The Authenticity of Doing Good: How Sticky Campaigns are Born and Propagate

Sitting in a hospital room at Christus St. Elizabeth in Beaumont, Texas, with my grandfather two days before Christmas, I am reminded that when it comes to doing good, authenticity counts.

 

As marketers and public relations professionals, it is easy to be cynical. While we search for the holy grail of tangible returns on our communication programs, events and strategies, it is easy to lose sight of the human element that really drives response. Maybe that is why the retweet campaigns on Twitter and the “Share” campaigns on Facebook seem to be so popular with companies. It is much easier to get people to pass along information that to take action, though “slactivism” can leveraged over time.

 

The importance of authenticity was driven home when my 90-year-old grandfather, who nearly died last week, was softly talking to me today. During his weeklong stay in the Intensive Care Unit, he had become a force for good. Many of the nurses said his room was the “place to be” and that he was a Christmas miracle. As he spoke to me, he started to sing in a weak and quiet voice:

 

“If I can help someone as I move along the road, then my living shall not be in vain.” (listen to it here)

 

I searched for the lyrics and found that the song was used in a speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, and it has been sung by Mahalia Joackson, Patti LaBelle and a score of others. The reason it is so popular is that it speaks to an elemental human need:

 

People need to know that they have made a difference.

 

My grandfather, in the twilight of his life, was expressing this to me in a powerful and authentic way.  I had another occasion to think about this earlier this week when Jenny Lawson (aka The Bloggess) wrote:

 

“I’m about to ruin your image of me but it’s for a good cause…”

 

Jenny offered $30 Amazon gift certificates to the first 20 people who left a comment to let her know they were struggling this year. She was donating back some of her profits. Heartbreaking comments started to roll in, and with them an avalanche of people offering to help, too. Jenny’s $600 gift was amplified into $42,000 in gift cards, toys and other needs helping over 900 people. The media are now starting to pick it up, on a Washington Post blog, and this segment on CBC in Canada.

 

It is an amazing story, and the reason it happened was because Jenny did something authentic and her readers responded. Moreover, they could see (in real time) who they were helping and how. You can’t manufacture this kind of engagement and response.

 

But how do you, as a company or organization set out to make this kind of difference or rally others around your cause? It seems to me that there are three ingredients that need to be present for it to work:

• Be Authentic to your company, organization or cause. When the nonprofit angle of a campaign seems “tacked on” it will always ring a little hollow. At the heart of Jenny’s $30 giveaway was a desire to give back out of gratefulness for her own success.
• Connect the Dots. Donors need to see and feel that they are making an impact in order to give at a maximum level ad to recruit their friends to do likewise. Not just thanked and appreciated, though that is important, but also to get a clear sense of how their contribution is impacting.
• Allow Outside Ownership of the ideas and responses. The best causes always seem to inspire others to action out of their own motivation. Jenny’s generosity touched the hearts of many people and made them want to do likewise.
• Amplify Others and their ideas. Jenny quickly (and often) talked about how the community had responded and she was willing to give up her original idea of $30 Amazon giftcards and allow the community to meet the needs as they arose.

One organization that is doing this pretty well is the Yahoo! Foundation with its Ripple of Kindness program. As a part of this program Yahoo! handed out $100 in seed money to a group of influencers to do good deeds. They then looked for some of the inspiring examples and were amplifying them. For instance, last year they paid the luggage fees at the local airport after one they saw one of their of their seedling influencers did similarly.

 

Full disclosure, I got one of these $100 checks. I went and bought two huge fruit arrangements, took them with me to the hospital and passed out fruit stems to the ICU and regular floor nurses. My family and I sang Christmas carols and generally sought to spread good cheer with the hospital staff. It doesn’t seem like much, but the truth is that even small acts of kindness can turn into bigger ones. It has been so much fun that I think I will keep going, perhaps next week we will have a free hot chocolate stand in our neighborhood and build a canned food Christmas tree to take to our local pantry.

 

If you can learn how to inspire people, you can change the world, one small act of kindness at a time.

