Cruiskeen Consulting LLC

Note from Beth: It’s vacation week for me, not publishing much this week or next accept for guest posts and a few book reviews or if I find inspiration.  This guest post was written by Rob Reed. He is the founder of MomentFeed, a location-based marketing, strategy, and technology firm.

Location technologies are transforming how we experience, navigate, and ultimately better our world. From the global to the local, here are #10Ways geolocation is a positive force for good.

Social media has changed the world. It has revolutionized communications on a global scale, and the transformation continues with every status update, blog post, and video stream. The global citizenry has become a global network.

Since becoming widely adopted just a couple years ago, social media has supercharged social action, cause marketing, and social entrepreneurship. Indeed, the true value hasn’t been the technology itself but how we’ve used it. Today, a second wave of innovation is defining a new era and setting the stage for change over the coming decade.

Mobile technologies will extend the global online network to anyone with a mobile device while enabling countless local networks to form in the real world. We’ve decentralized media production and distribution. We’re doing the same for energy. And we’ll continue this trend for social networking, social action, and commerce.

The combined forces of smartphones, mobile broadband, and location-aware applications will connect us in more meaningful ways to the people, organizations, events, information, and companies that matter most to us—namely, those within a physical proximity of where we live and where we are. Can location-based services (LBS) change the world? Here are #10Ways:

1. Checking in for Good: If Gowalla and Foursquare have taught us anything, it’s that people respond to simple incentives. By offering badges, mayorships, and other intangible rewards, millions of people are checking in to the places they go. Apps like Whrrl take this a step further and enable like-minded “societies” to form on a local basis. The next step is for these apps to add greater purpose by encouraging more meaningful checkins and offering corresponding badges and stamps, thus mapping the cause universe. Or for a dedicated app to be developed that rewards conscious consumption, social responsibility, and civic engagement. Yes, the CauseWorld app features a cause element, but it’s not about cause-worthy places.

2. Eating Locally: Sustainability demands that we source our food as close to its point of production as possible. Many so-called locavores subscribe to the 100-mile diet, which requires that one “eat nothing—or almost nothing—but sustenance drawn from within 100 miles of their home.” Given the difficulty of accessing and verifying this information in order to live by this standard, there’s a geo-powered Locavore app. It gives you info on in-season foods, those coming in-season, farmer’s markets, and links to recipes. This rather simple app is clearly just the start. In time, location-aware apps will guide us not only to the grocery store or farmer’s market but through them. All the while identifying foods based on our particular diet or sensibility.

3. Political Organizing: In the next presidential election, politics will not only be local but location-enabled. We saw the power of social media in Obama’s 2008 landslide victory. In 2012, location-based apps and technologies will play a central role in how campaigns are organized, managed, and ultimately won. Much of this will be visible through mobile apps and location-aware browsers. Activists and volunteers will be more empowered. Voters will be more engaged in the moment, right down to casting their votes. Behind the scenes, though, we’ll see massive new sets of data available to campaigns for targeting, empowerment, and optimization. The party, candidate, and/or cause that has the best handle on geolocation will have a measurable advantage. (The Elections app will soon be updated for 2010.)

4. Finding Green Businesses: The web has effectively replaced the paper Yellow Pages as a way to find local businesses and services. However, this “stationary web” experience is quickly being supplanted by the mobile web and mobile applications, which give us access to this information when we most need it. The Yelp and Around Me apps are popular ways to find restaurants, coffee shops, or hotels wherever you are, but what about green-rated businesses? Greenopia has transformed its printed, local guides into a dynamic, nationwide mobile application that lets you find local, green-rated businesses in any category. No more paper and a much better experience. The Green Map app is another that facilitates discovery and connects us to local green environments.

5. Traveling More Efficiently: We’ve had access to GPS navigation systems and static traffic information for some time, but only now are we seeing the full potential of these technologies. With access to more detailed traffic information that is specific to your route and updated in real time, we can minimize congestion and maximize traffic flow (as much as physically possible). The new turn-by-turn MapQuest 4 Mobile app is a good start, as you can get traffic alerts specific to the route you program. However, user-generated information from apps like Trapster and Waze can crowdsource more specific details, such as whether to avoid an intersection due to a toxic chemical spill. Or, if you want to avoid automobiles altogether, Google Maps makes it easy to use public transportation and take a bike.

6. Scanning for Ethical Products: With online shopping, we’ve become accustomed to reading reviews and making comparisons before we buy. This can now be done in the physical world through games like MyTown and services like Stikybits. By scanning a product barcode using a smartphone camera, you can unlock a treasure of additional information (not to mention deals) that can help with your purchase. This might include where it was produced, how far it traveled, the reputation of the manufacturer, chemical contents, carbon footprint, or the full lifecycle analysis. Location-aware applications can also transform commerce itself by giving us better access to local inventories and locally-produced goods. Whether it’s fruits and vegetables or books and electronics, if something can be found within blocks of your current location, it makes no sense to ship it from afar.

7. Networking Neighborhoods: One of the hottest categories in geolocation is neighborhood networking. The vision for many of these apps is to strengthen the very fabric of our communities. With DeHood, you can keep track of what’s happening in your neighborhood, share your favorite places, and grease the wheels for actually meeting people. After all, if you’ve made contact through the app, it’s a lot easier to say “Hello” in the real world. Blasterous is another that lets you share information locally, whereas BlockChalk does this on an anonymous basis. Finally, NeighborGoods uses your street address to facilitate one-to-one borrowing and trading of useful stuff. In the end, making connections with your neighbors can lead to safer, more productive, and more sustainable communities.

8. Tracking Environmental Disasters: The size and scope of environmental disasters appears to be growing. In 2008, we had the Tennessee coal ash spill, which was billed as “the largest environmental disaster of its kind in the United States.” And that was before we realized it was three times bigger than originally estimated. More recently, the BP oil spill set daily records for “largest environmental disaster in the U.S. ever.” In each case, geolocation technologies can be used by engaged citizens to monitor and track the effects. They can be used by response teams to coordinate containment and cleanup efforts. Ultimately, these technologies can be used to accurately measure the size and impact of a disaster in order to better understand its damages and costs.

9. Viewing the World Through an Eco Lens: Augmented reality (AR) follows geolocation as one of the hot trends in mobile technology. It enables you to view the world through a smartphone camera (or similar device) and see layers of geo-specific content or information. One of the most popular apps is Layar, an augmented reality browser/platform that lets you choose specific data layers or experiences. The potential for green- and cause-related content is tremendous. You might view green-rated businesses, LEED-certified buildings, or virtual GHG emissions as they enter the atmosphere. Combined with smart meter technology, you could see the most efficient and inefficient homes around you in real time. And for the cynics among us, you could view our mountains, forests, rivers, and oceans as they once were…before the effects of climate change and so many environmental disasters.

