January is Tune Up month in the Zoetica Salon, an online space for free peer learning about nonprofits and social media. Here's a few good resources shared on the wall in the past week.
Book: My colleague, Micah Sifry, has written a book, "Wikileaks and the Age of Transparency." The theme of transparency was an important idea in the Networked Nonprofit and I can't wait to read Micah's thinking about the transparency movement. You can pre-order the book and get 15% off.
Editorial Calendars: Use a social media editorial calendar. Identify all your platforms, themes, and schedule it. It is way less stress to know what you're going to publish for the week versus having do it on the fly. It also helps with celebrating organizational milestones via social media. Holly Minch shared this excellent template.
Strategy Tune Ups: Geoff Livingston shares his strategy tips on how nonprofits can break through the social media clutter and get stakeholders pay attention (Julie Pippert talks about the importance of passion) and a framework to think about your social media strategy.
Social Media Initiative Guide: This guide from Spreadfast, a social media management tool vendor, has some great tips and ways to think about Key Performance Indicators, tactics, and metrics. A big shout out to their new Director of Social Media, Jordan Viator.
Benchmarking: When assessing social media performance, many nonprofits want to benchmark their social media results against other similar nonprofits. Here are a couple of nonprofit and social media benchmarking resources. I like to see a digital IQ study focused solely on nonprofits - one that analyzes it by budget size. In lieu of that report, here's a quick list of nonprofit facebook pages that rock (for example this shoutout landing page from GLIDE)identified by folks participating in the Zoetica Salon in response to a question posed by Holly Ross at NTEN and Kivi Leroux Miller's Nonprofit Communications Trends e-book.
A Fresh Perspective: Steve Bridger shares this post that offers nonprofits five suggestions for giving their communications strategy a fresh look.
TechSoup Global Storytelling Challenge: Susan Tenby shared this post about the "TechSoup Global Storytelling Challenge" - part competition, part instructional - an opportunity for your organization to win some great prizes and improve the way you share your story. More here.
Personal Productivity at Social Media: Kami Huyse shares this informative video and deck about productivity in an age of distraction.