Will Marlow

People who don't use Twitter sometimes ask me why I started using Twitter.  The reason is simple: I was the cofounder of a startup company, and all startup companies have zero credibility: they have no customers, no track record, no glossy sales materials, no industry relationships, and an untested product.  You improve those things slowly, which we have done.  But on day one, you need to do everything you can to demonstrate, among other things, that you are who you say you are. 

Twitter is a no brainer for that.  With Twitter, I can have a conversation with a customer, and later when that customer Googles me and my company, she can see that I think and write about the same issues that we talked about.  She can also see that I spend seven days a week thinking and writing about those same issues that she cares about.  And, over time, she can see that I've done that for a long time.  That's one source of credibility, and that's what drew me to Twitter in the first place.  But gradually, as my company grew, I began to interact with people and Twitter became more valuable as a source of new connections and relationships.  In my next post, I'm going to tell you why this has led me to create a brand new Twitter feed for myself, @willmarlowchats.

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Will Marlow is a digital strategist/online marketing consultant.  He's the co-creator of  AlumniFidelity, which is a Web 2.0 fundraising platform for colleges, nonprofits and secondary schools.   He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, and Bowling Green State University and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge.  He would love to help you market your business on the Internet, boost the fundraising numbers for your school or nonprofit, or sellout your next big event.  Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

My business partner and I released a video "introduction" to our startup last week.  You can watch it embedded below.  

I talk to a lot of people about how to make sure that the Internet is filled with positive stories about their organizations.  Recently I was talking to a reporter who was writing a story about "Googlewashing," which is a term I don't like, because it implies that you are somehow removing negative stories from Google, and that's simply impossible (just ask any celebrity who has ever tried to remove a sex tape from the Internet).

I was quoted in the story that the reporter ended up writing, and in my quote I outline exactly the same strategy that I advise to most clients:

I just noticed that I was quoted in this news article about Toyota's social media strategy.  I was interviewed because of my background cofounding AlumniFidelity, which helps schools and nonprofits execute modern online fundraising campaigns, as well as for my former profession advising political candidates on their communication strategies.  You can read the full story here.  If you want me to send you updates like this, or to receive new blog posts by email, just subscribe by putting your email address in the field below and clicking "subscribe."

The Executive Director of the National Society of Collegiate Scholars, Steve Loflin (@sloflin) invited me to Boston to make a short presentation about online fundraising at the Annual Meeting of Collegiate Honor Societies.  I'm making the presentation today at 3:00, and I wanted to share some of my notes below.

Intro to online fundraising 

• Fundraising is about two things: (1) relationships and (2) storytelling.  For all 35 of my clients, no one ever gets a donation unless there is a relationship between the donor and the place they are making a gift.  In recent years, there's been a trend that has reshaped fundraising in some incredible ways.  A second type of relationship has started mattering more than ever.  That's the relationship between a donor and her friend.  Using any number of online tools, after someone makes a donation, they can now alert large numbers of friends and in some cases they can even solicit them on behalf of the organization to match their gift.  This phenomenon is changing the way schools, nonprofits, and political organizations are allocating their resources.
• No longer do you want to spend close to 100% of your resources on soliciting new donors and cultivating current donors.  Instead of that, organizations are spending more and more resources on enabling their current donors to tell their friends and family about their own donations.  What’s the ROI on this type of activity?
• Traditional "new donor acquisition" methods tend to net a ".03%" conversion rate of prospect to donor.  We see friend-to-friend techniques netting a conversion rate of about 30%.  That means that by some important measurements friend-to-friend fundraising is 100x more effective at new donor acquisition than traditional fundraising.

The long history of friend-to-friend fundraising

• People have always known that friend-to-friend fundraising is the most effective way to raise money, but until five or six years ago, it was too expensive to do on a large scale.
• Previously, "friend-to-friend" fundraising was limited to large donors who give $25,000 or more.  It was cost-effective to organize those large donors to ask their friends to match the gifts. 
• Additionally, on a smaller scale, many organizations have a history of distributing pre-stamped stationary and pens to encourage current donors to contact their friends.  Problem with this was that if the materials went unused, the organization operates at a loss. 

• Online fundraising pages.  This is a very simple concept where you take all of the friend-to-friend communication and you put it online on a single personal fundraising page.  
• Eliminate production costs and greatly reduce the resources required to communicate with the volunteers = a very compelling return on investment.
• Add in non-fundraising communication platforms like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter to supplement tools that are geared specifically for fundraising.  This ensures that the focus stays on fundraising even as activity migrates to large social networks.  

Many people focus on the content of their message.  They refine and tweak and improve their message, and when they really nail it they may land an op-ed in the Washington Post, or their video may go viral, or some other great thing will happen to get them attention.

But the thing that seems to separate the most impressive modern communicators (people like Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki and Apple and Google and Barack Obama) isn't the content of their message, it's their delivery.  (And they don't use every social media platform or megaphone available.  But the things they do, they do really well.)  Obama maximizes his time in front of the teleprompter, Godin writes a great blog post every day, Guy Kawasaki Tweets 60 times an hour, Apple famously doesn't touch any social media at all, and like Google it has employee evangelists who each have their own style and portfolio.