10. Capturing the Moment: Better access to information about what’s happening around us—right now—can dramatically improve quality of life. This sense of “geospatial awareness” is possible through today’s smartphones, whereby a piece of content or information—a moment—is captured and preserved based on the unique time and place in which it occurred. It is essentially to document spacetime. Protests, natural disasters, sporting events, parties, political crises…real-time information about anything happening anywhere at any time, as well as the history of what happened. This will take several years and a number of different applications to realize. In the end, though, it will revolutionize how we access and consume content. It will complete the democratization and decentralization of news and information…based on time and location.

Cautionary note: Privacy is the single biggest issue in the LBS industry. It’s important to understand what information you are sharing with regard to your location and with whom.

Author’s note: We’ll be hosting geolocation events for Social Media Week in Los Angeles this September. This is the third in Max Gladwell’s #10Ways series of distributed blog posts. It was published simultaneously on as many as 300 blogs.

Photo by Geoff Livingston

I’m on vacation this week and next!   We’re visiting family at the Jersey Shore, but stopping in DC to take the kids to the Smithsonian and other DC highlights.     You might see a few blog posts or tweets but don’t expect a fast reply via email.     Playing tourist in DC,  it is interesting to see how much your online digital life impacts your offline life.

The Smithsonian is one of the Networked Nonprofits we feature in the book.  My kids, who had been introduced to the Smithsonian through the popular movie “Night at the Smithsonian” were excited too.   There were a number of online/offline participatory visitor experiences.

We spent most of the day at the Smithsonian.   At the Natural History Museum, we visited the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins,  an immersive, interactive journey through the origins of human beings and the dramatic stories of survival and extinction in the midst of earth’s history of climate change.

There was one exhibit that the kids just loved.   It was a photo booth that took your photo and transformed you in an early human.   That’s me as a Homo floresiensis,.   It’s what I would have looked like if I lived  95,000 to 17,000 years ago on an island in what is now Southeast Asia.

You had the option of emailing the photo to yourself and it came with a description as well as a mention of what to purchase in the gift shop or where to donate.

At the Museum of American History, we visited the First Ladies Exhibit.  Outside the exhibit I noticed this sign and shared it on Twitter.  I wondered whether or not the information was of any value and asked?

Next stop, the Jersey Shore!

Arts Council of Silicon Valley Staff

This year my work as Visiting Scholar at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation includes training, coaching, and facilitating peer learning sessions for grantees on using social media effectively, becoming a Networked Nonprofit.    It has been incredible laboratory to put the big ideas in the book in practice.

I’ve had the pleasure working with one of grantees in the Local Program, the Arts Council of Silicon Valley, to coach them in making the transition to being a Networked Nonprofit.     There is a wide range of comfort levels and experience using social media on staff, including the social media gurus who manage the Artsopolis which is focused on marketing the arts in SV.

This is an interesting process of spreading the expertise and way of working to all parts of the organization.   This is a fairly small staff, with limited resources.   As we discussed the challenges of culture shifts, many of the concerns were around lack of time.    The Arts Council’s leader, executive director Bruce Davis, came up a great idea.  “Let’s make the process of experimenting fun – let’s start with a Facebook Friday.”    Their experiment is going to be focused on deepening and improving their Facebook presence for the Arts Council and getting  everyone on staff to participate.   Stay tuned for more …

Sharing Some Facebook Friday Insights

I like to have fun experimenting and that’s just what I’m doing on my Facebook Page, a place for learning, and sharing insights about best practices in social media for networked nonprofits.     I learn so much from the conversation threads and people sharing what they do.  I’ve been remiss in summarizing some of the nuggets out here on the blog, so here goes.

Facebook Strategic Objectives

I asked folks on Facebook:  “What is your organization trying to accomplish on Facebook with its Fan Page?“   Here’s a few answers:

• To disseminate short stories that are unique to the fan page, as well as to link to articles on our websites. We are much more successful when the stories come with a blurb than when they are simply automated RSS-feeds.
• To keep up with our friends, to empower them to tell their stories to the world, to find out what they need from us, to introduce them to each other, to offer mission-related action items, and to have fun.

Techniques for More Engagement

Someone said to me during a workshop a few weeks back – it really sucks to log into Facebook and see a two-star post quality ranking.    This prompted me to post a question on my wall:  How many of you Facebook Page admins notice your post quality ranking every time you visit? What I learned is that “drive by” analysis of metrics is really a waste of time.  You need to grab the month’s worth of measures and look at them against your content.

Some folks have been puzzled by the Post Quality score which  is determined by the percentage of your fans that engage when you post content to your Page. (It is calculated on a rolling seven-day basis… See More. The number of stars depends on how your Post Quality compares to similar Pages (for example, Pages that have a similar number of fans.)

Holly Ross simply ignores it and track the number of comments and likes on individual posts.   Jon Dunn does something similar:  “I prefer to really try to key in to what days were successful in terms of content. Understand why we had more new fans on a certain day. What about a certain post created that big conversation. Rinse and repeat.”

That particular wall post had 31 comments and 15 likes, way higher than other types of posts.  Even better than the numbers was the knowledge nuggets shared.  And, ah, I found the secret sauce:   Simply Asking Questions That Allow People To Share Their Knowledge and Ideas sparks engagement!

Is there an App for that?

I have been wanting to test a poll app to see if having close-ended questions or running a poll might encourage engagement.   So I installed this app and set up a poll “Do you think polls increase engagement?  Yes or No?”   Of the 43 people who took the poll, 89% said yes.   Those who didn’t participate in the poll at all, but did on my wall asking for their feedback on polling apps said they didn’t like that the app asked for their personal information.

So, sometimes, the simple approaches work better.

A Couple of Useful Tools To Streamline Workflow

I asked an open-ended question “What are your Facebook administrator best practices?“  This produced a rich conversation on techniques.    This was the first time I noticed people posting on the wall taking to one another, not me.    The thread also includes some great nuggets about streamlining the content strategy as well as streamlining interactions with fans.

• NutShell Mail is an software that aggregates comments and likes on your fan page and delivers it in one email.   Manny Hernandez shared this link to a post about it.
• Spredfast is a listening/content distribution tool.  One feature that I like is that it will give you a list of the names of fans and how much a like/comment.
• There is a way to link google analytics to FB insights.

