I had a great time this morning leading a training session for Leadership Alexandria’s alumnus related to online marketing, local search and social media for non-profits and businesses.

Here’s the online marketing presentation from today’s training.

I wanted to share with everyone the buzz monitoring tools I’ve discovered and think are useful. This list assumes that you’ve set up Google and Yahoo Alerts and are looking for the next step.

Keotag – lets you search various social media sites (delicious, facebook, etc) by tags.

Yahoo Pipes

Back Type - to follow and monitor comments

Social Mention – searches across a variety of social media sources, including Google blog search, Twitter, Delicious, FriendFeed, Flickr, Digg, YouTube. You can also set up RSS feeds and email alerts.

Serph – a search engine that searches across various sites.  The major social media sites that Serph uses are: Technorati, Digg, YouTube, Flickr, Google Blog Search, Bloglines, and Newsvine.

BuzzFeed.com – They say: We feature the kind of things you’d want to pass along to your friends: an outrageous video that’s about to go viral, an obscure subculture breaking into the mainstream, a juicy bit of gossip that everyone at the office will be talking about tomorrow, or an ordinary guy having his glorious 15-minutes of fame. And when you read BuzzFeed, you’ll always know the movies, music, and products that are on the rise and worth your time.

And last but not least, EgoSurf. This one just makes me smile. My blog received 2563 Ego points for my name, while my website recieved 2157 points. The ego meter graphic is one of the most amusing aspects.

So I’m impressed by the creativity of the Salvation Army of Chicago’s marketing efforts. You can see their YouTube vide where they have Chicagoans helping them play a Christmas carol using the SA bells, and their online donation kettle.

They get a gold star for innovation, but no stars for effectiveness. Why? They did not develop a promotional plan for either effort, and in the crowded social media scape, there’s a good chance that no one will see these efforts.

Here’s where they can improve:

1. Their YouTube video should be on a channel that is branded with their colors and they should apply for nonprofit status through YouTube so that they can have a donate now button on their page. Even better, they should create their “red kettle” icon as a gif and upload it to their page. You’ll notice that no one has commented on their video. This is because (as far as I can tell) they have not promoted it to their list or social media sites. Neither their description nor the title of their video have the keywords “Salvation Army Chicago” in them, so traffic from search is limited. I don’t believe they’ve done any keyword research. If they did, they would use the worlds “holiday volunteering”, “Chicago at the holidays” are terms people are currently using in search. (You can see for yourself by using SEOBook.com’s free keyword tool).

2. Their online holiday kettle page does not allow sharing to any social media site (like Facebook). In fact, their set up process is 4 steps long. This has clearly not been tested by users. They should create shorter sign up process (user name and password with an email asking for more info later) and a link to the code that you can then embed into your blog, myspace, facebook, would be much more effective. I abandoned the process at step 3 when I was suddenly asked to fill out 15 fields. That’s too much info for helping SA by installing a simple widget onto my social media profile, blog or website. In fact, if you visit their Facebook page (with 4,000 + fans) they don’t mention either of these tools. And this is the type of community where (if you make it easy for them) they will spread your message to their friends.

I wonder what kind of adoption they will have with both endeavors. My guess is very little due to the fact that the widget was build without the user in mind and without any usability testing, both items where set up without any strategic thought to selecting keywords on the pages that would capture natural traffic, and (as far as I can tell) neither were launched with a promotional plan encouraging those they know to use and spread the tools.

So close and yet so far….

This is the first time I’m going to do a full online marketing 101 crash course (including email) in under an hour, so we’ll see how it goes. If you’re interested in viewing the presentation I’ll be using for Environmental Working Group this next week in Washington, DC, you can view the online marketing 101 presentation here.

I had a great article forwarded to me by my friends at Oregon Volunteers which talks about how non-profits are becoming engaged in social media and managing the workload of multiple social media accounts.

Here are some of the highlights, but you should read the full article written by Beth Kanter – it has other great tips.

So for those venturing into social media, keep in mind:

1. You need to commit the time. It will take you 2 hours to create a new profile and understand the network, and a minimum of ten hours per week mantaining your accounts.

2. Create a schedule for yourself to participate in each of the networks regularly.

3. Solicit help (Your interns, volunteers, boards could help you maintain these accounts).

4. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes – that’s how you learn about how to use the tools to meet your objectives

5. Be friendly and personal on the sites (they are SOCIAL media sites after all).

For all of those following along at home, notice how I link to my friends who give me cool news and ideas to blog about? Keep them coming, I love to spread the link love!

I’m always on the look-out for non-profits that are doing a great job of using the web to engage their customer.

In this post, I wanted to highlight Goodwill of Greater Washington, who uses a blog, a virtual runway and E-bay/MissionFish powered fashion show & auction, and a pretty cool dialogue with the vintage clothing industry to engage their customers. They promote all of this with a facebook profile, MySpace page, they joined the DC Fashionist Meetup Group.

You should spend some time watching the fashion show. It’s taking a page from Project Runway. What an innovative way to change the perception of the quality of clothing that you can find in a Goodwill Store! You can buy many of the items on Ebay, so you can buy right from your computer – supporting Goodwill’s training and work placement programs for people with disadvantages and disabilities.

How has this strategy worked for them? Months after launching the program, the effort receives more than 1000 unique visitors weekly and its shopper conversion rate is 4.5%. Even better, national media outlets like CNN, Good Morning America and the Washington Post have discovered Goodwill’s online fashion show, turning it into a national phenomenon. (from Ylan Mui, Washington Post, “Goodwill’s New Look: Cheap Can Also Be Chic,” October 29, 2007)

There are also snippets from Brendan Hurley, Goodwill’s VP of Marketing from his interview on the Diva Marketing blog that I had to share:

It was Geoff (Geoff Livingston of Livingston Communications) that taught me that we had to treat the blog just like any other product with a mission statement, logo, positioning statement, etc. Doing so has helped us stay focused and forced us to maintain product integrity so that the blog doesn’t become another blatant advertisement that will simply turn off any half educated reader. The content has value and I believe that is what keeps readers coming back.

There are valuable tidbits to learn from how Goodwill has approached using social media:

1. They realize that the blog & online fashion show are branded products that have a distinct mission and need feed, care and promotion to be succcessful.

2. They invested resources in this effort. By having an employee dedicated to managing the pieces they were able to be more successful.

3. They joined existing social groups (Meetup) within their passion to promote their mission, and are using existing tested tools (Ebay/MissionFish) to execute their strategy instead of creating something from scratch.

4. They are tracking their end results with Google Analytics to be able to highlight their success.