Archive for the ‘Tools and Tactics’ Category

Dec

2011

21

Category:

Tips, Tools and Tactics, Visual

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7 Comments

Getting Insight from Facebook Insight Requires Sense Making Skills

Flickr Photo by Colin Faulkingham

If you want extract value from your social media strategy, you need to use measurement.    That means setting measurable goals,  collecting the right data, making sense of it, and transforming it into actionable decisions.   Sense-making is an essential workplace skill along with several others.

Robin Good curated this article about research on future workplace skills. (Found it via Curata’s collection).   The skills are:

  • Sense-making: ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed
  • Social intelligence: ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions
  • Novel and adaptive thinking: proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based
  • Cross-cultural competency: ability to operate in different cultural settings
  • Computational thinking: ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning
  • New media literacy: ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication
  • Transdisciplinarity: literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines
  • Design mindset: ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes
  • Cognitive load management: ability to discriminate and filter information for importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques
  • Virtual collaboration: ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team

    • Robin aptly points out that these skills are also required for content curation.   In a recent slide deck on the “Visualizing the Agency of the Future,  Jess3 and Leslie Bradshaw also touch on new work place skills, emphasizing the importance of data visualization.   They use this quote:

    “The ability to take data – to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value form it, to visualize it, to communicate is giong to be a hugely important skill in the next decade.”- Hal Varian, Google

    I think these workplace skills are important for nonprofits, especially making sense out of data.   What does that actually mean?  How do you do it?   Does it require some special gift?

    Let’s dissect an act of sense-making using Facebook Insights.    Your Facebook Insights analytics programs is most likely going to give you some “associated metrics.”   If you look at this out of context, it become trivia.   So, you must have an outcome or result identified and know how each metric you pick helps you take a step towards that outcome.    The goal of my Facebook page is serve as a focus group to listen to nonprofit practitioners and their ideas, concerns, and needs to use social media effectively.   My result metric is the number of good ideas  and saved time getting those ideas that I get for blog posts, curriculum development, and presentations.

    I know that in order to generate good ideas from network, I need to feed and tune it.    By feeding,  I’m talking about posting engaging and useful content that resonates.     So, that’s my track content against two metrics on in the new FB Insights:  Reach and Virality.   That’s all well and good, but the data – in and of itself – is pretty useless unless I use my sense-making skills.  Here’s how I do it:

    1.   Look for the Patterns

    I check my insights monthly against my editorial calendar.   The first step is to look at the visuals on the dashboard.     The blue represents weekly reach.  The green represents people talking about.  And, those purple dots represent frequency of content.   A bigger dots means more frequent postings, not dots means no content posted.

    I like to use metaphors … so I ask:   Where are the mountains?   Where are the mountains?  Where is prairie?

     

    2.   Look for Clues in the Canyon First

    I immediately go to the low points, the canyons and the flat lines.  Then I look at the date and carefully review what type of content and topics were posted.  In the example above,  I discovered a turkey in the canyon.  It was Thanksgiving and I didn’t post.     I’ve asked myself,  should I make an effort to post everyday, even during holidays?  Or should I post automatically even though it is likely to not get noticed as much as hand posting?    For me,  the numbers when back up, so I was glad I took a few days off.


    3.  Look for Clues in the Mountains

    Over the years, I noticed different types of mountains and hills in my Facebook analytics and Google Analytics for that matter.    One of them is the Devil’s Tower.    A spike that stays high for a days.  I get excited whenever I see a Devil’s Tower!

    4.  Analyze the Content

    One of the posts that I shared during the “Devil’s Tower” period was visual of some social media icons with a note telling folks if they needed social media icons, here’s  a good resource.  In the comments,  I shared the link to the post where I found it.     So, this was practical information, visual, geeky, and fun.

    5.  Analyze the Comments

    Next look at the comments and see if you can detect any patterns.  Be sure to click through and look at the comments on shares too.   I noticed that someone in network shared it with her network but calling it a “Fun Friday Share.”