A Couple of Good Facebook Links

I share about 2-3 really juicy how to links about Facebook a week.  Here’s a couple that got the most likes or comments over the past month or so:

How To Contact Facebook for Help: Directory of Help Forms

Ten Cool Status Update Tricks

Be Careful Not To Violate Facebook Promotional Guidelines With Contests

Four Proven Steps to Facebook Page Success

Top Six Social Media Mistakes and How To Fix Them

Creating a Custom Landing Tab

Facebook Book For Your Desk

Finally, Mari Smith has co-authored a book, “Facebook Marketing: An Hour A Day” – if you want one book about Facebook best practices that combines tactical and strategic – this is it!

Becoming A Networked Nonprofit

View more presentations from Beth Kanter.

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to deliver a half-day training workshop for staff members working at Junior Achievement Offices at their worldwide conference.    This workshop is called “Becoming A Networked Nonprofit:  Using Social Media Strategically.”

The learning objectives:

• To understand what a Networked Nonprofit is and why it is important to become one in order to implement your social media strategy effectively
• To understand the basic steps and frameworks for creating a social media strategy that supports a JA Office program or communications goal.
• To identify a couple of basic starter steps for using social media

I used a newly revamped version of the social media game that fits the learning objectives.  Participants also got a copy of The Networked Nonprofit as part of the materials.  This interactive workshop was a wide mix of perspectives – from senior management to education directors to development directors.   We had a range of attitudes about the value of social media.  This mix lead to a very rich and productive session.     Here’s a few insights.

Leveraging the Network

One of the common things I hear when teach workshops on social media is “We don’t have the time.”    We make the point in the book that if nonprofits make the shift from scarcity to abundance thinking – they will be able to leverage their networks.

Amy Boroff (@njdevmgr), development manager for Junior Achievement of NJ in Princeton, shared a wonderful story about her JA office discovered this in the video above.  They had started using Twitter about six months ago and found one of her new Twitter followers was Kate Specchio (@ecsfoundation), co-founder of Morris County-based The Emily C. Specchio Foundation. Through their conversation on Twitter, Amy recognized the potential for working together. They continued to communicate on Twitter in real-time, after working hours, to learn more about each respective organization. After several weeks, JANJ submitted a proposal to ECS for funding for an inaugural event: the Women’s Future Leadership Forum. The ECS Foundation accepted the proposal and granted funds to help support aspiring female high school students become future leaders.

Deborah L. Dalton who works with the Louisville, KY JA Office mentioned her organization reached out to the local Social Media Club to recruit a board member. They were lucky enough to have Jason Falls help them out.

I know it hard to think about “adding on” social media to the to do list.  But reframe it.  Think of opening up to the abundance of working in a networked way.

Do you have a story about how your organization made that shift?

The Networked Nonprofit Has Arrived in Australia. Connecting Up Office has Donnie the Wombat (Aussie Squirrel) and Tim Tams by their computers along with the book!

I’m so thrilled that the Networked Nonprofit has made it Australia! A few years ago, I had the opportunity to keynote Connecting Up, the national gathering of Nonprofit Techies hosted by Connecting Up. I’m thrilled that they shared a photo of themselves eating tim-tams and their #squirrel mascot!

I just had to blog this.

Standing up, from left to right: Doug Jacquier (CEO), Sarah Rayner-Fry, Pankaj Chhalotre, Josh Goodwin, and Kyla Poyner. Sitting Down, from left: Shai Coggins, Donnie our beloved mascot, and Tu-Trinh Vuong.

Photo by Geoff Livingston

Mark your calendars! Citizen Effect’s CitizenGulf project will become a National Day of Action on August 25th, in alignment with the week of the fifth anniversary of Katrina. The benefit — to be promoted by Gulf Coast Benefit — seeks to help fishing families find a new, more sustainable future by providing education resources for their children.  In addition to Zoetica’s support, additional promotion partners for the national day of action include Andy Sternberg, El Studio, Live Your Talk, Sloane Berrent, and Taylor Davidson.

For details on how you can participate in this important event,  see Geoff Livingston’s post.

This is a quick roundup of some of the wonderful reviews, blog posts, photos, and videos of The Networked Nonprofit.

If you’re in the Bay Area and didn’t make it to our launch party at TechSoup,  there’s a book party in the East Bay on Friday, July 23rd.  The staff of Donordigital Bay Area are throwing a #netnon book party.  Join us on Friday, July 23, 2010, from 6 to 8 pm at Pro Arts Gallery (http://www.proartsgallery.org/) at 150 Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland, a stone’s throw from the Oakland City Center/12th Street BART station. More information here.

The Networked Nonprofit is Available on Kindle!

Photo by Curious Lee

I don’t yet have a kindle, so I was thrilled to see this tweet from CuriousLee with a photo he shared on our Networked Nonprofit flickr group.

I’ve been enjoying the photos of friends and colleagues with the book popping up on my Facebook Page.  Judith Sol-Dyess and Steve Heye shared a couple of  “peek a boo” photos.   So, I sent them off a couple of the cool NTEN/Netnon t-shirts!   Hmm .. might see some photos popping up in the flickr group of people wearing #netnon t-shirts.

A Few Reviews

Rosetta Thurman created this video review. Rosetta is a fellow book nerd. (Yes, I bring nonprofit books to the beach too….). But what I love about Rosetta is her young nonprofit leader nerdiness. For example, check out her “50 Young Nonprofit Leaders To Follow on Twitter” list. She made it easy to follow these leaders – so let’s spread it far and wide.

My good friend, Roger Carr, wrote a great review of The Networked Nonprofit. More importantly, really appreciated the insights he shared in the comments of this guest post on volunteering by Robert Rosenthal from VolunteerMatch.

I loved this post from Devon Smith analyzing the metrics and reaping insights from her post on The Networked nonprofit. I learned about some new techniques for measuring blog stats and Twitter. So, go read her post now.

And last but not least,  Idealware has given us a 6 Thumbs Up Review from Johanna Bates, Heather Gardner-Madras, and Steve Backman.   Wow, honored!

I’ve been hearing a few reports that copies of the book are hard to find in the UK (and San Francisco)  and I know that they’re working on it!  In the meantime,  Social Edge is hosting a book blog with some excerpts.

If you wrote a review or have a photo to share, let me know in the comments!  And, thank you all for the great response to the book.

It has been a year since I’ve relocated to the Bay Area in California.  The summers here are much less humid than on the East Coast, but the real treat is having the Craigslist Foundation Annual Nonprofit Bootcamp practically in my backyard.  The next one takes place on August 14th – I wouldn’t miss it .

