1. Robust yet flexible issues and crisis management: The speed and efficiency by which information – and misinformation – can be broadly disseminated and shared is unmatched by other media, and provides both opportunities and challenges to organizations facing a crisis situation – from a rogue employee, to an event that brings unwanted attention to the NGO. There have been many situations over the past few years that have demonstrated the power of social media and digital technology to enable the rapid sharing of information through non-traditional channels. Effective online issues and crisis management protocols must be created to ensure external online environments are appropriately monitored and the right response mechanisms are put in place should active online engagement be required.
2. People before technology: At the core of social media is the emphasis on giving a voice to individuals and groups of individuals to participate in dialogue or community, and to share or access information and knowledge. Technology must be viewed as an enabler of this function, all digital or social media activities should first consider the impact on the individual, the need it addresses, the action it is looking to create, the issues that could arise, and the roadblocks to participation.
3. Speed & flexibility: From the perspective of building and deepening relationships with supporters, the immediacy of social media means that NGOs must be able to respond and react to conversations occurring at a much faster pace than traditional methods. The flexibility of most social media tools and platforms will enable organizations to jump on opportunities quickly even if the technology or concept is not fully ‘baked’ and adapt the program on the fly – so long as appropriate risk factors are taken into account. Ultimately, this means that NGOs must fully understand this need for speed and flexibility and be prepared to adjust processes as necessary.
4. Simplicity & ease of use: As organizations seek to develop and establish their digital platforms, emphasis should be given to ease of use and the overall simplicity of the task(s) that it enables. The rapid proliferation of social media has been, in large part, the result of its emphasis on simplicity, and making it easy for virtually anyone – even those with limited technical know-how.
5. Personal value as the foundation to community: As noted above, social media should fundamentally emphasize the individual vs. the actual technology. Equally important is the need for the technology to deliver meaningful personal value – e.g. this connects me to people who support the cause, I can find useful information quickly about the topic etc. – as the foundation to deriving community.
6. Build a foundation of influencers: One of the most predominant focuses from the onset is to seek out key online influencers that are enthusiastic and committed to the cause. Once identified and engaged, the emphasis must be on creating a sense of shared ownership in the initiative in order to drive the objectives forward and to allow each to claim some measure of success.

Acknowledging these factors are imperative to the success of a NGO implementing a strategy that invokes grassroots movement for their cause. Simply being on various social channels is not enough, NGOs must provide value, build relationships and provoke conversations that stimulates supporters to spread the word.

• Governance: The NGO must ensure that it has set out the appropriate control mechanisms – policies, roles, responsibilities, and processes – to protect the organization from potential reputation threats or even liability. Effective governance enforces best practices, anticipates the digital needs and goals for the NGO, and provides guidelines that makes the deployment of the digital strategy manageable and also an effective business tool.
• Alignment with the Strategic Objectives: alignment provides the ‘directional beacon’ that sets out which digital strategies to explore and which to avoid. Close alignment of any digital campaign to the strategic vision and direction of the NGO is critical in order to focus resources, and maximize the impact and return of any activity undertaken.
• Consistent standards of execution and measurement: As with traditional and online marketing & communications activities, NGOs will require consistent standards to be enforced in order to safeguard the reputation of the organization. At the same time, the very nature of what makes social media successful will require the NGO to consider creating standards – tactical and ethical – that not only reflects traditional visual guidelines, but which also reflects social media’s less structured, more individual, more transparent, and more interactive qualities. A clear, highly flexible, measurement structure should also be considered in this light, so as to allow the organization to benchmark activity over time, focus on those activities that are working, and shut down others that show no signs of real traction.
• Sustainability: Unlike traditional PR or marketing activities, social media often does not have a finite start or end period. Although many digital campaigns have been created with a sun-setting date in mind, many others – blogs, social networking tools, online communities, and crowd-sourcing tools – are all created, in many instances, to live on for an indefinite period. As such, the issue of sustainability and resourcing to support an ongoing initiative – whether through additional headcount or additional time given must be an important part of the digital strategy.
• Ongoing awareness & education: When the NGO engages in various digital activities, the value of social media will be viewed differently by different employees. Likewise, many who use social media personally may not be fully aware of the risks that inappropriate social media behavior can have on their individual reputations and that of the organization. Ongoing awareness and education of social media – tools, and policies – will be critical to safeguarding the reputation while encouraging organic growth and adoption throughout.

