This post is part of a series of posts I’m writing to help demystify social media tools and to give nonprofit organizations concrete steps they can take to use these tools to enhance their communications; better engage their constituents (and donors, and volunteers); and build their brand in new ways to new audiences.

What is a Facebook Page?

Because The Foraker Group is an organization, we’ve set up a presence on Facebook – the most popular social network on the Internet – using a Facebook Page. A Page on Facebook is different from a Profile which you as an individual might have as a Facebook member. Pages are for companies, organizations, products, celebrities and other entities or individuals wanting a more professional presence on Facebook.

Some organizations – including many in Alaska – have set up Profiles instead of Pages. They may have done this a year or so ago when Pages weren’t as prevalent, and they have probably built a large friends list over time. Unfortunately, if an organization has a Facebook Profile instead of a Facebook Page, they are at risk of losing the content and contacts they’ve accumulated because they are in violation of Faceboook’s Terms of Service i.e. the fine print in your Facebook user agreement. Facebook regularly disables Facebook Profiles that they deem a violation of their rules.

You can immediately tell the difference between a Facebook Page and a Facebook Profile because Pages have Fans while Profiles have Friends.

An important difference between a Facebook Page and a Facebook Profile is that a Page is publicly accessible to people who are not members of Facebook so it becomes a powerful Web presence for your organization that shows up in Google Searches. Facebook Profiles are only accessible by your Facebook Friends which means someone must be a member of Facebook and then send you a Friend request (which you must accept) in order to interact with your organization through your Profie.

Benefits of Using Facebook Pages

How can your organization benefit from a Facebook Page? Many nonprofits are limited in budgets and resources for outreach to constituents, donors, the media and the public. While a web site can serve as an effective destination for an organization, many people these days consider web sites as places for background and archived information rather than an active and dynamic communications tool.

Also the money and time costs of designing, building and maintaining a web site can be a burden, particularly if an organization’s site was not designed with an easy-to-use content management system. Many nonprofit organizations are saddled with outdated web sites where they are at the mercy of Web developers for even the most simple updates.

Other organizations use their web sites as repositories of information, for a list of services, to house a calendar of events, but when it comes to outreach, they are relying on an electronic newsletter – or even a print newsletter – to get the word out about their organization and important events. These days, a web site by nature is too static – and often too overloaded with information – to serve as a consistent outreach tool for shorter, more frequent messages.

While a blog is a useful tool to publish content more frequently, a blog can also be a burden on an organization’s resources if they aren’t equipped to publish content on a very regular basis.

A Facebook Page doesn’t demand the same kind of content publishing and is instead a more conversational resource where shorter bits of information – usually with a link to additional information – is the norm.

Using a Facebook Page Effectively

At the very minimum, here are a few things you should do with your Facebook Page:

1. Connect your blog to Page. If you have one, add your blog’s RSS feed URL to the Notes section of your Facebook Page so when you post to your blog, it automatically updates your Page.

2. Add Facebook Events. If you hold events, particularly regularly occuring events, you can use the Facebook Events feature to augment your Page. The Events tool integrates with your Page, and you can use it to spread the word about classes, meetings, etc. using a tool that makes it easy for others to invite their own Facebook friends to your event.

3. Link to Resources. While Status Updates can be intimidating for some people, updating your Facebook Page doesn’t have to be hard. Connecting your blog updates your Page status as does adding new events. You can also post links to relevant resources including those on your organization’s web site as well as others on the Web.

4. Respond to Comments. As you gather more Fans on your Page, people may start commenting on your Status Updates. A quick response is always appreciated and helps strengthen relationships. Your response doesn’t have to be long – just an answer to a question or acknowledgement of what they’ve said. While it is important to interact with your Page Fans, don’t feel obligated to respond to every single comment, but don’t ignore them all either.

5. Favorite Like-Minded Organizations’ Pages. If you are visiting another Alaska nonprofit or company Page that you think might be relevant to your own Facebook Fans, you can click on the link on the upper left side of their Page and choose Add This Page to My Page’s Favorites. Then add their Page to your Page. This will appear in a box on the left side of your Facebook Page Wall with their logo and a link to their Page. It is appropriate to ask them to Favorite your Page back, however, reciprocity is not an obligation here.

Facebook Pages are easy to set up and easier to maintain than a web site or blog. They also give you a direct communications channel to the people who you serve or who you want to reach with important messages about your organization. And when one person interacts with your Facebook Page, that action can be seen by dozens or even hundreds of their Facebook Friends giving your organization an instant and exponential reach beyond your own contacts.