Last year, I was honored to be a workshop leader at Craigslist Foundation Nonprofit Bootcamp, but was even better is that the sessions on the program were really good and I learned a lot.  I’ll be doing a session this year on The Networked Nonprofit, but really looking forward to hearing the keynotes as well as the sessions.

This year’s boot camp is focused on strategies for fostering and building communities with sessions led by incredible people  in the field. The one-day schedule is a chance to participate in interactive workshops, meet people who can turn dreams into action, receive expert coaching, and get fired up by stories of successful community transformations. There are also opportunities for private coaching sessions, break-out sessions, and camaraderie with other passionate change-makers – not to mention pre- and post-event meetups.

Lots more information here: Boot Camp website and you can purchase a ticket here.

Allison Fine and I, along with my Zoetica colleague Geoff Livingston have completed the  assessment and reflection paper for 2009 America’s Giving Challenge for the Case Foundation.   This is Case Foundation’s second online competition that encouraged people to leverage their social networks to raise money and awareness and recruit supporters for the causes they care about most.  Allison Fine and I wrote the reflection paper for the first challenge.

This year we took a more intercative approach to sharing the findings and learnings.  It was done through a series of blog posts called AGC Conversational Case Studies and encouraged the public to weigh in via comments to the blog posts, live CaseSoup video discussions, and Twitter.   You find the report, blog posts, and archived videos over at the Case Foundation site here.

We look forward to more  lively discussions and sharing of ideas about online contests.

Unlike fellow nonprofit book nerd, Rosetta Thurman,  I am way behind on my nonprofit book summer reading list.    My blog is the July 15th stop on Clay Shirky’s virtual book tour for his recently published book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in A Connected Age.  I received a review copy of the book and was invited to write a post about it.

We were lucky enough to have Clay read a copy of manuscript last November and he was one of our book blurbers.  Here’s what he said about the Networked Nonprofit:

“The Internet means never having to ask permission before trying something new.  In the Networked Nonprofit, Kanter and Fine show nonprofits how to harness this flexibility to pursue their mission in partnership with two billion connected citizens.”

Clay’s book talks about the implications of a society shifting from passive consumption of media to creators of media or being participatory.   As Clay Shirky says, “A society where everyone has some kind of access to the public sphere is a different kind of society that one where citizens approach media as mere consumers.” This shift has come because we’re watching less television, but participating more in online collective actions – from the silly – sharing photos of cute cats to the making the world a better place.

To my joy, he uses the example of how Ushahidi got started as one of the latter.   (Disclaimer:  I’m a proud board member of Ushahidi):

“A handful of people, working with cheap tools and little time or money to spare, managed to carve out enough collective goodwill from the community to create a resource that no one could have imagined even five years ago.  Like all good stories, they story of Ushahidi holds several different lessons:  People want to do somethiung to make the world a better place.  They will help when they are invited to.  Access to cheap,flexible tools removes many of the barriers to trying new things.  You don’t need fancy computers to harness cognitive surplus; simple phones are enough.  But one of the most important lessons is this: once you’ve figured out how to tap the surplus in a way that people care about, others can replicate your technique, over and over, around the world.”

The book give us the 50,000 mile high view.  It  forecasts the changes we will enjoy as social media tools allows people to put their talents and goodwill to use for society.   Each chapter is takes us through a look at the future by examining the past. It’s filled with wonderful stories from for-profit, technology sector, and politics.  There are some great quotes.

Shirky acknowledges as he gets a little closer to the ground with some principles “Looking for the Mouse”  that we can’t count on new kinds of socially beneficial activities just happening.   “Creating a participatory culture with wider benefits for society is harder than sharing amusing photos.  How much of that social change are we going to grasp?” (That is a question that the Networked Nonprofit asks.)

Shirky suggests that the most profound use of social media will come from groups trying new things.   He talks about about the importance of experiments and the listen, learn, and adapt skills required.  This idea of experimentation really resonates.

“Creating the most value from a tool involves not master plans or great leaps forward but constant trial and error.  The key question for any society undergoing such a shift is how to get the most of that process.”

“What matters is not the new capabilities we have, but how we turn those into opportunities.  The question is what we’ll do with those opportunities. “

“With social software, there are no foolproof recipes for success.  And yet we’ve learned somethings about human interaction in the last few decades.  The trick for creating new social media is to use those lessons to eight the odds in your favor, rather than as a set of instructions that guarantees success.”

“Start small.  Projects will only work if they grow large generally won’t grow large; people who fixated on creating large-scale future success can actually reduce the possibility of creating the small scale here and now successes needed to get there.”

“A veritable natural law in social media is that to get to a system that is large and good, it is far better to start with a system that is small and good and work on making it bigger than to start with a system that is large and mediocre and work on making it better.”

“No one gets it right the first time.  If successful uses of cognitive surplus required designers to get it right the first time, you’d be able to count the successes on the fingers of one hand.  Instead, it is imperative to learn from failure, adapt, and learn again.”

“The faster you learn, the sooner you’ll be able to adapt.  The possibilities for continual learning with social media are dramatic. “

“It is more important to try something new, and work on the problems as they arise, than to figure out a way to do something new without having any problems.”

After I read my review copy, I like to give it away. So, if you’ve read this far, leave a comment answering this question:

How can your nonprofit create a way of working that allows it to learn rapidly and adapt? Or, if that is the way you already work, tell me how.

I’ll pick a winner and send you my copy of Clay’s book (with my notes in the margin), along with The Networked Nonprofit.

Swedish-Lesson - (Photo: International Federation of Red Cross/Hakan Flank/VolunteerMatch)

Note from Beth: Last month, we did a Networked Nonprofit session at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service.  Robert J. Rosenthal, Director of Communications for VolunteerMatch was a participant.   He offered to write a guest post.

Recently I got my first full-on blast of the Networked Nonprofit at a session the authors presented at the 2010 National Conference on Volunteering and Service.  I left inspired, yet I also felt there is still a lot of work we need to do to help our peers in volunteer coordination put these ideas into practice.

There’s no doubt that social networks are allowing organizations to connect with and recruit non-traditional volunteers in new ways. At the same time, volunteer service organizations need to rethink how they work and what technology they use. The question is what can volunteer coordinators – those who are tasked with the work-a-day chores of volunteer engagement – do to help bring about this transformation?

The Free-Agent/Fortress Dilemma in Volunteer Coordination

At NCVS, the audience was a good mix of traditional and non-traditional volunteer coordinators. Some were social change leaders who leverage volunteers; others were administrators who recruit volunteers as their sole function – often at a large nonprofits or national service organizations.

Many of this latter group of are veterans of what Extraordinaries’ Jacob Colker calls the “Command & Control Model” – programs that seek to control the relationship of the volunteer with the organization and/or cause.

