Some new cool tools from DigitalLeap...

I was speaking this week at the Digital Leap conference in the ICO in London.  Firstly a superb venue for a bunch of geeks as everyone had their own desktop mics with buttons to raise their hands with so the toys endeared the place to this particular audience!  Second, and more importantly, we had speakers from across the NFP tech community.  The focus of the conference was on Social Media and the benefits of this to a not for profit organisation. 

One session that really caught my eye was run by Beth Granter and Roger Jones from TwentyFirst and Reuben Turner from the Good Agency.  The session was entitled 'Someone is talking about your organisation but do you know who they are and what they are saying?'.  The idea behind this session was how do you know that social media is doing you any good if you are not monitoring this.

'Social Media is not a broadcast Channel' - Reuben Turner

They used an example of the work that they had been doing with Compassion in World Farming where they stripped their users down into groups and segmented their targeting accordingly.  They had some pretty good results in increasing traffic and increasing coverage using things from Facebook ads through to blog postings and some more excellent tools which they used for gathering numbers.

 I thought I'd share some of these tools on here -

Addictomatic - Creates a custom page which will give you instant real time info on any topic you choose. Check out the Blackbaud info here.  Incredibly powerful.   This is a superb way to find out who is talking about you...and what they are saying!

Crazy Egg - Gives you the ability to create tests for users of your website and who they are using it.  Including the ability to create Heatmap images of your website showing how often click on certain areas etc (Like the image on the right here).

Qdos - is a way to measure your internet status and manage your on-line profile. To calculate your internet status, QDOS measures your digital footprint - how active, popular and impactful you are on-line. Create a profile to calculate your QDOS - and compare your internet status to your friends, families and celebrities.

Pipl.com - A superb individual tracker...if a little scary for those of us who live way too much on-line.  This will track all sorts such as blogs, twitter etc to give you a run down of what people are saying about you.

So some great tools for measure your success - thanks guys.  I would say that there were a few items I didn't agree fully with such as there is no good way to track social media currently (OK just being a little argumentative with that one).  The Netcommunity stuff we are currently working on will allow for much stronger integration between CRM and social media sites (we already offer some nice out of the box integration) so we're getting there and these things won't forever be different.  In an ideal world we'd be able to hook up our supporter database to the social media sites and tailor/optimise content to the user.  Then we'd see the real power of social media.  Did I really just say that the power is when we can further manipulate it?  ;-)

Overall the conference was excellent and put a lot of like minded people together to share ideas, techniques and opinions.  I was very glad to be part of it.  Finally if you didn't make it along and would like to know some of the things we talked about - We had a delegate liveblogging from the venue click here to see the excellent results from Jennifer Jones.  Howard Lake of UK Fundraising was also reporting live from the event so see the another side of the conversation here.