Talk to people. But I mean really talk to them.

Building a web presence is a lot like building your offline reputation; it’s a long term effort. Reaching your online publicity and traffic goals involves understanding the user perspective – give them things they want, and they will remember you for it. Give them what you want, and you will quickly be relegated to the trash heap of me-me-me companies out there.

Recognizing that what your organization wants to say may not be the same thing as what your users and customers want to hear is sometimes a difficult, but nonetheless critical, step on the path to a truly successful website and web presence. What this means practically is that you need to move your focus to creating and sharing content that is helpful and valuable, and not necessarily directly related to your products, mission, services, or any of the other things you want to promote through your website. Offer people good content that is related to your industry or skill set, and start to enjoy the fact that they come back for more. While seemingly counter-intuitive, this is actually a great way to promote your organization since it helps you build lasting, stable relationships with prospects and clients.

This point is especially important for non-profits, who rely strongly on values of goodwill and public service. Since the people behind non-profits often feel like their organization is their baby, they cannot help but talk about themselves. While people do want to know that your non-profit is a success, it gets tiresome hearing repeated stories about gala fundraisers and the hundreds of children you have helped. Instead, get up-close and personal and transform your stories from statistics to actual people. Interview your staff and the people you help. Also, talk about your field or industry. For example, if your non-profit is related to education, discuss developments in the world of education. Show people that you are an expert, and give those passionate about your field a reason to stay in their relationship with you.

Great content builds your organization, even (especially) if it’s not all about you.

This post is co-written by Miriam Schwab and David Danielson, our intern

Picture credit: The Conversation by polandeze on flickr

First, a story:

Almost a year ago, I met with representatives from one of Israel’s leading television and media networks, who had the backing of a prominent philanthropist to implement a social media strategy for Israel’s 60th birthday. Someone had recommended that they meet me, and I prepared a comprehensive presentation about what I called “Israel 2.0,” where we would create and implement a strategy that would celebrating Israel’s accomplishments with a diverse, wide-reaching web presence.

Notice I call it a “web presence”; that is because the web is no longer about just creating a website. It is about using the web and all its potential to promote your business, organization, or ideas with the greatest results possible. It is no longer sufficient to depend on your website alone, particularly since

“a recent Universal McCann report stating that content consumption outside of websites has increased 153% in the last 9 months. Overall, 53% of online users are consuming content outside of a publisher’s site – through the use of widgets, RSS readers, social networks and mobile devices” (from ReadWriteWeb)

Anyway, there was one guy in the room listening to my presentation who actually knew some of the terms I was using, like RSS feeds and the like, and I guess this made him feel like a social media expert. So when I finished my presentation, he said “Why do I need all that? I’ll just create a facebook group.”

I made a facebook group; so why am I all alone here?

What? Is he kidding me? I tried to explain until I was blue in the face that creating a facebook group is not a social media strategy, but it’s really difficult to explain concepts to people who have no knowledge of the field you are talking about, so they all believed the facebook-group guy, and that was that.

Needless to say, no all-encompassing web presence was created in honor of Israel’s birthday, and I don’t know what happened to that philanthropist’s offer.

A real social media strategy starts with goals, not tools

To create a serious web strategy, you should not start with the tools. “I’m going to create a blog,” or “I’ll join twitter” is not a strategy, since these may not be the right tools to use to achieve your goals.

I would like to build a house. These look like good tools to use.

Here’s an outline of the general steps needed to create a successful web presence:

1. Identify your goals: what do we want to achieve? Who are we trying to target?
   Part of this stage is benchmarking: analyzing current statistics; identifying what you hope will be different as a result of your social media efforts; defining parameters that you want to change most and least.
2. Next, work out the strategy: how are we going to achieve these goals? Where do we need to be to reach our target audience, i.e. based on their demographics, where are they hanging out on the web? What type of content will they like? What manpower considerations do we need to be aware of (i.e. the need to hire a Community Manager, etc.)? Do we have legal considerations?
3. Once all of that has been prepared, then and only then can you choose tools and technologies. A facebook group may not be the best strategy for your goals, or it may be appropriate, but maybe it won’t work on its own. Tools and technologies are just the medium, not the message (sorry McLuhan). For example, in the world of print marketing, you know a rollup is exactly what you need to get your message across at the upcoming trade show, but you’d look mighty strange schlepping it to pitch a new client at their office.
4. Implementation. Now you get to have fun with your shiny tools, because they’re the right ones.

Forrester has laid out a similar approach to creating an effective social media strategy by putting technology last, which they coined as POST: People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology. (Here’s a link to the original blog post, but it looks like Forrester is trying to wipe out any memory of Charlene Li since she left, so you can only access the cached version on Google.)

Like most things in life and business, you need to know what you want to achieve before you decide how you are going to achieve them. And that is why a facebook group is most definitely not a strategy.

Lonely girl image from willgame on flickr