Google is a great way to search for your audience. Three free tools can give you loads of actionable information on your audience: Google Alerts, Google AdPlanner, and Google Analytics. As you identify interests and common keywords, you can set up Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts) to let you know when those keywords are being used.

To make sure you’re using the right keywords, check out Google AdPlanner (www.google.com/adplanner). You can research keywords without having to set up ads. Sarah Hines from Shines & Jecker Labs, pointed out that the words you think work for you might be vastly different from what people are actually searching on. She gave the example that employees of the Fort William State Park in Maine, might try to make their information easy to find for people search on “Fort William State Park.” But doing some research may show that there are 20 million more searches for “Portland Headlight.” Obviously, it would serve them well to make sure they use “Portland Headlight” in their keywords and marketing too!

Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool, also free. You put some code on your website, and it can give you easy to read reports on a wide variety of data. You can see your overall visits, pageviews, and the average time spent on site. You can see where in the world people that visit your site come from. You can see what types of web browsers and mobile devices they’re using. You can see  how people are getting to your site (directly, through a search engine, or from other sites) and you can see what pages they’re finding. You can see what keywords they’re using. You can even drill down to see if people from Facebook spend more time on your site than people coming from Twitter or from a search engine.

I said it was a powerful tool!

All of this might seem incredibly overwhelming. And it is. Fortunately, you can find this information in many places. You could look at your current audience or customers to get much of this information. You could look at your competitors or similar organizations to see who they’re targeting. And you can look at the benefit you add to people’s lives. This is already in your marketing literature. The changes you are actually producing in people’s lives can provide good information on your audience.

Katya Andresen, author of Robin Hood Marketing: Stealing Corporate Savvy to Sell Just Causes, says one way to do quick research is find out what magazines and periodicals your audience is reading. Then get as many of each as you can and pull out all the ads. Stick the ads up on a wall and look for the common themes and images. Companies advertising in magazines are often spending millions of dollars. You can use this technique to benefit from their research.

When considering what tools to be using, it’s important to know who your target audience is. While we all would like to think our product, service, or mission is for everyone, focusing on “everyone” is a sure way to drive your business or nonprofit into bankruptcy.

So ask yourself: who are you trying to reach? In a traditional business, this would probably be answered by describing your perfect customer?  Is it a man or a woman? What age? How much are they making? Are they married or single? With children or not? Are they employees or entrepreneurs? Do they enjoy life or are they miserable? Where do they hang out online? Where to they hang out offline?

If you’re a nonprofit this might be a bit more challenging. You might have your perfect “client,” your perfect “donor,” your perfect “board member, and your perfect “staff.” Take the time to jot down the specific characteristics that make them “perfect.”

Chances are really good that your perfect customer is on the web. At a recent social media conference, Sarah Hines of Shines & Jecker Labs gave these statistics:

• 78% of Americans use internet daily
• 48% of Americans have a profile on a social media site
• 57% of woman use the internet daily
• 60% of consumers check websites first, 30% check social media first

She went on to give these additional ideas to consider as you try to understand your audience:

• Location
  Where are they based? Can you give them local insider tips that they’ll understand? Are they international? English-speaking or multi-lingual?
• Interests
  What do they like? Use these keywords in social media sites.
• Position/Role
  Are they in charge of an organization? A department? You’ll want to talk more formally to people who may be trying to show your work to their boss. But in many situations a less formal “voice” may be more appropriate.
• Information
  Where do they look for authoritative information? Are you establishing a presence there?
• Life Priorities
  What do they value? Family? Religion? Community Service? Money? These are all critical in helping you shape your story.
• Emotional State
  Are they stressed when they seek you out? Angry? Hurting? Happy?
• Demographics
  It will behoove you to get as clear a sense as possible about their ages, their level of education, their salary, and their family stats

All of your objectives should then be translated into getting someone to do something. Do you want them to click on a link? Sign up for your email? Buy a product? Refer the service to their friends? Comment on your blog?

These are all things you can easily measure. Some common key metrics are:

• Site visits
• Page views
• Average page views per visit
• Time spent on your site
• Number of subscribers to your email list
• Number of subscribers to your blog
• Number of your followers/friends/network
• The number of inbound links—how many sites are linking back to you
• Number of clicks on a link
• Number of “retweets”
• Amount of cash generated by a landing page
• Growth in affiliates to your program
• Amount of site visits coming from search engines or other specific websites (like Facebook)

Set goals and monitor them regularly. Weekly, monthly, or quarterly as appropriate. As you measure these stats, you’ll learn where your ROI is coming from, how to communicated to elicit the desired response, and how to allow your employees and staff to have their own “voice” in their online use.

