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I’m sure by now you’ve heard all the hoopla—Facebook is changing its pages and your personal life will now appear as a timeline, with a more organized and in-depth view of snapshots of your existence over the years.  It’s a bit like a digital scrapbook.  The simple world of “likes” will be replaced by a more complex series of reactions to interest areas.  Any verb (not just “like”) can be used as an action, thanks to a new feature called Gestures.  (A good summary is here.)  And those apps?  You won’t have to approve them all the time, so careful what you’re sharing!  You can also consume media right within Facebook - and have your friends see what you’re watching.

I’ve spent a little time this week fiddling around with my timeline and reading what various social media experts are saying about what this means to organizations, not just individuals.  I think these insights are worth sharing if you’re a nonprofit that has spent quite a bit of time building a community on Facebook.

1. If you have a Cause on Facebook, good news: Causes is very much on top of the changes, and they may be good news for supporters who want to show support for your organization more visibly.  Read more here.  If your organization is on Facebook but is not using Causes, read this.  (Full disclosure: My organization is partnered with Causes.)

2. What always held true holds MORE true now: Facebook is about conversation and relationships.  If you want to succeed in using it as a tool to build engagement, you have to treat it as such.  Recommended reading: this post by Beth Kanter.

3. Focus on real ROI.  Build relationships with an eye toward actually getting people to do something of value for your cause.  Read Beth Kanter’s thoughts on moving people along the ladder of engagement from the same post I cited here.  I completely agree with this.  If you’re spending your scarce and valuable time on social media, make sure it matters in an important way for your organization.  Set goals and meet them.

4. Great content will matter EVEN MORE. Read John Haydon’s thoughts here.

By the way, John is absolutely right when he says: “The good news is that 99% of communication and marketing professionals are too lazy and uninterested in having real discussions with their fans. So if you have a sincere commitment to do this, the competition will be few.”

The headline is that following the good advice that’s been out there for a long time is no longer optional but essential.  Namely, with Facebook you now must really, truly focus on relationship-building, clear movement toward action and superlative content. 

As a regular feature on this blog, I’ll be sharing insights from my conversations with NetSquared community members, especially when the lessons I’ve learned have implications for our Local groups around the world. Last week, I had the pleasure of meeting Steven Flower who is the founder and organizer of the Manchester Net2 Local group.

In a recent post about my conversation with Eduardo Bejar, I highlighted the need for greater connection among Net2 organizers to share ideas and best practices. There is a supportive component to these connections, but a very practical one as well. Local organizers are often on the lookout for new meeting ideas to keep their members engaged. Finding great speakers can be hard work, and it’s very easy to tap out one’s own network. Sometimes an outside spark is needed to catalyze new ideas.

Connecting Tech Experts with Nonprofits

One such idea being pursued by Steven and other Net2 organizers involves connecting nonprofits with tech and social media experts. Steve’s seen plenty of great organizations in Manchester whose impact could be accelerated by leveraging technology. At the same time, he’s seen lots of enthusiastic people who want to contribute their tech skills for good.

The challenge of bringing these two constituencies together is one that we often discuss here at TechSoup Global. The task is often described as connecting two groups that speak completely different languages!

Yet Steven helped me realize that such connections are not only possible, but that Net2 groups have a crucial role to play as intermediaries. Coming from philanthropy, the term “intermediary” is a familiar one, as I used to help donors connect with giving opportunities overseas. But I had never thought about NetSquared in that way!

Social Media Surgery & Crowdsourcing Change

Steven told me about the concept of “social media surgery” that is taking hold in the UK, including the event he just helped organize in Manchester. See the tweet and picture above! His pitch to nonprofits is simple and low-key — join us for a cup of tea! Tech and social media experts will be there to help you figure out what tools (if any) can accelerate your work. In return, volunteers are given easy ways to help organizations that are doing incredible work in their community and around the world.

A few weeks ago I got to observe a similar concept in action by checking out the Virtual Net2 event from Philadelphia. Their popular Crowdsourcing Change event offers two local nonprofits the chance to present and benefit from the collective social media wisdom of the crowd.

In both scenarios, Net2 serves as the intermediary that brings together these constituencies and enables the change to happen. To some, the word “intermediary” might imply the work of an unnecessary middleman, but I disagree. I’ve heard too many horror stories about tech volunteers who approach nonprofits with the best of intentions and great ideas. But when that volunteer exits, the nonprofits are often left managing a technology that they don’t understand or may not even need. Intermediaries can help prevent such disasters by providing a frame for technology and social good work. We can ask the right questions and be a resource to both sides of the tech-for-good equation.

