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5on5: Guiding the NPO Social Media Experience

“Today anybody can take messages into their own community and talk about it.”

We are on week four of the Nonprofits Using Social Media 5on5 Expert Blog Series.  Today’s interviewee works with Nonprofits in their web building and using video to tell stories.  Michael Hoffman is the CEO of See3 in Chicago.

How long has See3 communications been around and what do you do?

See3 was founded in 2004 to help nonprofits make the most of the web. I have been a consultant for nonprofits for many years now and what I and my partner Danny Alpert saw in 2004 was a shift happening and the shift was really about broadband. So See3 was formed to combine the best of web development and consulting with engaging storytelling, because the web could now really support visual storytelling in a way that couldn’t prior to that time.

How have you seen social media change and become an advantage for nonprofits?

I think social media is both the positive and the potential negative for nonprofits. I think the nonprofits that embrace social media and learn about it will do well and the one’s that ignore it do so at their own peril. The benefits of social media is that we are moving from a world of, as Seth Godin calls it, “interruption marketing to permission marketing”. A world where you pushed your message at people and now we are in a world where people don’t have to accept your messages. We’ve really seen a decline in authority and the authoritative voice.  So people are finding out things and learning things from the most trusted sources on the web. And so the benefits are the people that are really passionate about an issue can carry that issue into their own community and so there’s a lot of leverage there. So the opportunities are for the passionate ones who can invest their own time in their own networks and raise money and advocate and make a change. So the opportunity for organizations to reach new audiences far beyond what they can do with their own resources is tremendous.  The potential downside is you don’t control the messages. We see a lot of larger organizations or older organizations struggling with issues around branding and brand control and brand identity.  So figuring out how do we do that and how do we take advantage of it but at the same time where do we need to keep control of it and where can we let go.

Another thing we are seeing is the breakdown between the inside people and outside people. Today anybody can take messages into their own community and talk about it. The person who is actually doing the work in your organization becomes the voice that you have the opportunity now to amplify. So there’s a cultural shift because the organization may not have thought of that person as the voice for the organization. And that person may have never thought of that as part of what they are being paid to do. The other break down we are seeing in the same vain is between the personal and the professional. You go to people’s Facebook pages and they have information about the movie they saw and then they have information about you should give to this cause because it’s important. Seeing that there isn’t the clear line between people’s personal lives and their professional life. All of this is so new and everybody’s navigating it and learning along the way. But a lot of it is scary for people.

What social media tools do you recommend and use yourself?

I think that the big guys in social media are Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Those are tools everyone should be thinking about and everybody should be using. There are a lot of other tools, specific to other organizations these other tools can be deployed. A great example in the diabetes space is Manny Hernandez’s stuff with Diabetes Hands Foundation, which uses Ning as their home base and very successfully which is another build your own social network system. There are lots of other tools out there and the use of those tools I think depends on the circumstances. With regards to so many social media tools out there I think you need to go deep not wide. What social media is about is conversation and it’s very time consuming to have real conversations and relationships with people. The idea that you can just spread yourself around and push your content out I think that’s the mistake that some people make around social media. Thinking that it’s just another channel to push out the same press releases and marketing stuff that we do everywhere else. It’s really about real relationships, listening and finding opportunities and then motivating the people that you are connecting with to actually spread the word in their own words on your behalf.

Does your company help with social media guidelines?

There are some great tools out there. There is a FREE Social Media Policy Generator. Where you fill out the form and it gives you a generic policy, so that can be a starting point for organizations. We’ll help organizations do that, though most of our clients have some ideas about that. There are good models out there to help you.

When does your company typically come on board?

We’ve found that we are the most effective the earlier we are involved. So really in the planning stage we determine what are our goals and developing strategy. We have all different layers, we have clients that know exactly what they want, they need a video and social media plan and we’ll go in and do it. And then other clients that are on retainer and we are really helping them through all of this change. And building in the certain amounts of different deliverables, but really being there for them on a strategic level. And bringing a level of experience of this world to their internal team that makes their internal team that much more effective. Because they are not running around with their head cut off figuring out what do I do now. Much more focused and much more relaxed about it. There’s a lot of panic where I need to be using this tool or this thing and so what we really try to do is impose some calm and order and focus on that. So organizations feel like I get it and here’s how methodically we’re going to work through it.

I want to thank Michael Hoffman for sharing more about See3 and what they do for nonprofits. Next week’s interview is with Rod Arnold, COO of Charity: Water.  Subscribe to our white papers for more on these series. The Nonprofits using social media white paper will be available to download on June 14.

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