Often when I talk to people about engaging with customers or donors online, their reaction is that they aren’t ready. Not yet. Soon. Once this other thing happens. When we talk further, the root of their reluctance is a fear that things have to perfect.

You’re not perfect now and you won’t ever be perfect. Get over it.

Everything is an experiment and it’s your job to learn from mistakes and improve. At the 2009 NTC conference, Clay Shirky brought the idea of iterative learning and informed failure home. The theme carried through many other panels as speakers used the conversational hooks Shirky set up in his keynote to bring the idea to life with further examples. I came away from the conference with the imperative to fail harder and that advice is still relevant.

Recently I presented on a webinar to over 200 people. (Thanks to Janet Fouts for inviting me to join her). I was nervous, but afterwards I thought it went great. In some ways it had, but the feedback comments were a wake up and more than a little deflating. My nervousness had led me to ramble a bit and people thought  I could use more practice and perhaps some public speaking lessons. My audio equipment was also on the fritz during the presentation and people had trouble hearing me. How embarrassing! Panic! I’m never presenting again and I never should have tried. Right?

Wrong!

The feedback taught me ways I can improve. What do you know, I’m not perfect. More preparation and practice? I can do that. Get better audio equipment? I can do that too. Speaking to 200 is different than what works one-on-one. The feedback also taught me what I was doing right that I can do more of next time. People liked my examples and the places where I got hands on and really descriptive about how specific strategies have worked for me and played out in the trenches.

A You-Shaped Hole in the Wall

The fear that you aren’t perfect usually brings a posse of friends home for  dinner.What if we’re not compelling enough? What if someone says something nasty about us online? What if this takes all our time and we never get to the real work? What if no one cares? What if we’re not interesting enough? What if we make a mistake?

I love the West Wing TV show and can’t resist a good quote when it’s relevant, so I’ll share one now from Leo, the Chief-of-Staff on the show. In the episode “We Killed Yamamoto”, Leo admires the spirit of failing harder in one of the senior staff after a costly mistake.

“You know, it was a screw up, but I got to say I love the way he did it–full speed, bam. Like there’s a Sam Seaborn-shaped hole in the wall.”

Right on. The questions that accompany our need for perfection are important, but without a willingness to experiment you’re nowhere because until you start you don’t know what’s going to work best. By all means, be strategic and have a plan. But be prepared to change gears if its not working. Tweak, react, learn, rinse, repeat. It helps me to think out the worst case scenario (in detail) and remember that there are no bombs going off.

That’s what’s on my mind today. Fail harder, fail informedly. What about you? How do you get past the need for perfection? What shape hole in the wall are you busting today?

I wrote this from 30,000 feet on my way to The NTC, The Nonprofit Technology Network’s (NTEN) annual conference, though now I’m finally posting it from the conference hotel. I’m excited. I’ve been looking forward to this for over a year since Beth Kanter told me I ought to go last spring.

If it had worked out for me to attend last year I would have been overwhelmed and a bit lost. I’m sure I’ll still be overwhelmed this week (there are 1,400 folks coming to this shindig!), but this year I have the advantage of going with the anticipation of meeting up with friends and many people I’ve spoken and collaborated with via phone, email, and twitter.

This year 09NTC for me is a reunion. I feel like I belong and that I have ideas to contribute to the discussions. If you’d like to get a taste of the conference, but won’t be attending, you can be there virtually with me since I’ll be liveblogging! I’m flattered that Holly Ross asked me to help in this way and excited to be joining such a great team of bloggers in this effort. There are apparently some neat features in the liveblogging tool that I’ll get to play with like polling the audience, twitter integration that will pull my tweets while sessions are going. You can visit my ntc liveblog directly from here.

My session picks

There are so many great sessions, and I’m still undecided about some time slots so these may change, but here are my picks for now.

On Monday

10:30 I’ll be at “Online Outreach – The Seven Things Everyone Wants”
1:30 I’m at “You Made a Video, Now What?” with See3′s Michael Hoffman
3:30 at “Email Segmentation – Targeting works”.

Tuesday

10:30 I’m at “Old School Best Practices Applied to Social Media – Is social media for me?”
1:30 at “Community Management – Evolution of Online Communities”
3:30 at either “No Country for Old Media – SM Flash Causes, Twestival, etc.” or “Learning From the Presidential Campaigns”.

