So, your organisation is going social (Part one)

This post is the first in a short series on setting up and managing a social media presence for your organisation, you can find the rest here.


You’re a social media evangelist in an organisation that doesn’t have a social media presence, you’ve managed to convince your boss that it’s essential to start doing that Twitter thing, now what?

Well, the bad news is that you’re behind the curve, with 94% of corporates and over 90% of non-profits already using social media. The good news is you can learn from the mistakes already made and make the most of a swath of best-practice case studies. Before all that, there are a few key questions you should ask:

Why are you getting on board with social media?

If the answer is “because everyone else is”, you need to rethink your position. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t jump on board, but you should have a sound business case. Good reasons for developing a presence in the social sphere might be:

• To increase brand visibility/awareness
• Develop leads and drive sales/subscriptions
• Strengthen campaigns
• Improve customer service
• Network with key stakeholders

There are loads more reasons, and your strategic plan should be able to help you identify them. The initial reasons you outline can help you to develop your key performance indicators and create a formula to measure return on investment.

Who’s going to manage it?

This is one of the key questions, who do you trust to be able to manage both the technical and communications side of engaging with people on behalf of your organisation online?

Ideally, you’ll be in a position to appoint at least one full-time person to manage social media. Speaking in the most basic terms, you have two options from here:

• Appointing someone internally that may make a fantastic online ambassador
• Appointing a social media professional from outside 

Both of these options have pros and cons, a professional new to the organisation may take a little time to familiarise themselves with the organisation (although, you would hope they do much of this before they take up the role), whilst appointing someone internally may mean you run the risk of some early social media faux pas and that you may need additional investment to cover training.

What channels will you use?

If you hire a social media professional, they will be able to help you make the right decisions. The right channels will be influenced by your demographics, your sector and your ability to produce content. I’m a big fan of experimenting with new channels (usually with a personal profile initially), but one thing that you should avoid is spreading yourself too thinly across too many platforms.

Interesting Twitter update - Changes to ToS and Privacy Policy

Just received an interesting update from Twitter - changes to ToS and the privacy policy. It sounds like they're being more open (and I do have a lot of respect for the lengths Twitter will go to to protect their users), but what do you think?  Message follows: Hi Paul Darigan, New things are always happening here at Twitter HQ. We're growing at a rapid pace, and our commitment to simplicity, transparency, and reaching every person on the planet continues. We thought you might be interested in knowing about some of our most recent developments:

A new weekly email that delivers the most interesting news and items you might have missed from the people you're connected to on Twitter. Now Twitter is in more languages than ever. Check for your preferred language and change your setting. Download the latest Twitter mobile apps at twitter.com/download. There's more to Discover on Twitter.com - try out the new Discover tab.

In addition, we've made a number of updates to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

Here are some of the main changes to our Privacy Policy, with links for more information:

We've provided more details about the information we collect and how we use it to deliver our services and to improve Twitter. One example: our new tailored suggestions feature, which is based on your recent visits to websites that integrate Twitter buttons or widgets, is an experiment that we're beginning to roll out to some users in a number of countries. Learn more here. We've noted the many ways you can set your preferences to limit, modify or remove the information we collect. For example, we now support the Do Not Track (DNT) browser setting, which stops the collection of information used for tailored suggestions. We've clarified the limited circumstances in which your information may be shared with others (for example, when you've given us permission to do so, or when the data itself is not private or personal). Importantly, our privacy policy is not intended to limit your rights to object to a third party's request for your information.

In our Terms of Service, we've clarified how your relationship with Twitter works and made a number of small changes and formatting improvements, such as new headings for easy reference and updated descriptions of our services.

Take a moment to read our new Privacy Policy and Terms of Service, and thanks for using Twitter.

The Twitter Team

Twitter Visualisation Tools - In Action

Holding an event? Inviting people to tweet to a hashtag? Want to display those tweets? Great!

I've pulled together a list of different Twitter visualisation tools beneath - Some of them look pretty cool, others are a little bit dull but functional. Anyway, check them out, let me know what you think.

Note: In all examples, I've chosen to display tweets for the #ff hashtag - I don't endorse any tweets that appear, blah blah blah, etc.

1. Visible Tweets

I came across Visible Tweets a few weeks ago and I really like it. You can choose from three different types of animation and all of them are attractive. The one downside is that it is necessarily a little bit slow cycling through tweets, so don't expect it to pick up and display every tweet if you're hosting a popular event.

2. Twitter Search Widget

The Twitter Search Widget might not be quite as attractive as Visual Tweets, but it does allow you a great degree of personalisation. You can edit its dimensions, colour, frequency of updates, and much more.

3. Twitter Fountain

Twitter Fountain is a handy tool, it pulls in hashtagged tweets and mashes them up with images from Flickr. There are lots of different display options that you can fiddle with.
 