Does your organization have a Facebook Page? If so, please include a link to it here so we can visit it!

For many people, his words seemed unfair when he said that many nonprofits use excuses like “lack of resources” or a seemingly inherent “resistance to change” attitude to avoid social media. I have to say I agree with most of what he said, first because I experience what he has experienced every day as a speaker, teacher, and consultant to nonprofit organizations. And second, because even if you disagree, this conversation must happen again and again until things change for the better.

While I agree with most of what Seth says in his post, I don’t agree with this statement:

Of course, some folks, like charity: water are stepping into the void and raising millions of dollars as a result. They’re not necessarily a better cause, they’re just more passionate about making change.

Seth, it isn’t MORE PASSION that makes a group like charity: water effective at stepping into the void. It is because they more fully embrace the changes in the ways we communicate. I’m sure nobody at charity: water will claim more passion for their cause than folks busting their tails for other good causes. I’m sure everybody at charity: water will say their buy-in to understand, use and leverage social media tools and the new ways we all communicate made a huge difference.

For the record, on a near daily basis I hear these things from people working in the nonprofit sector:

11 Reasons Nonprofits Give For Not Using Social Media

1. I don’t understand it.

2. I don’t have time.

3. We don’t have the resources.

4. We don’t even know where to start.

5. It’s overwhelming.

6. I can’t figure out how to use it for my organization.

7. There are legal issues we can’t sort out.

8. I don’t know how to avoid the “crazies.”

9. Our firewall won’t let us use these tools.

10. We’re still trying to figure out how to update our web site.

11. We are afraid our employees will waste time with these tools.

Personally, I have solid, reasonable, practical tips to overcome each of the above (which will be an upcoming blog post).

Back to Seth Godin’s post. I whole heartedly agree with this statement:

The marketing world has changed completely. So has the environment for philanthropic giving. So have the attitudes of a new generation of philanthropists. But if you look at the biggest charities in the country, you couldn’t tell. Because they’re ‘non’ first, change second.

Anyone involved with a nonprofit or any consultant working with a nonprofit who DISAGREES with the above – i.e. the fact that many nonprofits are ‘non’ first, change second -  consider yourself LUCKY to be working in an environment where the fear of change does not dominate, especially of changing and new technologies.

For those of us who are not so lucky – meaning we witness this fear day after day – it is up to us to be the teachers. Evangelizing social media, no matter how passionate, can fall on deaf ears when others are listening through a filter of fear. We need to step back, dial down our enthusiasm for a moment, hold someone’s hand (figuratively and in some cases literally), and present sensible and rational reasons WHY and HOW a nonprofit can use social media regardless of resource limits and regardless of fear.

Channel the fear you encounter from others into something more like caution so that they at least try something; dipping a toe in a pool before they swim in an ocean.

It is up to us to lead the way. If nonprofits – organizations charged with good work for good causes – are behind when it comes to social media, it is OUR FAULTS.

What are YOU doing to help nonprofit organizations get up to speed with today’s technologies and communications tools?

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I did try to put a CV together which is much more of an academic document. While I have a 15 page CV, I ended up paring it down thinking it would be easier to read and ended up with a cross between an extended resume and abbreviated CV.

These days, I think the Resume/CV is LinkedIn. I can’t see being a working or even an out-of-work businessperson without a LinkedIn account. The site prompts you to add your work history in an orderly fashion and encourages you to keep adding relevant activities and experience to get to a 100% completed profile.

When I want to know about anyone’s background, I hit LinkedIn first to see if they have a profile and if so, what they’ve been up to in the last 5 years. I’m sure people are doing the same to learn more about me.

I find myself tweaking my LinkedIn account several times a month, making sure that it clearly conveys what I do.

How are you keeping up with your resume, CV or bio? Is LinkedIn working for you?

Dear Social Media Mama,

I’ve found myself joining more than one social network. Now I don’t know whether I should just copy and paste the same profile from one to the next or if I need something original for each one. Help!

Multiple Profiles Gal

Dear MPG,

I’ve gone back and forth about “should a profile be different for each social network” or is it acceptable to use basically the same wording for each one?

My overall feeling is that people find us in different places and read our bios in different places. While there is something to be said about maybe being more casual on MySpace and more formal on, say, LinkedIn, in general, people find us in one place, poke around sometimes to friend us in other places. While there could be some overlap, very few people go from network to network with an expectation to see completely different profiles on each network.

I gave a speech last year where someone in the audience said “I find it BORING when I see the same profile for a person on all of their different social networking pages.”

My first reaction was “What, are you stalking that person??” When you think about it, the main reasons to hop from and connect with a person – or company – on their various social networks is:

1. The Multi-Follower: If you are actively involved in several different social networks and truly want to follow them in all those places (most people do not do this);

2. The Info-Seeker: If you found them on YouTube via a video they’ve uploaded and you want to know more about them and interact with them. Then maybe you’d seek them out in the social network of your choice but more likely you’d go to their web site or blog.

3. The Fan/Stalker: If you are on their web site or blog and see all the networks where they belong where you can friend them and you’re such a fan (fanatic) that you friend them in all the places you can (not for the feint-hearted or busy professional).

Friending someone in all the places where they’re present is not so common for the everyday social networker. We go to different social networks with different expectations of engagement and connection. That said, most people who do multi-friend others aren’t being as critical about one’s profile as, say, a marketer who tends to examine and overanalyze all the fine details.

Most people couldn’t care less that I use the same wording in many of my profiles. In the whole scheme of social networking and connecting, it just doesn’t matter. If you are in social networks as a professional, there is something to be said about consistency of message and nothing wrong with having your own brand language everywhere you network. Copy away!

Do you agree that profiles can be the same/similar in each network or are you hard core about making them unique to each and every network?

1. A Blog is Your Social Media Hub
When I say this, many people still look at me in terror, especially those who finally got a web site up after all these years or just spent a bucketload of money to redesign their existing web site. I’m not saying that a web site is now obsolete because of social media and Web 2.0 tools, however, blog publishing tools tend to integrate these tools so that embedding social functionality is incredibly easy.

Many web sites and custom or older web site content management systems don’t even support javascript or flash code, literally stripping out widgets and embedded social features. This functionality flaw makes social media integration a bitch. (Note that WordPress.com also has this flaw which really pisses me off.)

Blogs – by the very nature of how comments work – encourage social interaction from the get go. Web sites still struggle to be interactive and these days are turned to by consumers more for archival and background information and not necessarily the ideal place to get the most current news or conversation. This rule, of course, doesn’t pertain to online stores which I’d argue aren’t static sites at all and also not always ideal places for social interaction.

2. Feeds Are Your Secret Weapon
An RSS Feed (Really Simple Syndication) is your blog or site content stripped down to bare bones so that it can be fed or syndicated easily. People should be able to subscribe to your blog RSS feed, for example, and read your blog posts in their feed reader such as Google Reader.

Or you can allow them to subscribe to your feed and receive your blog posts – or blog post headlines and excerpts with links back to your blog – via email. RSS feeds can also be used to tie your blog together with other social networking sites. For example, Twitterfeed can be used to automatically post a link to your latest blog post to your Twitter page – automatically. Now that’s handy!

3. You Only Need To Join a Few Key Networks
People get so overwhelmed by social networking and are afraid that they will have to join countless networks in order to have a successful online social media campaign. I would never recommend someone who is new to social media to set up more than a handful of accounts, if that. I would recommend that you be strategic about the networks you join in a way that provides you with the functionality you need.

For example, I would recommend that in addition to your blog, join Twitter to microblog; Facebook to take advantage of Business pages, Groups and Events; and every professional can benefit from LinkedIn. If you are involved with music, the arts, any entertainment or have a cool retail business, then a MySpace page still has juice.

4. You Need a Friending Strategy
Before you go accepting every friend offer you get, click over to see who they are. Beware of Friend Spam that leads to pornography. Beware of Friend Mongers who just friend people to friend them with no rhyme or reason. But don’t be too picky that you reject anyone who doesn’t fit into a neat demographic that you identify as your audience.

Keep in mind that social networks are not only about the people who are your “friends” but the people with whom your friends are friends. And when you embark on a Friending Campaign, don’t be scattershot and don’t be a spammer. Be polite, low key, give a good reason for why you are sending a Friend invite, and don’t persist if they decline.

Also note that both Facebook and now MySpace allow you to categorize your friends into lists or groups.

5. You Should Use a Password Algorithm
I learned about password algorithms not from my Dad. If you are joining a handful of networks and have already been having trouble keeping track of your many, many passwords, a password algorithm can save the day. Let’s say you want a 9 character password for all of your sites. You don’t want to use the same password for all sites and 9 characters is pretty hard to remember (other than your Social Security number, that is). Break the password down into 3 parts. Decide what you will use for each of the 3 parts. Such as:

First 3 characters: The first three letters of your last name
Next 3 characters: Use 8*8
Last 3 characters; The last three letters of the web site

So if your last name was Smith and you have a Twitter account, the password would be SMI8*8TER.
If you had a MySpace account, the password would be MI8*8ACE. And so on.

These are just a few thoughts on how to better manage your social media.

How are YOU managing your social media?

Dear Social Media Mama,

A colleague just told me about a freelance editing lead that was posted in a writer’s forum in Twitter. I realized I haven’t used Twitter for this purpose before or to even answer someone.

I looked at how to respond to someone in the Help section on Twitter and I think I understand how I reply to him. I reply to him in on Twitter page, using the @reply function, right?

But what I still need to know is what is the protocol here. Do I send the person a complete resume and cover letter, which it doesn’t seem like you can do in Twitter or do you send a short message briefly saying who you are and send him a link to either my linkedin page or website? Or something else totally different?

–Twitter Mystified

Dear TM:

Basically, you can contact people in two ways on Twitter itself:

1. @ing (“atting”) them – If they are not following you, this is your only way to hope to get their attention directly. You put an @ sign in front of their Twitter handle and put that at the START of your tweet in response to them. First make sure you are following them in order for them to privately message (DM) you in response. Then @ them that you’d like to submit something in response to their announcement and would like to know how to contact them.

2. DMing them – If they are following you, then go immediately into their MESSAGE link on their Twitter page. Message your email addrss to them (do NOT put your email address publicly in an @ message). Let them know what you are responding to and ask how to proceed.

3. Request a follow – Some people will also @ someone saying “I’m trying to contact you. Please follow me.” This is not usually the most efficient way of contacting someone via Twitter, but it is an option.

Two other ways to reach a fellow Twitterer:

1. Ask for a referral – Ask your Twitter followers to please let @soandso know that you are trying to reach them.

2. Go to the source - Click on their URL link on their Twitter profile page and look for their direct email address.

There is no one right way to reach someone directly who has put out a request or asked a question, but normally if they put a message out there looking for response, they’ll be actively checking for @’s so that is probably your best bet unless they have given specific instructions otherwise.

Extra tip: If someone makes a request and gives instructions on how to contact them, follow them to the letter. Often people consider how well someone follows directions as much as they pay attention to the content of a response.

Here is a recent draft of internal guidelines that I’ve come up with. I tried to make these accessible, achievable and more motivational than dictating “rules.”

Our blog is our brand – it represents who we are, what we think about, what we believe in. Here are some tips for blogging consistently and compellingly to help build our blog community.

1. Be transparent. No matter what, always be clear who you are. We are not blogging anonymously on our site and we do not encourage our guest bloggers to be anonymous either.

2. Be truthful. Honesty is the best policy when it comes to blogging. We will do our best to check facts, be accurate, and above all, tell the truth.

3. Be yourself. Your personality should show through in your blog posts. Since we have multiple authors, find a niche that you can call your own and be conversational.

4. Share your excitement. The best blog posts display your emotions. If you are frustrated, blog about it but provide solutions. If you are excited about something, don’t be afraid to show it. Successful blogs are not dispassionate and unbiased.

5. Be kind. Even if you are being critical about a software product, a service or a company, do so in a respectful way. Make sure your criticism is constructive.

6. Don’t cut and paste. The best way to blog is directly into the blog publishing tool and you can save your drafts until you are ready to publish (On Typepad, for example: Pulldown menu on right side of post reads: Posting Status. Choose Draft.) Otherwise, if you do cut and paste from another document, make sure you paste it into the Edit Html page (On Typepad: one of two tabs at top of your post – the other default one reads: Rich Text).

7. Link strategically. You should try to link out to at least one other site in every post. This could be an example of the point you are making, another article or blog post on the site or on another site that you are referencing, or a site containing supporting information, resources or applications.

8. Ask questions. You should try to pose a question at the end of every blog post to encourage dialogue. Make your post provocative so people want to comment on it.

9. Add comments. As a blogger, you are the start of our blog community, however, you can also contribute comments. Read your fellow bloggers’ posts, and find meaningful ways to continue the conversation.

10. Spread the word. Look for ways to talk up our blog by linking to it in your email signature file, by Twittering links to interesting posts (including your own), by putting a link in your Facebook status, and simply by talking about it.

What do you think? What key points am I forgetting?

If you would like to use this as a template for your own guidelines, please credit The Social Media Mama. Thanks!

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