Day of Service

Sunday morning I got to participate in NTC’s Day of Service. Britt Bravo and I met with Albert Bricker from the St. James’ School which is a Bay Area Catholic school. We talked about blogging strategy, focus, and tools. It was a lot of fun and Albert’s actually already up.

Today I’m sharing a video. It’s my first crack at iMovie- Enjoy!

Some Show notes:

Social Media Breakfast DC 2/5/09 with Jeff Pulver

Tweetsgiving

Happy Birthday Is, Risa Herbstman, and Jocelyn Harmon

Q: What would you like organizations you care about to ask of you aside from giving money?

In the wake of the TweetsGiving campaign I have been thinking a lot about the factors that contributed to our success and how we can learn and take things even further. I’ve already shared some basic stats from the campaign, but I agree with Beth that numbers can’t come close to telling a complete story. Thanks for the nudge to reflect further Beth! Here’s some of my thinking at this point and a bit more data. Stacey has also reflected further and offered insight into the donation stats.

What Happened?

Once Stacey and I realized we were on to something we got Matt and Vince to work immediately on a site and logo without knowing exact details on what actions we would be asking people to take or the exact shape the campaign would take. I reached out to Carrie and Dave and they were psyched and really helpful in getting the exact structure of the campaign crystallized and getting that focus reflected in the site content. The whole team did a lot of reaching out to spead the word a bit in advance. I spoke with Beth, Deborah, Joe, Tom, and Tamar who each had some ideas and agreed to tweet about it. On Tuesday we set a ChipIn Widget live for donations and settled in to wait until noon to ping our networks and release our idea to the wild.

Then a funny thing happened. Chris Brogan tweeted a link to the site. He likely found it in his ego feed since his name is on the site in the story section because of the inspiration we got from his TrickOrTweet Halloween campaign. I was on the phone with Dave when he saw Chris’s tweet and we all got really excited. “Everybody go now!”

Just like that Tweetsgiving was on. Tweets, donations, and blog posts came rolling in. We hit $1,500 in the first 2 hours. It was tough for the 4 of us to stay responsive between twitter, the gmail account we had set up, and keeping the site up to date with new Top Turkeys and blog posts. From the numbers alone we felt it was a resounding success and we’ve come away energized and grateful to the twitter community.

Factors Contributing to Tweetsgiving’s Success

Simplicity
Clarity and simplicity were key to this. We were asking for something very simple – share your gratitude and give a brick ($10). This nugget was easily remashed and retweeted making it attractive for people to express themselves creatively and feel like they were part of something larger. Tweets like “have you given your brick yet?” “just donated X dollars to #tweetsgiving” became pretty common and we started to retweet some of the inspiring and unique ones from the account.

Timeliness
The tie in of gratitude and giving to the Thanksgiving holiday was a natural sell. In the days leading up to the holiday and our campaign we noticed that people were already using twitter to reflect outloud about the blessings in their lives. Gratitude was already at the forefront and themes like health, education, wealth, jobs, and family were prompting people to share. Tweetsgiving tapped into that, encouraged it by making that reflection a communal activity, and presented donation to a worthy cause as a relevant action.

Having read Nancy Schwartz’s nonprofit tagline report (so worthwhile- thanks Nancy!) I insisted that we be super thoughtful about our tagline to cement the connection further and we came up with “Put the giving back in Thanksgiving.”

Our timing also helped us to avoid the issue of Donor fatigue which is always something to be concerned about in social giving campaigns. I think we stayed on the right side of this for a few reasons.

• it was only 2 days and people had that expectation we’d quiet down soon
• it was during a time that I suspect is quieter on twitter generally since a lot of people who normally tweet from work are traveling already

Integration with Twitter
Tweetsgiving was very rooted within twitter itself and I think that definitely was important to the campaign’s success.

In all there were 9,456 visits from 7,563 unique visitors resulting in 15,830 total pageviews. Here’s a basic breakdown of where that traffic came from including the five biggest traffic sources to the site.

twitter.com (referral) 3,700     39.13%
(direct) ((none)) 2,993     31.65%
search (organic) 608     6.43%
facebook.com (referral) 378     4.00%
google.com (referral) 172     1.82%

StumbleUpon only got us 169 visits and the combined traffic from Facebook and StumbleUpon accounted for less than 6% of total traffic. That surprises me and I think it’s worth considering whether including those social buttons on the site actually detracted from the twitter focus of the site and diluted our main calls to action (share gratitude and give).

