RESOURCES
Yeah, But . . .

YOU’VE MADE IT this far,¹ and maybe there’s still a bit of hesitation or naysaying in your head about why you don’t think you’ll change the world with social networking. Fear not, dear reader, I am here for you. The following are a number of questions and comments that I’ve received over the years in my work. By the end of this appendix, I hope to have relieved any last reservations about sharing your insight, experiences, and values with the rest of us (we need you! I’m serious!). If not, you can contact me either through the book’s website (http://www.sharethis change.com/), or on Twitter at @randomdeanna.

This is all so Big Brother! The corporations/FBI/NSA/CIA are gathering tons of information about us.

The short answer: Yeah, they are.

First, unless you live in a country run by a repressive regime, and/or participating in dissent actually puts your life in danger, I would take worries about the government with a grain of salt. One of the more political acts you can do is to share your opinions and experiences. Offering up your version of events, showing people (including Them) what it’s like to be in your shoes, and sharing your vision for the world can be incredibly potent acts.

As for the corporations, yes, they’re collecting this stuff so that they can try to sell you things. That doesn’t mean you have to buy what they peddle. And in many cases, you can adjust your privacy settings to prevent much of your information from being shared with third parties.

For further reading on privacy and social networks, check out the “Privacy” section of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s website: http://www.eff.org/issues/privacy.

These social networks are all closed systems! They belong to someone else. Why don’t we all join an open source social network?

I do have a problem with the nature of each social network being its own little world, and while there’s some cross-functionality, they’re not playing with one another as seamlessly as many of us would like.

Think about that in comparison with e-mail: You can e-mail anyone else with an e-mail address. It doesn’t matter that you’re on Gmail and the other person’s on Hotmail; because e-mail was developed as an open system that was not market driven, standards were developed to ensure that different systems could talk to one another.

That’s not the case with social networks. If I’m only on My-Space, and you’re only on Facebook, we can’t interact. Additionally, if one of those services goes down or goes away, we’re kinda stuck—we have to move on to another service and start all over.

I’d love it if there were a viable open source, open standard social network that everyone participated in. At the time of this writing, some are being worked on, like identi.ca, but none have reached widespread adoption rates. And most people want and need to go where their friends are already hanging out, so until there’s a big push to such a service, we’re stuck in walled-garden land.² I’ll keep track of new developments at http://www.share thischange.com/, so stop in to see if something new has popped up since this book went to print.

Good journalism requires money! We can share our stories for free, sure, but the hard work must be done by professionals who are paid.

Many people are participating in discussions about the future of news media, and I suggest looking at my list of recommended websites at the link below to get into some of the bigger questions. People need to be compensated for their work, yes, and investigative journalism needs substantial resources. But the current model just isn’t working, for any number of reasons, and I suspect that information in the digital age isn’t going to fit into a strictly market model.

That said, I also want to stress that social networks and media should be complementary tools, part of a larger tool kit in the social change and information distribution ecosystems. There’s no magic bullet here, only great opportunities to radically shift the way we’ve been doing things.

Here you’ll find a list of blogs I read for insights into the future of journalism; I highly recommend each and every one: http://sharethischange.com/futureofnews.

Everything moves so fast! Just when I learn one network, a new one pops up and I have to start all over.

It’s definitely a drag that new services launch all the time, and sometimes we feel pressured to keep up with the Joneses online. Pause before joining something new, and ask yourself if this service will help you to create or maintain relationships with people you already know or want to know. Trying out new services can be like a little adventure. Just remember that it’s OK to abandon networks that aren’t serving your needs.

Each service does seem to have its own rules and grammar, but much of what we talk about with social capital in chapter 3 applies to all social networks. Once you have a good grounding there, you should be able to carry what you learn from one to the next.

I don’t have time for any of this!

Social networking, depending on your goals, doesn’t have to take up a lot of time. Many people have noticed they’re spending less time searching for news because their networks cull and curate information for them. Instead of combing through the morning paper or Google News links, people check their social networks to find the most current news and information that matters to them.

People have also found that using social networks actually decreases the amount of e-mail they receive. Even though we’re mapping more relationships online, the communication tends to stay within social networks and not creep over to e-mail. Because there’s a lot of community and discussion, some people also spend less time on e-mail listservs and groups.

Think of it as adjusting your digital info mix instead of just adding to it.

I’ve been stalked before and don’t want to be found easily.

This is a tough one, especially for women. First, you can take some fundamental precautions:

• Don’t give your address or phone number, even if you can manage your privacy settings to keep them hidden. You also should make sure that you don’t publish personal details anywhere on your blog or website.

• If you need to make some contact information available, use a different e-mail address than the one you use for personal communication, and consider setting up a Google Voice number for telephone service.³

• Remember, only share what you feel comfortable with. You don’t have to share your location or other sensitive information to have valuable, authentic conversations with people that you do want to be in touch with.

If you experience harassment or threats, notify law enforcement immediately. Many local jurisdictions aren’t equipped to deal with these kinds of cases; if that’s the case, contact the FBI.

The best way to deal with most kinds of minor harassment, such as annoying commenters, is to ignore them, and feel free to delete responses and comments when necessary.

I like private communications that cannot be accessed by other people.

Me too! Think of social networks as extensions of your private relationships. They’re there for when you want more engagement, input, or just to share a story. Remember, you should only post—and respond to or comment on—things that you’re comfortable with. It’s perfectly OK, for example, to respond privately when a friend or colleague posts something that you want to contribute to, but you don’t want the whole world to see your contribution.

