. Louse (@weegspin), Kate (@skeggy), and I (@nes49) were pretty much shouting into the void, though — there was no real way to get the word out to the members that another information stream existed. See the report on that experiment.

This year, however, there was a rich “twitter stream” on all aspects of the convention. Staff and members both contributed, and while there was limited “conversations” with the folks back home, at least the word got out to many who were able to follow along. See the transcript.

What changed? Here’s my list:

1. Facebook happened. In the spring of 2007 a student from Alabama had started the first (and still the largest) AAUW Facebook group. After the 2007 convention, a second group was started by students from Illinois Iowa to help unite the younger members.  Starting in the fall of 2007, Facebook started attracting the “not so younger” members who were able to find each other, and they started conversations on how to use Facebook to advance the mission. The 2009 convention itself had a group.
2. AAUW started a blog in early 2008. The staff’s use of “web 2.0″ technology to raise awareness and support conversations legitimized the use of “putting unfiltered information into the public domain” in addition to the tightly controlled e-mail lists and the properly more formal research reports and www.aauw.org in general.
3. In late 2008, AAUW committed to sponsor the Feminism 2.0 conference, and that conference in February, 2009, demonstrated the possibilities of both blogging and micro-blogging to forge connections and build support for a wide range of issues on the feminist agenda.
4. So by June 2009, we had folks with blogs, facebook profiles, twitter, flickr and more who were ready to report back to the members at home about all that was going on. More than that, they could find each other and share photos, comments, and updates. I don’t know all that went into the staff’s decision not to publish a daily “newspaper” about the convention — but I think the coverage was pretty good without that extremely labor intensive project. Of course we’re still using e-mail lists and other tools to gather information for state newsletters and web sites, and more will be coming out in the next few weeks. But I think we did a credible job of getting the flavor of convention to those who couldn’t attend but were engaged enough to follow the information stream.

Again, I’m just seeing part of the elephant, but I have to give credit to Linda Hallman who took over as ED in January 2008 for supporting a culture that allowed this experimentation by the staff. Thanks, of course, to all the staff members and volunteers who participated. After such a big disappointment with twitter in 2007, this 2009 information sharing has been great.

I wonder what things will look like in 2011…

I’ll be traveling with my trusty laptop — this is old faithful’s fourth convention (knock wood). [See posts from 2003, 2005 and 2007.] But because Internet connectivity at convention is limited, I won’t be lugging that with me during the day — no e-mail or web (or Facebook), but I will have twitter.

On twitter we’re using the “hashtag” #aauw09, and folks at home can follow that at

• search.twitter.com or with other tools, like
• http://wthashtag.com/Aauw09 (“What the Hashtag”) — summary stats and a transcript [Thanks, Peggy!]  or
• twitterfall.com, and put #aauw09 in the search box (or use this link), then check back on that browser window every once in awahile.

If you want to post a comment or a question from home, some of us will be “listening” for that. You can post general comments to the #aauw09 twitter stream, but you can also send targeted messages (use “D <twittername>”) to reach a particular person. No promises, of course — there will be times when phones are turned off and we’re concentrating on the interactions with the wonderful members we see once every two years. But it may be a way to reach out to convention attendees and add your voice to the conversation.  You may just want to ues e-mail or Facebook to post your comments — some people will be staying in touch all day, and others will pick up those messages over night.

If you’re going to be in St. Louis and will depend on your phone for access, you have lots of options if you’ve entered the age of the “smart” phone. But if, like me, text messaging is the limit of your phone connectivity, how do you follow the #aauw09 conversation from the floor of the convention? Again, you may not want to keep up with all of that — but I’m exploring some options and if you have a suggestion, let me know. If any of my experiments pan out, I’ll let y’all know what I’m using.

The Fem2.0 conference brought it back to my attention (though I still think scrolling the #fem2 tweets on the screen behind the panelists was more distracting than valuable, and the twitter based meetings were *really* low on signal to noise). Also that meeting helped put twitter on the AAUW radar, so there’s now an “official” @aauw twitter stream and a few of the staff chime in on their own. I’ve still no evidence that AAUW members in general are into twitter — I expect (as I found in 2007) that the number of AAUW twitterers compares to the number of AAUW Facebook users about the way twitter/facebook has penetrated the general population. That might be down from the 1:100 ratio to more like 1:30 — but with only on the order of 1000 folks on Facebook who identify with AAUW, I’m not convinced there’d be a big payoff for twitter. [But then, I remember crying as I was leaving the "younger members session" in Phoenix in 2007 -- the panel said "use text messaging" but my note about twittering the convention was rejected as  inappropriate for the Convention Daily.]