In rough terms our traffic was
40% from twitter + 30% direct visits + 9% search + 6% Facebook and StumbleUpon = 85% of all visits

This means that only 15% of visits came from blog posts and articles. The press we received was so valuable to Epic Change and continues to benefit the organization, but in terms of raw traffic, it looks like word of mouth and twitter mentions were the main drivers. I also suspect that a large percentage of direct visits were from repeat visitors checking up on the site again, though I have to look into the analytics further to confirm that.

Evangelists
Individuals tweeting gratitude, sharing the link, and talking about our progress played a huge role. We did some outreach in advance, but largely I found that the individuals who went all out to champion the campaign emerged from the crowd organically.  We recognized some of them as Top Tweeters, but eventually we fell behind in listing them there. Mari Smith, Tori, and Brian Colman stand out in my mind. We considered giving some of them the password to the tweetsgiving twitter account itself, but decided that it was more authentic for people to share their enthusiasm as their own non-turkey selves.

Ego
Another aspect that played into the financial success of the campaign was the recognition we gave to our Top Turkeys who donated $100. Peter Kim has some thoughts on the value of ego traps like this and we had considered that thinking in advance. The On The Wires section showcasing blog press also incentivized people to share the story with audiences in other forums.

Wish List for the Future and Things to Consider and Improve

Disclaimer
I am very pleased with the way Tweetsgiving turned out. Though we set the goal for $10,000, it was an experiment that Stacey and I would have been proud of and considered a success even if we raised less money. We also felt strongly that the amount of reflection and gratitude we inspired people to share would be central to success as well, though we didn’t set a specific target for a number of gratitude tweets.

If we had thought of the idea a month before the holiday I am positive there are things we would have done differently and better. But with only six days, many ideas didn’t get implemented in time.

Aggregation
I would have liked to have a live aggregation of gratitude tweets on the site similar to the implementation on votereport (Alison Fine and Andy Carvin I’m looking at you! How did you do that and can we talk?) We did link to the twitter search results on the site, but I strongly suspect that if people knew their tweets would be displayed immediately on the sight it would encourage even more people to share thoughtful gratitude tweets and retweet. It’s already in the works, though Matt and I would love to talk to anyone who has suggestions on this implementation for the future.

Automation
We did have the Tweetsgiving account set up with Tweetlater to autofollow those who followed us. Interestingly we did get one complaint from someone who followed us and didn’t like being auto-followed back. I also wonder if there was more potential there. For example, I used the Tweetsgiving twitter account to follow people speaking about thanksgiving who I found with twitter search. I noticed many of these people tweeting that they had donated and some direct messaged us to thank us for connecting with them. These people were easily convinced to explore the site and learn more. I did try to set up Twollow to automate this process, but found that it didn’t function properly.

There is definitely the potential to use search keywords to identify twitter users to whom your campaign is relevant. Since manual twitter search isn’t easily scalable, I expect this kind of automation to be taken further in future campaigns. What are your thoughts on automation? I wonder if auto following with keywords the way twollow is intended to work removes the connection from the human level too much in a large campaign. I’d love your feedback on that. Good idea, or creepy?

Recognition
Especially after seeing the effect of the Top Turkeys, in the future I’d like to recognize all donors by name, twitter name, and amount given. There could be an opt-out option in the donation form for people who want to give anonymously. I’m curious to see the effect that would have on the size and number of donations as people identify a social norm in the level of giving and possibly try to one up each other.

Recognition for all donors has the advantage of enabling enthusiasts to tweet thanks to all recent donors not just Top Turkeys since they’d be able to see all donations coming in. Inspired by the recognition Peter Deitz is giving donors to his $20,09 campaign for Social Actions (Help them out! – they are seriously awesome over there) Stacey has added a donors page to the site recognizing everyone who gave. We’re happy to take your name down if you’d rather not be listed. I would have liked that information to be automated for immediate display upon donation and possibly a few different giving levels with explanation of what change you will be making possible with each new level of giving.

