I am not as connected to the non-profit world as I have been in the past. Some of this knowledge is older than I would like, but it is a start. If you know some great social networks related to social change, please leave a comment!

Top 5 Social Networks for Social Change

Current TV

Idealist

Facebook

Twitter

• Justcoz.org- Share information about your favorite charity
• Twitcause- Donate a Tweet to the cause of the week
• Fairttweets- Donate your extra characters to Fair Trade awareness

The Point

The donation doesn’t go through unless the campaign “tips”

The campaign may ask for $500, but you can only give $5. You pledge your support. When $500 worth of pledges have come in, the campaign tips, and the money is deducted from your account.

If you want to go beyond social networks then you will want to check out these social good campaigns by brands. We might detest it when a big corporation takes on a cause, but sometimes they do more help than hurt. The Red Campaign turns consumerism into a way to end AIDs.

How have you promoted social change on social networks?

Article written by Susantg

Susan Silver works as a copywriter and is available for contract or full-time opportunities. She is a weekly contributor to 12most.com in the media category. Her hobbies are web design & development.

Social Media and Social Activism

There are many reasons people give for why they won’t join a cause. You may have heard a few yourself. One of the most common you will hear during an election year is, “my vote doesn’t matter”.

I feel that social media lowers that resistance.

1. It is free
2. It can be done anonymously
3. It can be done in great numbers

The Hope for Mobile

Who is Beth Kanter

Beth was honored with the PepsiCo Women’s Inspiration Award in 2011.

I guess the other reason why I still read Beth’s Blog is because of my belief that marketing can be used for the social good. This is obviously the soul of Beth’s business. She could be working for Pepsi, Nike, or any other organization in a marketing department. She could be a consultant for anyone who came through the door, but she isn’t.

She works exclusively with non-profits.

Her achievements in this space could go on for a mile, but you can read them all on the Beth Kanter about page.

That is where I will end this discussion too.

If you haven’t yet subscribe to Beth’s Blog and follow her on Twitter @kanter

The Question Remains, Can Social Media Create Lasting Social Change?

Comments

• 02/21/2012, Beth Kanter writes:

  Susan, thanks so much for the kind words and writing about my work!

Article written by Susantg

Susan Silver works as a copywriter and is available for contract or full-time opportunities. She is a weekly contributor to 12most.com in the media category. Her hobbies are web design & development.

This week we will be moving to text-based interviews until I have a better setup.

Green Marketing

This weeks guest is Shel Horowitz of Green and Profitable.

He has a lifetime of experience in social activism related to Sustainability.

Sustainability is not an easy concept for me to explain…I know what it is not. It goes beyond environmentalism. It is about survival. It means adopting “green” practices so we can ensure a better future.

There are many implications for marketers and consumers about how we can make the world a better place to live.

It is these ideas that I will be exploring with Shel on Friday.

Mr. Horowitz latest book is, “Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet”

This Week’s Schedule

I am not qualified to talk about principles of Green Marketing. Instead on Tuesday and Wednesday I will be talking about Social Good & Social Media. I have asked Shel to share a few thoughts on this as well.

Tuesday: Discussion of Beth Kanter & The Networked Non-Profit

Wednesday: What Are the Social Networks for Social Change?

Thursday: Introduction to Shel Horowitz & Green Marketing

Friday: 10 Questions with Shel

What Are Your Questions for Shel Horowitz?

Article written by Susantg

Susan Silver works as a copywriter and is available for contract or full-time opportunities. She is a weekly contributor to 12most.com in the media category. Her hobbies are web design & development.

For myself, (not talking about what I do for clients) I am considering dropping down to following only a 100 people on Twitter.

Now that I have built a network… I want to see that network.

Share the awesome things they do and show my support.

Too many things are getting buried in status updates.

Developing a Social Media Policy

On 12most I read this insightful post by Jessica Malnik, “12 Most Telling Warning Signs that Your Community Manager is Clueless“.