Until recently Command & Control made sense. While a few highly-skilled volunteers stalked the boardroom, the rest was left to unskilled hands managed by coordinators fulfilling department orders. This is similar to the “Fortress” as described in the Networked Nonprofit book.

But as volunteers have begun to ask for more responsibility, and as running a social change organization has made it harder for organizations to staff all functions, Command & Control has started to break down.

The central question of the Networked Nonprofit is how organizations can embrace the change. Here are some examples:

Needs Assessment

Needs Assessment is about determining how volunteers can help and whether it’s feasible to support them. In a networked nonprofit, VCs might mine their personal and professional networks for ideation, best practices, and case studies to learn how organizations are engaging volunteers effectively.

Opportunity Design

Opportunity Design is the process of understanding the required skills and experience for a given volunteer role. Innovative VCs in a networked nonprofit might go beyond tradition to explore micro-volunteering, virtual volunteering, service-learning, national service, pro bono, or bringing corporate volunteer programs into the organization.

Outreach/Marketing

VCs need to work with communications folks to get their opportunities distributed, but a VC might also have her own Twitter feed or blog category to share new opportunities The VC could also use her own professional networks to target special skill sets (such as at LinkedIn). Sharing of opportunities among alumni and donors could be encouraged.

Screening

Filtering candidates to assess fit is a crucial step. As applications come in, the VC helps to narrow the pool, coordinate interviews, and run background checks.  In a networked nonprofit, VCs might also use Twitter to receive questions, LinkedIn to assess a candidate’s background, VolunteerMatch.org or GreatNonprofits.org to provide reviews from real volunteers, and Flickr and Youtube to inspire and inform volunteer prospects.

Orientation

VCs are often asked to play the lead role in welcoming, training, and doing in-take for new volunteers. In a networked nonprofit, VCs could partner new volunteers with experienced volunteers to save time in orientation. Training could also be done virtually with videos or through shared docs on a wiki.

Supervised or supported service

Recruitment is just the start. Guiding volunteers to success is equally critical. Daily coordination with volunteers could be done through social media to bolster membership in the online communities and encourage interactions.  Collaboration could take place on virtual or crowd-sourced projects. VCs could help volunteers share milestones and accomplishments with badges, banners, or widgets that can be shared with the volunteer’s personal network.  And volunteers could have the opportunity to share the organization’s story through their personal networks.

Fear of Failure vs. Fear of the Unknown

During the session,  a young man introduced himself to mne. At hi s organization, he told me, the system blocked anything with the word “Facebook,” and online social networking was forbidden because the boss thought irrelevant for volunteer coordination.
As they explore in their new book, fear of failure holds many organizations back from a networked nonprofit approach. For those orgs, Beth and Allison advise individuals at nonprofits to go small, try simple stuff, not focus on ROI, be willing to fail, and leverage small successes.
Yet I think it’s another fear – fear of the unknown – that’s one of the biggest limits. When things are unknown, they can’t be envisioned at all. The earth remains flat, and it’s hard to eliminate the barriers that stand in the way of exploration.
As an NP Tech communicator, my takeaway from the session is just how important it is to share stories how organizations are using a Networked Nonprofit approach to transform volunteer coordination. Do you have one?  Share it in the comments.

About the Author

Robert Rosenthal is communications director for VolunteerMatch, the Web’s most popular volunteer network, and a regular presenter on topics relating to technology, the nonprofit sector, and media. Nonprofits can find free training resources for volunteer coordination at http://www.volunteermatch.org/nonprofits/learningcenter.

Social Media Lab: Becoming A Networked Nonprofit View more presentations from Beth Kanter.

As Visiting Scholar in Nonprofits and Social Media at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation,  I am coaching grantee organizations and leading workshops and peer trainings on how to become a  Networked Nonprofit.   It is a fantastic laboratory to take some of the ideas in the book and put in them into a practice.

One of the themes in the book, The Networked Nonprofit, is the importance of doing experiments.  They do not frame them as success or failure but as learning.   The problem is that many nonprofits approach social media with over blown expectations, don’t realize them, and then throw their hands up and quit.   So, I designed and have been testing a training program that embraces thoughtful do-it-yourself social media experiments and a peer learning process for sharing the learning.

The inspiration was part The Lab Theater, a place where you try out experimental works before you bring them to the main stage.   There is also a social learning component.  Think about those 4th grade science experiments where huddled over your experiment you all learn together.    The instruction not only included the content – all the best practices and how-tos, but also took an approach that encouraged and developed reflection.

Last week, we had the  final session of the “Social Media Lab,” a social media peer group training with a small group of grantees from the Children, Families, Communities Program, that was launched a few months ago.  I was incredibly lucky to have a fantastic group of participants, all passionate about their work, very knowledgeable, and excited about integrating social media into their programs or communications plans.  I also was honored to work side-by-side with esteemed colleagues Shiree Teng and Cheryl Contee.

Representatives from Preschool California Share Their Experiment Insights

Participant-Generated Instructional Content

The best part of this design is that participants are the content – the community is the curriculum!  The program includes two face-to-face workshops.  The first workshop delivers content about becoming a Networked Nonprofit as well as tips and tactics on social media implementation and an “experiment in a box.”   We also included a lot of hands-on lab time. 

Participants go off and work on their experiments.  We used a wiki and conference calls to check in as a group.  There was also one-on-one coaching.   I approached my instructional role – less as expert and more as  network weaver and technology steward – a helpful guide on the side.     The final session puts the participants on the stage to share their learnings – either through ignite style presentations or speed geeking.

Treating participants as adult learners – allowing them to take responsibility for their learning and being the experts – produces quite a rich experience.    I was amazed to see how far participants had come from a few months ago.

Sharing Insights Around Practice

Each Participant Created A Learning Poster - Notes of Appreciation from Other Participants. Some will use to share with staff or board at their organizations.

You can dig deeper into the details over at the wiki as each participant shared a one-page “lab report.”   The experiments were very focused initial forays into social media.  They were all amazing.  But the biggest value as participants noted is that having to prepare a report or presentation about what they did helped consolidate their learning and insights. 

Here’s quick sampling:

LA Universal Preschool.  This was a Facebook experiment incorporated as part of the outreach for the 2nd Annual LAUP Dodger Day, an event that brings staff, providers and families throughout Los Angeles County together for a day to celebrate the “graduation” of preschoolers.   LAUP has a group of parent ambassadors who serve as their key advocates in Sacramento or on land.     They  established a fan page for this group so they can be their advocates on Facebook as well.  LAUP also discovered that they by providing engaging content on Facebook other super fans will self-identify.    PreSchool California

View more presentations from Beth Kanter.

