Thanks for the follow! Please join me on Facebook, too! {link}

Well… no.

Now I’m not saying the auto-response is a bad thing. If used effectively, it can be valuable real estate for connecting with your new followers. But the last thing we want to read is another boring sales pitch, which is essentially what the message above is.

So how do you make it more effective?

If you really want to use an auto-DM to direct new fans to your Facebook page, then tell me why. I need a reason. What can I get on Facebook that I won’t get through the Twitter account I just followed? Nothing? Then why would I follow both?

Which leads me to a secondary point: your Twitter and Facebook streams should not be duplicates of each other, for the exact reason I just gave. If they’re not different, then why should anyone follow both?

So diversify a bit. Tell me to follow your Facebook page for weekly trivia contests (eBook/ticket/anything giveaways or skip the prize and do it for fun), local event announcements (via Facebook Events), photo albums, testimonials, or more info about you (since all three are easier to curate on Facebook). Be creative. Each platform has its abilities and strengths. Just give me a why.

The same goes for auto-responses telling me to visit your blog, join your email list, or buy your eBook. Engage me.

Have you ever received any clever auto-response messages? What would you say on yours?

But I don’t think that works the way we think it does anymore.

We can’t just go from Point A to Point B and call it a day. As Sir Ken Robinson put it, the paradigm is changing, and we need to keep up.

It means realigning our thinking with how the world works now instead of how it worked over a century ago. And for all our college-bound youth, it means changing how you pursue your dreams.

We’re not cogs in a machine

A big piece of advice I always wanted to give my high school self was: “Figure out what you want to be. Don’t wait. Research what you like and pick a career early.”

But that’s wrong! How could I possibly define the rest of my life at 16? A rare few do know what they want early, but no one should ever be expected to know. It doesn’t matter if you’re 16, 25, 42, or 70. We should not be making set-in-stone decisions for our future selves because it’s impossible to know what our future hopes and needs will be.

Be well-rounded and flexible

What we should be doing instead is building adaptability. Follow your interests, but keep an eye on how everything relates. Train yourself to look for transferrable skills.

Adaptability is arguably the most important skill that an adult in today’s world can have. Opportunities come and go at the speed of sound. You lose your job. You get a new one. The market changes. Or: you just get bored.

You need to be allowed to change your mind. Humans weren’t born to do one thing for their whole lives. We were born to explore and experience and learn.

This ain’t no line dance

Careers are not ladders. Careers are networks of possibilities, interests, strengths, and experiences.

Don’t pigeon-hole yourself. Don’t start a career just so your future self can inherit it.

Pursue what interests you now and challenge yourself to learn new skills every day. Work on things that excite you. Dip your toe in things that frighten you. Showcase what you’re good at. Build yourself up as a well-rounded, passionate person. Take care of your current self, because that’s all you can really know.

Your Turn:

Has your education or career turned out the way you expected so far? How is it the same? How is it different? Answer in the comments!

Photo by aye_shamus on Flickr

You’re at the point where you know blogs do great things for your website. Blogs are especially good for nonprofits, where budgets are restricted but building community is really, really important.

But where the heck do you find time to think of ideas, let alone actually write them?

Let me save you the first step! Here’s my list of “Stuff That Makes a Great Blog Post.”

• News – This part is pretty easy. Chances are, you already have a newsletter. You can even recycle a bit of the writing, just remember to keep the posts short and conversational. Imagine you’re talking to a friend!
• Human Stories – Think spotlights. Interview your program directors or interns or receptionist. Ask them about why they’re involved and why it matters to them. What’s their job like? What’s their favorite part about working with you? Do they have a favorite memory? These could be animal spotlights too, if your organization works with them. The interview might be harder, though.
• Photos – Super short posts! They’re quick, especially if you have a Flickr account to store and share your photos online. Post a photo, say a few words, and voilà. Instant update that people will almost always “read.”
• Backstage Shenanigans – This makes perfect sense for a performing arts nonprofit (keep the shenanigans kid-friendly, though!) but it applies to anyone. What happens when you’re goofing off preparing for your next event? Do you have a pre-event tradition? Where are the friendships among your staff? Talk about the fun stuff.
• Did You Know…? – This can be anything relevant and interesting. If you work with animals, post some fun facts about dogs or horses or guinea pigs. If you’re on stage, talk about the different things that go into a production, from set design to stage managers. Pick something cool that you’ve learned yourself.
• Event Recaps – These can be simple stories designed to make everyone who wasn’t there jealous, filled with photos and great moments. Or, if you’re a little more daring, post about what went well and what you learned for next time. Transparency is a huge trust builder. Keep it positive. Either way, readers will appreciate you sharing.