Steven’s Footballer-as-Intermediary Metaphor

Being from Manchester, Steven couldn’t help but describe the intermediary role through the metaphor of football and one of his team’s (Manchester City) most underrated players, Kevin Horlock. Horlock was the highly influential player, not necessarily the one who always scored the goal, but the person in the middle who helped make that goal possible. Without him, there would be no team, no success, and no impact.

Just as Net2 Locals have an important intermediary role to play, so does NetSquared central. We must do more to facilitate connections between organizers while surfacing new meeting ideas that can be adapted around the world. With this goal in mind, we are in the process of developing an exciting new strategy that will accelerate workshops and events at the local level. More details coming soon!

In the meantime, please share your thoughts with me here and on Twitter @MarcManashil.

I first came across @paullyoung in September, 2008 when he implemented a birthday campaign as part of charity:water’s September campaign.   Fast forward a couple of years, and Paull is following his passion for clean water around the world and is the director of digital for charity:water. charity:water continues to be an innovator in the [...]

Once upon a time, there was a library system that was struggling to survive.  It was a dark and stormy economy, and there was very little money to keep the lights on and the books out.

The people who cared about the library had to go before their local government in Saint Marys, Ontario, to make a case for funding.  And they succeeded.  They even wrote me to tell the tale.  So I asked them how they did it.  And I also posed the question, what does this tale tell us about saving our own programs from the budget axe?  Read on for the story from the people who made this happen: Brendan Howley, Robert Brindley and Sam Coghlan (library CEO).  Thanks for the inspirational work, gentlemen!

How did you do it?

In previous years, we librarians ourselves had prepared pitches based on program descriptions and graphs presented in PowerPoint. The information made sense from a library perspective but for some reason it was not resonating with our audience.  Rob Brindley, an Acting Library CEO from our partnership was also the Chief Administrative Officer and had some experience with marketing.  He felt we needed help to communicate our message.  In order for our library partnership to be heard, we needed to translate the value proposition, the return on investment that the library was providing.  Also the story had to be told from their perspective – from their residents.  We brought in Brendan Howley, a cause marketer who lives locally.  When Brendan told us, a trio of librarians, that yes, we should use a story, who could better understand the power of story than a trio of librarians?!  We understood, though, that the story had to be told by an objective party in order to not appear self serving.  Brendan, using his skills as a seasoned investigative reported, scoured the cornfields and came up with an amazing articulate local leader who agreed to help Brendan deliver the story of the library.

What reaction did you get from the people making the decision about your funding?  How did storytelling make a difference?

Members of council were engaged, if not spellbound.  They seemed to grasp the essential truth of the message that libraries are valuable.  The tone of their questioning about the dollars involved was much less confrontational than it had been in the past.  They were now understanding the true value of the library and the role it played in building their community.

Based on this experience, what’s your advice for other libraries – and nonprofits – about making the case for funding?

First, bring in help.  You are likely too close to the situation to be able to describe it effectively to your potential funders.  You will not all be as fortunate as us – finding someone like Brendan Howley who is a marketer, an investigative reporter AND a published novelist, but there are marketers in your community who can help.  (And they likely use your library themselves, so you don’t need to sell them on your message.)

Second, stories are very powerful, but you need to have accurate, up to date, credible data to respond to the questions that funders need to ask. This was not about flash, remember to go to your roots.  Our pitch was a story from our residents, the heart of our community that was able to communicate the real human value of the situation.

Third, bring in help in delivering the stories.  A good story can seem self serving if you deliver it yourself.

How do you make sure the story delivers?

1. The investigative: We ran this task like an intelligence operation, identifying the key policy influencers and then doing an informal sit-down with each of them, to determine which issues were real and which were driven by poor communication between the parties. And, with the help of two inside “agents,” we profiled the opponents (gingerly, so as not to tip our hand) and identified their most likely counterarguments. (On the day, there were no surprises.)

2. The analytic: Which value proposition/s did the libraries not communicate well to stakeholders, which, if well-told, would open the purse-strings as politically defensible budget line-items? And then we researched like crazy to find the authoritative sources to make the individual case (“Why do we need libraries if we have Google?” “Because librarians are human search engines—they give not only a solution but context for that solution as well: priceless”)

3. The creative: How best to present the narrative? Our gut was that voices from the community itself, NOT couched as generic testimonials but rather as single-item “we need this and are passionate enough about it to take a public stand on-camera,” were the best elements. But the two librarians who did speak had unique points of view as “first responder”/therapist and as someone who’d united a community during a blizzard (selfless public service). Nothing was impersonal: every word came from a personal place.

