ARTICULATED

I’m at a Colorado Association of Funders daylong seminar on social media strategy. Hundreds of people from the state’s nonprofit community are here listening to author and consultant Beth Kanter, who is quite charming.

I’ve been tweeting live from the event with the hashtag #ztrain, one of about 20 people in the room doing so. Right now, I’m the guy I’ve made fun of before, the one with my eyes down pecking away rather than making eye contact with the live humans around me. Luckily, I’m charming, so I’m interacting with my table enough that they still seem to like having me around … even though they’re making fun of me for “twittering.”

The upside is that, because of the hashtag I’m using, I’m more or less identifying myself to other people in the room who also are tweeting from the conference. I couldn’t point them out, of course. But the whole dynamic is intriguing.  And maybe I’ll make a new friend or business contact out of it.

On a break, I just tried to explain all of this to a funny and fun copywriter sitting beside me. She was dying to know what the hell I’m doing. Her reaction to my explanation was quite entertaining.

I’m a counselor to an upstart, relatively small issue-advocacy nonprofit that will be watched and quite critical to the community it will serve. My little role is to urge the organization, since it’s largely building itself from the ground up, to seize its fresh slate-ness as an opportunity to capitalize on the power of smartly thought out social media strategy to contribute in a substantial way to the achievement of the organization’s loftiest goals.

Most small nonprofits, cash-strapped and overworked, remain woefully left behind by the social media bandwagon. So this project got me thinking. Let’s say a small nonprofit organization advocating on an issue you care about could start from scratch and think fresh about community engagement and how it does its work? What if it could entirely set aside inertia and those pesky organizational and cultural barriers? What five things would you have the organization do?

Below are my five things. They aren’t really social media ideas or tactics as much as they are principles for setting up the organization to let creativity flow in the area of today’s best movement-building. They are:

1. Recognize that “engaged community members” has become a more powerful measure today of capacity for issue-advocacy impact than more traditional notions of offline “dues-paying members,” “email address databases,” and the like. Think very carefully about what successful outreach really looks like now and tune the organization’s definitions of success accordingly.

2. Invest the time and resources to develop a sophisticated social media strategy. (Indeed it merits a full-blown strategy, the kind that takes time and effort to craft.) Define success explicitly and measurably. Make that success fundamental to the organization’s mission, goals, and measurable objectives.

3. Commit meaningful staff time and resources to the implementation of that social media strategy, with a heavy emphasis on individual content creation, active listening to influencers, and community management.

4. Incorporate social media-engagement metrics into the performance goals and objectives of staff members, including the executive director, and ensure that reward and compensation systems reflect those metrics. Develop incentives for board members and other committed volunteers to become community evangelists, replete with guidance on what success looks like.

5. Make the organization’s web strategy a component of its social media strategy, rather than vice versa. (How radical we can be when we start with a clean slate!) That means rethinking everything about the organization’s website. Chances are, far more real estate on that site should be devoted to real-time community-member activity and engagement, at the cost of static bits of pre-approved copy. No one is reading that stuff any more, anyway.

In a clean-slate scenario at the dawn of 2010, if an issue-advocacy organization wants to knock it out of the park, I believe it really has no choice but to make social media strategy integral to what it does. (That’s true even if social media strategizing and implementation are far outside the comfort zone of very smart, very qualified staff, board, funders, and consultants.)

I’m devoting a good amount of time to studying the latest thinking, guidance and examples of organizations – corporate, nonprofit and government – that have embraced the growth of social media to advance broader goals. I follow a bunch of social media thinkers and experts on Twitter, which really helps in discovering this kind of material.

Here are a very few examples of what I’m reading right now:

• This excellent blog post by Janet Fouts (“Do you need a corporate social media policy?). It provides links to the social media policies of some well-known corporations. For instance, here’s Intel’s.

• A detailed presentation of the Red Cross’s social media policy, as featured on the Beth Kanter blog “How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media.”

• The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) new “Transparency Blog.” I’m keeping a close eye on this one.

• The “How To” lists/channel on the preeminent social media website, Mashable.

• The social media “How To” articles channel on the Marketing Profs website (requires signup).

These only scratch the surface. But they are good basic reading and ongoing resources for anyone trying to wrap their head around what the future of communications, PR, public education, issue advocacy and marketing look like.

Check out this story by freelance writer Michael Estrin.

He lifts up three brands that “get” Twitter. I’m particularly intrigued by his description of the way Texas Instruments is using it. The company opened the door for customers with product questions to communicate directly with the Texas Instruments engineers that designed the product, via Twitter. It’s sort of call-center style dialogue, but directly from the horse’s mouth, and for all to see. What’s more, the engineering team ends up with insights they never would have gathered otherwise.

Estrin asserts the common denominator is “helpfulness” – licensing individuals internally to use Web 2.0 applications (like Twitter) to be helpful to the broader customer community … or by proxy, the marketplace. That very well put premise can apply in about any and every organization conceivable today.