You need a plan. Without a plan you have no way to measure if it’s worth your time. Just “getting on the Twitter” because you keep seeing it talked about on CNN isn’t a plan.

A great place to start is to define some goals for your use of social media. Ask yourself why you want to get involved in social media.

• Perhaps you’re in sales. Social media can be a great way to research buyers. You can actually hear what they’re saying about your product and products like yours. And you can learn a lot about their likes, dislikes, even their demographics. Sales people also can use social media to generate new leads, track customer conversions, or even test ways to encourage customers to increase their order size.
• Are you in marketing? Social media can be a great way to enhance your organization’s brand. You can use it to get PR. Or to make your website come up more quickly in search engine results.
• Are you in HR? Being proficient at social media can help you attract cool new employees that will really move your company forward. And social media can give you great research tools to find out more about the person you’re thinking about hiring.
• Are you in customer support? Great! There are famous examples of companies creating loyal followings because their customer support was actively engaged in social media.
• Are you looking for a way to increase repeat customers? Building a personality online can be a way to keep customers engaged between sales and increase customer loyalty. You may even find these tools help those customers become evangelists of your product or service.
• Are you simply looking for your own career development? Social media is a terrific way to establish yourself as an expert. You can showcase your expertise and have others talk about you for you.
• Or maybe you’re just intrigued with these tools and you want to play with them to see if any fit you. That’s great too!

It’s so important to start with your objectives, not with the tools. Technology is moving so quickly, it’s easy to get caught up in “shiny object syndrome.” Like the dog in Pixar’s movie “Up” who lost all focus when he thought a squirrel was nearby, we can easily get distracted by the latest and flashiest website. Resist this temptation.

To quickly know if your focus is on the objectives, look at your goals and see if they would still stand if all the social media tools (like Facebook and Twitter) crashed today. Would your company still try to generate more leads? Or would you still want to position yourself as an expert? If so, you’re starting at the right place.

Once you have your objectives, try to choose tools that will be best suited to help. If you’re in an audio/visual field, YouTube, Vimeo, or Flickr might be more obvious places to start than Twitter. If you’re trying to position yourself as an expert, expanding your connections on LinkedIn and using their “Answers” feature might make more sense than talking about last night’s party on Facebook.

Rather than starting with the tools, it’s important to start with your organizational objectives. Questions like these can help:

• What is your organization’s mission?
  If you exist to drill wells in developing countries, your strategy needs to rally around that . No matter how many other opportunities come up, if they pull you away from your mission, they’re distractions.
• What do you want to accomplish? What kind of outcomes do you want?
  There are really only three types of nonprofit communication:
  • Cultivation—raising awareness and educating people on your cause
  • Solicitation—asking people to give time, talent, or treasure
  • Stewardship—thanking people for giving and showing them what a great investment they made

While all nonprofits want to raise money, if people don’t even know you exist. In that case, measuring fans on a Facebook page or followers on a Twitter account might be the kind of outcomes you want to measure.

If you are in a solicitation campaign, your ultimate outcome will be how much money is raised. But to see if your social media is an effective part of your strategy, you want to measure how much traffic those sites are driving to your website’s donation page.

• Who do you want to reach?
  For instance, if you want to reach more donors, it’s helpful to have a grasp on who is currently donating. Are your donors typically men or women? What generation: WWII? Silent? Boomer? Xer? Millenial? Where do they typically live?

You could even get as specific as finding out what their normal incomes are, what magazines they tend to read, and how much education they tend to have.

The more information you know, the easier it is to pick the right tools to reach them.

Another tool that can help is called a SWOT analysis. Taking a look at your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats can bring amazing clarity to the strategy you should take.

• What are your organizational strengths? Weaknesses?
  
  We’re all good at some things and not good at others. Be honest about these. What are you really good at? What do you do better than any other organization? It may feel like bragging but you’ll just need to get over that. The people you want to reach need to know why you’re worth paying attention to.

  And what aren’t you so great at? What do other organizations do better than you? Most of us don’t like looking at these. Some of the weaknesses you’ll want to fix. But feel free to not fix them all. Your organization can’t be all things to all people. Anyone that’s visited Durgin-Park in Boston’s Quincy Market knows that even rude wait staff can be repackaged as a “part of the experience.”

