How to use Social Media time-effectively

'Advice on how to use Social Media effectively in a way that isn't massively time consuming' was the question on an excellent LinkedIn group 'Social Media for Nonprofit Organizations' (54K members). There are two lessons there immediately, and one quandary. The first lesson is that LinkedIn, after a very slow and cumbersome start, is becoming a lot more useful to ordinary members, partly because some of the group discussions are excellent. The best are niche, such as this one or Translators Worldwide, which has 15.5K members. 'Nothing ever happens in LinkedIn', was a standard complaint but its carefully nurtured image as the 'professional Facebook' drove recruitment. That meant that, until now, it has been mainly of use to recruiters who trawled productively amongst all those hopeful CVs. However, groups are increasingly seen as something which might take LinkedIn mainstream.


The second lesson is that social media does take time. To be even minimally effective in any one channel takes at least three to four hours a week - and that is maintenance level effort. To build a presence from scratch - define goals, identify audience, engage and build following etc - takes a lot more effort. And then there is doing this kind of curation task - gathering material to share with other people, learning from the content we browse or skim and 'feeding the web' (so that it will, as the adage has it, feed us back). Content still rules and creating new content is still an essential part of being effective in social media, even if the originality often lies in selecting from other people's contributions and taking a personal stance (well expressed in the content-aggregation site scoop.it which asks you to, 'add your insight' as you tag and share items of content').

That brings me to the quandary, which I shall share on the group: there have been a lot of useful, practical answers to the question from members. Nothing I have seen so far is new, in the sense of something we don't do or heard before but the crowd-sourcing process, triggered by a simple question, has generated a valuable collection of tips in one place. But because, sensibly, it is a members-only group (though open to anyone who wants to join) simply tweeting about it as I did this morning is frustrating for anyone who comes across my tweet, as a friend pointed out, since the resource is unavailable publcly. However, by gathering some of those tips - curating content - I am potentially exploiting people who contribute freely and voluntarily (even if there are promotional opportunities for those who share on such sites). I think the answer lies in following normal publishing conventions, listing sources of the tips below, but it will be interesting to hear responses from group members when I report what I have done.

Time-effective social media top tips:

Tools

• Use a social media dashboard like HootSuite or Tweetdeck to monitor, post and manage and several accounts
• Shareaholic browser extension for Chrome to post relevant content to social networks
• Develop summary podcasts or blogposts and share them widely
• Use Google alerts for keywords relevant to the target audience
• BufferApp as an alternative dashboard for scheduling and getting application specific analytics

Habits

• Schedule your time – and set time limits: nicely summarised in this infographic showing a 30 minute daily timeable
• Develop an editorial and content calendar
• Blog regularly (curate content, comment on other content, contribute original pieces) and promote blogs to all social media channels
• Spend an hour each week finding people to follow and pruning your own follower (friend) list
• Limit the networks you're involved in
• Manage notifications (they're always configurable in each network), limiting them to daily or less frequently

Sources

• Susan Chavez
• David Carr 
• David Somerfleck
• Lee Roberts 
• Sarah Zeldman
• Sue Duris

[cross-posted from Diplo Foundation website]

Seven principles for middle and late adopters of social media

We are meeting different people these days when we talk about and work with social media, more of the massive numbers in  the middle and latter portions of the classic adoption curve.

Presenting and facilitating at three very different events - the eDiplomacy day at the Instituto Publico in Rome, an ICARDA/ICRISAT programme inception workshop in Dubai and an informal chat with a group of international development consultants in Oxford -  I heard similar things from people who are only now feeling their way into how they can engage with the online mainstream:

• there are many  from the ‘early majority’: people who have became enthusiastic and skilled users of several social media or collaborative platforms and who want to integrate them into their everyday work, as well as evaluate some of the less-well known tools
• there are probably more from the ‘late majority’ who are involved in one or two platforms, sometimes uneasily or by default: 
• 'I am on Facebook to follow the kids' is something I've heard around the world; 
• the logistics information, agenda and reports for the Dubai workshop were on a wiki, which for many of the  participants was their first real exposure to anything other than Wikipedia: they had no choice;  
• 'I kept being invited to LinkedIn so I eventually joined'
• and there are some classic late adopters checking out the space: 'everyone tells me I need to be on Twitter, do I?' to which the answer is, 'it depends'. I don't like the term 'laggards’. It is loaded and   inaccurate: it implies everyone will - should - adopt,  eventually. But there is, of course, no reason to join any of these platforms unless it serves a purpose. 