In my next post, which I’m hoping will be within the next week or so will touch upon Crisis Management, Technology, People, and Speed & Flexibility. This will be several posts but will set the stage for a successful implementation of your digital strategy.

For those of you haven’t seen this video – very well done.

http://www.socialnomics.net/ Part of the world’s most watched Social Media video series; “Social Media Revolution” by Erik Qualman. Based on #1 International Best Selling Book Socialnomics by Erik Qualman. This is a shorter version that includes new social media statistics for 2011.

by Anastasia Chumakova.

Thanks Brian for the introduction and I look forward to making the connection with your readers. Let`s get started, do you have accounts on Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace? Recently, I started to do so much work that I was busy almost all the time. I didn’t want my friends and relatives to think that I didn’t care for them, so I made sure that I posted short messages and pictures on my profile. This made them know, wherever they are, no matter in what time zone, that I’m ok, just pretty busy.

Is it possible that we could use social media the same way we do in our private life, but for work? The answer is yes, for my first article I`ll be discussing: online collaboration tools.

Online collaboration tools can be software or a feature within an application that enables teams to discuss projects, deadlines, tasks, scheduling, and planning. An extremely effective feature within an online collaboration tool is the ability for it to send email notifications to all members of the team who may be involved at various points throughout the project. Thus, all the discussions and relevant data are kept in one place. When any changes are brought to the discussion, everyone gets notified. Searching for emails, making phone calls or scheduling more meetings is not necessary with the use of these tools. In my opinion, collaboration tools are extremely useful as I can take a quick look at what tasks people are doing at any given moment, I can prioritize tasks to create an effective to-do list for myself. Because of this feature, I`m able to share my to-do list, and I can view other lists from my team members.

Solutions for daily task management are numerous. You can choose one according to your personal needs. I am not going to recommend or promote any in this article. You can test them for free and pick the one that you like most. Here is some sound advice that can you can use when making your choice, but understand making a choice may not be easy. First thing to consider is the price of the product and the maintenance package included or available for purchase. If you are serious about keeping your data safe and accessible, do not refuse the maintenance, however it should be affordable. Many of the collaboration tools available have been designed for enterprise, small and medium businesses (SMB) or small teams, thus giving you the option to choose whatever features you need based on the size of your organization. Based on my past experiences with open source collaboration applications, I would recommend not choosing this option for small teams unless you are a software development business and can deal with programming yourself. I`ve also discovered that enterprise solutions for the most part use project management (PM) features and tracking along with collaboration tools. In this case, collaboration tools are positioned as just another feature that comes with the software. Project management features help you to plan and control your resources, so that you can assign tasks in a more efficient way. The Tracking that comes with most enterprise solutions provides business process automation: it typically enables you to start an automated generation of tasks. Tracking is very useful in the event you have daily repeated activity, like ticketing or customer support that involves processing of like kind data in a similar way.

To sum it up, collaboration tools can enable you to create to-do list online, access it through your browser window, and store your data within a secure cloud service. What truly makes it collaborative is the ability to make comments, create notes, build wikis around projects, spur on discussions through forums, stay up-to-date with RSS feeds, and be notified by email based on tasks if necessary. As mentioned, project management features can help you plan your personal and team to-do list keeping everyone on track with needs to be accomplished and with the tracker feature you can add business process automation to deliver tasks on time to all team members.== Be sure to do your research before purchasing your collaboration tool – I`ve tried to explain some of the offerings available to-date in the market to help you make a choice. One thing to remember when trying to bring social media into your collaborative environment – the main principles is the same as Facebook: enabling people to unite online, to allow them to work in collaboration together.

—- Anastasia has been studying task management features for different collaboration solutions for many years and enjoys sharing her conclusions with you.

Build a Private Social Network for Your College With Student Life Network.

Delivering on a mandate for a social cause from a digital perspective requires, in large part, sustained, relevant and credible communications between the NGO and the target audience. For the most part NGO’s must consider core platforms such as web, mobile and social media to deliver it’s message – in order to:

• Spark dialogue and action,
• Create awareness,
• Create and offer a multitude of opportunities for individuals and organizations to take action.

We must first consider the following in order to meet our digital objectives, if not considered it could mean serious damage to the NGO’s reputation, efforts and image within the public.

