Should I bother with a blog?

At the recent SCANPO conference, Coastal Community Foundation staff talked about using social media tools. A common concern with the audience was whether or not their nonprofit should even bother with a blog.  I think it's a great question to ask before jumping into since it can be time-consuming.

You can think of a blog as a resource or a place to tell stories (among other things).  If your nonprofit has great stories to tell about volunteers or clients, this is a way to showcase them online.   You are publicly recognizing their great work and sharing your successes with donors.

For me, I use this blog as a resource.  I was often getting the same questions from people about technology tools and social media.  This blog is a great place to refer people with questions about these topics.

If you think either of those directions would work for you, you may want to talk with your team about getting started.  However, if you are having trouble coming up with ideas, don't stress about it.  The timing may not be right for you or a blog may not be the best direction at all.  Either option is fine.  No one can do everything.

Three Tools for Managing Twitter

Once you’ve set up a twitter account, you’ll find yourself using it for different purposes.  For some people, the ability to schedule tweets in advance is important.  This is great if you will be offline for a bit, but still want to appear “active”.  Other people manage multiple accounts, so being able to easily work with more than one account from a single dashboard is another feature found with different tools.  Read on for a brief review of tools that will help you manage twitter.

TweetDeck

When I first started using Twitter, I was a huge fan of TweetDeck.  Being able to put twitter users into columns made it much easier to manage who I was following.  My columns include local people, nonprofits, and social media rockstars.  On days when I was a little short on twitter-time or maybe just interested in what was going on in my area of town, I could scan one column, such as local tweeters. I also set up a column to track mentions of my own user name.  That way, I wasn’t overlooking any replies sent specifically to me.  Being able to do these customizations is a feature to look for with any tool.

Seesmic

Seesmic is another desktop application that is similar to TweetDeck.  Like TweetDeck, you create columns based on people you follow.  It’s also very easy to include other social media accounts, like Facebook or LinkedIn.  I didn't see a feature that allows you to schedule tweets, which is important for people who want to plan ahead.

HootSuite

Although I still log-on on TweetDeck occasionally, I started using HootSuite earlier this year and wrote my initial impressions on my social media blog.  I love that you can add other social networks to your dashboard, such as Facebook.  Since I manage multiple Facebook pages, I set up a tab simply called “Facebook”.  Each column on this tab has a different Facebook page. At a glance, I can see if there was any activity on the page without having to log-in and pull up the different pages.

A version of HootSuite released last summer includes Google Analytics in the dashboard.  This is especially useful for people using twitter to generate business leads.  You want this kind of detailed data to see what’s working and what you may need to change.

Twitter can be a very useful way to promote the work you do and stay connected with professionals in your field, but it is important to be able to easily manage your account so that your time does not become all-consumed by Twitter.  Try out a few different tools to see which one works best for your purposes.  And let me know if I missed any good ones. 

Happy Tweeting!

Four Tips for Managing Information Overload

There’s no shortage of media competing for our attention – print newspapers, social networking accounts, blogs, and text messages just to name a few. While all these resources are good, it can definitely be overwhelming. So how can you manage information overload? Here are four of my favorite tips.

Use RSS feeds

I follow a number of different blogs and updates from different web sites. I used to have email subscriptions to these various resources. They all provide great content, but seeing that many emails in my inbox each morning nearly brought tears to my eyes because it was so overwhelming.

I un-subscribed to the majority of email updates and set up an RSS feed instead using Netvibes. This way I can look at one screen to see all the headlines. From here, I can decide which ones I want to dig deeper into on a particular day. This is even easier with tabs set up so I can check local blogs (such as LTP), nonprofit specific news, social media updates, etc.

Google alerts

Whether you monitor your brand or simply your name as a freelancer, using Google alerts will make life much simply than constantly surfing the internet for new mentions. Simply visit the Google alerts page and enter your search criteria, email address, and frequency of updates. And that’s it. You’ll start receiving email notifications when your brand or name is mentioned.

This can also be useful for monitoring specific keywords. It can get overwhelming though – obviously there’s a lot of information available on the Internet – but it’s very easy to modify the search criteria in your Google alert if you’re not getting the right information.

Quit multi-tasking

This is one I’m guilty of doing. I have two monitors at my computer, so I’ll have one screen set up to search something up on the Internet. While it’s searching, I’m reading email on the other monitor. Apparently, waiting 5 seconds for the search to complete is just too much downtime!

We all think we’re getting more done when we multi-task, but that’s not the case. You think you’re learning more. In fact, you’re learning less. Any information learned while multi-tasking can actually take longer to retrieve later on. Multi-taskers are also prone to more errors and are generally less productive than people who focus on one task at a time

Turn off the electronics

I am a strongly believer in shutting down electronic devices by a certain time each night. This includes television, computer, mobile devices, and anything else with a screen. During the week, I have a set time where I shut things down and just relax with a book. I talked about this in my article on work and life balance

To wrap up, use RSS feeds and Google alerts to monitor your electronic news (but still shut down at a certain time each night). If you’re a multi-tasker, start doing one thing at a time this week and see if you notice a difference in your overall productivity.