This example uses an app from the Salesforce AppExchange, called “Salesforce for Facebook and Twitter.” To make things just a tad confusing, this is also called “Salesforce for Social Media” and “Salesforce for Twitter.”

There are likely many more options, but this is one I’ve seen that is pretty cool, although it has its weak spots. It definitely is geared more toward the “Service Cloud” than the “Sales Cloud.”

You can set up multiple twitter and facebook accounts, and each facebook account can have access to multiple pages. It’s all done via OAuth, which is cool. Once you set up the accounts, you can then grab conversations:

You can filter and sort, just like records in any other SF object. You can choose whether or not to send Twitter or Facebook identities to Leads, Contacts, or Person Accounts. You can choose to create cases from tweets or FB posts as well.

You can tweet or post to facebook directly from Salesforce:

And it works:

You can schedule tweets and facebook posts as well.

There is a lot more you can do – it’s a pretty cool tool. The one thing I can’t seem to find – and I don’t know whether this is in development, or they won’t ever do it – is import your social graph into salesforce – your facebook fans or your twitter followers. I’m not sure why this is, exactly. It seems a big gap to me. But then, it is the folks who engage with you who you definitely want to make sure to keep track of.

Anyway, if you are a user of either Salesforce, the Nonprofit Starter Pack, or Convio Common Ground, this is definitely a tool to know about.

As you know, I’m a bit of a technology curmudgeon, but I’m far from a luddite – I’m an early adopter, for the most part. I’m a fairly active user of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and some other social networking sites, and have been for years now. I certainly have followed and friended lots of organizations on these networks (particularly on Twitter, but also some more personally relevant to me on Facebook.) The apps I use most on my phone include the Facebook app for Android and Tweetdeck.

I spend some amount of my Drupal and WordPress development time, both for my clients and for myself, in setting up one or two-way integrations between websites and social media sites. I understand how the varied APIs work, and have to keep on top of whether I should be using a “like” or a “share” button for Facebook. I’ve been using social media to actively promote my new science fiction books.

In other words, I don’t avoid social media, I use it a lot, and I actively facilitate my clients use of social media integration with their web presence. (And I use hashtags in blog entries!)

But I’m still bored silly. Case in point: A new report out from IBM on Social CRM. It’s geared toward a for-profit audience, but it certainly has some reasonably useful lessons for nonprofits, and it has been a topic of conversation in the #nptech world today. But there isn’t anything in this report I haven’t read a dozen times already. It doesn’t help organizations bridge the huge data and workflow gap present between their traditional CRM/Donation management systems and their social media interactions. And if I hear the buzz phrase “game changer” one more time, I’m going to puke. It’s hype designed to sell things. And hype designed to sell things isn’t necessarily going to help make the world a better place.

No one should take this post personally. I’m very glad that most of my #socialmedia #nptech colleagues talk a lot about ROI of social media, and really try and figure out what works, and what doesn’t. But we’ve had, what 3 or 4 years solid of nonprofits using this stuff. Can it be demoted now?

So what do I want us to talk more about? How about lowering the costs of software by using open source and collaboratively developing software? How about data standards to help us share information more easily? How about finishing the work we did on getting the expensive CRM vendors to really open up their APIs so that organizations can better integrate their systems? Maybe talking how to deal with neglected nonprofit verticals like client management? Helping accidental techies get the training they need so that they can do more work in-house? Nonprofits who need tech help partnering with local organizations who provide training to the unemployed and ex-offender? The list goes on and on.

I joined Twitter in the beginning, because my colleagues were. I didn’t have a reason, or a goal, except to find out what everyone one else was, well, all a-twitter about (sorry, I couldn’t help it.) I knew that my nonprofit consulting practice was not going to be geared toward social media (as you all know, I veer way more to the plumber end of the web technology spectrum.) And, it was fun, for a while, then it got old. I didn’t have a specific set of things I wanted to get out there in the world (save in the realm of what I can easily do by blogging) and I just joined because all of my nptech buddies joined.  I got overwhelmed by the information coming my way and it invaded my life. So I left.

