Flickr photo by Vidiot: Person Dressed Up Like ATM Machine
Maddie Grant from Social Fish sent me a link to their training 'Buzz2009 Social Media for Associations" on July 9th in Washington, DC featuring presenters Guy Kawasaki and Andy Sernovitz. She asked me if I would write about it or Tweet it. She included a handy "retweet" link. (I asked how she did that and she pointed me over to these simple how-to instructions).
I get a lot of requests like this and I don't have the capacity blog or tweet them all. However, I tweeted her message and now I'm blogging about it. Why? Because I have a relationship with Maddie. We've gotten to know each other through our respective blogs, I follow her Twitter stream, we retweet each others links, we've met face-to-face and had drinks together. She didn't just come out the blue and ask me to do something for her - and there's been a history reciprocity.
It's all about the relationships. Person to person.
I think this was the point that Peter Deitz was making in his slide show "I am not an ATM Machine: Your Charity from the Donor Perspective." I agree. In fact, I've been yammering about the importance relationship building for years on this blog in countless posts (see below.)
What does this look like at an organizational level?
Allison Fine and I have been noodling with an evaluation model that looks social media from an organizational perspective - from social networks to social capital (relationships) to action in the real world. We've been calling it "Listening and Learning Loops." We've placed relationships as an outcome or result using the techniques of listening, learning, reflection, micro-planning, and adapting. Now I'm wondering where the techniques of engagement need to be incorporated.
Listening is not just a one-way activity. It eventually shifts to two-way conversation. Dave Fleet shares a rubric of going from not listening to engaging in conversation to build a relationship. It's called "Five Level of Social Media Response." It's quite funny.
True listening - active listening - involves more than just nodding your head at the right time. It means absorbing what people are saying, acting where appropriate, and letting people know when you've acted.
But these ideas about relationships and engagement are looking at from the point of view of marketing, fundraising, and advocacy. How can we look at this from an networked organization perspective?
Charlene Li's "Tapping the Power of the Groundswell" offers some models on relationship building and engagement in a broader way and more as a strategy.
This slide shows the different type of relationships and shift in thinking. How do you go from treating your donors like ATM machines and turn them into passionate, loyal, and constant supporters? And, that's the problem with how some online fundraising campaigns and applications are designed - they are transactional - vote for me, give me ten dollars, etc.
Charlene lays out four strategies. Learning is a combination of listening and learning. The listening piece is the monitoring and tracking and Charlene Li points out that there is no one right approach to monitoring. The big challenge is turning the river of noise into insight. Charlene's model incorporates what Allison and I have been noodling around with and calling "Micro-Planning" and what Charlene called "flexible, fast learning." She makes some points about how to improve learning:
- Determine where fast, flexible learning is most needed to support business goals
- Figure out who you need to listen to, and where they are
- Find out who is best at listening to that audience
- Hint: It's probably not Market Research
The dialog is the engagement piece, help is using these tools to provide customer service, and the innovate is the process of getting crowd sourced feedback to create new programs or products.
These points also make me think about an organizational listening/learning model. The culture change in nonprofit organizations to embrace this is significant. It is going to be harder for those organizations that haven't taken the first step.
My questions:
- What are the opportunity costs of not thinking of relationships and engagement on a holistic organizational level?
- Can organizations that are younger and have embraced the cloud-like way of working - will they have a better chance of survival in the longer term because they can more easily embrace these ways of working?
Beth's Other Ramblings on Relationships/Engagement in a Social World.
- Social Relationship Development
- Measuring the Return on Relationships
- Is Facebook Causes A One Night Stand?
- How Do Social Network Applications Incorporate the Ladder of Engagement
- Networked Relationship Building and Leveraging Social Capital
- Ladder of Social Engagement - Version 1
- Ladder of Social Engagement - Version 2
- Building Relationships: Using Your Social Graph for Social Good
- Giving Good Poke