Beth Kanter
This is a guest post from The A-List podcast guest Beth Kanter. Beth is the author of Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media, one of the longest running and most popular blogs for nonprofits. She is a frequent technology trainer and speaker and in 2009, she was named by Fast Company magazine as one of the most influential women in technology and one of Business Week’s “Voices of Innovation for Social Media.” She is the 2009 Scholar in Residence for Social Media and Nonprofits for the Packard Foundation. A frequent contributor to many nonprofit technology web sites,blogs, and magazines, Beth has authored chapters in several books, including the ROI chapter in “Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission: A Strategic Guide for Nonprofit Leaders,” edited by NTEN published in 2009. She is currently co-writing a book with Allison Fine to be published by Wiley in 2010 called “The Networked Nonprofit.” You can read Beth’s complete biography here.
There are free and paid monitoring tools available to support listening through social media channels. To make your scanning efficient, you’ll a RSS Reader, software that grabs fresh content from blog posts, web posts, Twitter, and other sources. Most RSS readers, like Google Reader, are free.
Many nonprofits like Google Reader, especially those who are working as a team because it makes it easy to share items without cluttering up email.
For additional tutorials and tips on using RSS Readers, see the NTEN’s WeAreMedia ToolBox.
Listening tools consist of monitoring, tracking, and analytics software. Here is a good starter kit using free tools.
Google Alerts: Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on a keyword query or topic. The results can be emailed or read in an RSS reader. At the very minimum, your organization should be listening with a google alert.
Technorati: Technorati is blog search engine. It searches by keyword or links for mentions on blogs. Technorati makes it easy to figure out if an influential blogger, someone who is linked to by many others, has mentioned a nonprofit organization or its issue area.
Social Mention: Social Mention searches for keywords or URLS on many different social media sites, including blogs, podcasts, video, social networking sites, online discussion boards, micro blogging, and more. It also provides graphic illustrations or charts showing mentions per day or week.
Twitter Search: Twitter’s search function is one of the most valuable ways to use it. Listening on Twitter is like being able to read people’s thoughts. It can also give your organization the ability overhear conversations.
The Smithsonian Museum is currently undertaking a strategic planning process that is using a variety of social media channels to listen to and engage with its audience. Nina Simon, in a talk she gave at the Smithsonian in May, 2009, illustrates how searching on the phrase “Smithsonian” resulted in a rich stream of insights about how Smithsonian’s visitors feel about the institution as well as how they plan their museum visit. All valuable information that can be used to design a web presence.
BoardReader: BoardReader finds and displays information posted on the online discussion forums and message boards.
When Apollo Gonzales, NRDC’s Netroots Campaign Manager, was in the listening phase for a campaign to support a bill before Congress that would mandate stricter fuel-economy standards, they targeted Toyota Prius owners and fans known as “Hypermilers” who obsess about their green hybrid cards. Gonzales thought that this group of hard-core fans might be interested to know that the manufacturer of their car was opposing the bill. Maybe, this group of fuel efficiency lovers would do something about it. Using a tool like BoardReader, helped Gonzales hone in the multiple conversations happening across different online discussion boards and to quickly identify influencers.
BackType is a search engine that will search through blog comments, social networks, and Twitter to identify. In addition, BackType has the ability track conversations on a specific blog post.
Many nonprofits begin listening using free tools and as appropriate migrate to professional or fee-based listening tools when the volume of mentions is too large for one person to summarize. Professional tools can also help automate the listening reporting by avoiding tedious cut and pasting. Services start out at free trial for a month and shoot up over thousands of dollars for large institutions with multiple users. Some venders, like Radian 6, are offering special nonprofit pricing.
The number of professional listening tools has grown rapidly over the past year and will continue to grow as more companies adopt social media and begin with listening. When the nonprofit’s listening activities have become established and the need for professional software becomes obvious, the social media team needs to decide if they want software for tracking conversations or if want to hire a consultant to do the tracking and provide a report. The difference is a trade off between the time required for the DIY approach or the cost of hiring a consultant.
Remember, it is important to remember that the skills – composing keywords – are the same for both free and paid tools. When considering a paid service, nonprofits should do their due diligence for the different vendors and select the one that best matches their needs.
What’s in your nonprofit social media listening tool box? What’s your killer tip on how to use these listening tools?
Look for Part 4 – the final post of this series, Listening Case Study: The Red Cross – will be published here on December 7th.