For these people and companies, the messaging itself seems effortless.  It's the delivery they work on.

Will Marlow is the co-creator of AlumniFidelity, which helps schools and nonprofits improve their online fundraising results.  Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.  

This post is intended for people who are either new to Twitter, or who have been Tweeting for awhile and would like to get more out of Twitter by understanding one of the most common Twitter use cases, the ReTweet. 

ReTweet (or, RT): as a verb, to ReTweet is to re-post something posted by another user, usually preceded with “RT” and “@username” to give credit to an original poster.

(Quick aside: ReTweet was one of the words that the Oxford English Dictionary made a big deal about adding this year from social media.  The word “Unfriend,” however, beat it out for the new word of the year.)

What’s the point of ReTweeting?  ReTweeting showcases the powerful viral nature of Twitter, because as people ReTweet interesting posts, good ideas have more opportunities to reach more of Twitter’s 40 million-plus users.  Also, from an individual point of view, if a user is commonly ReTweeted, it shows that his/her Twitter followers are truly reading their posts, and this is valuable information since there are some effective ways for people to “inflate” their Twitter following, and to create a misleading impression of their actual influence.  It seems nearly impossible, however, to fake the number of ReTweets you have.

How to do you increase the frequency that people ReTweet you? The first thing you should do is make sure you yourself know why you are on Twitter, and what you want to say and accomplish.  For example, if you are a health clinic trying to build relationships with neighborhood donors, you should Tweet about your health expertise (interesting news health stories, public health announcements, news regarding the treatments you offer, news about donations and how they help you serve the community, etc.).  

Second, you should proactively follow a handful of people who are interested in the same things you are writing about.  (Just look at their profile bio, and their Twitter stream to find out what they are interested in.) This is a way of saying hello on Twitter.  If they are in fact interested in what you have to say, they will likely follow you back.  Quick tip: make sure you have just Tweeted something relevant to them before you follow them, so that when they take a quick look a your Twitter stream and bio, they will be able to recognize that you aren’t a spammer or a bot.  This outreach is very important at first, because it will introduce you to people who are interested more in what you have to say and less in who you are.  That is to say, if your sister or best friend are following you on Twitter, they may be fully satisfied by nothing more than reading your posts.  You want to engage with people who want to pull-in and push-out information from you.

Rather than going into a detailed list of the many specific tactics that you can master to increase the frequency with which you are ReTweeted, I am instead going to give you this link here to a great blog post by @GuyKawasaki, and just share a few fundamentals.  The hard part is introducing yourself to the right audience and knowing your Twitter goals and objectives (i.e., what do you want to say and whom are you speaking with?).  Once you have that solid framework in place, all you need to do is regularly ReTweet some fellow Twitterers, and they will begin to return the favor.  (And pay attention to Guy Kawasaki's tactical tips to help make sure your material is highly "retweetable.")

One final tip: Every time you get ReTweeted, add that person to a public or a private list that identifies them as someone who has ReTweeted you.  As the number of people who ReTweet you grows, you can make an organized effort to stay engaged with these people by ReTweeting them, and @replying ot them before doing so for others.  This will help you with the challenge of follower retention and not just follower acquisition, which is what most people focus on exclusively.

My friend DJ Smith over at WebDrivenGuy just posted the story about how Wikipedia is losing thousands of page creators each month. 

Even though I love Wikipedia, I also love reading stories like this. 

This is a great illustration of one of the most disruptive aspects of Web 2.0: when you build a modern web platform, your challenge is not to build an online destination that attracts 347 million page views each month (which is Wikipedia’s current monthly traffic).  Your challenge instead is to build a platform that attracts a small segment of people, but that engages these folks in an intense way, and gives them something productive to do that can be shared with others. 

If you succeed in doing this, you’ll join the ranks of YouTube, Blogger, Flickr, Wikipedia, eBay, Facebook, MySpace, craigslist, Squidoo, wordpress, Digg, TypePad, Topix, Photobucket, Scribd...and, although my company is a hybrid model, I'd include AlumniFidelity in there, along with plenty of others.

Quick side-note: don't be fooled by corporations that create instant hits like Hulu, which are backed by content that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to create and market.  That sort of site isn't a modern web platform.  Everything about these sites are supported by dollars that were generated elsewhere, and they just happen to be on the web. 

I attended a good panel this morning organized by the people at Ogilvy PR in DC.  The topic was innovation in organizations, and there were some great panelists.

We ran out of time, but I would have loved to discuss the dynamic between the outward-facing guys and inward-facing guys within companies.  My own attitude has been that a company should do its best to create tension between the outward-facing team (maybe led by the CEO), and the inward-facing team (led by the COO).  Both teams are essential to stimulating innovation.  The trick is, even though you want to foster tension between the outward and inward forces, you need the outward force to win often enough to keep people very busy.

First of all, this post is NOT intended to be a political statement or judgment, merely an observation.  The only provocative aspect of this post is that the title could have been, "One Way the Government Affects the Economy," but instead I chose to use Obama's name because my example comes from his policies.