Member-to-Member

Case Study: Facebook Causes Increases My Personal Fundraising ROI 220%

I recently got older. Rather than get depressed however, I found reason to celebrate my encroaching mortality with Facebook Causes. The reason I'm writing about it is because Causes' new birthday application enabled me to garner social profit for myself and financial gain for those I'd like to help in a unique way. By evolving their cause marketing platform from an "invite your friends" model to a "run your own fundraising campaign" model, they personally helped me increase my Causes fundraising ROI by 220% and helped me raise $160 for my chosen cause, Educate Tomorrow. Based on my rather general assumptions detailed below, by creating a social marketing tool that let me build my own fundraising campaign, Facebook Causes could raise their donations revenue by as much as 93% (or $18 million).

Web Sites Need Strategic Plans Too

I recently ran across a list serve request for a "Web Site Strategic Plan." I was happy to see the words "strategic" and "web" strung together like that so I pounced on it. My modified response below. I think this applies to any technology initiative regardless of the technologies it leverages, social or otherwise. Hope you find it useful. Note: this was for an association, so many of the examples are too.

Having written and implemented any number of web site plans for a wide variety of organizations, programs and products, I can tell you that your web site's strategic plan should be as unique as your organization. I agree strongly with [someone else's] recommendation to align your web plan with your organization's plan very closely and to put yourself through the rigor of a "business case" analysis which defines as precisely as possible what benefits (financial and otherwise) your effort will produce at what cost. There are two reasons to do this:

• you will be able to get executive and peer support more easily if you show them how their financial and personal support will help them accomplish their primary business objectives through a successful web initiative; and
• you will have more confidence in your own efforts and better understand how to make priority decisions about functionality, changing technology choices, budget etc., because you know your end game.

The place where I see web strategies often go wrong is in the imprecise statement of their objectives. It's easy to allow objectives to be too many and too broad. Of course we want to "serve our members" and "grow the membership base", but this gives little meaningful guidance to designers and marketers and results in expensive iterations of everything from coding to design. More precise objectives like "provide the membership with better networking opportunities" and "attract new members graduating from college and graduate school" are much more likely to produce effective web sites.

Here is a high-level Strategic Plan outline to get you started. Make it your own and you'll succeed.

The Value of 'Real World' Value - Social Network Lessons from the Association Sector

Good news! Successful social networking among trade and professional associations demonstrate that fundamental principals of business are thriving and that despite my periodic doubts, people still value value. Even better, if you're me, after studying several specific initiatives and talking to lots of people I have uncovered what I think is the pithy success formula for social networking success: enable something virtually which cannot be fully achieved in the real world, and ensure that it has 'real world value' to your participant base. We talk a lot about social networking lacking ROI, but where it delivers real world value, there is strong potential for ROI.

I follow the association sector's adoption and use of social media because I think the association sector is the perfect petri dish for B2B social media adoption since association members already value their strong and multilayered business communities in the real world, many of which are ripe for migration or expansion online. To explore this further, I attended the ASAE & The Center's annual conference in San Diego last month in order to get the pulse of how social media is working in this sector. I paid special attention to how these new strategies were integrated into their marketing efforts. My takeaway is that the sector's involvement is still largely experimental but that social media and networking is growing among associations overall and that there are several very noteworthy implementations that have a lot to teach us.

Social Media Press Release - "Controlling" the Message in a Web 2.0 World

I hear it all the time when the subject of social media marketing comes up with executives, particularly in the B2B (business-to-business) space, "but how do we control what people say about us?" The answer is, "You don't, but you can influence what they say if you're smart and play by the same rules your audience is playing by." Of course, i usually don't have a nice pithy comeback when queried on just what "rules" I'm referring to - Web 2.0 being hardly about rules at all - but now I have an actual example I can point to to explain what I mean!

A new tool called the Social Media Press Release demonstrates a sophisticated way to shape what others say about you without controlling anything. I suppose some would argue it's not that new (first introduced in 2006 by Shift Communications and now updated by Social Media Group's Digital Snippets), and perhaps not all that revolutionary (being primarily a web page not unlike PR Web's press release format) but the concept of the SMPR provides insight into how marketing in the era of social media and networking is evolving.

