Week 9 - Social Media Strategy

“Education: a debt due from present to future generations.” -- George Peabody

Neelima Pratap is clearing her debt by spreading education and supporting community development. As co-founder of the Grace Educational Trust, she and her 'partners in education' are giving children of a small village of Betim Ramnagar in Goa, India, the opportunity to break the poverty cycle. In partnership with a courageous social worker and counselor - Francis Dass - from India, Neelima started the organization with her own funds and resources, and has steadily built a community of donors / supporters who know her and/or are inspired by her work. And as is true of all worthy causes, the resources are always lagging behind the need.

Social media allows us to do things differently. Currently, the funds raised through Neelima's efforts (as well as her own resources) are used to support the organization's work in India. There is an opportunity to use social media, reach out to a community of contributors of educational content and instruction, and enable these contributions to directly and virtually support the work in India. Specifically, this means collecting digital educational resources as well as inviting educators' time contributions to deliver instruction in India over the internet or through mobile technologies. This model can be used both for the kids and for the professional development of teachers in India.

A quick SWOT: Grace has a great story to tell. Its current social media usage is at a very early stage, and resources are obviously a concern. But social media philanthropy is on the rise, and so is use of digital resources as well as mobile technologies for education. We can connect the trend with the need.

The plan to implement Grace's social media strategy needs to be sensitive to the organization's constraints. Social Media is not "free". There is work and investment involved in building and maintaining relationships with the community. So in Grace's case, the 'slow and steady' principle needs to be observed. The strategy of building a contributors' community can utilize a careful and incremental process:

• Listen to where the relevant conversations about early education are occurring (e.g. build a Google reader page of interest)
  
• Find key motivated contributors and engage them by soliciting advice on specific questions or commenting on their contributions to existing educational communities
• Relate back about how their contributions helped the organization
  
• Use as much community resources as possible (e.g. organizations like Taproot which help connect non-profit organizations with professional pro bono services)
  

The four pillars of a social media strategy - communicate, collaborate, educate and entertain - can all work together in the above model to effectively achieve the organization's goal of sustainability. The traffic from the targeted educational communities coming back to Grace's site, and conversion rates (e.g. newsletter sign-ups, contributions in kind, or donations) can be tracked with analytics. These measures/ metrics and reports can be used to refine the strategy.

The full circle of an effective social media strategy follows good business practice: define goals and measures, use the appropriate tools to support the goals, monitor and evaluate, and refine goals and strategy. The social media strategy is not and should not be an independent component, rather an integrated and complementary part of the overall business model and strategy. Life is, after all, one indivisible whole.

Week 8 – Social Media Measurement

“The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor; he took my measurement anew every time he saw me, while all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.” - George Bernard Shaw

The debate continues on what model (if any) can measure the effectiveness of marketing/ advertising. The challenge is that we first need to figure out what we need to measure. AllBusiness warns us: “Advertising is not an exact science. There's no precise way to measure the success of an ad campaign.” And while we're trying to figure things out, (quite annoyingly) the world continues to shift in its habits, mechanisms and the factors that influence consumer/ audience behaviour. The one good thing is: rate of change in technology is somewhat helping come up with new tools and services to facilitate measurement of various factors – these are our clues. And enough clues exist about the potential of social media's effectiveness to achieve some goals. So like good investigators, we take the clues, blend them well with expertise/ caution/ intelligent analysis, and produce the 'smoothy' answer to our whodunnit (i.e. what did the trick to help achieve our objectives, or not).

The process for measuring social media effectiveness is similar to any systematic cause-and-effect based activity. Answering a series of questions, thoughtfully and methodically, and acting on the answers with discipline is a time-tested technique. Works as well for weight-loss or personal financial management as for measuring social media effectiveness:

Pre-experiment:

1. What do I want to accomplish? (objectives)

2. How will I know when I've done it? (SMART success targets/ metrics; measurement mechanisms)

3. Where am I now? (baseline or starting measurement)

4. How do I get to where I want to be? (strategy and plan)

Post-experiment:

1. Are we there yet/ how far am I? (final or interim measurement)

2. Are my measurements reliable? (intelligent analysis)

3. How strong is the relationship between my strategy and my outcomes? (ditto)

4. What else/ what more do I need to do? (refine objectives, strategy, plan, tool selection, analysis... or my favourite: do nothing!)

While each step is important (and many have sub-steps), the significance of #2 and #3: understanding the data and strengths/ weaknesses of tools in piecing together the story cannot be over-stressed. Many a distorted number has led to many a distorted decision.

If all this is making you go “but where's the social media in this long diatribe”... well, there are two general paths in life. There's the “fly by the seat of one's pants” way. By definition, the method (or lack thereof) is unique to each situation and therefore as “tinglingly” (my word) exciting as a new romance. So fans of this philosophy may induce in me a heart-flutter and, at times, envy (because it can and sometimes does work). But this path of life has not yet gotten my followership (snacking habits notwithstanding).

And then there is the Stephen Covey way. He gave us 7 principles of highly effective people. Not 7 adventures or 7 short-cuts. But 7 principles. This method decreases the heart flutter, and increases the likelihood of repeatedly producing desired results. The process outlined above for measuring social media effectiveness is also a principle-based approach, therefore it is not specific to social media, and doesn't sound very flashy or exciting. When it's our clients' or audience's money on the line though, I'd rather decrease my heart flutter, and theirs.

Week 7 - Publishing Plus!

Unavoidably, I missed class, seeing everyone, hearing about the integrative week experiences. And spent a frustrating but eventually rewarding few days trying to figure out this video publishing process from PowerPoint to YouTube. Finally there. The results of my humble, and clearly newbie, publishing efforts are on my newly created YouTube page. I also used the technique in one of our earlier readings to make it private using un-intuitive tags. Just for fun.