Amazing blog of the day: Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

Posted 2 years, 1 month ago at 9:38 am. 3 comments

Thanks goes to Rob (twitter: robert_francis) for sending me a link to Beth’s blog. I have been reading the entries on this for the last hour and there are so many awesome nuggets here that anyone thinking of social media and online communities can use.

I have traditionally used my blogs as an open notebook for taking notes (Code Zen started similarly, where I could take notes on development), and in the same spirit I am going to note a few good points here:

Questions to ask yourself while building a social network:

* Are you constituents online? If not, why build an online community.
* Are your constituents members of many other social networks and communities? Will they join YET one more? If not, can you leverage connections into the communities and networks they already belong to?
* Are your constituents using mobile devices more than computer based devices? How will this impact participation in more “traditional” online communities?
* Do you really want a community, or are you simply looking for ways for people to access and create content, but they really don’t need/want to interact with each other and form relationships while interacting over time around a topic of shared interest.

What makes for network weaving skills:

* Paying attention and noticing comments and tweets
* Personalized follow up
* Weaving together people
* Saying thank you

Encouraging community behavior:

* Give people a reason to come back, and in the community elements recruit one or two active posters to regularly discuss and comment on new material. - Alex Berger

* Be wary of clique behavior. It always forms, and can be detrimental to community growth and health. It is paramount to your success that the old guard welcomes the new guard. - Alex Berger

* The key is to get alumni influencers involved. If you can get these influencers involved and participating, they will often bring along a number of others. Small colleges use this model as well for alumni relations/fundraising - volunteers from each class do most of the outreach to their peers. - Kevin Martone

There are a lot of other great pointers there, so if you are into social media at all, I strongly encourage you to add this blog to your RSS reader.