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Social Source Commons Blog | ||
Nonprofit Tech, Tools and Social Media |
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Hi everyone, I just wanted to post a quick note for you all to check out the awesome Facebook Privacy Toolbox that Kathryn Benedicto put together to help people like yourselves to navigate Facebook‘s every-changing privacy invasion settings.
Check out the tools below to protect yourself and regain some kind of semblance of security from your favorite social network to hate. Let us know if you know of more tools that should be in the box!
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| Baby Shocked After Finding Out Facebook Privacy Changes Image courtesy of mithadriel |
Facebook has been pretty lame lately. If you’ve been living under a rock, go check your privacy settings and cry. Then, angrily tweet or update your status saying how you should leave Facebook. But don’t. You can’t. A lot of us can’t. For one reason or another, we are tied to Facebook. For nonprofits, a lot of this tying is wrapped up in our organizational Pages. (shameless plug for SSC Facebook Page) Somewhere back there, Facebook became a great way to interact and engage with the communities or our nonprofits.
Lately, a lot of people in the tech sphere (as well as many people outside of it) have been wondering out loud about what to do about the recent privacy changes. From considering whether or not your nonprofit’s Facebook page is worth it to putting together a Facebook Privacy Toolbox on Social Source Commons, people are starting to at the very least be more conscious of their social network information if not jumping ship altogether.
Leaving Facebook is becoming more and more of a consideration and as such, nonprofits need to examine their own Facebook presence. More to the point, nonprofits need to know who owns their Facebook page. When an organizational Facebook Page is created, the creating user automatically becomes an unremovable admin of that Page. The only way that they can remove themselves as an admin is to leave Facebook altogether. However, if they do leave Facebook and there are no other admins, the page that they created is deleted with them. So make sure that there are multiple admins for your nonprofit’s Facebook Page, because God forbid Johnny-Facebook-Page-creator gets fed up with Facebook’s new privacy violations and deletes his account without realizing that he is the only Admin for the Save the Purple-Toed Porcupines Facebook Page. God help the Purple-Toed Porcupines…
What do you all think about Facebook’s privacy changes and their implications for nonprofit?
Related Articles:
With all of this talk about Social Media Dashboards, I thought I would condense Aspiration‘s Building Your Own Social Media Dashboard slide deck into a blog post to show you how easy it is to start monitoring social media outlets for what you care about.
A dashboard is a kind of RSS reader that takes RSS feeds and arranges them on the screen so that it’s easy to see the content of multiple feeds at once in what are called “widgets” (Basically floating boxes of content). Dashboards can display other kinds of information besides RSS feeds, but for our purposes here, all you need are RSS feeds.
There are many dashboard tools including iGoogle, Netvibes, Filtrbox and Radian6. I like to use and recommend Netvibes because it’s free, easy to use and easy to customize. Most importantly, though, it does the job but you may find you like another tool better. A social media dashboard on Netvibes looks like this:
The purpose of a Social Media Dashboard is, in one place, to easily and quickly find out when, where and what people are saying about you online. Once you put a dashboard together, it does all the work for you. You simply log into your dashboard and in front of you will be a collection of widgets that will populate with links when someone mentions you online. Monitoring isn’t limited to your organizational name either. You’ll be able to search for any search terms that may be important to your organization. Executive director’s name, your upcoming conference’s name, a bill you want to stop from getting passed. Eavesdrop on conversations about any topic or keyword that is important to you. If this sounds vague, it will make more sense as we go on. Just know that if you know when, where and what people are saying about you and your organization online, you can engage those people and join the conversation.
Back a few weeks ago, I posted about Taking Advantage of RSS where I looked at uses for RSS subscriptions that many people don’t take advantage of. Building a Social Media Dashboard is built upon the concept that RSS feeds, which are like radio signals for a webpage, are also published for searches on social media sites. So a search for a keyword will generate a RSS Feed that you can subscribe to in order to be automatically notified when a new result matches your search term. New Twitter Tweets, Blog Comments, Topics on Message boards and forums… These are all potential places where search terms you care about (like your organizational name) can be mentioned. The RSS feeds from their searches are all waiting to live on your dashboard
As an example, let me show you how to pull a Twitter Search into your dashboard to be notified when someone mentions your organization on Twitter:
on the right sidebar and it should take you the the search’s RSS feed which you can copy from the URL bar.
Now click the “Add a Feed” button, paste the RSS feed from our Twitter Search into the field it gives us and click the smaller “Add Feed” button
When it’s done loading, click the green “Add” button and BAM, you have added your first RSS feed onto your dashboard.
That’s all there really is to adding RSS feeds to Netvibes. I walked you through searching Twitter, but you can do the same type of search on many different sites (we recommend that you check out what people are saying about you in the sites listed in the Sites to Monitor box above in addition to Twitter). You just have to search for your org, find the RSS feed for the search and copy it into Netvibes just like we did with Twitter above. These search RSS widgets will now automatically update anytime a new result matches your search terms. They do all the work for you and best of all, you can add as many feeds to the dashboard as you want.