In the comments I pointed out the importance of a Social Media Policy. Something that tells your customers just how they can expect to communicate with you on Social Media. Especially what hours you are available to give a response.

Sonia of Logallot also wrote a great post about her Social Media Rules.

Margie Clayman in a somewhat unrelated post talked about the expectations people develop in social media. Specifically she points out several times when people contacted her and asked why she didn’t tweet their posts. What can you do? Here are her thoughts.

All things considered I decided to develop a social media policy for myself. It seems like a good step and my mind was going there anyway. These posts just reinforced the idea in my head. I have a personal brand that I need to protect, but mostly it is for my sanity.

Do You Have a Social Media Policy?

Article written by Susantg

Susan Silver works as a copywriter and is available for contract or full-time opportunities. She is a weekly contributor to 12most.com in the media category. Her hobbies are web design & development.

A friend of mine was blowing up on me over the phone. Why? She had copy & pasted some text from word into her newsletter program, and now there weren’t any spaces! All her paragraphs were mashed together and there was no way she could send it out.

Oy, This must be a pet peeve for many. Lucky there is an easy work around that I learned early on when coding HTML. It is not an elegant solution, but it works and it should be in your toolkit too.

Lets introduce the two big players when it comes to formatting text in HTML

Non-breaking Spaces

These 6 characters pack a punch. You can create some extra space between words by using a simple non-breaking space and it won’t become another line. It is pretty special and not many people know about it.

Paragraph Tag

 <p> text </p> 

With the paragraph tag you need to mind your P’s. The tag is pretty powerful, but in the most basic sense it creates space around paragraphs. Often when we import text from a word processor these are the culprits that have messed everything up!

If you are finding a lot of weird spacing look for the <p> tag in an HTML view. Then you can simply delete the extra if you have too many spaces. Alternatively, you may need to add a few if you had my friend’s problem.

Your New Tool

This is what I really want to teach you today though. When you need multiple spaces around paragraphs then you need to use this code.

<p> &nbsp; </p>

A simple <p></p> often gets stripped by WordPress and other editors. By putting the non-breaking space in the editor thinks there is text between the paragraph tag. It seems really silly, but it works every time.

The best way to fix these errors is with CSS, but that is still over my head. This is all about teaching you what works. Even if it isn’t pretty!

What tricks have you learned for formatting your text?

Comments

• 02/22/2012, Bruce Sallan writes:

  Ugh, I write in WORD and if I try to post it directly from a Word doc, it's always overloaded with code...and then I'm lost.

  I am an Apply guy so now I just covert whatever I need to post to "plain text" via Text Editor. Simple...

• 02/22/2012, Susan writes:

  That is a great tip! I recently learned that you can use ctrl+shift+V to paste and it removes all formatting automatically. Haven't tried it yet.

Article written by Susantg

Susan Silver works as a copywriter and is available for contract or full-time opportunities. She is a weekly contributor to 12most.com in the media category. Her hobbies are web design & development.

Of course there is more to this story. Brian Vickery also works for a company called Mantis Technology. One of their specialties is Social Media Monitoring, our theme of the week. When talking to Brian this interested me the most as a subject because it is an important field with a lot of misconceptions.

In fact, I probably have to admit I have a few. Something I hope to correct by speaking with Brian today. Bloggers like me don’t always have all the facts on the topic. We use some make-shift solutions like Google Alerts, but that doesn’t match what companies use. I am quite interested to hear what it is like on the front lines!

Brian sent me a few links about his work with Mantis applicable to the subject of monitoring. Check these out:

Social Media Monitoring – Mantis Pulse Analytics – A Personal Perspective

Social Media – Football – Brand and Ball Protection

Social Media – Tennis – Defense to Offense

What sticks out to me among these posts is Brian’s passion for sports. He is a talented writer who has found a way to link what he loves with his job. That is a trait I admire and makes a dull subject into an interesting read.

Well, this post is a little late. My fault, but if you see this Friday morning please join Brian and I today on Google+. You can circle me to get a notification at 10am MST/9 AM PST/ 12 PM EST.