Photo Credit: By Tatiana Gerus who writes - In art, craquelure is the fine pattern of cracks formed on old paintings. It is sometimes used to detect forged art, as craquelure is a hard-to-forge signature of authenticity

A Delicious Demise: A Look at Social Bookmarking Tools for Sharing and Keeping Your Data

 

Social bookmarking isn’t the most sexy of topics, it is just one of those things that, for those who do it, underlies their online experience. Slowly but surely, these bookmarks become a crutch, or as I like to kid, your online brain:

 

• Need to find a way to measure the effectiveness of Facebook? There is a collection of bookmarks for that.
• What about the best Twitter tools. There is one for that, too!

And the list goes on…

 

Just last week, I would have told you that there were quite a few bookmarking tools out there, but that I would recommend Delicious. It was simple, organized and powerful – albeit a little homely. But for features and simplicity, it would have been my recommendation.

 

And I wasn’t alone on this, you can read just a few of the novel ways you can use Delicious in this ReadWriteWeb post. One of its most powerful features was an RSS feed by tag.

 

However, all of that is in question after a leaked slide from an all-hands meeting at Yahoo!, the current owner of Delicious, shows that the service is on the “Sunset” list.

 

 

 

 

And while Yahoo! hasn’t quite figured out if it will sell or give away Delicious. It is clear that they won’t support it anymore. In this excellent post by Stephen Hood, who was formerly on the Yahoo! team for Delicious, there are a lot of hurdles to overcome for the service to become open source, or even a useable platform, once the proprietary engines that underlie the service are changed. Also, Yahoo! laid off the majority of its Delicious team. So whatever Yahoo! becomes, it will become it outside of Yahoo! You can sign a petition to have Yahoo! convert the platform to open source, but read Stephen’s post to see why this will be difficult to achieve.

 

Alternative Bookmarking Services to Delicious

 

The bottom line is that for those that have a Delicious account, they need to consider transitioning to something else, or at least hedging their bets by using a service that still integrates with Delicious for the time being. To look at this question, I laid out the “must have” features for a Delicious power user.

 

• Portability: You need a service that allows you to import and export your bookmarks. Delicious allows you to export your bookmarks, so best case scenario is a service that easily allows this. If you are going to outsource your brain, make sure you can get it back out of a service that is being discontinued.
  
• Tools: It needs to be compatible with your favorite browser. Does the service have a bookmarklet for Firefox, IE, Chrome or Safari? Does it have other tools to make it easy for you to share?
  
• Tagging. Does it allow you to tag webpages with whatever words you want to use.
  
• Related (nested) Tags: Can you refine your searches with multiple tags? When you have thousands of tags this becomes essential in order to find relevant saved articles/posts/websites.
  
• Editing. Does it allow bulk editing of tags. This is also critical when you have lots of bookmarks and have to make changes or add new tags.
  
• RSS Feeds. Does it have RSS feeds by tag? You can use this feature to curate copy or selectively share info on another webpage.
  
• Sharable. How does the service allow you to share with others?
  
• Mobile. Does it have applications and mobile compatibility? So much of life and business is lived on the go.
  
• Integration. Is it integrated with other important services like Facebook, Twitter and more? The more it works into your daily life, the more likely you are to use it and build a rich reservoir of knowledge.
  
• Delicious Synch. If you have invested lots of time in Delicious, you might want to pick a service that allows you to continue to synch the new bookmarks with Delicious. Several do, including Diigo and Pinboard.in

 

I looked at Diigo, Pinboard.In, Evernote, and Google Bookmarks. Of these four, I think I will go with Diigo for now. It has some nice extra features and it also synchs with Delicious. Pinboard.in (paid) also synchs with Delicious and would be my second choice. But I really can’t see any improvement over Delicious unless you hit the $25/year level, where it will archive your saved pages (nice). Speaking of archiving, that is what is cool about Evernote, and also Diigo to a lesser extent. The one I hoped would work was Google Bookmarks, since I live in Google products everyday, but it is seriously lacking in features and doesn’t seem to easily integrate with anything, even Google products like the Android phone.

 

Add Your Own Recommendations

 

Other services recommended to me included ShareThis, Pearltrees, X-Marks and Scuttle. I added them to the spreadsheet, but have no info on them there but they sound interesting. Beth Kanter shared this Google Doc last week that is being edited by people with a ton more recommendations. It is in a document format and talks about pros and cons.