PreSchool California:  Did an experiment using Twitter as a way to connect with journalists.  With the media landscape shifting from print to online, Preschool California has adjusted its strategy to ensure it is reaching its target audiences through both traditional forms of media and the rapidly growing social media.  PreSchool California was able to connect initially with journalists covering their issue.  They discovered that Tweets are more informal, less time consuming than email so journalists may be more likely to read.  They discovered a slight disconnect between those journalists that wrote print stories on early learning issues, and those education journalists that were on Twitter.  Despite only having a few interactions with reporters, Preschool California retweeted and commented on a number of articles, garnering responses from other advocates, which helped increase their issue exposure to a larger audience.   They discovered that Twitter has value as a listening channel to support their overall communications strategy.

Fowler Hoffman did a listening experiment to identify who was  participating in conversations on social media platforms about two issue areas  – summer learning and after-school – listen to what they are saying about the issues, and engage them in conversations on these platforms.

“Tweeting to the Choir” Alone May Not be Sufficient: They discovered a small group of advocates and organizations with a similar focus and looked for ways to engage with those who are not already involved.  They discovered there are many people and organizations who are sharing information and engaging in dialog about their same issues and topics but just not in the same way.  At first this was a little uncomfortable to outside the existing circle of known allies by @responding to people they didn’t know.  But they did an experiment by sharing useful links to summer learning study with moms who were talking about summer learning for their kids.    These tweets ended up getting retweeted by these moms and they were able to attract more fans.

Children Now and Partnership for Children and Youth explored how to begin to integrate social media content channels into their newly designed web sites.   Both ended their experiments with insights about how to set up systems and structures for content creation across channels, linking, and engaging.

Advancement Project set up a Facebook presence for one of its programs, Healthy Cities as a proof of concept for understanding the work flow of integrating content and engaging with fans.  They will use the lessons learned to share with the education program to set up its Facebook presence as the next experiment. The intent is to use the lessons learned to get other staff buy in other departments.

United Ways of California focused on using Facebook to communicate and facilitate networking between staff members of United Ways in California. Several of the organizations participating in the lab observed that it was hard for them to envision using social media because “they don’t touch the public.”  Not only do many of their UW members have an organizational presence on Facebook, many staffers us it personally. Setting up a Fan Page is an efficient way to share professional information. This experiment focused on using metrics to evaluate how engaging content was and recruitment tactics.

The Yolo County Children’s Alliance’s (YCCA)/Children’s Health Initiative’s (CHI) experiment was to start a blog for Certified Application Assistors (CAAs).   Like the United Ways of California, YCCA’s does not touch the grassroots and the big ah ha for them was they could use social media to support their interactions with different constituents and for the purposes of sharing professional learning.

HCAP is a small agency and its executive director participated.   As she notes in her case study, “The world of social media was quite new to our organization. Due to this learning curve, we felt it best to take one step at a time so that we have a better understanding of how it is used both in the personal social world, as well as business, and non-profit world.”   They did a  listening experiment designed to better advance their understanding of social media and its role in their communications strategy.  This is a critical first step towards a social culture for many nonprofits that is often skipped and it is terrific to have a case study.

An Unanticipated Outcome

One of the unanticipated outcomes was the rich discussion we had after everyone shared their case studies.   The group realized that there were a lot of opportunities and ways that they could support one another’s work through social media.   And, that it didn’t required a huge amount of extra work.

Celebrating Learning

At the end of the session,  each participant received a gift – The Networked Nonprofit book and a Networked Nonprofit T-shirt created by the good folks at NTEN!

I don't have time for social media

Join me on Tuesday, July 13th at 1 PM EST/1o am PST for a webinar hosted by Networked for Good “Using Social Media to Accomplish More with Less.”    It’s free and three lucky participants will win a copy of the book.  I’ll be talking about some of themes in the book and sharing some tips for streamlining your social media use.

One of the most common questions I hear is when I do workshops is, “How much time does it take to do social media?”.  It is usually followed by an observation that the organization is so resourced and time strapped that they can’t invest time doing anything that doesn’t provide an immediate and maximized return.   So, they don’t go further with their social media.  A common mistake.

One of the thing that Networked Nonprofits have in common is simplicity.   It clarifies organizations and forces them to focus their energy on what they do best, while leveraging resources of their networks for the rest.   Simplicity powers more informal connections between people, blurs boundaries, and enables nonprofits to scale efforts better than a single organization could.

Embracing simplicity helps nonprofits move from scarcity lens to that of abundance and allows them to leverage their networks through social media.  Here’s a couple of examples:

The SFSPCA has connected with social media savvy volunteers that now create content and manage some of their social media channels such as the Litter Did You Know blog and YouTube Channel.

Los Angeles Universal Preschool Parent Ambassadors on Facebook

Los Angeles Universal Preschool mission is to make voluntary, high-quality preschool available to every 4-year-old in Los Angeles County, regardless of their family’s income.  They have a group of parent ambassadors who work on land to spread the word about high quality preschool.  This group also has a Facebook Fan Page where they provide the same role online.

Preschool California uses Twitter to connect with journalists.  They discovered that Tweets are more informal, less time consuming than email so journalists may be more likely to read.   Despite only having a few interactions with reporters, Preschool California still retweeted and commented on a number of articles, garnering responses from other advocates and interested Twitter users, which helped increase their issue exposure to a larger audience that focus on early childhood education and are using Twitter.

Using social media can help nonprofits find people and other organizations with good ideas an interest in working together.  This is the leverage that they need to stop doing everything alone while ensure that a lot is getting done in their networks.     These organizations and people are right there, in the network, on Facebook or Twitter, waiting to connect with and support your organization’s efforts.

How are you using social media to accomplish more with less?  Have a story?   Leave it in the comments below and win a free copy of the book or this nifty Networked Nonprofit t-shirt created by NTEN.

Using Social Media to Do More With Less

View more presentations from Beth Kanter.

Update:  Slides and Resource List from Webinar

@Clamo88 (Claire Murray) is a technologist who works for human service agencies

One of the most gratifying things about the publication of the book,  The Networked Nonprofit, is that it has re-connected me to colleagues and past clients as well as making connections to new people.

I met Claire Murray almost five years ago this month when I was working as a consultant for the Community Technology Center Networks to do training for human service agencies that provided homeless services.     Claire was working with the Cyber Cafe @ Malden Square.   I trained her staff on how to blog.