Data Collection
While Epic Change did get a lot of new donors through the campaign in hindsight I realize that we should have collected more information about them while we had their attention at the donation stage. The advantage of the ChipIn widget was the graphical display of progress and the fact that it was fast to implement. Similar campaigns should definitely invest time to thinking carefully on this. Craft a clear well flowing form that collects essential information, but isn’t so long people tune out.

For Tweetsgiving I’d have liked to collect name, twitter username, url, email, address, recopied gratitude tweet if the donation was $10 or more, what you want displayed in the Top Turkey section as your name if you are giving $100 or more, and a checkbox for Epic Change newsletter subscription.

Team Building
In the future in a campaign like this I would gather a swarm of committed people to organize and brainstorm together in advance. This group could reflect together on who they each knew individually to ask directly to donate, share gratitude, retweet, blog and offer feedback. I’d set up a google doc where this group could share ideas and a list of people to reach out to. I’d have a conference call to build team rapport and plan a second call in advance for the first night of the campaign that would be open to the public.
Connecting voices to twitter names and avatars goes a long way to building teamwork and can lend a valuable grassroots feeling to any social campaign.

Measurement

One issue I’ve found trying to analyze the way the word spread is that search.twitter.com only lets you go back 100 pages (anyone know a way to dig further there?) I have an RSS feed from the whole campaign of “#tweetsgiving” but I know many tweets didn’t include the # and that doesn’t encompass all the ways the message changed- alternate links people used and phrases that caught on and were retweeted.

Stacey has a post up with her reflections and some details about donations. Most notable is the fact that all but six gifts to Tweetsgiving were new donors. The median gift size was $10 and over half the money came from Top Turkeys who gave $100 or more. Be sure to check out her more detailed breakdown.

What’s Your Take?

For me this thinking raised more questions than closure. I think this is just the start and we can all expect to see twitter and other social networks used for social causes more frequently and on a larger scale in the future. Several people have already reached out to us to collaborate and brainstorm with them about their plans. That’s great!

What does this all jar for you? What’s the biggest question in your mind now? What else was central in your mind to Tweetsgiving’s success and what avenues remain to be explored to take things further and improve? Please share and dissect with us so we can learn together!

I have been amazed at the response of the twitter community to the TweetsGiving campaign. The firehose of gratitude shared through the #tweetsgiving tag during those 48 hours was overwhelming. Now that TweetsGiving 2008 is over (and we’ve met our goal!!) I wanted to share some data about our efforts. This year during TweetsGiving…

• ~3,000 gratitude tweets were posted including the tweetsgiving tag. search.twitter.com only lets you go back 100 pages so that’s an estimate, but check out the awesome wordle visualization of these gratitude tweets below.

• TweetsGiving was one of the top trending terms over the 48 hours of the campaign. The screenshot below from twitscoop gives a sense of the campaign as it spread in real time. Note the rise in activity in the first and last hours as word initially got out and as urgency built to help us reach the goal by the deadline.

• $11,021 were raised in 364 donations

• The TweetsGiving site had 15,830 Total Pageviews from 7,563 Unique Visitors in 101 different countries.

• TweetsGiving received over 100 press and blogger mentions (currently 107).

I had an amazing time putting together the TweetsGiving campaign with Stacey and the rest of our team. Thank you Stacey, Dave and Carrie, Matt, Vince, and Sarah. Thanks to Tori, Brian, and Mari for tweeting up a storm with us and feeling empowered to make this event their own. I can’t express my appreciation enough for everyone who tweeted thanks, donated, blogged, shared, or reflected with us to help make this Thanksgiving truly amazing.

First of all, if you haven’t yet been to http://tweetsgiving.org, go now, I’ll wait.

The Scoop

So, Stacey called me on Wednesday night, with the name and twitter account for TweetsGiving, asking for ideas.  We settled on the idea of getting people to tweet their gratitude, and immediately began thinking about who we could bring on board to help make it happen. Today, after a lot of brainstorming and hard work by many amazing people, #TweetsGiving was a top trending term in twitter and our campaign is well underway to building a new classroom in Tanzania for Gideon and his classmates.

So many twitterers tweeted gratitude throughout the Twitterverse, demonstrating that social media can mobilize an outpouring of Thanksgiving. If you’re not on twitter you can still participate and donate to a worthy cause. Also consider sharing your gratitude in your Facebook status instead.