    6.   Turn Insights To Actionable Decisions

    All this is fun to do and interesting but so what?    What I do is now relate this back to my content and goals.   Remember, I was looking to encourage more engagement and interaction.   So, what I do is write up content ideas for the next month.  In this case,  ”Post geeky, visual, fun stuff on Fridays.”  If you take a peak at my spreadsheet, you’ll see that I’m rather disciplined about learning – and include a “What did we learn” column to write down these insights so I have them at hand when I’m planning for the next campaign or the next editorial calendar.

    If your takeaway from this post is, “hmm .. I should post geeky, visual, fun stuff on Fridays on Facebook” then you’ve missed the point.     It is more important to practice and sharpen your sense-making skills – the process I just took you through.

    What have you learned from analyzing your social media data?   How do you transform data to actionable insights and decisions?

    Dec

    2011

    19

    Category:

    Tools and Tactics, Visual

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    8 Comments

    Putting Your Twitter Followers on the Map, Literally

    TweepsMap is an interesting Twitter app that will put your followers on a map of the world, literally.   It analyzes the percentage of total followers from countries, states, and cities. (here’s more about how it works)    While you can check out the profiles of your followers and find out where they’re from (if they filled out the location information), you can’t really get a snapshot.   When I analyzed my followers, I discovered that 60% were from outside the US (compared to 70% on Facebook)

    So, I started to dig down and review the information country by country, continent by continent.  I shared the screen captures on my Facebook page.   Cindy Leonard asked a great question:  How come you don’t have any followers in Washington state?

    I made a mistake, I didn’t give my data the sniff test before sharing it.     That’s some great advice from KD Paine for the last chapter of our forthcoming book,  ”Measuring the Networked Nonprofit,” which is on data analysis and turning data in action.     So, look at every chart, every graph, every number and ask does it make sense.

    So I asked on Twitter if there was anyone out there from Washington state – and a number of them responded back.     So, it looks like there is a glitch.    My colleague, Zan Mccolloch-Lussier, from Washington state suggested that the problem might be that is confuses Washington, DC with Washington state.

    Despite a few glitches,  you use this tool to see if your audience is local or global.    What did you discover by putting your Twitter followers on the map?

     

     

     

    Oct

    2011

    31

    Category:

    Tips, Tools and Tactics

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    19 Comments

    Trick or Tweet? Seven Twitter Tools To Help You Measure, Learn, and Improve

    Last week, I celebrated my 5th birthday of joining Twitter!    As far as I can tell, the first arrivals on Twitter from the NpTech sector were Ruby Sinreich and Brian Reich who signed up two weeks before me.     So, in honor our collective Twitter birthdays in October and Halloween, I thought I’d share a few Twitter tools for tracking and learning that are real treats and a few that make your work flow on Twitter efficient for documenting events.

    I track to learn and improve relationships on Twitter.   I don’t bother with click rates or influence leader board scores.  Some reflections questions I used to understand the data:

    • What content/links are of interest to the people who are engaging with me?
    • Who is regularly retweeting me?
    • Is Twitter directing traffic and referrals to content for me and people in my network that I highlight?
    • Who is interacting with me and I have replied to me or given them some Twitter love?
    • Of the people I follow on Twitter and/or who follow me, who are the hubs within certain spheres?  Am I interacting with them and supporting their work?

    Do you need an easy way to track tweets from an event in real time?   Want something free or very low cost?  RowFeeder fits the bill.   It will search hashtags or keywords and dump the data in a google spreadsheet.  I used for anytime I teach a workshop or give a presentation.  For example, here’s the spreadsheet from the workshop I facilitated that was hosted by Compasspoint.   It makes really easy to do a quick content analysis, figure out what content resonated, and build community.

    Susan Tenby from TechSoup Global told me about socialbro.  It is a Twitter analytics tool.   What’s cool about it is that you easily identify users that tweeted a hashtag.  It offers many other useful features for those of you who are community managers on Twitter.  I couldn’t actually use it because I have too many followers and it took too long to synch, but they’re coming out a version to handle this problem.

    Crowdbooster is another Twitter analytics tool that gives you a lot of interesting charts and graphs and data.  What I find most useful is the list of your top retweeters.   Reciprocity is the secret to building a strong network – and understanding who is paying attention can help you give back some love.