Remember: blog posts don’t have to be long and complicated. Some can be as short as a photo and a caption (or even just a photo!). Just keep an eye open for things that would make someone say “Cool!” Even if it’s not something you think is neat because you’ve been there X number of years.

If you’re still stumped, think about this question (and answer in the comments!):

What would you like to know about your favorite nonprofit that you don’t get anywhere else?

Sharing is what social media is all about. But it’s not totally about giving, either. Sharing also helps you more than you may realize!

Give a little, get a little. You can maximize your own exposure by promoting others. This helps you because:

• You’re providing relevant and interesting content to your followers – whether it’s your content or not
• You’re generous and thoughtful, which are always good qualities
• There’s a good chance the person or organization you mentioned will thank you for it publicly, which means you might gain a few more followers from their list

So how do you do it? Here are the methods for two of the most popular social sharing sites to get you started.

On Twitter

If you share a link you got from someone else, add “via @yoursource” or something like that to your tweet (where “yoursource” is the Twitter handle of the person you got the link from). You can also simply re-tweet it, either using the old “RT @yoursource” format or the newer “Re-Tweet This” buttons that appear on Twitter and several dashboards like HootSuite or TweetDeck.

No matter how you give credit to your tweeps, your sources will be notified that you mentioned them. Sometimes, they’ll even tweet their thanks in front of all their own followers. Win-win!

At the very least, you go down in their book as someone they appreciate.

On Facebook

The sharing tools on Facebook require you to be friends with or be a fan of the person or page you want to tag. If you’re posting as a page, you still need to be a fan of your target on your personal profile.

After that, just put the “@” symbol before someone’s name or the name of a page your status update. The “@” will trigger a drop-down menu full of profiles and pages matching what you’re typing. Choose your target, and click on it to add a link to that page.

When you publish the status, it will appear on your wall and on the wall of whoever or whatever you mentioned. Can anyone say free advertising?

I'm praising the ASU Lodestar classes as well as advertising to anyone who might look at their page that I went through training and may be available to connect!

Make sure what you write is appropriate. It’s also a good idea to click through your link after you post it to make sure it looks good on the neighboring wall.

Pay It Forward

Mentioning your sources and tagging people and pages will ultimately improve your online image, just as being generous to your colleagues is an important part of networking. In doing others a favor by providing them a shout-out or promoting their content, you can get a little good publicity for yourself. You’re perpetuating the wheel of gratitude and sharing.

The cycle of sharing starts with you.

Just last Friday, The Collaboration Prize announced its third annual winner (congratulations to the Adoption Coalition of Texas!). This annual competition is working hard to encourage collaboration and highlight outstanding partnerships in our communities.

‘Collaboration’ is one of the big buzzwords in nonprofits now. It makes sense: when budgets stretch thin, it’s important to maximize your resources. The Collaboration Prize itself is a joint effort by several pioneering organizations, The Lodestar Foundation has partnered with the AIM Alliance, the Foundation Center, La Piana Consulting, and other foundation and nonprofit leaders to support the 2011 Prize.

By working together, you’re boosting the potential of both organizations. Two heads are better than one, right? How about three? Or five?

It’s amazing how many resources are shareable. Have extra toiletries from your last donation drive? Give them to an organization that can use them. Need more volunteers for an event? Invite your friends from the nonprofit down the street to participate with their volunteers. In fact, why don’t you plan the event together and make it even bigger and better? And things go on from there.

Yet it’s not just about sharing supplies, funds, or even human resources. There are also hidden benefits. By working together, you’re combining your reputation with theirs, their public support and branding with yours. You’re sharing marketing and word-of-mouth, and we all know how valuable getting your name out there is when looking for support.

So how do we get started? Isn’t it hard to find partners?

Actually, it’s pretty easy these days. The ease of communication has advanced steadily over the past two decades, but it went up exponentially as soon as social media hit the internet. Communication is now interactive rather than passive (for more on this concept, check out my blog post on how social media makes the world accessible).

With social media, organizations can create profiles and interact with local, national, and international partners in a myriad of ways. It starts as casual chat, sharing links and information, then maybe an idea is mentioned and discussed. An opportunity is discovered. A partnership is born.