Almost everything online is forever. That’s scary!

This is actually a Good Thing™. The contributions that you share with the online universe—whether personal, professional, or both—go a long way toward achieving very macro cultural goals. First, you’re helping to define and document your own history; second, you’re contributing to a larger compendium of what it’s like to be in your shoes. You are sharing your story to benefit those who come after you.

On the micro level, when you’re first getting into it, knowing that pieces of your life are lingering out there in the ether can be scary. But if you think about how many people are also contributing to that giant pool of personal information, it sort of reduces the likelihood that you’ll stand out in any tremendous way. (Unless you do something really embarrassing . . . just kidding.)

Keep in mind that you have control over what you share, and each service’s privacy settings will keep certain information from being catalogued or indexed. But remember, too, that everyone is going to have some sort of profile online, whether or not they’re participating directly (simply by being part of other people’s lives, you’ll be referenced in one way or another), so it’s best to do what you can to shape how that profile manifests.

I feel like I have nothing to add to the conversations out there. Won’t I just be more “noise”? What if no one responds to what I say?

Sometimes you don’t have a lot to say, and that’s fine. But there’s value in adding thoughts and opinions to a conversation, even if they’re just supportive statements agreeing with what’s been said; what can feel repetitive is often helpful for showing solidarity.

Noise is a matter of relevancy and taste; one person’s noise is another person’s lifeline. Even if people aren’t explicitly responding to everything you post, they are taking notice, and this feeds into the ambient awareness we talked about in chapter 3. Expecting a direct response only sets you up for disappointment; you’re contributing to a flow of information, not broadcasting from a remote island in the ocean.

These technologies are making everyone stupider! No one has any attention span anymore.

It’s true that we’re more easily distracted than ever—and in many cases, it’s going to be up to us as individuals to take breaks from the flood of information available to us at all times and to resist the urge to check in every time we think of it.

On the flip side, studies have shown that a healthy amount of distraction is not bad for us—it helps our creativity to daydream and bounce around a little, rather than staying intensely focused on one task.⁴

Why should I organize online when I have so little precious time and so few money resources as it is? Doesn’t this take away from the work on the ground?

A learning curve investment definitely has to be made, but realize that developing your community online is complementary to the work that you are doing offline—not replacing it. You don’t have to go full force into every social network right away. If you’re limited as to how much time you can put in at the beginning, Kety Esquivel, new media manager at National Council of La Raza, suggests picking one small goal, and one low-cost, easy tool to help you achieve that goal. Don’t break your back to come up with an entire social media strategy and figure out how you’re going to implement it—the work you do online should be considered another available tool in the tool kit, not just another task to complete.

Technology is taking over our lives! There’s no such thing as (tech-) free time anymore.

I hear you on that one—I used to feel like that, too. But it’s not technology that’s the problem; it’s the compulsive nature of our culture. Technology can’t do anything on its own. The users have to change their behavior. We have the capability to draw boundaries where we don’t want technology to infiltrate.

Right now, our culture’s competitiveness compels us to always be on—we fear we’ll miss something if we’re not looking. Some jobs do require always-on connectivity, but most don’t. It’s time for a reality check and to remember that these tools are built to enhance your life, not ruin it.

Simply put, it’s about managing expectations. If you suddenly disappear off the digital face of the earth, yes, people might come looking for you. But if you let people know that you’re taking a break (which is becoming more and more common, and even expected), whether it’s for the afternoon or the week, they’ll know not to pester you with wall posts on your Facebook page.

RESOURCES
Tips for Individuals

SO, NOW THAT YOU’VE figured out how you can change the world with what you share, you’re looking for a few pointers either to get started or to finesse what you’re already doing. You’ve come to the right place.

A Word about “Personal Branding”

Some social media advocates strongly recommend the philosophy of personal branding. The idea is that you pick a few keywords to build your expertise upon (good idea) and then center almost all of your professional activities in your social networks around those specific keywords, to the exclusion of everything else, much like selling a product (not so good).

The term personal branding has always made me uncomfortable, but it wasn’t until I spoke with author and speaker Tara Hunt that I understood why. “People shouldn’t be acting more like brands,” she said. “We’re humans! Instead of having a personal brand, why not just have a personality?”⁵ I couldn’t agree more. Remember that not only is sharing authentically what will win people over to your charming personality, but it’s also what’s going to change the world. Do we want to create “brands” out of each other or share our true selves?

That said, it’s certainly OK to pick the areas of expertise that you want to focus on to build your professional presence—just make sure it’s you that you’re sharing, not a branded version of you.

Nuts and Bolts: Getting Started

If you haven’t waded too far into social networking yet, and you don’t feel like you know which end is up, read on to start learning the ropes.

“Excuse me, where are the restrooms?”

One challenge of this social networking journey is that each service seems to have its own lingo and customs. Depending on the service, it can be like visiting a foreign country where you don’t know the language or attending a party where you understand what’s being said but you don’t recognize any of the guests.

First thing upon arrival, take a look at your surroundings. Normally in these awkward situations, you might focus on finding the bar, the bathrooms, and the exit. I’ve got an easier assignment. Look around and ask yourself: How do I create a personal profile? How do I manage the privacy settings? What happens to my information if I want to close the account?

