MarketerBlog

Blogs & Public Policy: Stimulating Conversation Where It’s Needed Most

People often accuse those of us who live “inside the Beltway” of being an insulated group of policy wonks. While it’s true that you could spend a lifetime going to policy briefings in Washington, there are in fact more than a few things being done which benefit society, both in the US and elsewhere. Today, representatives from a variety of public policy organizations came together to discuss ways to use blogs, wiki’s and workspaces to further their missions.

The session was hosted by Forum One Communications, a consultancy which assists not-for-profit, foundation, government and commercial organizations in making a positive impact on social issues by providing Internet business strategy, technology implementation and user experience & design.

One of the most interesting discussions was on the use of blogs. As usual, the NGO community is a bit behind the private sector in implementation, but in this case they may benefit from the lessons learned by early adopters. Clearly the social sector is well-suited to the kinds of transparency and constituent engagement offered by blogs. And if the Bivings Group recent report is at all accurate, the Internet and CGM will have an enormous impact on this year’s elections. 

Both the World Bank and the Center for Global Development presented case studies on the success of their blogs. The World Bank blog was launched a year ago, and today is ranked 1,569 with links from 221 sites according to Technorati. Both organizations have seen a substantial jump in traffic, as well as search engine rankings as a result of their blogs.

These organizations approached their blogs strategically. They understand that their work is part of a larger set of conversations on important issues. They see blogging as an opportunity to engage in these conversations and a way to improve the transparency of their respective organizations. They cautioned against using blogs as a pure PR mechanism. Their experience was that readers responded to genuine dialog about issues of interest. Their point: don’t try to dominate the conversation, use your blog to be a voice in the conversation.

That’s sage advice, even for those of us who aren’t trying to save the world.

 
Technorati Tags:

Blogs, CGM, Marketing, NPTech, Public Policy, Social Sector, Web 2.0

The “Social Web”: The Power of Social Networking for the Social Sector

It is often the case that nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations lag behind their peers in the private sector in technology adoption.  Many organizations are either risk-averse or under-resourced and therefore hesitant to embrace new technology tools.  In the case of social networking this would be a grave mistake.  Issue-based organizations are perhaps uniquely suited to take advantage of the momentum behind “Web 2.0” and tools like blogs, wikis, podcasts and social networks.  There are a myriad of uses for nonprofit organizations and arguably better reasons for adoption by their advocates, donors and volunteers.  These organizations have existing networks of people who care passionately about their causes.  Consumer generated media and social networking enable these organizations to expand their reach, increase the efficiency of dollars spent, and empower their supporters with another mechanism to actively engage with the organization and its cause.

Political and advocacy organizations were the first to employ these tools, which successfully translate and amplify offline grassroots politicking.  The 2004 Presidential campaign of Howard Dean was one of the earliest and most successful, and there is much to be learned from it.  But there have been many other successful e-advocacy organizations, with Move On and Meet Up being perhaps the most visible.  For most nonprofits the goal is similar but a bit less inflammatory: catalyze people who are passionate about the cause to become ambassadors/advocates for the organization, and nurture their long-term engagement.  This may take many forms including enriching the experience, expanding reach to new markets, audiences and donor pools, and audience/membership development. 

Nonprofits are experimenting with blogs, podcasts, and other forms of consumer generated media.  National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting Service, and the lobbying arm of the Association of Public Television Stations introduced a joint web site in April.  The goal of the site is  to generate grass-roots messages to members of Congress.  In late May TechSoup, a project of CompuMentor, will host one of the first “Web 2.0” conferences for the nonprofit community, in San Jose, California.  The goal of the conference is to help organizations understand the potential for the “social web” and its role in helping them accomplish their missions.  TechSoup recently hosted a webinar on social networking for nonprofits.  Next generation social networking sites like CollectiveX are also helping nonprofits strengthen member engagement and achieve their goals through group communications, coordination and networking tools.

For nonprofits and other membership organizations, social networking presents an opportunity to amplify in the digital world what people have been doing all along offline – coming together around a shared cause or vision and working to make it happen.  Along the way friendships are formed and professional relationships develop.  Social networking in this case doesn’t mean random hook-ups in “cyberspace”.  Instead it represents the ability to leverage the digital “global village” to achieve worthy goals with like-minded individuals.

(Disclosure:  I provide strategic consulting to CollectiveX.   Regular MarketerBlog readers will note that this is a reprise/revision of a post on a similar topic from December of 2005.)

Technorati Tags:

CGM, Consumer Generated Media Nonprofit, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Web, Web 2.0

Cooking to the Oldies & Cultural CGM

This is going to be a short post today. I’m on my way to try to convince one of the old-school cultural institutions in town that they need to get on the social-consumer generated media party train if they want to truly understand audience preferences and cultivate new communities of interest.

A big thank you to Yoz over at Ning for his very helpful comments in response to yesterday’s post on social apps for the Boomer generation. Thanks for letting me know about the blossoming group of Ning apps for cooking, restaurant reviews, and other social activities. I’ll be sure to check those out. And thanks to my buddy Andy, who hooked me up with Flavorpill – a great source of cultural information for a short list of metro areas. I hope they expand their content to include  Washington DC soon.

To that point, I’m looking for other examples of nonprofit organizations making good use of social/consumer generated media. I have a long row to hoe with my friends in the social sector. Looks like I have some partners in crime though.  Any ideas will be greatly appreciated.