Listening and Learning

"To listen well is a powerful means of influence as to talk well, and is the essence of all true conversation."
-- Chinese Proverb

I often engage with people about how to use Social Web tools - Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.  People generally tend to be interested in what information they need to publish or what sort of accounts they need to have to get their message out there. That's great ... BUT is that really all there is to it?  We really need to stop for a moment and remember that the Social Web is all about a two-way conversation.  There are plenty of organisations shouting out their message trying to be heard above the noise.  And that's all they do, they haven't stopped to listen to their audience.  Somewhere in all the shouting that your organisation does, there is an undercurrent of conversations going on about you, your mission and pretty much most of what you do.  You're missing opportunities to grow, improve and retain if you're not listening.  Have you heard what people are saying about you?  Do you track it?

So what should you be listening for?  Here are a few examples to help you get going:

• Your organisation name
• Campaigns and events you might be having
• Key staff or ambassadors' names
• Keywords you use on your website or that you associate with
• Other organisations who are do similar things 

There are a lot of things to be listening out for and plenty of conversation.  To help you out, there are also some pretty amazing tools available to help you to listen.  So let's start with how we can listen on Twitter (I'll follow-up with a few more posts on ways to listen in on other conversations). 

When I'm on my laptop, I use a nice little program called TweetDeck (one of the reasons I chose it is because it synchronises with my iPhone).  There are a plethora of others out there that will do the same job.  Once of the great features of programs like these, is that they can help you track a number of different keyword searches in a single program.

My other favourite way of doing this is to build a dashboard in Google.  Again, there are plenty of widgets out there to help you to do this, but a simple way is to pair Twitter Search with the standard Google news reader.  Twitter Search actually lets you build an RSS feed which can be used with the Google news reader to display the latest results of your search.  If you add enough of these feeds onto your Google home page, you've got yourself neat little dashboard to help you track all the conversations.

One thing to note, is that you don't have to tweet to listen, once you've heard you can respond.  Just remember that a little birdie told you so.

Nerding it for the Nonprofit

Blog titles are hard to come up with when you're trying to encapsulate everything you want to say in 50 words or less.  So here's mine: "The Nerd, the Net and the Nonprofit".  I think it pretty much gets to the bottom of everything I want this blog to be about, except perhaps one thing. Dictionary.com defines a nerd as:

1. A foolish, inept, or unattractive person.
2. A person who is single-minded or accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits but is felt to be socially inept.

I should have done some more research before I picked "nerd" to be a part of my blog title, oh well, just a little too late now.  But it does actually help get to the bottom of what I want this blog to be about, and that is checking out some of the cool tools & technologies that other nonprofits are using online to help them be have an effective online presence.  I'll be a little ambitious at this point in also suggesting that I want to blog on occasion about how this impacts the offline world too.  You just can't have a "virtual" without a "physical".

Join me as I put on my virtual taped glasses, my virtual bow tie and my virtual pocket protector and get stuck into the Net and how it can help you!