What’s changed for me is that I now have a goal and a focus, and with that goal and focus comes a realization. Aha! Twitter will be useful. It sort of took me by surprise, interestingly enough. I began to think about how I would approach this thing, and what would be the best way to learn more, as well as share, and put stuff out, and … voila, Twitter.

And the lesson, I learned, which I’m sure lots of nonprofits are learning, seems to be: Twitter is a means to an end, and it’s important for me to treat it that way, rather than it being and end unto itself. And I know the social media folks have been saying this all along, but it took me this long for it to really sink in.

I know that at least some of you are thinking “so what’s the goal and focus?” Sorry, it’s not nonprofit technology, ya’ll. Now that I’ll be back on Twitter, I’ll probably do a few tweets now and again from our company twitter account, so feel free to follow. And please don’t feel at all slighted if I stop following you on my personal twitter account (It’s likely.)  Because besides being a web techie, I’m a science fiction writer with some stories and novels to peddle.

In July, Idealware published the Nonprofit Social Media Decision Guide. It’s great – chock full of good information, and some very, very interesting research. One of the most interesting tidbits of data to me was the large gap between people who “thought” social media of varied types either helped them reach new audiences, or helped them raise money, and those that really “knew” this was the case.

And further, the largest change was just an increase in website traffic (20%).  A very close second was substantive feedback and discussions (21%), and a relatively close third was to attract new members or volunteers (16%).

There are some great worksheets to help you figure out what strategies to use, and how to move forward in this space. And there is, to my mind, a lot of fodder for thought and conversation among folks thinking about  how to really measure success in social media, as well as those of us thinking about SocialCRM:  how to best capture that data – whether it be engagement metrics, or actual constituent information.

CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Management” (not to be confused with “Cause Related Marketing”- it came from the for-profit space. In the nonprofit world we use this acronym to mean “Constituent Relationship Management”, generally. From Wikipedia:

Customer relationship management is a broadly recognized, widely-implemented strategy for managing and nurturing a company’s interactions with clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former clients back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service.

Now we could easily translate that into “managing and nurturing an organizations’ interactions with donors and constituents.” and “overall goals are to find, attract and win new donors, nurture and retain those donors the organization already has, entice former donors back into the fold, and reduce the costs of fundraising.” (I’ve never been convinced that CRM and Donation management are very different beasts, even though many argue differently.)

Anyway, you all know this stuff, and know the tools we all use to do this – Salesforce, CiviCRM, Raiser’s Edge, etc. And these tools are great at doing CRM with the standard communications methods – email, phone, snail mail, in person contact. But what about social media as another form of communication? That was the question I cam to this issue with.

There are good arguments for why social media will radically change standard CRM practices. You should definitely read the report I mentioned in my earlier post. But in the Social CRM space, there seems to be a lot more attention paid to what I would call “metrics”  - useful for attracting new donors, and understanding the “emotional state of conversations” rather than relationships that are trackable to “nurture and retain those donors the organization already has.”

I don’t mean to downplay metrics – metrics are hugely important – but I think mixing up metrics and CRM might make it harder to really do either well.

Example – in Jeremiah Owyang’s report, of the 18 use cases for Social CRM he uses, 7 or 8 of them are really use cases for metrics. Example “Social Campaign Tracking” and “Social Sales Insights.”

In this series, I’m going to talk a fair bit about both, although I’m going to lean  more heavily on the CRM side of things than the Metrics side, since that’s more my bailiwick anyway. And I welcome any comments.

I think over the course of lo this last few years, I have blogged or tweeted about this very phenomenon what feels like countless times. Nonprofits find services for free. They start depending on them. The free services disappear, for business reasons. The nonprofit community gets up in arms. Lather, rinse, repeat.

There is nothing wrong with software or services that don’t cost anything. Nothing at all. But if you are going to bet the farm, make sure you know what the risks are. Using free services is fine, but know why they are free. Are they free because the company behind them is an ad revenue machine and uber profitable (Google)? Is it free because it’s open source (Drupal, Elgg, Word Press)?  Is it free because it is a profitable company that has a clear and well defined donation program (Salesforce.com)? Or is it free because it is a start up in search for a business model (Ning)?