1. Acquire and accessing rich content for digital initiatives. If a non-profit is to engage their target audience through the use of digital and social media it would need to create an online experience that would act as the catalyzing elements in establishing a dynamic community. It must invest in meaningful two-way dialogue with their audience to stimulate valuable and discussion-worthy content to invoke support and action. It must access rich content, stories, and knowledge which will aid in providing further value to the community.
2. Call to action vs. information. For the most part organizations or groups use Social Media as a way to share information about them instead of using it to involve the public. For the purpose of causes it must use innovation and social media tools to stimulate grassroots efforts by focusing on “call to action” activities. In order to be successful at stimulating a grassroots movement causes must only be seen as the enabler (bottom-up) of the grassroots movement online by providing their audience the tools to support the call to action.
3. The digital experience. In Canada, approximately 79.2% of Canadians (36M) use the internet of which 59.9% access social networking sites. Given these statistic it is evident that the web-based online experience will serve as a key catalyst to engaging Canadians. In countries where online user know what to expect when visiting a social network specifically people between the ages of 18-34. They’re more web-savvy, experiential, and look for ways to engage with organizations and content. In order for a non-profit to be successful in building a digital experience that engages their audiences it must create a bold and innovative community that is highly immersive, challenging, and radically different from traditional social cause websites.
4. Engaging your audience in an open, dynamic and an unpredictable environment. Due to the unpredictable nature of social media non-profits must be prepared to potentially face attacks against the cause, high levels of emotions, anger, and offensive language as they engage and create discussion with their audience. To ensure a non-profit remains committed and transparent throughout situations of unrest, clear rules for engagement and risk mitigation strategies must be considered. These rules will bring some level of normalcy and to keep the dialogue at a respectable level to keep Canadians engaged.

Since my last post I’ve moved from my previous position from Canada Post as Director of Social Media and moved to the world of non-profit in the same capacity. Over the past 4 months I’ve been developing the digital strategy for a Canadian cause involved in the mental health space. It has been an exceptional journey to determine how social media can be applied to a cause that requires grassroots support from all Canadians. Many of the best practices, approaches, tools and technologies that are effective in the for-profit world apply in the non-profit space (probably more so…). I’ve discovered the ground is fertile for new and innovative approaches to moving social causes in the social media world. Now that I’m back online, I’m ready to share what I’ve discovered and strategized over the past 4 months – many of the post that will follow I’ll bring you through my journey. But what I’m more interested in is to know your thoughts in my approach and if there are opportunities that I may have missed.

The opportunity…

Digital communications and technologies are transforming the way organizations interact with the general public. Emerging social software tools enable broader and easier information access, sharing and consumption, so too are they imposing unprecedented transparency on people, organizations and issues, while disrupting traditional communication and information hierarchies.

But despite the challenges posed by this new digital landscape, new opportunities – previously unforeseen – are emerging as a result. Over the past 2 years non-profit organizations have approached social media with a “listen, fail informatively, and evolve approach” and our seeing tremendous results. These results are causing non-profits to change both in the way they work and as well as their relationships with supporters. Social technologies have enabled these organizations to build and deepen relationships, encourage individuals and small groups to self-organize, facilitate collaboration, and engage the public.

As a result, my recommendation to the foundation is to proactively embrace the full potential of social software and recognize the need to enable meaningful two-way communication and engagement between the cause and all Canadians to get involved in a meaningful way that leads to unprecedented improvements in mental health services, mental health project funding and the mental well-being of all.

The ‘Digital Strategy’ is intended to provide the foundation with a common-sense roadmap upon which to successfully deliver on the promise to catalyze a grassroots social movement that will transform the way people think about, and act towards people living with mental illness.

Let me know your thoughts…next post I’ll introduce some of the strategic consideration that will be considered in order to take advantage of the opportunity.

Alexis Lamster, VP of customers at Postling and creator of the below infographic, told us that the company analyzed nearly 20,000 Postling users to extract information on how small business are using social media.

Check out the data below and let us know in the comments how your small business is using social media comparatively.

How Small Businesses Are Using Social Media [INFOGRAPHIC].

http://www.mashable.com by Erica Swallow

In 2011, the focus on mobile will continue to grow with the launch of mobile- and iPad-only news products, but the greater focus for news media in 2011 will be on re-imagining its approach to the open social web. The focus will shift from searchable news to social and share-able news, as social media referrals close the gap on search traffic for more news organizations. In the coming year, news media’s focus will be affected by the personalization of news consumption and social media’s influence on journalism.

Read more by Mashable: 10 Predictions for the News Media in 2011.