B2B Social Media - Real World Research

I attended the New New Internet conference last week in Washington D.C. (Tyson's Corner, VA actually - we here in D.C. are trying to create a regional feel to the large but fragmented tech community). I had the good fortune to see a presentation by Janet Hall, CMO of TMNG Global on some qualitative research they did into B2B uses of social media. As serendipity would have it, I had been introduced to Janet virtually the week before and so this week I followed up with her in person to discuss some of the more detailed findings, including the importance of companies' Return on Engagement (ROE) and some actual examples of how companies are beginning to experiment with social media in a B2B context. First, Janet's summary of the "so what?" on B2B social media.

"Why should online communities matter so much to the B2B sector? For one thing, the opportunities from social media offer a perfect alignment with the key objectives B2B marketers cite most often: transforming customer relationships, expanding brand identity, and lead generation. Secondly, the ability to leverage the collaboration and participation in online communities – which is at the heart of what Web 2.0 is all about, after all – is becoming a critical differentiator in the B2B marketplace and is likely to define a successful marketing strategy in the future. Customer collaboration, a form of user generated content (UGC), is the ultimate value-added data for a company; harnessing that data is the Holy Grail for the marketing department. It’s as much about knowledge management as it is about marketing."         

-Excerpt from Janet Hall's TMNG GLobal blog entry Why Social Media Matters

Behind the link, I've summarized some of the other interesting findings from the research, and provide a link to the full study.

Automating Serendipity via LinkedIn: Quantifying Social Media Efficiency

A few weeks back I sent out a question to my LinkedIn network asking if people found value in Facebook and/or LinkedIn and inviting them to join my Facebook network. The answers were really interesting and I made some new Facebook friends (see below), but I found a little gem in them that proved LinkedIn can be more efficient than serendipity (the occurrence of accidental fortune, not the open source blog system). One of my contacts helped her husband find his job through a LinkedIn contact, thereby demonstrating the potential for huge networking efficiencies that this service and other social media have to offer. Who would have thought we could ever have automated serendipity to achieve tangible business value?

Here’s the anecdote: My friend’s husband had sent in a resume for a job and waited two weeks. Nothing. So she got on LinkedIn and found someone in her network who knew the CTO of the company. She asked her friend for an introduction to the CTO. Her contact was happy to make the introduction to the CTO, who checked to find out the HR department had no record of the resume. Her husband submitted his resume through the CTO, got an interview and was hired.

This happy sequence of events could just as easily taken place through a serendipitous meeting at a business lunch or happy hour, except that it didn’t. And that’s what’s intriguing.

The serendipity of the happy hour was essentially “automated” via the wife’s LinkedIn search, making LinkedIn serendipity’s not-so-little helper. And, according to my analysis, if her husband’s new job was truly meant to be – the fates bound and determined to help him get it through LinkedIn or through a happenstance social encounter - the LinkedIn approach could still be as much as one day and 13 minutes more efficient. See my analysis below. :-)

I Facebooked Myself

I did it. I set up a Facebook profile for myself.

What possessed me to do this? I was reading Charlene Li's Groundswell Blog about Facebook's potential valuation at $6-10 Billion (up from $1 B last year). This seemed kind of mindboggling to me - as was the calculation that this valuation meant that (at 42 million registered users/members) each Facebook member is worth as much as $138-142 in ad revenue.

This says a lot about the potential for social media sites & applications to keep the advertising model strong as these sites prove themselves both stickier (people staying on the sites longer) and more targeted (able to deliver more individually appropriate ads to viewers who have logged in). Online advertising revenue continues to show healthy growth although the rapid changes in users' behaviors as these new Web 2.0 technologies come online are keeping the ad companies on their toes.

My Facebook experience also demonstrated the power of these social technologies to both engage people with technology and to connect with offline friends through online channels. I initially signed up just to check it out, but w/in a few minutes, I had invited several friends - professional and personal - and they had accepted and - darn it if I wasn't facebooking! I started playing with the applications and found one for promoting causes which I thought was nice. And then I added a few more.

So what's my takeaway from my little Facebook experience?