Create a strong online presence

[Christine Prefontaine]

Your online presence starts with your website. But it also includes making yourself visible in all the places your publics go: other organizations’ websites, social networks, portals, blogs, forums, and email groups.

When developing an online strategy start by researching what already exists and where your members already go. To cut costs and maximize reach look for opportunities to build on, leverage, and complement existing efforts. What can you contribute to? What partnerships can you form? Otherwise you risk duplicating efforts and creating unnecessary competition.

Website
Your website is your face to the world, particularly to supporters and people who will help you reach them, like journalists. Make sure it has the basic information they need to assess you (see section on information kit).

Equally important, your website is the place where network members can connect and learn about each other. Consider using a “private-label” social networking platform, such as Ning, to develop your site (see Jeremiah Owyang’s blog more information). This type of platform is best for networks because it allows members to see each other's faces, leave silly notes, post comments, share documents, and — most importantly — fall in love. Love is a feeling that elicits deep interest and enthusiasm, which underpins successful collaboration and partnerships. Mutual trust, affection, and respect inspires us to take the time to share and help each other. It sees us through those difficult times when we collaborate a project and start to annoy each other (or worse).

Invite all of your publics to join your online community: support team, members, donors, partners. Designate a Community Facilitator (see below) to animate the network, support members, and stimulate engagement. Distribute your network’s logo in web-ready form so members can add it to their website and link to you. Make it easy for others to access and promote your content by promoting RSS feeds of your blogs, events, and actions. Open up support and discussion forums. Create work groups. These are just a few ideas. Once you get your site established you can lay out a detailed community engagement plan.

Above all, network websites should support members. When designing your website, take care not to divert or “poach” visitors from members’ websites. A network website can promote members by aggregating their content via RSS feeds, inviting telecentre leaders to moderate discussions or write short editorials, profiling and highlighting individual members and telecentres, and posting a member directory.

Microblogging
Microblogging allows people to create brief (140 characters or fewer) updates and share them using the web, text messaging, instant messaging, or email. Some people also share micromedia, such as photos or audio clips. Microblogs are similar to “status updates” on social networking sites. There are many microblogging services: Twitter, Identica, Yammer, Pownce, Jaiku, Plurk.

Typically, microbloggers are answering a simple question: What are you doing? What are you working on? What have you achieved today? Microblogging is social: notices can be private or public, you can allow "friends" to follow you, and you can subscribe to others’ notices. Members can follow each other on the Web, with a desktop client, or via SMS text messaging.

Microblogging is valuable for networks because it makes keeping in touch and providing real-time support easy and fun. Networks can participate by sharing under an organizational profile, or they can host their own microblogging platform with a tool like Laconica. Microblogs can be tagged, linked to specific people, and streamed using an RSS feed. Microblogging it is particularly appealing in places where people increasingly use mobile phones and text messages. This is an emerging tool, development and technology activists are still exploring and documenting its uses.

Email groups
If connectivity is an issue then your online strategy should focus on creating a presence on popular email groups. If not, you may want to consider forgoing email for online forums, where discussions are more open, accessible, and integrated with other online activities. For many people, however, email groups are the preferred sharing tool. There are a number of email group services with varying features, including Dgroups, Mailman, YahooGroups, GoogleGroups.

Before starting your own group, reach out to members and look for opportunities to contribute to existing efforts, such as UgaBYTES and BytesForAll. It’s also important to set up processes to ensure that the best email group content is posted on the website, and vice versa.

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Network Communications Guide
Previous: building blocks
Next: invest in a community facilitator

[Christine Prefontaine]

On microblogging. Nice post by Tim O'Reilly: Why I love Twitter. I'd prefer it be called "Why I love Identica", but that's another story ;)