 

I find the spreadsheet format helpful so I created this Delicious Replacements Spreadsheet with the evaluation categories I mentioned above. Feel free to add the ones you like and fill out the form with any missing info or change what I got wrong. But please, in true Wikipedia style, refrain from writing promotional material in the Doc.

 

You can see a preview of what that doc looks like below:

 

 

UPDATE: A really nice summary from Shel Holtz explaining why we lose so much more than our own personal bookmarks if we lose Delicious.

How to Use Google Analytics URL Builder to Track Online Campaigns and Show Value

 

While the rest of the world is fascinated by shortening their links through services such at bit.ly, and Hootsuite (ow.ly), among others. Advertisers are making their links longer so they can determine which online marketing campaigns are producing traffic on their website. It is called “link tagging,” and if you have used Google AdWords, you may already be familiar with the insights they offer through the free Google Analytics tool.

 

Some communication professionals are also finding that using link tagging for e-mail newsletters, press releases, blog links, and even Twitter campaigns help them to show the effectiveness of their efforts. Why let the marketers and advertising people have all the fun?

 

It turns out that there is a free tool in the Google Toolbox that you can use to make these special links called the Google URL Builder. If you just have one or two links that you need to convert and track it is ideal. If you are more advanced and have multiple links (say 100s) that you need to track, you might want to go with the free EpikOne URL Builder spreadsheet tool. My recommendation is to start small and grow as you scale the learning curve.

 

I have done this for a couple of clients, but didn’t have permission to show the data. Luckily Marc van Bree, who blogs at Dutch Perspective, has been using this technique in his job at Chapin Hall, a family policy and programs research center at the University of Chicago. We will use Chapin Hill as a “How to” case study.

 

Marc had been using Google Analytics to look at user behaviors and intentions on the organization’s new website. However, he was interested in the large amount of "Direct Traffic" coming to the site when he learned that direct traffic is a broad category that can include people inputting a particular web address directly in the URL bar or clicking a link that opens a new browser window—for example, a link in a document or from an e-mail program. Knowing this, it was no stretch to hypothesize that his e-mail marketing efforts were responsible for a large amount of this direct traffic.

 

But how to prove that the direct traffic was really from the email newsletter? or from Twitter links, or from Facebook?

 

Enter Google’s URL Builder tool! If you have Google Analytics on your website, you can use this tool without any IT help or technical expertise. The same principle applies for other analytics tools, but you will have to get specific instructions for that, like this one for Omniture. If you are in a big organization where IT controls your analytics, take this post to them and see if they can help you with a solution.

 

Step One

 

1. Go to the Google URL Builder Site or the free the free EpikOne URL Builder spreadsheet tool if you have many URLs to convert.
   
   
2. For Google URL Builder, Fill out the form
   You can use any words you want for the Campaign Source, Campaign Medium and Campaign Name fields. They key is staying consistent in both word choice and case sensitivity. The long URL that the tool generates is called a “referral string” and can be “read” by Google Analytics.
   
   
   
   
3. Paste the URL into an Excel spreadsheet, you will need to keep track of the links you have used and you can reuse them when it makes sense. Be sure to note what you used for the Campaign Source, Campaign Medium and Campaign Name fields.


Marc filled out the required options: source, medium and campaign. He only uses two source identifiers: “ConstantContact” and “Manual.” since he is only tracking e-mail marketing efforts the only identifier I used for medium is “Email.” Campaign is where he differentiates between “August,” “October” or “November” newsletters, etc.

- Source: Constant Contact

- Medium: Email

- Campaign: August2010



4. Shorten the link (if you need to) with your favorite shortener.
   Side Note and Tip: The great thing about using these links for a Twitter campaign is that even if someone reshortens them, you still don’t lose the tracking. When you use a shortened link to track, once they are reshortened by the person RTing it, or their Twitter platform, you lose the trail. Not so with link tagging.
   
   
5. Put the link in your campaign
   
   
6. See the results in Google Analytics, or in your Website’s analytics program. IN Google Analytics, look in your “Traffic Sources Overview.” You will see four categories: direct traffic; search engines; referring sites; and other. Your Google URL builder links will appear under the “other” category.