There is an effort afloat (and a petition) to get Ning to make nonprofit and educational accounts free. I’m not holding my breath. They eliminated 40% of their staff. They are feeling pinched, and need to stop their burn rate. I don’t know how charitable this will make them feel. And even if they do, there is no guarantee that Ning will even survive.

Anyway, if you’re looking for a great social network management system that won’t get pulled out from under you, try Elgg. It’s open source, and out of the box, it does just about everything Ning does, without the need for the deep setup required to set up Drupal like Ning. It has an active developer community, and is growing.

Or, if you look for another free service, make sure you understand the risks, and be prepared for possible disaster if it’s a startup in search of a business model.

As you know, I don’t blog much about social media. I use it all the time, but there are much better sources of good information on that – I’ve been sticking to writing what I know best. But I have to admit, this idea of social CRM piqued my interest. More than that. The truth is, if @kanter asks me about something that is related to social media, it must be important, so I’d better figure it out. And, of course, I’m at least a year behind the curve on this – there has been a lot going on in this space, although, frankly, in my research so far, I haven’t found a lot in the technology sphere that would immediately be helpful to nonprofits (especially small to medium-sized ones.) There’s some, and I’ll talk about that in the next posts in this series.

Beth pointed us in the direction of Jeremiah Owyang, who I’d been reading a little for a while, but had lost track of, since I don’t follow the social media space carefully. He has a great post on the use cases for Social CRM. It’s a really solid post, with an information-packed report attached, as well as some resources. This is a bit high level for me – my job in life is generally to make use cases real using technology. I’m hoping that someone (hint, hint) will write the blog post or report taking off on this work, and articulate the major nonprofit use cases for Social CRM. The report does include some technologies to look at, and I’ll be delving into those in future posts.

I’m going to take a little chunk off of this, though, and ask some leading questions. And then, I’ll do my best over the course of the next few weeks to answer how these would get accomplished via the technological tools that most nonprofits use  or can get access to.

1. How do you know which of your Facebook fans/Causes members are also a donors (separate from donations through Causes)?
2. How do you know how many of your twitter followers are also donors?
3. How do you know what percentage of your donors or constituents are on social media at all (twitter, facebook, myspace, linkedin?)
4. Can you follow the trail from tweet (or facebook status) to a donation? A tweet to a specific action (like a petition?)

If you’ve got more questions you’d like to see me address, or you’ve got some examples of how your nonprofit has answered these questions, please feel free to comment on this post.

Security Camera - Photo by Sirius Rust

Beth threw down the gauntlet, and I had to pick it up. I’m sort of surprised I hadn’t written about this before. I think a lot about both of these, not so much for myself, but for organizations that I work with whose work is fairly sensitive.

First off, some definitions – I think that these two terms do get mixed up quite often, and understanding what’s really being meant by them in a technical context is important.

Security, in this context, is the concept that your personal computing resources and data are safe from both prying eyes, as well as hijack by crackers and spammers who will use those resources and data for their nefarious ends. In the case of your computing resources and personal data inside that box you call your laptop, or protecting the whole of your home or office network, security is a matter of using specific tools that prevent unprivileged outsiders from getting in. Wifi passwords, firewalls, password protected fileshares, virus protection software, etc. are the tools of the trade here. Security of your private data that is “in the cloud” is largely at the mercy of the software developers who hold your data. Luckily, most of them take security quite seriously. (That said, your data “in the cloud” can be compromised by lack of security on your network or laptop – someone installs a key logger, for instance, and grabs all of your passwords.)

Privacy, in this context, is that you can control, in a granular sense, what information about you is exposed to whom. Privacy is, as Beth says, primarily a matter of human behavior, but there are very interesting intersections with technology and security. In some instances, services have default privacy settings that are a lot less private than someone might like – and it takes some know-how to figure out how to correct those settings. Privacy is, also, a set of decisions that get made – sometimes in haste, or without much consideration. Your drunken decision to post that picture of you (or a co-worker) dancing in your underwear on a table at a party, the cat is out of the bag, and may never be able to be put back.

