Blogging Basics for Fund Raising & Non-Profits

Tonight I am participating in a social media roundtables networking event being hosted by the Association of Fundraising Professionals' Young Professionals here in Saint Louis. I am hosting a table on "Blogging"

Here are some of my favorite blogs about fund raising and non-profit marketing:
Beth Kantor's Blog for Non-Profits 
The Agitator
The Fundraising Coach
GettingAttention.org
Katya's Non-Profit Marketing Blog
Nonprofit Marketing Guide


Here are some of the best non-profit blogs, from my experience:
Feeding America
American Red Cross
The Salvation Army
Holland Bloorview Childrens Rehabilitation Hospital
Operation Blessing
World Vision
Refugees International

I also produced a one-page Blogging Basics guide to hand out at tonight's eveng. It includes:

• Stats on why blogging is an effective medium for businesses and organizations
• Style and Tone best practices
• What to include in a social media policy for your team
• Blogging "Musts"
• How to motivate bloggers
• Great content ideas

You can also take a look at my presentation on Social Media for Non-Profits:

Social Media Strategies for Non-Profit Organizations

View more PowerPoint from Erin Moloney

Join Me for Social Media 101, June 7th at Webster University

I am looking forward to joining my colleagues and some of Saint Louis' social media "best" Chris Reimer (@RizzoTees), Nick Gilham (@NickGilham), Matt Ridings (@techguerilla) and Patrick Powers (@PatrickJPowers) on June 7th when we conduct a Business Boot Camp called Social Media 101 at Webster University.

It's only 5 hours and less than a few hundred dollars, and attendees will see us present on what has worked for companies in social media, both locally and nationally, small and large, and they will get to pick our brains and network with us to stay on top of this rapidly changing space. More Info / Register Here

This special half-day seminar is designed for businesses (large and small), entrepreneurs and nonprofits completely new to social media, as well as those who don’t feel they are up-to-date with the latest online has to offer.

Social Media 101:  Business Boot Camp is sponsored by Webster University’s Office of Corporate Partnerships which engages corporate partners in concert with Webster’s five colleges/schools, faculty, staff, students and extended campuses by connecting business and industry partners to these Webster constituencies. 

This is the first time I've seen a true "bootcamp" around social media here in Saint Louis, and Webster University has really lined up a great team of presenters for this workshop.

More Info / Register Here

Read More about My Presentation

Let's Talk About Social Media Marketing in Saint Louis

Yesterday, I was invited to speak about social media marketing on 550 KTRS as part of the All About Business radio show. I enjoyed the segment, in which I was asked to comment on what it means to be a social media expert and explain the Social Media Club of Saint Louis. I think it went pretty well, but I will warn you that I have a case of laryngitis. ;) Here's the recording of the 11 minute portion of the show in which I was interviewed.

How I Track Twitter Traffic for My Company

Until recently, it had been very difficult, and near impossible, to accurately report on traffic coming from Twitter posts to your website or blog.

Google Analytics has made changes recently that make it easier. According to a recent post in BtoB Magazine, "Rebooting Twitter Analytics":

The issue has to do with the way Twitter referrals were tracked through popular third-party applications such as TweetDeck and HootSuite. When a user clicked on a link embedded in one of these applications, the referral to your website wasn't recorded as a Twitter referral. Instead, Google recognized it as a “direct referral,” thus hiding some of the Twitter-related traffic under the direct referral column on your analytics report. 

“Now, whenever you click on a tweet, Twitter routes the URL through the t.co shortener,” said Tom Critchlow, VP-operations for Distilled NYC, an SEO and online marketing company. “So it shows up in analytics as a Twitter referral.” 

However, it's not that simple.

Here's what I've discovered. If we follow the advice of this article, then in our Google Analytics, we should be able to simply go to the "Social" reporting category in the left nav and click on "Sources" to see how much traffic we get from Twitter. I did this, and for the time period I am looking at, this report shows me that my company's blogs got 588 visits from Twitter in that time period.

Alternatively, you can try using "Advanced Segments" in Google Analytics to create a segment of your traffic (for reporting) that only shows traffic from Twitter. I set this up using the "Include: Source" filter, and then started typing "twi..." and it auto-suggests three different referring URLs that are part of Twitter: mobile.twitter.com; twitter.com and twitter. See screen shot:

So, that suggests to me that it would be in my best interest to include all three of these as part of this segment I am setting up. So I do just that, and I am sure to include "t.co" as well, per Critchlow's comment in the quote above.

My advanced segment setting ends up looking like this:

Save the segment as "Twitter Referred Visits" or your title of choice. Then, run a standard report on number of visitors in the same time frame as I ran earlier for Google's "Social" report that had returned a figure of 588 visits.

I get a total of 1,651 visits! That's three times what Google's social report told me was coming from Twitter.

I feel more comfortable relying upon my own advanced filter to show me a more accurate view of just how much traffic is coming to my site from Twitter. Why? Because I set it up myself, and I'm including what I personally know to be URLs that Twitter owns and uses to refer traffic.

The BtoB Magazine article ends with a quote that helps us keep a frame of reference around even attempting to track all inbound referrals accurately to begin with:

“It's a misconception that inbound traffic over the Internet is 100% trackable,” he [Chad Pollitt, director of inbound marketing for Kuno Creative] said. “It's not; it's just more trackable than the older print methods.”

How are you reporting on Twitter referrals to your company's web properties? If you're using Google's social reports or any web analytics tool's built-in social reporting, you may be missing the mark and leaving out a large portion of traffic actually coming from tweets. I recommend building reports on your own so that you have more control. Besides, I know our social media strategy involves a heavy Twitter component, so I want to make sure I'm giving that time investment in Twitter the most accurate data I can find to justify that it's working. 

I'd be curious to know if anyone else is seeing this kind of discrepancy and if you've set up your analytics in any different way to report on Twitter traffic.

When Amazing Design is Not Enough

Bet you didn't think it was possible! Being a great designer often isn't enough, and the surge of functional mobile applications and social networks is making this reality all the more apparent.

I've spoken with plenty of marketing and web technology folks who place a high premium on the design of their application, website, or product's user interface. Good design is certainly important and can set your site or app apart. However, as I came across a great article in TechCrunch today, I was reminded once again just how much usability and function can take precedence over aesthetics. It provided several examples of apps killing their competition on usefulness and function even when the styling was inferior.

I wrote about it on Perficient's Spark blog, a blog for all things innovative and experience design related. Check out my post here:

When Amazing Design is Not Enough

Copyright and IP Rules to Follow in Social Media

Some rights reserved. - Horia Varlan

I just finished reading this great article by Stephen Easley, posted today on SmartBlog on Social Media: "Why IP law still matters in a social media age"

Easley outlines three key learnings from South by Southwest Interactive, one of the largest interactive marketing & technology conferences in the U.S. - which ended this past week. These are his three key tips to follow as it pertains to copyright law applied to social media:

1. Photos: "Be careful when using any picture, even one widely circulated through Twitter or Facebook.  If you use a photo, the best practice is to obtain express permission to use it, and at the very least do not use photos without proper attribution and links at a minimum."
2. Copy: "Don’t just scrape content — instead transform content with your own unique creativity, and thereby avoid unfair competition or copyright violation claims."
3. Criticism and Impersonation: "When dealing with criticism or parody of individuals, be careful not to “credibly impersonate” — so using the word “fake” offers a good deal of protection. When dealing with criticism or parody of a corporation, learn their trademarked logos and marks and try to avoid using them or at least transforming them so that you can argue that there is no consumer confusion, an element necessary under trademark law."

...and the full article provides some background on why Easley suggests you follow these tips. Read the Full Post Here. 

Helping Saint Louis Lead in Business Technology

AdSaint - a local Saint Louis ad industry site - recently interviewed my boss, Bill Davis, Director of Marketing at Perficient. This link includes the audio interview. 

I think he does a great job describing what our company does. He also talks about raising Perficient's visibility as a company based in Saint Louis with our airport ads, and social media (which I do) as a key strategy.  

3 Types of Metrics that Demonstrate Social Media Marketing Success

Recently I have been thinking a lot about how we can demonstrate positive business impact from social media or content marketing initiatives. I report on social media marketing metrics weekly to my direct manager, and I often think about them in three major groups:

1. Fans, Followers and Subscribers: People who have said they want to follow our brand. This gives you a sense of  Awareness or Brand Visibility as well as how it is impacting the brand's online reputation in its space.
2. Clicks, Traffic: People who have visited your blog or site as a result of finding you online via social channels. 
3. Leads/Sales: Actual interest in doing business with your company. I value leads coming from general inquiry forms higher than leads coming to us via incentive offers such as a white paper or webinar. 

Technically you could add a fourth category to this and actually quantify sales that started as a social media based lead. That requires adequate tracking in your CRM or analytics system, and is much easier for something like an e-commerce site selling products than it would be for a B-to-B firm. 

I also thoroughly enjoyed a recently published article by Jon Miller of Marketo called "5 CEO-Worthy Metrics for Demonstrating Inbound Marketing Success." In his post, Miller outlines the following metric types and gives detail to them:

1. Month over month growth in organic website traffic, leads, and opportunities. 
2. Social engagement, not just reach. 
3. Lead generation by content, channel, and initiative. 
4. Percent of leads with an inbound original source.
5. Forecasted conversion through the funnel.

Very similar to my line of thinking but he's talking more generally about inbound marketing and not just social media. You can read his full post here. 

IBM Study Unveils Top Inhibitors to Adopting Social

Sandy Carter (@sandy_carter), VP Social Business Evangelism at IBM, recently did a video interview in which she talked about the reasons why companies are hesitant to really get engaged with social media and use either internally within a hosted community or allow their employees to engage online - to post work-related communications via social networks.

IBM conducted a study of over 2,000 companies and asked them about the top inhibitors to adopting social media. Here are the top response areas. I wasn't surprised at any of these, but I'm glad that IBM's study groups the reasons into buckets so that we, as social media marketers, can help tackle the fears that companies face as we approach social media strategies unique to each company's needs.

1. Security - Someone might break into my private community and something bad will happen
2. Adoption - How will people use it? Will they come? Will they like it?
3. Culture - Is our company culture ready to listen to employees or clients? Are we ready to respond and react in this way?
4. Compliance - Regulated industries such as finance are hesitant to let anyone tweet/post about investments.

Sandy's high-level understanding of social media for business is impressive, and she's extremely articulate about it. I had the opportunity to have dinner with her at an IBM conference earlier this year and enjoyed meeting her and connecting with her.

Huge change coming to the Web: New gTLDs and what it means

I have heard about the coming change to website domain names but didn't quite understand it clearly until I read this article. AdAge titled the article "Are You Ready For One of the Biggest Changes on the Internet in a Decade?" At first, I thought that sounded a bit over-sensationalized, and perhaps it is, but if your ead through the finer points here (and I've only highlighted the key points) I think you'll see why it will change things quite a bit.

Amplify’d from adage.com

First, the basics. A "generic top-level domain" is the part of the domain name to the right of the dot, e.g. in "http://www.ICANN.org" - the "org" is the top-level domain (TLD). There are 22 generic TLDs (gTLDs) such as .COM, .ORG and .NET, and around 250 country-code TLDs (ccTLDs) that are specific to certain countries, like .JP for Japan and .MX for Mexico.

With ICANNs New gTLD Program to commence January 2012, the doors will be thrown wide open and virtually any word can become a gTLD if the company or organization meets certain criteria:

They can pony up the hefty application fee ($185,000) They can prove they can afford to run a gTLD year after year They can justify why they should own a particular word as a gTLD – e.g. a travel company is unlikely to be successful at justifying buying ".Apple" as a gTLD but they can justify buying ".adventure"

If a company can meet these criteria - then congratulations – they've just become a registry. Amazon can buy ".books" and JetBlue can buy ".fly". And if two companies want the same word and can't reach an agreement on their own, an auction commences with the word going to the highest bidder.

From a consumer's perspective: Just when we thought it was kinda safe to go into Internet waters because we had a basic understanding of what a safe URL should look like … now anything's possible. With hundreds of new gTLDs likely to be introduced starting next year, consumer confusion is virtually guaranteed. There's little doubt fraudsters intend to exploit this new window of vulnerability.

Now you can see why there is a lot at stake. Yet, when I spoke to my IT and marketing peers at the largest companies, there was a near universal lack of information on this topic! Read more at adage.com

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/a1f6ip