Finding Your People

Once you’ve got the basics down, it’s time to start finding your people. Almost every social network has a “find friends” feature. You can enter your Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, or Yahoo address, and it will search your address book/contacts list to see if it finds anyone who’s already a member. If there’s a match, you can then choose if you want to friend or follow that person. Or if it’s crazy Uncle Herb, whom you’ve been avoiding, you can pretend you never saw him.

The second step almost always inquires if you want to invite the billion other people in your contact list who aren’t already members—please don’t do this! Many of your contacts will consider it spam.

If you don’t have one of the e-mail addresses associated with the service you’re signing up for, that’s easy to remedy—just sign up with one of those listed above for the purpose of accessing the address book. The easiest to navigate is probably Gmail; export the address book from your current e-mail program, and then import it into the Gmail Contacts list.

You can also find new friends using the info in “How to Find New Friends and Followers,” in this section.

Consider looking for people you don’t already know but whom you might find interesting. The most effective way is often the organic way: Watch who your friends are talking to. Click those names and scan through their posts. Find them interesting? Add them as a friend or follow them.

People Finding You

“But how will others know if I’m in their social networks?”

Well, you can start by telling them. You could go old school and send an e-mail to people you think might be interested, though not that many people do this. A subtler maneuver is to add your profile’s web address to your e-mail signature. This way, you can announce it without making an announcement. Note that people you choose to follow or friend likely have their profiles set to alert them every time someone new follows them or adds them as a friend, so you don’t have to tell them.

It’s a good idea to use your full name in your profile so that people who are searching for you, or who have you as an e-mail contact, will be able to find you.

Another good idea is to personalize your icon or profile picture. It will help differentiate your posts in your friends’ and followers’ feeds, and it’ll help people recognize you when they’re searching for contacts. Many people advocate using a photo, but I say as long as it’s something interesting and unique, go for it. My friend Tanya Tarr (on Twitter: @nerdette) has a picture of her red cowboy boots as her icon, and everyone knows it’s her when she’s posting.

One Big Point

If you’re new, it’s important to realize that these networks take a while to get the hang of. You’re not going to become an instant fast-moving fish swimming upstream. Commit, if you can, to trying a new service a couple of times a day for two weeks or so. At the end of your little trial period, assess how you feel and how you think you’ll use it.

Use the Buddy System

Find a friend who can hold your hand and be available to answer questions when you get stuck. TweetProgress.us has a list of people who have volunteered to be mentors in the progressive community (http://tweetprogress.us/users/mentors).

A Recommended Mix

• Twenty percent to 30% of what you share is about you: what you’re up to, things you’ve accomplished, opinions you want to share, etc.

• The other 70% to 80% has nothing to do with you but is made up of things you find interesting or care about, such as links to news articles (or funny videos, even), someone else’s posts that you liked, responses to and comments on others in your feed, etc.

Reputation Grooming

Your presence on social media does require a certain amount of general maintenance in order to maintain its usefulness. Spending just a little bit of time each day keeping your networks updated can go a long way toward building your social capital. It’s like keeping a small garden: You pull weeds, prune good plants that have become too large, water, feed, and nurture. Oakland Local.com founder Susan Mernit refers to certain tasks we do in social networks to keep our conversations interesting and relevant as “reputation grooming.”⁶ Here are some maintenance items to help you grow your social media garden:

• Setup:

• Make sure you complete the short bio section and add a picture for each of your social network memberships. This is very helpful for friends who are looking for you and for people who are trying to get a quick idea of your interests and types of information you share.

• Create Google alerts for your name and/or organization and for topics that interest you (http://www.google.com/alerts).

• Save searches for relevant terms—topics you’re interested in or have expertise in—in your RSS reader and/or social application. (A list of suggested applications can be found in “Applications to help you manage,” later in this section.)

• Daily routine: Spend 20–30 minutes on the following:

• Checking in on what’s happening in your social networks.

• Replying to comments and mentions.

• Joining conversations on relevant topics.

• Weekly:

• Check friend and follow requests, and approve/deny accordingly.

• Check the health of your saved searches: Are they doing what you need them to do? Providing too much or too little info?

• Check filters: Are they enough, or not enough?

• Monthly:

• Weed out information sources and people who don’t fit well with your stream.

• Consider taking time to investigate new people and sources to diversify your information flow.

Dos and Don’ts

• DO be yourself. It may be hard at first to find your voice, but you’ll get there. Authenticity matters.

• DON’T automate your activities. Automatically following people back and sending automated private welcome messages are signals that you’re in the game to collect friends and followers like bottle caps, not to have meaningful interactions. It’s OK for some organizations to automate their status updates for scheduling purposes, but individuals should avoid this.

• DO be honest if someone is tweeting on your behalf. If you’re a candidate running for office, for example, and staffers occasionally post updates, make sure the staffers identify themselves as such.

• DON’T use services or websites that promise to give you thousands of new friends or followers, even if they’re “free.” Not only is this considered spamlike behavior, but it doesn’t work—remember, it’s about cultivating community, not padding your numbers.

How to Find New Friends and Followers

• Twitter

• Go to Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com/) and enter your search terms. If you use an application to access Twitter, chances are it has a handy search function.

• Save the search results for future use as an RSS feed⁷ or with your favorite Twitter application’s saved-searches function.

• Check out the tweets of people who appear in the search results. Find them interesting? Respond to them and follow them.

• Check back again occasionally, using your saved searches, to find more people.

• Use the following filters to narrow your results:⁸

Location. near:city. This looks for tweets from people who have listed a city in their profile.