Here’s the graph of our presence throughout the day on twitter.

Wow. I’m feeling wow.

Yesterday I was pumped and today I am so inspired and happy that this project came together from a mere inkling of an idea six days ago. It has grown into such an amazing campaign.

I’ve been overwhelmed all day by the willingness of the twitter community to step up and get involved in this project. A search for the #TweetsGiving tag really demonstrates how deeply we’ve threaded twitter with gratitude. So far, we have raised over $4,000 (and counting!) towards our goal of $10,000. In just 12 of 48 hours!

This screenshot from this afternoon shows #TweetsGiving as the third most popular term (And there are over 4 million twitter users!).

Thanks!

Since TweetsGiving is about gratitude, I will say that I am so grateful to all those working on the project, especially my partner in crime Stacey and countless others who have reached out to me throughout the day. You rock! I am also grateful to the gazillions of tweeters and the 150+ people who have so far generously donated to TweetsGiving.

On a personal note, I am so grateful to have my mom and sister and so thankful to have all four of my grandparents active in my life. Since the election, I’ve been thinking a lot about all of the blessings that come with being an American. I will have more to say on that and about what I’ve learned from this project after Thanksgiving. I will definitely have more to say once the frenzy winds down. (But not yet! Keep it coming!)

I found this video in a post on Todd Defren’s site PR-Squared where he shared Gary Vaynerchuk‘s Web2.0 keynote.

Gary’s tone and energy match the way I’m feeling now. I’m working on something big and I am pumped. Every conversation about this project has me energized and I’ve taken to saying “Kill It!” as the pieces fall into place. Hopefully I’ll have more to report early next week. In the meantime enjoy Gary.

Note: There’s some not so office friendly language in there.

There are so many gems here including the quote Todd shared that I also liked.

“If you’re pumping out good shit, people will follow. But if you for a second – for a 1/2 second – don’t believe in what you are doing … you need to get out, now.”

Some of my other favorites -

“Hustle is the most important word. Ever.”
“Your great great great grandchildren are going to watch and see everything you’ve ever done.”
“There is never a bad time when you believe, when you work hard, and when you know what you’re doing.”
“The only way to succeed now is to be completely transparent.”

How does this resonate with you?

Thanks for reading my blog. I’ve enjoyed my my new posting schedule (more of an aspiration really). If you haven’t already, I encourage you to subscribe in the sidebar. You can subscribe using an RSS reader, or you can receive the posts in your inbox by putting your email into the box in the blog side bar, or type it into this box here and click subscribe.

But what is RSS?

RSS or Really Simple Syndication enables you to subscribe to the content of many websites or blogs so that you can more easily keep track of them without visiting the sites directly. Basically you can receive the posts of many different blogs in an interface called an RSS reader that feels a lot more like email.

Huh? Well maybe the good folks at Common Craft explain it better than I can. They make a living clarifying Web concepts like RSS in fantastic videos like this one on RSS in plain English.

Nifty. It turns out only about 11% of internet users make use of RSS (LINK) so now you are in the know

My RSS reader of choice is google reader because I enjoy a lot of the extra features Google has baked in and some of the customizations I have found from various developers and Google itself.

Shortcuts. Shortcuts make the world go round and google reader has a lot of shortcuts many of which are similar to google’s own gmail shortcuts which I also use.

Sharing. One of the most useful features of google reader is the ability to easily share something you enjoyed with everyone connected to you in the reader. You can even include comments that will be included with the post itself when your friends go to see what you’ve shared with them. The feature automatically culls from your list of gmail contacts to determine who is also sharing on the system, though you can customize sharing as well. Even cooler is the fact that you can literally share anything via google reader even things you aren’t subscribed to by using the sharing notes bookmarklet.

Search and sorting. Like most google products, reader is powered by search so I can find articles easily even if I only a few phrases from the content stick out in my memory. You can also and view the reading list in alphabetical order or view only new items. There is also and All Items view that gives you the option to see things in one river of news the way Robert Scoble describes.

So please subscribe to the RSS feed (by RSS reader or email if you prefer), keep sharing your feedback, and if you enjoy something you see here please do share it with a friend.