  While you don’t need to trumpet your weaknesses as Durgin-Park did, resist the urge to try to hide them. People on social media appreciate authenticity. And many take glee in exposing anything less than that. Rest assured, in today’s age anything you try to hide will be found out anyway.

• What represents organizational opportunities in the marketplace?
  I firmly believe every economy has opportunities. If your industry is in a downturn because it’s becoming obsolete, you may have the opportunity to position your organization to play on nostalgia. Whatever the case is, look at your strengths and weaknesses and brainstorm things that you could lay hold of.
• What are the threats?
  The threats can be external (economy, competitors, new technology) or internal (staffing issues, lack of board harmony, technophobia). Be open about these as you develop your strategy.

After you gone through a SWOT analysis, you need to determine what direction is best to build on your strengths and take advantage of your opportunities.

The great news is, your organization has probably done all this work. Check with the people that head up your marketing and your fundraising. (Or, if you’re in a one person shop, have a great chat with yourself!)

Taking a step back to see the big picture will help you focus your social media strategy. Perhaps you planned on using social media to drive donations but now you see that you need to improve employee morale first. Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center in Boston found that being involved in the hospitals Facebook page helped him communicate with employees on the third shift. One time, he was able to address their concerns before they became an issue.

Some additional thoughts:

• It’s far too easy to get caught up in the tools. 10 years ago, Yahoo! Groups was all the rage. Today it’s Facebook and Twitter. In five years who knows what it’ll be.
• What are the outcomes you want? What are you trying to accomplish?
• This will help you determine where to focus your efforts. LinkedIn may be more appropriate than Facebook.

You can use the tools to find new donors, to identify potential new employees, to support existing caregivers, to strengthen donor loyalty, or even to establish your organization as a trend setter in its field.

I recently heard a speaker say that if you put a bunch of people on a field, they’ll probably just mill around. If you toss them a ball, a few may kick it around to pass the time. But if you put nets on either end of the field and paint some white lines, people start playing a common game. The parameters give context to their experience. As a result, they’re all on the same page.

A good strategy creates those parameters.

Often nonprofits get excited about a tool like Facebook and even start using it, without defining a specific outcome. So the staff gets thrilled because the page has 250 fans; but their board isn’t impressed because they don’t see any new donations resulting from the page. “Didn’t Obama raise $500 million through Facebook? When will we?”

Both sides get disillusioned with the tools and get a little hurt too all because the expected outcomes weren’t defined.

A clear strategy can avoid that.

In addition, focusing exclusively on a tool like Facebook leaves you out in the cold if should ever go down. A defined strategy will keep you from being a one trick pony. If one site goes down, you won’t be sunk. And you’ll be more aware of other sites that might be even better suited to getting you where you want to go.

“Always be creating content. Content is the currency of social media.” -David Wells, founder of www.SocializeYourCause.org

In the social media age, content is king. So we need to be creating content all the time.

This doesn’t mean we necessarily have to do much more than we’re currently doing. But it does require we think differently about what we’re already creating. Rather than a static homepage that never changes, we may want to have a home page that features the stories in our latest newsletter or view book. When our CEO or board chair speaks, we may want to record them for an audio offering on the site. Or take a quick video of them to upload to YouTube. We are already doing the newsletters and our CEO is already speaking. But now we get much more use out of things that used to be one-time hits.

This is called the long tail.

All too often, someone in our organization goes to a conference or reads an article about social media and drinks the social media Kool-Aid. They jump in with both feet, joining social networks and posting things all over the web. They drive people around them crazy trying to get them drink the Kool-Aid too. Some people ride this high for an amazing period of time. (At the time of this writing in 2010, I know people that are still advocating AOL and Yahoo!Groups., tools that were cutting edge 10 years ago but have been surpassed since then!)

When the excitement finally ebbs, they get frustrated. People in their organization aren’t “getting” it fast enough. Or donors and supporters aren’t jumping on the band wagon the way the guy at the conference said they would. So they give up, and stop creating content cold turkey. Years later that content is still up there, looking really dated. (I just came across a travel guide website that warned of a site not opening until the fall of 2007. That was three years ago. How in the world can I trust anything else written in that travel guide?)

It’s far more effective to channel that enthusiasm into creating a sustainable strategy that fits the style of the organization. To that end, let’s look at how to build a solid strategy.

Back in the “old days” of the 1990’s, websites were simply pages with a  logo, some text, and a bunch of blue links. When I do trainings, one of my slides is an Amazon site from this time. An Amazon logo on the top of a gray page with blue links to the books.

