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Archive for the ‘Facebook’ Category

A new social media planning tool

Monday, December 5, 2011 —

I recently spoke at an event for the Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee. The event, called Social Media for Nonprofits, featured Wayne Breitbarth, LinkedIn expert, and me; and although it was targeted at the nonprofit community in Milwaukee, much of what we spoke about can be useful to for-profit businesses.

My presentation focused on the results of our recent Social Media Survey of Nonprofits ( get the results here) , specifically what nonprofits value about social media, and the challenges nonprofits face in implementing social media tools for their organizations. Because the Business Journal was kind enough to ask me to speak at this event, I wanted to be sure to deliver some high quality content for them. The result of my prep for this event is a new tool we hope you’ll find useful in planning your social media strategy. We call it the Ongoing Social Media Strategy Wheel.

One of the biggest challenges faced by nonprofit is getting others involved in the effort, either from a participation standpoint or from an implementation standpoint. This is partially because most nonprofits (64%) do not have a social media policy guiding the people charged with implementing social media. If your organization doesn’t have a social media policy, be sure to download our template so you can fix this! A social media policy can help make it “safe” to build a team of people to get the work done, rather than relying on a single person (who often has other work to do).

The other challenge is finding time to plan a strategy. Although most of us would never think of spending advertising dollars without a plan or hiring a receptionist and not training that person on how to answer the phone, many people don’t think anything of just jumping into social media without a plan of action. We hope our new document, the Ongoing Social Media Strategy Wheel, helps address the planning issue. When we created it, we wanted to be sure we recognized the following things:

Most organizations are already using social media in some way. It would be stupid for me to lead you through the perfect planning process for people that are not yet involved in social media. That process won’t work if you’re already participating because you can’t stop and undo what you’ve already done just to make a plan.
Planning is not a one time activity. You have to constantly reassess where you are at, look for new ideas, and pay attention to what is going on in the world.
The world doesn’t stop while you plan. You can’t take a vacation from interacting with your social media contacts while you think. You have to think and act at the same time.

The ongoing social media strategy wheel attempts to show this by using continuous circles. The inner circle illustrates the planning and reflection activities that most people forget. These activities are conducted internally and aren’t seen by the public, but they are very important because performing these activities will increase the effectiveness of the woare the public sees. The outer circle illustrates the activities that most people see. Both wheels are rotating constantly and at the same time.

We hope that this new document will help you continuously refine your communications on social media.

If you want to see the rest of the presentation from the Social Media for Nonprofits event (the ideas work for for-profits too), you can view it here:

Social Media for Nonprofits

View more presentations from Clear Verve Marketing, LLC.

Christina Steder is the President of Clear Verve Marketing and works with clients to plan, create and execute marketing campaigns. Follow her on Twitter as @clearverve

Tags: Clear Verve, Communication, content marketing, Facebook, marketing, nonprofit, Public Relations, Social Media, Social Media Policy

Thoughts on the PR & Social Media Summit

Friday, October 14, 2011 —

I don’t think I realized the brilliance of the PR & Social Media Summit presented in Milwaukee until the next day, when I found myself missing the energy of the conference. Being a part of a community on several different levels was extremely enriching.

We all got to take a day to navigate the social media landscape as a group, with very few outside disturbances. This was my first conference with a smart phone and tweet screens and I really enjoyed it for two main reasons:

1) It was great to SEE WHAT OTHER PEOPLE WERE THINKING as the presentations were taking place (even in the other session) and even see how people outside of the summit were responding.

2) I really enjoyed the FREEDOM to feel like I could be on a phone or computer without insulting people around me for once. We are taught from a young age that paying attention means looking at the speaker, actively listening and nodding (not off to sleep, obviously). But multi-listening opened things up in an amazing social media savvy way!

2.25) It was my birthday and somebody not at the summit figured out they could wish me a big screen happy birthday tweet all the way from Africa.

Being in sessions with people who were into social media (or wanted to learn more about social media) was helpful, and the summit set us all up to communicate successfully. Presenters wanted to interact with both in-person and Twitter questions/comments, and audience members shared information about social media tools, planning, influencing influencers, videos and driving engagement as fast as they learned it.

Did you attend # PRSMS in Milwaukee? If so did you feel this same connectedness? Or have you attended another conference where you felt similarly? I know that one day later, I was still inclined to tweet about what I was experiencing to others and missed being in that type of environment.