The clients at the  Cyber Cafe @ Malden Square were people who were “transitional homeless” – looking for work, getting job skills, finding a place to live, etc.   The concept for the blog was to for staff to use to capture ongoing resources that trainers and others might use to assist clients in their goals.   It was a good example of using a blog for nonprofits that we shared at Berkman Center Bloggers Meetup.

Claire has a unique perspective because she works inside of fortresses and networked nonprofits:  “I have one foot in the networked nonprofit world at the Cyber Cafe.  I have another foot in the not-so-networked world with my major organization.  They do network with other organizations, but they are not so ready for the digital foray.  (Young padouan must practice patience daily while straddling this dichotomy.)”    Here’s Claire’s review.

I hope Claire will share her thoughts in more depth on the JigSaw Puzzled Approach over at the Networked Nonprofit Wiki.

Devon Smith

I finally met Devon Smith face-to-face who writes the awesome 24 Usable Hours blog, a must read on theatres and social media at our New York City book launch event hosted by Demos  last month.  Devon was inspired to write a book review as well as a ten-point Networked Theatre Manifesto.  I like point 5 about interns.

We assert the unalienable rights of The Intern. We understand that The Intern might be a high school student, an MBA, a retiree, or anyone in between. The Intern will be taken seriously, given real work to do, be respected for their opinion, and will be patiently taught the things they don’t yet know.

(And, if you are looking for ten ideas on real work for interns, Allison Jones, have found this useful post)

Manny Hernandez

Manny Hernandez, has this review of the Networked Nonprofit on his blog and on Amazon.   Manny is the author of Ning for Dummies, but he is also the founder  of tudiabetes and estudiabetes, 2 social networks with more than 22,000 members.   He’s been at the center of the Social Media Diabetes community.

We are thrilled with the reviews (if I missed adding a link to yours, let me know in the comments).

Networked Nonprofits know how to close the loop between social media and offline actions.  They understand that it is a scaffolded process.   Whatever channel they use, they’re building a bridge from online to onland.   They’re masters at meeting their audience where they’re at and bringing them further along the ladder of engagement.

Take Twitter for example.  Once a nonprofit has developed a presence  and a network – and has integrated regular and engaging tweeting into the work flow, the next step is to host a Tweet Up.   What’s A Tweet Up?  It is an in-person meeting of Twitter users.  It is also used to describe any in-person networking event that integrates social media.

There e are different types of Tweet Ups.  Some are spontaneous and informal.  Others are pre-scheduled events with activities and presentations or part of an existing event.  There is no right way to do them.

The benefits of hosting a Tweetup include deeper relationships,  lead generation, or more exposure.   It can also lead to memberships (see comment below)   It can be a good way to meet your Twitter followers or identify who in your existing audience is using Twitter.

Tweet Ups are perfectly suited for performing arts organizations that may have pre-concert Tweet Ups or a museum that is offering a “young professionals event.”     A quick search of museum tweet up show many results including the recent Hubble and Holst, with a private showing of the Hubble 3D IMAX at the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences and a special performance by Houston Symphony musicians.

Some Tips:

Tweet Before the Tweet Up To Build Excitement

Before

Use a Unique HashTag: A hashtag is a keyword that opens up a public conversation on Twitter.  You’ll want to designate one for your event and use it before, during, and after the event.

Scope out the Location: Make sure it is networking friendly, so people can chat and exchange business cards.  Also, make sure there is decent wifi (or cell phone reception).

Use Social Media Event Software: Three of those resources are Meetup.com, Eventbrite and TwTvite.  They all have free elements to their service.   If your organization has a robust Facebook presence, you can also use a Facebook Event to promote the event.

Encourage Live Tweeting during the event and don't forget to encourage photos

During

Name Tags: Make sure you have name tags and if are you hosting, be a good host and introduce people.

Activities: If the event will be more than a networking event, have some structure activities or presentations.  Be creative.  Have fun.   Also encourage people to live tweet from the event.  If you have a projector and laptop available, you may want to stream the Twitter Feed during the event.

Keep in touch. Encourage them to participate in other programs.

After

Connect: Continue to engage with Twitter followers after the event and encourage them to participate in other organizational activities.  Don’t forget to have an email list sign up at the event.  The Dallas Art Museum ran an “arthunt” where they tweeted clues and those who answered correctly could win a prize, including a free membership.

Resources

How To Host Successful Tweetups

How Tweet Ups Can Benefit Your Marketing Strategy

What’s A Tweet Up?

Planning TweetUps

Nina Simon interviews Shelley Bernstein about Brooklyn Museum 1st Fans

What are your best tips for hosting Tweet Ups?  Have an amazing story?  Share it in the comments.

Source: Valdis Krebs

For the past few years whenever I doing a training or speak about nonprofits and social media and more recently when we’ve presented about the book, The Networked Nonprofit, someone always raises this concern:   “Social media is a time suck.”

Networked Nonprofits are not only experts in using social media, but they know how to streamline their work flow often based on an understanding of applying network theory to their practice.  One of the best principles I learned was from Valdis Krebs  who suggests following fewer people to get to the many in his classic post  “So Many People, So Little Time.”

It isn’t about following thousands and thousands of friends on Twitter.  We don’t have the time or brain cells for that.    It’s about finding people who are connected to different social circles and following them.    Of course you have to be interested in what information or conversations they are sharing on Twitter.   Identifying these people or what Krebs calls “nodes” is core of social network analysis.

And you need to build some redundancy in your network so you have a few multiple paths to people and ideas of interest to you.

He explains why this approach is efficient:

For the time invested, I want maximum return. I use the redundancy of connections, between the many social circles I am interested in, to my advantage. I follow a select group of people that give me the same access as following someone in every group. Follow the few to reach the many!

Strategically I am building a small, yet efficient, group that reaches out into the many diverse information pools I am interested in. I know I am finding good people to follow on Twitter by the number of great exchanges that emerge on many topics. Think before you follow, use your time and ties wisely!

What if  you have been following people without thinking and now have an overloaded Twitter Stream?  Here are some tips that help you tame the Twitter lion.

What is most important to find and cultivate the connectors and weavers in communities or topics of interest.   There are some free tools that can help you visualize your Twitter network or do quasi social network analysis on Twitter.   Here’s a few that I’ve used.

Use Friend or Follow to download a spreadsheet of followers. Sort the information to find  people to get to know.  This works best if you have small network.

Mr. Tweet finds people in your network you should follow (use this after you have built up your following list).

Mailana can help you identify people who have strong affinity.   I wrote about an experiment I did last year using this tool.  One problem is that it doesn’t analyze your network in real time.  You submit the userid and then have to come back a few days later unless it is already in the database.