Since this type of web presence is more like a magazine or a brochure, it’s often referred to as brochure-ware.

Most of our nonprofit websites haven’t left the 1990’s. They’re not much more than digital brochures. We have great information on them, but we control all the content. There’s precious little opportunity for fans to add their comments or join an email list or sign a petition. And we often make it really hard for people to see how to make a donation. It’s almost as though we just want people to come to our site and read.

Amazon found out it could sell more books if it allowed customers rate books and write reviews. It turns out, we trusted other customers’ comments more than we trusted Amazon’s. After all, Amazon was trying to get us to buy the book. We expect them to say nice things about it. But the customers didn’t have anything to gain, so their comments were seen as more authentic.

Allowing customers to create reviews is a form of “user generated content.” And user generated content is a phenomena that took off! People like creating, like being noticed, like making their mark.  Successful online communities make it easy.

Out of control
Let’s be honest: this freaks us out. We live in the illusion that we control our nonprofit’s message. We like that illusion. Like a child snuggling a blanket, we find comfort in it. But it’s not true. We’ve never controlled the message. People have always been talking about us—saying both good things and bad.

Users have always been generating their own content. It’s just that today’s tools are more sophisticated than a can of spray paint or a picket line. And can have a much wider impact.

One common objection to “social media” is that it’s “just a fad; it’s not going to last.” But seen in this light, social media is birthed out of our innate desire to communicate and connect with others. We’ve been doing this stuff for millennia. Ancients used to gather around the campfire and cave walls are filled with drawings of killing the wooly mammoth.

Today our campfire is the Internet and the drawings can be viewed by anyone with a web browser.

User generated content
User generated content can be written. It can be as basic as a blog. Some of the nastier examples of written user generated content can be seen in the comments sections on any newspaper website. Written content is continuously created on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

User generated content can be audible—recordings of lectures or music or just a personal ranting. These are often called podcasts. NPR podcasts each of its show segments, but you can make one right from your laptop. My kids make them from their ipods! Audible user generated content is often shared on sites like iTunes, Blip.fm, Last.fm, MySpace, and Facebook.

User generated content can be video—Apple found that out when iPod fans started creating their own iPod ads. These ads were good. Another example is the completely volunteer made movie “The Search for Gollum,” a story birthed out of fans passion for Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The more passionately identified people are with a product or cause, the more inclined they are to tell their friends. And some of that telling can be amazingly creative. Video content can be shared on sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and—yes—Facebook.

But let’s face it, social media seems like a wildly chaotic space filled with made up words and badly spelled names: Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, tweeple, tweetups, pinging, Razoo. The list goes on becoming more and more like alphabet soup.

It’s far too easy to let your head be turned by tools. “Did you see CNN is quoting from Twitter? Why aren’t we on Twitter?” “Hey, XYZ nonprofit has a Facebook page, we need one too!” “What do you mean we don’t have a Ning community. We’re going to miss out.”

Saying we need a Facebook page or a Twitter account is just as crazy as a contractor saying, “I need to build a house because I have a hammer.” Crazy, isn’t it? We’d want the contractor to have a plan first. Then, and only then, would she be able to choose the appropriate tool. A hammer might be right but in some places you’ll need a wrench. So too in social media: sometimes you need Facebook, other times you need a blog or a  Flickr account. It depends on your strategy.

So in this guide, we’ll help you define your strategy and then show you tricks to effectively use the tools.

So that’s where we’ll start. Using the process in the first half of this book, you’ll be able to craft a strategy for your organization. You can use this to convince board members, your boss, your staff, or even yourself, that social media might be of benefit for your organization.

Fortunately, there are ways to put parameters on social media, to master it so it doesn’t master us. Because it can feel like it is taking over your life. The learning curve on these tools can be quite steep. And even though they’re “free” —meaning there’s no charge to use them—they do cost you or your organization time.

To create a strategy, we’ll help you define:

• What you want to accomplish
• Why that is the right thing to accomplish
• Who you need to reach to accomplish it
• Where those people mostly likely hang out
• Which tools you need to reach them
• How to use those tools

The old saying is true “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll likely end up somewhere else.”

In the second half, you’ll be able to focus on the most common tools in the social media tool box. We’ll give you tips and tricks on using each one. We’ll also give you ideas about some up-and-coming tools. And I’ll be sure you have techniques for the now “old school” tools of websites, blogs, email newsletters, and search engine optimization.

The world is at your doorstep. Go ahead, welcome it in.