And what is the mainstream? As an illustration I listed for one of the groups the tools that I use regularly, not because I am a model but because they are also typically used by many other early adopters I know.  The list is at the bottom of this post. 

 

Seven principles for those late into the social web

It’s hard to come up with general principles for the majority, since it includes all human variation and possible sets of interests. And in 2012 there are many, many mature products on the market which can be adapted to suit an individual’s needs. For a long time in our training we have used business functions within organisations as the basis for assessing need and interest. It's an approach that can be extended to individuals. For example, promotion and collaboration were the two functions which generated most interest amongst the group of consultants. Here are some  notes from our discussion, elaborated later of course, which is the right of the blogger. 

1. As ever, start with your aims: why would you want to use one of these tools? For example:
• Promotion: what is the audience you want to reach, where do they hangout online? Research, join and start to engage. 
• Collaboration: are your colleagues already using a tool? How good is their Internet access and how confident are they using social media? Select an appropriate platform (see below) and invest the time in learning how to use it well, so you can support them. Note that if you choose a wiki they will probably find it surprisingly difficult.
2. Engage with people: the essence of social media is that it is, well, social. That means personal conversations, linking people to people, sharing information, ideas etc, joining important lists and conversations on other people’s sites. These are not platforms for broadcast messages. Crucially, it also means keeping on top of the exchanges, for example, commenting on comments, thanking people for linking to your work or RT your tweets. 
3. Feed the web and it will feed you back. For example, linking to other people’s content, RT in Twitter, liking in Facebook or slideshare and commenting in blogs will get you noticed, connected and - if your content has meaning - shared in turn
4. Use groups of tools, linking and integrating: many social media tools are designed to one thing well but they are all designed to interact and exchange data (to be mashed up, as they say). For example, I echo tweets into LinkedIn (via the Hootsuite client) and selectively into Facebook (you simply have to link the two accounts and use #fb). I tweet about content I generate - Blogs, videos, photos, slides;
5. Always share and record your work online somewhere public, for example slides on slideshare, project progress on Blogs or Twitter
6. Be yourself: authenticity scores over slickness, although manufacturing 'authenticity' earns PR firms and political spin merchants a good living. 
7. Have fun: Good social media practice has a lot in common with being a good party host: introduce people to people, provide interesting titbits, circulate regularly, help people have fun.

 

So what social media tools do you use?

For the record, and because we believe in transparency, here is the list of tools I regularly use, ranked loosely by how often and how important they are to my work:

• Twitter (via client software - hootsuite [web client] or tweetdeck [dowloadable client])
• Delicious (it's always surprising how few people who work collaboratively with others around the world use Delicious or one of the competitors like Diigo) 
• Dropbox (probably the most straightforward collaborative application since it requires no social media experience and, carefully managed, can serve as a common repository for collaborative projects. Importantly, it doesn't require users to change their favourite tools, like MS Office or the Mac equivalents
• Wiki (e.g. euforicweb; platforms I use include mediawiki [free, open source: clunky, the original, and still the Wikipedia platform]; wikispaces; pbworks) Note that a lot of people find learning to use a wiki quite difficult: for example the 'edit' function, also a basic essential for blogging, flummoxes people who haven't had a lot of experience)
• Google docs (tends to be easier to understand for new users, since the applications 'feel' similar to MS Office packages that people use already. It does require good Internet access, although there is offline access to documents. Candidly, I have had more problems that I expected with offline Google docs)
• Facebook
• News and other feeds, through Google Reader; we suggest using an iGoogle Home Page as an introduction to the value of filtering news through feeds, or  netvibes, which allows users to share and publish a common home page, as in this great example from Stephanie Psaila of Diplo Foundation
• Blogs (writing on our own blog; for communication support, for example the Diplo Foundation blog, from where I cross-post here or from events,  such as those we support for GDNet. I always quote John Naughton as my favourite blogger, partly for interest and partly because he does it so well; Tim Davies is another superb digital-artist)  
• Slideshare
• LinkedIn
• Scheduling tools (for example Doodle for diaries; eventbrite for, er, events)
• YouTube (we use Blip.tv, as it syndicates content to other sites; Vimeo is used by many people for video quality reasons)
• Flickr for pictures and images (see again euforicweb for how we easily the content can be shared and displayed; many people also Google’s platform called Picassa)
• Mindmeister, for collaborative mindmaps
• Yammer, which works as an internal Twitter

There are several platforms I want to explore a bit more

• Tumblr, and easy to use and flexible blogging and aggregation tool
• Google+, Google's 'social network', which is apparently used by more people than Twitter, but still has to convince me
• Pinterest which enables people to collect and link to images from across the web and I communicate best through images

How ODI uses digital tools for measuring success in research uptake

A fascinating peer exchange last week in DFID discussed issues (and possible solutions) to the challenges related to monitoring and evaluating research uptake and communication efforts. The session, facilitated by my colleague Pete Cranston, was the first in a series of 3 meetings organised as part of the R4D project, to address different aspects of social media and engagement in and around development research.

The conversation was started by an excellent presentation from ODI’s Nick Scott. Over the past months, Nick has put a lot of effort into looking at how ODI was doing its own M&E of research uptake. As a result, the organisation has adopted a new analytical framework - and a new set of tools to track usage and uptake of their research outputs. The ODI approach and dashboard is well described by Nick in a recent post and presented in the slides below - if you have missed them and are interested in the subject, make sure you have a read both of them.

ODI's M&E approach and dashboard on Prezi

What the ODI’s experience shows is why and how research organisations should escape the “tyranny of downloads”. Downloads and pageviews alone are simply not enough to capture the different ways in which users interacts with the digital content in today’s social web. For example, for ODI a good 10% of their traffic is generated by social media. Tweets, shares, Facebook likes they all add a new layer of information that needs to be taken into account. An efficient use of digital tools can help in capturing much more of this information and do a better job in assessing the uptake and impact of research outputs.

Additionally, even when you are able to track all these elements, you need to make up your mind and decide on which metrics you are actually going to focus. When it comes to Google Analytics for example, ODI focuses on just a couple of the many different things you can track - unique visitors, entry pages, country of origin and a few others. But the choice of metrics and indicators is very much related to the goals you want to achieve, and how the information gathered can be put to use.

But why track stats and pile up information if you can’t make use of it? ODI M&E reports are now more intuitive to read, more colorful and graphic and able to present insights in easy formats. They are shared throughout the organisations in a much more open way. Further, because the different statistics are tracked at the level of the single outputs produced, they provide ODI’s communications team with the evidence to back up what its already known, but not always proved: using a balanced mix of channels and a more comprehensive communication approach creates a positive circle that gives more mileage to the research outputs. ODI researchers are now more inclined to write opinion pieces and blog posts that complement research reports, or to tweet about their new publications.

Finally, looking at the specific technical implementation that ODI has put in place, this seems to be rather advanced and complex. It uses APIs, servers logs and business intelligent applications to combine a set of different statistics into a structured dataset that can be enquired at any given moment though a dashboard interface. This is the result of 6 months of work and quite some investment in time and technology, so it wouldn’t probably be a viable solution smaller organisations. However, as Nick suggests in the video below, there is a huge need of a ‘think tank M&E’ tool that is affordable and allows to track the footprint of research outputs across the social web. Hopefully we won’t have to wait long before such an application is available.