4. The passionate: Everyone who connected with the presentation saw the value of libraries and reacted from their hearts. That shone through and cost us…nothing.

5. The interpersonal: What were the councillors actually going to debate? A deep psychological understanding of this process was paramount—-we had to provide unanswerable fact-allegations to demonstrate ROI and value-for-money unequivocally…and in voices that our advocates and fence-sitters could appropriate credibly as their own.

6. A dry run: Our first iteration was factually solid but the narrative was far less powerful than what we finally presented. The difference? Fresh eyes and ears. We did two dry runs and had multiple rehearsals in anticipation of questions. Made a world of difference.

Here’s a video that summarizes much of what they presented.  I just love the first story.

The discussion about the recent changes on Facebook has focused mostly around what it means for individuals, particularly the tension between openness and  privacy.    Many people are wondering what it means for nonprofit brands  using Facebook as one of their marketing channels.   So are people like me who do coaching and training on how [...]

For this month’s Net2 Think Tank, we asked you to share your tips, resources, and ideas about curating content at your organization or enterprise. Below, read the curated list of the community responses we received - and share your own tips in the comments!

Here’s a quick working definition to get us started: Content curation focuses on using the web to highlight important information in situations where information overload may be a problem. Many organizations today are writing on the web regularly to communicate with their audience. At the same time, information pollution is an increasing problem for the consumers of that content. As Will Coley explains, “when organizations offer clarity amidst the noise, they build trust among supporters”

Topic: What are your best practices for curating content? Share your tips, tactics, tools, and techniques for effectively curating to serve your audience. And, if you’ve written about curation in the past, share the link with us!

While this month’s Net2 Think Tank is now closed, you’re always welcome to add your feedback on the subject. Feel free to add your ideas in the comments section at the bottom of this page.

Why Curate?

• Grow your audience: “I’ve discovered that curation is the best way to build an organization’s following and it’s often the first step in engaging supporters: first as audience members and then as contributors.” - from Will Coley’s blog post on content curation.
• Become a leader: “The overarching theme [of curation] seems to center on a few key things. The what has to do with maintaining and adding value to a trusted body of knowledge and the why has to do with providing a service to a busy and information-inundated nonprofit sector. It goes much deeper and broader than this, but those are the highlights.” - from Michael DeLong on the TechSoup Forums.
• Build relationships: “By sharing the information and giving credit to the source where you found the link, you build relationships and a network.” - from Beth Kanter on her blog.
• Build trust through the human touch: ”Over the past 10 years, much of the movement in the content world has been driven by machines and crowdsourcing. It’s time to bring the human expert back into the mix, but to give him or her the companion toolkit of great technology and access to crowd wisdom. That way, he or she can truly curate thoughtful content that will cut through the noise, and ultimately rebuild the trust and authority severely damaged by content overcrowding.” - from Dermot McCormack on Mashable, recommended via @TechSoup.

Getting Started

• Curation starts with listening: “Scan and monitor the web for relevant content every day. To find content that relates to my project, I follow lots of blogs of partner organizations and allies through Google Reader (RSS subscription service), as well as by getting news updates from Google Alerts, and friends/colleagues in my Facebook and Twitter newsfeeds.” - from Will Coley’s blog post on content curation.
• Know your existing content resources:
  - “Firstly start with a content audit - what does the organisation already have? ensure it is classified correctly and stored in a retrievable way, what percentage of this content could be adapted or refined into different formats? this is always a good starting place then you can move on to newly created content.” - from Jenni Beattie on Linkedin. 
  - “We’ve assembled a task-force of sorts here at TechSoup to tackle the topic, with all of us sharing the tools, methods, and ideas we have around content curation.” - from Michael DeLong on the TechSoup Forums.
• Understand how others are successfully curating:
  - “The Gertrude Stein exhibit curated by @jewseum uses selection & arrangement to convey a point of view.” - Example from Marnie Webb on Twitter. 
  - “Bruce Lesley is one of a growing number of  nonprofit executive directors and senior leaders that use Twitter.  And, he isn’t tweeting about what he ate for breakfast or one of his personal passions, basketball.   He uses Twitter to curate information related to his organization’s mission and work as a bipartisan advocacy organization dedicated to making children and families a priority in federal policy and budget decisions.” - Example from Beth Kanter on her curation blog post.
• … and get more curation ideas for beginners from Beth Kanter’s Social Media Strategy wiki. This tool includes further reading on the process and tools you can use for curation. 