Analysis of the Chapin Hill Example

 

Marc has been doing this for four months for Chapin Hall and he has been able to get a better idea of where his traffic is coming from. The next two charts show a rise in “Other” traffic, which when you drill down you can see came

 

From just these four months, Marc says he was able to learn about the bigger picture. You can see the difference in traffic for the periods April-July or August-November. The first period also saw an NPR article refer much traffic, skewing the referring traffic statistic a bit upward. You can see that the search engine statistic remains constant. The Other category was also bigger as he was able to capture his email campaign.

 

 

April – July 2010

August – November 2010

 

Drilling down deeper, they learned more about individual campaigns. The November newsletter had a lower bounce rate than the August or October newsletters. Did they make any significant changes that caused that? Did perhaps the November content lend itself to more exploration on the site?

 

They also learned more about particular research reports and what campaigns were more successful in bringing traffic. But they didn’t just want traffic; they wanted people to download the report once they got to the page. Perhaps a campaign that brought in a lot of traffic actually had relatively few people download a report?

 

A few tips from Marc:

• Consistency is very important. Case in point, our Google Analytics show two entries for medium: “email” and “Email” when I meant it to be the same. Also, be consistent in your use of the tool; make sure each e-mail and each link within your e-mail has the Google identifiers to get the most accurate information.
• Don’t over analyze. You will be able to get more and more information by refining your use of Google Analytics and Google URL Builder, but don’t get bogged down in the data.
• A one-time event, like the NPR article in the above example, can skew your data, so don’t base your decisions on inaccurate, short term data.
• Pick your definitions well. They have to mean something when you see them back in Google Analytics.

In addition to what Marc outlines, if you can analyze what people who entered through the email link do after they enter the site. For instance, did they download the report, make a donation, or buy a product? If so, are they more or less likely to do so than someone else that came to the site through a different path? You can see if one campaign coverts better than another. The options are endless. You can even prove ROI this way if you can connect the dots.

 

How will you use the Google URL Builder tool for your campaigns? Would love to have you share your thoughts in the comments.

 

Photo Credit: Amazing chain Link Photo by VIncent Van Der Pas

Commonsense Social Media Measurement Part 4: A’s of Social Media Measurement: Attention, Attitude, Action

 

When it comes to social media measurement, one of the hardest things for most organizations to determine is where to put their limited resources and focus. All measurable objectives for online media should be consolidated to a dashboard that is frequently updated and can show where online efforts stand at a glance. You can use free ones like the new Glert’s, currently in Beta, which puts free Google Alerts into a dashboard; or you can use paid services like the Do It Yourself Dashboard by KD Paine and Partners.

 

It can also be as simple as a PowerPoint document or Spreadsheet with numbers and goals updated on a monthly basis. Entering these numbers into an Excel spreadsheet allows an organization to analyze the numbers for a period of time and to add other data, such as sales numbers.

 

I like to break down the types of measurement into three buckets in order to more clearly see the impact on the organization.

 

The Three As’s of Social Media Measurement

 

• Attention: The overall volume of interest, these include fans, traffic and other analytics
  
• Attitude: Overall sentiment and relationship measures
  
• Action: Business results of online outreach

 

These categories correspond to the more traditional measures of communication: Outcomes, Outtakes and Outputs. As you can see in this paper by Dr. Walter K. Lindenmann Guidelines for Measuring the Effectiveness of PR Programs and Activities.

 

In today’s post, I am going to start with the measurement of action and will circle back to Attention and Attitude next week.

 

Measuring Action

 

Probably the most important and least measured part of a social media campaign is the action people take as a result. This is where campaigns can be tied to key performance indicators (KPIs) or other organizational goals for action. Return on investment can also be measured in terms of actions.

 

Business measures can include things such as registrations for conferences, sales leads, hiring, store traffic and reduction in customer-service costs. For nonprofits, business goals include donations, votes (for politicians), new volunteers, return volunteers, volume of donations and the median amount of money per donation.