Plenty of resources are appearing to help guide and promote collaboration. If you’re completely lost, the Nonprofit Collaboration Database is a great place to start. It’s packed with helpful information as well as searchable database of nonprofits who are looking for partners.

A great book on the subject came out late last year, so if you’re into reading, check out The Networked Nonprofit by Beth Kanter and Allison Fine.

So whether you’re social media savvy or not, I encourage you to start looking around for opportunities. Give and ye shall receive. Support each other. Foster new ideas. Think outside the box to further your mission. Just make the connection!

This post was originally written by me for the ASU Lodestar Center nonprofit management blog.

1. Invite feedback, positive or negative. Nonprofits are community organizations, so trust your community and they will trust you.
2. When someone criticizes you publicly, respond as soon as possible in the same forum (Facebook, Twitter, your blog, etc.)
3. Be polite and humble. Thank them for their input and let them know what you’ll do about it.
4. Note: if the comment is just someone trying to cause trouble, don’t take it too personally. Here’s a simple write-up on how to identify internet trolls and what to do about them. Bottom line: don’t worry. Your real supporters can spot them and ignore them, too (or leap to your defense!).

Don’t be afraid of negative feedback. A savvy nonprofit organization can use it to their advantage and come out better for it. After all, social media is about engaging your supporters and giving them a voice to help you.

Engage me in the comments! Have you ever seen a negative feedback issue get out of control? Could anything be done to turn it around?

I was invited to speak to the management team at a local nonprofit this week. They asked me for a boiled-down introductory class for social media marketing. So this is what I gave them.

The PowerPoint presentation is short, but the meeting ran over an hour with questions and discussions about anything from best practices to what kinds of topics to post about. There’s a lot of room for creativity in your social media strategy, and the details should be different for every organization. It’s part of what I love about consulting!

What do you think are the most important lessons for organizations to learn when starting with social media?

If you have any questions about this or are thinking about developing your own social media strategy, please leave a comment on this post or contact me!

The answer is the interview, but do you know why? Because that’s when you get to know someone as a person.

So how do you prepare to ace the interview, so to speak?

I’m applying this week at a local nonprofit in Phoenix and the first thing I did after reviewing the job posting was look through my contacts to see if I had any connections there. I needed some information.

I checked the nonprofit’s company profile on LinkedIn. They had employees listed, but none of them were connected to me.

I went through everyone I’ve met at my nonprofit classes over the past 8 months.

I ran through my recent social media activity in my head, trying to remember if I’ve had any conversations related to this nonprofit or their field.

I asked a few personal friends.

Lo and behold, my husband had a friend whose mother had worked there for many years! It kind of makes me wish I had asked me husband first.

The connection is a bit of a stretch, but what you’re looking for isn’t necessarily a recommendation or a bump to the top of the resume pile (though that would be a dream come true!). Your most valuable resource at this point is… insight.

You want to know what the company is about – the work environment, what their values are, and what kind of candidates they usually hire. When it comes down to it, a personality match is what’s going to set you apart from all the other applicants who look just like you on paper. As the saying goes, companies hire people, not resumes.

You also want to find out if the company is a good fit for you. Is the company laid-back, but you work better in a fast-paced, high energy environment? Do they support career growth, or does everyone usually stay in the same place? Knowing the answers to these kinds of question will ultimately help you get the job you want at the place you want.

So do any of you have any stories about how networking helped you in a job application or business deal? What might be some of the downsides to putting energy into networking? Please share in the comments!

What makes a social media brand successful? Is it posting on Facebook at least once per day? Having lots of Twitter followers? Always being first to spread the news on your blog? Do you need a great logo?

These are all good things, but they’re not the heart of what makes a social media brand great.

Whether you’re a nonprofit, for-profit, or an individual trying to make a name for yourself, the basic elements of success are the same. Here’s my list of 10 things you must be to have a truly remarkable social brand.

