What troubles me, is the very “do as i say and not as I do” attitude of these experts. This past weekend, one of them asked me, pleaded with me to please come by their blog and say hello, because so many of his hundreds and thousands of readers never do! “Just say hi!” he says.

I commented:

Why Chris? Listen I like you, i enjoy reading your emails and stuff. I’ve watched most of your vids, read Trust Agents… I’ve tweeting to you, I’ve RT’d you, I’ve commented on your thoughts or forwarded your posts – but not once have you even acknowledged any of it. You have many thousands of followers, you have God knows how many subscribers to your blog – and I’m sorry – but after a while – it just becomes a little fake to me. I love what you preach, but not how you practice it – and i speak only for myself. I make sure i take the time (and GOD knows it takes a lot) to interact with those who interact with me and that’s why I have no aspirations to be a “Chris Brogan”. Some of “you folks” have a lot of interest, eyeballs, readers and followers – but we both know after a certain level -you can’t keep up. And as soon as you get to that point – you start moving into hypocrite territory. I like you Chris, I like what you say – but please – don’t do a blog post or tweet about how you want my input and then can’t even acknowledge it. That’s not cool.

I noticed after my comment he started acknowledging people’s comments – even at one point saying – “oh but see how much WORK this is???”

Dude. You asked for it. Don’t complain to me.

Bottom line: don’t ask for someone – be it a client, customer, donor – anyone – to engage with you and not acknowledge it. Don’t tell someone that these are the rules but you don’t need to play by them. Don’t complain that you are so important to so many people that you can’t do the very things you are constantly telling them to do. Especially when you are the “expert” in this kind of thing.

Just a reminder: please resubscribe over at our new blog which can be found at: http://blog.agentsofgood.org

You can follow Mark Horvath on twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/hardlynormal

Part two to come: Where do you find you fans? How hard is it to find them? What should you do when you do find them?

Think about how you can apply this to your charity or your business or your life. The way we communicate is not the same as it was 10 years ago (or really even last year!)

This the the Princess Margaret Hospital commercial I reference.

and finally, a Jeff Brooks video about The Boy Who Learned How to Pick Up Girls from Fundraising Letters.

@unmarketing
@kenburnett1
@laurie_pringle
@jonathongrapsas
@erinblaskie

I like marketing author Jim Sterne’s two cents, “Whoop-dee-doo.” Well said Jim.

Jim was quoted in an article in Marketing Magazine called “The Numbers Game“. Most of the numbers that people quote ‘are great for chest-beating and nothing else’.

So how do we measure the effects of social media?

Recently Mark, my part time partner of Idea Design asked me “Seriously, how much new business have we gotten as a result of all this work you are doing (using social media).”

And I don’t know. I’m not sure I even care. For me it’s about establishing new relationships with colleagues in our sector, or sharing some of the great content that I stumble upon from and with my network, or blogging about what I do and what I think because it forces me to think about what I do and what I think and reflect on that. For me, it’s about being a leader in my chosen profession and having people look to me as a leader.

And if I get new work as a result of this work then I’m thrilled. And to answer Mark’s question, I don’t think I have won a lot of new work directly but indirectly I have met people via social media (hello Laurie Pringle!) and I have been offered new work through those contacts…

So back to the question – how do you measure this social media thing?

The article quotes analytics evangelist for Google, Avinash Kaushik who says that the over used word of ‘engagement’ is not a metric. “Engagement no longer means anything to anyone because it means everything to everyone.” Instead he thinks in terms of amplification.

Kaushik states what matters is what happens to your message after you post it. He charts the performance of his own twitter account by measuring the number of retweets he generates, and breaks it down further by calculating the number of retweets per thousand followers (he has over 7,000 followers and boasts a retweek-per-thousand rate of 7.86).

I’ve said before and I’ll say it again. This stuff can be analyzed to death.

What you, the charity, should be thinking about is relationship building and producing content that is important and relevant to your donors. I only have 150 followers on twitter (I think) but I hope that everytime I tweet or RT a message, those followers are finding it useful or enlightening or informative or funny.

And that to me, it is the one of the most important measurements.