 

One useful example is a research study conducted by Altimeter and WetPaint called EngagementdB, which sought to connect key business results to social media engagement. The study looked at the engagement in social media by 100 top brands as measured by BusinessWeek / Interbrand “Best Global Brands 2008” rankings and correlated that engagement with one of the biggest KPIs for many organizations ¾ revenue and profit.

 

The study found brands that were highly engaged in a number of social media and networking channels showed stronger revenue and profit than those that were not. Moreover, it found that those that were not active in social networking performed worse in all categories than those that were. The correlation is striking, because it indicates the need for an open mindset of listening and responding to the needs of customers, donors or other stakeholders for a company or organization to be successful.

 

In his very popular “Basics of Social Media ROI” presentation, Olivier Blanchard of BrandBuilder Marketing outlines a process to tie social media activities to revenue and cost savings that includes looking at sales data overlaid with social media activities and campaigns. He recommends looking at F.R.Y., which is frequency, or number of transactions per month; reach, or number of new customers; and yield, or total transactions.

Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi

View more presentations from Olivier Blanchard.

 

For example, in a timeline, overlay basic sales data with social media activities, the results of your monitoring and any market research, then look at the data for areas where they seem to rise in concert (commonly known as deltas in the measurement world). This kind of measurement is best done for a significant period of time to give the best results, and it can demonstrate which social media activities and campaigns seem to be having the best effect.

 

If an organization noticed that more lively chatter on its Facebook page usually means better attendance at weekend events, it might consider timing communication or promotions for maximum effectiveness. Determine what’s most important to the business, and start measuring that right away. More variables can always be added, and it’s better to start small than not to start at all.

 

But what about organizations that don’t have sales, you might ask? A nonprofit is a good example. For a nonprofit you might want to look at how often current supporters are giving, and compare online and offline donors to see how their rates compare. You could then compare this to any campaigns you were runnign to see if there was an uptick in giving during those times compared to other times. What other measures can you think of?

 

You can check out more about measuring social media, including some case studies, in my presentation, Prove It! Tools and Techniques for Measuring Social Media.

• Part I: A Commonsense Approach to Social Media Measurement
• Part 2: Setting SMART Objectives
• Part 3: Measurement as a Diagnostic Tool

Next in the series will be Measuring the “Three Ss” of Attitude

The above is draft material for a chapter on measurement that Geoff Livingstonkindly asked me to write in his new book, Welcome to the Fifth Estate (the follow up to Now Is Gone, which is almost out of print). Comments may be used in the final edition. You can download the first drafted chapter of his new edition — Welcome to the Fifth Estate — for free.

Cool Tools: Four Ways to Build a Custom Facebook Tab, and the Tools and Services to Accomplish It

 

 

There has been lots of good conversation over at the Zoetica Salon this week about building Custom Facebook tabs (image above is the tab for the Zoetica Salon built on Beth Kanter’s Fanpage). It was of particular interest to me since I built two such tabs within the last month, one the Nonprofit Zoetica Salon community, which I built with the free tool hy.ly, and the Zoetica Salon Reveal Tab, which I hand-coded with FBML, and lots of help from AllFacebook and Tim Ware on the blogs Social Media Explorer and Media Arts. I have also built a few tabs for clients and been a part of teams where we had custom tabs built. Still, I consider myself a newcomer to tabs and exploring the best ways to use them.

 

There are lots of changes coming to fan pages, including the phasing out of the proprietary FBML code, which was required to build pages, to a more well-known iFrame standard. However, in the meanwhile, you may still want to build a tab, and most Facebook watchers say that the company will most likely support FBML pages for some time to come.

 

To take a look at some nonprofit examples, and also some of the reasons to make a custom tab for your Facebook page, you can check out Debrea Askanase’s Slideshare presentation about using custom tabs to convert visitors to fans. And Zoetica CEO and nonprofit blogger Beth Kanter has a good post on how to move Facebook Fans up the ladder of engagement,

 

In this article, I am going to sum up the findings from the discussion over at the Salon and mention some resources out there to get your page built. They fall roughly into four categories, including: Do It Yourself (DIY), Free Applications, Semi-Custom Applications, and Custom Applications.

 

Let me start by saying that the list is not exhaustive. I know there are 100s of services out there to help people build custom pages and I definitely have no time to research and list them all. I also welcome you adding the ones I missed to the comment area, However, I would ask that if you do, thatyou identify which of the four areas they fit and give a price range.

