apollo gonzales

Photo Credit: ryancr

I’m willing to bet that this post from Ben Parr over at Mashable will be one of the most shared posts he’s ever written. I highly recommend it, and suggest you share it, not just with other folks in the business of social media, but with your colleagues too.

I’m as guilty as the next social media professional of sharing just about everything Social Media that interests me. I do it in Twitter and Facebook every day, and when I’m really moved I share things at Digg, Delicious, Current, Flickr and few others. As social media professionals we know that we are resources for others in the business, and we share with one another as often as we possibly can. This is what keeps this business moving at a breakneck pace. I love it and I’m thankful every day to have thousands of giving professionals out there.

There is another side of sharing though – sharing the work of our colleagues. In my organization a select few of us give many of the blog posts our bloggers write the full treatment. We take the steps that Parr outlines every day, sometimes several times a day. That extra work pays off, and we don’t do this just out of a habit of process, but because the work our colleagues is doing it truly exceptional. For that reason, I can’t imagine a time we will not do this. If you work for an organization that has bloggers, and you really believe in the work they do, you should be doing this too.

Parr’s post is a great outline of 20 easy ways to promote the blog posts you find interesting, and I’m going to take it a step further and say that these are 20 easy steps for self promotion too. These are all fairly simple things to do, and as Parr points out, if you don’t want to take the time to visit all of the social media sites, Ping.fm is a fantastic platform for saving time. If you’ve got bloggers at your organization, you should be sharing Parr’s post with everyone there, and add an offer to help them get set up in the social media spaces mentioned. This last part, offering help, is key. Without it our colleagues who don’t live and breathe this stuff can easily feel overwhelmed and may even abandon the most basic forms of sharing. For some time now, I’ve been considering offering brownbags in my office covering social media sharing, but it has always seemed too dense to cover in an hour. I think Parr’s post actially created a great outline for these events. Stay tuned, and I’ll post my slides once I’ve got things worked out. As always, I’d love it if you’d share your thoughts, especially on putting the brownbags together.

Make Parr’s post the first thing you email to your colleagues on Monday morning, and don’t forgeth the offer to help. I don’t have to guess that you’ll see the return on the investment of your time pretty quickly, I see the results every day.

I am so f-ing sick of hearing this excuse to not try new things in the NPO social media space. I should stop writing right now because I’m a little pissed, and everyone knows you don’t blog when you are a little pissed, things never come out the right way. I’m going to keep going anyway because I’m lucky enough to work for a place that is willing to try new things.

Look, you’ve got to try things, it’s how you find out what works for your audience. Your health care NPO is not going to attract the same audience or trolls that the pro civil disobedience environmental organization is going to attract. You may wish you could attract the audience Burger King attracted with their defunct Facebook app, but the truth of the matter is that it ain’t gonna happen. In the end it doesn’t matter does it? You don’t have the stones to try it anyway.

When Skittles launched their new social media based website last week, and got hammered by trolls and the press and the social medial bloggers, they were trying something new. They went out on a limb, and gave it a shot. Their Twitter stream got hijacked by trolls and griefers and other NPO’s - but go there now and see for yourself, the trolls are mostly gone.  Guess what? So are the trolls who hijacked #dontgo and #tcot.

When Greenpeace tried to name a whale, they ended up with Mr. Splashy Pants, and now NASA is trying to name a section of the Space Station and they may well end up calling it Colbert or even Xenu, but you know what? You’ve heard of all of these things, and no one even knows that you have a Facebook app that cycles through your action alerts or that you have a Twitter stream of your press releases.

Stop playing it safe. Innovate. Take chances. The worst that can happen may not be as bad as you think.

I’ve been doing this whole social-web-strategy thing for about a year and half now. When I first started doing this I was full of ideas about the potential of the social media, and I was excited about applying the tools to the strategy of issue campaigns. As the year wore on I felt like my ideas about the tools were starting to look the Chinese food menu on my refrigerator - that menu always sounds like a good idea, but really it hasn’t changed in a year and I’ve tried just about everything on it.

There have been a lot of discussions as we near the end of the year, about what the next year holds for those of us doing social web work, but I can’t help but feel like it’s still stuff from the same menu. Recently someone suggested that the next big thing is mastering the last big thing. Which makes me wonder if I need to reconsider that menu, maybe it IS about the combinations. Maybe, I should try the Mu Shoo with the Lo Mein instead of the Orange Chicken.

I’ve said all of that to say this: I’m excited about Facebook Connect, hell, I’ve been excited about it since they announced it back in May. I’ve added a simple FBConnect plug-in to this blog, so now I can reach more people, and more people can find me. That means at work I can kill 2 birds with one stone. I can answer the “How do we get more readers to our blog?” and “How do we build our social network?” with an elegant combination. And that’s just the start. What about adding FBConnect to donation pages? Or Action Alerts?

I’m just starting to really think about he possibilities here without sounding like I’m drinking all the Kool-Aid at once. But that menu is looking tasty again, and that is pretty exciting.