For those not in the know, according to its Wikipedia page:

“Parkour … is an activity with the aim of moving from one point to another as efficiently and quickly as possible, using principally the abilities of the human body.^[2] It is meant to help one overcome obstacles, which can be anything in the surrounding environment—from branches and rocks to rails and concrete walls—and can be practiced in both rural and urban areas.”

Still confused? Check out this video of Parkour at the Fermi Institute. (Thank you google reader and thanks Judy for sharing!)

So what can Parkour teach us about Social Media Adoption?

For those now thinking,  “Avi that was pretty cool, but I don’t need my organization or business to bounce off walls”, let me explain why I think Parkour works as an analogy for social media adoption.

1. Social Media can be very exciting

These days it seems everyone is talking about social tools. A lot of people are talking about the role it played in this year’s historic presidential election both in terms of communicating with supporters and tracking the election results. CNN anchors are reading Twitter on air. It’s definitely gotten some more attention lately.

When organizations first start to see a return on their investment into social media it can be a rush. Once you really start to listen and engage customers, donors, constituents, whoever it can be really exciting. Look! They’re talking about us!

2. You can get hurt

Of course, fast adoption of social media without careful planning and an adequate investment of time and attention can land your organization in hot water. You could make the mistake of throwing your social efforts on one person or department, cordoning off the responsibility and ultimately wind up with burned out and frustrated staff people. Equally dangerous is falling into the trap of being distracted by all the shiny tools, instead of focusing on where you’re going. There is a time to fondle the hammer, but as in Parkour if you’d better know where you are and where you’re going, or you’re likely to run into obstacles, maybe even have some nasty spills.

3. Transparency

With Social Media, as in Parkour, all the action is in public. If your not prepared to tighten your grip on your message and release the conversation to the wild than you ought to think twice before diving in. Of course, deciding that Social Media efforts aren’t the right approach for your organization or business is perfectly valid, but once you’re playing you’d better be prepared. It’s a complex question and there is a lot to consider before you do.

Does my Parkour analogy work? In any case these are some good things to keep in mind. What else should organizations keep in mind about Social Media?

I can’t leave it at that can I? No, did you really think I’d deny you these awesome Parkour links and videos? First off if you have an Xbox you may want to check out the new Mirror’s Edge game which let’s you lay it down on screen.

And another similar phenomenon of people chucking cans.

When I saw Summer Workation had entered the contest I took the opportunity to ask Nitesh to answer some questions about his work so far and he happily agreed.

Tell me about yourself.

What’s the idea behind Summer Workation?

Summer workation is an education social entrepreneurship project that helps teachers make the most of their summers. By doing this, we hope to address some of the challenges currently facing education. Right now teachers generally have a limited set of summer opportunities, most of which don’t focus on their own growth. By helping teachers find the best workations, we hope teachers can spend their summers developing and return to the classroom as stronger teachers.

What’s your founding story?

You’ve been talking about this project nonstop. Is there an elevator pitch and what have you learned about communicating your social entrepreneurship through this process?

Do you have any thoughts on being a young person advocating for social change?

Stick with it! Starting up any project is difficult and I think everything can be that much harder when you are young. There aren’t necessarily a lot of avenues for young people to become entrepreneurs, but their are a lot of great mentors. Reach out to your friends, you will be surprised how many have started (or are thinking about starting) a business/nonprofit/project. Connect with them and you can learn together!

How have you been spreading the word?

I’m still trying to figure out the best way to share my idea. I have been using my own network and asked friends/family to spread the word. The more you talk about an idea the better – it is crazy how quickly an idea can grow!

OK, so I voted for the project on Ideablob, now what? How else can people get involved?

Stay updated on the site and let us know what you think (particularly if you have workation ideas.) If you are really interested, shoot me an e-mail (nbanta@summerworkation.org) and we can figure out a way for you to get involved!

Finally, if you could go anywhere in the world for Summer Workation where would you go?

I would go to Alaska to learn about climate change and hang out with polar bears/my friend Faon.

Thank you Nitesh for sharing your experience with us!

What advice would you offer Nitesh? Personally, I’m interested to hear what further steps people think he should consider taking to spread the word and get more people invested in his idea, but something else might jump out at you. Brainstorm in the comments and Nitesh feel free to respond to people’s ideas. Remember to vote!