listening in a digital world

::assumptions

There are people out there who are interested in our issues.

(whether we know them or not)

Those people are active in our communities.

(whether we help them or not)

We want to engage those interested and active people in our work.

(whether we agree with them or not)

That’s the heart of collaboration:

Engaging with interested and active people to create change.

But first:

you have to listen

::the steps

1. Set up your toolbox

The RSS Reader

• Google Reader• Bloglines• Netvibes• Feedly

Brainstorm keywords

• Organization name• Issue area• Synonyms for issue area• Other nonprofit names in your space• Program, services, and event names• URLs for your blog, web site, online

community• Geography

Set up your feeds

• Google Alerts• Twitter Search• Technorati• Flickr• YouTube• BackType• Blogpulse• Social Mention• BoardReader

And a few other accounts…

• Twitter• Delicious• BackType• Flickr• YouTube

2. Make listening a practice

Lurk for the first 30 days

• Review feeds first thing every morning• Open interesting links in new tabs• Read and follow links• Subscribe to new feeds• “Share” the most interesting information

On Day 31, go into triage mode

• Be quick to mark as read• “Share” or “Star” as the first level of interest• Bookmark in delicious• Share with short comment in Twitter

On Day 45, begin to leave comments

• Add value to the conversation• Don’t be afraid to disagree• Keep to the point of the post• Point to relevant sources if you’ve more

information• Watch the conversation develop

3. Regular time for reflection

Review the trends

• What/who do you share?• Where do you comment?• Are topics of conversation changing?• Are topics important to you increasing or

decreasing in frequency?• Where are the most interesting conversations

happening?

Measure your influence

• Mining delicious• Twitter– Followers– Retweets– Link activity

• Return traffic

Aggregate your contributions

• Friendfeed– Backtype– Delicious– Twitter

Sources

We Are Media: Tactical Track Module 1 http://www.wearemedia.org/Tactical+Track+Module+1

nptech taghttp://delicious.com/tag/nptech

Thank you

• Marnie Webb– http://www.techsoupglobal.org– http://twitter.com/webb– http://delicious.com/ext337– http://ext337.org

License

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