Okay, this is a rant. I need to write some of this out to try to understand what’s happening. Comment or not — but if you’ve got a lifeline, please throw it to me.
The switch to Google Drive from Google Docs may be the death of my efforts to stay sane and engaged with multiple groups.
Thanks to Roger for the link to “7 Secrets About Social Media, Revealed” from businessinsider.com. But the post was based on 2009 data, so I’m not sure the link is worth forwarding without comment. Here, though, are a few points that may relate to the AAUW Social Media discussions. My point of view is that of a member of the AAUW communications team, and here are four of the seven points that resonate with me.
Yep, I can’t tell you how many of my friends joined Facebook only to view the photo albums posted there. Pictures get more comments and likes than status updates. And my “top comments” recent post was a video.
What does this tell us? Include pictures with the AAUW news and notes!
Again the study is a bit dated, but since this follows the general rule of content creation in other contexts, it’s probably generally right. I’m not sure what this tells us. Since I’m not a power user of twitter –
So who actually reads all of those posts? As Kivi Leruox Miller pointed out at NCTech4Good 2010, it’s perfectly okay to repeat yourself on twitter since no one catches everything you say each time you say it.
My current view is that as @nes49 I’m writing for a very few people. As @aauwnc and @ncwu I leverage the tweets to a broader audience (@aauwnc goes to facebook.com/aauwnc and to the weekly newsletter generated from that; @ncwu gets archived for the NCWU e-newsletter).
Well, yeah. Most people don’t click on ads anywhere. But the numbers can work for you if your expectations are realistic. The AAUW Social Media Task Force discussions have some examples of using ads.
At the 2009 AAUW convention, I discussed an experience with Facebook events (see slides 13-17) and it might be instructive to run an experiment to see how running an ad improves attendance at an event.
The AAUW Social Media Task Force’s Facebook page may be an excellent example of how offline networks need a supplement. How would all of those folks have found each other without something like Facebook? While I have AAUW friends from around the country because I’ve been active at the national level and have attended national conventions, the earlier way of connecting (e-mail lists) just doesn’t hold a candle to being able to connect with people on Facebook.
What I hear from the Facebook averse is a fear of more information overload and that they “just don’t have the time”. However, what I find with Facebook is that it is much easier to “keep up with” friends by skimming their short posts and comments. But the real benefit for me, again as a member of a communications team, is that it’s easier to put information out into the world where those who consider it interesting can find it. And I don’t have to worry about its being just “more e-mail clutter” that everyone will ignore.
Perhaps social media doesn’t make sense unless you are one of those who see its benefit as a publishing platform, who have things to say that aren’t directed to particular people, who want to get on board with this “anyone can be a broadcaster” new world. If that’s not you (yet), I recommend reading Clay Shirky — either Here Comes Everybody or the newer Cognitive Surplus (which I’m just starting).
[This is another post whose original version went to the webmgrs list at AAUW.]
AAUW NC has had
These are integrated in the following ways
Tools:
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.
Okay, change is hard. And “software as a service” leaves you open to change at the whim of the service provider. I suppose I’ll get used to it one of these days.
As background, I spend a lot of my time setting up support for virtual offices. This usually means crafting e-mail alias lists for addresses like “info@something.org” where it’s a really good idea to have more than one person monitoring the e-mail. [You then do need a protocol for who answers the mail, but that’s another discussion.]
As more background, most of the sites I work on are hosted at Dreamhost, a very large, but still quirky, hosting company. As an ex UNIX sysadmin, I love the way they offer a select group of software installs that often give me just what I need without the effort of sorting through the myriad of options that are available. They do, however, have a less than stellar reputation for hosting e-mail. So when they started offering Google Apps for Domains hosted with them, I jumped at the chance to move my domain’s mail service to Google.
Anyway, for the first few sites, I was merrily creating my “info@xxx.org” addresses using the “e-mail address” function.
Sometime last month, that just “went away”. It wasn’t possible to set up an address that pointed to more than one external address.
But wait! There’s a new option “group”. Oh, I guess that’s good — having a Google Group “attached” to the domain. But the overhead of setting up a whole Google group just to get quick alias list? [Yes, I’ve been known to use Mailman for a 3-person list when there was no other easy way to edit the alias. But I’m reformed.]
So today I finally tried it, and it turns out their “group” really is just a list of addresses — with minimal Google group functionality. [You can limit who can post to the address, but there’s no footer, no subscription page, no files attached to the thing.]
So… What looked like a change really wasn’t much of one. Probably would have been obvious to most of you…
Any lessons here?
I’m not sure anyone’s interested in this, but since there’s a follow on discussion on Sunday night, I’m posting my version of the discussion of Sunday the 18th. To see how the program has actually been written up, see
Threaded discussion from #fem2 twittercast, 1/18/2009
This transcript attempts to reorder the tweets of the twittercast into threads. Apologies for any misunderstandings. For the raw data, go to search.twitter.com.