Best Practices for Content Curation

• Use various media types to tell a single story: “Mix up the type of content you curate on your blog. Perhaps I’m contributing to the ‘Death of American Culture’ here, but don’t rely solely on only written blog posts. Experiment with blog posts that are composed of audio clips, video, slideshows, infographics, graphic art, etc.” - from Will Coley’s blog post on content curation.
• Be Opportunistic: “Get creative in capturing content. Everyone is so busy these days and strapped for time. I’ve been trying to think of ways to integrate content creation into work and events already happening. I always remind people to document their live events with photos or video. I’ve also tried turning email discussions on listserves into blog posts and opting to record conference call presentations. My next big experiment is recording video check-ins via Skype that take less than five minutes.” - from Will Coley’s blog post on content curation.
• Follow the experts: “Find the best curators in my topic and follow them – it’s like sipping fine wine.  You have to be organized and know your sources. And you have to scan your sources regularly.” - from Beth Kanter on the Scoopit Blog.
• Curate your event notes and materials: “We encourage our speakers and our attendees to share their conference materials and notes with each other, and to help them and the community easily share and find these, we use a combination of SlideShare, Google Docs, and tagging to keep things connected [...] We also reinforce the conference tag (11NTC for the 2011 Nonprofit Technology Conference, for example) in our communications to all speakers and attendees and encourage their use of it to help us aggregate community content around the conference. After the conference, we do a round-up of the resources we’ve been able to identify via that tag.” - from Annaliese Hoehling on Linkedin.
• Create content with a purpose: “I know of a charity who found of over 10k pages on their site only 2k had EVER been accessed externally. Less is more?” - Curation fail from Charles Bagnall on Twitter. 

Tools:

Resources for Additional Content Curation Information 

• Read the book Curation Nation: How to Win in a World Where Consumers are Creators, written by Steven Rosenbaum and recommended by Will Coley.
• Follow the Content and Curation for Nonprofits Scoopit Page, organized by Beth Kanter.

Post About Your Curation Tips, Tools, or Best Practices!

What did we miss? While this month’s Net2 Think Tank is now closed, you’re always welcome to add your feedback on the subject. Feel free to add your ideas in the comments section at the bottom of this page.

Thank you to all of our contributors this month! 

About Net2 Think Tank:

Net2 Think Tank is a monthly blogging/social networking event open to anyone and is a great way to participate in an exchange of ideas.  We post a question or topic to the NetSquared community and participants submit responses either on their own blogs, the NetSquared Community Blog, or using social media.  Tag your post with “net2thinktank” and email a link to us to be included. At the end of the month, the entries get curated in the Net2 Think Tank Round-Up.

Branding is changing, and it requires us to dig deeper.

That was the message Jelly Helm delivered at last week’s Communication Network conference.  Jelly is principal of a communication arts studio in Portland and a former executive creative director of Wieden+Kennedy, where he was creative director for Google, Coke, Starbucks, Target and Nike, among other brands.

Helm, a self-described sensitive man - “Everything makes me want to cry or laugh” - said that authenticity is critical.  He showed two of his own sketches.  One was branding of yesteryear, symbolized by a box with a fake front featuring jazzy self-promotion—“new! improved! the best!”—in the style of old school advertising.  The second was today’s branding, which he symbolized with an Apple store-esque box - clear and transparent.

“You can no longer stick messages on your organization and make people feel the way you want them to feel.  That’s inherently manipulative and doesn’t work.  Now a brand is like a clear box that can’t be over-narrated or over-mediated by the organization.”

So how do you navigate this new world?  He urged organizations to ask themselves two questions.

1.) What is your deep story?  This is your strategy.  What is your vision?  Purpose?  The value you create?  The roots you have?
2.) How is that deep story most powerfully expressed? This is where creativity comes in.

Good framework. 

It reflects what I believe about branding.  Branding is not what we say about ourselves - it’s about what others feel about us.  It’s not something we can impress upon others.  The more we authentically and honestly tell and live our own story, the more likely we can evoke the positive feelings in others that are the heart of a strong brand.