Example: near:Brooklyn.

Radius. within:distance. In larger cities, just putting in the city’s name can return too many results, so you can add a radius to further filter it down.

Example: within:2mi.

Exclude terms. Add a minus sign before a word to find results that don’t contain that word.

Example:-cupcakes.

Questions. Add a space and a question mark to find questions asked about an item or topic. Helpful for those who are looking to share expertise!

Example: lumber ?

To and from. Find tweets to or from specific users.

Example: from:maddow, to:corybooker.

• Use BackTweets.com to track references to URLs. This is handy for people who don’t mention your name or the keywords you’re tracking but who still refer to your work.

• Facebook

• At the time of this writing, Facebook had announced more robust search capabilities but had implemented only a rudimentary approach. Check http://www.sharethischange.com for more info.

• People tend to use Facebook more than other services to connect with people they know. Many users make their information visible to friends only, so it’s harder to determine in passing whether new people’s feeds are going to be interesting if you’re not already friends with them and they’ve chosen in their privacy settings to hide from strangers.

Managing Information Overload

Yes, sometimes it seems like technology is taking over our lives and threatening our sanity. It doesn’t have to! Technology is here to complement other parts of your life, not ruin them. Here are some tips for keeping it in its place.

It’s not the tech, it’s you

• Information overload is not just stuff being pushed at you; it’s also your own compulsion! Technology can be like a slot machine—sometimes when you get e-mail, or check Facebook, or look at Twitter, you get rewarded with something fun. The rest of the time you don’t, but you still keep trying. Be aware of that tendency to pull the lever, always hoping for triple 7s.

• Take breaks! It’s OK to step away from your social networks and disconnect. No one will get mad at you, and if you missed anything big, you’ll still find out about it. I swear.

Applications to help you manage

We were using these way back in the time and space we called 2009. For new additions, check out http://www.sharethischange.com.

• Facebook has mobile applications for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android.

• TweetDeck (Facebook and Twitter)
(http://www.tweetdeck.com/).

• Seesmic (Facebook and Twitter) (http://seesmic.com/).

• Twhirl (Twitter and Friendfeed) (http://www.twhirl.org/).

• Tweetie (Twitter on Mac and iPhone)
(http://www.atebits.com/tweetie-mac/).

• AlertThingy (Twitter, Friendfeed)
(http://www.alertthingy.com/).

• ÜberTwitter (Twitter on BlackBerry)
(http://ubertwitter.com/).

• twidroid (Twitter for Android) (http://twidroid.com/).

Services to help you manage

• Ping.fm is a website that connects all kinds of social networks together, so that you can post one update to Ping, and it will update all the other networks that you choose.

• Atomkeep.com is a service that keeps all of your social network profiles in sync. When you change your information (for example, jobs), you can tell it which profiles you’d also like to update.

E-mail is still the bane of your existence

• Set up a different e-mail address for newsletters, action alerts, etc. You should consider your regular e-mail address as a place for humans only, where you have contact only with Real People. Set up a secondary address for everything else, and commit to checking it as infrequently as possible.

• Filters and rules are your friends—learn how to use them.
Along the lines of the previous item, chances are that at least some of your listserv memberships and other notifications are not providing urgent, must-read-now news. Use filters to automatically send them to different e-mail folders that you’ll check periodically. Google the name of your e-mail program and the words filters and tutorials, and you’ll find a variety of instructional videos on how to do this.

• Set your e-mail to manual check, including mobile devices.
I know some of you have colleagues who will pester you and expect you to be checking e-mail every five minutes. Don’t. Tell people that you’re only going to be checking e-mail X number of times a day, and stick to it. Train the people around you not to expect immediate responses (by, get this, not responding immediately), and to call you for urgent matters.

• Auto-responders: They’re not just for vacations anymore!
If you’ve got pressing deadlines or are otherwise going to be unavailable via e-mail, tell people with an auto-response message. Also include an approximate date when you’ll be available or more responsive.

Beware the Viruses, Hoaxes, and Hacks!

Just like e-mail and websites, social networks have been targeted by malicious viruses and hacks. Often people are tricked into following links that make their accounts vulnerable, and spam is spread to their contacts through private messages and public postings.

Rule number one is to never give your password via a website or e-mail reply. Most social networks are now using authentication systems that do not need you to enter your password, except to log in to your own account. Rule number two is to use common sense. If someone in your network sends you a message like, “hey check this out i got a really cool deal” and gives you a cryptic URL, don’t click it. If something about the message seems real, use another tool to contact your friend and ask if this was a valid message.

RESOURCES
Tactics for Organizations

List-o-Rama

Here are a few lists of reading materials to get you on your way.

• Helpful books: http://sharethischange.com/books

• People I just think are smart about this stuff:
http://sharethischange.com/smarties

• Social networks for organizations:
http://sharethischange.com/orgreading

• A running tally from friends and colleagues who said, “I can’t believe you didn’t include this in your book!”: http://sharethischange.com/whoops

Organizations: Set Your Culture/Policy and Be Clear

Organizations need to set clear guidelines and expectations when it comes to employees’ using social networks.

• Banning employees from blogging, social networking, and social media on their own time is not a good idea. However, make your group’s policy clear regarding individuals’ talking about their work.

• Generally speaking, businesses and organizations should encourage employees to be as open as possible, as long as it doesn’t violate anyone’s privacy or spill corporate secrets. Transparency is the new black.

