A week and a bit ago I had the good fortune to attend the Web Standards Group meetup with guest speakers Richard Ishida and José Manuel Alonso, both from the W3C.

Over the jump are my notes from the session…

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The details of Web Directions South 08 have been announced. Having been inspired by previous years’ events, I’m excited to this year be participating as a presenter.

It’s probably little surprise that my session is entitled Strategies for social media engagement, part of the management/strategy track. The session outline:

With so many social networks blooming, all with different participants and methods of interaction, it can be hard to determine where to invest your energy, time and $$.

The session will provide ideas and a “background briefing” to help you answer the question:

• why is social media important to my organisation?
• what is the ROI for social media?
• how can I evaluate which approaches are right for me/my organisation?
• what sort of activities can/should I undertake in these spaces?

This is not a technical session and although we will briefly touch on some popular sites, the focus will be on how you and your organisation can effectively and authentically engage participants in the social media world.

I’m looking forward to attending this year – there are some great speakers and sessions in the program – Jeffrey Veen and Mark Pesce are both presenting this year, and the previous talks I’ve seen both do were excellent – and I suspect (hope) this time ’round will be just as good.

I’m also interested in catching the sessions by Gabriel White, Teale Shapcott and Kay Smoljak, among others. (The schedule hasn’t been announced yet, so hopefully there’s no clashes!)

Beth Kanter interviews David Neff:

Good advice. I think the “experiment” tip is essential. Clay Shirky, in his Web 2.0 talk, mentions “failing informatively” – I think experimenting with the sites and spaces, before you put your brand into them, is a great way to “fail informatively” with minimal brand risk.

That may mean setting up a dummy profile to play around with the technology, or it may mean setting up a personal profile and connecting with friends and colleagues – getting a sense of the space and learning the ropes while you’re there.

As I was in Canberra last week I wasn’t able to attend the Connecting Up conference in Brisbane.

Luckily I have accounts from both Nigel and Priscilla to fill me in.

Update: Catching up on my reading I just spotted that Priscilla also blogged her lunch conversation with Beth.

Today I had the pleasure of presenting at the CPA Australia Branding Conference on the topic of social media. Thanks to everyone who came along.

I’ve uploaded the presentation, which is a bit of an amalgam of my last presentation and Tuesday’s workshop, to Slideshare.

| View | Upload your own

The presentation notes (PDF 6.45 MB) contain additional links and reference material.

Update 28 May 2008: In the presentation notes I state that MySpace is larger than Facebook. Seems this is no longer the case.

Yesterday I lead the Social media and government workshop that was part of the Web Directions South Government conference. I hope the participants enjoyed and benefited from our time together as much as I did – it was a great day from my perspective. Thanks again to those of you that attended.

Thanks also to Maxine, John and the Web Directions team for the opportunity to meet with you all and for putting on such a great day.

As promised, here are the workshop presentation with associated notes (PDF 12.8 MB). I didn’t put this up on Slideshare as it was designed to support the workshop across the day and doesn’t really “read” as a slideshow. (If you think I should put it up anyway, lemme know…) Video slides have also been removed…

There are a number of links in the notes to further information and sources. Unfortunately the links aren’t clickable (does anyone know how to get that to work in Keynote?), but you can copy and paste into your browser to access. I hope that you find the slides and notes useful.

Update 28 May 2008: In the presentation notes I state that MySpace is larger than Facebook. Seems this is no longer the case.

The results of the “Live Wiki” exercise, where we brainstormed the many benefits of social media are also available for download (PDF 40 KB).

I will write up the brainstorming session ideas in the next few days and post them here once they’re done.

One of the side effects of a great brainstorming session is that there are a lot of notes to write up! Sorry for the delay – you can now download them from here (PDF 88 KB).

Yesterday I had the pleasure of chatting to Ross Monaghan at Deakin University about social media in general, but also about its use by NGOs and non-profits.

One point that came out of the conversation was that such groups seem to be jumping into the social media realm more readily than others (government and businesses in particular), and Ross asked what reasons I thought might be contributing to this.

Thinking about it on the spot, I came up with 3 reasons why I think social media is a great fit for non-profits which I thought I’d share here.

1. They have “passionate users”: NGOs are often (though not always) working in areas that people are passionate about – human rights, the environment, youth services. Supporters are happy to help spread the word through their networks, and are also happy to “invite them in” to their space.
2. They have a “remarkable” product: Seth Godin talks about “remarkable” products – that is products that people want to remark (i.e. talk) about – as being the first part of a strong marketing strategy. For the same reason that NGOs have passionate users, their product (the cause, campaign etc.) is often remarkable. Of course, not all topics that NGOs/non-profits work on are “remarkable” – and sometimes it takes some creativity to make them sparkle. But I think perhaps that the job is a little easier for NGOs than many businesses.
3. They (often) have limited budgets: social media can be an extremely cost effective means of promoting a cause, campaign or organisation. Even if an NGO has a significant online budget (and research shows that budget does matter) it’s always great to be able to save some donor dollars. A Facebook fan page, or a free Ning social network, can be as effective (possibly more effective) than a campaign site costing tens of thousands of dollars.

The first two points really make a difference in the success of social media engagement. So with potential financial benefits to boot, I think social media can be a really good option for NGO/non-profit organisations, and I suspect that’s why uptake has been reasonably quick by this sector.

Jax has an enthusiastic post entitled “Building brands on the web“. There’s some great points in there, worth a read (it’s pretty snappy – so won’t take long).

In relation to point 1: “Web users are an active audience” – I would heartily recommend checking out Clay Shirky’s talk at Web 2.0 – it’s a goldmine.

And extending point 5: “Easy and cost effective device to gain customer insights” – make sure you have permission! I know Jax knows this, but didn’t state it explicitly :)

And as Seth Godin and the folks at Campaign Monitor often point out, permission isn’t just “can I email you?” – it means providing timely and relevant communications.

In other words, just because you have an email address and an “opt-in” checkbox doesn’t mean that people won’t consider you spam.

For the past 12 months or some friends of mine from the NGO web world and I have been meeting up for an informal get-together every month or two to chat about the web and social change.

The group has been growing as friends have been invited and word of mouth has worked its magic, but at the last meetup there was a bit of a discussion about expanding the network and spreading the word a bit further.

In Sydney, the group will be meeting the first Tuesday of each month at The Rose in Chippendale (on Cleveland Street, near City Road). That means the next meetup is on Tuesday night (6pm kick-off in the front bar). The topic this month is “Social media and government”.

If you’re working for an NGO or on a project related to social change and the web, or interested in meeting folks who are, come down and join us there.

(We’re in the process of creating a blog to announce meetings and extend the discussions beyond the Facebook group – I’ll post more on that once it’s up and running.)