Once you input the RSS feeds of your searches on these sites all you have to do is log into Netvibes once a day, once a week or two months from now and see what has been said about your search terms.
The tricky part is finding where the RSS feed lives on your favorite sites. Be sure to look for the RSS icon 
or the words “Feed” and “Atom” which signal an RSS feed.
Does that make sense?
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| Photo courtesy of Shawn Econo |
In our continued quest to make our blog more accessible (see Social Media and Accessibility), we’ve added Worldwide Lexicon to the SSC Blog! What is Worldwide Lexicon, you ask? Well, dear friend, Worldwide Lexicon (or WWL as the cool kids say) is a great way to offer your blog or website in multiple languages. The WWL plugin for WordPress is free, easy to install and easy to use which are the three magic phrases for blog work, as far as I’m concerned.
WWL allows you to choose the languages that are available for your site, giving you the options to enable machine translation, community translation and professional translation (requires a Speaklike account) for each one. The languages then appear as options in a widget (see the right sidebar here on the SSC Blog) that visitors simply click on to see the translated page. Furthermore, if you enable community translation, users (you can designate what access privileges they need to have) of your blog can contribute translations of your posts to improve the quality of the translations.
Worldwide Lexicon is a great, free and easy way to offer multiple languages on your site and get the information that you present out to a much wider audience. We definitely recommend it to easily increase the potential audience of your site. So why not click on one of the languages to the right and check it out!
You can find out more information at the Worldwide Lexicon Blog
Embedded below is a toolbox that I put together on Social Source Commons of tools that I use when working on websites that Aspiration manages (Aspiration, Social Source Commons, SSC Blog & Answr). I wanted to show you how easy it is to create a narrative with a toolbox.
First Sign In, then go to My Toolboxes, and click “Create Toolbox” on the right green sidebar. Name it, add a description for the collection and then add the tools you want inside. After you have your tools all together, you can edit the descriptions of the tools inside the toolbox to explain how they relate to your toolbox theme. For instance, in my Web Design Apps Toolbox below, you can read my descriptions for the tools where I explain why I use each one when doing web design work.
Creating Toolboxes on SSC is super simple and a great way to not only share the tools you use but to explain why you use them.
Give it a whirl. I promise it won’t hurt. 😛
As you may know, we here at Social Source Commons and Aspiration are big proponents of putting together a Social Media Dashboard to monitor what people are saying about you online. The basic idea was that social media sites post RSS feeds for searches. This means that you can search for a term like your organization’s name on a social media site like Twitter, pull the RSS feed and it will automatically update when someone mentions you on Twitter. You can then collect a multitude of these searches in a tool called a Dashboard like Netvibes or iGoogle. We recommend Netvibes because it is free, easy to set up and does the job.
This process used to require a free Netvibes account and then the time it took to copy and paste RSS feeds from search queries. Well today Netvibes introduced a feature that creates an instant Social Media Dashboard where all you have to do is type in the keyword you want to track and it does the rest. For a little comparison, Aspiration’s Social Media Dashboard while easy to put together, required me to go to a variety of sites like Twitter Search, Google Blogsearch and BackTweets, search for the keyword “aspirationtech,” pull the search’s RSS feed and then paste it into Netvibes. You can imagine that it would take a little time for each keyword and site. Netvibes’ new feature means that instead of going around the web and copying individual feeds into my dashboard, all I have to do is input “aspirationtech” once and it pulls a collection of individual feeds for me. Awesome time-saver.
To create a new instant dashboard, log in to Netvibes, click on “Dashboard” in the upper left-hand corner then click “New.” Then simply type in the keyword you want to track and click “Next.” Super simple. It even gives you the option to use a relevant photo (from your keyword search) as the basis for a dashboard theme.
While the new instant dashboard creation feature is a great time-saver, I was a little disappointed to see the feeds that are not included in the automatic setup. They don’t search BackType (for searching Blog comments), BackTweets (to see who has shortened your URLs) or Delicious (to see who’s bookmarking with your keyword as a tag). This, however isn’t a big deal as you can still add individual feeds to the instant dashboard to fill in any holes. Finally, the only other feature request I would have is to be able to track multiple individual keywords. For instance, input “aspirationtech” and generate the instant tracking widgets and then be able to add the same tracking widgets to the dashboard for a different keyword like “SSC Blog.”
However, these are minor quibbles in the face of a great feature addition that will hopefully allow more organizations to track what people are saying about them online. FTW!
Related Resources:
There is so much information related to social justice and nonprofit organizations floating around the internet just waiting to be plucked from research obscurity and be used by an organization that can affect real lives. BUT who’s going to pull all of this information and research together into any coherent fashion? Enter IssueLab, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization who “archives research about social issues, shares it with a broader audience, and advocates for the use of open licenses and open access standards in the nonprofit sector.”