• Also set a clear policy for employees’ checking personal social network sites while they are on the clock. Obviously, employees who have more responsibility for work activities on social networks have more leeway, but all employees should be allowed time to check in.

• One note about information overload: Be very clear about your after-hours expectations. Do employees need to check work e-mail or communicate via other social networks after 5 p.m.? For some positions, this may be necessary, but remember that no one can be “on” 24/7, even though the technology is.

• Consider a tool like Yammer or Status.net for in-house communications. They’re basically Twitters for enterprise, hosted or set up on your office server, and can be completely private. Tools like these have been shown to help increase collaborative conversation and decrease long e-mail threads about project work.

Leadership Is Changing

Remember how we talked in chapter 1 about how the top-down and bottom-up organization of our culture is rapidly shifting? This also applies to organizational culture. Strong, effective leadership in this environment definitely doesn’t mean rule with an iron fist, and it can be difficult to figure out how to strike a balance between collaboration and leadership. Author Allison Fine offers some tips: Bear in mind that we’re all in this together, create the pathway and goals, be transparent in decision making, and develop great listening skills and flexibility.

Together, each of these tactics creates the possibility of providing guidance and a backbone for your organization, while being open to the ideas and energy that your organization and community bring to the table. Your job is no longer to be the end-all-be-all—it’s to set goals and create the space for the organization to achieve them, often in uncharted territory. You’ll be able to do this only if you make your group part of the process and help your group to understand why you’re doing things a certain way. You’ll also need to listen to their responses.

For a more in-depth look at open leadership, check out Fine’s book, cowritten with nonprofit tech blogger Beth Kanter, The Networked Nonprofit: Using Social Media to Power Social Networks for Change (Jossey-Bass, 2010).

Social Networks Are Not ATMs

While the mechanisms of fund-raising have gotten easier—think of “Donate now” buttons and online event organizing—the actual process of fund-raising is very much the same. You can’t simply roll into Facebook and start asking people for money, as much as you’d like to. In fact, acting that way would be a huge turnoff for most of your constituents and members. It’s the equivalent of walking into a party, getting up on a chair, and asking everyone in the room to please give you some money because you’re a very good, responsible person doing excellent things in the world. As Betsy Harman, a fund-raising strategist for nonprofits, has said, “It’s still all about building relationships, telling your story, and taking potential donors through the process of cultivation, stewardship and solicitation.”¹⁰

Private, Roll-Your-Own vs. Joining Public Networks

In most cases, you’re going to want to follow the “Go where your people are” rule of thumb and do your constituent organizing where people are already congregating.

That said, there are some advantages to using custom social networks, especially ones that are easy (technologically) to build using preexisting services. One such example is Ning.com, a community forum with blogs and video that can be made public or private. The benefits include flexibility in creating a private/safe space for discussion and the ability to provide users with tools to self-organize around issues.

A good example of one of these networks is She Writes (http://www.shewrites.com), where writers can gather and discuss all the ins and outs of writing and publishing. It acts much like other networks, where members can “friend” one another and create discussion groups, but offers the possibility for private discussion too. It also features educational webinars, which are open to everyone.

How Not to Respond to a Social Media Rampage

Just in case you do something really, unbelievably silly that makes a whole bunch of folks angry, I’ve compiled a quick list of Things Not to Do when the masses come storming your castle. This list is based on responses from other companies and organizations that have made these mistakes. The results, as you might imagine, were disastrous. Consider yourself warned:

• Stay silent. You know that you have an organizational blog, a Twitter feed, and pages on Facebook, but you ignore them. People aren’t there to talk to you; they’re there to wait patiently for your pearls of wisdom. Preferably wait at least 36 hours before making any kind of statement.

• Go old school. When you’ve finally got something to say, choose old PR strategies from broadcast media and apply them to social networks. Get your entire communications team to talk only to traditional media outlets that the angry mob will clearly listen to and be quieted by.

• Make it up. Don’t have control over your inner situation, or any idea what’s happening? Come up with a really flimsy excuse, like, I don’t know, a “glitch.” Your community, especially the sector that’s raving loony, is clearly not savvy enough to understand the complicated nature of your organizational work. Don’t admit, ever, that you are not 100% in control of the situation or that you’ve made a mistake. Ever.

You Are Not Alone!

Finding solidarity with other people can save your sanity on any day. Organizations now have the ability to seek out one another, share strategies, and compare notes—powerful building blocks for larger movement-building. Kety Esquivel, the new media manager for the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), has embraced this ethos. “We need to transcend these constructs in which each of us are in our isolated spaces,” she says. “Whenever I present social media tools to our affiliates, I try to show them different Latino/a profiles or blogs that they’d recognize—it’s about showing context, and that people are engaging in this space.”¹¹ These tools make coalition building technologically far easier than ever and allow us to tackle the big cultural problems together.

Neat Petition Tool

Want to make it super easy for people on Twitter to create and spread online petitions? Be sure to check out Jim Gilliam’s act.ly, conveniently located at http://act.ly/.

In the summer of 2009, Allyson Kapin of Women Who Tech used act.ly to get the attention of Tim O’Reilly, organizer of numerous critically acclaimed tech conferences, and to ask him to include more women. Kapin reported that not only did O’Reilly respond, but other tech conference organizers also got in touch with her to ask how they could be more inclusive.¹²

Using Causes to Build Community

A popular tool for awareness, fund-raising, and petitions on social networks is an application called Causes (http://www.causes.com/), currently available on Facebook (support for MySpace was discontinued in late 2009). It allows people to sign up in support of your campaigns, donate money, sign petitions, and recruit others to do the same.

