Why influence scores are fairly meaningless

Number 10 Downing Street is given a Klout score of 51. While WiredUK is given a (higher) Klout score of 56.

Nicely illustrating that your ability to gather lots of friends, and even disseminate your message online, is not really the same thing as influence.

Tools like Klout, and the influence tools offered by most online monitoring services, aren't completely meaningless. But without analysis and insight they are fairly meaningless.

A basic online campaigning guide - Part 2a - Strategy for building your databases -Building your Facebook support

The most important single thing you can do to boost your support on Facebook (a client of mine) is to use Facebook pages.

Why Facebook pages

Facebook page status updates appear in your fans' newsfeeds, so allow you to appear where people spend 80% of their time on Facebook.

Unlike a personal Facebook profile, where you are limited to 5,000 friends, there is no upper limit on the number of fans you can have.

Install a Facebook page widget on your other websites

If you do this people who visit your other websites will see a window on your site showing some of your fans on your Facebook page. People who visit your page, who are also logged into Facebook (extremely common now), will see their friends who are already your fans endorsing you.

Obviously since a personal endorsement from a friend is extremely powerful, this is a great help in recruiting more fans.

Look to the right of this post to see an example for me.

Advertise your page in offline materials

The easiest way to promote your page in offline materials such as leaflets and advertising is to get a vanity URL such as facebook.com/rob.blackie - which is both easier to put on offline literature and better optimised for search engines such as Google.

Advertise

Facebook's self service advertising can be highly targeted based on a combination of:

• Workplace
• Education
• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Interests

The quality of the targeting means that a high proportion of clicks should convert to fans - so in some circumstances it can be very valuable. I find it particularly valuable where a brand has a well defined set of fans who are already enthusiastic.

The official Facebook guide to adverts is worth a read.

A basic online campaigning guide - Part 2a - Strategy for building your databases

Most online campaigners naturally want as much control over when they send out their messages, to who and exactly what they say.

The most common online databases that need to be maintained now are:

• Mobile numbers (increasingly there is an overlap between mobile text messages and internet use)
• Email addresses (used by almost everyone online)
• Facebook (used by the majority of the online population)
• Twitter (still relatively small but useful in many circumstances

Here are some simple things you can do to boost the numbers of people you have in each.

1. Building email and mobile phone number lists

• Gather up all your existing emails from everyone in your organisation. Clarify the permissions you have, and, if necessary, contact people to re-confirm their opt-ins
• Make email sign up forms prominent on your website, and on every offline response slip you create
• Use email as the primary way to register for events
• Collect emails at events
• Use petitions where the primary way of signing up is by email. This is the main recruitment mechanism used by Avaaz.
• Create a funnel of people who might be interested to sign up and ask them if they want to sign up. Conversion rates can be very high. Sources include Facebook friends and pages, Twitter followers, email contacts (many people have hundreds saved so even in a small organisation there are a lot) and Customer relationship databases / other general databases. Simply contact these people and ask them to sign up.

Facebook

This will be the subject of a separate article, but in brief the key things you need to do are:

• Use a Facebook page, not a group, because your status updates appear in your fans' newsfeeds (where people spend 80% of their online time)
• Get a vanity URL such as facebook.com/rob.blackie - which is both easier to put on offline literature and better optimised for search engines such as Google.

Twitter

This will also be the subject of a separate article, but as with Facebook and email one of the crucial elements of building a following is to cross-promote your Twitter feed via Facebook and email and vice versa.

A basic online campaigning guide - Part 1 - Contents

Over the next few months I'm creating a brief guide to basic online campaigning - one piece at a time, as a reference material for all the people I work with on this.

Here's a brief overview of the process:

1. What's your objective? Commonly this might be to gain votes in an election or to persuade a council to build (or not build) something.

2. What is your strategy for using online campaigning? Which online channels do your audiences use most? How can you build your support on Facebook, increase the number of email addresses you have or increase your number of Twitter followers?

3. What's your message for your campaigning?

4. How can you get your message to as many people as possible? Usually this is a mixture of outreach to popular websites (etc.) and using your own databases to direct contact people.

5. How can you creatively make your message as effective as possible at translating into action? What has worked in the past?

Google's creative internet

A great source of ideas here from Google. 119 slides - so exhausting to try and consume in one go.

September digital inspiration from Blue Rubicon

Blue Rubicon Digital Delights Sept 2010