There are more Twitter visualisation tools that I either can't embed on the blog or haven't paid for, but that I believe are still worth a look:

• Twitterfall - Basic but functional, although it does scroll a little too quickly for my liking (Free)
• TweetWall Pro - Looks very impressive, lots of different themes (Free trial, paid for thereafter)
• Revisit - Well worth a look, really interesting layout and it 'emphasizes conversational threads' (Free)

That's it from me for the moment. Let me know if you've got any more event-oriented visualisation tools to add to the list above.

Twitter Basics: Counting your click-throughs

Here we go, the first of a series of posts covering some social media basics.

There are lots of great tools for posting and measuring clicks on links in tweets, the free versions of which often provide a good but limited service - I fully recommend checking out Buffer and Hootsuite.

However, if you don't have any budget, but need to record these statistics, Tweetdeck and Bitly work really well together. Here's how you sync them:

1. Create a Tweetdeck account and add your profile/s to it. You can download Tweetdeck to your desktop, use the Tweetdeck web app, or install Tweetdeck for Chrome (my personal favourite).

2. Create a Bitly account.

3. When you've created your Bitly account, click on 'Settings', scroll down the page and find your API key (a long combination of letters and numbers). Copy this and open Tweetdeck.

4. When you're in Tweetdeck, click on 'Settings' and then 'Services':

• Set your 'Link Shortening' service to 'bit.ly'
• Enter your Bitly username
• Paste in your Bitly API key

5. When you've saved those changes, any links that you tweet from Tweetdeck will automatically be shortened using your Bitly account (yay).You can measure the click-throughs on these links by logging in to your Bitly account.

So, what do you think - Is that useful, do you have any other/betters tools, tips or solutions? I've got a feeling that some people will flag-up Google Analytics as a solution, and it certainly is a really strong, free tool - Have you got any Google Analytics tips for measuring the impact of your social media presence?

Channel 4's exclusive Prometheus trailer in numbers

Channel 4's Prometheus trailer, heralded as a world first and broadcast during Homeland on 29th April, generated some interesting figures (The Homeland episode of 29th April had 2.87 million viewers).

3 minute-long trailer

40 seconds of viewers' tweets displayed during the following ad-break

4,000 hashtagged tweets

15,000,000 potential hashtag reach

1 Ofcom investigation

Missed the trailer? Watch it below

@LASAICT's #lasatechtools tweetchat - Making to most of online tools in the third sector

Today's LASA Tech Tools tweetchat (kicking off at 12:30 GMT, 2nd May) sounds promising:

...Lasa will be running a Twitter chat on online tools for charities on 2 May from 12.30-14.30. This programme of events has been funded by Google. 

The tweetchat will share the latest thinking from experts in this area, who will offer tips and advice to help charities make the most of the best online tools for their needs.

LasaICT have lined up an impressive panel including Matt Collins of Beatbullying, Ross McCulloch of Be Good Be Social, Mark Walker of AbilityNet, Sylwia Presley of Barcamp Nonprofits, and Crispin Read of White Fuse Media.

* Note: The tweet chat moved so quickly that I gave up trying to Storify it and concentrated on participating instead. I'll replace the partial Storify beneath with the one created by Lasa as soon as it's available*
Now updated with Lasa's Storify:

"These views are my own..."

The caveat that graces several million Twitter bios (including my own), and that is required by just about every social media policy going.

Now that I’ve added that disclaimer to my bio, I’m free to turn the twittersphere blue, endorse politically-incorrect causes and indulge in tweeting some offensive ‘jokes’... right?

Wrong.

Everything you post says something about you and adds to your overall digital footprint, which can say a lot about you. Check it out - Google yourself and see what you find, I’ll wait...

... Done? Did you like what you saw? Would a current or potential employer like it? Would clients or customers of that employer like it? You had better hope so, because it reflects on them as well.

If I see an employee of a charity posting offensive comments online, am I more or less likely to donate money or volunteer with that charity?

If my broadband contract is up for renewal and I see that a customer support officer at ‘Broadband Provider X’ tends to tweet highly offensive jokes, am I going to want to deal with that person when my connection drops?

Those examples may be trite, but if your employer has seen fit to employ you, that is both an endorsement of your skill-set and of your personality.

But I don’t reference my job in my bio

That doesn’t really matter I’m afraid. In the vast majority of cases it just takes a quick search and a few clicks to find the person behind the twitter account and to figure out where they work.

That all sounds a bit depressing

It doesn’t have to be. Protecting your employer by being careful with your posts also protects you. It helps you to avoid tweeting a stream of expletives when your football team concedes a goal and it helps to stop you getting involved in pointless spats online.

I dislike the term ‘personal brand’, but it does have a place here. Do your online posts reflect the personal brand that you would like to present and market?

---

*Disclaimer* The tone of tweets mentioned in the second paragraph are not indicative of the sort of content I would like to be able to tweet. The sort of tweets that I want to (and do) post are sometimes a little bit grouchy, but mostly pretty safe (some might even use the term ‘dull’)