One thing to remember is that Causes, as well as other applications and tools that plug into social networks, should not function as a replacement for traditional donor management and fund-raising tools.

You can find more on using Causes by checking out the organizational reading list in “List-o-Rama,” p. 127.

ROI for Social Networks and Social Media

So now you’ve learned why it’s important for your organization to participate in social media, and you’ve learned how to get started, but you’ve got someone in your universe—a higher-up, a funder, an investor—who wants to know what you’re getting out of all this chitchat.

ROI (return on investment) typically means what kind of money you’re making from all the hoo-hah, but as we’ve seen in other parts of this book, money and fund-raising can’t be the driving forces within social networks. So let’s start by reframing ROI.

Even though many of the tools used in social media are free or very inexpensive, a significant investment of staff time is still involved. That I in ROI means more than just how much it costs to pay for an employee to work in the social network space; it also means how much social capital you’re investing in the relationships you’re developing.

And the R, as we’ve said, is not just what kind of funds come out of your social network endeavors. Think of it as the relationships you’re building and where you want them to lead. Remember, this is not about broadcasting and marketing; this is about engaging in two-way communication.

It’s important to think about how you measure the qualitative aspects of social networks (Do people like you? Do they respond to the work you’re doing?), and not just the quantitative ones (How many fans do you have? How much money have you raised?). Qualitative metrics can be tricky, but the first step is making clear decisions about what action you want your community to take.

Here are some examples:

• Satisfaction. Don’t just look at the number of people talking about your work, but start documenting what they’re saying. Is it positive? Neutral? Negative?

• Authority. Are they coming to your organization as a resource, looking to you for expertise?

• Loyalty and trust. How about repeat performance—is this their first time dealing with you? How often are they returning or interacting?

When working with these measurements, goal setting becomes crucial. It’s important to keep your goals very focused, especially when you’re starting out. Choose small timeframes—having X positive conversations about your work per week. Also, keep your metrics, to start, within just a couple of services. Decide that you’re going to work on your Twitter presence for the next two months and then stick with it, rather than spreading yourself too thin across multiple services.

A few final thoughts to take away as you venture out into the wild world of social media ROI:

• ROI isn’t always about dollars. It’s about social capital, and the goodwill and influence you’re able to work with.

• The more specific you can get, the better. Make your goals and corresponding metrics direct and clear.

• Audience, audience, audience. A reminder: This isn’t a broadcast medium, it’s a conversational medium. Find people who want to have the conversation with you.

• Ditch things that don’t work. The low cost of these tools allows you to easily abandon tactics that don’t work. Don’t think that this means you’ve failed—it just means that it’s time to try the next thing.

Further reading: Social Media ROI Report: The importance of goals and success metrics, by Peashoot, from Egg Co. (http://peashootapp.com).

The Danger of Slacktivism

For all the evangelizing we do about the power of social networks to lead to fundamental political and social change, one thing we have to keep in mind is the difference between tools that lead to offline acts of change and tools that just make us feel like we’re making a difference.

While most of what we’ve covered in this book is not about taking direct action (like petitioning, phone banking, and door knocking) for advocacy, I do want to briefly discuss this as a problem to keep in mind as you move forward.

In 2009, one of the most visibly popular “actions” to take on social networks during the crisis following the Iranian elections was to turn one’s photo or avatar green, the campaign color of the slightly reformist candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Within days, everyone everywhere was green (myself included) and feeling like they’d done something, when in fact Iranian activists were still being arrested, shot in the streets, and disappeared.

It’s a fine line to toe, doing the hard work of raising awareness about a cause or issue (which things like colored avatars and added banners with messages do nicely) and making sure that supporters have additional, valuable actions to take. As discussed in chapter 4, we must understand clearly what these tools can and cannot do. Promoting social networks as an idealistic, magic-bullet answer for organizations engaged in activism and policy work not only is irresponsible, but also can be dangerous. Certainly the 2008 U.S. elections made it clear that plenty of activism (and fund-raising) could be conducted through social networks. What’s equally important to remember is that the Obama campaign’s social media tools were part of a clear, focused overall strategy that went far beyond simple awareness raising. These tools were designed to organize volunteers and to raise money in multiple ways, online and off.

Evidence suggests that group activism on social networks involving exceedingly simple, noncommittal tasks is less effective because participants aren’t recognized for their work. Making it too easy to participate in a world-changing event means that people don’t become emotionally invested enough to take an action that can actually make a difference. Evgeny Morozov, a Yahoo Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University and blogger at Net.Effect on Foreign Policy.com, offers excellent advice for structuring campaigns on social networks:

So, given all this, how do we avoid “slacktivism” when designing an online campaign? First, make it hard for your supporters to become a slacktivist: don’t give people their identity trophies until they have proved their worth. The merit badge should come as a result of their successful and effective contributions to your campaign rather than precede it.

Second, create diverse, distinctive, and non-trivial tasks; your supporters can do more than just click [a] “send to all” button all day. Since most digital activism campaigns are bound to suffer from the problem of diffusion of responsibility, make it impossible for your supporters to fade into the crowd and “free ride” on the work of other people.¹³

Changing color may be good for raising awareness, but we need to demonstrate more than solidarity if we want to change the world. An early example of a successful campaign that engaged everyday people into taking a small but useful action was the Sunlight Foundation project “Is Congress A Family Business.” Participants were asked to select a single member of Congress and dig into available electoral campaign information to see if the congressperson was paying a family member from campaign funds; then they were to submit that information via a simple tool online. Organizers of the campaign kept participants and the public aware of the status of the project in two ways: (1) When a congressperson’s information had been submitted, the participant was shown how many other people completed their tasks in the same time period; (2) updates were blogged on the foundation’s website for the public to see.