1. Personable – You must be likable! Out of all the media outlets from traditional newspapers to professional TV news channels, social media is the most relaxed. You must be friendly and engage people so they want to listen to you.
2. Consistent - Whether you have one employee or many updating your social media, your brand’s voice must be consistent. Is it funny? Authoritative? Down-to-earth? Do you blog about personal things, or keep it strictly business? Discuss these questions with your team and agree on them.
3. Focused – Your company has a mission, right? So should your social media! Don’t just write about anything and everything. Make sure it’s relevant or serves a purpose. Even if you let your employees write about personal things, they should write with the mission in mind.
4. Creative - No one wants to hear the same thing over and over again. Keep looking for new ways to engage your audience through real life updates, links to interesting material, live events, polls, contests, discussion questions, or anything else that can relate back to your mission.
5. Transparent - Be open with your followers. Share the ups and downs! Not only do people love hearing “behind-the-scenes” stories, it’s a great way to build loyalty.
6. Sincere - Don’t fake it. Don’t pretend to be something you’re not. People can see right through you, trust me.
7. Interesting – A good rule of thumb is: if you don’t want to read it, why should your followers? Keep it relevant, entertaining, or informative – or all three, if possible!
8. Helpful – People follow businesses and nonprofits because they want to know more about them, or they want to be entertained, or maybe they want to learn something. It’s your job to figure out what they want and then give it to them.
9. Modest – Social media is advertising, but that doesn’t mean you should be talking about how great you are all the time. It’s annoying. Even if you really are the greatest thing since sliced bread, no one will listen to you.
10. Grateful – This goes hand-in-hand with modesty. Give credit where credit is due! Thank people when they re-tweet your messages or comment on your blog. Acknowledge your biggest fans every once in a while. Don’t thank people so often that you sound insincere, but don’t ever forget to remember the guys who help you.

For about the last 24 hours, reports that Facebook is down have been popping up on Mashable, Twitter, tech blogs, and pretty much anywhere else you look on the web. I’m sure they have dozens of IT guys rushing to fix the problem as we speak.

It seems last week’s social media blackout experiment at Harrisburg University was a little prophetic! But that experiment was confined to one university. Today’s Facebook blackout is no experiment – and it’s global.

So what does that mean for everyone?

At first, I was a little disappointed because I couldn’t get into Facebook itself. Then, more and more things started popping up outside of Facebook that I couldn’t do anymore.  I started to realize that Facebook was a big part of how I participate in the world.

I asked myself why one website would have such a big impact on my day and I came up with two answers.

1) Social media is a big part of how people interact with each other in the modern world. This goes for businesses and nonprofits, too. Facebook is part of how people connect.

2) Even though social media is important, it’s also critical that you diversify your brand identity and marketing.

The Network – why social media is important

The social media is all about building connections between ideas. We share content and stories with our friends. We link our Facebook account to Twitter and LinkedIn. We blog about ideas and link to other blogs and articles. It’s all a big web (hence, the World Wide Web). So, when one of the pieces breaks, all of the connections surrounding it lose a little of their strength.

A broken Facebook isn’t the end of the world, but it does mean it’s harder for me to share information with my network. When your mission is to be a source of interesting stories and nonprofit tips, that’s a big problem.

Even this blog post will be affected, because I always announce new updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to generate traffic. I’ll have to remind myself to update Facebook when it’s working again. But who knows how much traffic I’ll lose because of the blackout?

On a more personal and slightly petty note, I also can’t log in to my Goodreads account, because I forgot my password a long time ago and started relying on the “Facebook Connect” button to get access. That’s my own fault, but it shows how Facebook has integrated itself all over the internet through “Like” and “Connect” and “Share” buttons. You don’t realize you rely on them until they’re gone.

Blackout

When Harrisburg University conducted their social media blackout experiment, they got mixed reviews.

On UWire.com, Danielle Huppke wrote that we should all try to live without social media for a day “in order to find the real pleasure in living.”

Alex Priest, in a guest post for eBranding.me, argues that blacking out social media is taking a step backwards. Instead, he challenged the university to encourage innovation and forward-thinking by using only social media.

I tend to agree with both. Yes, it’s easy to get lost in front of the computer and forget to go outside and interact the old fashioned way. On the other hand, social media is a powerful tool to connect with others in a way that was never possible before.  But we shouldn’t be forcing ourselves into one mold or the other, either backwards or forwards.

The key is balance.

Diversify – and come out with a stronger brand

Even though it’s causing a lot of problems, this temporary outage does have at least one good point: it shows how important it is to diversify your online strategies.

Diverse strategies have been important to business since long before social media, and it still applies now. As the old saying goes, “Don’t put all your eggs into one basket.”

If your business or nonprofit thinks they can get by on just Facebook or just Twitter or just email, you’re missing something. They’re all important to the puzzle, and they all supply something different. I even think traditional mail marketing has an important place in any marketing campaign.

To be really successful – and to be ready when one network or another crashes like today – you should make a point of having multiple links to your followers.  Don’t rely on just one way to reach them, even if it is the best way.

After all, do you really want to have “just” anything? Or do you want to be a rockstar in your field?