Security and privacy in the context of online communities, as Beth points out, are different beasts. The software that drives online communities (such as Drupal, phpBB, and others) have options to allow for varied levels of security. You might need to have a password to see anything. Or you might just need a password to make comments. You might not be able to just register for an account – you might need to go through an admin. These days, most software driving communities have roles you can assign people to, with specific privileges granted per role.

But privacy is made up of policy (the policy of the organization running the community) as well as the behavior of the members – their collective agreement that “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.”

Even though I tend not to blog anywhere near as much as most of my colleagues about social networks (because it’s really not my passion,) I’ve been a fairly early adopter, in the broad sense (of course, if I compare myself to Beth Kanter, I’m a laggard.) I have an account on all of the major social networks (and some of the obscure ones, too,) listen often, and update fairly regularly. A while ago, I realized that I would keep hearing the same nonprofit technology related stuff, over and over again, and I realized I was contributing to that by using Ping.fm to send the same status notices everywhere, or connecting my twitter account to my facebook and linked in accounts, etc. (actually, I think it might even be possible to create an infinite loop doing that stuff.) I stopped doing that a while back.

Now of course it used to be that all of my Facebook “friends” were other nptech early adopters. But around two years ago, a steady stream of my real friends started to come on, and then about 40% of my Facebook friends were non-nptech related. I noticed two important things: first, a status notice that a real friend was having a hard time would get buried in the cacophany of new reports, new campaigns, new blog posts, etc. Not a good thing. Also, I noticed that I censored myself on Facebook – I wouldn’t say things to friends, or play games, or take silly quizzes because I felt the need to be “professional.”

So all of that lead me to make Facebook a “work-free” space. I left work-related groups, disconnected this blog from Facebook, etc.

And doing that led me to think a little bit about how we nonprofit technology leaders use these social networks, and how we work with our clients to use these services. I do think that still, the majority of nonprofit organizations aren’t all that connected to social networks. I’m not entirely utterly convinced yet that all of them should. And I do wonder about the echo effect – if you are an early adopter, and you are on multiple networks, you are going to hear the same stuff over and over. Is that a good thing, or a bad thing? Should we be suggesting that organizations tailor much more specifically their messages, rather than using the services that allow them (and us) to send the same updates everywhere at once?

The technology behind social network strategy and implementation is way more my bad than communications strategy, but this experiment has opened my eyes to some of the things we may be doing wrong. And, of course, there is an entirely interesting conversation to be had about the issues of work and personal life, but I’ll save that for my other blog.

What do these two toolsets mean? Are they truly open, and based on open standards?

Just a quick definition: the “social graph” is, basically, your data about who you are, and who is connected to you – who your friends are. A portable social graph would be one that you can take with you, wherever you are – so the friends that are connected with you on one network are also connected with you on another. It’s the holy grail of social network connectivity – you are connected to who you are connected to, no matter what site you are on.

Google Friend Connect is a toolset based on three standards, two of which are open, one of which could probably be considered an open standard, but it originated with Google: OpenID, OAuth and OpenSocial. Any social network that can use these three standards can be drawn into the open social network web using Google Friend Connect. Any user on any of the social networks that use these standards can connect with their friends on others that use these standards.

Facebook connect, on the other hand is a proprietary process that competes with OpenID, and is only a two way communication between other sites and Facebook – it’s not at all open. And, if you are not on Facebook, that other sites use Facebook Connect won’t matter to you. (For instance, it won’t help connect LinkedIn with MySpace.)

Facebook Connect is not the portable social graph we’ve all been hoping for – Google Friend Connect is a bit closer to it. Both Google and Facebook are interested in being the repository for your credential and social graph data. However, the fact that Google uses the open standard OpenID means that you can actually control where that data lives – and that is not the case for Facebook.

What is most annoying to me is that Facebook Connect is proprietary, and it competes with an open standard, OpenID. They could have just as easily implemented the open standards – but they chose to go in a different direction. For most of the social networks except for Facebook, the walls of the gardens are coming tumbling down. But Facebook is basically just enlarging their walled garden.

What does this mean for most nonprofit organizations: not a whole lot. This is going to take a long time to shake out, and only the most Web2.0 savvy nonprofits are going to be doing technology projects that will involve implementing either of these new toolsets.