BONUS! Some one-liner takeaways that I found quality enough to write down on actual paper:

• Seek what people are seeking, not what they already have. (@georgegsmithjr)
• Social media is less about the moment more about the movement (@georgegsmithjr)
• Technology changes but remember it’s about consumer’s behavior and how they interact with the changing technology that matters (@georgegsmithjr)
• Liking something means something in the real world, but not on Facebook (@augieray)
• ROI tools are different for everyone depending on what you’re trying to accomplish (@sarameaney)
• Foster a narrative with your consumers (@alkrueger)
• You can’t influence an influencer unless you ARE an influencer (@the_spinmd)
• People don’t sign up on Facebook to be marketed to (@the_spinmd)
• “The shadow is what we think of it, the tree is the real thing.” – Abe Lincoln, re one’s character (@JennyMcTighe)

Erica Gordon is a Marketing Associate at Clear Verve and also works part-time at a Milwaukee area nonprofit. Follow Erica on Twitter: @erica_g.

Tags: Facebook, Social Media, twitter

Facebook vs. Twitter ?

Friday, July 29, 2011 —

I came across a great infographic yesterday that illustrates the 2010 demographics of Facebook and Twitter. There is a lot of information in these two pie charts. Here is what I found most interesting:

Number of users
• Facebook – 500 million
• Twitter – 108 million
Clearly, Facebook is this winner here. And with the ability for advertisers to target their messages by location, age, gender, and interests, Facebook offers a lot more opportunities for businesses to promote themselves.

Usage patterns
• 41% of Facebook users log in every day
• 27% of Twitter users log in every day
If you are marketing a business, this is an important distinction because you will either need to adjust the frequency of your posts depending on the network or adjust your expectations regarding the timeline of your campaign.

It is also worth noting that only 12% of people who log in update their status on Facebook, while 52% of Twitter users update their status every time they log in. While this statistic can mean a number of things, I think it shows that Facebook users are more consumers of content, while Twitter users are more generators of content. Facebook users may be more likely to be receptive to your messages, provided they are appropriate for the social network setting, while Twitter users may be too busy talking about themselves to care about anyone else. Or not. The statistics are true, the rest is just a hypothesis from me.

Age of users
• Facebook – approximately 60% of users are ages 13 – 34
• Twitter – approximately 60% of users are ages 26 – 44
Twitter users are also more educated. 76% of Twitter users are in college or are college graduates. Only 50% of Facebook users are either in college or are college graduates. This might make you think that if you are targeting educated individuals, you should choose Twitter. Don’t be so hasty! It is important to convert these percentages into a head count. 50% of Facebook users = 250 million users. 76% of Twitter users = 80.5 million.

I hope you will take a minute to look at the infographic. What does it tell you? We’d love to get your insights!

Christina Steder is the President of Clear Verve Marketing and works with clients to plan, create and execute marketing campaigns. Follow her on Twitter as @clearverve.

Tags: content marketing, Facebook, marketing, Social Media, twitter

The UNfollow challenge – did you miss me?

Thursday, July 14, 2011 —

As an organization or business, we all want people to like us. That’s a gimme.

And now in the social media world, it’s become the norm to want people to like us and follow us. But what if we start challenging people to UNlike us? Or UNfollow us?

By doing this, we are showing a sense of confidence that we know you really like us. Right now, all people see is “Follow us!” “Like us!” “Join us!” “If you do this for us, we’ll give you this!” So do something different. Posing this UNfollow challenge does make people take extra steps, but it will engage them to think about if they really need you.

Should you expect some people not to come back if they unfollow you? Of course! Should you worry? Of course not!

They way I see it there are five possible reactions to the challenge. People will:

1) Do nothing but respect what you’re doing (and what you do) even more
2) Do nothing because they’re not engaged
3) Accept the challenge and come back to you
4) Accept the challenge and not come back because they decide they don’t really need you
5) Accept the challenge and not come back because they think you’re crazy and tell their friends

Only one of these reactions is not good for you, and even then it’s not that bad. Which one do you think it is?

I’ll wait.

(insert your own waiting music here)

Number two (although I could be guilted into admitting other ones are also not great, depending on your situation). Why is only number two not good? If you don’t have people actively engaged in what you are all about, they’re just a number to you. And that’s not the kind of audience anybody craves. Creating a community with 100 engaged audience members is far better than 2,000 people who couldn’t care less!

What do you think? Does this have the potential to massively backfire? Explode into flames? Or is this something that you would consider trying? I’d love to hear what you think! Or unread what you just read, I challenge you!

Erica Gordon is a Marketing Associate at Clear Verve and also works part-time at a Milwaukee area nonprofit. Follow Erica on Twitter: @erica_g.