Twitalyzer is a terrific analytics tool that gives you some good benchmarking metrics for Twitter. Run the  impact report to help you identify influencers.

Twiangulate lets you analyze cross over between your Twitter network and another Twitter user.  This can be useful to find potential collaborators.

Klout lets you track the “influence” of specific Twitter users, including the growth of their network, who they influence, and who they are influenced by.

Mention Map helps you visualize who is interacting with you around which hashtags.  It shows nodes on your network.   There is not information about what exactly how the drawings are created though.

Once you’ve started to identify connectors and people to follow, you’ll need to manage it.  Twitter lists can help you create sub-groups of all your followers.

Create Twitter Lists of those accounts, organized by topic or community
Keep the lists small and manageable
Add these lists to your Twitter client and set up a schedule to monitor.   This makes the Twitter content feel more grounded, as opposed to just flying by.
Create Twitter searches for keywords to find additional sources. Follow them as needed
Tend to your lists regularly and unfollow people who don’t provide value to you, perhaps people who tweet about things you are not interested in.

If you were stranded on a deserted island, and could only follow 150 people, who would you follow?

Apply a little social networking theory and think before you follow.   Ask yourself, if you were stuck on desert island and could only follow 150 people, who would you choose?  How many people do you follow and why?  How do you manage it?

For me, one of the joys of  the publication of  Networked Nonprofit co-authored with Allison Fine is seeing people in my network reading it and discussing.    I’ve never met Joitske Hulsebosch face-to-face, but we have collaborated and learned together through the wonders of the social web from US to Holland.

I first met Joitske back in 2005 through Nancy White’s online facilitation workshop.  We had a lot of sandbox time to explore tagging and other emerging web 2.0 technologies.  I remember when she started blogging and she was one of my first “blogger interviews.”   Joitske is an expert in change management and technology adoption and is a trainer who was taught web 2.0 techniques all over the world.

Joitske mentioned that she took a long bike ride to get the right background for this photo!  Can’t wait to hear what she thinks about the ideas in the book!

Wendy Harman from the Red Cross wished me a Happy Fourth of July with a Joey Chestnut reference which reminded of a post I wrote almost a year ago.  Let me explain.

Photo by Dietrich of Joey Chestnut, Winner of the 4th of July Hot Dog Eating Contest

Joey Chestnut won the Nathan’s hot dog eating contest in 2008.   His total for the day was 64 hot dogs.    In 2009, he won again, beating his own record by consuming 68 hot dogs. The thought of consuming 68 hot dogs makes me feel a little uncomfortable.  No downright sick in the stomach.  It’s the same sort of discomfort that some people feel about approaching the task of listening for learning using the social web.

Doesn’t listening require plowing through mountains and mountains of unstructured information?   Won’t it make you dizzy and uncomfortable?  Don’t you have to be Joey Chestnut to be successful?

No!

Networked Nonprofits understand this.  They know how to use social media to engage people inside and outside the organization to improve programs, services, or reach communications goals.  Everyone in the organization understands that social media is more than an external communications tool, and they use it adroitly for their professional learning and even their personal lives.   Networked Nonprofits spell this out in their organization’s social media  strategy handbook and policy guidelines and encourage personal exploration and learning.

It’s one thing to have it written in a social media policy.  It’s quite another to put it into practice.   It does require that someone inside of the organization can help with one-on-one coaching, answer questions, provide support, and do this without loosing their enthusiasm.

It is harder to convince people who aren’t already social media users to use it in their personal lives.   One strategy is to use it as a professional learning tool.  This can be put practice by using listening (and engaging techniques) for program development.

Three Tips for Getting Started

1.  Think of Professional Learning As A Gift To Yourself

Pay Yourself First

Professional learning is and should be a part of staff’s job and honored by the culture. That you feel it is okay to spend some of your work day investing in your knowledge and you gather wisdom from your professional networks via social media channels.

Jeremiah Owyang wrote a great post two years ago called “Pay Yourself First.”   In a nutshell: “Every morning, for about 2 hours, I pay myself first by researching, reading, and writing blog posts…before I dive into email hell.” Many of us in nonprofits can’t afford to spend two hours in professional learning through listening, but maybe we could spare 30 minutes during the day to get started?

I put a sticky note on my computer that reminds to “pay myself first.”   I try (when not traveling) to do my professional learning at the same time each day.    I spend 15-30 minutes reading RSS feeds or Tweets and 15 minutes thinking about something I learned.  Sometimes that happens by writing a blog post which take me 30 minutes.

2. Make It Part of Your Routine

Photo by Salon De Maria

You don’t need to necessarily carve out additional time for professional learning because you’re probably doing it already through other channels.  The challenge is adding it your routine. It is difficult because you have to shift gears from your Outlook calendar, answering emails, meetings, or getting tasks done.   It’s a shift from a getting things done sort of productivity to social productivity. Or rather it is finding your social productivity sweet spot.

Ask yourself how time you can allocate to listening for professional learning.   Is it a half-hour a day, an hour a day, or is an hour or two a week? The point is to get started, block out that time, and start paying yourself.

Think about your current routine.   When does it make sense to integrate something new?    I do my social media listening for professional learning before email and after I’ve created my 3 things I must do today list.  I do it in the morning.  I know other people who do it right after lunch.

3.  Cut Up The Salami Into Smaller Pieces

Cut Up The Salami Into Smaller Pieces (Photo by TalkoftheTomatoes)

It can be difficult to get started.  Some people think they are so far behind and there is so much to do – so they just stay with their current routine and habit.   They also need to get past the concern about information overload and too much unstructured information.  Attending to your professional learning using social media and networks requires making sense out of the leaves rather than being presented a knowledge tree.  The initial dip into the leaves can be overwhelming and unpleasant at first, but you will get past it if you keep calm and carry on for a couple of days.

Pick one small step and get started.  Just do that one thing everyday until it becomes comfortable.

Here are some steps to get started with listening for professional learning via social media.  The bigger questions is – are you ready make the shift?

Chris Wells Created This Tombstone for Email

I asked the above question on Twitter after reading what Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg said at the Nielsen’s Con­sumer 360 con­fer­ence.   If you read only that, then you might think email is on life support.  (A change from a few years ago when people were saying “Email is for old people.” )

As much as we’d wish that email was dead, read Aus­tin Carr’s recent Open Thread art­icle on Fast­Com­pany.  Perhaps this is a more likely scenario-  a phased trans­ition or con­tinual upgrade.   While sometimes I feel the same as Katrin Verclas about killing email, perhaps because I get too much, it is still an effective marketing tool for nonprofits.

What you think?