Wired Causes

You are browsing the archives of 2010 September.

My colleague, Clay Lord, Theatre Bay Area told me about a bet that the communications manager is having with the director of development.   Here’s the bet:
THE BET:
I must use the It’s Not the Size of the Gift platform to raise $1,937 by 5pm EST Friday, October 1st, and I can only promote it over social media [...]

Allison Fine and I have been thrilled with the reception that our book, The Networked Nonprofit, has received.   I’m very grateful for support and more so for the conversations and thoughtful blog posts you have shared.  I wanted to share a few recent posts that I’ve enjoyed and a couple of upcoming book events.
If You [...]

“Measurement’ is a big buzz word in the NP Tech world. But for some of us, recognizing the value isn’t enough to execute a strategy. That’s where Web Analytics Demystified comes in. They are a consulting firm that helps develop successful, sustainable, and scalable web analytics programs, and have done a great job sharing their knowledge and creating a community around measurement. Recently, I connected with the firm’s founder, Eric T. Peterson, to learn more.

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Malcolm Gladwell’s article “Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted,” brings the slacktivism,  social media for social good or evil,  strong and weak ties, and organizations vs networks debates to a mainstream audience.  He tries to make the point:  “Social change has been happening before the creation of Twitter four years ago”  but [...]

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The NetSquared team reads and shares lots of different blog posts, articles, reports, and surveys within our team. We have a lot of fun sharing within the team and it occurred to us that we should start sharing them with you, too! Net2 Recommends is a monthly series of news and blog posts from around the web that we found interesting or inspiring, mind-bending or opinion-changing, fun or just plain weird.

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This is the title of a presentation by Google’s Matt Walton that I’m blogging here at Artez Interactive.  Here are the highlights of how Google Analytics helps us find out things that really matter: Who are our visitors?  How are they finding and coming to our site?  What did they do on our site?  Why does my site exist and did our visitors meet those objectives?

It’s easy to drown in data— Google says to look for the data that tells you something actionable:

1. Measure your site’s effectiveness by monetary and non-monetary goals:  Look for how many times a visitor comes to your site before taking an action.  If you put in your cost data (like how much you spend to get visitors), you can look at ROI: are you getting back what you’re investing in attracting visitors?

2. Measure online campaign performance:  Look at the impact of your Google Grants Adwords, email marketing and social media outreach results. For example, when you send out an email, use a URL builder with metadata in the links to your site.  (It’s very important to tag your URLs, folks!)  Then Google Analytics will tell you the results of that campaign—and you can compare it to other campaigns.  Did people click?  Did they take action?  You can check it out.  Also, you can track traffic from your organization’s Facebook page or Twitter.

3. Understand if you’re reaching the right people:  Google Analytics will tell you if you’re hitting your key audience geographically.  It will tell you if you’re serving your intended audience.  Most of your visitors likely come from search engines.  Google will tell you what keywords people are using to find your site.  Also look at who is sending you traffic.

4. Improve your online performance: Reduce bounce rates—ie, people coming to your site and immediately departing.  Or, in more colorful terms, the bounce rate is the percentage of users “who go to a web page, puke and leave,” said the presenter, quoting an unnamed blogger.  If you have a high bounce rate on certain pages, they probably need changing.  Or maybe the keywords your using on your Adwords are sending people who were looking for something else - in which case you want to rethink your Adwords.  Then using funnel reporting, look at where you are losing the people who do not bounce.  At each step of their visit, what is happening?  Are people staying with you until they donate or take action?  Where do they drop off?  This can provide clues to where to improve your visitors’ experience.  Maybe visitors have privacy concerns or get stuck on a login—adjust and see what happens!

He recommended more resources:

analytics.blogspot.com
Kaushik.net

I’m at the Artez Interactive conference in Toronto to speak today - but I’m also here to listen to some juicy data from comScore on social networking - aka social conversation.  (comScore is to the Internet as Neilsen is to TV.)  Brent Low-Bernie who leads comScore Media Metrix in Canada shared the following data from across the border. 

Canada has the highest per capita penetration of the Internet and highest level of online engagement in the world, so it’s interesting to look at Canadian behavior online.

-Nearly all Canadians are touched by social media (96%)
-Email and instant messaging is flat but social networks, blogs and multimedia are growing
-Social networking is the number two destination online after portals like MSN/Yahoo!/etc. (20% vs. 33% of visitors)
-It’s not just young people: 99% of people 55+ with HHI over $60K use social media - it’s the area of fastest growth
-Facebook dominates in Canada just as it does in the US;
-If Facebook would be a country, it would be the third-largest country in the world after China and India
-Facebook is a leading driver of traffic to traditional media online, like the CBC
-In 2007, Facebook traffic/month was 31 visits/visitor and now it is 42/visitor
-Twitter is growing rapidly - 5% vs. Facebook’s 9% in a year; Linkedin is up 95%
-Of people who go to social media sites, 78% go to photo sharing sites and 60% go to web publishing sites

He also shared some US Mobile data:

-The mobile market has moved from 44% female mobile use in 2005 to 52%
-People 35-54 are a third of mobile users
-Top social networks on mobile: Facebook, followed by MySpace and Twitter
-The average Facebook user is spending nearly 300 minutes on the social network on mobile - almost the same amount of time they spend on a computer on Facebook
-He predicts mobile will surpass desktop screens very soon

He offered some additional parting predictions:

-He predicts Google TV will succeed
-iPads will change how people consume the web
-Social media search is the next frontier
-Facebook “like” could be the future of social retail (imagine asking your FB friends: do these jeans make my butt look big?)
-Twitter is a rapidly growing and dominant form of video link sharing

The conclusion:

It’s all about content.  Social media will be everywhere, on devices, in traditional media, within business strategies.  What will win is the quality content.

My take?  The last point is critical.  These tools only work well when they are used to share amazing content.  Nonprofits take heed:  the tools are cool but if you use them to transmit tired message, they won’t do you much good.