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Three months without Twitter

July 19, 2010

As you know, I left twitter 3 months ago today. I figured it was a good time to do a reflection of my experiences over this time – what I miss, and what I don’t miss.

What I don’t miss

  • Distractions: I find myself more productive, for sure. I never was very disciplined about turning twitter off, so I was constantly distracted. The lack of distraction has been a really good thing.
  • Information overload: how did I keep all that stuff in my head? My mind feels a lot quieter.
  • Need to share: I’m happy to leave the somewhat narcissistic impulse that Twitter feeds behind.

What I miss

  • Instant answers to questions! And answering people’s questions.
  • Banter: Twitter is way better for banter than any other medium besides being in person.
  • Opportunities for collaboration: it does seem like a lot of that happens now on Twitter and Facebook (which for me is a friends/family only zone) so I’m probably missing out on some of that.

In general, I’m still happy I left, and have no plans to return. I have, on a couple of occasions, used search.twitter.com when a certain event was happening, so I could see up to the minute what was going on. I’m sure I’ll still do that sometimes.

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External, alienated, busy-busy

April 19, 2010

As you might know, almost a year ago, I made a big change in my use of social media – I segregated my social graph – work related stuff moved to LinkedIn and Twitter, and personal friends only on Facebook. Now, I have taken the next step, and made somewhat of a momentous decision. I’m not alone – Jon Stahl did this before me, and I know there are others. There are plenty of people who never entered these waters at all.

I have been fairly conflicted about this for a while. There are things I really like about Twitter, Identi.ca, Buzz, etc. I like being connected to the nptech community, and learning what’s happening. I really like reaching out and getting questions answered. But, being on those networks has taken it’s toll on me. It’s time spent I need for other things. It’s an influx of information in my brain that I really don’t need. And I’m sure people really don’t need to hear what I think or what I’m doing in 140 characters or less.

Most of the reason I named this blog “Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology” is that I am very interested in the ethical and spiritual dimensions of technology in general, and nonprofit technology in particular. And I’m very interested in the way my work affects me and my life.

Thomas Merton, one of the people I look to for wisdom once said:

When I speak of the contemplative life … I am talking about a special dimension of inner discipline and experience, a certain integrity and fullness of personal development, which are not compatible with a purely external, alienated, busy-busy existence.

(By “alienated” he meant alienated from ourselves.) For me (and only for me - I’m not making any generalizations for others) this being almost always-on connected to the 140 characters-or-less social networks lead me to an external, alienated, busy-busy existence – the opposite of the direction I want to go.

So … I deleted my Four Square account, and I disconnected varied things from my twitter account. I won’t be using the 1/2 dozen or social media accounts that I have.  I won’t be tweeting really anymore. I haven’t deleted my twitter account, so if you DM me, I’ll still get an SMS telling me. But I won’t be watching it for the most part.

I’ll miss the banter, and the exchange. I’ll miss the easy answers. I won’t miss the barrage of info I don’t need, or the time spent. And, I’ll still be blogging. Although it likely won’t be on too many up-to-the-minute news items (like the recent Ning Thing) because I’ll be paying less attention to those goings on, and more attention to other, deeper things.

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Social CRM, part 1

April 11, 2010

This blog series is all Beth Kanter’s fault. We (the two partners of OpenIssue) shared a cab from the Atlanta airport to the hotel when we arrived for the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference. We were chatting with her about what kind of work we do, and she asked “do you do social CRM?” She might not have seen the blank stares on our faces since we were in a dark cab, but I’m sure she heard the pregnant, confused silence.

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.

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