If you miss us this week, don’t worry. These discussions will be happening every Friday!

Comments

• 02/20/2012, Brian Vickery writes:

  I did enjoy our brief discussion on Friday, Susan. Thanks for including all of those blog post links - I had fun writing them.

  I like the challenge of applying sports analogies to social media and leadership concepts. And I definitely believe in the importance of social media monitoring!!

  We will have to do a Google+ Hangout and take a spin through Pulse Analytics some time.

Article written by Susantg

Susan Silver works as a copywriter and is available for contract or full-time opportunities. She is a weekly contributor to 12most.com in the media category. Her hobbies are web design & development.

How to set-up an Alert

It is pretty simple. Of course you are going to need a Google Account and I am guessing you probably have one of those. Just head over to Google Alerts.

As you can see you have several options at this point:

• Query- Your Keywords
• Result type- Blogs,News,Video,Discussion,Books or All
• How often- The Quantity of results
• How many- The Quality of results
• Deliver to- Defaults to email used to set-up the account

My Defaults

I’ll take you through the process of how I set-up an Alert for “Cirquedumot”.

Query

There are several topics you should be monitoring. If you are a blogger like me then you should be looking for mentions of your blog name. Not just to see who is talking about you, but to see how quickly Google indexes your blog content.

Result Type

Generally I set this to all no matter what my query. Change this if you are looking for specific types of content.

How Often

You get only a few options here. For most queries I choose daily. This wraps it up in one easily digestible piece. You can only choose weekly. In this example we want “as-it-happens”.

This means I will receive an email immediately when Google finds a new mention of “Cirquedumot”. This gives me a good sign of quickly the Search Engine indexes my content. After posting daily for one month, I can see that new content is indexed`the same day. I wouldn’t know that without an alert.

How Many

There are going to be certain topics where choosing “best results” is the right choice. If you were monitoring your blog keywords then this would be the best option. Alerts would show you the top results in your niche.

For this example though we want “all results”. We aren’t concerned about quality,but capturing links to all mentions of our blog.

The final product

Click to see image full-size

So Simple Monitoring

I am sure this is probably fairly easy for you, but don’t take it for granted. It is because Google Alerts is so easy to set-up that makes it powerful.

Social Mention is going to give you more access to the web then Google Alerts. For most of us Google is the web and will do for most of our needs.

Of course if you are running a business then you are going to need some more robust strategies!

Your Just In Luck Because we have Brian Vickery of Mantis Pulse Analytics to answer your questions!

He will be talking with the Cirquedumot community Friday at 10 am MST in a Google+ hangout. Please join us and leave a question below. You can also tweet them to @susan_silver .

Comments

• 02/16/2012, Lisa writes:

  I love Google alerts and social mention. Great ways to monitor topics and keywords.

• 02/16/2012, Bruce Sallan writes:

  I LOVE Google Alerts...has "alerted" me to many things I needed to know that I otherwise would not have! Good tutorial SS!

Article written by Susantg

Susan Silver works as a copywriter and is available for contract or full-time opportunities. She is a weekly contributor to 12most.com in the media category. Her hobbies are web design & development.

Yep, I have a certain bias as some one who believes strongly in word-of-mouth marketing. One think I have been encouraging people to do is to be braver in engaging in conversations online. If you don’t,you will get left behind. Users are expecting you to find them and respond to them.

That means doing your research and learning about your customers. Discover the best places to reach them and the language they use. When appropriate take the conversation to them,instead of passively updating them about the same information they can find somewhere else.

Social Mention finds conversations

Of course then you need to be able to find conversations and that is where Social Mention comes in. It is a free Search Engine that will find references to you on Blogs,Youtube,Twitter,and many other sites.

They also allow you to subscribe to alerts via email or rss feed.

This solves a big problem!

Most status updates only last a few seconds. If you miss a tweet or a Facebook post then you are likely to never see it again. Social Mention’s ability to send you instant updates is really important!