Within two days, the information for all 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives had been submitted, and 16 were found to be paying family members.¹⁵ Since then, the Sunlight Foundation has led the way in creating crowd-sourced projects that are building a movement of open, transparent government.

Awareness is not enough; we must build movement infrastructure that supports full-on campaigns and utilizes social technologies to effect tangible social change.

Successful Organizations on Twitter: Wellstone Action

The following is an interview I conducted with Elana Wolowitz, the communications director of Wellstone Action, a nonprofit organization dedicated to progressive social change, on April 6, 2009.

DZ: How long have you been on Twitter? What inspired you to join?

EW: I’m pretty sure we started in May or June of 2008. I was starting to hear more and more about the service (from bloggers and early adopters like Beth Kanter and others), and simultaneously was launching a new website for Wellstone Action that we wanted to be more interactive, and which included a blog. I was looking for ways to be accessible to our constituents, grow our audience, and virally promote our content, so Twitter seemed like the way to go. But mostly I just wanted to try something new and experiment—throw something at the wall to see if it stuck.

DZ: Was there any organizational resistance to Twitter (or other social media)? What convinced them otherwise?

EW: I wouldn’t say there was organizational resistance at all. More like organizational confusion mixed with good-natured mockery when I talked about it in staff meetings. In my role as communications director, it is in my job description to promote our work and grow our network while building our brand, so I didn’t ask permission to start tweeting, and I didn’t have to prove to my ED or board the value in terms of results or ROI. I said, “I don’t know if this will be valuable, but it can’t hurt,” and any tactic that could help raise our profile was received well. After the Obama campaign, more of our staff and partners really saw the value in social networking, and then were even more on board.

DZ: Is there more than one person that tweets for your organization? If yes, how do you schedule who does what and when?

EW: Well, I am the only person that tweets from @wellstoneaction, and I also have a personal account (with much less interesting ramblings: @e_lana). Elsewhere in the organization, our training manager, Jen Haut, tweets from @campwellstone as a way to interact with participants/alumni from our flagship training program. Our executive director, Jeff Blodgett (@jeffblodgett), is on Twitter, but I am still working on showing him some of the benefits beyond just broadcasting links to our content. A few of our staff have personal accounts and mostly just “listen,” but have contributed updates from out in the field—this includes Sarah Scanlon (@sarahjscanlon) and Peggy Flanagan (@peggy flanagan). Since we don’t share usernames, we don’t need to schedule our tweets.

DZ: What’s your Twitter “plan,” so to speak—what are your guidelines for tweeting?

EW: I wish I could tell you that we had a “plan”! Really, I think that the people who have said that Twitter is hard to access, but once you start doing it, you find its usefulness to you, have it right on. The only guideline I have is that our tweets should be genuine and come from a real “voice”—and that for our organizational account, that “voice” is a key part of our brand.

We try to keep it light, informal, and funny—providing helpful resources and interesting links, and being responsive to our followers, while also using it as a way to crowdsource and get buy-in and guidance on new projects. We want to have a mix of self-promotional content and links to things happening in the progressive movement that our audience should know about but might not necessarily read about from any traditional or even new media sources.

If I were to put a ratio on it, I wouldn’t want to exceed 30% self-promotional content to about 70% links to other things. Some days are more on one end than others, but overall that is our goal.

DZ: What do you feel you’re getting out of it? Also, are there any specific examples of a “Twitter success” that you can share?

EW: I think that the jury is still out on what we are getting out of it. Clearly there is value, but it can be hard to define. We get a direct line to our constituents, who can give us instant feedback and answers that we’re looking for. It allows us to find interesting content by following like-minded organizations and partners, and pass that on, sometimes writing blog posts about things we find.

It’s a good mode of communicating with the media, and we have had a couple of successes in that realm. Jason DeRusha from WCCO news in Minneapolis (@derushaj) tweeted that he was looking for sources on a story about lawn signs. At Well-stone Action, it’s a running gag in our trainings that we say, “Lawn signs don’t vote!” so we had a particularly interesting angle for him on the story, and I contacted him and was interviewed for the news that night. It wasn’t a story I’d planned on pitching, but it was a great way to promote our brand (irreverent, not politics as usual) and help a journalist looking for a source.

Also, when Sarah Palin knocked community organizers in her speech at the RNC, we did a rapid response blog post about the real responsibilities of a community organizer. That is our only post that has gone majorly viral, getting picked up by a lot of other blogs and news sources, and Twitter helped with that a great deal.

DZ: How does it fit into your overall communications strategy? Does it ever feel like, “Oh God, I’ve got to tweet again,” or otherwise overwhelming?

EW: It did in the beginning. I would have to get to work and sit there and think, “What the heck am I going to say today?” I knew that I had to contribute to make it work, but was unsure what made sense. As I became more familiar with the service, and followed more people, it became easier. Twitter is a component of our overall communications strategy, but not because we have specific metrics and goals in mind. I think the medium is just too fluid for that. Right now, we’re using it to grow the audience of people that are involved and help create that amorphous “buzz.” Paradoxically, I think that as Twitter grows in popularity and loses some of its potency as a place for early adopters and influencers, its ability to generate buzz is reduced somewhat. But it’s still a great tool in the toolbox, and I love interacting with our followers.

