In this Social Media Strategy tutorial, we learned to put the strategy into the context of the organisation.

We identified the role of social media in “connecting our target audience to our core content” and looked at the roles of different social media tools.

But nothing in life is simple. A social media strategy is no exception. Let’s fine-tune our generic strategy.

Is social media only a means? Can it be a goal too? Can social media be “core content”?

In the previous parts of our series, we defined two roles for social media: either the sandwich men handing out flyers (using microblogging and social networking tools) or as the store front, making core content digestive, and pleasing to the eye (in the form of blogposts, videos, pictures,…).

But can social media also be core content? Can core content be stored in social media? The answer is “yes”, twice. An encouraging yes!

Even within the context of this tutorial, where we defined a social media strategy for a nonprofit agricultural research organisation, it is not all about research papers and scientific publications. Those are really the end result of a process, often covering several years. No, it is just as important, or even more important to also document the process itself. Describe the tools you use, the methodologies you try out, your experiences, your successes and failures, your experiments…

Here is a nice example of a CIAT scientist using video to document some of his process. He actually goes a step further and also uses video as one of his end products. In that way, social media becomes core content.

In same area, here is an example of how CCAFS used a series of video testimonials to document how farmers adapt to climate change.

The only question I would encourage you to ask yourself, for every piece of content is: “Is this core content”, or is it “meta-content”, leading into “core content”? Is it the “terminus” of the rail track you are traveling with your audience, or just “a half-way train station”? Practically, when uploading a video, is it supposed to introduce a research report, as core content? If so, it should have links to that report. The same with pictures, blogposts,…

Social media can also be “a simple publishing tool”

Sometimes, we just want to have a simple publishing tool, to put up content easily and fast.
See how ILRI uses a blog to assemble press clippings, and another blog to publish their vacancies. All core content! Check out how Bioversity uses a blog to publish about the latest additions in their library.

Because blogplatforms like WordPress become more and more versatile, they can be used as sophisticated tools, linking into databases or aggregating data from many different s0urces. Check out the CGIAR Ongoing Research site, a visual interface into their research projects, AMNK which aggregates complex climate data into a data modeling tool. All on WordPress!

Are there any other uses of social media?

In this tutorial, we mostly concentrated on one specific purpose of social media, within a non-profit organisation. Even more, it was done within the context of one specific type of organisation, doing agricultural research.

As we stressed in part 1 of this tutorial: Your social media strategy needs to be put within the context of your nonprofit organisation. This tutorial (in afterthought, maybe I should have called it a “case study”) was based on one of several possible  social media approaches, one within the context of an agricultural research organisation. This is not the “only right” stream of thoughts, not the “only good” social media strategy.

There are others, dependent on your organisation and the role you want to attribute to social media within your context:

• Stir up conversations, engage your peers, your audience: Many organisations use social media for the “social” part. Social media are very well suited for the exchange of ideas, feedback on projects, and general engagement with your audience. In that way, the audience would not only read, but also be part of creating core content.
• Productivity tools: social bookmarking tools like Delicious and Diigo are part of the social media family, though fit in less within our strategy to “connect our target audience to our core content”. I would classify them more as “productivity” tools. Collaborative social media tools like Wiki’s fall under the same category
• News sources: Many of us want to stay abreast of the news, in the specific areas of our work. Social media, through its social networking function, is an excellent tool to get first hand updates and news from our peers and target public. By curating your audience on Twitter or Facebook, you can stay up to date with the latest in your professional field
• Fundraising: Aha, an area we have not touched yet. While related to the generic use of social media as an advocacy tool, we could also use specific tools to actually fund-raise. A nonprofit I work with raised US$1 million, in 24 hours for the tsunami in Japan.
• Social reporting: We highlighted several times on this blog how social media can be used to report from events, conferences and meetings, as a way to engage the onsite and offsite audience, as a way to keep track of the event’s content and as an advocacy tool
• Odd ends: As you can imagine, any crowdsourced mass media tool can have all kinds of applications. I have used it to recruit people, to ask for help, to find real-time solutions to software bugs, as user support, to connect to people where I travel to, etc… You name it, somewhere you can find an application for it in social media…

About “social media reach” and “social media impact”

We have not touched upon figures and statistics in this tutorial. A crucial but also dangerous area… It is soooo easy to get stuck on “social media reach”, on figures showing statistics of your social media traffic.

A graph showing your Twitter followers going up, proving how many thousand of people access your Flickr pictures, the amount of views on YouTube videos and the number of “likes” on your Facebook links. Oooh and those Google Analytics figures for your blog. Njam Njam! Goody!

I love it. Everybody loves those figures. These are black and white. Objective. Nobody can dispute them.

But they don’t mean much actually…

Again, make sure those are figures for your target audience. Point one.
Point two: your social media content is not our target. It is not your goal. It is a means. Your goal is to bring your target audience to your core content: your scientific research, your reports, your impact measurements, etc…

So measure how much of your target audience reaches your target content. Measure that funnel, that flow of people attracted by the sandwich men’s flyers to your store window to your core content.

Measure how much of the core content is read, the progress of the access to it, how long people spend reading it, how much your core content is spreading, republished and re-digested on other websites and blogs.

THAT is what I call social media impact.

This post is part of our tutorial How to define a social media strategy.
Looking for more inspiration? This list of social media strategies and policies will help you.

This tutorial is based on my work with the Consortium of international agricultural research centers, who kindly allowed me to share our work on this blog.

Picture courtesy Social Media Today

In this Social Media Strategy tutorial, we learned to put the strategy into the context of the organisation and identified the role of social media in “connecting our target audience to our core content”.

We identified three critical parts in our social media strategy: identifying our target audience and our core content, and how social media can be used to connect them both: as the window display of our store, and as the sandwich men handing out flyers.

Let’s look at those functions in detail:

The first function of social media: The window display of our candy store

I have my candy. I also know my customers, my target group… Now how to get customers into my candy store?

The first thing I would do, is to make a nice window display. Our store window should present all candy in an attractive way. We’ll show all the different kinds and flavours we have. It should catch the eye of anyone walking by.

Here lays the first role role of social media: blogs, videos (YouTube, Vimeo, BlipTV), pictures (Flickr, Picasa), podcasts (Podomatic), presentation (Slideshare),… I call it “meta content”. It is “easy to access, easy to digest” content which leads “customers” to your core content.

Each of the “meta content” tools should be used as our store window: they should present our core content in an attractive, enjoyable, provocative, teasing way. The content of these social media tools should tell a story, give a summary of our core content. It should stir enough interest for people to dig further, and read our actual target content.
This means this tier of social media tools should also be like a “digest” of our core content, easy to read with plentiful of links to our core content, so people can access that core content easily.

It is pretty obvious on how we can use blogs as a “window display”: for each of the core content we have, we write a blogpost with a story around that core content. Something which is enjoyable to ready, pretty short and attractive. Within the blog posts, we put the links to our core content, so if people like to know more, they can dig deeper, and check out our “candy”. Check out how we did this in the Research with Impact series, how it is done in this blogpost, leading into the research report proving there is sufficient water to sustain the population growth. See how CIAT is using their newsblog to lead into their core content.

Few organisations, however, use videos, pictures, podcasts and presentation tools that way. Most just publish these “as is”, without offering a way to dig deeper. A waste of effort, if you ask me. What good is it if 100,000 people visit your Flickr gallery if there are no links to your core content? Just as for blog posts, video and picture galleries, podcasts and Slideshare presentations can not be “the end terminal” of a train track. They are not the goal but a means: They are not core content, but meta content leading people towards our core content.

Let me give an example how to use Flickr pictures in a better way:
- for each picture, put an appropriate title. “Kenyan farmer uses drip irrigation to save water” is more significant and search-friendly than “DSC0433.jpg” as a title, no?
- Use significant descriptions and put links to your core content within the descriptions. Often Flickr picture descriptions are left blank, or just contain a copy of the title, or even less. Why not spend a bit of time to write a short description, linking back to your website? Or, in our context of working with agricultural research centers, why not put links to the scientific research reports related to the Flickr picture?

I have to say, it is encouraging to see how many CGIAR centers and research programs are already pretty far in using Flickr galleries as “meta content”. Check out this gallery from CCAFS, or CIAT.. Nicely curated, no? Check also how CIFOR is putting in links to their websites in the pictures’ descriptions.

The same also goes for your YouTube videos, Slideshare presentations, etc… Why do I see so many cryptic titles and descriptions? Why do I lack a link back to the projects, or research reports related to these presentations? This is your store front, dear people, so use it as such. Don’t have people see your store front, get all excited, but keep the candy shop’s door shut! Invite them in…!

The second function of social media: Our sandwich men handing out leaflets

Now we have our store shelves in order (our target content is well organised and accessible on our webpage), our store window is attractive (we write blogposts and publish videos and pictures about our core content), and we are ready for business!

Well, not quite yet… We might have the nicest window display and the best candy, but unless if people know where to find us, we won’t get any customers.

This is the second function of social media, where microblogging and social networking tools have a crucial role: We will use these to reach out directly to our target audience, and hand out flyers saying “Big sale, 50% off on all candy (put the addres here)” or “Sugarless and still yummy? Our candy has both! (fill address here)”…

Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and other microblogging or social networking tools are like our sandwich men, mingling with our target audience. Each tool has its own social network, which we will use to make short attractive announcement (our flyers), with links to our store front content (the blogs, but also videos, podcasts, pictures…).

For each piece of meta-content we write or publish, we can tweet or publish an update on Facebook. Each then links to a blogpost, a Flickr gallery, a presentation, podcast, or video. A question of grabbing people’s attention in a flash of a second.

Social media: it is all about seduction

“Selling” is all about “slow seduction”. It goes step by step. That is why I am adamant NOT to use Facebook and Twitter, to link to our core content directly for instance. That is too big a step: The attention span to read a Tweet of Facebook post is counted in terms of “seconds”. You can not take people who –in a second- found your tweet intriguing and clicked on the link, only to throw a 200 page scientific report at them!

Nope. You get their attention in a second. A one liner-Tweet. This links to a nice blogpost, which is easy to read, pleasant to look at, and in the attention span of a few minutes stirs up enough curiosity for people to click on the links in the post, which, now, links to your core content.

Our social media strategy in a nutshell

So there you have it, your social media strategy: We use social media as an intermediate step to connect our target audience to our core content, in three steps:

1. Sandwich men handing out flyers (Twitter, Facebook, Google+ etc..) in areas where our target audience hangs out (our social networks, filled with our target audience)
2. The flyers bring the people to our store front (mainly blogs, but also video, pictures, etc.. with links to our core content)
3. Once they looked at our display window, we encourage our public to come into our shop (our website) and buy our candy (read our key content).

Our social media strategy, as easy as one-two-three (“ABC, easy as one-two-three”, did they not make a song about that? The Jackson Five, no?)

You’re still with me? Then you will want to read all about “Fine-tuning your social media strategy” in our fourth and last part.
This post is part of our tutorial How to define a social media strategy.

This tutorial is based on my work with the Consortium of international agricultural research centers, who kindly allowed me to share our work on this blog.

Picture courtesy The Giallo Antico

In the process of defining a social media strategy in the context of nonprofit agricultural research, we defined the key role of social media in part 1 of this tutorial, as:

• Make research available and accessible, AND
• Document the research processes

In this part, we’ll convert these goals into a social media strategy.

Connecting our target audience to our content

Let’s cut to the chase: Within the context of an international nonprofit research organisation, we defined the core social media strategy as “Using social media to connect our target audience to our core content”.

This gives us three parts to concentrate on:

1. Our target audience: What is our target audience? Who are they? How do we reach and engage them?…;
2. Our core content: What is it? Where is it stored? Why is that core content? What is the value of it?…;
3. Social media as the link: What tools can we use to connect “audience to content”? What is the role of these tools? How to best use them?…

Running a candy shop

Imagine we run a candy store. In order not to have people pick on the example: say that we only have unique non-sugary candy, made out of natural ingredients, produced by ethnic minority groups, wrapped in recyclable paper.

We want:

1. to reach people interested in buying candy (our target audience);
2. them to know about our store (a role of social media);
3. the potential clients to come over and check out our store’s window display (another role for social media);
4. the potential clients to enter the shop (our website and repositories);
5. the potential clients to buy our candy (read our core content).

Step 1: Who is interested in our candy? Defining our target audience.

In a previous post, we explained a practical way how to identify a target audience. That’s the first step in any social media strategy.

This exercise is not a small feat: Go from a high level (identify your target groups), to the nitty gritty details (identify the actual individual people or organisations), to the mechanics (identify your audience’s social media channels and connect to them via those channels).

It is also a process which never ends: you should continuously update and expand this list. But, it is worth while, it is the core of your online presence: the people you want to reach and impact.

In this example, we defined the target audience for CCAFS, the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security, as:

• policy makers (working on climate change issues)
• researchers (working on climate change issues related to food security and agriculture)
• internal partners (partners within the CGIAR system, and staff implementing the CCAFS program)
• selected universities (partnering with them on projects)
• donors (both existing and possible future ones)
• public media (in general, not only those working on climate change)

In another example, as part of the social media work we did for IFWF3, The Third International Forum on Water and Food, our target audience was defined as:

• Donors
• Researchers, scientists
• Partners
• Development professionals
• Media
• Universities and youth
• The general public

In the latter example, you can also see how those target groups were fleshed out into individual organisations, and how we started listing their social media outlets.

Step 2: What candy do we sell? Defining our core content

Let’s continue within our example: defining a social media strategy for nonprofit agricultural research centers:

Given we have all our research on our website or online-repository, often it is buried amongst loads of other information. No wonder that for many organisations, it is a difficult and painful process to pinpoint their most valuable online information. Though painful, it is the first step of our social media strategy: “identify the core content”.

Mechanically, it is not that difficult: Our core content inventory can be as simple as a mere list of links to scientific publications, research reports, agricultural data, different research processes, progress reports,… As long as we have it on an online repository, we’re ok: be it a website, a slide-share presentation, Google Books,…

Check out a simple example of what content we defined as “core” for the IFWF3.

Oh, and remember what we said in part 1 of this tutorial: the research results are not the only important content for a research organisation. It is just as important to document the process one followed, the project challenges,….

Once we have this list, ladies and gentlemen, we have your candy. Now we are ready to sell!

Step 3: The Art of Selling Candy: the role of social media

Ready to sell candy? Are we? Before we start, though, let’s make sure our store is in order: we put the candy reachable, viewable in nice racks, in other words: we’ll make sure our website containing the core content is well structured, user friendly, fast, etc…

Now, we have the candy, and we know who is interested in your candy. But how do we connect those two? Our customers need to know where our store is located, what candy we sell. The candy has to presented in an appealing way.

This is where social media plays a crucial role: “Connecting our customers to our candy”.

For our candy store, I would:

1. Have sandwich men hand out flyers within areas where our target audience usually hangs out, teasing people to come to our store: “The best candy in town”, “Sugar free, and still delicious”,..
2. Make a nice store window display: once the flyers teased people’s curiosity, and walk to our shop, I want them to be able to see a selection of what we sell, displayed in a way which stirs up their interest even further, up to the point where they enter our shop.

Translating this into social media tools:

1. Our sandwich men handing out flyers, grabbing people’s attention in a second, will be the role of Twitter, Facebook, Google+,..: teasers, one liners which take no longer than a few seconds to assimilate. Each of them has a link to…
2. Our store front, our window display: blogs, videos, Flickr pictures, podcasts, etc..: this social media content takes more than a second to assimilate, but just like a nice window display, it teases into “checking it out some more”: each of those social media pieces will have a link leading to core content, our candy in our store.

More about the details on the role of social media, window displays, sandwich men and flyers in part 3 of this tutorial.
This post is part of our tutorial How to define a social media strategy.

This tutorial is based on my work with the Consortium of international agricultural research centers, who kindly allowed me to share our work on this blog.

Defining a social media strategy for an agricultural research center

Every nonprofit organisation has its own goals. You might be fundraising for a shelter in your city, or advocating for companies to ban the use of Congo blood minerals in their products. Your social media strategy will logically depend on your “raison d’être”, on your organisation’s goals.

This tutorial shows how we built up a social media strategy for some of the CGIAR agricultural research research centers. While they were the inspiration for this tutorial, the approach and process can be applied for many other nonprofit organisations.

Social media in the context of the CGIAR

At the CGIAR, our goal is: “To reduce poverty and hunger, improve human health and nutrition, and enhance ecosystem resilience through high-quality international agricultural research, partnership and leadership. “

The key word in there is: “Research”. We do agricultural research. But what good is agricultural research if it is not “available” and “accessible”?

CGIAR’s AAA strategy strives at making research Available, Accessible and Applicable. It highlights that “research for the sake of research ain’t worth the value of the paper it is written on”. CGIAR’s research, funded by public sources, needs to be readily available and accessible by the very same public, and not locked up in copyrighted scientific journals or in file cabinets. Sure, as scientists, they need to publish our articles in peer reviewed journals, but it can’t stop there in order to convert “research” into “impact”!

Social media plays a critical role in this.

Social media makes research “available” and “accessible”

In the past years, the CGIAR has made great progress in getting the research material “out”. Research data and publications are readily available on most CGIAR’s research centres websites and public repositories. Check the efforts of two of the CGIAR centres: the CIAT publications, or the ILRI publications on Google Books for instance.

But… a website or a web repository can be just as difficult to access as a massive filing cabinet in an obscure room… Unless if you know the information is there, why would you look for it on a website? How do people know the information is there?

Sure, search engine optimization (SEO) and other mechanical tools can optimize the “find-ability” or “access-ability” of our data, but, ladies and gentlemen, social media has an even more crucial role in this: Social media can help in getting the research “out there”.

With several CGIAR research centres, we made these the corner stones of our social media strategy:

• Making research available and accessible, AND
• Documenting the research processes

With those overall social media goals in mind, we are ready to move into the details: On to the “candy store”

Continue to part 2: Social media strategies- about candy shops
This post is part of our tutorial How to define a social media strategy.

This tutorial is based on my work with the Consortium of international agricultural research centers, who kindly allowed me to share our work on this blog.

Picture courtesy Neil Palmer (CIAT)

Long gone are the times where nonprofit organisations saw social media tools as a “nice add-on”. Time and again, social media has proven its potential in fundraising, advocacy, campaigning, live event reporting, knowledge sharing,..

Now comes the time where organisations’ media people are actively seeking to merge the “social” media with their more “traditional” media outreach.

Now, we have more social media tools on offer, than ever before. Which tools are the best suited for your cause? Which give the best return on investment? How do you use these tools best?

Now, more than ever, our management asks questions on our social media efforts. “What is its return?”, “What does it cost us”, “What is the measurable impact?”.

While I touched on the subject before, it is high time to tackle a core challenge for many organisations: “How to define a social media strategy”, and “How to integrate it into an organisation’s overall online strategy”.

Tutorial: How to define a social media strategy

In the past year, I have been fortunate to work with several international agricultural research centres, part of the CGIAR Consortium. With several centres, we’re engaging in a more strategic approach to social media. My work with the CGIAR was the inspiration for this tutorial, in which I will build up a social media strategy from the beginning until the end. Though this strategy is specifically applicable to the CGIAR, the process used, can be applied for many other nonprofit organisations.

The tutorial:

• Part 1: Social media strategies: put it in context
• Part 2: Social media strategies: about candy shops
• Part 3: Social media: about candy shop displays and sandwich men
• Part 4: Fine tuning social media strategies

This tutorial is based on my work with the Consortium of international agricultural research centers, who kindly allowed me to share our work on this blog.

I have blogged before how I don’t like Google’s growing monopoly on the web, and how they increasingly block non-Chrome browsers when you use their own web applications.

It looks like Google is now moving into more unsound web practices, using their web crawling power and abilities to unfair, unethical and illegal purposes.

Google pays bloggers for Chrome links

Earlier this month, news broke that Google paid bloggers to write about Chrome, their own browser. Embedding paid advertisements, and, in some cases, hiding it as genuine blog content, has always been something I found highly unethical.
OK, in some cases during Google’s campaign, the paid blogs were clearly marked as such, but the post embedded links to Chrome’s download site. “Paid” links is something Google themselves have always battled against, saying it cheats search engines. Now they are doing it themselves, to market their own products.

Verdict: unethical and unfair competition.

Google crawls for data for their own profit

Today, I read this interesting and in-depth story where Google crawled data from Mocality, a small Kenyan company publishing an online Kenya business directory.

In their article, the Mocality folks detail how Google crawls their business directory, with the sole purpose to contact the listed companies, convincing them to convert to a Google business directory. The article features recording of telephone calls from Google employees to the listed companies, which also reveals other unclear and illegal business practices.
Even worse, after the story broke out, Google willingly switched the crawler’s IP address, and continued their malpractice in crawling Mocality’s data. This shows a lack of ignorance, and clear mal-intent.

Verdict: unethical, unfair competition, commercial spying.

My own thing with Google

Web crawlers, scanning your web content, are to obey rules web admins set in “robots.txt”. This file defines what crawlers can scan, what they should not, and at what rate they can scan.
I always had a problem that for the Google crawler, some settings, like the Google’s crawler rate, can only be set in the Google Web Master tools, ignoring the settings in “robots.txt”. Even worse, every three months, Google resets their crawler rates. If you want to spare your server from excessive Google crawling, you have to manually reset the crawler rates for each of your site, again. Every three months.

Today, I discovered that Google’s crawlers also ignore other, more basic rules:

On “Humanitarian News“, one of my sites, the “robots.txt” explicitly disallows crawlers to access the search facility:

Disallow: /search/
Disallow: /opensearch/

The reason is that with the rate Google crawls, and the amount of search combinations possible, my server performance goes down each time Google spams my site with excessive crawls. Even worse, this “opensearch” string calls for SOLR search, which invokes a JAVA script offering advanced RSS features for “live” users. Needless to say this sucks up server resources, certainly if you shoot off opensearch requests at a rate Google’s crawler does. This is the reason why I block crawlers from accessing the search, in the first place.

This morning, while verifying my log, I found a string of searches which caught my attention:

search 13 Jan 2012 – 12:02 somalia (Search). Anonymous results
search 13 Jan 2012 – 12:02 somalia (Search). Anonymous results
search 13 Jan 2012 – 12:02 somalia (Search). Anonymous results
search 13 Jan 2012 – 12:02 somalia (Search). Anonymous results
search 13 Jan 2012 – 12:02 somalia (Search). Anonymous results
etc etc etc..

Looking into it further, the search strings were of the format:

http://humanitariannews.org/search/apachesolr_search/somalia?page=1442

And who generated those searches? They all come from IP 66.249.72.105
Which is (source)…:

OrgName: Google Inc.
OrgId: GOGL
Address: 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
City: Mountain View
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94043
Country: US

So…

1. My robots.txt clearly blocks /search access.
2. Google ignores that rule, and as such ignores a basic rule to protect certain web content from crawling.
3. Going over my log, I find repetitive Google crawlers of the search
4. On top of that, there is not much relevant data to be found in the search which can not be found in a normal crawl of my site. And certainly not on (as in the example) on “page 1,442″ of a search (see above example).

The problem is that other than blocking their crawler’s IP address, you can’t do much about it. And if you block their crawler’s IP address, as a web manager, you can just as well throw yourself under a train: The Google search results for your site, would disappear. – do I smell a monopoly here?-

Verdict: monopoly, unethical business practice, bad example for anyone else on the web.

Is it time for an #OccupyGoogle ? I think it is.
PS: If anyone has bright ideas how to tweak the robots.txt to disallow crawler access, I’d like to hear about it.
Angry face picture courtesy SearchEnginePeople

Don’t you hate it when organisations are using social media merely as a “broadcast medium”? You know the types…, those who only tweet links to their own websites, only publish their own publications on Facebook,… Those who never reply when you send them a message on Twitter, and hardly monitor their social media channels.

No surprise none of these organisations are very successful in the social media scene.

Social media is first and foremost about being “social”: interacting with your audience, conversing with your peers. It is also – and certainly in the nonprofit sector – about helping others, with their causes.

Nonprofits regularly use social media to support campaigns, events, conferences,… But for each event, social media can only be as successful as the size of crowd you reach. And to reach a crowd, you need a social media “followership”, you need a “social media momentum”. This take time, and your crowd can never be large enough.

I have been frustrated over the past year, how organisations have to start from scratch for each event, rallying “social media activists” to help bring out their campaign’s message. A bit like I did for the Addis Sharefair, the CGIAR Horn of Africa event and the Water and Food forum. That takes time and efforts which are better allocated to other, more useful tasks.

After the Rome Sharefair last September, a couple of us, social media agitators, decided to make a change: we started a Google discussion forum (a “Google Group”), gathering social media coordinators from nonprofit organisations, social media activists and fanatics alike.

In short, our group “Social Media for NonProfit” or “SM4NP”, gathers people with “their fingers on larger social media accounts”. We assemble social media enthusiasts who can help each other in spreading news, events, appeals, queries,. for nonprofit causes. Assisting each other, we mutually benefit from plugging into each other’s networks.

In the past, we have helped in spreading single messages like

“We have a webcast on Monday on (subject) at (time), please spread the message”

or

“Check this announcement. Looking for a reblog in Spanish and Chinese (link)”

up to

“Organising onsite/offsite social reporting volunteers around #COP17 – If interested email and we’ll register you on the discussion forum”

We aim to gather people with a larger social media networks, often via the organisations they work for, people running popular 
blogs, etc.. but we just as well welcome newbies, and will be more than helpful in getting them on the right social media path. (Amen!)

If you are interested in joining our group:

• apply for a membership (yes, you will need a Google account), or
• send me an email  peter (at) blogtips (dot) org, or
• even easier, just leave your email address in a comment on this post.

Hope you help us putting the word “social” back into “Social Media” !

“AddThis” is one of the main social media sharing sites. Just like “ShareThis“, which I covered before on this blog, they provide browser plugins and social bookmarking icons for 11 million websites. In short, they facilitate ways to “pass on” links via different (social) media.

Knowing AddThis reached over 1 billion users, they can provide a representative view of the social media and web market. In this 2011 overview, some things really stand out:

• Facebook is the most popular social media tool used for sharing links (just over 50% of the market);
• … followed by Twitter (14%), whose “sharing”-market grows by over 500%.
• Tumblr and StumbleUpon still have a tremendous growth.
• Sharing via Google+, the new social media kid on the block in 2011, has already levelled. Bad news for Google who heavily promoted it. But was to be expected, as it seems also the Google+ users is already levelling.
• Digg and MySpace are on their way down (no surprise here).
• Sharing via a browser pluging (“Address Bar” sharing) grows by over 1,600%.
• Internet Explorer is on its way down, Firefox levels and Chrome is on its way up. Chrome has been heavily promoted in Google’s Internet dictatorship.
• The use of mobile devices for sharing is on its way up. Once again, no surprise, though many mobile browsers could still do with good sharing plugins, if you ask me.

Happy 2012 sharing!

Oh, PS: If you are still doubting to put bookmark sharing buttons on your blog, check out my experience.

A few weeks ago, I complained that the new Google’s Blogger dashboard no longer supported Safari. Instead Google encouraged people to switch to Chrome, Google’s own browser.

I predicted that it would not stop there, knowing Google’s tendency to monopolize the web world.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, we are moving yet one step closer to Google’s web dominance: now Firefox users get an error message popping up when using Google Docs, urging users to switch to… Google Chrome once more.

What’s the next step? Mmm Google+ will follow soon. And Google Maps. And the biggie would of course be if Google web search would only be possible with Chrome.

Was there not a US anti-trust law invented once to stand against monopolies?

Maybe it is time to #OccupyGoogle to shake things up a bit.

5 buttons, 10 lines of code = 700 additional visitors/week

On many of my blogs, I have the social bookmarking buttons beneath each blogpost. They allow visitors to easily publish a link to the post they are reading, onto Facebook, Twitter, and a variety of other social media sites.

As a user, I don’t use those buttons often, and I always wondered if other people actually used them. On some of my sites, I never implemented them.

I was wrong. Little did I know how much these buttons were used…

On one of my big news aggregators, I implemented ShareThis social buttons two weeks ago. It only takes two steps:

1. Register (for free) on ShareThis and get a publisher’s ID;
2. Cut and past the code in your blog template.

ShareThis keeps pretty neat traffic statistics, and this is what I got, after the first week:

• Facebook:
• 40 posts were shared
• 59 people clicked on these Facebook links
• those 59 visitors read 66 pages.
• Twitter:
• 34 posts were shared
• 597 people clicked on the Twitter links ( ! )
• those 597 visitors read 683 pages ( ! )
• And there were heaps of shares via other media: email, LinkedIn, Brainify, Tumblr, etc..

My surprise was two-fold: I had no idea social bookmarking icons were used that much, AND I had no idea this much traffic would be generated through it: over 700 visitors per week…

Quite a return for a simple cut and paste of 10 lines of code…

PS: one more surprise is how much more traffic Twitter links generated… It is clear Twitter is still the champion to spread links and to generate traffic to your site.