We’ll see if I stick with it (and can control the time sink). Two new tools may help:

• The Firefox add in Shareaholic. Almost a one-click tweet of an interesting link. Let me know if you find those annoying. I still do use del.icio.us for things of lasting value (particularly tag aauwtech).
• Web interface tweetree.com. This is something like twitter.com on steroids –
  • gives additional info on links including showing  the media links as pix or videos,
  • has a box to do a search directly (instead of moving over to search.twitter.com),
  • shows (as best as it can figure) the original message when a friend posts an @reply,
  • supports retweet directly (without copy/paste),
  • and more.

I’m still being circumspect about following other folks – so don’t take it personally, just consider my borderline ADD and twitter @nes49 to get my attention (or, as my twitter profile still says, find me on Facebook).

My background for the conference (which I guess I am thinking of as mix of web 2.0 and feminism) includes

• Working on web minus 1 strategies for using technology to connect people since 1982.
• Using web 1.0 strategies to connect feminists, in particular, since 1996
• Using web 2.0 strategies for feminists and other organizations since 2005.
• Supporting the NC Women United coalition with web/virtual office strategies since 2002 when the nonprofit that had been managing that organization’s projects lost its funding.

I’m a fan of WordPress and Facebook. I’m a twitter dropout (but for limited use of twitterfeed). I’ve been a noisy advocate for better use of technology at AAUW since 2001, and am currently serving as admin of the largest AAUW Facebook group which is about to pass 1000 members.

I hope to connect with new folks and learn new strategies to

• promote AAUW’s mission and feminist goals
• learn how to better use 2.0 strategies for fundraising
• engage volunteers, particularly feminists (of all generations)
• keep up with the whirlwind pace of new techniques that help us all share information without succumbing to information overload.

So, as you can see, I’m a “work on the plumbing” kind of person — not much feminist theory in my background, and I’ll let others do the heavy lifting of crafting positions that I’m glad to help publicize.

I’m looking forward to the day!

• Twitter Primer from Beth Kanter. Lots of info and links like the ones below.
• Twitter in Plain English from CommonCraft. A very short video that covers the basics in CommonCraft’s engaging style.
• The Big Juicy Twitter Guide from Caroline Middlebrook. Well named tutorial.

In any event, one thing I just learned about was the “favorites” option. On your twitter home page, over on the right, there’s a set of “stats.” The ones you’ll use most often will likely be the “Following” and “Followers” — how many folks you’re following and how many are getting your tweets. Next is “Favorites.” I’d assumed that was “favorite people,” like “top friends” in Facebook, and I ignored it because I just don’t do ranking that way. But it’s not. It’s favorite tweets — a way of marking messages as ones you’d want to get back to later. Just click the dim star at the end of a message and it will be listed in your “favorites.”

The goal of this exercise is to put AAUW info into the SMS stream so the SMS “natives” (who might not be reached with e-mail) get at least a few pings (if they choose to connect). We’re months away from figuring out if this really works — I won’t have much time to publicize it until after July 1. One piece to evaluate will be whether this really does bring in new contacts — or just reaches, say, the Facebook contacts in a different way.

But, as I said in the comments on the previous post, I think we’re there. The missing piece was twitterfeed.com. I’d heard of it before, and even got part way to setting up an account (had used my yahoo account to create an OpenID). But the full possibilities didn’t really register.  Here’s the summary:

1. Set up an RSS feed for the items you want to send to twitter. [In AAUW NC we have an "announcements" category for items that appear on the front page of the WordPress-based www.aauwnc.org. That seemed like a good subset of all the news to share in twitter.]
2. Choose an administrator for the twitter feed and set up an OpenID  for the administrator. Now this is my first experiment with OpenID, so it’s unlikely I understand all the implications here. One can use a Yahoo or AOL account to generate an OpenID (I used Yahoo). It also looks like it’s possible to link a WordPress.com or Blogger blog to set up an OpenID (if I’m reading the twitterfeed help correctly). I haven’t read the T&C’s carefully — if someone has a link to the OpenID basics (particularly OpenID for an organization rather than an individual), please post.
3. Create a twitter account that will retweet the items in the RSS feed, or choose one that already exists to tweet information of interest to the expected audience.
4. Login to twitterfeed.com with the OpenID and create a twitterfeed that links the RSS feed to the twitter account. There’s a minimal amount of configuration (titles only, include link).
5. Tell people who want to get the messages through IM or SMS to follow the twitter user created in #3 and set “notifications” for that user to “on”. [The assumption is that such folks exist -- otherwise everyone could just follow the RSS feed directly over the web.]

Now I’m not an SMS “native” (I can send and receive text messages on my phone, but it’s not something that I’ve integrated into my life). I haven’t drunk the Koolaid of IM (remembering the evil that was “write” back in the 80′s). I don’t use a PDA (paper DayTimer person, would you believe), let alone a smart phone. So I may have missed the point completely. If so, please do holler at me. But if you want to get AAUW NC announcements through twitter, follow “aauwnc”.

Other notes:

• Twitterfeed puts a limit on the number of messages it will forward – currently a max of 5 messages an hour. Consider this when choosing your feed in #1, and don’t expect “real time” forwarding of the messages.

• I “own” bbvx, so setting up twitter.com/bbvx was okay. I’m currently board chair for the all-volunteer AAUW NC, so I think I’m okay there, too. I do have a question, though, on what approval would be required to set up similar accounts for “aauw” and “nccwsl,” and what safeguards we should think about when passing, say, “aauwnc” from one person to another. [Yeah, yeah, I've been webmanager for nearly 10 years, but at some point ...]
• What happens to the tweets that are sent to the account set up in #3? If one uses an account that is set up just for that purpose, it, presumably won’t be “following” anyone, so there will be little motivation for anyone to check the twitter account. That means, I think, that direct messages will go into a black hole. Replies (@ messages) could be followed via RSS using an RSS reader that allows for authentication on the feed (I’m using RSSOwl).

I’ve made some corrections to the previous post based on what I’ve learned, and I may have found the missing piece to the kludge I started in this post. [Follow bbvx on twitter to see if I'm right -- should get notifications of new posts to this blog.] This may be the “hour delay” that Kari was talking about in the tutorial — or there may be some other solution that they’re working on.

The problem I’ve been trying to solve is how to use twitter to get info about an event out to folks who can’t attend the event. Kari’s concerned about twittering at NTC and needs a a way to get almost real-time messages (“cookies in the ballroom”) out to the attendees. I’m more concerned about getting highlights (“great speaker who made these points…”). Her solution (retweeting posts directed @08NTC) would be more general than mine.

That, I think, is the missing link in the instructions for “using Twitter for an event“. In thinking of 08NTC, I think the options for an attendee/non-attendee to get updates are:

1. “All messages from 08NTC and its friends” is too much information (and is, perhaps reasonably, only available from the web, I think).
2. “All messages from 08NTC” is too little (and puts the burden on the few 08NTC folks to keep everyone posted).
3. Setting “track 08NTC” is close, but seems to have some bugs (ktlove’s recent message was cut off after just a few characters when it got to my phone) and has no web interface.
4. Using #08NTC is close, but until just now, I hadn’t discovered any IM/phone interface. Twitterfeed.com might provide that, but since the service’s forwarding is throttled (5 messages an  hour) it isn’t be appropriate for conferences with lots of tweeters.
5. I think having 08NTC retweet all the @08NTC messages is “just right”. Even with the delay it’d be useful for the large number of folks who aren’t able to attend, and if the delay can be eliminated, and folks turn on “notifications” for 08NTC, I think you’ve got the “cookies in the ballroom” announcement scheme!

If #4 or #5 is feasible, then there’s probably no need to set up the “event” twitter account which is used now to provide a “with others” list of tweets. That list inevitably includes lots of messages that have nothing to do with the event. [This wasn't a problem for the AAUW 2007 convention because the few of us following aauw07 were only there so we could tweet about the convention. But for NTC? Talk about information overload!]

