I spoke today to the Memphis AFP (Association of Fundraising Professionals) about integrating social media into their marketing efforts to engage supporters and donors, as well as to get people to help spread the word.

I think fundraisers and cause marketers are no different than the rest of us: in these trying economic times, everyone is clamoring for the same donation dollars.  The need for a more cost-effective strategy to spread the word is crucial. Communicating more effectively than your competition is the name of the game.

That’s why social media is perfect:

• Typical cost of a social networking account:  $0.00
• Audience: varies by platform, but some counts put social media users at well over 1/2 a billion (and continuing to grow quickly)

Here is a copy of the presentation:

We just finished up Day 4 of our Social Media Crash Course for Business that Howell Marketing is hosting with us.  We covered a lot of ground today – and I worked hard to make sure that the information was tailored to the questions that our crowd had yesterday in the Facebook 101 course.

The most pressing questions had to do with effective methods for using Facebook Fan Pages to market a business – a burning question in a lot of marketing minds right now.  I covered the Fan Page sales funnel that is a great method for drawing people to your Facebook presence, engaging them, and offering multiple ways for them to take action.

Here are the slides from today’s presentation:

Day 3 of our Social Media Crash Course for Business was an intro to using Facebook for marketing your business.  Since our surveys told us that most of the class already had accounts, we decided to skip the really elementary material and jump right into something really helpful: how you can separate your personal and professional life on Facebook.

Like all the other days of this seminar, we talked a great deal about strategy.  If someone doesn’t claim the saying “in all things, have strategy” then I’m going to!  Here are the slides from our class today:

Tomorrow we’re going to cover:

• Fan pages vs Groups
• Advertising
• How to grow your Page and add Fans
• Best practices for B-to-B organizations

Now that you know how to create URLs that can be tracked and measured, let’s get into a little more about how you can use them, and ways to streamline the process.

I use Bit.ly links for every single thing that we post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and also in email newsletters.  The majority of this activity is posting on Twitter, so let’s start there.  That is, after all, why these shorteners became so popular in such a short amount of time.

Twitter has that glorious 140 character limit, so we need a way to post succinct links to blogs that have long, SEO friendly URLs (like the one you no doubt see in the address bar of your browser if you’re on this blog).  But wants to go back to the actual Bit.ly site?  That takes too long!  You need a Twitter client that has Bit.ly integration so that it will short the links for you, using your previously created Bit.ly account.

I personally use Twhirl as my desktop client since it has such great multi-account support, but there are other clients out there as well.  Bit.ly has a list of tools you can check out to find something that suites you.

The thing on that list that I want to point out is the Bit.ly Bookmarklet.  This might be really useful for you, since some say that the Web is still the most popular Twitter client.

Bookmarklets

According to the Wikipedia, a bookmarklet is an applet, a small computer application, stored as the URL of a bookmark in a web browser or as a hyperlink on a web page.

That means you can add this to the toolbar in your browser, and create shortened, trackable URLs with no effort at all!

So now- I hope that sufficiently explains it.  I have been getting a TON of people asking about this!  We’ll get back to the more esoteric stuff in the next post =)