I’ll also stay in the same room for the last session of the day on expanding your Online Community. I know Laura Lee Dooley, who joined the Social Media Committee I started at the WAA and read Beth Kanter’s blog which is an excellent resource for Non-Profits who wish to leverage Social Media (and honestly, a lot of what Beth Kanter writes about could be applied to for profit businesses just as well as non-profits).

“..S04 Tuesday, 5:10 - 6:00

Followers, Friends, and Fans: Expanding Your Online Community

Jonathon D. Colman, The Nature Conservancy
Laura Lee Dooley, World Resources Institute
Beth Kanter, How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

If you aren’t on facebook, twitter, friendfeed, technorati, and delicious, should you be? And once you jump into social media, how do you track and measure success? Tips, tools and stories from the trenches from three people who focus on online engagement and have more links, friends and followers than some small countries have citizens.

Laura Lee on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Anyway, here’s my notes on Beth Kantor’s presentation. She looks at AideRss and the statistics and see’s what posts do best.

Also Beth looks at Technorati and noted her ranking goes up and down and says she says she’s noted when her rankings go up or down and what triggers it.

Btw, Beth raised 215k for Cambodian refugees as non profit. Beth goes and friends a lot of people who follow alerts on her name, or “Cambodia”.

Laura Ann - she uses Twitter a lot and suggests we all create Twitter accounts.

But….But… Most companies are not prepared to handle interactive feedback. That’s a major roadblock.

Ambient Awareness - Listening Post Exhibition. Post Ratio: 1 : 12 (once about yourself and 12 times about others)

Laura handles two Twitter accounts
She used several metrics including twitter clickthrough and posts.

Xefer and Twitter Grader.

Is twitter multiple relationships or a single one to Twitter?

A lot of concerns about Twitter downtime but the service continues to grow.

laura points out the person who has the Twitter account for your company needs to be a senior person who knows the Brand well. No Interns, that’s not a good idea for several reason.

Nature Conservatory Case study using DIGG

One thing to note was the Digg traffic wasn’t worth much though they got a lot of that traffic.

Digg is good if you want to reach new people but it can lead to other things that are valuable.

Results of Social News Campaign on Digg. Normally they get 20,000 visits a day but 76,000 visits for the day when a Digg story ran on Digg homepage.

But ….. Our goal was to spur conversations about the enviornment plus tons of links, which in turn drove new visits of higher quality plus SEO juice.

How much time required? A few years to become a crediable source on Digg, or whatever large Social Networks.

The ad itself, took a few hours to set up. But Digg helped reach people we normally would not be able to contact.

Nature Conservatory also uses Radian6 to listen to the conversation.

My take is that social media is a lot of work, learning to leverage relationships.

Many organizations are too stoggy to adopt Social Media but once they see the results you usually get but it’s a culture change.

Digg changes make it harder to get a story on the first page but many top Diggers have interests in causes.

Fact is that Digg has been gamed so much the top keyword in Google for a search on Digg is “gamed”.