I can’t really tell you why I’m not letting this go — but if the BBVX experiment works, maybe I’ll talk to Patty again about setting up something similar for NCCWSL.

One “aha!” moment is that I now realize that while the Twitter canonical question is “what are you doing?” the users in the twittersphere have morphed that to include:

• What are you thinking about?
• What key resource have you just discovered?
• What problem are you having “right now”?
• What solution can you offer to someone else’s problem?

Looked at that way, a Twitter “conversation” can be much more content rich than “I’m sitting down to a tuna sandwich” nonsense that might have provided workers in a virtual office with the “background chatter” they might miss — but which, to me, just seemed like so much noise.

Other things I’ve learned:

• Track vs. Hashtags
  • You can “track” a term and get all tweets with that term sent to your phone or IM. [In about three weeks of tracking "aauw" and "nccwsl" there's been one (count it!) tweet containing either. I did make a new acquaintance of the twitterer, but I'm not sure our community is ready for this yet.]
  • You can add a “hashtag” to a tweet. Examples would be “#aauw” or “#nccwsl”. [In some communities the # symbol is referred to as "hash" -- anyone else ever use the term hashbang?] If you are also “following” the twitter user hashtags, then your posts will be accessible from www.hashtags.org, and folks can even subscribe to an RSS feed attached to a particular term (e.g. the #aauw feed is http://hashtags.org/feeds/tag/aauw/
  • Note that “track” gets messages to your phone. Hashtags can be followed over the web. Track follows “everyone,” Hashtags follows those who are also following Hashtags and who remember to use the hash character. I’d actually prefer to see Hashtags on my phone and follow tracks on the web: using the hash indicates an intentionality that, to me, improves the chances that I’d need to “see it right now”.
• D vs. @: sending a message to a particular person
  • When you send a message to a particular person, you use the D command (e.g. “D nes49″), and it works pretty much like an ordinary text message. The benefit is that you remember their twitter name, not their phone number. The message isn’t stored, it just goes into the either –so, it’s okay to use this for posting private data. On the other hand, if the person is reading tweets over the web it still works. On the other other hand, if the person isn’t following you, you cannot use the “D” command.
    
  • When you use the @ in a message, you’re saying that the message is a specifically to someone, e.g. @nes49. It differs from D (which is just between you and the other person) in that this is a public message, and your followers can choose whether or not they want to see your messages to others. I find reading others’ @ messages pretty confusing (I’m rarely following the person to whom they are directed, so I’m seeing the reply out of context). But it’s a useful tool for those “let me help you with a problem messages” that are becoming a significant portion of the twittersphere, and you can send an @ message to someone who’s not following you.

So, some conclusions:

• While I may continue to post AAUW and NCCWSL tweets (as nes49 and aauw07), the intersection of AAUW members and twitter users is so small that this is pretty much like spitting in the wind. If anyone (maybe from NCCWSL) disagrees and wants to take over the community building here, feel free.
• I’m connected to a *very* few “real folks” in twitter — and have already had a seredipitous outcome through that connection:
  • He posted a query
  • I forwarded a link to a possible helpful item on wiki.bbvx.org
  • He noticed the spam problem that was announced there and sent me a link to a media wiki extension I hadn’t been able to find on my own.
  • All is now well on the wiki and rogue folks trying to register.

  Could the exchange have happened in e-mail — very unlikely. In Facebook — possibly, and it’s likely I saw his first question as a Facebook status update imported from twitter. In any event, it’s enough of a “good outcome” that I’ll stick it out awhile longer (though as I look at my twitterfox bug – I’ve got 22 unread tweets…).

3/14 update: clarifications to D vs @

Sounds good, right? Follow the hashtag #aauw or #08NTC and we’re done.

So I test. And nothing. Nada.

More research. Turns out that’s not the only list of twitter commands — but it may have been an early one that prompted this at twitter.com. Ah, there’s the rub. Only works with IM and phone, and I’m using the TwitterFox extension to read the tweets.

So…

If I want to follow #aauw on my computer, I can do it through RSS or I can climb another learning curve and get onto IM. [Eeks. "Talk" was deemed evil back in the 80's. Can I overcome my resistance??]

Or do I go back and reinstate the unlimited text on the phone that I had during Phoenix?

Sigh.