 

 

Do it Yourself with FBML

 

Pro:

It’s free if you can do it

Con:

The FBML standard for Facebook pages is changing to the more standard iFrames

 

Tutorials

Reveal page posts at AllFacebook, Social Media Explorer and Media Arts

How to Create a Facebook Landing Page by @socialmouths

 

 

Do It with Free Apps

Pro:

It’s free and you don’t have to deal with code

Con:

You have to “pay” with ads on your tab, or by “LIking” someone’s page

 

Free Apps

Hy.ly. http://hy.ly/ (You must LIKE their page to get the credits you need to build your page). They also have some new apps, including a sweepstakes app coming up.

 

Page Lever Welcome Page, http://www.pagelever.com, Free basic page, upload an image

 

Free TabSite Weclome Page, https://www.facebooktabsite.com/steps.php

The tab will show ads

 

Semi-Custom Paid Apps

 

Pro: You get some pretty cool apps for a fair price. Also, when Facebook changes it’s direction to iFrame, some of the more stable of these companies might make those changes in its product (seamless for you)

 

Con: You have to keep paying every month. Also, if they don’t make the FBML switch well, you might be caught holding the bag.

 

 

North Social

http://northsocial.com/plans/

Plans from $19-$100 per month, for one Facebook page

Lots of interesting and visually appealing apps

 

Page Lever

http://www.pagelever.com/upgrade

Plan is $3 per month

Pretty basic and straightforward, no frills, service

 

TabSite

https://www.facebooktabsite.com/steps.php

Starts at $5 a month to $15 a month for all the bells and whistles.

 

Shortstack

http://www.shortstacklab.com/features/

Starts at $0 for less than 500 fans, but quickly goes from $5 to $500 pr month based on number of fans

 

Custom Tab Builders

 

Pro: You get whatever you want

Con: It costs a lot, from around $1,000 to many thousands (average of about $5K)

 

There are so many custom Facebook tab builders out there that I could hardly start to list them all. Buddy Media is a well-known company that builds tabs for many brands, but some of the people above, including Tim Were from HyperArts, can build custom tabs. Also, Munish Gandhi says hy.ly builds custom tabs, too.

 

I would love to hear from readers who they use. If you are a developer, be sure to also leave your price range in the comments.

Three Things I Have Learned from Julie Pippert, Zoetica’s New Director of Accounts

Two years ago I was at a Kirtsy party at SxSW when I met Julie Pippert for the first time. We hit it off immediately. With both of us living in Houston and our similar interests as Moms, bloggers and consultants, we made an instant connection that would only grow with time.

Last year, when I co-founded Zoetica with partners Beth Kanter and Geoff Livingston, Julie quickly became one of the wonderful group of consultants that we work with on bigger projects, like the Crisis Data Summit we did with the Red Cross in August. In fact, she has become an integral part of our team.

As a result, we decided to make it official, and Julie will be joining the Zoetica team full-time on January 1, 2010, as our Director of Accounts. Julie has done, and continues to do, amazing things. You can read all about her achievements in the official press release. She will also help us with our newly announced community The Zoetica Salon, which will be hosted on CEO Beth Kanter’s Facebook page, starting today.

But what I love the most about Julie is how she brings her passion to work. One example is the American Cancer Society’s Choose You campaign, for which she writes as a blogger and serves as a community leader. I pulled a screenshot from the video she did for that effort for the lead photo of this post. She talks about how how her friend died of lung cancer and she realized she wouldn’t be having any more birthdays. The American Cancer Society has a More Birthday’s campaign in which Julie is involved. Just one more example about how she takes her client work personally. You can see her in this picture recently celebrating her own birthday.

Three things I have learned from Julie:

• Always bring your passion to the table, it makes for better communication of your clients mission
• Look for ways to connect the dots, part of what you are hired to do is to make introductions and Julie does this well
• Good blogger relations requires the right people, which are not necessarily the ones with the biggest following

I plan on learning a lot more from Julie. Welcome to the team!

Julie’s Birthday photo credit: The Amazing Imelda Bettinger