• • •

It’s a beautiful thing to see Twitter being used organically by an organization—participating in the conversation, growing its audience and constituency through sharing of information, giving followers solid actions to take. And as a result of that organic approach, they have achieved a solid amount of success with a relatively low level of investment, when one looks at the costs of other campaign strategies. Bravo, Elana and the rest of the Wellstone Action crew!

Reprinted with permission from Care2’s Frogloop, a blog about nonprofit online marketing (http://www.frogloop.com/).

RESOURCES
Crowdfunding Share This!

THE PREPARATION and writing of this book was a pretty unique experience for me that many have asked about. The book’s publisher, Berrett-Koehler, which is staffed by some of the coolest people on the planet, doesn’t offer advances to its authors. B-K feels that it’s sort of like betting on horses, and that it taints the work between publisher and author, as well as the work that’s ultimately produced. Not to say that there aren’t books that don’t need large advances: There most certainly are. But when it comes to how the market works, the larger the advance, the greater the onus on the author to do something spectacular. And I mean that in the “spectacle” sense, not necessarily just the “good” sense.

I decided that the book needed to be fast-tracked, given how quickly technology changes. It would be difficult to write the draft of a book in (what ultimately ended up being) less than four months if I were consulting full time, so the lack of an advance was even more complicated.

Rent needs to get paid (thanks, Hightower and Phillip, who employ me at the Hightower Lowdown), and my dog, Izzy Louise, and I have to eat. Basic principles that required me to put a price tag on something that I feel passionate about. Weeeeeird and uncomfortable. On top of my own expenses, I also wanted to be in a position to pay people who poured themselves into the project with me. I had originally intended only to approach foundations and large funders, looking for small grants along the way. But a couple of talks with Steve Katz and Don Hazen changed my mind.

As Steve put it—and I can’t remember if these were his exact words, but this was the idea—it’d be pretty interesting to put my money where my mouth was. I’m writing specifically about the power of social media to shift perceptions and cultural values, and I’m constantly discussing new models for media and journalism with my peers. Could I leverage my social capital for this kind of good will? Also, how many people would I tick off in the process? Steve convinced me that the pros would outweigh the cons, and so far, I believe that’s still true.

It was my first time doing any kind of fund-raising on this scale for one of my own projects. I’d done some arts development work back when I worked for Bowery Poetry/Bowery Arts & Science, and I’d helped out with some grant work at Alter Net.org when they were between development directors. In 2004, I worked myself into a hole of red ink, campaigning with the ABBA (Anybody But Bush Again) platform, and when I wanted to go to Ohio to work with Election Protection, I was so broke that I couldn’t, as my pop says, pay attention. I sent an e-mail to all my friends, asking them to pledge money to my trip, as if it were a walkathon. That was my first experience friend raising: I raised enough money to make it to Ohio and back; even more amazingly, two friends jumped in, inspired by the e-mail, and went with me.

I returned to that format. I sent an e-mail to several hundred people in late June and of course put it out to my social networks. I set up a fund-raising page with ChipIn.com, which was free and allowed me to post a widget on my site that showed how much I’d collected.

Over the course of the summer, I was able to raise close to the amount that I needed to live on. I also received two unique donations: a monthly pizza stipend from a local eatery, and a free eye exam and new lenses from a Brooklyn optometrist. Nothing like being able to see while carb-loading and writing, says me. A family member way over in the Old Country gave me a loan for the after-book-before-work-pay-comes-in-again period. In short: I lived to tell the tale. Publishers Weekly even ran a story about my little adventure.¹⁶

Now, a couple of things I would have changed about the e-mail I sent out:

• The word investors, used once. Two or three people latched on to it, thinking that I was going to offer something in return for donations. I’m not. I meant invest in the sense of “Invest in your child’s future by supporting public education” or “Invest in independent media by donating to this organization.” People who donated more than $100 get a copy of the book, sort of PBS fund-raising style.

• I would have been clearer about where the money was going, that there’s a whole little project happening here. I didn’t want people to think it’s all going to booze ’n’ parties, heh. As I mentioned, I wanted to pay others who helped me, and I needed some dough for random stuff like a digital recorder (I bought a mic for my iPod in the end).

Just in case it’s not been clear up to now, I don’t think that this model should replace advances given to authors altogether. As I alluded to above, some authors have way bigger overheads than just me ’n’ the dog. Those authors, if they do not receive advances from publishers, will need serious help from larger institutions. Crowdfunding should be one of many resources available to authors, not the sole one.

I also don’t want to act as if anybody can raise $5,000 or whatever it is they need at the drop of a hat. I recognize that through my work in media, and because of the type of person I am, I’ve carefully cultivated an ever-growing network of fabulous, supportive people. What hasn’t changed about fund-raising is that it’s still about relationships. The people who work with me know that I’m there for them whenever humanly possible, and the project I’m working on will benefit our shared community at large.

This fund-raising project has been overwhelmingly emotional, in a way that I didn’t expect. The people who came out of the woodwork to support this effort have given me a lot of courage to plow on with the project, and their generosity made true the ol’ adage, “Do what you love and the money will follow.”

Without further ado, please give a round of applause (seriously, just clap a little for them) to my wonderful donors: