You’ve Twittered, Facebooked and blogged about your organization’s story but aren’t receiving the response you desire.

Tim Frick, author of “Return on Engagement” and social media trainer at the Workshop’s upcoming fall session, says many nonprofits have two misconceptions about social media and why they don’t produce the desired audience engagement.

“There’s the misconception that it’s free,” says Frick. “It doesn’t cost any money to get a Twitter account, Facebook account, or a LinkedIn account, but it does take time to create and build the content for those things and present that content in a way that is actually going to engage people.”

Frick says most people tend to dive right into social media tools without thinking how they will use them and how they will engage their audience. According to Frick, many nonprofit communicators take their “old one-way marketing approach,” apply it to their social media strategy and are confused when there’s no response from their audience.

“A lot of times that’s because they’re not trying to engage their users. They’re sending out one-way marketing messages that are all about them and not about what the users might actually want to read,” says Frick.

In September, Frick will cover these common misconceptions and more at the Community Media Workshop training Using Social Media To Build Awareness. This three-hour training is designed to show nonprofits how to optimize social media best practices. Participants explore how to create content strategies, which aligns their digital communications with their website; how to create social media profiles and how to engage their audiences.  Using tactics outlined in his book, Frick shows communicators how to shift their offline communications to an online presence and how to adjust their strategy to work with the organization’s available resources.

Frick says many communicators during his training have their ah-ha moment when they see multiple ways to share their message across digital platforms and track that message’s impact.

No matter what size your organization is, increase your impact with this training and start having the conversations that engage your audience. To register for “Using Social Media to Build Awareness” call 312-369-6400 or click here.

To read more about Tim Frick’s work with nonprofits and digital strategies, click here. Tim Frick is the CEO of Mightybytes, is a full-service creative firm that executes design-drive communication solutions for their clientele. Frick is also the author of Design Techniques for Digital Marketing. Follow him on Twitter at @Mightybytes, on Facebook at Mightybytes and learn more on his website at www.mightbytes.com.

Diane Rarick, College of Lake County Takes Social Media to Next Level from Community Media Workshop on Vimeo.

Diane Rarick doesn’t much care about GeekyGuy43 — who followed her when she tweeted about Star Wars, then dropped her a month later. She’s more excited about the recent doubling of Facebook followers to the account she manages for the College of Lake County–many of them part of a key demographic her, 18- to 24-year-olds.

Nerds may not be a target audience for Diane, but they are key to Adam Thurman, who led the workshop she and other nonprofit communicators took earlier today. Court Theater, a branch of the University of Chicago, considers one of their core online audiences to be (and he means this obviously in the best sense possible) nerds.

These ideas about audience are what Taking Social Media to the Next Level — the title of Adam’s session — was all about. In addition to turning in stellar results via online engagement at Court, he has his own firm (and blog) Mission Paradox. The key theme of the session:  how to use social media as a tool to lead to:

• more transactions, not just clicks and
• more engagement, not just friends on Facebook

Read the rest of this entry »

In the end, if there had been more than the 18 or so people who turned out to hear Steve Heye of the Metro Chicago YMCA speak about his chapter of the new book Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission (produced by the Nonprofit Technology Network, published by Jossey-Bass) we probably might have had less good of a time, because Steve might have presented his prepared powerpoint, from the podium, in the theater, instead of opening in late-night pitchman style while we sat on the couches in the adjacent open space (see video).

The Secret to Managing Tech for Nonprofits… May Be To Buy This Book from Community Media Workshop on Vimeo.

(Apologies for the shaky wrist with the camera–it’s a first date with the flip camera for me).

After the pitchman-style intro, Steve delivered a thoughtful presentation outlining some of the issues the book takes up.

Working at a small organization, I tend not to think about or understand as much of the issues that the “IT department” has to deal with. It was kind of refreshing to talk about technology and not discuss social media–the focus was more on aligning IT with overall organizational operations and strategy (the subject of Steve’s chapter in the new work). Read the rest of this entry »

Special skills to talk on the phone? Are you crazy?

As Community Media Workshop has dipped a toe and then a foot and then a bit more in the webinar water, it seems like a good moment to reflect on what we’ve learned so far about the potential and the problems of connecting with nothing but a phone and a computer

We’ve learned that sometimes you get what you pay for (but free is good) and that yes, it does pay to have a bit of learning–ideally beyond just the basic learning that comes from the school of experience. Read the rest of this entry »

Just picking up on the theme of new news, in the “truth is stranger than fiction” category:

Dan Pacheco is no slouch in the world of citizen journalism: his printcasting.com site promises to help you “start your own local magazine in minutes” (intrigued? I am) and has grant support from the Knight Foundation. But as he posted June 15, “Citizen Media Goes Fisher Price” (also at PBS MediaShift Idea Lab, where I first read it) his daughter scooped him and the rest of the news media with a tornado picture she snapped with a Fisher-Price camera in the suburbs of Denver earlier this week.

In a nutshell, there’d been some freaky weather in the Denver area for several days, so Dan was on the lookout already for tornados; his daughter walked into the home office to tell him she’d spotted a weird cloud, he went to grab his camera, tweeted it , and started taking pictures. The 6-year-old naturally grabbed her camera as well (who knew fisher price made a $64 digital camera?) And they all ended up on the local TV news. Anyway, read it there, at his blog, as Dan tells the story great, with video and pictures.

His takeaway is that “a confluence of inexpensive, accessible consumer technology, and microblogging sites like Twitter and Facebook, has lowered the barriers of entry so far to make me think we’re witnessing the birth of a completely new — and arguably better — breaking news system that involves everyone.”

Yes! but also, that new system is still going to incorporate some kind of Big Media that reaches out to wider audiences.(Like, in this story CBS 4, the local TV news guys). That role is still key to a better news ecosystem. Anyway, I get a kick out of imagining a 6-year-old on the weather–or any other–beat.

As struggling local newspapers continue to abandon the printed page, foundations, entrepreneurs and journalists are launching “hyperlocal” and watchdog news Web sites.

Where and who are they? What do they tell us about the new media landscape?

We’ve pinpointed significant news Web sites emerging around the United States and beyond by creating this custom Google Map for the Community Media Workshop.

Chicago is fertile ground for a number of “new news” sites, such as LISC/New Communities, Chi-Town Daily News and EveryBlock, to name just a few.

Click on the map, then zoom in or search it for specific locations to get a closer view of the emerging players in online news.

Have more sites to add? Please tell us in the comments!

–Elsa Wenzel

I cross posted this at the Making Media Connections conference site

Pulling together a list of books for the bookseller’s table at Making Media Connections. Reams of reports on communications and other great resources are fresh and new:

• Simon Perazza drew my attention to this one from Arts Work Fund, for arts groups, here
• last fall’s evaluating communications guide under the auspices of the Communications Network by Edith Asibey here (you will need to scroll down to the 3rd item on the page),
• Ford Foundation’s GrantCraft is producing a report on strategic communications next month, too

But we don’t have much between covers on our field.

Since we are having a book seller at our conference who helpfully asked us–what kind of books would your attendees find useful? we did some brainstorming but I suspect we are missing a few gems. Read the rest of this entry »

The panelists at this afternoon’s town hall panel on the future of local news in Chicago, organized by Ken Davis, were funny, charming, engaging. Sort of like at, uh, a wake.

Maybe I was overly influenced talking to some of the online news folks at the end, like Steve Rhodes of Beechwood Reporter. He and a few others were chagrined at how clueless the panel seemed generally, still, about how to deal with the world online.

For those just joining us: Ken Davis, former Chicago Public Radio guy, realized talking to his peers that, as he said, “People are freaked out” by the shift from traditional to online journalism. He set up a web site, booked the room at the hotel allegro, and voila. Mike Miner, a panelist, wrote about it twice (articles at Ken’s site) and Time Out Chicago advanced the event nicely.

Journalists and anyone who cares about local news are right to be freaked out. The rumors and more than rumors are swirling around the Sun-Times, it’s no secret that they were de-listed from the New York Stock Exchange because the value of the stock fell below the minimum needed to be on the Big Board. The Chicago Tribune is bankrupt. As Ken said to set the stage for the dialogue that went on at the hotel, “One by one online has been annihilating or completely rewriting the script for every industry.” (think, e.g., travel agents).

Read the rest of this entry »

Facebook turned 5 years old a couple of weeks ago, so it has now began kindergarten. I’ve been on it since July 2004, when the Facebook was barely sitting up, a mere toddler with no big hoopla attached to it. I’ve watched it evolve through all these adaptations, to the juggernaut that it is today. Mark Zuckerberg and I are the same age, and its crazy to know that what he started as a class project his Sophomore year at Harvard has turned into a multi-billion dollar empire. This project turned into a tool that has revolutionized the way we communicate, the ease of access to people we would otherwise be complete strangers to, and shrank those 6 degrees of separation to about 3. My class project as a Sophomore at University of Illinois was… hmm yeah I don’t remember.

Anyway, I’ve been on since there were only Ivy Leagues and Big Ten Universities there, and profiles had no tabs, just a simple page. I’ve been on Facebook since wall posts looked like discussion board messages and groups were only intra-campus (not yet global). When I joined Facebook, there was actually a guy with a face that was it’s official icon (I kinda miss that guy holding down the upper left corner of the pages), and profiles used to display the exact date you joined the service.

Each change Facebook has made in the past 5 years has given people easier (and more) access to one another, and the point of “Where does it end?” is quite relevant. The changes have been half welcome, half looked upon with disdain by me. As a full member of Generation Social Network (as I have named us), I cannot imagine life without the internet, and more recently, social networking. However, there ought to be boundaries set, and I sometimes long for the good old days when I was not so accessible. How much access is TOO much? Well, we may have reached that point.

By now, I will assume that everyone has heard about the controversy with Facebook changing it’s Terms of Service to allow them unrestricted use of content users upload on there, even AFTER they leave Facebook. This Orwellian move has rightfully been met with a good amount of backlash, and I believe the brunt of it is yet to come. However, I do think that the whole thing has began a discussion that is necessary to have in this day and age of 24/7 access to everyone and everything.

*With all the content we are uploading to the web (videos, photos, writing, artwork), what rights do we retain once we make them available on such a public domain?

*Will people become more deliberate and conscious of the content they upload to the web?

*What future implications will the permanence of uploaded content have long term in terms of personal responsibility, goals and overall our 2-dimensional representation? (i.e. Will our future president’s Facebook account- which goes back to his college days-be a huge factor in his vetting process and qualifications?)

Now, that shag mullet or bad perm you decided to experiment with is forever immortalized on remote servers somewhere. Oh, the HORROR! *wilhelm scream*

Lovette Ajayi
Marketing Coordinator for Community Media Workshop

P.S. Interestingly enough, Facebook’s deactivation page now says:”Are you deactivating because you are concerned about Facebook’s Terms of Service? This was a mistake that we have now corrected. You own the information you put on Facebook and you control what happens to it. We are sorry for the confusion. – The Facebook Team”

Oh, really?
Edit: This morning, Facebook’s homepage (after you log in) was changed to say “Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.”

The people spoke, and they had to listen.