I highly suggest you run a search every 3-5 days so you don’t miss anything. This should be done in conjunction with Google Alerts and some form of backup you may be using for your social media activities.

What Social Mention Can Do For You

When you first arrive to Social Mention you will be greeted with a friendly search box.

Social Mention

If you click the “or select social media sources” link the gray box will appear that will allow you to choose specific sources to search.

From the front page just search your name, brand, blog,or username. What ever piece of information you are interested in. Here is a sample search for my username [@susan_silver] mentioned on Twitter.

http://socialmention.com/search?q=susan_silver&t=all&btnG=Search&src[]=twitter

Social Mention

You will notice some gray boxes on the right. This is the area where you can subscribe to feeds and alerts. You can even download some data that can be uploaded into an excel table.

What Social Mention Does

Social Mention frees data!

Hey,if you are like me and you can’t afford a fancy service to monitor your social media efforts then you will love Social Mention.

It is very crude, but it will get the job done. I especially love that it will track down links from blogs. Not every blog post sends out track backs nor are they optimized well enough to show up in a Google search.

This is where Social Mention really starts to shine.

Mentions of Cirquedumot on blogs

What will you search for?

Comments

• 02/15/2012, Bruce Sallan writes:

  Oy, Susan. This seems so good and smart. I am running out of hours in the day!

• 02/15/2012, Susan writes:

  I know! Technology is getting better, but I feel like I am getting slower.

Article written by Susantg

Susan Silver works as a copywriter and is available for contract or full-time opportunities. She is a weekly contributor to 12most.com in the media category. Her hobbies are web design & development.

Monitoring

Today’s post is going to be a simple introduction to the idea & concept of monitoring.

To me this is a pretty crucial aspect of working with Social Media. I am not going to argue the importance for business, that is obvious. I am straight up going to tell you that you will want to be doing this to grow your blog audience. I often think of it as a common courtesy!

So let’s define what this Monitoring word means to us.

Monitoring

“Social media monitoring is the active monitoring of social media channels for information about a company or organisation.” - From the Financial Times Lexicon

Unfortunately for us that is a more complicated subject than it sounds.

Imagine this, you are a community manager. Your main duty is to listen to users of your product on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Foursquare, Yelp, Blogs and any other medium you can think of! Not only that, but you need to be worried about customer service, branding, and act as the voice for your company on all those platforms. Then you have to be measuring the effectiveness or your efforts too. Are you getting the sense that this might be more complicated than a one sentence description?

I am telling you there is a magical art to doing it well.

Questions & Controversy

Social Media has made Monitoring easier as a simple search will bring up most mentions of a product/brand.

There are Two Big Issues:

Most conversations are happening offline.

How do you measure Social?

These two questions alone account for most of the debate surrounding monitoring that I have encountered. I hope that Brian will be a great resource for digging into these questions.

Related Concepts

Monitoring itself covers many related subjects. Here are few things you should know.

Dashboards

These refer to companies like Radian6 (the biggest) who have created a dashboard for tracking & monitoring brand mentions online. It is a pretty impressive piece of software (that I have not gotten to use). Many job advertisements in marketing will require experience with Radian6.

KPI

KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator. This is the Holy Grail of Social Media Monitoring, measurement. Everyone is looking to figure out what a “fan” is actually worth. Identifying a good KPI means being able to repeat your successes. That is really important to marketers who need to show they can get meaningful results for clients.

CRM

CRM means Customer Relationship Management. As you can see Monitoring usually is done in the name of customer service. If I mention a brand on Twitter then it is nice to hear something back. If I complain on Twitter then I should hear from someone qualified to speak on the company’s behalf.

Information Travels Faster isn’t just a song. It is a fact of modern life.

This Week’s Schedule

Tuesday – Tips on Using the Free Tool “Social Mention”

Wednesday- Setting up Google Alerts for Instant Notifications

Thursday- Introduction to Our Special Guest Brian Vickery

Friday- Google+ Hangout at 10am with Brian Vickery

Add Susan to Your Circles

Add Brian to Your Circles

I Hope You Will Join Us for All the Fun!