Tags: Communication, customer experience, Facebook, marketing, Social Media, twitter

Most Liked Pages on Facebook

Thursday, May 19, 2011 —

The 25 most liked pages on Facebook surprised me when I stumbled upon it. While I currently lead a semi-active Facebook life, I joined back in the “olden days” where there was no news feed and you typed information in the About Me section with total freedom. (Did I also mention you had to walk uphill both ways before logging into Facebook?)

I was surprised when I looked at the longer Top Pages leaderboard list and saw mostly celebrities and music stars. A few other notable details:

Texax Hold’em Poker eclipses everything else by more than two million likes. It’s both an online and real-life game so it would potentially have more “likes” than running or swimming because you can use Facebook to BOTH play the game and connect with others.
Facebook is number two on the list. Isn’t being on Facebook enough to show that you like the company?
The only movie (series) in the top 40 is Toy Story.
The only food in the top 40 is Oreo. My guess is they must have done some kind of promotion to get this high because it doesn’t look like they do too many deals from their wall. But I could be wrong.

Two companies that I thought would be on the list were Coca-Cola and Starbucks. These two still make sense to me because they do a pretty good job keeping up with technology, social media and interacting with customers.

The only one I like in the top 25 is Disney, and I like them because they post random screenshots with quotes. I’m not in anyway obsessed with Disney movies, but it’s fun to have something different amongst friend updates and nonprofit organization updates (which make up most of what I see in my news feed).

Which of the top 25 do you “Like” and why? Or why not?

Erica Gordon is a Marketing Associate at Clear Verve and also works part-time at a Milwaukee area nonprofit. She recently received her Communication MA from Marquette University. Follow Erica on Twitter: @erica_g.

Tags: Communication, Facebook, marketing, Social Media

Official Researcher for a Day

Wednesday, April 20, 2011 —

A few weeks ago I shared a research paper that I wrote in grad school with two classmates about creating communities on Facebook. We wrote it almost two years ago, but since the timeline to get accepted into a conference is quite long, we just presented our paper at the Central States Communication Association (CSCA) Midwest Convention a week and a half ago. I thought I’d briefly share my conference-presenting experience!

Not one of the three of us has any desire to include the title of “researcher” in our future but we decided that getting accepted and presenting at a conference would be our last grad school benefit/hurrah of sorts. We went into it with an open mind, excited to present to other researchers outside of a classroom setting.

The week of our panel presentation, we met and ended up with more questions than answers. How much time would we have? Would there be a podium? A microphone? Would there be 20 people or 100 in attendance? Did people want to find holes in our research or would they be mostly supportive? At least the one thing we did know was our material, which we were grateful for. And that there would be three other presentations during our time slot.

Our presentation went pretty well, although we stumbled over one or two points that had become rusty over the past year. It was great to share with others at a communications conference where people actively research a variety of communication subjects. After all four presentations in our time slot, a respondent assigned to our session stood up to talk about how all of the topics were the same and then spent a few minutes on each paper in front of everyone.

The respondent seemed very impressed by ours and it was great to get that response from somebody who didn’t need to give us an official grade! Apparently the theory we chose was unique to communications but worked very well and our ideas could really be used in a variety of circumstances. Success!

It was really valuable and satisfying to see a research paper from infancy (about our shared interest in social media and nonprofits) to being acknowledged in the research world. While it would be amazing to have a published paper, the three of us are completely content and proud to have presented at a conference.

Have you experienced something similar? Was it everything you thought it would be and more?

Tags: Clear Verve, Communication, Facebook, marketing, research

Creating Communities on Facebook

Friday, March 4, 2011 —

The idea started as a graduate school project for a qualitative research class at Marquette University. My group mates and I discovered a shared interest in social media, nonprofits, and, well, not research. We turned all that into a research project that we all actually enjoyed, and that we can now share with others!

We decided to use each of our undergrad schools (Marquette University, the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin – Madison) to study communication within Facebook fan pages. I’ll skip some of the in-between stuff. We did some research with a theory and it was awesome- all of our findings are backed by facts we can point to. Research can be COOL! But that’s not the point of this.

The featured character of each school is the voice of the university (which we called “The Narrator”). In addition to The Narrator each school has a small cast of supporting characters that fall into two main categories: the silent supporters (who voluntarily liked their school’s fan page) and the active cheerleaders (fans who clicked like and commented on the school’s fan page posts in addition to liking the page).