IssueLab provides a great resource of research organized by source, issue and even geographical area and recently Luise B, Marketing Associate at IssueLab, put together a toolbox entitled Knowledge Mobilization (embedded at right) to highlight the tools that they use at IssueLab to comb the internet for the research that they profile and provide on the IssueLab site.
Luise writes that these tools are “some of the tools IssueLab uses regularly for managing and mobilizing information and research – internally and with a broader audience online.” I thought this was an interesting toolbox in that many organizations, nonprofit and otherwise are constantly combing the internet in some kind of fashion for information and data related to their work. Each has its own technique of capturing relevant information and sites. Whether it is using Delicious bookmarks or covering a wall in Post-It notes, it’s valuable and important to take a step back to see how your organization is collecting and storing data and resources that are organizationally relevant. If only to answer the question “What would happen if a staff member who has various accounts across the internet suddenly leaves the organization?”
What processes does your organization have in place to monitor and keep track of the multitude of data silos the members of your organization have?
Related Resources:
Many organizations use Facebook as their primary social network (as opposed to Twitter, LinkedIn or MySpace). We have a Facebook page for both Social Source Commons and Aspiration on which we periodically update our statuses in addition to the resources that we push out through our Twitter page.
One feature that I don’t think many organizations have taken advantage of on Facebook is the @ functionality as a networking mechanism with other organizations. The basic idea is that if the administrator for an organizational Facebook page is a fan of an organization, she can “mention” that organization in a status update and the status update will automatically show up on both organizations’ walls. All the admin has to do is type @ into the status update field and then start typing the name of the org she is a fan of. That org will show up in a little dropdown menu which she can then select. The organization’s name will be blue in the status update so you know that it’s taken advantage of the “@” functionality.
I feel like this is a missed opportunity for a lot of Facebook pages to network and promote themselves on Facebook. By mentioning organizations in your status updates you not only alert your fans of another organization doing great things, but you get placed smack in the middle of their wall providing exposure to your organization to a whole new set of people who may not have known that your organization did similar work. It’s another way to move past having your Facebook page be a silo-ed little page that doesn’t take advantage of your nonprofit network.
Have you used Facebook’s “@” mentions to promote your page? How do you think it compares to Twitter’s “@” mentions?
Some other related articles you may be interested in:
Many people have no idea what that funny little icon is on some webpages. It’s not really hurting anything so most people ignore it as another “computer thing” that they don’t need to know about. Others, who know what RSS is, know it as a easier way to stay on top of blogs. However, even these people aren’t taking advantage of a lot of the things that RSS can do for them. RSS can change your entire browsing experience for the better if you let it.
RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, tells you when a webpage has new content. That’s it. It works a lot like a magazine subscription. Just like you subscribe to your favorite magazine instead of going to the corner store every few days to see if there’s a new issue, you subscribe to your favorite webpage’s RSS instead of going to the page every few days to see if there’s new content. And just like how you tell the magazine company to send the issues to your mailbox, you tell your RSS subscription where to go, usually to an “RSS Reader” that acts as the mailbox for your RSS feeds.
RSS is not relegated to just the blogosphere. Most websites that regularly update the content on their pages publish an RSS feed. This may sound like a “so what?” kind of statement, but there are a lot of resources out there to get updated content from besides blogs. A few example you may not have thought of:
Site-Wide Changes Newly Added Tools Newly Added Toolboxes New MembersPersonally, I think that pulling RSS feeds from searches is one of its best uses. When a site provides an RSS feed for a search, the feed updates any time a new listing that matches your search term comes up. For instance:
There are many ways to organize your RSS feeds so that staying up to date on your favorite sites is convenient and not just another hassle.
What is your favorite RSS Tip or Trick? Let me know!
~Matt
This week, I’m in beautiful Austin, Texas with BBQ, cowboy hats and more live music than you can shake a stick at. Aspiration is here co-organizing Mozilla‘s Jetpack for Learning Design Camp, an event bringing together finalists who have developed open education-related add-ons for Firefox using Mozilla’s new “Jetpack” framework. “Jetpack”+ “Mozilla”+ “add-on”+ “open education” = Lots of weird jargon. These terms refer to a program called Jetpack that Mozilla, the people who have brought us such wonderful tools as Firefox and Thunderbird have put together to enable anyone who has basic web development skills (HTML, CSS and Javascript) to produce “powerful” add-ons for Firefox. The participants at this Design Camp have all produced add-ons using Jetpack that focus on Open Education.
According to Wikipedia, “open education is a collective term that refers to forms of education in which knowledge, ideas or important aspects of teaching methodology or infrastructure are shared freely over the internet.”
Some Open Education Resources
The following is a list of the participating projects at the Design Camp. They are still in development so we didn’t want to create a functioning toolbox out of them but definitely check them out because there is some innovative stuff going on with regards to education through the open web.
Be sure to check out these links if you’re interested in the work that’s going on here at the design camp:
What are your thoughts on Open Education? What implications are there for nonprofits?
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Paper: Aspiration Manifesto |
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Book:
Open Translation Tools |
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Paper: Creating Participatory Events |
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