What Questions Do You have for Brian?

Bonus

Follow @ambercadabra

Amber Naslund is a former Employee of Radian6 and an Expert on CRM & Social Monitoring

She also blogs at BrassTack Thinking

Comments

• 02/13/2012, Brian Vickery writes:

  Susan, I'm looking forward to the hangout on Friday. Since Mantis has its own social media monitoring tool, it is definitely a topic I feel passionately about.

  Great idea introducing your readers to Google Alerts, too!

• 02/13/2012, Bruce Sallan writes:

  Gee BV, I thought you could only write about sports!

• 02/13/2012, Brian Vickery writes:

  Funny, Bruce. Yep - I painted myself into a corner with the sports analogies! Of course, we found creative ways to monitor sports like the World Series, Super Bowl and the NFL and NBA Seasons. Great when you can combine your passions!

• 02/15/2012, Susan writes:

  Awesome, I am so excited about this project and I am glad to have your support as the first guest!

• 02/15/2012, Rhianna writes:

  Certainlynfood for thought there stopping by from #commenthour

• 02/15/2012, Mental Mosaic writes:

  I've still not used Google + but this could get me there... 10am Friday in which time zone?

  Nice seeing you at #commenthour tonight! :) Tui

• 02/15/2012, Morgan Dragonwillow (@MDragonwillow) writes:

  It was nice seeing you on commenthour tonight!

  I wish I had the energy for everything that is necessary for running successful blogs and business. This sounds like it could be very helpful in keeping up with some of it.

  Peace, Morgan Riding the Blog Hopping Train. :D

• 02/15/2012, Susan writes:

  I need to correct it,but it is Mountain time. I hope to see you there!

• 02/15/2012, Susan writes:

  follow the tips for Tuesday & Wednesday and you will be off to a great start!

Article written by Susantg

Susan Silver works as a copywriter and is available for contract or full-time opportunities. She is a weekly contributor to 12most.com in the media category. Her hobbies are web design & development.

I stumbled upon this great post by Hubspot not to long ago, “31 Fluffy Buzzwords Marketers Overuse and Abuse”. One of the main purposes of this blog is to get this lint out of our collective belly button.

My family has found my interest in online marketing to be a superficial one. That is not entirely true. While there can be some cliques type elements, that is not all there is here.

I think far more we get tripped up by confusion. Most people just aren’t educated on the words marketers are using. savvy people than use that to intimidate others and build a reputation out of thin air. The best defense then is education! Something I hope to provide for my readers.

Hubspot’s List

Hubspot’s 31 Words Include:

• Personalization
• Listening
• ROI
• Viral
and
• Authentic

The Full List

I have a few that I would add:

• Reach
• KPI
• Analytics
• Paid Media
• Outreach

I have kept a Marketing Dictionary that explains and gives examples of the words.

It is still a little sparse and needs to be updated. I am hoping with the move to a new style of content creation that there will be more time to complete it. Let me know what words you would like to see defined in the comments.

What Words Trip You Up?

Comments

• 02/11/2012, Rhia Roberts writes:

  This article made me smile. I know all the words and how to use them in my professional field of education...but I knew very few of them from the perspective of marketing. Makes me wonder what marketing people make out of what I say...!

• 02/11/2012, Chasing Joy writes:

  I get tripped up with anything related to analytics and SEO.

• 02/11/2012, Chasing Joy writes:

  Great video too!

• 02/15/2012, Susan writes:

  AHa, will work on that Chasing Joy! Thanks for the input :D

• 02/15/2012, Susan writes:

  I wonder too...there is so much we take for granted. Especially where things can cross over. I spoke to someone the other day about "outreach" and we had totally different definitions! Could have been a big misunderstanding if we hadn't talked about it.

Article written by Susantg

Susan Silver works as a copywriter and is available for contract or full-time opportunities. She is a weekly contributor to 12most.com in the media category. Her hobbies are web design & development.