Now, how can this help you? We identified several strategies that can be used to maximize the effectiveness of current or potential Facebook pages:

Facebook fan page administrators should post regularly to the page, more than once per week. Regular posts not only offer more opportunities to deliver key messages to the fan page, they also keep fans of the group engaged! And this makes fans more likely to make checking the page part of their daily routine.
Post about topics that involve people, places, or events closely associated with your school/business/nonprofit.
Use phrases that resonate with your audience. In our study we observed that phrases such as Go Marquette, Ski-U-Mah, and On Wisconsin, rallied fans of each group. Such expressions help to define a group as a community and illustrate the bond members of the community share.
Pose questions to fans of the group, building opportunities for fans to be active members. When a question is posed and fans are encouraged to voice their thoughts and opinions, they may feel more essential to and active in the group dynamic.

Do these strategies correlate with what you do? Have you discovered any strategies on your own? We’d love to know! And if you’re interested in more about our research or have questions, let me know!

Tags: Communication, community, Facebook, marketing, Social Media

One Nonprofit’s Strategy on Facebook

Monday, May 17, 2010 —

This week’s post comes to us from guest blogger Caroline Anderson, Public Relations and Advocacy Coordinator at Meta House.

Meta House recently ran a successful fundraising and awareness campaign on twitter, as Clear Verve blogged about earlier. Afterwards, we were asked to participate in a seminar on ‘Social Media Strategies for Nonprofits’ at the BizTech Conference & Expo on Thursday, April 29. Our panel of four discussed various ways that nonprofits use social media like facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. and the audience seemed to appreciate hearing about our different approaches.

Clear Verve invited Meta House to guest blog and share our facebook strategy. Without claiming to know it all (especially because social media is always evolving…and no one likes a self-proclaimed expert anyway) here is the general approach that Meta House uses on Facebook. We hope that this blog will help other nonprofit organizations as they navigate social media!

Background on the organization: “Meta House helps women struggling with drug and alcohol addiction reclaim their lives and rebuild their families. Its model program meets the unique needs of women and their children, ending the generational cycle of substance abuse.” This is important to know, because unlike an organization that works with cute puppies or something else with easy crowd appeal, we are working against a stigmatized conception of drug addicts. By sharing their stories of recovery and the benefits of treatment, we help fight this stigma and increase support for our mission.

Frequency: We usually update our Facebook page about 4 times per week. If stretching to find news for an update, better to post nothing. If time is an issue because of other obligations one week, that’s ok. Conversely, if lots of exciting things are happening then we might post more…but we don’t want to flood News Feeds.

Audience: We have a diverse group of “fans” (now that we “like” pages, is the noun still “fan”?) including: Meta House clients, graduates, staff, volunteers, donors, sponsors, and new supporters of the organization. Some fans know a lot about us, and some may just have a general interest in women’s issues or addiction and treatment.

Content of updates: We try to post items that will be interesting for everyone, which isn’t always easy. We share about both big and small happenings going on in the various programs at Meta House – from a healthy baby being born to a topic discussed in one of our treatment classes. Our women and their children go on outings around Milwaukee, so we like to share about the fun places they visit, especially because most of it happens for free! Sometimes we put out timely requests if we need something specific, like diapers in large sizes or volunteers to help with a project.

Sharing other media: If we are featured somewhere else online, we share a link to it. After an event, we post photos and encourage people to tag themselves and friends. We have videos on YouTube featuring some of our graduates’ stories, and we post them in the hopes that viewers will gain a greater understanding and empathy for the women we serve.

Applications: We have a Causes page and have raised some money through that application, mostly during “America’s Giving Challenge” and when a supporter makes us the focus of their Birthday Wish. We tried to win on Chase Community Giving, but there was too much competition.

The person behind the updates: Remember how we said that we don’t know it all? Meta House was unsure of how to move forward with social media, as full-time staff didn’t have enough time and interns were too temporary. When I (Caroline) began working at Meta House part-time in September 2009, it was clear that it would be me or no one. I was hesitant because I had just spent three years with the Peace Corps in Cameroon, Central Africa and felt pretty disconnected from the fast-moving online world. However, I began learning by observing other nonprofits in action, attending trainings and webinars on the subject, and talking to new contacts. Christina Steder of Clear Verve also volunteered her advice! Slowly, I began to tweet and update the Meta House fan page. I’ve learned a lot from our followers- their responses are the best indication of what to adjust in your strategy.

We’ll end with a shameless request: please “like” us and suggest us to your friends as well! Thanks for reading.

Tags: Clear Verve, content marketing, Facebook, fundraising, marketing, Meta House, milwaukee, nonprofit, Public Relations, Social Media

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