    Timely and Buffer do the same thing.  They allow you load up your Tweets into que and then tweet them at the best times to get the most attention.    They offer an analysis of click thrus and reach – and you can start to see patterns around good time to tweet.   They both have chrome plugins that make it easy to add tweets w/links into your que.    This has saved me so much time and bandwidth.  I can do the seeking part of curation but I don’t have to share everything at once.

    I’ve been looking for a tool like this and grateful that Avi Kaplan told me about Snapbird.  It allows you to search beyond the Twitter history in search which is only a few days.   I often need to do archaeological digs into Twitter and have been frustrated that I can’t go back – which means I have to capture in the moment and that’s a pain.   Twitter history is useful for documentation and presentations.  Here’s a few other tools that do the same and sift.

    Storify is a content curation tool.   It allows you to easily curate tweets and links and create a nice presentation.   It’s my tool of choice for documenting Tweeting at conferences.  Here’s an example of my storify for the recent Network Funders conference.

    Tools are like candy – have a sugar high yet?  Want more, see my big, messy list of social media tools.

    What’s your favorite Twitter tool for learning and tracking or being efficient?

    Jul

    2011

    26

    Category:

    Measurement, Tools and Tactics

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    4 Comments

    You Can Stand Up for Health Care on Twitter and Facebook, What About On Google +?

    Twitter App Looks Up Zip Code to Tweet Your Legislator

    With the debt ceiling debate raging in our nation’s capital, health care advocates have kicked into high gear and are using new social media tactics to engage elected officials in the fight to protect health care rights – Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act.

    Families USA is an organization fighting for affordable health care for all Americans.  Their web site tools provide useful information for grassroots advocates or anyone for that matter to  stay informed on health care-related topics such as the proposed Medicaid cuts in the  budget that are currently being debated in Congress.   They have a online resource for  understanding the Affordable Care Act and potential roadblocks to its implementation.

    They are integrating social media tactics to their online advocacy tool box with this Twitter tool.   Its Stand Up For Health Care, a project of Families USA, has created a Twitter tool that easily lets your identify Twitter names for your US Representatives, Senators and Governor by typing your zip code.  You just type in your zip code, and their Twitter handles are displayed with buttons that allow you to easily Tweet them about not cutting Medicaid.

    The holy grail of social media impact is on the ground social change, whether that’s impacting policy debates or large-scale behavior change.    One can’t really claim cause and effect here, but  social media is becoming an important tool in grassroots organizing.    At minimum, this application lets people air their concerns to legislators and policy makers easily through Twitter and can amplify  more traditional tactics such as email campaigns and signing online/offline petitions.

    In this example of using grassroots organizing to influence grass tops debates, how do we measure it?  Use the “Valid Measurement Grid”

    Back in June,   I wrote a post about the “Valid Metrics Grid” developed by measurement professionals to launch the debate about standardization of social media metrics.      The above grid  is a very much simplified version.

    Putting your strategy on the grid can only help you design a measurement strategy, but more importantly help your strategy have more impact.     The grid itself can be customized to your organization’s way of thinking about its marketing funnel, target audiences, and tactics.

    The columns represent a simplified  marketing funnel – how people make “purchase” decisions or in this case advocacy “action” decisions.      Your  organization’s “funnel” for advocacy may look different,  it may have more stages.  A funnel for donations or volunteering may be different as well.    The important thing is that you need to have tactics to get people to the next stage and metrics to measure effectiveness.

    The rows are your audience.  There are two types of audiences.   The messages or story is created, shared via intermediaries or influencers:   This can be legislators,  journalists, or other influencers.   The message is consumed by a target audience that goes through the stages of attention, engagement, and finally action.

    One could take each channel and place it on the grid, understanding that not all channels are appropriate or effective for getting people up to the next level.

    Apps allow citizens to use their zip codes to look up their elected officials and voice their concerns or support on a policy issue are not unique to Twitter as I learned from posting about the App on Google+.     Voice for America’s Children has a similar app on Facebook.

    It also made me wonder about the Google + and it is potential for social activism and organizing.   I posted this question on Google + =  ”Are there social change activists on Google + or they waiting for the early adopters and geeks to clear the path?”

    Stephen Downes said:

    Google is very deliberately designing G+ to not be a broadcasting network, and a lot of social activist stuff is about broadcasting messages.   G+ is very very cleverly designed. The broadcast part will come when Sparks kicks in big time. It’s pretty difficult to create circles or groups of like-minded individuals in G+. Clusters will form around Sparks content.  If they can sustain the network component – people talking more or less disjointedly with people they’re connected to – then marketers, including activists, will pay (and need to pay) dearly for a marketing push through Sparks.

    Activists – genuine activists, not just marketing agencies – need to figure out how to sustain collective discussion in a system designed to constrain it and shape it. Or, failing that, to come up with an alternative to G+.

    Nathan Henderson-James added:

    Most of the social change folks I work with work with membership organizations and try to mobilize mass numbers (that’s just my world, other people’s social change activist circle’s mileage may vary). And most of those folks are busy working with folks who aren’t as wired or use the web differently from early adopters. So for my very specific circle, the people who I’ve seen on it tend to be the geeky ones and they aren’t using it for their organizing. They are trying to figure out how it is different from Twitter and Facebook. Most everyone else is kinda like, great, another social media thing to try to understand. Just tell me how to use it. These are mostly people who share pics of their kids on FB and are never on Twitter. So… for my specific circle, it’s not worth the time spent yet.

    Mark Dilley made a proposal about LinkLanguage, an elegant solution to the lack of hashtags, to help sustain a conversation on Google + related to activism.

    Stephen Downes pointed out:

    However, when I tested it in Sparks, like this - https://plus.google.com/u/0/sparks/interests/LinkLanguage – it appears that G+ actually extracts the words out of the search string, even if they are mashed together. That’s probably why hashtags don’t work either. Even nonsense strings - https://plus.google.com/u/0/sparks/interests/farsingmallow – resolve into ordinary words.

    This is actually pretty deeply disturbing. It means that Google basically takes a search string and matches it against a previously defined vocabulary. You can only search for what Google allows in Sparks. This is a terribly broken system.

     

    So, for now advocates are using Twitter/Facebook tools because the issues are pressing and we haven’t yet figured out how or if Google + can or will become a useful platform for social change work.  Meanwhile, early adopter social activists are discussing this.

    Jun

    2011

    22

    Category:

    Measurement, Tips, Tools and Tactics

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    5 Comments

    Are You Using the Best Ever Social Media Analytics Tool?

    A simple online survey.

    There are so  social media analytic tools to measure social media and other emerging technologies, that we’ve created a new genre of Shiny Objective Syndrome — Data Puking disorder.   We’ve become addicted to generating pretty charts and graphs, while taking any opportunity to play with any new (and especially free) social media measurement tool that we  read about on blogs.

    We’re so enchanted by data, that we’ve lost sight of what decisions we’re trying or results to document.     It isn’t hard to see why we forget about one of the best ever social media measurement tools:  surveys!

    If we are setting SMART objectives or trying to measure them, we may need to do a little audience research first.  Surveys can help get data to form a baseline, benchmark,  or inform strategy.  Surveys can also provide useful data to track progress along the way.

    I stumbled across this online survey from the Birmingham Museum asking its Twitter followers what content they prefer and whose voice from the institution they’d like to hear.    I love this question – one that every organization that is trying to encourage more internal participation from staff should ask on a survey:

    If we could get more BMAG staff involved in tweeting, who would you like to see tweet and answer your questions via twitter?

    Curators
    Exhibitions team
    Learning team
    Conservators
    Collections Management team
    Photographer
    Front of House team
    Museum Management
    Fundraising team
    Digital
    None

    Some nonprofits have surveyed their audiences on Facebook or Twitter in less structured ways to get feedback on content and engagement ideas.    I’ve done so on my own Facebook Page.   Jo Johnson from the London Symphony uses survey data to help track conversions from conversations on Facebook to ticket purchases at the box office.

    How have you used surveys as part of your measurement strategy?

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